The cruiser turned out of Mason Park with Isaiah folded into the hard plastic back seat and his cuffed hands pressed awkwardly behind him. The door had closed with a heavy sound that seemed to seal the morning shut. Through the window, scratched and smudged at the edges, he could still see the park shrinking behind them, the swing set standing crooked in the thin fog, the slide with its cracked seam catching the first pale light. He did not look away until the cruiser reached the corner of Fourth and Linden, because he wanted the place fixed in his memory exactly as it had been when the morning broke open.
Mrs. Alden was still on her porch. He saw her through the side window as the cruiser rolled past her house, and the sight of her steadied him in a way nothing else that morning had. She had not gone back inside. She was standing at the top of her porch steps in her robe, her old tablet tucked under one arm, and she was holding a phone to her ear with her other hand. Her mouth was moving fast. Her free hand was cutting the air in short, sharp gestures, the way people gesture when they are trying to make someone on the other end understand that something urgent has happened and that there is no time to waste on pleasantries.
Isaiah watched her until the cruiser carried him past the hedge that bordered her yard, and then he watched her in the side mirror for as long as the angle allowed. She did not call the police. He was certain of that, not because he could hear her words through the glass and the engine noise, but because of the way she stood. A person calling the police stands still and waits to be told what to do. Mrs. Alden was not waiting. She was directing. She was telling someone what she had seen, where it had happened, and who needed to be found right away. She was calling someone who knows what to do, someone who would not need the story explained twice, someone who would move.
He stored that image alongside everything else he had already stored that morning. The badge number he had read off the uniform when Briggs first stepped out of the cruiser. The time, as close as he could fix it, about seven in the morning, after his arrival at the park at six forty seven. The place, Mason Park at the edge of Northgate, beside the chain link fence where his cheek had met the metal. The witness, an elderly woman in a robe on a porch across the street, holding a tablet that had recorded it all. The words, including the word that had changed the air between them. The force, the twist of his arm, the shove, the cuffs biting into his wrists, the punch that had folded him onto the gravel. And the lie, already taking shape in the way Briggs had spoken into his radio, calling him a vandalism suspect who resisted, calling him a man who refused to identify himself.
The ride took twelve minutes. Isaiah counted them not by a clock, because he had no watch worth noticing and his phone was in his pocket where he could not reach it, but by the streets the cruiser passed and by the rhythm of the drive. He knew Brookhaven the way a mayor knows a city he has walked for years, and he knew when they turned off Linden and when they crossed into the busier roads that led toward the station. At each stoplight Isaiah looked out at ordinary people starting ordinary Sundays, people carrying coffee, people walking dogs, people who had no idea that a mayor sat cuffed in the back of a police car two lanes away from them.
Briggs drove in silence for most of the ride, his hands firm on the wheel, his eyes fixed on the road. Once, at a red light, he glanced into the rearview mirror, and his pale eyes met Isaiah's for a fraction of a second before sliding away again. Isaiah did not speak. He had stopped explaining in the park, and he did not start again in the car. Explanations had done nothing at the fence, and he would not spend the ride begging a man who had already decided what story he was going to tell. Instead he kept his breathing even and his mind orderly, the way he had learned to keep it orderly in rooms where other people were shouting. He noted the way the cuffs pulled when the cruiser turned. He noted the ache in his ribs where the punch had landed. He noted the taste of blood that still lingered where his teeth had cut his lip.
The cruiser slowed as it approached the station, turned into the entrance, and rolled toward the sally port. Isaiah straightened his shoulders as much as the cuffs allowed and set his face calm. The ride was ending. The next room would be harder in some ways and easier in others, because in the next room there would be other officers, other eyes, and a desk where a name would have to be written down. He was ready for that room. He had his memory intact, his witness on her porch, and a phone call traveling through the city ahead of him like a signal he could not see but could trust.
Chapter Seventeen
The Man Who Needed A Little Persuasion