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Wells approaching with his hand on the holster.
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The demand for license and registration—lawful, technically.
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The questions that followed: "Where are you from? Where are you going? What kind of work?" Fishing. Legal, but fishing.
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The demand to pop the trunk—unlawful without consent or probable cause.
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Adrian's refusal—lawful.
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The arrest that followed—unlawful.
He replayed the booking:
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No Miranda warning.
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No charge read.
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No attorney access.
The desk sergeant had processed him on Wells's verbal description alone: "Suspicious individual, uncooperative." Those weren't charges; they were adjectives.
He thought about the garment bag, still hanging in his car, still unexamined: a judicial robe with the seal of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia embroidered on the breast. If either officer had unzipped it, just once, this night would have ended very differently.
But they didn't look. People like Wells never look. They see what they've already decided to see, and everything else might as well be invisible.
At some point, Adrian's phone call came through—not because they remembered, but because the shift changed. A new officer, nametag reading Collins, appeared at the bars at quarter to five. Younger than Pike, less sure of himself. He unlocked the cell door with the expression of a man defusing a bomb he didn't build.
"You get one call."
Adrian stood, followed Collins to a wall-mounted phone near the intake desk, and dialed the only number that mattered. His clerk, Sandra Whitmore, answered on the second ring. Her voice was alert—the voice of someone used to calls before dawn.
"Judge Ross?"
"Sandra, I may be late this morning."
A pause. "How late?"
"I'm not sure yet. I'm at the Telfair County Sheriff's Station."
A longer pause. He could hear her processing. Sandra had been a judicial clerk for nineteen years; she'd heard a lot of things, but this was new. "Are you... are you all right?"
"I'm fine. Don't contact anyone. Don't make calls. I'll be there."
"Yes, sir."
He hung up.
Collins walked him back to the cell, locked the door, and looked at him for a second too long. "Is there anything—"
"No," Adrian said. "Thank you."