I left the house at seven forty-five. I drove the same route I always drove to the courthouse — down Carver Boulevard, across the Meridian Bridge, south on Federal to the parking structure. Fourteen minutes on a clear morning. I was mentally in the hearing already — running through the procedural questions I expected to face in the first hour, the arguments I anticipated from both sides, the specific points where I would need to be most precise.
I was thinking about protocol.
I was, always, thinking about protocol.
The lights appeared in my rearview mirror on the Carver Boulevard stretch, before the bridge. Red and blue, the particular combination that I had seen ten thousand times from the bench and perhaps a hundred times from the driver’s seat, and each time from the driver’s seat produced the same response: a check of the speedometer, a pull toward the curb, a composed and practiced readiness to comply.
