"Good catch, Tommy," Doyle grunted, not bothering to look back at Cynthia. His voice was flat, tired, the voice of a man who had said the same thing a hundred times before and meant it less each time. "Captain Miller's been riding us all month about narcotics numbers. This ought to get him off our backs."
"Easy money, Kev," O'Grady said, and he grinned at the road ahead, at the wet black ribbon of highway unspooling under the headlights. "She practically handed it to me. Pulled her over for a swerve, saw the baggy sitting right in plain sight on the passenger seat. Didn't even try to hide it."
Cynthia filed the sentence away with the same precision she used for evidence logs. On the highway, beside her car, he had said the bag was under the driver's seat. He had pretended to find it there, had held it up in the glare of the headlights and announced it like a discovery. Now, in the cruiser, it was on the passenger seat, in plain sight, as if it had been waiting there all along for any honest officer to see. The difference was not a slip of memory. It was a choice, made in real time, to build a cleaner story for the ride back, a story that would sound better to a captain, better to a prosecutor, better to a jury that would never stand in the rain on Interstate 55 and watch a man's hand disappear into his own coat pocket.
"She give you any trouble?" Doyle asked.
"A little lip," O'Grady scoffed, waving one hand off the wheel as if brushing away a fly. "Try to pull the do you know who I am routine. Just another mule in a rented suit."
Cynthia did not correct him. She did not speak at all. She let the silence in the back seat do its work. She had not pulled any routine. She had given her name, her license, her rental agreement, and nothing else. She had stepped out when ordered, placed her hands where ordered, endured a search that went past protocol and into something rougher and more personal, and she had said only what the law required her to say. The fact that O'Grady was already rewriting her into a woman who had argued and postured told her everything she needed to know about how he would write the rest of the night. If he could invent trouble where there had been compliance, he could invent anything.
"Miller is going to put me up for that detective shield after this one," O'Grady went on, his voice warming with the pleasure of the thought. "I can feel it. A clean collar, right off the highway, two ounces, no fuss. That's the kind of thing that gets remembered when the list comes out."