"Turn around!"
Adrian didn't move. For three seconds, nobody moved. The fluorescent light above the pump buzzed and flickered. A moth circled it once, twice, and flew into the dark.
Then Wells grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him. Adrian's chest hit the hood of the sedan, his cheek pressed flat against the warm metal. Pike was on him in a second: hands behind his back, cuffs ratcheting tight.
"You're making a mistake," Adrian said. Quiet. Not a threat—a fact.
"Only mistake out here tonight is yours." Wells patted him on the back the way you'd pat a dog that finally sat down. "You should have just popped the trunk."
They put him in the back of the cruiser. The doors shut with a sound like a vault closing. Through the cage partition, Adrian watched Wells walk back to the sedan, open the driver's door, and start rifling through the glove box.
The garment bag hung from the hook above the rear passenger window: black fabric, brass zipper, a small embroidered seal on the front. Neither officer looked at it. Not once.
The drive to the county station took eleven minutes; Adrian counted every one of them. He sat in the back of the cruiser with his hands cuffed behind him and his shoulders burning from the angle. The partition smelled like old sweat and disinfectant. Someone had scratched the words good luck into the plastic with a fingernail.
Wells drove. Pike sat in the passenger seat, twisting around every thirty seconds to look at Adrian through the cage. Not checking on him—studying him, the way a kid studies something he caught in a jar.
"You know," Wells said, not looking in the mirror, "most people just cooperate. Open the trunk, let us take a look, everybody goes home happy. But you had to be difficult."
Adrian said nothing.
"Silent treatment now? That's fine. We got all night."
The station was a flat brick building at the edge of town, the kind of place that looked like it had been built in the seventies and hadn't been touched since. A flag hung limp from a pole out front. The parking lot was empty except for two other cruisers and a pickup truck with a department sticker on the bumper.
They pulled him out of the car by his arm, not gently. Wells walked him through the front door with one hand on the back of his neck, fingers digging in, steering him like cargo.
The desk sergeant looked up from his computer—a heavy-set man with reading glasses pushed down his nose. "What have we got?"
"Suspicious individual, rest stop off I-16. Uncooperative." Wells pushed Adrian toward the booking counter. "Nice car, no explanation. Got mouthy when we asked questions."
The desk sergeant looked at Adrian. Looked at the suit. Looked at the cuffs. Something flickered across his face—maybe doubt, maybe recognition that something was off. It disappeared in a second.
"Name?"
"Adrian Ross."