"My Maggie said things like that," James added after a moment. "Nurse. She kept the truest records of all. If I so much as looked at a second piece of pie, it was documented."
"Is she at home, Mr. Harris?" Emily asked, seizing the practical thread. "Your wife — could we reach her? If we needed to —"
"No," James said, simply. "She died. November of twenty nineteen. Six years this fall." He said it without flinching and without inviting sympathy, the way a man states the location of a scar. "Good years, though. Fifty-three of them. I don't complain about the arithmetic."
"I'm sorry," Emily said, and she meant it, and she hated that meaning it changed nothing about the shape of the stop.
"So am I," he said. "Most days in the morning, and then the day gets going and she sends me something to do. Today it's this ride."
He looked west, where Reed had looked, and for just a second Emily saw him not as a problem to resolve but as a man in the middle of a journey she was delaying — a journey he had declined to explain, which was his right, printed plain across every page of training she had ever sat through.
She thought about Danny. She thought about a ditch, a bike on its side with the wheel still turning, and no signal from the creek bridge to the county line.
Fear, dressed in a uniform, calls itself caution. Her caution was not foolish. It was only misplaced — a good instinct standing in the wrong man's afternoon.
"All right," she said at last. "Here's what we're going to do, Mr. Harris. Before I can let you ride out of here, I'm going to ask you to do a few basic checks with me. Balance, coordination. Just to be sure. Walk with me."
James raised his eyebrows, very slightly.
"You want me to walk a line for you, Officer."
"I want to observe you walk, yes. Heel to toe, on the shoulder line, the way I'd ask anyone whose operation of a vehicle I had questions about. It's not an accusation. It's a check."
"Carter," Reed said, low.
"It's within my discretion, Sergeant."
"It is," Reed agreed, after a pause that said several other things. "It is within your discretion."
James looked at the white line painted along the edge of Highway 47, faded in stretches, bright in others where the county had repainted in the spring. He looked at the patrol car, at the dash camera whose small red eye regarded them all impartially. He seemed to come to some conclusion about the afternoon that he kept to himself.
"I walked harder lines than this one, in worse places, before I was twenty," he said. "I expect I can walk yours. Where would you like me to stop?"
"Nine steps out, turn, nine back, when you're ready. Arms at your sides, if you can."
"If I can," he repeated, with great mildness, and stepped to the head of the line.
What followed took less than a minute and Emily would remember it for a long while, the way you remember small perfections. James placed one boot directly in front of the other, heel touching toe, and walked west into the sun without hurry and without a single visible correction. At nine steps he turned — not a shuffle, not a grab at the air, but a clean, economical pivot, the kind drilled into a body so long ago that the body had stopped consulting the mind about it — and walked back and stopped exactly where he had started, boot tips a half inch from her own shoes.
"Satisfactory?" he asked.
"Count backwards for me," Emily said, aware as she said it that she was moving the finish line and aware that he knew it too. "From one hundred, by sevens."
"A hundred," James said. "Ninety-three. Eighty-six. Seventy-nine. Seventy-two. Sixty-five. Fifty-eight. Fifty-one. Forty-four. Thirty-seven. Thirty. Twenty-three. Sixteen. Nine. Two." He paused. "Shall I go into debt, Officer? The Army discouraged debt."
"Touch your finger to your nose. Eyes closed. Either hand."
He closed his eyes. Right hand, unerringly. Left hand, unerringly. He opened his eyes on the second touch with the faintest suggestion of a man who has decided to be amused rather than insulted, because amusement was the discipline he had chosen for the afternoon. Overhead, a hawk rode the thermal coming off the fields, watching all three of them with an indifference that felt almost like mercy.
"Stand on one foot," Emily said.
For how long, she did not specify, and James simply lifted his right boot an inch off the asphalt and stood. Ten seconds. Twenty. A truck went by in the far lane and the wash of it moved the grass and his jacket hem and did not move him. At thirty seconds he put the boot down and lifted the other, without being asked, and stood that one through as well, until Emily found she was the one who had become uncomfortable and said, "That's fine. That's fine, Mr. Harris. You can stop."
"Yes, ma'am," he said, and set both feet down together, neat as a man stepping off a parade square.
Reed had taken his sunglasses off. He was looking at the old man the way a man looks at a tune he almost recognizes, close now, closer than before. His gaze kept returning, despite himself, to that small brass plate on the fuel tank.