"Walk," Voss hissed into my ear. "Don't trip, lady. It's a long way to the concrete."
As he marched me down the narrow center aisle between the booths, I raised my eyes. I didn't look down at the floor. I held my head as high as my contorted posture allowed.
Every face in the Magnolia Diner was turned toward us, frozen in terror. There was Mr. Abernathy, the elderly hardware store owner whose family had lived in Pell County for four generations; Mrs. Gable, who played the organ at the First Baptist Church; and two young utility workers in high-visibility vests who immediately cast their eyes down into their grits, terrified of making eye contact with the man who carried the county’s only law on his hip.
They knew Dalton Voss. They had watched him run Pell County like a personal feudal plantation for twelve uninterrupted years.
They knew about the suspicious car crashes that happened to local politicians who challenged him at election time. They knew about the small business owners who suddenly found their licenses revoked after refusing to donate to his "Sheriff's Youth Rodeo." And they knew about Pinecrest Holdings—the shadowy real-estate firm run by Voss's brother-in-law that had systematically bought up tax-delinquent family farms for pennies on the dollar after the sheriff’s office served disputed, unverified eviction notices.
Nobody dared to speak.
Nobody lifted a phone to film.
Except one person.
Tucked behind the pie case near the stainless steel kitchen doors, the nineteen-year-old waitress, Kayla Dupree, stood frozen with a dish towel in her hand. Beneath the edge of the glass display, her fingers were locked around her smartphone. The small, dark camera lens was pointed directly through the gap between two tiered cake stands, tracking Voss's hand on my collar, tracking my bruised wrists, tracking every step of this unlawful arrest. Her eyes met mine for a split second, wide with terror, yet blazing with defiance. I offered her a microscopic nod—just enough to let her know I saw her—before Voss shoved me through the swinging glass doors into the blistering Georgia summer heat.
The heavy, humid air hit like a damp wool blanket.
Parked directly on the sidewalk curb, blocking the yellow-painted emergency lane, sat Voss’s patrol SUV—a massive, blacked-out cruiser with heavily tinted windows and custom steel push-bumpers. The engine was idling, the exhaust burbling with a low, menacing growl.
"Open the rear door, Miller," Voss barked.
Deputy Miller scrambled forward, his knuckles pale as he grabbed the cruiser's rear door handle and pulled it open. The interior was a reinforced cage of hard black plastic and heavy wire mesh, lacking handles on the inside and smelling intensely of air freshener masking urine and sweat.
"Watch your head, felon," Voss sneered, shoving his hand onto the crown of my head and jamming me down into the back seat.
He didn't ease me in. He slammed me against the molded plastic partition. My shoulder hit the hard molded seat with a sickening thud, and the sharp edge of the handcuff gouged into my wrist bone. Warm blood welled immediately under the metal band, trickling down into the palm of my hand.
I didn't utter a sound. I leaned back against the hard plastic, pulled my legs inside the threshold, and looked Voss dead in the eyes through the open door.
"You're very confident, Sheriff," I said, my voice carrying the flat, crystalline weight of someone reading an indictment from behind an elevated mahogany bench. "I wonder if you'll maintain that same confidence by dinner time."
Voss barked a harsh, ugly laugh. He leaned into the vehicle, resting both forearms on the doorframe, his leathery face inches from mine.
"Let me tell you how Pell County works, sweetie," he whispered, his eyes gleaming with malicious satisfaction. "Out here on these back roads, God is a long way off, and the federal government doesn't even know your name. Nobody hears you call for help. Nobody is coming down that highway to save you. By the time I get done writing the incident report, you'll be lucky if you see daylight before your fiftieth birthday."
He slammed the heavy patrol car door with a concussive bang that shook the entire vehicle.
Through the heavy steel mesh that separated the front cabin from the prisoner transport cage, I watched Voss slide into the driver's seat. He adjusted his sunglasses in the rearview mirror, reached down, and turned on the local country station, letting the twang of a pedal steel guitar drown out the quiet hum of the air conditioner.
Deputy Miller climbed into the front passenger seat, gingerly placing my leather handbag on the floorboard between his boots. The young deputy's shoulders were hunched forward, his hands resting flat on his knees, his eyes staring straight out through the bug-splattered windshield as if he were trying to disappear into the upholstery.
"Look at her," Voss laughed, putting the heavy transmission into drive and pulling away from the curb with a chirp of rubber. "Thinks she's some kind of high-class city lawyer. Thinks because she speaks proper English, she's untouchable. You learn real fast in this line of work, Caleb: people only have the rights you decide to give 'em."
Miller said nothing. He swallowed once, hard, his gaze dropping to the floorboard.
Right between his boots, deep inside the interior lining of my designer handbag, my phone began to vibrate.
It wasn't a standard, chirping ringtone. It was the low, rhythmic, double-pulse buzz of an encrypted federal hardware device receiving an urgent dispatch.
Bzz-bzz. Bzz-bzz.
The sound was faint, muffled by leather and heavy canvas, but in the tense silence of the patrol cruiser, it sounded like a ticking detonator.
Miller’s head twitched downward. His eyes locked onto the dark leather zipper of the bag. He reached his hand out instinctively, then froze, glancing nervously toward the driver's seat.
"What is that?" Miller whispered.
Voss didn't even turn his head. He had one thick forearm resting casually on the top of the steering wheel, his left foot tapping along to the radio.