Harlow County officers did not pay close attention to the names of federal officials in agencies they had never felt accountable to. He looked back at her. Naomi. He made her first name a slow, deliberate word, two syllables used like a hand on a shoulder. "Where are you headed?
Long way to drive in a sweatshirt." "I'm traveling through the county," Naomi said. "I haven't been given a reason for the stop." "I'll give you the reason when I decide to." He tapped the license against his palm.
"You got a lot of bags in there? You carrying anything you want to tell me about?" "I have a weekend bag in the back. I'm not carrying anything that concerns you." "Uh-huh."
He looked at the car again, took his time. "You know, for a smart school girl, you drive like you didn't graduate. You drifted over the center line back on Route 9 about a mile ago. Right tail light is also flickering." He said it with the smooth, unremarkable ease of a man reciting something he has said so many times it no longer requires any conscious effort.
"Plus, you've been acting nervous since I walked up." "I'm perfectly calm, officer, and any inspection of my vehicle will confirm that both tail lights are fully functional." Something shifted in Shepherd's expression, not quite anger yet, but its immediate neighbor. He was not accustomed to the woman in the cheap hoodie answering him in complete composed sentences that did not contain a single note of fear. "Smart mouth," he said.
We notice that around here. I'm answering your questions accurately. "Step out of the vehicle." Naomi knew Pennsylvania v. Mimms.
She knew it the way she knew her own phone number. She also knew that compliance in this moment was not surrender. It was evidence. Every cooperative action she took created a floor that Officer Shepherd would have to explain his way past in federal court. Of course, she said.
She stepped out into the thick humid Georgia afternoon. The gravel bit slightly through her sneaker soles. She heard the cruiser's passenger door open behind her. Deputy Kevin Slater jogged up from the passenger side still straightening his jacket and arrived at the rear of the Subaru. He was younger than Shepherd by a decade, thicker through the shoulders, with an expression that was working very hard to look like it had made up its mind.
"What we got?" Slater asked. Suspicious driver, drifting, uncooperative. Shepherd glanced at him over the roof. You smell anything?