"It doesn't burn alone," I told him.
I reached into my breast pocket with my right hand, moving slowly, deliberately, keeping my fingers where he could see them. I produced the torn yellow scrap of the Redline Transit courier manifest, setting it flat against the glass partition of the supervisor's desk. Beside it, I laid the second document Miller had dropped on the counter: Form 109-B, bearing the County District Attorney’s red wax narcotics seal, with the handwritten diversion to Yard 4 and Sullivan’s personal shield number, #4182, scrawled across the bottom margin.
"The hydraulic plate recorded forty-eight thousand two hundred pounds at two minutes past two," I said. "That is the exact tare weight of Gordon’s tri-axle tractor combined with twelve steel DA evidence lockers. When the state auditors pull this continuous feed, the needle vibration matches the engine RPM of a running diesel sleeper cab idling on the pad. And your gate code, Sullivan, is written in your own handwriting on the manifest corner that came out of your clipboard."
Sullivan looked from the paper to the desk, his breathing turning shallow and thick. The pry-bar in his grip dropped two inches. His eyes darted toward Miller, who was still pressed against the filing drawers.
"Miller," Sullivan barked, the command sharp enough to rattle the glass behind him. "Get over here. Take the paper off that spindle and drop it down the furnace drop behind the records cage. Now."
Miller swallowed. The sound was audible in the cold bullpen. He looked at Sullivan’s face—the bulging vein along the sergeant’s temple, the raw fury tightening the corners of his mouth—and then his eyes slid toward the brass bell of the copper voice-pipe mounted beside the scale cabinet.
"I heard you, Derek," Miller whispered. His voice was thin, almost lost beneath the humming fluorescent tubes, but it carried the absolute finality of a man whose illusions had been severed with a scalpel. "I heard you talking to Gordon through the mezzanine pipe. You told him the rookie at the desk takes the fall for the entire shift wipe."
Sullivan’s chest hitched. He didn't deny it. He didn't offer an excuse or claim it was a misunderstanding. A dirty cop who has run out of procedural cover does not argue protocol; he eliminates witnesses.
"You stupid, cowardly little farm boy," Sullivan snarled, lunging forward with a speed that defied his bulk.
He didn't go for the paper. He drove the pry-bar straight toward Miller’s head, aiming to shatter the rookie’s jaw and take the master keys from his limp fingers.
I moved before the steel bar reached the apex of its arc.
I threw my entire weight against the heavy steel door of the scale cabinet, swinging the rectangular slab of quarter-inch plate iron outward into Sullivan’s path. The reinforced edge caught Sullivan squarely across his left forearm with a deafening, bell-like clang. The impact jarred through my wrists, but the sheer physics of the steel door stopped his swing dead, sending the iron pry-bar clattering across the tile floor toward the empty holding cells.
Sullivan roared, spinning toward me with a furious backhand that tore across the split skin on my cheekbone. The blow drove me backward into the supervisor’s desk, scattering docket sheets, brass paperweights, and telephone cradles across the floor. My vision flared white at the edges as my lower back struck the walnut molding, the breath exploding from my lungs in a ragged gasp.
Sullivan was on me instantly. His heavy work gloves clamped around the lapels of my coat, hauling me upward until my boots left the floor, and he drove his knee hard into my ribs. The bone creaked beneath the impact, sending an electric bolt of pain through my diaphragm that dropped me to my knees as he threw me against the base of the desk.
"You want an audit, Vance?" Sullivan grunted, unhooking the leather retention snap on his service holster. "Here’s your municipal report: two casualties during an armed escape attempt by a federal detainee."
His fingers closed around the checkered polymer grip of his service weapon.
Before the barrel cleared the leather holster, a deafening mechanical shriek tore through the concrete floorboards beneath our feet.
It was not a gunshot. It was the high-pressure pneumatic emergency lockout horn wired to the bay apron.
Miller stood over the watch commander’s master security console on the far wall, both of his hands slammed down onto the twin yellow panic plungers labeled BAY THREE HYDRAULIC FLOOD GATE - EMERGENCY SEAL.