Raymond set the wash mitt on the hood of the Chevelle. Sandra stopped close enough to touch him but did not reach out immediately. "Are you hurt?" she asked. "My arm's sore where he grabbed it." She looked at the place and saw the early mark beneath his sleeve.
"Anything else?" Raymond looked at her and took longer to answer than either of them expected. "I'm angry," he finally said. "I'm angry that he thought he could threaten you inside our own house."
Sandra swallowed. "I heard him," she said. "I heard what he said about coming inside." She looked toward the street, where the last cruiser had disappeared.
"For a moment I thought you were going to get hurt, and I couldn't decide whether coming out would make it worse." Raymond drew her close, and she rested her forehead against his shoulder. Their embrace was brief but carried the exhaustion of something neither had yet had time to understand.
"Why didn't you show him your badge when he first pulled up?" Sandra asked eventually. It was not an accusation. Raymond considered the question and found that the simple answer he had been carrying through the encounter no longer felt sufficient. "Because the man he thought he was dealing with wasn't supposed to have one," he said. "I wanted him to do his job for that man, not for Sergeant Doss."
"And if he'd hit you before you opened it?" Sandra asked. Raymond had no easy answer. He looked at the baton mark still visible on the concrete where the rod had fallen.
"Then I made a dangerous decision," he admitted. "I won't pretend otherwise. I thought I could keep the situation from getting there." Sandra watched his face. "You know being right won't keep me from being afraid for you," she said.
The Chevelle remained unfinished for another hour. Raymond went inside, sat at the kitchen table, and drank coffee that had gone cold while Sandra checked his arm. His phone began ringing almost immediately. A lieutenant from Major Crimes called first, followed by an old academy friend, then Chief Diane Mercer's office. Raymond let most of the calls go unanswered until he had written down everything he remembered while the sequence remained clear.
He used a legal pad from the hall drawer and began with the time. Arrival of police vehicle, approximately 9:47. Emergency lights, shortly after 9:49. Initial contact, demand for identification, plate check, threat to household, call for backup, first physical contact, baton deployment, display of credentials. He wrote each phrase he could recall and marked the points where he could not be certain of an exact word. Sandra sat opposite him with her own notebook, describing what she had heard from the kitchen and what she had seen from the window.