Headlights cut through the dust at the end of the alley.
Two dark unmarked sedans swept into the annex lot at forty miles an hour, their high beams pinning Vance against the side of his truck. Tires bit into the crushed limestone, spraying white rock across the fence line. Before the dust could settle, four doors kicked open simultaneously.
"State Police! Do not move!" Ramos’s voice hit the yard like a whip crack.
She was out of the passenger seat of the lead car, her service weapon leveled across the roof, two troopers in tactical vests flanking her left. Behind them, Jim Harris stepped into the glare, an open radio in his left hand and Albright’s signed warrant clipped to a hardboard in his right.
"Hands on the bed rail, Vance!" Ramos commanded, advancing across the gravel with steady, measured strides. "Miller, face down on the blacktop, right now!"
Miller dropped immediately, spreading his arms and legs flat against the dirt without a word of protest.
Vance stood frozen between the headlights, his face pale, his breath rattling in his throat. His uninjured hand hung three inches from his weapon. He looked at Jim Harris, then at the three troopers fanning out to box him against the tailgate, and finally at me, standing six feet away with my knuckles bleeding from the Ford's door latch.
"You had this planned before you left Cullum's," Vance muttered, his voice hollow and ruined.
"No," I told him, wiping the dust from my jaw with the back of my work shirt. "I just know how a rusted bolt acts when you put too much torque on it. It strips out every single time."
Jim Harris walked straight past me, his eyes locked on Vance. He reached into the open bed of the Silverado, picked up the banded stack of twenty hundred-dollar bills resting on the ribbed plastic liner, and turned it over under the beam of Ramos’s tactical light.
The violet audit stamp glowed plain and sharp against the green Treasury paper.
"Serial check confirmed," Jim said into his radio lapel. "Subject is in possession of the marked asset. Take his weapon."
One of the troopers stepped in, stripped Vance’s duty belt with two practiced clicks of the buckle, and forced his hands behind his back. The steel cuffs locked around his wrists with a double click that seemed to quiet the entire yard.
Vance didn't look up as they pushed him toward the back seat of the state sedan. His eyes stayed glued to the dirt, watching his own boots drag through the limestone dust he had spent six years kicking into other men's faces.
CHAPTER 4: What The Morning Kept
The holding room in the county annex smelled of sour radiator steam, wet wool, and thirty years of floor wax stripped down to bare yellow pine.