On the fuel tank, low on the right side, there was a small brass plate, no larger than a matchbook, scratched and dull. She had noticed it when she first walked up and had not thought anything of it.
"You understand my concern," Emily said.
"I understand you're doing your job," James said. "That's a different thing, but I understand it."
It was not insolence. That was what unsettled her. She had been on patrol five years, long enough to know the flavors of a traffic stop, and James Harris was none of them. He sat in the sun with his hands visible and his breathing even and watched her the way an old teacher might watch a student work a problem, patient enough to let her get it wrong first.
"How old are you, Mr. Harris?"
"Eighty-two," he said, without hesitation. "Eighty-two and a half, if we're counting like children. Born March of forty-three, same as it says there. You can trust the license on that one. The state got it right."
"And you're out here alone," she said. "On this."
"Yes, ma'am."
"On Highway 47. Do you know how far it is to the next town with a hospital?"
"I do," he said. "I've known this road a long time."
The sun was dropping toward the long line of the hills in the west, throwing their shadows east across the grass. It was September — a good September day, the fourteenth, the air still summer-warm at four in the afternoon but with a thinness at the edge of it that promised the evening would turn. Grasshoppers ticked in the ditch grass. The patrol car's air conditioning sighed behind its closed windows.
Emily's uncle had died on a motorcycle. She did not say that, and she told herself it had nothing to do with her work, which was a lie she maintained carefully. Danny Carter had been fifty-eight, a big laughing man who rode a red bike too fast and had taken a deer through the front wheel at dusk in October, six years ago now. She had been twenty-three, in her first year. She remembered her mother's voice on the telephone more clearly than the funeral.
She looked at James Harris's hands on the handlebars. Spotted and corded, the nails cut short and clean, they did not tremble. She watched for a tremor, any honest fact that would help her write this stop into a shape she could defend. There was none. His hands were steadier than hers felt, with the heat coming up off the asphalt.
"License is good," Reed said again, very even. He had moved half a step closer to the bike, not to James — to the bike, looking at it with an interest that was not quite professional. "Registration's good. Insurance is good."
"I'm aware, Sergeant."
"I know you are."
There was something in the exchange that James understood and Emily did not like being understood about. His gaze moved from one of them to the other with a mild, unshowy attention.
"If everything's in order, Officer," he said, "is there something particular you're waiting on?"
It was a fair question. It was the question any citizen was entitled to ask five minutes into a stop that had produced no violation, and Emily felt it as a small, clean pressure against her ribs.
She made a decision then, the kind you make because the alternative is admitting you have already made one.
"I'm waiting until I'm satisfied you're safe to operate this vehicle," she said. "That's my responsibility out here. Step off the motorcycle, please, Mr. Harris."
For a moment he did not move. Not in defiance — in consideration, as if he were translating the instruction into some older language he trusted more. Then he swung his right leg over the seat in one smooth motion that a man thirty years younger might have been pleased with, and stood beside the bike on the shoulder, taking his weight evenly, no hand out for balance, no reach toward the machine to steady himself.
He was taller standing than he had looked seated — six feet perhaps, or just under now, a little stooped at the shoulders but not frail. His jacket was old leather over a plain shirt buttoned to the second button. His jeans were clean. His boots were worn and polished in the places boots hold polish. Around his neck, half-hidden, Emily saw the fine glint of a chain, though whatever hung from it stayed under his shirt.
"There," he said. "Standing, as requested. What would you like next?"
"Sir —" Reed began, and stopped himself.
Emily straightened her shoulders. "I'd like to ask you some questions. Where are you headed today, Mr. Harris?"
"Out along forty-seven," James said. "West."
"To where, specifically?"
He considered his answer with the same care he had given to stepping off the bike. "To a place I go," he said. "And then home, after."
"And where is home?" she asked, though the license had told her, and they both knew it had.
"Home is about eighty miles from here," he said. "Off the river road, north of Millbrook. House with a blue door my wife picked out and I never had the heart to repaint a different color. Been there forty-one years."