He had been watching for most of an hour. He had watched Malik Johnson come home with his backpack over one shoulder, go inside, come back out with two grocery bags and carry them up the driveway for his mother. He had watched the boy return to the hoop over the garage and settle into its rhythm. Shoot. Retrieve. Shoot. The backboard's small metallic shudder. Again.
He picked up his phone and dialed the non-emergency line. He was careful; he understood how things looked on paper.
"Police department, non-emergency. How can I help you?"
"Yes," Richard said. "I'd like to report a persistent nuisance on Brier View Court."
"All right, sir. Can you describe what's happening?"
"There's a young man out in the street area making noise, loitering around a driveway. He's been at it for hours, day after day."
The dispatcher asked her questions in the flat tone of someone working through a form, and Richard answered them honestly, or at least narrowly.
"Is anyone in immediate danger?"
"No."
"Has he threatened anyone?"
"No."
"Has there been any property damage?"
"Not that I'm aware of."
"Can you describe the individual?"
Richard looked through the window at the boy lining up another shot, at the tall frame and broad shoulders inherited from his father, at the ease with which he moved on a driveway he had played on since he was small enough to need both hands to launch the ball.
"Young Black male," Richard said, "who doesn't appear to belong in the neighborhood."
He did not say that the driveway belonged to the boy's family, or that the house behind the hoop was the boy's home. He did not say the boy's name, though he knew it. Omissions, Richard had learned, were rarely challenged the way statements were. An omission was only an absence, and absences were hard to prosecute.
"We'll send an officer to check it out," the dispatcher said.
Malik had been outside for nearly forty minutes when the cruiser turned into Brier View Court, and those forty minutes had been the best part of the day.
School had been school: a quiz he had probably passed, a lunch he had half eaten. Then the bus, the walk up the court, homework at the kitchen table while his mother called out questions from the stove, and the groceries carried in from the car two bags at a time. Then the driveway. Then the ball.
He was working on his free throws. He had a routine: bounce three times, find the seam, breathe, bend, release. Don't fight the shot. Give it somewhere to go. His father's voice lived in the routine the way a watermark lives in paper. It was simply the way a shot was taken.
He had the silver coin in his pocket. He usually did. Its edge was worn smooth where his father's thumb had rested for years, and where Malik's thumb rested now.
The cruiser came slowly down the court just after five o'clock. Police cars did not come to Brier View Court often. Malik watched it roll past Samuel Brooks's house and slow, and some small animal part of his brain understood it was slowing for him.
He caught the ball and held it against his hip. His first thought, absurd and complete, was that he should not be holding the ball when they got out. Then the doors were opening, and thought no longer mattered.
There were two officers. The older one came around the front of the cruiser fast, a man who had decided the shape of the next five minutes before he arrived. His hand rested near his belt. He did not look at the house or the hoop or the net still swaying from Malik's last made shot. He looked only at Malik.
"Let me see some identification," he said.
"I live here," Malik said.
"Identification. Now."
Malik's heart was going very hard. He could hear it in his ears, louder than the ball had been. "I don't have it on me. It's in the house. This is my house."
"We got a call about a suspicious individual," the officer said. His name tag read BRIGGS. "Step over here by the car."
"I'm just playing basketball," Malik said. "I live right here."
"By the car," Briggs said, and when Malik, holding the ball, half-turned toward his own front door, to call for his mother, to make the officer see the house, Briggs closed the distance between them and took hold of Malik's wrist.
It happened so fast that the ball fell. It bounced once on the driveway and rolled under the cruiser's front bumper, and nobody went after it.
Briggs's grip was not a steadying grip. It was a grip meant to say that Malik's arm belonged to someone else's decision. He pulled Malik the last two steps to the side of the cruiser and held him there, wrist pinned at an angle that sent a wire of pain up into Malik's shoulder.