After a moment, it reversed. Sergeant Gavin Ror was behind the wheel. Miles Keaton sat in the passenger seat. Travis Bellamy was in the back.
All three men were in uniform midway through what appeared to be a routine Saturday patrol, though nothing about the way they were watching the driveway suggested routine interest. Darius picked up the television and turned toward the garage. "Where are you going, buddy?" He stopped.
He turned around slowly. The patrol car had pulled to the curb. Ror was already out, one hand resting on top of the door frame, his posture easy in the way of someone who expected the next part of this conversation to go a very specific way. Darius set the television down on the driveway.
"Moving in," he said. Ror repeated the words with a slight upward inflection as if filing them away rather than acknowledging them. He looked at the house, then at the SUV. "This your place?"
"It is." Ror said something to Keaton that Darius could not hear. Keaton got out, then Bellamy. The three men spread slightly across the driveway, not in any formation that would look deliberate to someone passing by, but deliberate nonetheless.
"We're going to need some ID," Ror said, "and proof of residence if you've got it." Darius walked to the SUV without argument. He kept his movement slow and visible. He retrieved his driver's license from his wallet and took the property deed from the glove compartment he had brought it along that morning for no particular reason, or perhaps for exactly this one.
He handed both documents to Ror. The sergeant studied the license. He read the deed. He checked the address on each document against the number mounted beside the garage door.
Everything matched, the name, the address, the date of sale 3 weeks prior. Ror handed the documents back. "What do you do for work?" he said.
Darius looked at him. "Why?" "Just making conversation." "I travel for work," Darius said.
"Consulting." Ror nodded slowly. His eyes moved to the SUV, then to the boxes stacked in the garage, then back to Darius. "Place like this runs north of 600,000," he said.
"Long way from a consulting salary." "I did fine," Darius said. Keaton had moved to the rear of the SUV and was checking the plate without being asked. He looked up and gave Ror a short shake of his head.
"Clean." Ror was quiet for a moment. Then, "Mind if we take a look in the vehicle?" "On what grounds?"
Darius said. Something shifted in the sergeant's expression. Not anger, exactly. Something closer to the decision to stop pretending this was a request.
"Just being thorough," Ror said. "That's not a legal basis," Darius said. Ror looked at Bellamy. Bellamy moved first.
He stepped to Darius's left and took hold of his arm just above the elbow, not roughly, but with the kind of pressure that made the direction clear. Ror said, "Let's not make this complicated." Darius did not pull away. He stood still and looked at Ror with an expression that gave the sergeant nothing to work with.
"Put him on the hood," Ror said. Bellamy walked Darius to the front of the SUV and pressed him forward against the hood. Darius put his hands flat on the warm metal and looked out at Crest View Drive. A woman two houses down had stopped watering her front garden.
A man walking a dog crossed to the other side of the street. No one moved toward the driveway. Ror came around to stand behind him. "Want to tell me what's in the boxes?"
"My belongings," Darius said. "We'll see about that." It was in this moment, his palms flat on the hood of his own vehicle in front of his own house on a street he had chosen specifically for its quietness, that Darius allowed himself to look at things clearly. He looked at Ror's name tag.
He had seen that name before, not on a street, not in person. He had seen it typed at the top of a complaint document formatted in the standard FBI intake template filed by a 47-year-old delivery driver who said he had been pulled from his truck, searched without consent, and watched his vehicle impounded on charges later dismissed. The complaint had gone nowhere. The driver had not followed up.
The name Ror had sat in a folder that was still technically open. Then Ror reached for his radio. The transmission was brief: a unit identifier and a location. Darius heard it clearly.
Unit 74. He kept his expression flat. He kept his hands on the hood. Unit 74 had appeared in seven separate complaint documents filed with the FBI's Richmond office over the past four years.
The pattern was consistent enough that a preliminary review had been opened 3 months prior. Vehicles stopped without documented cause. Searches conducted without warrants. Residents who pushed back verbally, legally, never physically, were described in subsequent reports as aggressive, uncooperative, or threatening.