She turned the pad around to face Grady. Glowing with process. I do my homework. Officer, this is what responsible ownership looks like. Grady looked at the legal pad.
Then at the birthday party, then back at the legal pad with the expression of a man being handed a ransom note about a lost cat that was sitting right there. You measured their smoker, he said. Twice, said Todd proudly. At the picnic table, nobody moved. Levi had come around his smoker with his jaw set, tongs still in hand, and stopped at a single small motion of his brother's left hand.
Flat and low, the oldest signal in their family's vocabulary. I have it. Regina drifted up to stand at Anony's shoulder. Silent, beautiful, immovable. A second flag pole.
And Mama Ernestine sat in her paper crown with her hands folded on 70 years of exactly this, watching her son's back, and her face was not afraid. It was patient. It was a face that had seen the weather change before and knew which way this wind blew. Up and down Dogwood Lane. Porches were quietly filling.
Screen doors eased open. The retired school teacher stepped out with her arms crossed. Somebody's sprinkler shut off mid ark as if the whole street wanted to hear. Boy, the rookie, 23 years old and 10 weeks on the street, had his notepad out and was trying to write everything and nothing. He looked at the man in the apron, who had still not raised his voice, whose hand was still resting easy behind his back.
Something about the man's calm was ringing a bell Bole couldn't find. People weren't this calm, innocent or guilty. Nobody was this calm. Sir, Bole said, "You got some ID on you?" "I do," Anthony said pleasantly. "In fact, officer, I've got it in my hand." And that is when Grady, who had drifted a step wide, the way 19-year veterans automatically do, got an angle on the chief's right hand behind his back, and saw what was in it.
A worn leather case fallen open against the small of the man's back and riding in it. Gold, engraved, heavy, catching the 5:00 sun, a shield that Grady had only ever seen up close twice in his career. Both times, right before somebody very senior shook his hand, Grady stopped walking midstride like a man stepping off a curb that was not there. His eyes came up from the badge to the man's face, and the face assembled itself. The newspaper photo, the swearing in stage, the portrait that had gone up in the precinct lobby in March that everybody walked past and nobody looked at.
And Officer Grady's blood pressure did something his doctor would have wanted to discuss. What are you waiting for? Lindsay had run out of patience with the pace of her own arrest. Her lovely face twisted. The vein rose at her temple.
Her finger snapped out at Anthony like a bayonet. And she screamed it. The whole street's worth of scream. The scream. Four separate phones caught in high definition.
Grab him right now. Silence. Even the playlist. By pure cosmic timing. Chose that second to change songs.