“Ma’am?”
She turned her head back to him, locked her eyes on his, and her heart was going, all right, because she could tell where this was leading and it scared her and made the anger come up in her too, and why couldn’t they just leave well enough alone? “I told you,” she said, “I have no contract with you.”
“Does that mean you refuse?”
“Let me repeat,” she said. “I—have—no—contract—with—you.”
He shifted his boots in the gravel along the roadside, a dull grating intolerable sound that got Kutya back up into the high register. The cop put his hands on his hips, as if to show her where the gun was and the nightstick and handcuffs too. He said, “I’m going to have to ask you to get out of the car.”
“No,” she said. “I won’t.”
“Suit yourself.” He straightened up then and stalked back to his car, where she could see him in her rearview as he leaned in, pulled out the cord of the radio mike and started moving his lips.
Ten long minutes crept by. Each one of them, each second, dripped acid through her veins, and she thought of just putting the car in gear and driving off, but resisted because that would only make things worse. Kutya—he was a puli, a white puli—settled into the discolored basket of his dreadlocks and fell off to sleep, thinking the threat had passed. Foolishly. But then he was a dog, and dogs had other concerns.
Finally another cruiser appeared, lights flashing, siren screaming, swooping on up the road behind her like a black steel shroud and nosing in at an angle so close to her front bumper she thought it was going to hit her. In the next instant she was staring across the passenger’s seat of this new car and into the face—the hard demanding unforgiving put-upon face—of a female officer, who picked something up off the seat, squared herself and swung out of the car. Next thing she knew, both cops were there, one on either side of her, and Kutya was back on his feet, back at it again, barking in a renewed frenzy that just made everything that much harder.
“Good afternoon,” the female cop said, her eyes roaming over the interior as if she was thinking of making an offer on the car. “I understand that you refuse to comply with Officer Switzer’s request for identification, is that right?”
She said nothing.
The female officer—she was tall, thin, no shape to her at all, and she wore no makeup, not a trace, not even lipstick—asked her to get out of the car. Or no, commanded her.
She said nothing.
“Just to be sure you understand me,” the male cop cut in now—he was stationed by the passenger’s-side window, leaning in so he could watch her, and if that didn’t make her feel paranoid she couldn’t imagine what would because this was like being squeezed between two pincers and it was wrong, intolerable, a violation of every natural right there was—“I have to inform you that state law requires you to show a valid driver’s license, registration and proof of insurance at the reasonable request of a peace officer.”
She threw it right back at him. “Reasonable? You call this reasonable? You have no authority here—you’re nothing more to me than a man dressed up in a Halloween costume.”
“If you refuse,” he said, the muscles tightening around his mouth, “we will have no recourse but to remove you forcibly from your vehicle—”
“Which will be impounded,” the female added, as if they’d switched speakers on a stereo, his voice assaulting her on the right, hers on the left. “And your dog will be taken to the shelter.” She paused. A top-heavy camper swished delicately past them, ten miles under the limit. A pickup going the opposite way swung with elaborate courtesy off onto the shoulder to give it room and then continued on in a slow-motion crawl. “And you yourself, if you don’t comply this minute, will be arrested, I promise you that—and I personally will escort you to the county jail.”