She thought about that photograph. The pump island. The cameras. The out-of-state decal on the rental car bumper. How close she had come to not stopping. She had nearly continued past the exit. And the tank had been at a quarter. Not empty. A quarter. She could have made it to the next exit, twenty miles north. She had looked at the gauge, and she had looked at the exit sign, and she had made the decision the way she made all decisions. One variable at a time.
Variable, fuel level. Adequate but declining. Variable, next service exit. Twenty miles. Uncertain. Variable, current exit. Certain. One gas station. She had taken the exit.
She thought sometimes about the seventeen people who had come before her. Women who had stopped at the same exit, the same pump island, the same station with the newer cameras and the hand-painted sign. Women who had not been writing things down. Women who had been afraid or had not been afraid, but had been alone in a way that meant afraid didn’t matter. The outcome was the same. Women whose rental agreements had gone into pockets and whose documents had not appeared on intake logs and whose charges had been dismissed sixty days later, quietly, without explanation, in a county courthouse forty minutes from the nearest interstate.
None of them had been able to build what she built. Not because they weren’t smart enough. Not because they weren’t paying attention. Because they hadn’t known when they pulled off the interstate that they needed to start writing before anything happened. She had known because it was her job to know.
The Board of Supervisors met on June 3rd. The agenda item regarding Sheriff Beaumont’s status was listed as item seven of twelve. It was the only item that drew a crowd. Forty-three people in a room designed for thirty, standing along the walls. One journalist from the Telegraph and one from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in the front row. A camera from the Macon television affiliate in the back.
The meeting was chaired by the county manager, a careful man named Ted Briscoe, who had been in the role for nine years and had developed over those nine years the particular institutional talent for threading between competing pressures without visibly choosing a side. He chose a side on June 3rd.
Item seven lasted forty minutes. Dalrymple spoke for Beaumont. Beaumont himself was not present on the advice of counsel. The county attorney presented the IA findings. A representative from the Board of Supervisors asked three questions. A second representative asked one. At the end of forty minutes, the board voted. Four to one. Beaumont’s suspension was extended pending a formal removal hearing, which would be scheduled within ninety days. The one dissenting vote was a supervisor named Glenn Marsh, who had known Beaumont since high school and who issued a statement afterwards saying the process had been rushed.
Spates called Tamara with the vote count. She was in her car. “Four to one,” she said. “Four to one.” She drove for a moment without speaking. “Ninety days,” she said. “Ninety days for the hearing. Then however long the hearing takes.” “And the DA?” “Still reviewing.” A pause. “Tamara, four to one is not nothing.” “No,” she said. “It’s not nothing.”
It was not nothing. She held onto that. Four supervisors in a county where two of them had known Beaumont since high school. Four votes against the comfortable weight of twenty years of the same man in the same chair. That was something. That was something earned, not given. Earned by body cam footage and dispatch logs and a fourteen-second voicemail and a notebook bought three for a dollar.