For forty minutes, Cole had acted as if he were waiting on something official. Waiting on a database. Waiting on a call. Waiting on some invisible machinery that required my mother to stand in ninety-one-degree heat while he sat inside an air-conditioned cruiser. Every time I had looked through the windshield at the back of his patrol car, I had imagined computers blinking, records loading, some bureaucratic delay grinding away beyond our control.
Now the radio had just said he had never asked anyone anything.
Cole released the button.
Mom looked at him.
Not triumphantly. That would have made more sense to me. If somebody had humiliated me for forty minutes and then got caught pretending he had been doing his job, I would have wanted him to know I knew.
Mom only said, “Thank you.”
Cole’s head snapped toward her. “For what?”
“For not calling the tow truck yet.”
He stared at her long enough that I felt the urge to open my door again.
The chrome handle burned beneath my fingers before I even pulled it.
