The second officer’s hands were shaking now too as he handed the case back. His voice, when it came, had lost every trace of the swagger from a minute ago.
“Why didn’t you — why didn’t you say something?”
Victoria met his eyes without flinching.
“Because I wanted to see how you treat ordinary people,” she said. “Now I have.”
There was a silence after that. A real, heavy silence, the kind that presses down on a scene like weather. The two men stood there in the fading evening light, and for the first time since the lights had gone on in her mirror, they looked less like officers of the law and more like two men who had just watched the ground open up in front of them.
They fumbled the cuffs off her wrists so fast the metal scraped her skin. The tall one started talking immediately, words tumbling over each other.
