Free Spectre Black by J. Carson Black Page A

felt entitled. It explained why she’d run roughshod over him—
    Literally.
    There was at least one family like that in every town.
    Vitelli had felt extremely entitled. In fact, Landry was still recovering from her right to entitlement.
    He approached The Satellite INN from behind, across an empty lot, a scrub patch of desert. The white subcompact rental car was in back, one of ten to twenty other cars there, give or take. His van was out front.
    A sheriff’s cruiser had pulled up catty-corner to the rental Nissan, as if planning to stop an escape in its tracks. Landry could hear the crackle of the unit’s radio.
    He looked up at the open door to his motel room on the second floor. A hive of activity. Deputies in tan uniforms, big-hipped from their duty belts, coming out with white trash bags in their gloved hands.
    Landry felt the tickle of hair on his neck just before he heard a loud engine gun down the side street and screech into the dirt lot.
    “Police! Don’t move! Hands on your head!”
    Landry obeyed.

Chapter 7
    “Can you tell me what you’re charging me with?” he asked the deputy who had cuffed him and was marching him toward a sheriff’s car.
    “You have the right to remain silent, and if I were you I’d do just that.”
    “I’ll take it from here,” a gruff voice said. Landry turned his head to look at him. The man was older, beefy, with a gray mustache like a whisk broom.
    Landry had already been to the Tobosa County Sheriff’s website, and he knew who the man was. He was the Tobosa Sheriff’s Office’s undersheriff, Walt Davis.
    The undersheriff grabbed Landry’s shoulder and spun him toward his own plain-wrap Crown Vic.

    Landry was delivered to the Tobosa County Jail in the back of the undersheriff’s car, already handcuffed and chained. They must think he was dangerous, or perhaps it had been reported that he was dangerous, and they were taking no chances.
    Containment .
    There was a separate entrance for arrestees, and in this smallish cinder block building that entrance was in the back, as it usually was. Davis marched him up a loading ramp and into a gray hallway with gray linoleum and gray-painted walls. The only brightness was the row of fluorescent light panels at intervals along the ceiling, which seemed to chase the shadows into what few corners there were. The artificial light made it brighter than day, like those warehouse shopping marts, only worse in every respect. He could smell disinfectant that did little to mask the odor of piss and vomit.
    He knew his first stop would be Intake. It would be a long, drawn-out process, designed to humiliate and cow him.
    The first precept for cops was control. Clamp down on the perpetrator so he can’t make a move. Intimidate him into not even thinking about resistance. Always, the goal was to cut off rebellion at the source. Police were trained to run to meet trouble, to stop it before it could get any traction at all. Police work was based on the concepts of prevention and containment. Never let the tossed match turn into a brushfire.
    Landry understood this and even admired it, but he had been on the wrong end of this policy before, and he didn’t like it.
    He didn’t like it now.
    The undersheriff called to one of the guards. “Don’t bother with the other stuff, just give him the once-over and get him in lockup. I’ve got twenty-four hours.”
    There was one other man to be processed before him, so he waited. As he waited, his mind ran through the possibilities. The number-one possibility: his car, a white subcompact car, had been seen going through the checkpoint shortly before one of the militia members was shot to death.
    Landry knew that the guy who stopped him at the checkpoint did not write down his driver’s license number or even jot down the license plate of the car. The other two people at the checkpoint had been engrossed in conversation. Landry was sure the big guy who stopped him had not looked inside the