A White Mercedes Pulled Up to Gate Six on a Tuesday Afternoon Without a Permit

“It’s two dollars, Sergeant.

I’m not going to starve.”

He lifted the lid.

On top, folded in a paper napkin, was the brass clip.

I turned it over.

Twenty years of spring in that hinge, the jaw still biting.

Along the inside of the jaw, a thin crust of dried ink had gone the color of an old bruise.

The same blue-black I had put a cotton swab to in the record room in August.