Southern Fried by Cathy Pickens

ask you to supply a search warrant before you go any further.”
    Muscles on either side of Jason’s jaw shot out in tight knots. “If you want to play hardball, Miz Andrews—”
    “Now, wait a minute.” Harrison Garnet wobbled a bit, trying to enter the fray.
    “You can simply tell the judge what you’re looking for and he’ll spell it out in the warrant. Then there won’t be any misunderstandings.”
    “Mr. Garnet has already given consent to an inspection. It’s too late—”
    “No, it’s not.” Nice try, Junior . “He consented to show you the plant. On advice of counsel, he’ll need to see an administrative search warrant before you can see the company’s records.”
    Jason’s jaw muscles worked overtime. “Verywell, Miz Andrews. But plan on seeing me—and my supervisor—here first thing tomorrow morning. Accompanied by a search warrant allowing us access to the records. If you want to do this the hard way, I assure you that can be arranged.”
    Harrison Garnet’s gaze trailed from Jason Smith’s reddened face and locked on me. Without a word, he told me I’d better know what I was getting him into.

Four
    H olding off Jason Smith, Boy Regulator, lacked the finality of a victory, but at least I’d won the skirmish—and gained a twinge of that ha, beat you that I hadn’t felt in a while. Where that set the battle lines, I wasn’t sure.
    If I took time to admit it, I also felt a twinge of oh, shit . Angering the little twit in the olive Italian suit likely hadn’t been the smartest thing I’d ever done. But every instinct I had said he knew exactly what he was looking for. And Garnet and I still wouldn’t know when or if he found it—until it was too late to explain or rectify.
    I’d bought enough time to evaluate the records myself. I just hoped I would understand what I saw. The complaint apparently hadn’t alleged anything life-threatening, urgent, or irreversible, which meant Jason the wonder kid would have to wait until after Thanksgiving. No judge would give him an administrative warrant—valid for only twenty-four hours—for Thanksgiving Day.
    Harrison Garnet hadn’t seemed too concerned.At least not concerned enough to review the records with me after Jason left, despite my insistence. I tried to set a meeting for first thing Friday morning, though I doubted that would give us enough time to adequately prepare for the junior G-man’s return. But he said he’d call.
    Did Harrison Garnet know what Jason wanted? Did that explain why he wasn’t worried? Or did he not have enough experience to worry? He was a difficult man to read.
    I had an hour before my appointment with Melvin Bertram, so I drove to my great-aunts’ house on North Main and parked out front. I studied the house. This lengthy holiday visit to Dacus felt odd. Everything in Dacus, everything that had been normal and accustomed in my life before, now shone in stark relief. Against what? The backdrop of my life as a lawyer? As I studied my past, the light seemed to have shifted or to have grown brighter. Not the blinding light that floods in the side door of a movie theater at the end of a matinee. More like the stark quality of light on a fall afternoon, when the crisp air holds little humidity and the edges of everything seem sharper.
    From behind the privet hedge that crowded the sidewalk, the rusty, spicy smell of boxwood enveloped me. The hoop-skirted branches of a magnolia tree, that staunch representative of the indestructible South, sheltered the entire right front yard.
    Anyone who associates magnolias with their waxy, iridescent white flowers has missed the essential nature of magnolias. Every time I see a magnolia, I remember my first visit to Charleston days after Hurricane Hugo hit. Stalwart oaks, downed or damaged, trashed the streets. Even the palmettos once used to build fortresses stood ragged. But the magnolias, despite wind and flood, hadn’t lost a single waxy leaf, as though their skirts had