Where are you really from? And what are you really doing here? Blake looked at her for a long moment. Then he picked up his box. "I answered your question, ma'am."
Then she laughed. Not a polite laugh, not an embarrassed laugh, a loud barking laugh. Head thrown back, mouth wide open, the kind designed to make the person in front of her feel small. You bought this house. She said it to the street, not to him.
She turned her body toward the neighboring houses and raised her voice so it carried. Did everyone hear that? This man says he bought 714 Willowbrook. $1.2 million him in that truck. A door opened across the street, then another.
Mrs. Callaway, a white woman in her 60s, stepped onto her porch with a glass of lemonade. Two houses down, Mr. and Mrs. Brennan, both white, both retired, came out to their front lawn. Greg Wells appeared at his mailbox, watching quietly from 7-Eleven. Diane had her audience. She turned back to Blake.
You know what I think? She stepped closer, her voice dropped to something she probably thought sounded reasonable, but it was louder than she realized. I think you saw an empty house in a nice neighborhood and figured you'd park here, scope it out, see what's worth taking. That's what I think. I have the deed in the house, ma'am.
I can show you. Oh, a deed. She clapped her hands together once mockingly. A deed. Wonderful, because criminals never forge documents.
She pulled out her phone and aimed it at Blake's license plate. She read the numbers aloud slowly, making sure every neighbor could hear. Bravo kilo niner 231. I'm sending this to a friend at the sheriff's office. We'll see if this vehicle is in the system.
She turned back to the neighbors. A $1.2 2 million house and he pulls up in a truck that belongs in a junkyard. Use your brains, people. Where does money like that come from? Dealing, stealing, you tell me.
Blake said nothing. He had learned this discipline a long time ago. Year two on the force, a drunk man at a traffic stop had called him every name in the book. The old ones, the ugly ones, the ones that sit in your chest like hot metal. His training officer, a white sergeant named Bill Hadley, had told him afterward, "The moment you react is the moment they win.
You hear me? Don't give them the moment." Blake had never given anyone the moment. Not once in 25 years. He picked up the box he'd set down, turned his back on Diane, and walked to the front door.
He set it inside, came back, pulled another box from the truck bed. He moved like she wasn't there, like she was weather unpleasant, but irrelevant. This made Diane furious. Being ignored was worse than being challenged. A challenge she could meet.