The windshield wipers slapped back and forth. The trooper in the front ignored her.
Dez kicked the back of the seat. “Yo! Fuckface! I asked you a question. ”
Without turning, the trooper said, “I can pull over to the side of the road and tase you again, Officer Fox. Or you can behave yourself and wait until we get to your station. ”
“Is that where you’re taking me?”
“Yes. ”
“Why the hell didn’t you just say so? Whatever happened to professional courtesy?”
He made a sound. She thought it was a snort of laughter. She kicked the seat again.
“Hey!” he barked.
“Why did you ass-monkeys tase me in the first place? And who hit me in the head?”
“You struck your head on the counter when you fell. An accident … and I’m sorry about that. Doesn’t look serious though. ”
“Feels pretty goddamn serious,” she snarled. Dez considered throwing up on the screen. That would make her stomach feel better and would really piss this guy off. But she didn’t. Instead, she asked, “What the shit is going on here?”
“You’ve been arrested, Officer Fox. I’d have thought that was clear. Even to you. ”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
He didn’t answer. Dez looked at her cuffed wrists. For most prisoners the chain of the cuffs would be threaded through a D ring on the floor, but they had given her the smallest slice of courtesy by cuffing her hands in front of her without attaching her to the ring. Even so, the rear doors were reinforced and could not be opened from inside. The wire mesh cage separating front from rear seat was heavy grade, and she wasn’t going to kick her way through it.
Dez looked out the rain-slick window. They were halfway across the county from the hardware store, just a couple of miles from the center of town. Stebbins was a tiny community on a massive piece of land. The “town” proper was one traffic light long. Three blocks in one direction, two in the other, and all of it clustered around a Baptist church and the public safety office—which served as the police station, post office, fire station, municipal offices, mayor’s office, and various other one-person offices. The next biggest building in town was a Bean-O’s coffee shop, a greasy spoon with aspirations of Starbuckshood.
Even on its best days Stebbins was a ghost town. The only thing that kept Stebbins from drying up and blowing away was some state and federal money for a regional elementary school that occupied the northwest corner of the township and a slightly smaller regional middle school a few miles away from the town proper—and the county hospital whose campus shared real estate with Bordentown.
They stopped at a crossroads to allow four yellow school buses to pass, heading from the middle school toward the shelter of Stebbins Little School. Dez craned her neck to look at the buses, at the pale, frightened faces pressed to each window. One of the kids, a little girl with yellow curls, waved to her. Dez waved back, needing to lift both hands to do it. Then the buses turned onto Schoolhouse Lane and were gone into the swirling gray wind.
“Where’s my partner?” Dez asked.
“You’ll see him at the station,” said the trooper.
“What?
??s going on? We’re the frigging police, or were you too busy looking at my tits to read the wording on my badge?”
“Don’t flatter yourself. ”
“Fuck you and answer the question. Why arrest us?”
“You’ll have to discuss that with Lieutenant Hardy. ”
“How about you stop being a total prick and tell me. What happened back there? Did you stop them?”
Nothing.
“Did you fucking stop them?”
“Stop whom?”
“What the Christ do you mean, ‘stop whom’? There were fifty of those things in the middle of the street. You had to have driven right through them. ”
“I think we should get to the station and you should listen to your Miranda rights before you say anything, Officer Fox. And that is professional courtesy. ”