The Phone In Back

The cruiser’s back seat smelled like hot vinyl and old sweat. Sloane kept her wrists together in her lap and looked out through the mesh cage as Verna Sue’s diner slid backward, the nine tables and flat-top grill shrinking in the window.

Deputy Tunstall got in on the other side with her tote bag. He held it like it might break. His hands shook once before he set it on the seat between them.

“Don’t touch that,” Gaddy said from the front.

The sheriff drove one-handed, the other resting near the .45 on his hip. He had not loosened the cuffs. He had not asked her name again. The county road gave way to scrub pine and dust, then the two-lane out toward the jail.

Sloane said, “My bag stays closed.”

Gaddy laughed without looking back. “You’ll get all the time you want in my place.”

The phone in the tote rang.

Everyone froze.

Tunstall stared at the bag, then at Gaddy. “Sheriff, that’s—”

“Don’t answer it,” Gaddy said.

It rang again, sharp and insistent in the cage. Sloane kept her face toward the window, but her pulse gave a hard beat in her throat. That would be Tobin. He would be checking the calendar, then the flight, then her rental return, then the missing gap in her day. He would already know something was wrong.

Gaddy reached back, snapped the bag open, and dug out the phone. The screen flashed a name, then went dark in his fist.

“Who is it?” Tunstall asked.

“Not your concern.”

Sloane said, “Give it back.”

Gaddy turned his head just enough to show the side of his face. Sweat had started at his hairline. “You’re learning a lesson right now. Best pay attention.”

The road dipped, and the county jail came into view, low and blocky behind its fence. Sloane looked at it once and then back at the road. She had a folded card receipt in her wallet, a notarized inventory in her tote, and a two-day leave request in her pocket. Aunt Ozella’s estate. That had been the plain truth. The county had no reason to own her.

Gaddy must have heard the silence and mistaken it for fear. “Nobody’s coming out here,” he said. “Nobody hears a thing past my fence.”

Sloane said nothing.

Behind her eyes, the paper pile on her desk came back in a hard flash: eleven yellow-lined sheets, each one from a man in the old wing, each one ending the same way in the margin where she had signed them out. Exhausted remedies. No timely appeal. The words had looked clean then. In her lap, the cuffs cut her skin.

The jail gate rolled open ahead of them.