The room fell quiet again as I stood tall, the denim jacket draped over my shoulders, my head held high under the fluorescent lights.
"I am not going to a hotel, Renee," I said, looking out through the front glass windows toward the town square, where dozens of local citizens were already gathering along the sidewalks, watching the federal vehicles with wide, disbelieving eyes. "My seventy-six-year-old aunt is waiting for her blood pressure medication on Old Mill Road. Take me to the clinic to set this bone, and then take me home to Aunt Lorraine. Our work in Pell County is just getting started."
The regional medical clinic on the highway outside town smelled of alcohol prep pads and stale air conditioning.
Under the buzzing lights of the small radiology suite, a young technician positioned my arm over the cold imaging plate, wincing slightly as he saw the purple ridge and the deep gouges carved into the flesh by Dalton Voss's handcuffs. Twenty minutes later, the attending physician walked into the exam room holding the digital readouts.
"Hairline fracture on the distal radius," the doctor said, shaking his head with quiet anger as he pointed to the thin, dark line cleaving the dense white image of bone. "Along with severe soft-tissue trauma and torn collateral ligaments. If that metal cuff had been torqued another quarter-inch, the bone would have snapped entirely through. Who did this to you?"
"A man who no longer has the authority to do it to anyone else," I answered quietly.
He didn't ask another question. In rural Georgia, people knew when not to pry, especially when an armed federal agent in a suit stood guard directly outside the examination door. The doctor wrapped the arm in layers of soft batting, soaked a roll of fiberglass tape in warm water, and molded a rigid charcoal-gray cast from the middle of my forearm down to the base of my fingers, leaving my thumb free. He prescribed an anti-inflammatory and an antibiotic for the open cuts, wrote the instructions on a yellow slip, and handed me a black cloth sling to support the weight.
By the time Special Agent Renee Calloway escorted me out to her black government sedan, the late afternoon sun was slipping behind the towering loblolly pines, casting long, bleeding crimson shadows across the asphalt.
"Chief Judge Brennan called again while you were in X-ray," Calloway said, opening the passenger door for me. "He wants you on a private charter out of Macon tonight, heading straight back to Atlanta. He’s already reached out to the United States Marshals Service to place your residential building in Midtown under twenty-four-hour detail."
"I am not leaving Halvorsen Springs, Renee," I said, sliding into the passenger seat and using my right hand to pull the seatbelt across my lap. "My aunt cannot walk without a frame, and she relies on me. More importantly, leaving right now sends the wrong message to every citizen who watched Dalton Voss throw me into that patrol car. If a federal judge flees this county the moment a corrupt sheriff is handcuffed, what hope do the people who live here have?"
Calloway sighed, a low sound of mingled frustration and deep respect, and put the sedan into gear. "Voss may be in federal custody, Amara, but the machine he built didn't collapse with him. His brother-in-law, Gary Pritchard, was tipped off twenty minutes after we breached the precinct. By the time our tactical team reached Pritchard's office at the county title company, the front door was unlocked, the hard drives had been pulled from the servers, and his personal vehicle was gone."
I looked out the passenger window as the suburban fringes of Halvorsen Springs gave way to dense, dark stands of hardwood and pine. "Gary Pritchard is the ledger. Voss was merely the blunt instrument. Where would Pritchard run?"
"He hasn't left the state yet," Calloway said grimly. "Highway Patrol found his truck abandoned at an off-ramp near Cordele, but we think he doubled back in a secondary vehicle. He has money, Amara. Millions of dollars diverted through Pinecrest Holdings over the last seven years. And more than that, he has people on his payroll who aren't bound by an oath to the Constitution. Local enforcers. Men who worked off-the-books for Voss running intimidation jobs out in the woods."
"Then we prepare for them," I said. "Take me to Old Mill Road."
The drive to Aunt Lorraine’s house took twenty minutes along winding, two-lane blacktop roads where the asphalt had degraded into gravel shoulders. The trees here grew thick and close, their branches interlacing overhead to form a vaulted canopy of dark green that blocked out the dying sun. Every few miles, a small, weathered homestead sat set back in a clearing—clapboard houses with tin roofs, rusted pickup trucks parked beneath weeping willows, and front porches where elderly residents sat watching the road with cautious, weary eyes.
Lorraine Bishop’s home was an eleven-acre island of quiet dignity. The modest, single-story ranch house had been built by my uncle in 1968, surrounded by high sweetgum trees, a neat vegetable garden surrounded by chicken wire, and a gravel driveway lined with blooming white hydrangeas.
As Calloway pulled the sedan to a halt before the front porch, the glow of a television screen flickered against the sheer curtains of the front window.
Two unmarked black cruisers with dark tinted windows were already parked in the grass beside the garage—a perimeter team from the U.S. Marshals Service dispatched on Calloway's orders. A tall marshal in plainclothes nodded respectfully as I stepped out of the sedan, holding the heavy fiberglass cast close against my ribs.
I pushed open the unlocked front door.
The living room smelled of lavender wax melts, menthol rub, and the rich, roasted scent of chicken stew simmering in a slow cooker on the kitchen counter. Aunt Lorraine was propped up in an adjustable hospital bed that had been set up in the center of the room to accommodate her fractured hip. Her walker was parked within arm's reach, its rubber feet wrapped in yellow tennis balls to keep from scuffing the polished heart-pine floors.