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.
"Probably her drug dealer wondering where the drop is," Voss scoffed, accelerating through a yellow light at the town square, kicking up red Georgia dust behind us. "Let it ring. Once we get her into the booking cage, you can strip that bag down to the threads. If she's got cash, log half of it into the general evidence locker and put the rest in the safe in my office. Just like we always do."
Miller didn't answer. He reached down and rested one trembling hand against the leather strap of the purse.
I leaned my head back against the cold, bulletproof glass of the rear window and watched the green pine trees blur past into a wall of dark emerald.
Three weeks earlier, I had taken an emergency judicial leave from my chambers in Atlanta. I had driven down to this forgotten corner of the state for one reason: my seventy-six-year-old Aunt Lorraine, a retired schoolteacher who had lived on eleven acres outside of town for half a century, had fallen and broken her hip. But when I arrived at her bedside, she hadn't talked about her hip. She had handed me a shoebox packed with thirty-one handwritten letters from county residents detailing unlawful property seizures, fabricated police reports, and missing family members.
I had recused myself from the federal bench regarding any matters touching Pell County and turned the entire dossier over to the United States Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The Chief Judge of the Eleventh Circuit, Harold Brennan, had personally warned me before I left Atlanta: Amara, don't get involved. The FBI has a task force running a deep public corruption probe into Voss and his cronies. Keep your head down, care for your aunt, and let the agents do their jobs.
I had fully intended to follow that advice. I had only driven into Halvorsen Springs that morning to pick up Aunt Lorraine’s blood pressure medication at Pruitt's Pharmacy. I had only stopped at the Magnolia Diner because I smelled fried catfish.
I had not planned to confront Dalton Voss.
I had not planned to be thrown against a diner booth in front of thirty people.
And I certainly had not planned to ride in the back of a police cruiser in handcuffs.
The phone buzzed again—five short, rapid vibrations this time. That was the automated code for an emergency priority broadcast, reserved exclusively for federal judges and top-tier federal law enforcement officials during active operational alerts.
Deputy Miller leaned forward, staring down at the purse with eyes wide with an instinctual, animal dread. He was young, and he was terrified of his boss, but he wasn't stupid. He could feel the pressure dropping in the vehicle like the lead-up to a tornado.
"Sheriff," Miller said, his voice cracking slightly. "That phone... it's vibrating in a weird pattern. It's been going non-stop since we left the diner."
Voss let out an irritated growl and swung the cruiser hard to the left, turning down the narrow, gravel-paved access road that led to the squat, ugly red-brick compound of the Pell County Sheriff’s Department.
"Shut up about the damn phone, Miller," Voss barked, slamming his foot on the brake as the cruiser slid to a halt in front of the sally port gate. "You're acting like a terrified rookie. We’ve got an unidentified transient woman in custody on felony charges of assaulting an officer and resisting arrest. By the time I get through with the prosecutor, she won't see a courtroom outside of this county for ten years."
The automated iron gate groaned on its rusty hinges, rolling back to swallow the cruiser into the dark, shadowed belly of the sally port.
Voss killed the engine, unbuckled his seatbelt, and turned around in his seat, giving me that same wide, crooked, predatory grin.