"I’m sorry about the car, Mr. Cole," he said quietly. "I should have pulled the emergency card ten minutes earlier."
"You did the right thing when it counted, Mercer," I said. "Remember that when you testify. It’s the only part of this night that’s going to keep your badge on your shirt."
He nodded once, sharp and tight, and walked back to the driver's seat of his cruiser to begin the long paperwork process that would dismantle three years of highway department kickbacks.
Miller stayed by the Pontiac until the red flashing lights of the county central wrecker appeared through the mist at the bottom of the ridge. The driver, an older mechanic named Jenkins who had worked on the county's big Diesels since I was a boy, hopped out with chains already rattling in his hands.
Jenkins took one look at the sheared dash and the ripped quarter panel, then whistled through his teeth. "Vance do this?"
"Vance did it," Miller said.
"Fool," Jenkins muttered. "Never touch an old Pontiac’s iron. Too much work to put back together, and too many people remember where the parts came from."
We hooked the Pontiac's lower control arms with heavy nylon slings, lifting the front end off the wet asphalt with the smooth, rhythmic whine of the hydraulic boom. As the car tilted upward, the rainwater cleared from the chrome drip rails, streaming down the dark hunter-green paint and splashing onto the macadam.
Inside the shattered dash, the blue light finally flickered and went dark as the distance severed the line-of-sight link to the Miller Mountain tower. The transmission was complete. The record was locked.
I climbed into the passenger side of Jenkins’s wrecker, the cab warm and smelling of hydraulic fluid and damp sawdust. Through the rearview mirror, I watched Mercer’s cruiser pull away toward the valley, carrying Vance in the back behind the barred glass.
Behind them, the rain continued to fall over the empty turnoff at marker twenty-two, washing away the tire tracks and the curls of flaked paint until only the cold, bare stone of the ridge remained.
CHAPTER 4: What The Morning Kept
The yellow tow sling let down with a slow, grinding hiss of hydraulic fluid, dropping the front tires of my grandfather’s Pontiac into the rutted mud beside my tool shed.
Jenkins climbed down from the cab of his wrecker, leaving the diesel idling in the pre-dawn gray. He smelled of cold grease and sweet gas station tobacco. He unhitched the nylon straps, tossed them into the back rack with a dull clang, and kicked a wooden chock under the right front wheel.
"Frame’s square enough," Jenkins said, squinting through the dawn at the buckled deck lid and the curled edges of the quarter panel. "Fender took the worst of the bar. A body hammer and a heat gun will pull most of that tin out, but you won’t ever get that factory green to lay smooth over the scar."
"I don't need it to lay smooth," I said.
He looked at me once, his rheumy eyes steady under the grease-stained brim of his cap. "Superintendent’s secretary called my home phone at five this morning. Asked if I had hooked your car off Ridge Road. I told her I hadn't seen you or your car, that I was hauling gravel out of the south pit. She didn't like that answer."
"Thanks, Jenkins."
"Don't thank me, Cole. Go get yourself cleaned up. The courthouse steps get crowded early on a first-of-the-month docket." He climbed back into the cab, shoved the transmission into low, and backed down the gravel lane, his exhaust hanging thick and blue in the cold October air.
I didn't go inside the house. I pulled my toolbox from the shed, walked over to the driver's side of the Pontiac, and set my socket set on the running board.
The dashboard hung down in ragged strips of molded vinyl and yellowed insulation foam, exposing the bare steel cowl beneath. I knelt on the wet gravel, took an eight-millimeter nut driver, and began unbolting the auxiliary mounting bracket behind the radio housing.
My fingers were stiff from the night chill, the knuckles raw where Vance had driven me back against the push-bar. The waxed lacing cord my students had tied around the harness was black with road grime, but the solder joints held firm. I clipped the twin output leads, freed the Delco radio casing from the bracket, and lifted the assembly out of the chassis.
The small lithium pack was cold to the touch. Tucked into the hollow cavity of the old tuner housing, the custom low-frequency transceiver board sat seated in its phenolic cradle, intact, silent, and completely dead now that its battery reserve had drained to zero.