It was Miller’s cruiser, Car 4. The spotlight mounted on his driver-side door post was angled sharply down toward the west shoulder, sweeping the culverts and brush piles. He hadn’t spotted my tailgate because I had pulled the fuse on the running lights five miles back, but he knew the math. A thirty-year-old flatbed carrying two tons of spare scrap iron couldn't outrun a modern patrol package on open asphalt. He was running a sweep to catch me before I crossed into Union Township, where the county radio channels crossed over to the regional dispatch center in Sunbury.
I waited until the taillights dipped beyond the culvert ridge, then keyed the starter again. The dashboard stayed black. The only indicator in the whole cab was the faint green diode of David’s recorder, blinking once every four seconds to show the solid-state cache was writing clean.
To reach the Route 11 scales without crossing the Mercer County bypass, I had to take the haul route behind the lime kilns. It was four miles of washed-out corduroy timber road, timbered thirty years ago and left to rot, but it bypassed the automated camera at the township reservoir where Miller’s uncle kept the municipal pumps.
Every jolt over the exposed hemlock ties sent a dull, tearing spike through my left shoulder. Vance had known exactly how to lean his knee into the collarbone so the joint would separate without tearing the skin. It was the same leverage the county guards used down in the lockup when an inmate wouldn't drop his chin during the intake strip-search. I kept my teeth set against the lower lip, feeling the salt of a split skin, and held the wheel with my right forearm braced across the spoke.
Ten minutes out, the timber road climbed the shale bluff overlooking the river bottoms. Through the bare locust branches to the south, the whole valley opened up like a contour map under the moon.
Two miles back on Route 9, a second set of headlights was creeping north, moving at barely twenty miles an hour. Every three hundred yards, a spotlight stabbed into the brush, played across a farm gate, and flicked off again.
That was Vance in the second car. They weren't just patrolling. They were hunting the ditch where Miller had dropped that withdrawal carbon. They had realized that if I was crazy enough to drive toward the state scales instead of heading home to nurse my ribs, I might have stopped to pick up the paper trail before I cleared the turn.
My boot tongue rubbed against the folded slip in my left work boot, stiff and sharp against the ankle bone. That little slip wasn't enough on its own. Vance would swear in any magistrate’s hearing that I pulled out onto Route 9 with a tail light out, became combative when asked for registration, and threw my own paperwork into the weeds to stage a civil rights grievance. The local magistrate was his second cousin; the clerk was his sister-in-law. An old man with grease under his nails and a forty-year-old service record wouldn't even get past the preliminary docket.
The timber road dropped down a steep shelf of loose limestone into the rear apron of the state weighing facility.
The Route 11 inspection station didn't look like a county precinct. It looked like what it was: an austere concrete bunker built into the side of the interstate approach, surrounded by high chain-link topped with razor wire, illuminated by three thousand watts of sodium-vapor floodlights that turned the asphalt the color of raw tallow. The sign over the gate was federal green: COMMERCIAL VEHICLE ENFORCEMENT DIVISION — REGION IV.
Under the terms of the 1984 highway trust agreement, the grounds inside the double gates were under the sole authority of the Department of Transportation and the State Police Bureau of Records. County deputies had no legal standing inside the fence line unless they were transporting an active felony warrant signed by a common pleas judge.
I pulled the flatbed onto the dynamic axle scale. The sensor plates under the front tires chimed with a heavy pneumatic hiss, and the overhead indicator lit up red: STOP — VEHICLE OVER 10,000 LBS — PREPARE FOR LOG CHECK.
I shut down the motor. The sudden quiet in the cab was louder than the engine had been. My hands were shaking, not with fear, but with that cold, empty fatigue that settles into the marrow when the adrenaline finally drains out of a damaged shoulder.
The glass door of the scale house clicked open. A man stepped out onto the concrete ramp carrying an aluminum clip ledger and a sealed fiberboard box.
He didn't wear a uniform. He wore a rumpled wool cardigan with elbow patches over an open-collar work shirt, his white hair cropped down to the scalp, a pair of steel-framed bifocals hanging around his neck on a nylon lanyard.
Arthur Pendergast hadn't changed his posture since we sat together in the field hospital in Chu Lai while the corpsmen washed the salt out of our eyes. He walked with a heavy, flat-footed hitch from a knee that had never quite set right after a secondary blast, but his back was as straight as an oak lath.
He didn't look at my face first. He looked at the driver-side mirror, then at the passenger door where Miller had kicked the lower panel until the primer showed through the dark blue enamel.
"You're leaking transmission fluid, Walter," he said, his voice as dry as corn husk.
"Gasket's weeping," I told him, pushing the door open with my right arm. "It'll hold till morning."
Pendergast reached up, took my right elbow, and took my weight before my boots hit the concrete. He saw the way my left arm hung limp inside the denim coat, pinned against my ribs to keep the joint from grinding. His mouth tightened into a line no thicker than a pencil lead.
"Vance?" he asked.
"Vance held," I said. "Miller took the envelope."