I clicked the speaker on before I hit the highway bridge.
"Did they take the bait, Art?" Harris asked, his voice crackling through the truck cab.
I looked at the empty leather wallet on the passenger seat. "He took all twenty bills, Jim. But Miller didn't just stand watch. He disabled the car unit before Vance pulled the band."
TO BE CONTINUED: The Cruiser Rolled Away While The Hidden Receiver Kept Recording
CHAPTER 2: The Envelope In The Glovebox
"Keep the line open, Arthur," Jim Harris said, his voice coming through the burner's tiny speaker with the flat grit of someone sitting in an unmarked van with headphones clamped to his skull. "State Police unit three is parked four miles up at the rest turnout. Do not turn down your gravel road. Drive straight through to the state weigh station on Nine. We need the physical transmitter in hand before Vance calls in his shift log."
"He didn't write a slip, Jim," I said, looking into my side mirror as the dusk deepened between the pines. "He told me Cullum's yard had three commercial break-ins this quarter. That wasn't on the radio. He had that story practiced."
"Because Cullum never reported a break-in," Jim replied. "We checked the county call ledger at noon. Vance has been feeding that line to every independent hauler crossing the north line since harvest began. But he never took marked bills off a driver with a running federal wire before. Stay on Nine. Maintain forty-five."
I kept my right boot steady on the throttle. The old Ford had a valve rattle around forty-eight miles an hour that I usually tuned out with habit, but tonight every metallic click against the firewall sounded like a hammer striking an anvil. A man sixty-nine years old doesn't run stings because he wants excitement. You do it because three weeks ago, my nephew Jesse—twenty-four, trying to pay off his first flatbed—pulled into my bay with his lip split, his logbook shredded, and his nine-hundred-dollar haul check gone. Jesse had tried to argue on the shoulder of Route 9, and Vance had put him face-down in the limestone dust until Jesse signed a voluntary forfeiture form claiming the cash was abandoned roadside debris.
When Jesse told me, he was shaking so hard he dropped a half-inch socket down the drain pan. The county prosecutor's office had told him that without dash footage or an independent witness, a deputy's word on road safety was ironclad. That was the afternoon I walked into Jim Harris's kitchen in town with Jesse's torn jacket. Jim had known me since my brother and I ran recovery rigs during the floods of ninety-eight. He was six months from his state pension, tired of looking at county incident sheets where routine traffic stops ended in cash surrenders that never made the clerk’s vault.
The highway opened up where the pine scrub gave way to the state weigh scale. The overhead halogens hummed, throwing stark white rectangles across the scales. The electronic sign flashed green for commercial bypass, but I guided the Ford into the inspection lane beside the concrete scale house.
A plain dark Crown Victoria sat parked behind the scale master's booth, its engine idling without headlights. As soon as my tires stopped rolling, the passenger door of the sedan cracked open. Jim stepped out into the damp chill. He wore an unzipped windbreaker over plain clothes, his gray hair cropped down to the scalp, holding a manila folder against his ribs.
Behind him came a younger woman in a dark trooper pullover, her badge clipped to her belt loop, carrying a foam-lined plastic hard case.
"Out of the cab, Art," Jim said quietly, scanning the empty blacktop behind us. "Special Agent Ramos wants the mic off the seat frame before the receiver cache resets."
I swung my legs out, my left knee catching with that familiar dry grinding ache. I stepped down onto the tarmac and braced my hand on the door frame while Ramos leaned into the Ford's footwell. She didn't waste motion. Her penlight cut under the bench seat, illuminating the two self-tapping screws where we had mounted the audio relay yesterday afternoon beside the rusted heater core.
She clipped the wire, slipped the transmitter unit into an anti-static envelope, and laid it directly into her foam case. Then she plugged a handheld diagnostic monitor into the jack on the side of the unit.
"Audio captured clean from the initial stop through his departure," Ramos said, looking up at Harris. "We have Vance clearly stating the two-thousand-dollar amount. We have him identifying Cullum Equipment. But the dashcam shutoff—that's the hinge."