At that moment, two patrol cars appeared around the curve, their roof lights off and their tires making a faint hiss on the sun-warmed pavement. I glanced at them and, despite myself, smiled. Linda caught it immediately.
"Why are you smiling?"
"Because I was hoping somebody neutral would check."
Richard looked at the stake again. Then his eyes moved to the blue binder, with colored tabs labeled Property, Fire, Communications, and Police protruding from one side. For the first time all morning, he stopped pretending this was merely a matter of ordering an uncooperative resident to move an appliance.
"What did you do?" he asked.
"Nothing complicated," I replied. "I checked where your authority ends."
If you had seen only that moment, you might have assumed I spent my weekends looking for ways to torment a neighborhood association. The truth was much less exciting. My name is Mark Dalton. I was forty-seven years old, seventeen years into a military career, and responsible at work for more than a hundred people whose families expected them to come home safely. Regulations, inspections, checklists, and risk assessments occupied so much of my professional life that the last thing I wanted after work was another argument about a rule. I had enough conflict without manufacturing any for recreation.
That was why, when I came home, I tried to leave my command voice at the door. My fiancee, Emily, had a name for the quieter version of me. She called it my civilian voice. It was low, polite, and usually began with some variation of "Good morning," "No problem," or "Could you show me where that's written?" The third sentence, I eventually discovered, was dangerous around people who preferred their authority to be accepted without inspection.
Emily owned our condo, unit 214, in a modest but well-maintained complex on the edge of town. It wasn't a grand place. There were two-story buildings with brick along the lower walls, pale siding above, small balconies, and a central green area that connected the parking lot to the pool. Somebody had planted ornamental grasses around the clubhouse, and the maintenance crew trimmed the hedges with military precision whenever the weather cooperated. The development had the unremarkable comfortable appearance of a place where people worked all week, paid their bills, and wanted a little peace on the weekends.
I moved in after Emily and I decided that sharing one home made more sense than spending half our lives driving between two addresses. We were engaged, but I made a point of remembering that the deed was in her name. She had worked hard for that condo. She had put down her own money, signed her own mortgage documents, and built a home before I came along. If somebody threatened the unit with fines or liens because of something I did, she would bear the consequences as the owner. That fact mattered to me far more than whether Linda Carver liked my manners.