To the west, through the tree line, a pair of sharp, brilliant high beams crested the long hill on route nine. Sheriff Wayne Miller's patrol interceptor was dropping down the ridge at sixty miles an hour, the blue strobes on the roof rack pulsing in silent, cold rhythm against the low-hanging autumn clouds.
He wasn't coming with paperwork. He was running hot with his siren off.
I threw myself back behind the wheel, hauled the truck into the dark timber, and released the clutch. The tires bit into the slick clay of the abandoned logging trail, throwing a heavy spray of mud against the wooden flatbed. The branches of the scrub oak whipped against the windshield, screeching like fingernails across the glass, but the canopy swallowed us instantly, cutting off the highway glare.
Behind us, a sharp horn blast echoed over the trees—Kevin, hitting his siren as Wayne’s cruiser tore into the diner’s gravel lot.
"They'll see the rear gate open," Thomas said, bracing his forearm against the dashboard as the truck bucked over a buried limestone shelf. "They'll know within sixty seconds."
"Let them look," I said, wrestling the heavy steering wheel as the front tires slid in the ruts. "Kevin’s Crown Victoria will rip its oil pan off on the first rock bar, and Wayne won't risk high-centering his pursuit cruiser in these washouts. If they want this track, they have to turn back to the county shed to get the four-wheel Dodge supervisor trucks."
"That gives us ten minutes," Thomas muttered, his face illuminated only by the faint green dash lamps. He reached into his coat and felt the stiff paper of the manifest. "Clara... if they catch us before the scale house, it won't just be an official trespass. Wayne has thirty years of county credit. His brother chairs the sanitation authority. If he finds that pink voucher on this road, it gets burned in a ditch fire, and our names go into the county register as two haulers who stole a rig and rolled it into the strip pit."
"Then we make sure we aren't alone when we hit the gate," I said.
The logging road climbed steeply along the rim of the creek ravine, the timber thinning as we approached the old industrial ridge. Four miles of rock, mud, and flooded ditches tore at the truck's undercarriage, the transmission whining in second gear as the engine strained against the gradient. Ahead, through the thinning mist, the high chain-link perimeter of the north quarry cut across the dark horizon.
This was Gate Four.
A pair of heavy steel gates, eight feet high and strung with concertina wire, blocked the wide gravel access road that led to the abandoned lime pits. A massive brass chain, three inches thick, hung across the center stanchions, held together by a heavy padlock bearing the stamped seal of the State Department of Environmental Protection.
Beside the gate, parked under the dripping branches of a dead sycamore, was a second vehicle.
It wasn't a county patrol car. It was a dark blue state utility pickup, the gold shield of the Department of Environmental Protection stenciled on the door. Sitting in the cab, illuminated by a clip-on reading lamp, was an older woman in a green work jacket, a wide clipboard balanced on the steering wheel.
Thomas let out a ragged breath, the tension dropping from his shoulders for the first time since he had stumbled through my diner door. "She came."
"Who is that?" I asked, cutting the truck's ignition twenty yards short of the barrier.
"Evelyn Vance," Thomas said quietly. "My sister. She's the regional field officer for the Mercer district. She’s been trying to audit the lime pits since June, but Wayne Miller kept filing local injunctions claiming the county roads weren't graded for state inspection rigs. She told me if I could get the physical receiving voucher out of the transfer office, she would meet me here with the state master key and a portable water testing kit before the morning shift buried the drums."
I stepped out into the rain, my boots sinking into the wet crushed shale of the quarry approach. Evelyn Vance was already out of her truck, a heavy metal-cased flashlight in her hand. Her hair was pulled back in a tight gray knot, her face lined with the sharp, uncompromising suspicion of a state bureaucrat who had spent thirty years fighting small-town kickbacks.
"Tom?" she called out, her voice hard as gravel. Then she saw me, and her hand dropped toward the two-way state radio strapped across her chest. "Who is that with you?"