The silence that followed was of a different kind than the silence after the brick. The alarm had cycled down, and in the sudden quiet the whole forecourt could hear the ticking of cooling engines and the small, bright sound of glass still settling in its frame.
Vivian's eyes went from the credentials to Darius and back.
"You're FBI?" she said.
"Yes," Darius said.
The employee behind the counter chose that moment to move at last. She came around the end of the counter and took up a position near the office door, and it was only then, with the light from the broken window falling across her, that the badge clipped beside her employee tag became plainly visible to everyone on the forecourt. It was not a name badge. It was a federal identification badge, and it had been there the entire time.
Vivian stared at it. "She's FBI too?"
"You're running an FBI office from a gas station?" she said to Darius. Her voice had climbed. "That is what this is? That is why nobody could get a straight answer about who owned this place or what was happening here? You have been running some kind of operation out of a neighborhood business?"
"No," Darius said. "This is my gas station. And it is currently supporting a federal operation."
There was a difference between those two sentences, and he watched her decide not to hear it.
"What I did," she said, rallying, drawing herself up inside the salmon-pink suit, "was an HOA enforcement action. I am the president of this association. That station sat vacant for eleven months inside our community boundary, it was a nuisance and a safety hazard, and this man has refused every compliance process the association has. Whatever your involvement is, it does not change the fact that I was acting in my official capacity."
"You threw a brick through a commercial window," Chen said.
"I enforced a covenant."
"You threw a brick," Darius said, "through the window of a business with customers at the pumps, and then you called emergency services and told them I had broken into it."
Her chin came up. "I told them what the situation appeared to be."
"You told them I was aggressive while I was standing still. You told them I refused to identify myself when you never asked my name. You mentioned weapons. There were no weapons. There was a brick."
"Dispatch records calls," she said. "I have nothing to worry about if the call is reviewed fairly."
"The cameras will make twisting difficult," Darius said.
She had no answer for that, and into the space where the answer should have been came the second set of sirens, rising from the far end of Harrison Boulevard, growing, and resolving into two marked cruisers that swung into the lot and stopped well back from the unmarked vehicles, the way local officers stop when a scene has already been claimed by people they do not outrank.
The senior of them, Sergeant Paul Daniels, got out slowly, read the forecourt in one long pass, the SUVs, the suits, the glass, the woman in pink, the man in the doorway, and then he made a decision that everyone present noticed.
He walked to Darius first.
"Sir," he said. "Sergeant Daniels. Can you tell me what happened here?"
"I own this station," Darius said. "That woman threw a brick through the front window about fifteen minutes ago. She then called 911 and reported that I had broken in. Two customers were at the pumps. One of them recorded it. She also attempted to enter the business afterward, and I declined to allow that."
Daniels looked at the window. He looked at the brick, where it lay against the drink rack in its drift of bottles.
"You have documentation of ownership on you?" he asked. There was no edge in it. It was a question being asked in its proper order.
Darius lifted the portfolio. For the first time since the glass broke, he opened it, and he took out the documents in the sequence they had been arranged on the morning he closed.
"Deed," he said, and handed it over. "Operating license. Corporate registration. Insurance. And the purchase closing documents."
Daniels read the first page of the deed. He read the second. He handed the portfolio back with both hands.
"Thank you, sir."
"The parcel line is on page four," Darius said. "If it comes up."
"I expect it will," Daniels said.
Only then did he turn to Vivian.
She was ready for him. She had her phone out and a document open on it, held up like a shield with small print. "Sergeant, I have the association's commercial covenant right here, and the compliance review notices, all of them, going back months. If you will just look at section nine, you will see the authority the board operates under regarding properties that affect the community."