Harlan shoved me toward the open door of Cell 1, his right hand reaching for the iron latch.
"Get in," he ordered, his knuckles white around the wooden baton. "You sit quiet until the wrecker clears the county line."
Instead of stepping into the cell, I threw my weight against the chain-link partition of the evidence cage opposite the bars. My hand hooked into the wire mesh, arresting my momentum.
Right behind the wire, sitting on two wooden transport pallets, were the six commercial crates seized from Tuesday's interstate stop.
They were not intact federal evidence.
The heavy blue Department of Justice security tape that sealed each crate lid had been cleanly sliced through with a utility knife. The official federal wax stamps had been chipped away and swept into a corner of the concrete floor. In their place, heavy yellow commercial freight stickers had been slapped across the rough pine slats, stenciled in industrial black ink: APEX INTERMODAL FREIGHT / CONSIGNMENT D-881 / DESTINATION: CASPER RAIL INTERCHANGE.
Taped to the top of the nearest crate was an aluminum clip ledger.
Harlan caught me by the scruff of my wool coat, wrenching me back toward the cell door. "You don't need to worry about what's in those crates, Claire. None of that concerns an auditor who had a mechanical failure on the mountain."
"That isn't county seizure inventory, Harlan," I said, planting my boots against the doorframe and holding the iron rail with my left hand, keeping my eyes fixed on the ledger. "You broke federal evidence seals. That’s ten years per crate before they even open the manifest."
"Nobody is opening anything," Harlan said through clenched teeth. He hooked his forearm under my chin, pulling my head back to force my grip loose from the frame. "At six o'clock, a refrigerated freight carrier backs down that ramp, takes these six boxes, and rolls across the state border with a verified commercial transport bill. Marcus Albright signs the receiving ledger in Casper on Friday. The federal loss claim gets processed under your name as an in-transit administrative write-off caused by an unrecoverable crash."
He wasn't just hiding his own theft; he had built an entire paper apparatus to bury the crates inside Albright's regional balance sheet. The fatal collision log on Mara's terminal wasn't an impromptu cover-up hatched when I walked through the door. It was the keystone of the entire transaction.
As Harlan shifted his stance to throw me into the cell, his boot nudged the clipboard resting on the corner of the low steel workbench beside the gate. The metal clip slid forward two inches, the white parchment fluttering under the draft from the heating duct.
I twisted my torso savagely against his arm, disregarding the tearing seam of my coat, and drove my right elbow backward into his solar plexus.
Harlan gasped, his breath cutting short with a ragged wheeze, his forearm loosening just enough for me to wrench my head free. Before he could raise the baton, I lunged at the workbench and snatched the papers from the clipboard.
It was not a transport manifest. It was a three-page federal custody transfer packet—the exact administrative clearance required to release federal escrow to a commercial carrier.
At the bottom of the first page, the supervisory approval line bore Marcus Albright's personal signature, rendered in fresh blue ink above his official executive seal. Directly beside his signature was the date: yesterday morning.
Directly below Albright's authorization sat the receiving agent’s line.
My name was pre-printed on the dotted line: Claire A. Vance, Field Examiner.
Beside my name was a forged signature—a crude, hurried imitation of my script, scrawled with a thick black ballpoint pen. Taped beneath the forged signature was a pink county property voucher that Harlan had already stamped with his own departmental seal.
The date stamped beside my forged signature was tomorrow at 9:00 AM.
Albright and Harlan hadn't just arranged to declare me dead in a ditch; they had created a paper trail that showed me personally releasing the sixty million dollars in bearer bonds to their private dummy corporation before I departed the mountain, making it appear that I had embezzled the instruments myself and died while fleeing jurisdiction.
"Give me the manifest, Claire," Harlan rasped, his voice dropping to a low, guttural growl as he raised the baton two-handed. His eyes were wide, cold, and entirely devoid of hesitation.
Behind him, through the wire mesh at the end of the corridor, the sally port fire exit stood three feet away. Its red emergency push-bar was unbolted. A single hard shove would put me out into the alley behind the station, into the deep pine timber of the ridge. I could run into the dark before Pete could get down from his wrecker cab.
But running into the timber meant leaving this packet behind. Without Albright's original signed release and the pre-dated forgery in my hands, I was just a rogue agent fleeing a staged accident scene, hunted across three mountain counties by Harlan’s deputies with a terminal arrest warrant on every police scanner in the state.