"I said cell six," Miller repeated, his voice dropping into an icy register. He looked at me, his eyes dead and steady. "The system says the terminal is locked. It doesn't say what happened between the desk and the bench. An uncooperative suspect resisted transfer. A fall on the iron stairs. We have an hour before anyone from Spokane drives down Route 9 to see what the wire caught."
I looked at the brass key in Miller's hand, then at the heavy padlock guarding the utility corridor behind the cells. The legal trap had closed on the terminal, but the physical room belonged to the men with the guns. If I let them drag me past that camera blind spot into cell six, whatever proof was rolling through the digital wire wouldn't keep my head from hitting the concrete floor.
I planted my boots against the iron rim of the booking bench, took a deep breath that pulled sharp against my bruised ribs, and braced myself for the counter.
CHAPTER 2 CONTINUED
The only camera operating under the federal override lock was the fixed wide-angle lens mounted high in the corner directly above the booking terminal. Cell six lay down the darkened utility hall to the right, hidden behind the reinforced security door where the county kept its blind spots. The intake counter sat squarely in the camera’s unbroken field of view. As long as I remained within that three-foot radius of the terminal desk, every frame was being uploaded directly to the Spokane server in high-definition digital sync.
"Get him down!" Miller barked, his face tightening with sudden desperation as he lunged again, trying to get both hands around my throat to drag me backward into the hall. "Vance, pin his legs!"
I grabbed the heavy metal edge of the intake counter with both handcuffed wrists, looping my chained forearms over the vertical partition that separated the clerk's keyboard from the arrestee bench. When Vance lunged and tackled my knees, dragging my boots out from under me, I did not resist downward; I locked my wrists into the steel bracket of the computer mount and dropped all my dead weight into the partition.
The steel groaned under the torque. The digital terminal shuddered, its monitor tilting hard toward me, the bright amber banner of the regional alert flashing violently against the plexiglass screen.
"Harris!" Miller shouted, wrestling to pry my fingers loose from the bracket while Vance drove a knee into my thigh to break my grip. "Hit the circuit breaker! Kill the main panel on the back wall!"
Young Deputy Harris stood frozen against the back filing cabinets, his face drained of all color. He looked from Miller’s contorted face to the amber text pulsing across the terminal.
"I can't, Chief," Harris stammered, his voice cracking like dry timber. "The override protocol locked the auxiliary power supply. If I cut the main breaker, the battery backup automatically triggers a Level Three panic alert to the state patrol barracks in Colville. It logs an intentional tampering event. We learned that in the compliance seminar last spring."
"Shut your mouth and throw the switch!" Miller roared, wrenching my left arm backward until the shoulder joint screamed under the strain. "Throw the damn switch, or you're walking the line with him!"
"Harris, look at the screen," I grunted through clenched teeth, spitting the blood pooling in my mouth straight onto the linoleum at Miller's boots. The pain in my shoulder was blinding, but I kept my eyes locked on the younger deputy. "Look at the authorization line. It's not a general notice. It’s an active investigative warrant issued forty-eight hours ago out of the Eastern District Federal Court. Case number 24-CR-882. The target isn't me. It’s the timber logistics pool out of Kettle Falls. Look at the company names on the seizure manifest."
Harris didn't throw the breaker. Instead, his eyes darted involuntarily down to the glowing monitor, scanning the rapid lines of blue text expanding beneath the override seal. His jaw went slack.
"Miller..." Harris whispered, his voice barely audible beneath the scrape of our boots. "The timber pool... that's your brother-in-law's hauling company. The four flatbeds stopped at the county weigh station last Tuesday... you signed the chain-of-custody release on personal authority."
"Shut up, Harris!" Miller spat, his grip slipping slightly as my sweat and blood slicked his sleeve.