Mercer didn't answer. He had leaned farther into the passenger side, his flashlight beam fixed steadily on the center console. The green diode behind the Bakelite volume knob was dark now, replaced by the deep, continuous blue pulse that indicated an active duplex channel.
"Vance," Mercer said. His voice was different now. The dull, subordinate cadence had vanished, replaced by the tight, dry precision of an officer who had just stepped onto live electrical conduit. "Step over here."
"What is it?" Vance barked, though he didn't let go of my jacket. "Did you find the casing?"
"You need to hear this," Mercer said.
Vance shoved me backward against the cruiser's grille, hard enough to send a dull ache through my spine, and strode around the Pontiac's rear bumper. He leaned down, thrusting his head through the passenger window, rain dripping off his hat directly onto the floorboard.
The radio's center speaker—the original perforated paper cone my grandfather had replaced with an eight-ohm marine driver thirty years ago—was humming with low, clear static. Then a woman's voice came through, clean, uncompressed, and carrying the slight digital latency of a high-altitude repeater link.
"Unit 402, this is County Central Dispatch," the voice said, sounding as close and indifferent as if she were sitting in the backseat. "We are showing an open priority carrier on the Miller Mountain municipal maintenance trunk. Carrier ID matches the vocational telematics prototype assigned to shop bay four. Any county unit on Ridge Road, authenticate your station immediately."
Vance went completely motionless. The crowbar in his right hand dipped until the curved tip clicked against the sill.
"What is that?" Vance whispered, his voice cracking slightly on the edge of the syllable. "Who authorized an open carrier on the county maintenance band?"
"It's not authorized," Mercer said quietly, pointing his flashlight at the underside of the dashboard. His light caught the neat, color-coded wiring harness my third-year students had laced with waxed aircraft cord, running from the hollow Delco housing directly to an auxiliary transmitter bracket bolted flush behind the cowl. "It's an automated distress packet. The STEM chassis uses the road department’s repeater frequency because the school board voted last August to let the vocational program test public transit signal priority modules."
Mercer looked up, his pale eyes catching the red strobe from his own cruiser. "Every word you said since you pulled the trunk lid open went over the repeater, Vance. It didn't go to Pete's flatbed. It went to the county communications log in the basement of the courthouse."
The silence that followed was heavier than the engine rumble. The rain kept falling, sweeping in gray sheets through the pine boughs overhead, washing the fresh scrape marks along the Pontiac's fender into bright, raw silver.
Vance stood upright very slowly. The arrogance that had carried him out of his patrol car had not entirely drained, but it had curdled into something desperate and sharp. He stared down at the open door of the Pontiac, then turned his gaze back to me.
"Mercer," Vance said, his voice flat, low, and stripped of authority. "Shut that receiver off. Pull the harness out of the dash."
"It's already buffered to the district cloud drive, Vance," I said, stepping away from the cruiser's hood and letting my arms hang straight at my sides. "You can tear the wiring out of the cowl, you can smash the speaker with your bar, and you can throw the Delco unit into the creek at the bottom of the ridge. But the audio file has a municipal time stamp, a tower triangulation fix, and your voice on the recording stating you intended to plant county hardware in my frame rails before Monday morning."
Vance’s hand moved down toward his duty belt, hovering two inches above the retention snap of his sidearm. He was breathing hard, his chest heaving under the wet Kevlar vest.
"You set this up," he said, his teeth clicking together on the words. "You knew the road department was looking at that bay."
"I didn't set anything up," I said. "I built a project with four seventeen-year-old kids who wanted to win a regional scholarship by showing how municipal vehicles could automate emergency maintenance logs. You’re the one who thought an old car was just an empty box you could break open in the dark."
Vance turned his head toward Mercer, his eyes wild, searching for the obedience he had relied on for three years.
"Mercer," Vance commanded, his voice trembling with an ugly, jagged intensity. "Take his keys. Put him in the back of your car. We drive to Pete’s. We don't log anything until we talk to my uncle."
Mercer stood in the rain, looking from Vance to me, and then down at the small blue light glowing quietly inside the dark dashboard.
He reached up, grasped the lapel microphone pinned to his left shoulder, and pressed the transmit bar.
"Dispatch, this is Unit 404 on Ridge Road," Mercer said clearly, his voice steady against the rushing sound of the wind through the timber. "We have a ten-fifty interdiction stop at marker twenty-two. Advise the shift lieutenant to roll to this location. We have an operational discrepancy regarding county property, and we need supervisor presence on scene immediately."