The headlights carved twin lanes of illumination into the humid darkness outside. The road noise was a dull and steady drone inside the quiet of the squad car. It was neatly kept, almost pristine. The kind of environment that spoke to being either brand new, or maintained by someone especially fastidious. Likely the second, based on the woman in the driver's seat. Everything about her communicated poise, experience, and attention to detail. She sat with the rigid but confident posture of someone long accustomed to rigorous mastery of her body. Her hands sat at a perfect ten and two on the wheel. When the car passed beneath the occasional streetlight, the shine gleamed on a recently-polished badge affixed in the perfect position on her chest. Her uniform was spotless and creased in all the right places. She watched the road ahead with the attentive eye of someone who didn't miss much, if anything.
The man in her backseat was her visible opposite in many ways. He slouched. He sat with one shoulder against the seatback, one foot up on the seat, half-reclined. His posture was the picture of insouciance and casual disregard for his situation. He looked more like a libertine on a divan than a perp travelling to police HQ in the middle of the night. His hair -- brownish, thick, and just slightly wavy -- was tousled nicely. He had just enough of a five o'clock shadow to make one question whether or not it was intentional. His jacket was rumpled just a touch. The casual observer might take him for a drunken indigent, given his situation, picked up by the police and all. But anyone looking more closely would note the sharp quickness of his gaze, the faux-carelessness of his movements. This more cautious observer would have to conclude the man was right where he wanted to be.
The two drove in silence. On the long, straight roads of the backcountry, with no other cars around, there was very little way to tell exactly how long it was before he spoke.
"You know that this is unnecessary, right?"
His voice was low. The rumble of the tires on the asphalt was almost enough to swallow it up, but not quite. He inspected a fingernail as he spoke.
"Tara. The woman I was talking to back there. She just got worked up. Nothing bad happened. You know that, right?"
Officer Samantha Holt -- six years on the force, qualified in hand-to-hand combat, expert in pistol marksmanship, certified in emergency vehicle operations and crisis intervention -- put all of her expertise into a measured and calculated response.
"Uh huh."
"I mean it," the man said. "We were just talking. There's nothing wrong with talking, is there, Officer?"
"There is not," Officer Holt replied. "Though apparently she thought there was more than just talking going on, because she called the police. And apparently you aren't the best judge of how a conversation's going, because when I ran your ID, it turns out this is the sixth time in eight months that a woman's called the authorities because you were 'just talking'. I know they've let you off with warnings before, but tonight, you're coming down to the station with me so you can explain to us why this keeps happening. Just a little conversation to clear things up." She paused, the car rumbling over the road. "There's nothing wrong with talking, is there?"
He laughed. Smug fucker.
"What can I say, Officer?" He spread his hands, palms up to the night sky. "You're in charge."
***
Not for the first time, Officer Holt reflected on her choice to work in a community with a police HQ that somehow seemed to be a full hour from everywhere. A true geographical oddity. No matter where she was making her returns from, she always seemed to end up on this long, poorly-lit roads, stretching for miles. Her squad car rumbled its lonely way along the isolated road, nothing but darkness and tall trees to be seen around them. She kept the siren off but the blue lights flashing, casting their illumination out into the empty wooded expanses on either side.
"Do you have the time, Officer?"
The man's voice was so smooth and low that it didn't startle Samantha so much as just softly bump her back into awareness of the moment. She raised an eyebrow. "Got somewhere to be tonight, do you?"
A little chuckle, rumbling faintly from the other side of the partition. "I just like to know. It's easy to lose track of yourself out here in the dark, you know? Feels like we could've been driving for five minutes or five hundred. Can't really say."
Sam sniffed lightly. She'd been having similar thoughts herself but wasn't looking to bond with a perp about travel through liminal spaces and the unmoored timelessness of night.
"It's about ten thirty. Settle in. We have a ways to go."
He didn't respond, and Holt could hear him shifting around in the backseat. Making himself comfortable.
Another impossible-to-define batch of minutes marched on, and the near-silence of the drive was broken by his voice again. Just enough to get her attention, not loud or sudden enough to quite be a surprise.
"Are you sure you have the right guy, by the way?"
Sam exhaled through her nose sharply, the kind of sound that's adjacent to a laugh but doesn't actually have any familiarity with humor. The kind of sound that had made dozens of perps in that backseat wither. The kind of sound that says 'that's the stupidest thing anyone in this state has said today' without deigning to actually use the energy to say it aloud.
"I'm serious. You glance at my ID, tell me I've got a history, throw me in a car. How do I know you ran the right person?"
A long and weary sigh from the driver's seat. "Let me guess. Your twin brother did it, maybe? I've heard that before, you know."
