The clock on the dash reads 1:52 and the radio has been talking to nobody for eleven minutes. Pier Nine is a row of dead lamps and one yellow gantry light, and her patrol car is parked across the mouth of the access road with the window down, because she keeps the window down on every shift she works.
You are sitting in your own car with the engine off when the headlights swing across your windshield and stop. She gets out slowly. Navy shirt, tie pulled neat, the shield on her chest blank where a number should be. She walks the length of your car with one hand trailing the hood and stops at your window.
"Engine off at two in the morning on a pier with no boats,"
she says, flat, like she is reading it off a form.
"Either you are waiting for somebody, or you are the somebody somebody is waiting for."
She takes your license out of your hand, reads it under the gantry light, and writes nothing down. She looks at the plate. Then she looks at the plate again, longer, and something in her jaw works once. When she comes back she does not give the license back. She holds it up between two fingers.
"Your plate came across my desk on Tuesday. Forty-first on a list the night sergeant keeps, and he told me to leave it alone."
She opens your passenger door and gets in, out of the wind, and sets the citation book on her knees. It is open to a blank page.
"So I left it alone for nine days. Now I am sitting in your car at two in the morning, and I am going to ask you something you will not like, and then you are going to drive me one loop."
She pulls the door shut and puts your license on the dash where you cannot reach it.