Miller ignored me. He reached through my open driver's door, popped the glove box latch, and dragged out my travel folder, scattering fuel receipts and maintenance vouchers across the floor mat. He wasn't searching for a weapon; he was looking for anything that justified keeping my hands pinned behind my spine until he could figure out why a field audit car had pulled into his district unannounced.
Across the asphalt, a young woman in medical scrubs lowered her phone a half-inch, her eyes cutting from Miller's patrol cruiser to the shield lying face down in the grit. "Officer," she called out, her voice shaky but clear. "He wasn't speeding. He was just parked by the pharmacy."
"Back up to your car, ma'am," Miller barked without turning around. "Active police investigation. Clear the lane."
He didn't know about the pressure switch sewn inside the lining of my leather holder. When the brass clasp hit the deck with enough force to trip the internal inertia pin, the silent relay paired to my sedan’s encrypted transponder had already cleared the tower on Route 9. It broadcast my call sign, my coordinates, and an unacknowledged distress hold to the regional field director's desk in Savannah.
Miller slammed my trunk lid shut and grabbed my elbow, shoving me toward the cage of his cruiser. "You're going to sit in county air conditioning while we verify your mail-order badge, Underwood."
I stopped at the edge of his open rear door, looking past his shoulder toward the plaza entrance.
A gray transport truck had just braked across the access ramp, blocking the north turn, while three unmarked black Suburbans turned silently into the perimeter lot, their low-beam strobes cutting through the midday haze.
CHAPTER 2: Three Black Suburbans Sealed The Exit While My Damaged Credentials Lay In The Gravel
The perimeter tires did not screech; they dropped off the concrete lip of the plaza drainage culvert with a dry, rhythmic thud that vibrated through the metal frame of Deputy Miller’s patrol car.
Miller did not drop my arm. His fingers tightened through the poplin sleeve of my left bicep until the seam strained, his thumb gouging into the muscle just above the elbow. He was still half-turned toward the open cage of his cruiser, his boots planted in the sticky tar of stall forty-two. He hadn't yet looked past my right shoulder. To him, the heavy thrumming vibration shaking the loose stone under our soles was just another grain hauler taking the bypass too fast on Route 9.
"Get your feet inside the floorboards, Underwood," Miller said, his chin jerking down toward the dark vinyl footwell. "Don't make me use the knee."
"Take your hand off my shoulder, Deputy," I said. My voice did not rise. It was the same tone I used across conference tables in Atlanta when an asphalt contractor tried to explain why seven miles of binder course contained twenty percent river sand. "You have thirty seconds before this perimeter ceases to be an unmonitored stop."
Miller chuckled, a short, wet bark from the side of his mouth, but his neck twitched. He felt the shift before he saw it. The air in the Oakridge plaza didn't usually smell of hot synthetic rubber and high-output diesel exhaust; it smelled of dry pine straw, fried chicken from the gas station deli across the road, and pesticide dust drifting off the cotton fields.
When he finally glanced up, his jaw went rigid.