I did not pull back against his grip. Pulling back would only give his two hundred and twenty pounds of mountain-cured muscle the leverage to slam me against the wall. Instead, I drove my right heel hard into the toe of his heavy leather service boot and threw my upper body sideways into the intake counter.
The impact rattled the plexiglass partition and knocked the air from my ribs, but the sudden shift tore my arm free from his calloused fingers. Before he could reset his balance, I shoved my right arm straight through the paperwork pass-through window beneath the glass.
The young clerk inside the booth scrambled out of her swivel chair, her back pressing flat against the gray metal equipment racks behind her. Her hands flew up, palms outward, trembling against the green LED display of the radio console.
"Mara," Harlan barked, stumbling back half a step as he shook his bruised foot. "Hit the secondary release. Back corridor. Now."
"Don't touch that console, Mara," I said, my voice cutting flat and cold through the pass-through slot. "You're nineteen, maybe twenty. You took an oath to this county, not to Harlan's retirement fund. If you log a living federal officer as a corpse in a state-linked repository, you are signing an accessory warrant to felony kidnapping and capital homicide. There is no civil immunity for that. None."
Mara's eyes darted between me and Harlan. Her throat worked, but no sound came out. Her right hand hovered two inches above the red auxiliary button that controlled the interior pneumatic gates.
On the desk directly in front of the pass-through tray lay the physical intake binder, an oversized blue canvas three-ring ledger holding the hardcopy logs for Tuesday’s impoundments. Beside it, the dot-matrix incident printer was still slowly clicking, feeding a continuous sheet of perforated, two-ply carbon paper from its tractor spool.
Harlan lunged forward, his service belt creaking as his holster slapped against the mahogany edge of the partition. He reached across the counter to drag my collar back, his heavy fingers catching the lapel of my blazer.
I ignored his hand and drove both hands forward onto the desk, grabbing the emerging carbon sheet right below the printhead. With a sharp, downward wrench of my wrists, I ripped four feet of the tractor-feed paper cleanly out of the feeder tray.
Harlan grabbed my right wrist, twisting it violently against the edge of the steel pass-through frame until a hot needle of pain shot straight into my shoulder. "Give me that paper, Claire."
"Why, Sheriff?" I gasped, planting both feet against the baseboard and refusing to yield the slack. "Afraid the county audit will show you can't tell the difference between a car crash and a forgery?"
"You don't understand what county you're in," he muttered. He reached down with his left hand, unholstering the long, heavy wooden baton looped at his hip. "Out here, the mountain decides what's real."
He didn't swing the baton. He used the flat of it as a lever, wedging it under my forearm against the metal shelf to pry my grip apart. The wood bit savagely into the tendon of my wrist. My fingers went numb, and the top half of the carbon sheet tore loose in his grasp.
But the lower section—the dense block of header data printed in pale purple ink—stayed crumpled inside my closed left fist as I yanked my arm back through the slot.
I scrambled back two steps into the center of the anteroom, breathing hard through my teeth, cradling my left hand against my stomach.
Harlan looked down at the scrap of paper in his thick fingers, crumpled it into a ball, and shoved it into his pocket. He didn't chase me across the room. He didn't need to. The magnetic lock on the exterior exit hummed steadily, a three-ton electromag seal holding the heavy door flush against its frame. He leaned his forearms against the booking counter once more, breathing through his nose, his gray eyes watching me like a man watching an animal tire itself out in a dead-end chute.
"Look at it," Harlan said softly, nodding toward my clenched fist. "Go ahead. Read the header. See how much good your Denver friends are going to do you."
I kept my back to the wall, six feet from his reach, and smoothed the crumpled purple carbon against my thigh with my uninjured hand.
My initial assumption had been straightforward: Harlan was a small-town predator running a rogue seizure racket. On Tuesday, an unmanifested interstate transport carrying six sealed wooden crates of commercial financial instruments—bearer bonds and certified equity debentures seized from an offshore holding firm—had broken down seven miles outside town. Harlan’s deputies had impounded the rig under a vague county emergency ordinance, shoved the crates into the basement vault, and refused to file the federal chain-of-custody transfer. I had been dispatched on a routine administrative warrant to compel compliance and take custody. I had believed Harlan was simply trying to stall the federal government long enough to broker a private payout.