The woman with the phone wore blue hospital scrubs beneath an open cardigan. She kept the silver minivan between herself and the officers, but she did not lower the camera. Andre could see her reflection in his truck window. She was recording the distance between the pump and his feet, the discarded nozzle, the officers’ hands. He tried to remember her face. At that moment, remembering seemed like the only useful thing he could do without being accused of resisting.
“Is he hurt?” she asked.
“Ma’am, this is police business,” Rusk answered.
“He said he can’t breathe properly.”
“I said my ribs hurt,” Andre corrected, carefully. He did not want an exaggeration attached to the record, even one intended to help him. “I can breathe. It hurts.”
Pike eased the pressure against his back by a fraction. Rusk noticed and looked at her. She stepped closer again, though she did not push as hard. Her radio made a brief electronic chirp. She touched the microphone, then let her hand fall without speaking.
The market owner came outside. He was a narrow man with a white beard and a green apron darkened by water. “I’ve shut the pumps off,” he said. “We need everybody away from the spill.”
“Then clear the area,” Rusk told him.
“Including him.”
The owner pointed at Andre’s boots. Rusk stared at him, apparently deciding whether to argue about something so practical that the cameras would make the argument look absurd. Finally he pulled Andre upright and guided him toward the rear of the truck. The fresh air felt cooler away from the fuel, but standing straight made the pain along his ribs sharper.
“My name’s Samuel Harper,” the owner said to Andre. “My cameras are working.”
Rusk turned. “Nobody asked you.”
“I know.”
Pike looked toward the little black dome under the canopy. Andre noticed that her own chest camera had a light on. Rusk’s did not. He did not know what the light meant on that model, and he would not pretend later that he did. He only remembered the difference because the woman filming had moved her phone to capture both officers at once.
Rusk reached into Andre’s shirt pocket. Andre felt the folded photocopy scrape against his collarbone. The officer unfolded it with one hand. At the top were the words Alder Creek Recovery Allocation, followed by a list of numbered units and delivery dates. Andre’s mother had circled her assigned unit with a blue pen. Beside the number was a signature she had never written. Andre watched Rusk recognize the page before he tried to make his face empty again.
“What’s this?” Rusk asked.
“You tell me.”
The officer’s hand tightened around the paper.
Andre corrected himself before the moment could turn worse. “It’s the record they gave me. I asked why the home assigned to my mother was marked delivered.”
“Government paperwork doesn’t belong to you.”
“They photocopied it for me.”
“Which employee?”
“I don’t know her name.”
Rusk folded the sheet into quarters. “Then we’ll find out.”
Andre thought of his mother waiting in a motel room with a broken ice machine outside the door. Evelyn Bennett had spent thirty-one years helping other people find seats in a crowded church hall. She had organized meals after funerals and driven neighbors to appointments without making a list of favors owed. Since the river rose, strangers had spoken to her as though needing assistance had made her unreliable. Now an officer held the only paper proving that somebody else’s account of her life was wrong.
“Please don’t lose that,” Andre said.
Rusk smiled without warmth. “You worried about a piece of paper?”
“It has my mother’s name on it.”
Celia checked that her recording had not stopped when a notification appeared. She moved her thumb carefully, keeping the officers in frame. A patient had once told her that fear made people forget instructions they knew perfectly well. Now she understood the observation differently. She wanted to say six useful things at once and could manage only one. She asked Andre whether he needed an ambulance. He nodded before Rusk told her to stop interfering. She repeated the question anyway, this time loudly enough for Pike to hear.
Pike glanced at the fold in his hand. For the first time she looked uncertain in a way that seemed larger than the spilled fuel. Before she could speak, Rusk’s phone vibrated. He checked the screen, silenced it, and looked toward the road. Andre followed his gaze. Three black SUVs had turned off the highway together. They entered slowly, without sirens, and stopped beyond the outer pumps.