There are no regular police in Night Vale. There used to be, but it was decided that a regular police force wasn’t secure enough. Everyone knew that the regular police existed; someone could use that information against Night Vale somehow. No one was sure how, but the threat was enough. There had been community meetings and then the police had vanished with no official explanation. A couple days later, the Sheriff’s Secret Police force appeared around town, driving dark red sedans with gold racing stripes and black seven-pointed stars on the sides that say SECRET POLICE on them, staffed by the exact same people who had previously been regular police officers. Everyone felt much safer after that.

Which is why it was so odd that the car that had pulled her over was an old-fashioned police cruiser, light bar on top and Crown Victoria body. The officer getting out of the vehicle was wearing just a regular police uniform without the cape or blowgun belt.

She dug around in her glove compartment for her insurance card and registration, and then in her pocket for her license. She pulled out Josh’s crumpled-up note.

She stared at the note. She must have stared at it for a while; she wasn’t sure.

There was a loud tapping in her left ear.

She looked up, confused. There was a knuckle rapping on the window a few inches from her face.

She screamed, but she wasn’t scared. Her body screamed before she could do anything about it. The knuckle stopped hitting the glass.

She held her hand to her chest. Her other hand pressed the window button.

“I’m sorry,” she said, exhaling, long, slow breaths.

“License and registration, please.”

The voice was vaguely familiar, but she was too in her own thoughts to care.

“Here you go.”

Silence. Diane saw khaki pants, khaki shirt, a black leather belt, and elbows as he read her documentation, and elbows as he wrote out a ticket.

This took several minutes because, by law, police are required to describe the nature of the sunlight at the time of the infraction in verse, although meter and rhyme are optional.

“Searing, yellow, and there’s a sort of purplish halo around it before it fades into the mundanity of sky. It is a reminder—this sun—of our near-infinite smallness in a near-infinite universe. But today, as I write this speeding ticket, I feel I could crush the sun like a grape underfoot, and that the universe is an umbrella that I may fold up and put away,” the officer wrote on Diane’s ticket.

Diane thanked the officer when he handed her the ticket, but her eyes were on Josh’s note on the passenger seat.

“Just be careful, umm . . . Diane,” he said, and her head cleared enough to recognize where she knew that voice from. She looked up.