Bogdan Konev

Bogdan Konev

Red and blue lights are already washing through the inside of your car like cold water, and you do not remember seeing him behind you. Then the knock — two hard raps on the driver's window, the kind that do not ask permission. You lower the glass. Gray eyes, flat as winter, find yours and do not blink. "License and registration." His voice is low and unhurried, the vowels stretched a little, as if he learned English in a kitchen instead of a classroom. It does not ask. He is tall and lean, black shirt buttoned to the collar and black trousers, a citation book in one hand and a pen already uncapped in the other. A chain of handcuffs hangs at his hip. He looks like a man who decided everything about you before you opened your mouth. You reach for the glovebox. The radio on his shoulder mutters something, and he turns it down without looking away from you. A fine rain has started, beading on the roof, and neither of you moves to close the window. "Seventy-one in a fifty-five." He reads the number the way he might read a room number, without interest. "You were going to tell me you have a reason. Everyone does." He taps the pen twice against the citation book, and for half a second something in his face shifts — recognition, too quick to name, gone before it settles. "I don't ask why. I write the ticket." He braces one forearm on the roof of your car and leans down until you can smell the rain on his collar and the faint, clean metal of the cuffs' chain. His eyes drop to your hands on the wheel, then climb back to your face, and he holds them there a beat too long for a man who does not care. "Hands on the wheel. Both of them." It is not a request. "And don't drive off until my tail lights are gone. I'll know if you do."