I pushed myself up against the timber frame until my spine found the heavy workbench. My fingers groped across the lower shelf, navigating greasy rags until my knuckles grazed the ground edge of a mower blade clamped in the iron vise. Pressing my back flush against the wood, I worked my bound wrists over the vise and dropped the nylon loop across the beveled steel. With four frantic thrusts, the cold edge bit into the plastic. The loop frayed, snapped with a dull pop, and freed my hands.
I didn't stop to nurse my bleeding wrists. At the rear of the shed, behind three drums of off-road diesel, road-salt runoff had rotted the lowest pine planking. I grabbed a steel tire iron, wedged the tip under the timber, and levered the sheet metal outward. The rusted screws tore free with a dull scrape beneath the drone of the floodlights. Squeezing through headfirst, I dragged my belly across crushed limestone into the narrow gap between the shed and Bay Four’s fence.
Fifty feet across the gravel, the silver Ford F-150 sat under the orange glare, its front fender crumpled from Monday's fatal collision. Mercer’s unmarked cruiser was idling against the chain link, headlights extinguished. Mercer was wedged half-inside the cab, a penlight in his teeth as his gloved hands worked a cordless driver beneath the steering column. The squeal of stripped screws cut through the night, followed by the snap of plastic trim clips being forced past their limit.
I flattened my ribs against the tin, edging toward the corner. On the tailgate, beside an open toolbox, sat the manila envelope Mercer had pulled from his vest, its sliced evidence seal visible under the lamps. Through the shattered windshield, I watched him pry a rectangular black casing from behind the instrument cluster: the event data recorder, the factory black box logging vehicle speed and brake application before impact.
Mercer backed out of the cab, pulled a butane soldering torch from his pocket, and flicked the igniter. He was preparing to melt the diagnostic memory pins, turning the telemetry into an unreadable electrical short. But before the flame touched the harness, his personal cell phone vibrated violently against the tailgate. Mercer clicked the torch off, slid it into his coat, and answered on speaker.
"I’m in the truck now," Mercer said in a low rasp. "I have the dashcam card. The lens was cracked, but the chip is intact. The video caught the whole thing—the crossing lights, the centerline drift, and Dale behind the wheel."
A woman’s voice crackled through the speaker, tight with panic. "Did anyone see the vehicle transfer? Alan, the county prosecutor called our house twenty minutes ago. They want that card at the courthouse by eight tomorrow morning."
"The prosecutor doesn't have jurisdiction until ten," Mercer snapped, eyes scanning the driveway. "Bradley signed the state intake, but I kept the municipal copy separate. The kid on the desk tried to wave the felony hold, so I locked him in the mower shed. By morning, Ellis takes the blame for an unattended gate and stolen evidence. Nobody questions a yard clerk with priors when county property goes missing."
The mention of my name made my blood run cold. I had no record, only an informal juvenile diversion from three years ago when my cousin took a farm four-wheeler—a closed matter Mercer personally handled. He was weaponizing that buried paper to frame me for the stolen evidence to protect his son Dale.
Mercer ended the call and turned toward the cab. I seized the moment, darting across the dark driveway to where my aluminum clipboard lay face-down in the clover. Dropping into the grass, I popped open the storage tray beneath the writing plate. Inside lay the pink carbon copy of State Police Form 104-B, handed to me at five-fifteen by Trooper Bradley. In the blank for vehicle inventory, Bradley's slanted script was pressed through the wax: Forward cabin camera model V-40 intact; removed by Sgt. A. Mercer for initial municipal triage; serial #9942-D.
Below Bradley's note was my signature as receiver, time-stamped five-twenty-two. In the township ledger on the desk, Mercer had scribbled camera destroyed on impact—a forged entry contradicted by the state manifest in my hands. Pulling my phone, I snapped three photos of the pink slip against the grass, capturing the serial number and the wet blood from my wrists. Then I aimed through the fence and recorded fifteen seconds of Mercer inside the cab, the severed black box harness in his hand and the taped envelope on the tailgate.
My phone vibrated with an incoming call from Artie Vance, my supervisor. Relief hit me for an instant; Artie had hired me to help keep my mother’s trailer out of tax foreclosure. Ducking into the shadow of the salt dome, I answered in a ragged whisper. "Artie, call the state barracks. Mercer is in Bay Four destroying the truck’s telemetry. He locked me in the shed—"