The three glass vials dropped from the foam holder. Two of them shattered instantly against the truck's steel bedliner, the thick dark blood mixing with rain puddles and streaming toward the drainage channels of the tailgate. The third tube, cushioned by the rolled edge of the tarp, stayed intact, rolling beneath the spare tire where his boot couldn't immediately reach it.
Vance didn't look down at the shards. He reached back into his pocket, pulled out a yellow roadside impound citation, and pressed the damp cardboard pad against my chest.
"Mechanical failure," he said, speaking slowly, enunciating each syllable as if reciting an affidavit to an empty room. "Driver Jesse Miller operating an uncertified private utility vehicle carrying unverified hazardous biological samples. Vehicle disabled on the shoulder due to leaking fuel lines and unsecured cargo. Keys stay on the dash. You walk back toward the gap, or you sit in the back of my cruiser until the tow hook shows up from Blackwood."
Behind us, the cruiser's radio receiver finally cracked through the rain.
It wasn't county dispatch. The squelch tail was short and clipped—a private sub-audible tone that cut straight through the open driver's door of the patrol car.
"Unit Four," a voice rasped from the cruiser's cabin speaker. The transmission was flat, running through a voice scrambler that hissed like dry gravel being shaken in a can. "The flatbed's on the hook. Trooper Barrera cleared the gate. You got the secondary panel or not?"
Vance didn't touch his shoulder mic. He reached out with his left hand, grabbed the neck of my jacket, and shoved me backward against the wet metal of my driver's door. The chrome mirror housing dug hard into my shoulder blade.
"Get your wallet off the seat," Vance whispered, leaning in until his breath hit my cheek. "Leave the paperwork on the clipboard. You walk down to the clinic turnout and you tell Sterling the truck broke an axle and the samples washed out in the creek. You do that, and your father keeps his pension voucher next month. You say one word about my coat, and I tell the county commissioner that Tom Miller's boy has been selling prescription manifests out of the back of his pickup since November."
He let go of my collar. His fingers dropped back to his holster, unsnapping the leather retention flap with a deliberate, audible pop.
He turned his back on me and walked toward the tailgate to grab Cooler Two.
He thought I was looking at his gun. He thought twenty-two years of watching my father swallow county politics had taught me how to keep my head down and survive on crumbs. But as he bent over the tailgate to rip the second seal, my eyes weren't on his holster.
They were on the floorboards of my cab.
Clipped beneath my visor wasn't just the transit manifest Vance wanted to burn. Stuffed into the leather pouch behind the passenger sun-shade was the carbon duplicate Dr. Sterling had handed me in the back room of the clinic at three in the morning—the secondary baseline draw he had pulled from Arthur Cross's locked office locker before the deputies sealed the depot perimeter. A clean, sealed hair-follicle test and a thumb drive containing the depot's internal pressure logs, taped inside a waterproof evidence envelope Sterling hadn't entered into the county ledger because he didn't know who in the sheriff's department was on the chemical company's payroll.
And down by the spare tire, half-buried under the hem of the wet tarp, the third gray-topped tube of Arthur Cross's blood was still sitting unbroken in the dark.
Vance ripped the lid off Cooler Two, hurled the empty ice packs into the weeds, and reached down into the foam core to crush the remaining samples.
I didn't reach for my keys. I stepped backward, slid my hand into the side pocket of my canvas coat, and felt the cold, hard brass of the duplicate key ring my father had hidden in the frame rail ten years ago.
Waiting for Vance to finish his work was not going to save my father's name, and it wasn't going to keep Arthur Cross's death on the accident rolls. The only way out of Mile Marker Nine was through the dirt.
CHAPTER 2 CONTINUED
Through the rain, the amber signal light mounted on Vance’s spotlight bracket flashed three rapid, silent pulses. The repeater frequency hummed through the open driver door of his cruiser fifty yards away. The second unit up on the ridge wasn't waiting for county dispatch to log an incident report; they were listening to see if Vance secured the payload before the state troopers took over the fatal rollover at the bottom of Old Freight Road.