"I tried to report it," I told him, leaning closer to the counter. "The supervisor said the officer logged it as a 'motorist assist.' They said without proof, there’s nothing they can do. Please. I drive this route alone all the time."
Mateo chewed on his bottom lip. He glanced at the camera mounted above the door, then back out the window. "Harris is bad news. He parks out there all the time. Scares off my late-night truckers. But if I give you footage of a deputy, and he finds out it came from me..."
"I won't tell them where I got it. But if I don't have something to back me up, he's going to do this to someone else. Or he's going to find me again."
Mateo hesitated for a long moment. Then he locked the cash register and gestured with his head toward the back hallway. "Five minutes. Come here."
I followed him into a cramped office filled with cardboard boxes and a desk holding a four-pane security monitor. Mateo clicked a mouse, pulling up an archive from the previous night.
He scrubbed backward until the timestamp read 11:14 PM.
There it was. Silent and grainy, but unmistakably clear. The exterior camera was mounted under the awning, pointing directly at my car. The black-and-white footage showed me walking out of the store. It showed Cole stepping into my path. It showed me trying to step around him twice, and him mirroring my movements to trap me against the vehicle.
And then, plain as day, it showed his hand snaking around my waist and yanking me backward. It captured my violent struggle to pull away.
It was not a motorist assist. It was a predator testing his reach.
"Hold your phone up," Mateo instructed, keeping his eyes on the screen. "Record the monitor. I can't burn you a drive right now without leaving a digital trace on the system. Just take the video on your phone."
I pulled out my phone, opened the camera, and recorded the screen as the incident played out. I captured the entire thirty seconds, right up to the moment David walked into the frame.
"Thank you," I whispered, lowering my phone. "You don't know what this means."
"Just be careful," Mateo warned, turning back to me. "A video proves he lied. It doesn't prove he won't come after you for exposing it."
I walked back out to my car, clutching my phone in my hand. I had the proof. I had the first crack in Officer Harris’s armor. But as I opened my door, a flash of white and black caught my eye.
Across the street, idling on the dirt shoulder of the highway, was a county cruiser.
It was too far away to see the driver’s face, but I didn't need to. The vehicle wasn't running radar. It was simply sitting there, facing the convenience store, watching the parking lot.
He knew I would come back.
I got into my car and locked the doors, my heart hammering against my ribs. Sitting in silence wasn't going to protect me. Calling a disinterested supervisor wasn't going to protect me.
If I was going to stop Cole Harris, I had to take this evidence somewhere his badge couldn't reach.
CHAPTER 2 CONTINUED
He pulled out behind me.
I checked my speedometer. I was doing exactly fifty-five in a sixty-five zone. I kept my blinker off, my lane position perfect, and my breathing shallow. In the rearview mirror, the heavy grille of the police interceptor filled my line of sight. He wasn’t running his emergency lights. He was just riding my bumper, less than a car length away, tracking my every movement.
He knew exactly who I was, and he knew I had gone back to the store.
The drive to the county line took twelve minutes. It felt like twelve hours. Every time a car approached from the opposite direction, passing us in a rush of wind, I braced for the flashing red and blue lights to flood my cabin. I ran through the terrifying arithmetic of my situation. I was a young woman alone on a rural road. The local sheriff’s department had already documented my encounter with Officer Harris as a "consensual motorist assist," citing my supposed disorientation. If he pulled me over now, whatever he chose to write in his report would become the official truth.
A green reflective sign appeared in the darkness ahead, marking the boundary for the next county.
As soon as my sedan crossed the invisible line, the cruiser slowed. I watched in the mirror as it performed a slow, deliberate U-turn across the empty highway, heading back toward the convenience store.
It wasn't a traffic patrol. It was a message. I own this stretch of road.
By Monday morning, the reality of that message had severely impacted my life. My territory as a regional medical supply rep required me to drive through that exact county to reach three of my largest rural clinic accounts. I sat at my dining table in Dallas with my laptop open, staring at my weekly route planner.
My phone buzzed. It was the purchasing manager for a clinic in a town twenty miles past Harris’s jurisdiction.
"Lena, are we still on for one o'clock?" he asked. "We're out of the pediatric respiratory kits, and I need to review the new catalog."
I looked at the route. There was no way to get there without taking the state highway through Cole Harris’s patrol zone.
"I'm so sorry, Tom," I said, my voice tight. "I have a family emergency in Dallas. I can't make the drive today. I can try to have the warehouse overnight the kits to you."
"Overnighting eats our margin, Lena. You know that," Tom replied, his tone cooling instantly. "If you can't service the account reliably, we're going to have to look at the national distributor again."
"I understand. Give me a few days to sort this out."
I hung up, knowing I had just jeopardized a commission that paid my rent. I closed my laptop. Waiting wasn't an option. Avoiding the county meant losing my job, and driving through it meant risking my safety. The local sheriff’s supervisor had made it perfectly clear they were going to protect their senior deputy.
I picked up my keys and my phone. I needed an authority that Cole Harris didn't control.
An hour later, I walked through the glass doors of the Texas Department of Public Safety headquarters in the Dallas region. The waiting area was sterile and institutional, smelling of floor wax and stale coffee. I approached the bulletproof glass at the reception desk.
"I need to speak to an investigator," I told the uniformed trooper behind the glass. "I have video evidence of a county deputy falsifying a CAD log to cover up a physical assault."
The trooper paused, his hand hovering over his keyboard. "Which county?"
I told him. He made a brief phone call, keeping his voice low. Ten minutes later, a man in a gray suit and a subdued blue tie pushed through the heavy wooden door beside the reception desk. He had a badge clipped to his belt and carried a yellow legal pad.
"Ms. Carter? I'm Agent Garza, Texas Rangers division, Public Integrity Unit," he said, holding the door open for me. "Come on back."