I reached back through the window, took the heavy logging chain from my emergency recovery crate, and secured it over my shoulder. Along with it, I brought the twelve-gauge flare launcher and two heavy steel chocks. I checked the action on my service sidearm, locked the wagon's interior posts, and touched Lily's shoulder through the opening. "You keep the passenger latch locked. If someone who isn't wearing a state patch touches this sheet metal, you hit the vehicle horn twice and drop flat beneath the glove box. Understand?"
She nodded once, firm and clear. "Two taps. Stay down."
I left her secured in the blind cut and moved up the rise toward the neck of the junction.
The silence on the mountain was absolute, broken only by the stiff clatter of dry pine needles and the distant, hollow groan of an old galvanized roof rattling somewhere near the quarry workings. The cold had settled into the gorge, dropping the temperature into the low twenties and freezing the wet clay along the road margins into sharp, brittle ridges.
At the narrow throat where the access lane pinched between a sheer shale wall and the steep drop-off into the timber culvert, I went to work.
I hauled two dead red-fir logs across the roadbed, anchoring the thick butt ends against the jagged outcrop of exposed rock. Across their center, I looped the recovery chain, wrapping the hardened links around an ancient, deep-rooted larch stump on the cut bank and securing the tail with a heavy screw-pin shackle. It was not a fortification built to stop a tank, but in the dark, thrown across an unlit curve, it formed a rigid shelf three feet above the gravel—high enough to take out a radiator and fold a front axle if taken at speed, and solid enough that no driver could push through it without getting out to clear the road.
I dropped into the shadow of the larch trunk, seated my back against the rough bark, and waited.
Eight minutes later, the dull, rhythmic vibration began.
It was a heavy, low-frequency hum that traveled through the bedrock before it reached the air—an old V8 engine running hard in second gear, its broken exhaust baffle vibrating like a torn snare drum. Through the dark canopy of the upper pines, two pale fingers of light swept across the rock face half a mile up the haul spur.
Mercer had hit the washout.
The lights dipped, swung in an erratic circle as he executed a violent three-point turn against the cut bank, and then accelerated downhill. He wasn't coasting. He was driving with the desperate, jagged aggression of a man racing a clock he knew had already started running against him. He had realized that the digital transponder in my car wasn't a bluff; he knew that somewhere down on Route 395, state troopers were already pulling keys from ignition boards and rolling toward the county border.
I drew my sidearm, thumbed the retention strap loose, and held the receiver against my chest.
The surplus Crown Victoria came down the switchback with its tires chewing into the loose granite, throwing a spray of gravel against the undercarriage. Mercer had killed the spinning auxiliary roof strobe to avoid casting light into the valley, running only on his faded halogen high beams. The light bounced wildly over the ruts, flashing across the frozen ditches, until the beams swung around the final curve and locked directly onto the barred lane.
Brake shoes screamed against grooved rotors.
The heavy sedan fish-tailed violently, its rear end sliding sideways toward the four-foot drop into the culvert mouth. Mercer fought the steering wheel, his front tires locking and skidding across the frosted gravel, the rubber smoking as the car dragged itself to a shuddering halt less than ten feet from the chained fir logs.
The engine idled with an irregular, clattering knock. For several seconds, nothing moved inside the cab. Through the dirt-streaked windshield, illuminated by the backwash of his own headlights, I could see Mercer gripping the steering column with both hands, his head bowed, his shoulders heaving with ragged breaths.
Then he reached down.
The interior dome light did not activate when the driver's door swung open; he had cut the fuse long ago to facilitate unobserved stops. Mercer stepped out onto the road, leaving the driver's door hanging wide. He wasn't carrying the revolver in his hand; he had it jammed into his waistband, his fingers wrapped instead around a thirty-inch iron pry bar he had grabbed from the trunk.
He walked toward the barrier, his heavy boots crunching hard on the frost. He spat onto the gravel, grabbed the top link of the logging chain, and gave it an angry, rattling jerk.
"You're wasting steel, Brooks," Mercer shouted into the black timber, his voice cracking with exhaustion and fury. "You think you're holding a perimeter out here? You're hiding in the brush with a kid while your car sits dead! Show yourself and get this timber out of my lane!"
I didn't answer from the trees. I stepped out from behind the larch stump, placing my boots squarely in the center of the road twenty feet behind his open cruiser door, the gold star of the Marshals Service pinned openly to my wool lapel.
"Step away from the timber, Mercer," I said, my voice carrying clean and level through the freezing air. "Hands where the headlights can find them."
Mercer didn't drop his hands. He spun around, the pry bar held at his side like a club, his face contorted in the harsh glare of the halogen lamps. The gray stubble on his cheeks was soaked with sweat despite the biting cold, his uniform shirt torn at the left armpit where he had caught it on something inside the car.
"You don't have a backup unit within thirty miles," he hissed, his eyes darting from my hands to the dark timberline behind me. "I know the response times in this county better than you do. The dispatch center in Colville runs two cars after eight at night, and both of them are sitting at the south scale house waiting on an oversize permit."