"I'm just saying, mistaken identities happen. You could have the wrong guy. It's possible. You know it is. What's my name, Officer Holt?"
Sam blinked. The man's voice had changed there, just a bit. With his attempts at casual chat, she'd gotten used to the sound of it. Not quite sonorous, but low and full. Quiet. A hint of gravel to it on certain vowel sounds. Pleasant enough, in another context. But that last question, that had something else riding on it. Not an edge so much as a weight. Like... she couldn't have explained this feeling, but it was like the words had more pressure to them. Heft. Like they were more solid.
She shook it off.
"Your name is Elias Mercer," she said. "I ran your name along with your DOB and got back info that perfectly matched what was reported tonight. I'm sure you don't want the reputation of being a man who harasses random women, but that's really not my problem. If you want to play it-wasn't-me, you can knock yourself out during the interview at the station. But regardless of what you say, that's where I'm bringing you. So maybe save your breath."
He chuckled at that, but didn't reply. It was a grating sound, and Holt squeezed the wheel a little tighter as she heard it. A couple of deep breaths and the repetitive thumping drone of road noise helped settle her pulse rate back down.
Minutes passed.
"It is Officer Holt, right?"
Inside the car, the illumination was faint. Dead electric glows from the dashboard, the screen of the mobile data terminal. A murky greenish light that cast itself onto every surface, sticking weakly in the dark. Sam wanted to keep her focus out there, in the warm serenity of the night. He wanted to be under her skin. He wouldn't let her get lost in the dark, apparently. So instead she had to focus on the faint contours of light and the feel of the steering wheel in her hands. Grounding sensations, thankfully.
"That's correct," she replied. She could feel in the way Elias asked that he wanted her to ask why. He wanted her to engage. Probably he was just bored. It was a long, dark drive, and this was a man burdened by a need to verbally harass women. Not likely he'd overcome that impulse just because the setting was a moving cop car and the only available woman was armed, annoyed, and vested with the power of the law. So she opted to simply keep quiet and deny him the opportunity to be a nuisance.
"What's your badge number?"
She sighed. Inane questions were the driving game of the night, it seemed. "Why?" she asked, immediately failing at her previous commitment to not engage more than necessary.
"Just wanted to know. Isn't that something you're required to give out if asked? For the safety of the citizenry and all that."
She tensed. Of course this creep would pick up on her by-the-book fastidiousness and try and twist a knife there. "My commanding officer is Lieutenant Daniels, if you're looking to make a complaint about how you've been treated-"
"No, no, come on. Nothing like that. You've been great," he said, a cloying note of humor creeping into his voice. A patronizing laugh hiding behind the words, talking to her like she was a waitress or flight attendant or something. She could imagine the smirk on his face, leering at her from the backseat. "I just want to know. Tell me your badge number, Officer."
Again something with the voice. Like it was -- this made no sense to Sam -- brighter somehow. More vivid. She thought of the dim glow of the dashboard clock. Small, faint. Weak little diodes endlessly pushing out against the night. But always there, pulling at the edge of her vision, like his voice seemed to be always there.
She tried to distract herself. Thought of the car driving through the streetlights. Long stretches of darkness and then a moment of light. Again, like his voice. It was one thing, stretching out and inhabiting that form, until... it was another thing.
"Badge number 6174," she said. This was a stupid thing to fight about. Just tell him the number, Sam. Maybe then he'll shut up.
"Sorry -- I didn't get that. A little slower?"
She grit her teeth, the little muscles in her jaw and neck flexing. "Six. One. Seven. Four."
"Great. Thank you. Was that so hard?"
Holt felt a flicker of real anger cross through her. It had been just irritation so far, and that was common enough. Most perps were some form of irritating. She could deal with irritating. But this guy had crossed over into something past that, something more solid and immediate. She squeezed the wheel, hard. A streetlight poured its dim gold over the car and her knuckles shone white at her, before sinking back down to the dull greenish of the dashboard lights. She took a breath. This kind of anger didn't serve anything while on duty. She knew better. She needed to just breathe and be calm.
It was easy enough to get back there, to a more tranquil mind. The car was quiet. She watched the flickering blue lights break into the shadows around her for a moment, the lights throwing color out into the night. And she breathed, and she drove, and she felt herself calm down. More quickly than expected, in fact. Something about this night drive was calming, despite the company.
"Officer Holt, what time is it?"
Samantha blinked. She'd spaced out a little. Her efforts to calm herself were perhaps a little too effective, and she had to reorient herself. Her attention collapsed back into the small territory of the car, rather than the empty dark of the night around them. Her eyes flicked to the dashboard clock, and she spoke before she thought about it. "It's ten forty-three."
