Miller was watching him, too. "Sheriff? Who is that?"
Cleary didn't answer the boy. He pulled the receiver two inches from his ear, looked at the black plastic mouthpiece as if it might spit grease at him, then brought it back. "This is an active county processing facility. You don't have jurisdiction to issue directives to an elected sheriff in the state of—"
Whatever was said next cut him off like a wire clipper snapping copper. Cleary’s throat bobbed. He didn't hang up the receiver; he set it down on the blotter without returning it to its cradle, leaving the line live.
When he stepped out of the office, his gait was different. The rolling strut, the easy swagger that comes with a twelve-gauge rack in the cruiser and thirty miles of highway where nobody can dispute your word, had evaporated. But the malice hadn't left him. It had curdled into the panic of a cornered rural bully who realizes he has driven a wedge into something solid and doesn't know how to pull his fingers out.
"Toby," Cleary said, his voice dropped an octave, raspy and thin. "Where's her civilian purse?"
"Right here on the desk, Sheriff," Miller said, pulling his hand away from the evidence tray like the plastic was electrified.
"Search the interior lining," Cleary ordered. "She’s carrying unauthorized military hardware in an unmarked private vehicle. That’s contraband until proven otherwise. I want the registration papers for that Chevy. Check the trunk inventory."
"Sheriff Cleary," I said, remaining still on the bench. "The vehicle is a certified General Services Administration long-term lease. The contract folder is in the glove box, stamped by the Department of the Army Logistics Command. If you send your deputy to tamper with the contents of that trunk before federal counsel arrives, you are compounding an unlawful detention with the theft of classified transit material."
Cleary turned on me, his teeth bare. "You think because you throw a title around you run this county? I don't care if you work at the Pentagon or the local post office. In Oak Haven, you obey an officer on the blacktop. You don't give me lip, you don't tell me what phone to answer, and you don't dictate procedure in my house."
"It isn't your house," I said. "It's a municipal substation funded under Title Twenty-Three of the Federal Highway Safety Act. Which means every foot of this floor is subject to federal oversight the second you interfere with interstate transit."
Outside, through the frosted lower panes of the front windows, the light began to change.
It wasn't a cloud passing over the midday sun. It was a rhythmic, pulsing shuttering of the afternoon glare, accompanied by a low, sub-audible thrum that started in the soles of my shoes before it hit my ears. The acoustic vibration rattled the metal louvers of the ventilation grate above the holding cells.
Miller turned around toward the glass front doors. "Boyd... look at the treeline across the bypass."
Two olive-drab shadows were clearing the ridge above the quarry road, flying low enough beneath the municipal radar envelope to kick up twin rooster-tails of white limestone dust from the access gravel. The heavy twin-turbine beat of Sikorsky UH-60s did not belong to the state police traffic division.
Cleary didn't look outside. His eyes stayed glued to the evidence tray, where the little red diode on my transceiver had shifted from a slow blink to a steady, solid amber.
He reached out his hand, picked up the black unit, and dropped it into his uniform shirt pocket, buttoning the flap down tight. "Toby, shut the exterior security gate. Lock the inner sally port."
"Sheriff?" Miller's voice broke. "They're landing in the municipal lot."