He went to his knees. 43 seconds. From the back of the building, behind the closed door of the corner office, came the sound of a chair being shoved back violently, then footsteps, heavy, fast footsteps. Sheriff Clovis Beaumont burst through his office door at a near run, a cell phone pressed to his ear, his face a dark, mottled red. Beaumont was 61 years old, built like a man who had been large in his youth and had since rearranged the mass into new and less flattering configurations.
He wore his uniform with the practiced ease of a man who had been wearing it for three decades, but right now the ease was entirely gone. "I need the governor's direct line, Earl," he was shouting into the phone, not his office, his direct line, right now. Right? He stopped when he saw the lobby. He saw Pruitt on his knees.
He saw Grover with his hands raised. He saw the screens. He saw the sealed doors. And then he saw Josephine Duvall standing in the center of it all, blood on her lip, badge in her hand, watching him with an expression of total composure. Beaumont lowered the phone.
"Duvall," he said. The name came out like something he'd been dreading saying for a very long time. "Sheriff Beaumont." She took one step toward him. "I have a sealed federal indictment, 68 counts including racketeering, civil rights conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and distribution of narcotics seized from the evidence vault."
She held out the envelope from her folio. "I'd recommend you accept service now." Beaumont looked at the envelope. He looked at the screens. He looked at the doors.
Then he looked at Pruitt, still on his knees, and something shifted in his expression, a microsecond calculation that Josephine caught and cataloged and would recall word for word in her testimony 4 months later. The sheriff wasn't grieving. He was calculating whether Pruitt was still useful. He wasn't. "You can't do this," Beaumont said.
The words came out hollow. He knew they were hollow when he said them. I have political standing in this district. I know people in the state legislature. I have 20 seconds.
"What you have, Sheriff Beaumont," Josephine said, her voice as level as a spirit level, is approximately 20 seconds before a federal tactical team enters this building and you lose your last opportunity to accept service without a physical confrontation. She paused. "I would recommend accepting the envelope." He looked at her for a long moment. A man watching everything he had built, 30 years of favors and leverage and carefully maintained fear come apart at its rivets.