I didn't wait for Leonard to argue. I turned and moved through the dripping hemlocks toward the haul road, my boots sinking into the wet shale as I circled the perimeter of the pit. Wayne’s back was turned, the roar of the cutting torch masking the sound of my approach as the blue flame began to bite into the heavy steel hinges of my brother’s chest.
I stepped out from the pine shadows into the blazing glare of the halogen lamps, drawing my service weapon and leveling the barrel squarely at the center of Wayne Miller’s back.
"Shut the gas off, Wayne," I said, my voice cutting through the hiss of the flame. "Drop the torch, or we find out tonight how deep that trench really goes."
CHAPTER 3: The Vault Beneath The County Seal
Wayne didn’t drop the torch. He released the oxygen lever with a slow, deliberate thumb, letting the sharp blue cutting needle collapse back into a soft, guttering yellow flame that cast oily shadows across the front of his yellow rain slicker. Then he turned, his boots suctioning through four inches of wet shale slurry, the brass nozzle of the torch angled toward the gravel at his feet like a walking cane.
His face was completely calm. It was the same granite expression he had worn at the county courthouse when the commissioners voted to condemn the basin, the same face he had turned toward my mother when he sat at her kitchen table and handed her five hundred dollars in an unmarked envelope.
"Put the iron away, Arthur," Wayne said, his voice flat and heavy, carrying easily over the clatter of the excavator's diesel engine. "You’ve been sitting behind that records counter too long. You’re letting old ghosts rattle your ribs. You don't know what you're pointing that service piece at."
"I’m pointing it at the man who torqued the stop dogs off Sluice Gate Four," I said. My two-handed grip didn't waver. The three-dot night sights on my Glock stayed centered on the heavy brass buckle of his duty belt. "Step two paces to your left, Wayne. Away from the pallet. Away from my brother's box."
Wayne didn't step left. Instead, he smiled—a small, tired twitch at the corner of his mustache that held no humor at all. "You think you found something clever in my desk? A piece of carbon from a fourteen-year-old dispatch ledger? You’re a clerk, boy. You stamp death certificates and file property liens. You don't know what it takes to keep this valley from drowning every spring. In October of twelve, that timber dam was rotten to the bedrock. The mill owners were pulling their equipment out in the middle of the night, leaving forty million gallons of industrial wash water sitting behind an unreinforced timber cribbing. If that wall had blown out into the lower valley, Oak Haven would have been under ten feet of mud before breakfast."
"So you drowned three men in the intake pit to force a federal disaster declaration," I said, the cold mountain rain running down the bridge of my nose, stinging my eyes. "You seized the bypass valve with a pipe wrench while Caleb was clearing the drift logs, let the chamber flood, and then you called the county board to claim the mountain collapsed on them."
"I saved four hundred homes downriver," Wayne said, raising his chin, his voice rising with that practiced, booming authority that had won him four consecutive county elections. "The state was never going to pay for the diversion channel unless the damage was catastrophic. We needed the federal buyout to clear the debt. Caleb was an apprentice. He was told to stay on the upper catwalk. He went down into the vault against orders because he dropped a socket set. That was his choice, Arthur. His bad luck. And I took care of your mother every winter since. I paid your tuition at the regional academy. I gave you that badge on your chest."
"You gave me a desk where I could watch the phones you thought were dead," I said. "Drop the torch, Wayne. I won't tell you a third time."
A spray of wet gravel cut off his answer.
Behind the excavator, twin high-beam headlights flared through the hemlocks, blinding in the rain. A dark green Ford F-250 with county municipal plates bounced over the severed gate chain and slid to a halt twenty yards from the trench, its driver-side door flying open before the suspension had even settled.
Lyle Vance stepped out into the glare, clutching an oversized leather legal portfolio against his chest to protect it from the downpour. He was wearing his city loafers, his polished leather soles skidding through the shale as he hurried toward the trench, clearly expecting Wayne to have the metal chest already cracked open.
"Wayne, the Spokane haulers are already at the weigh station on Highway 9," Lyle called out, breathless, his spectacles fogged with steam. "Their regional supervisor wants the signed title in hand before he releases the transport flats. Did you get the—"