Dent didn't unclip the belt. His eyes went wild for a split second, measuring the distance to the pedestrian gate at the far corner of the chain link—a narrow gap between two scrap stacks where a man on foot could squeeze through into the alley behind the lumber yard.
"You think you've won something?" Dent said, his voice cracking against the wind. "Kovacs will tear this whole block down by noon tomorrow. He'll have a court order from the circuit bench before you can get an attorney to the courthouse."
"He might try," I said. "But he'll do it without your badge to clear the road. And he'll do it with a federal track-tampering warrant hanging over every truck he owns."
Dent pulled the thick white envelope from his uniform pocket. His fingers were shaking so hard that the pink voucher slip tore along its perforated margin as he threw the bundle down onto the freezing metal of his cruiser's hood. The hundred-dollar bills, bound with an ordinary blue rubber band, landed with a dull, heavy slap against the wet paint.
He didn't wait for the railroad cruiser. He didn't look back at Clara or at me. He turned on his heel, his patrol boots slipping wildly in the frozen muck as he lunged toward the narrow break between the scrap piles, abandoning his idling vehicle in the locked alley.
The sound of his heavy, frantic breathing vanished into the whine of the river wind, followed three seconds later by the shrill, rising wail of a dual-tone siren turning off Fort Street toward the gate.
The flashing beacons of the Conrail police unit washed blue and amber across the corrugated zinc siding of Bay 3, throwing long, rhythmic bars of light over Marcus Dent’s abandoned cruiser.
Two men in heavy navy storm coats had stepped through the pedestrian break twenty minutes ago. They did not shout, they did not reach for holsters, and they did not look at the crumpled truck cab blocking the gate as an offense against municipal pride. To them, it was an obstruction of a Class-1 switching corridor. The senior officer, a thickset man named Miller whose mustache was frosted stiff with sleet, had spent five minutes examining the ground clamp wired from my gantry track into the railhead before he even looked at the envelope on the hood of the cruiser.
The forty-two hundred dollars in cash lay inside a clear polyethylene evidence bag on the cruiser’s trunk. Beside it sat the pink Kovacs voucher, flattened smooth against the enamel, along with the carbon slip from the credit union that bore Clara’s signature and the purple morning stamp from the branch on Springwells.
"Dent’s sergeant arrived at the outer curb five minutes ago," Miller said, looking up from his clipboard. He had set up a folding aluminum document desk right on the tail of the Conrail truck. "He’s standing on Fort Street with two patrol supervisors. They aren't coming inside the fence, Frank. They know whose jurisdiction begins six feet north of the rail centerline."
"Dent didn't walk out through the front gate," I said. My hand still rested on the railing of the tool-room ramp. The cold had worked through my sheepskin collar, settling deep into the ache behind my sternum, but my pulse had slowed to a steady, quiet rhythm. "He went down the culvert trail toward the turning basin."
"They picked him up thirty yards from the aggregate loader," Miller replied, his pencil scratching across an official federal hazard intake form. "He was on foot, without his service cap, trying to climb the security fence into Kovacs’ south yard. His sergeant took his duty belt and his badge right there on the gravel. They’re running him downtown to the internal affairs bureau at headquarters right now."
Through the low breezeway door, the porch light of the rear cottage cut a pale yellow square across the icy cinder drive. Clara hadn't stayed outside in the freezing draft. Once the Conrail cruiser had pulled across the spur with its air horns blaring, she had turned her walker around, shuffling her boots inch by inch across the frozen threshold back into the kitchen. Through the small paned window above the sink, I could see the silhouette of her head by the iron radiator, her hand steady as she lifted a steaming porcelain mug to her cannula.
The compressor inside her parlor was still running. Its low, cyclical hum pushed through the workshop’s open doorway, steady and unbroken, carried along the dedicated six-hundred-volt auxiliary loop that had fed this ground since before Marcus Dent's father had swung a hammer on the freight cars.
"Kovacs won't be sending a heavy rotator tonight," Miller said, tearing the yellow inspection copy from his pad and pressing it into my grease-stained fingers. "The federal transportation board issued an immediate administrative stop-work order on the entire riverfront parcel at six-fifteen. That omnibus tax lien he bought from the county receiver? It included sixteen hundred feet of active track easement that never reverted to the land bank. The city emergency manager’s office didn't have the statutory authority to quiet-title a federal right-of-way in nineteen-ninety-two, and Kovacs’ lawyers knew it. They were trying to get physical possession of your dirt before the title company caught the defect on tomorrow's court docket."
I looked down at the yellow carbon slip in my hand. At the bottom, where the municipal enforcement line usually required an owner's waiver, Miller had stamped the three-inch oval seal of the Interstate Commerce Commission's regional safety division. It didn't make the yard pretty. It didn't fix the forty years of oil soak in the floorboards or the cracked asphalt along the fence line. But it meant no private hauler could put a hook into my crane rails without a federal marshal standing at his shoulder.
"What about the municipal citation?" I asked.
"There is no citation," Miller said flatly, capping his pen with a sharp brass click. "Dent's book was an obsolete nineteen-eighty-four municipal revision he pulled out of an abandoned locker at the old precinct house. It had no legal standing. The county prosecutor’s public integrity division already has an investigator waiting at the hospital ward where they took him for hypothermia checks. By tomorrow noon, Kovacs’ entire commercial towing franchise with the Third Precinct is going before the grand jury."