Just as that thought occurred to me, the woman flicked a cigarette butt out of the window toward a Sonic carhop that was heading to another car.
She had to sidestep to avoid getting hit.
I gritted my teeth and added yet another citation to the growing list that was already taking place in my head.
“No outstanding warrants,” the dispatcher said. “Though there are several notes in here about the woman.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “Argumentative with the police?”
“You got it,” she said. “Want backup?”
Did I?
I didn’t think I needed it, but sometimes it was better safe than sorry.
“Who’s close?”
“Black’s down the street eating lunch,” she said. “Mance is just down the road, too. Faith and Colliery are on a call.”
I grimaced.
I wasn’t interrupting Black’s lunch if I didn’t have to. And I couldn’t stand Mance.
“I’ll be okay,” I said. “Thanks, darlin’.”
I didn’t actually know the dispatcher’s name.
It was some grandma name that she’d told me a hundred thousand times, and I felt bad that I couldn’t remember it. So I always called her “darlin’.” We both knew that I didn’t know and pretended like I did.
I was really bad at names, and it took an act of God to get me to remember one.
“Be careful, Gentry,” she ordered in her grandmotherly voice.
I got out, my ticket book already in my hand.
We usually went digital with our tickets, but of course, today was not our day.
The system had gone down around noon and had stayed down for the last two hours.
So we were back to paper tickets and filling out notes by hand until the system was back up.
Even worse, with the system being down, we were also kind of flying blind on the warrants thing.
To the best of the dispatcher’s knowledge, there wasn’t a warrant. But that system was outdated and clunky. It wasn’t always the most reliable, and the offline version was like reading half of what was actually in each person’s file.
“Do you know why I pulled you over?” I asked as I walked up to the open car door window.
The woman who’d started a new cigarette the moment she threw the old one out blew out a puff of smoke in my direction before answering, “Isn’t that your job, Officer? To know why I was pulled over?”
The woman was in her fifties. She was short, scrawny, and I was right. She looked like she lived in the sun.
The carhop came back with a bag of food for the bitch in the truck and I pointed at a table behind her. “Just sit it there until we’re done with this traffic stop. Thank you.”
The woman didn’t argue, setting it on the table just beyond the woman in the car’s reach.
The chain smoker narrowed her eyes at me. “That’s my food.”
“Sure is,” I said. “And you should’ve waited to order it. In the meantime, I need your license and registration.”