My hands tightened against the cold plastic barrels of the glasses.
That was the flaw in Jim’s plan. A county deputy might be reckless, but he wasn't illiterate. Cullum’s bookkeeper hadn't just used ordinary bank straps. To satisfy the federal task force chain-of-custody requirement, Jim’s auditor had stamped the bottom edge of the paper band with a tiny, five-digit state treasury audit control code in violet ink. At sixty paces on the shoulder of Route 9, in the red wash of the cruiser's strobes, Vance hadn't looked at the paper; he’d only seen the hundred-dollar denominations.
Here, under two hundred watts of mercury vapor, the purple ink was as plain as an oil stain on white concrete.
Vance’s posture changed instantly. His shoulders hitched up toward his ears. He dropped the bill back into the box, grabbed the entire stack, and brought it within three inches of his face. He rubbed the band with his bare thumb, trying to smear the ink.
"Miller," Vance said. The lazy arrogance had vanished from his voice, replaced by the tight, ugly rasp of a trapped animal. "Where did he say he picked this up?"
"Cullum," Miller whispered, backing away a half-step. "At the main quarry office."
"This isn't commercial payroll," Vance hissed. He turned around, the stack clutched tight in his fist, his knuckles white against the leather of his gloves. "Look at the corner code. That’s state revenue reserve. Cullum doesn't draw cash from the state treasury branch in capital city."
Miller stared at the money, his jaw slackening. "Then who gave it to him?"
"Nobody gave it to him," Vance said, his head snapping toward the empty alleyway. "The old bastard set us up."
Vance didn't hesitate. He didn't reach for his radio, and he didn't run inside to destroy the logbook. A man like Vance knows that once marked paper enters an official evidence chain, his career is over; but if the paper vanishes before the search warrant arrives, the complaint is nothing more than the word of an aging mechanic against two sworn deputies.
He reached into his utility pocket, pulled out an ordinary yellow plastic disposable lighter, and flicked the wheel.
A small yellow flame bloomed between his thick fingers.
The burner phone in my pocket stayed dead. Jim was still two miles out on the bypass, waiting for his state cruisers to clear the cattle truck wreck. If Vance touched that flame to the paper band, the physical evidence—the only thing tying the cash to Cullum's invoice and the federal serial list—would be reduced to black soot in the bottom of a steel box before Ramos could turn the corner onto Court Street.
I let the binoculars drop onto the passenger seat. I didn't reach for the burner. A man can spend his whole life waiting for the proper authorities to file the proper paperwork, or he can fix the leak while the engine is still on the stand.
I dropped my hand to the gearshift, kicked the clutch pedal to the floorboards, and pulled the lever down into low gear. My left knee screamed as I stood on the starter button.
The Ford's starter motor groaned once, caught the flywheel teeth, and the big eight-cylinder diesel tore through the quiet evening like a burst of machine-gun fire. I dropped the clutch, hammered the throttle, and cut the steering wheel hard to the left, sending two hundred pounds of loose gravel spraying against the feed store’s aluminum siding as the front bumper surged over the railroad ties and slammed down onto Court Street.