"Whose car is this? Puit moved closer, stopping at roughly 5 feet, crowding the personal space in the way designed to produce a flinch. His eyes moved over the Chevelle, then came back to Raymond's work clothes. "Mine," Raymond said. "And what are you doing with it?
Raymond glanced at the bucket of soapy water sitting beside his left foot, the chamois cloth on the roof, the garden hose coiled on the concrete. He looked back at Puit.
"I'm washing it. I would think that's fairly obvious. Something shifted behind the sunglasses. "Don't get smart with me. I asked whose car this is.
This is a very expensive vehicle for someone dressed like that. The words landed with the casual, almost absent quality of a phrase that has been used enough times that the speaker no longer registers its specific cruelty.
Raymond felt the familiar bitter sting, the feeling he had spent two decades learning to metabolize quickly. He had been fighting this from inside the department through every available institutional channel and from outside it by being exactly who he was in the places he was supposed to be. He made the decision in that moment with the deliberate clarity he applied to investigative decisions at crime scenes. He would not show his badge. Not yet.
He wanted to see what Puit was fully and completely without the variable of rank changing the calculation. He wanted to see how a man like this treated a man he believed to be without protection, without recourse, without the institutional weight of a gold shield to throw on the scale. He was in some part of his mind that had never entirely stopped being a detective gathering evidence. It's my car, Raymond said quietly. This is my driveway.
My name is on the registration in the glove box and on the deed to this house. "Your house?" Puit repeated in a tone that made the two words a question. Dressed as a statement, he looked up the manicured street with the expression of a man who has caught something in a lie. We get a lot of break-in reports in this area. High-value vehicles getting scoped out.
I'm going to need to see some identification. Am I suspected of a crime? Raymond asked. His tone had shifted slightly. Not hostile, but carrying a new precision, the interrogative edge of a trained investigator.