“You match the description of a suspect in an armed theft,” he said. “And right now, you’re resisting arrest.”
I had neither moved nor spoken loudly.
He dragged me from the booth, jolting the table and overturning my water. Water and ice streamed across the Formica onto the floor. Someone gasped; an older customer half stood, saw Voss’s expression, then sat again.
Nobody objected; in Georgia’s Pell County, nobody had challenged Dalton Voss for twelve years.
Voss whispered near my ear, savoring his cruelty.
“You think you’re clever? In my town, nobody hears you scream. And nobody’s coming to save you.”
He pushed me through the glass doors toward his running patrol car. A young deputy followed, awkwardly carrying my purse.
My government phone vibrated inside it with an urgent alert.
The message came from my district’s Chief Judge. Judgerobe sales
Voss believed he had shamed another defenseless stranger. He never imagined whom he had arrested; his trouble at the station had barely begun.
