"The notification didn't come through regular banking channels, Marcus," Brenda said, lowering her voice until I could barely hear her over the office chatter behind her. "The City Comptroller’s office flagged the account ten minutes ago with an administrative fraud hold. They marked your payroll as subject to municipal recovery. If the account isn't cleared by five o'clock tomorrow, the facility board initiates an involuntary transfer to the county ward in Pine Bluff."
Pine Bluff was an overcrowded state warehouse where patients spent fourteen hours a day strapped to wheelchair rests in hallway queues.
"Give me until tomorrow afternoon," I said, my knuckles turning white against the plastic wheel. "I'll bring a cashier's check."
"I have until noon before the bed is reassigned, Marcus. That's the state administrative window. I'm sorry."
The line went dead.
Vance wasn't waiting for a formal internal affairs interview. He wasn't filing a standard conduct citation with the union representative. He was pulling the levers of city hall from the front seat of his Tahoe, stripping away the single financial lifeline keeping my mother in a clean room, boxing me into a corner where survival meant begging him for mercy on his terms.
I took three slow, controlled breaths. If I panicked, if I drove down to the precinct and screamed through the bulletproof glass of the muster room, Miller would have three tactical officers pin me to the tile and charge me with armed felony trespass before my knees hit the floor.
I needed the printout copied, preserved, and placed beyond the reach of the city server network.
I put the Crown Victoria in gear, pulled out of the shopping center through the rear delivery lane to avoid the cruiser idling near the avenue lights, and drove west toward the river bottoms.
Twenty minutes later, I killed my headlights two blocks before the gravel turnoff for Blackwood Ironworks. The scrap yard sat behind an eight-foot chain-link fence topped with rusted razor wire, tucked between the railroad spur and the marsh. Behind the sorting sheds stood a single-story cinderblock office belonging to Hank Mercer, Chloe’s sixty-two-year-old uncle.
Hank had worked heavy diesel for thirty-five years. When Chloe’s car had been dredged out of seven feet of muddy water, Hank had spent three days sitting on the hood of his service truck outside the county courthouse, demanding the maintenance records for the bridge’s missing guardrail section, until Vance’s deputies arrested him for disorderly conduct and impounded his tow rig.
I stepped out into the biting wind, tucking the dispatch slip into my inner coat pocket, and pushed through the narrow pedestrian gate.
A single yellowish bulb burned over the office door. Inside, Hank sat behind a metal desk covered in hydraulic schematics, an electric space heater glowing orange between his steel-toed boots. He didn't look up when the brass bell above the frame chimed; his hand remained clamped around a heavy iron wrench resting beside his ledger.
"Sign out front says closed, Cole," Hank said, his gravelly voice scraping the dry air. "I don't sell scrap to off-duty badges."
"I don't have a badge anymore, Hank," I said, stepping into the room and closing the storm door behind me.
Hank looked up then, his bloodshot eyes drifting from my face down to the torn wool above my pocket where the silver pins had ripped through the fabric. His expression didn't soften, but the tension in his forearm eased two inches.
"Vance do that?" Hank asked.
"Ten minutes ago. Inside Miller & Croft."
"Evelyn was there?"
The question stopped me cold. I stood frozen beside the metal counter, the smell of sulfur and motor oil heavy in my throat. "How do you know about Evelyn?"
Hank reached into his desk drawer, pulled out a flat commercial scanner bed, and plugged its USB cable into an aging laptop sitting beside the register.
"Because three nights before Chloe died, she wasn't at the pharmacy," Hank said, staring directly into my eyes. "She was meeting Evelyn Vance behind the municipal water tower. Chloe called me twenty minutes before she drove out there. She said the Chief’s wife had found something in Vance’s personal safe that was going to put half the county board in federal prison."
Hank tapped the glass surface of the scanner bed with one calloused fingernail.
"Put what you're holding on the glass, Marcus," he whispered. "Because Miller just pulled two marked cars across the bridge at the end of my road."
CHAPTER 2 CONTINUED
Hank shoved a heavy thumb drive into the side port, his calloused hands working the trackpad without hesitation. "Miller isn't pinging Wi-Fi, Marcus. He knows you're here because this is the only place in the county where someone still remembers what Chloe looked like."