Adrian didn’t answer.
“That sounds like a story. And I’ve heard a lot of stories on this road.” Wells pushed off the car and stepped closer, close enough that Adrian could smell the dip tobacco on his breath. “Pop the trunk.”
“No.”
The word landed like a stone in still water. Pike’s hand went to his holster. Wells didn’t move; he just tilted his head the way a dog does when it hears something it doesn’t understand.
“What did you say?”
“I said no. You don’t have probable cause, and I haven’t consented to a search.”
“Probable cause.” Wells tasted the words, smiled. Not a warm smile—the smile of a man whose patience was a performance, and the performance was ending. “You hear that, Pike? He knows the vocabulary.”
“I hear it.”
“Let me tell you something about probable cause.” Wells jabbed a finger into Adrian’s chest, hard. “I decide what’s probable. I decide what’s cause. Out here, I’m the law. You’re just a guy with a nice car and no good reason to have it.”
“I want your badge number.”
Wells laughed, a short bark that echoed off the gas pumps. “Badge number. That’s cute.” He turned to Pike. “Write that down, would you? Man wants my badge number.”
Pike didn’t write anything down.
“Turn around.”
“I’m not—”
“Turn around!”
Adrian didn’t move. For three seconds, nobody moved. The fluorescent light above the pump buzzed and flickered. A moth circled it once, twice, and flew into the dark.
Then Wells grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him. Adrian’s chest hit the hood of the sedan, his cheek pressed flat against the warm metal. Pike was on him in a second: hands behind his back, cuffs ratcheting tight.
“You’re making a mistake,” Adrian said. Quiet. Not a threat—a fact.
“Only mistake out here tonight is yours.” Wells patted him on the back the way you’d pat a dog that finally sat down. “You should have just popped the trunk.”
They put him in the back of the cruiser. The doors shut with a sound like a vault closing. Through the cage partition, Adrian watched Wells walk back to the sedan, open the driver’s door, and start rifling through the glove box.
The garment bag hung from the hook above the rear passenger window: black fabric, brass zipper, a small embroidered seal on the front. Neither officer looked at it. Not once.
The drive to the county station took eleven minutes; Adrian counted every one of them. He sat in the back of the cruiser with his hands cuffed behind him and his shoulders burning from the angle. The partition smelled like old sweat and disinfectant. Someone had scratched the words good luck into the plastic with a fingernail.
Wells drove. Pike sat in the passenger seat, twisting around every thirty seconds to look at Adrian through the cage. Not checking on him—studying him, the way a kid studies something he caught in a jar.
“You know,” Wells said, not looking in the mirror, “most people just cooperate. Open the trunk, let us take a look, everybody goes home happy. But you had to be difficult.”
Adrian said nothing.
“Silent treatment now? That’s fine. We got all night.”
The station was a flat brick building at the edge of town, the kind of place that looked like it had been built in the seventies and hadn’t been touched since. A flag hung limp from a pole out front. The parking lot was empty except for two other cruisers and a pickup truck with a department sticker on the bumper.
They pulled him out of the car by his arm, not gently. Wells walked him through the front door with one hand on the back of his neck, fingers digging in, steering him like cargo.
The desk sergeant looked up from his computer—a heavy-set man with reading glasses pushed down his nose. “What have we got?”
“Suspicious individual, rest stop off I-16. Uncooperative.” Wells pushed Adrian toward the booking counter. “Nice car, no explanation. Got mouthy when we asked questions.”
The desk sergeant looked at Adrian. Looked at the suit. Looked at the cuffs. Something flickered across his face—maybe doubt, maybe recognition that something was off. It disappeared in a second.
“Name?”
“Adrian Ross.”
“Address?”
Adrian gave his Atlanta address. The desk sergeant typed it in, slowly, one finger at a time.
“Occupation?”
“Attorney.”
Wells snorted behind him. “Yeah, and I’m the governor.”
Pike laughed; the desk sergeant didn’t.
They fingerprinted him, rolled each finger across the ink pad and pressed it to the card with a kind of bored efficiency that said they’d done this a thousand times and stopped caring at two hundred. The ink stained his fingers black. Adrian stared at it: the dark smudges across the hands that had signed a federal oath nine days ago.
They took his mugshot, front and side. The camera flash was too bright and left a green smear across his vision. The height chart behind him marked him at 6'1". They wrote it down as 6' even. Small thing, meaningless, but Adrian noticed. He noticed everything now.
“Empty your pockets.”
Wallet, keys, phone. A pen—Montblanc, a gift from his mentor when he passed the bar. The officer handling the bag looked at the pen, turned it over, and set it down without comment.
“Belt and shoes.”