She settled her shoulders against the bite of the cuffs and prepared, calmly, for the rest of it.
Chapter 15: The Ride Downtown
In the end, Sutter did not argue with the badge, the names, or the room. He simply outlasted them, the way a man can when he has handcuffs and a vehicle waiting outside, and other people have only the truth and their patience. He gave his orders in short pieces, as if brevity could make them sound lawful.
"Boone. Vehicle. Pryce, get their things. We're transporting."
Hector stepped forward, close enough that Pryce had to look at him. "Transporting them where, for what?" he demanded. "You heard who they are. Everybody heard." His voice strained, a man spending his courage twice in one night. "I am the owner. Nothing happened here that needs a station."
"Step back, or you're next," Sutter said, without even turning his head.
Jada watched Ethan Wright keep filming, watched the crowd make the same ragged aisle as before. The walk out of The Copper Lantern felt longer than the walk in. At every table somebody met their eyes. Some nodded, small and fierce, promises that they had seen. Some looked away at the last second, and Jada did not judge them. Courage arrived at different speeds. Their cameras had already done a braver thing than their faces could manage.
At their corner table, Pryce stopped. Two purses rested beside glasses filmed with melting ice. He picked them up like a man handling objects that might accuse him. Jada's purse he carried in his right hand, held away from his body by its strap, stiff and awkward, as if good manners could be pasted over everything else he had done.
"That is my purse Officer Pryce is carrying," Jada said clearly, for the recordings. "I have not given permission to search it. Neither has my sister. Anything taken from either bag is taken without consent."
Pryce's ears went red. "I'm not searching nothing," he muttered. "I'm carrying it. There's a difference."
"Then keep the difference clean," Jayla told him. "Carry it closed."
Outside, the Charleston night met them with warm air smelling of rain not yet fallen, of river and hot pavement. Friday continued out here, indifferent and alive: laughter from another doorway, music spilling from a passing car. The ordinariness struck Jada as almost merciful, almost cruel. The city did not pause.
The patrol vehicle waited at the curb under the streetlight. Boone went ahead, fumbling his keys once, and climbed into the driver's seat like a man handed a task because he is the youngest and least able to refuse it. He sat with both hands on the wheel, staring forward, while Sutter opened the rear door.
"Watch your heads," Sutter said, with a parody of procedure, and put a heavy hand on Jayla's shoulder to guide her in — the same shoulder Pryce had grabbed inside, the same presumption, dressed now as routine. Jayla paused and looked at the hand until he removed it. She got in on her own terms, as much as a handcuffed woman could, sliding across the hard seat, braids against one shoulder.
Jada followed. The rear compartment smelled of vinyl cleaner and old sweat. There was no dignity in the space, so she supplied her own. She sat upright. She breathed through the bite of the cuffs, which Sutter had never loosened — not after the badge, not after the names, not after anything. She noted that too, in the part of her mind building a report since the first insult at their table. The report was getting long, and very precise.
Pryce came around the vehicle carrying both purses and loaded them where Sutter directed, still closed, while Ethan Wright filmed from the sidewalk, calling out the time and location in a clear young voice. A handful of patrons had followed them out, Hector among them, standing in his doorway with the light behind him, watching his guests be taken from his curb.
Boone started the engine. In the mirror his eyes flicked to the back seat, met Jada's, and dropped. His hands adjusted on the wheel, ten and two, a trainee's grip, careful as a prayer. Whatever he believed now — and Jada thought he believed almost everything — he had still turned the key when told. The night would ask him about that for a long time. It would ask all three of them.
Sutter shut their door with a solid, final-sounding slam and took the front passenger seat. The vehicle pulled away from The Copper Lantern, away from Hector in the doorway and the witnesses on the sidewalk and the gold badge still lying damaged inside on the floor, because no one, in the end, had dared pick it up at Sutter's order.
Jayla leaned close, shoulder to shoulder with her sister in the dark of the back seat, the way they had stood at the start of it.