He thought of that promise while the police arrived, which they did in a single car rolling slow and unlit up the service track, because Riverside Park at dusk did not rate theatre and Sergeant Amy Lindqvist, who got out of the passenger side with a notebook already in her hand, did not do theatre at all. She was forty-one, lean as a wire, with her fair hair cut short for a helmet she no longer wore on patrol and a face that read people the way other people read weather maps, for pressure systems and fronts. Her constable, whose name was Osei and who was young enough to make Tomas feel museum-grade, went to the bench and began the gentle work of names and dates of birth. Amy came to Tomas and Dana, and Dana said, "One complainant, depending how you count, five gentlemen on the bench who keep agreeing with each other's corrections, no weapons, no injuries above the dignity line yet, and the gentleman here did the, and I quote, folding."
Amy looked at Tomas. She looked at him for what was, by the standards of a first meeting on a dark path, a long time, and Tomas watched the look change as it went, watched the professional assessment get interrupted by something older and personal arriving behind her eyes, and he knew, before she said a word, that the evening was about to do the thing he had spent eight years politely asking evenings not to do.
"I know you," Amy said.
"Most people here know the bus depot," Tomas said, evenly. "I do the late shift on the county contract."
"No," Amy said. "That's not it." She tilted her head slightly, reading him off against a memory, the way Ricky had. "You've lost weight since. And the beard's new. But I'd know the, my brother had a poster. Not a poster, a programme, from the civic centre, he kept it on his wall for years because you signed it and you wrote something on it for him about his exams, of all things. Tomas Herrera. The Alder Falls civic centre, the regional finals. You stopped that boy from Dayton in the second with a, help me, it was all grappling, you never threw a thing, everybody said you were the most boring champion in Ohio and my brother said boring was what winning looked like when a grown-up did it."
"Your brother was generous," Tomas said.
"You were the champion."
"I was," Tomas said. "Eight years ago. I fix buses now."
Amy held his gaze a moment longer and then, to her great credit, let the poster go back onto the wall of the past, and opened the notebook, and was a sergeant again. "All right, Mr. Herrera the bus mechanic. Walk me through my evening. Slowly, and leave nothing out, including the parts where you're the hero, because I'll get those from the bench in a different flavour and I'd rather have yours plain."
So Tomas told it plainly, standing on the path with the lamps lit and the river going past, from the water fountain to the bench, the shove and the asks, the offers to walk away, each man in the order in which he had become, as Ricky put it, available, and what he had done with each of them and what he had not done, which was hit any one of them, at any point, in any way, and as he talked he watched Amy's pen move and watched her, twice, glance up at the bench when his account reached a name, and get from the bench, in dumbshow, a nod or a wince or once, from Deacon, an elaborate and entirely confirmatory mime of a man being folded. Pete's phone, surrendered to Constable Osei with the air of a man handing over a diary, sat in an evidence bag with the screen asleep, its small beginning preserved; Dana, as a witness, gave her own account, which was short and consisted mainly of the observation that in eleven years she had never arrived at a fight that was over and apologising to itself. The statements took time. The dusk finished becoming night around them while they worked, and the five were read their positions in the new order of things and were put, one by one and without any more theatre than they had arrived with, into cars for the short journey to the station, where there were forms. Kyle, at the door of the second car, stopped with one foot on the ground and looked back at Tomas across the lamp-lit gravel.
"You could've," he said. It was not a sentence, exactly. It was the front half of one.
"I know," Tomas said.
Kyle nodded, as if that completed it to his satisfaction, or at least filed it, and got in.
A paramedic waiting by the ambulance offered, with professional patience, to check his eyes, his wrists and his neck, and Tomas refused the fuss with thanks, accepted a leaflet he did not need, and signed where she pointed.