I don't know. Please send someone quickly. The dispatcher asked. Has he physically harmed you? Not yet, but he's aggressive.
Please hurry. We're dispatching units now, ma'am. Stay inside your home. Thank you. Oh, thank God.
Thank you. She hung up. The frightened voice disappeared. Her shoulders straightened. She slid the phone into her pocket and walked back out to the front of her yard, arms crossed, chin up.
She smiled. The police were coming. They would see a black man in a beat up truck parked where he didn't belong. They would ask questions he couldn't answer fast enough. And she would be standing right there, the concerned citizen, the good neighbor, the woman who had tried to keep her community safe.
This was her neighborhood, her rules, and she had just called down the full weight of the law on a man whose only crime was parking in his own driveway. She didn't know that man had spent 25 years wearing the same uniform she'd just summoned. She didn't know the officers racing toward Willowbrook with their hands near their weapons would arrive, step out of their cruisers, and do the one thing Diane Hartley could never have imagined. Blake stood by his truck, soaking wet, holding a box of ruined photographs. He heard the sirens in the distance, faint but closing.
He knew the sound better than anyone on this street. He'd driven behind those sirens for half his life. He set the box down, straightened up, let his arms hang loose at his sides, palms open, fingers visible. The posture of a man who knew exactly what a traffic stop looked like from the wrong end. Then he glanced into the truck cabin.
The small black case was still on the passenger seat. The badge inside caught the afternoon sun through the windshield. He almost smiled. Almost. Nah.
The first cruiser turned onto Willowbrook Lane at 4:42 p.m. Then the second, then the third. Three black-and-white Glenwood PD units, lights flashing, rolling down the quietest street in the quietest neighborhood in the city. Red and blue swept across the manicured lawns, the white garage doors, the hydrangea beds. The light hit the windows of every house on the block and turned them into mirrors. Willowbrook Estates had never seen a police car on this street.
Now there were three. Neighbors appeared. Front doors opened up and down the block. The Brennan stepped onto their lawn. Mrs. Callaway came back out with a fresh glass of lemonade.
This time standing closer. Mrs. Turner finally shut off her hose. Greg Wells stood in his doorway at 711, arms crossed, watching. Diane Hartley walked to the edge of her property line and stood with her arms folded. Her chin was high.
Her hair was untouched. She looked like a woman who had just placed an order and was waiting for delivery. Blake stood next to his truck, soaking wet. His gray t-shirt clung dark to his chest. Water still dripped from his forearms.