"Address?"
Adrian gave his Atlanta address. The desk sergeant typed it in, slowly, one finger at a time.
"Occupation?"
"Attorney."
Wells snorted behind him. "Yeah, and I'm the governor."
Pike laughed; the desk sergeant didn't.
They fingerprinted him, rolled each finger across the ink pad and pressed it to the card with a kind of bored efficiency that said they'd done this a thousand times and stopped caring at two hundred. The ink stained his fingers black. Adrian stared at it: the dark smudges across the hands that had signed a federal oath nine days ago.
They took his mugshot, front and side. The camera flash was too bright and left a green smear across his vision. The height chart behind him marked him at 6'1". They wrote it down as 6' even. Small thing, meaningless, but Adrian noticed. He noticed everything now.
"Empty your pockets."
Wallet, keys, phone. A pen—Montblanc, a gift from his mentor when he passed the bar. The officer handling the bag looked at the pen, turned it over, and set it down without comment.
"Belt and shoes."
Adrian removed them. The concrete floor was cold through his socks. They handed him a plastic bag with his belongings and pointed him down a hallway.
"Cell four. End of the hall."
The holding cell was eight feet by ten: a concrete bench along one wall, a steel toilet with no seat, a single bulb behind a cage on the ceiling that buzzed at a frequency designed to make sleep impossible. The walls were painted the color of old teeth—a yellow that might have once been white, but had surrendered decades ago.
Adrian sat on the bench. The metal was cold enough to feel through his suit pants. He placed his hands on his knees, straight-backed, still.
Wells appeared at the bars twenty minutes later, leaned against the frame with his arms crossed—the posture of a man visiting a zoo. "Comfortable?"
Adrian looked at him, said nothing.
"You know, this whole thing could have been over in five minutes. You pop the trunk, trunk's clean, we shake hands and you drive off. But you had to make it a thing." Wells picked at something in his teeth. "Pride. That's what it is. Your people always got too much pride for your own good."
"I'd like to make my phone call."