I looked at Marsha. Her eyes were wide, pleading with me not to push it, warning me of what the county could do to a man who refused to bend. She had a mortgage in town and two years left until her own state retirement vested. If I forced this into the light, she would be standing in the blast radius beside me.
"Marsha," I said quietly, keeping my eyes fixed on the deputy. "What is the penalty for an unauthorized override on an active state telemetry transit log?"
She swallowed hard, her fingers tightening on the edges of the folder. "It's an immediate Class B misdemeanor for the terminal operator, and an administrative suspension of county road jurisdiction pending a formal review by the state attorney general's office."
"There isn't going to be a review," Ryder hissed. He reached across the counter, his fingers darting out to snatch the flip phone from my grasp.
I didn't pull back. Instead of pulling the phone away, I slammed my calloused right palm down flat on top of the instrument, pinning it against the hard laminate counter. At the same instant, my left hand gripped the carbon receipt beneath Marsha’s folder, yanking the purple-inked strip free before Ryder’s bulk could pin it down.
"Touch this counter again, Deputy," I said, my face inches from his, "and I won't wait for Tommy's backup to run. I’ll walk this paper straight up the stairs to the circuit judge's chambers. Judge Miller is still in his office until five. He was the one who signed Clara’s probate papers, and he knows my signature as well as he knows his own."
Ryder froze, his hand hovering two inches above my knuckles. His face flushed a dark, angry crimson, the veins along his temples standing out like heavy twine. He looked at the paper in my fist, then at the closed door behind him, realizing for the first time that the clock on the administrative wall read twenty minutes to five.
The judge was upstairs. The evidence had broken out of the local server trap and attached itself to a state permit he couldn't delete.
Ryder pulled his hand back slowly, tucking his thumbs into his duty belt. "You’re making a mistake, old man," he muttered, though the threat lacked the weight it had carried on the highway. "Miller won't ruin a departmental career over a misunderstanding at a traffic stop."
"It wasn't a misunderstanding," I told him, picking up the small phone and sliding it deep into my canvas vest pocket alongside the state receipt. "It was a robbery on Highway Nine. And we're going upstairs to see what the circuit court calls it."
CHAPTER 3: The Hearing That Stole My Voice
The stone staircase leading to the third floor of the Crawford County courthouse was steep, narrow, and worn hollow in the center of every riser by eighty years of work boots. Deputy Ryder didn't run to catch me, but his heavy stride took two steps at a time behind me, the leather gear on his duty belt creaking like dry harness. He kept his right hand resting flat against his holstered service pistol, close enough that I could hear the harsh, uneven rasp of his breathing against the back of my collar.
"You don't walk into chambers unannounced, Walter," he said, his voice dropping into a harsh, warning rasp that echoed off the cold plaster walls. "You turn around right now, and we handle this in the squad room like civil men."
I didn't answer. I reached the third-floor landing and pushed through the frosted glass door that read CIRCUIT COURT DIVISION TWO - HON. ARTHUR MILLER.
The reception anteroom was quiet, smelling of floor wax, leather-bound statutes, and the stale residue of radiator steam. Behind a dark walnut partition, Evelyn Vance, the judge’s bailiff for nearly twenty-five years, sat entering docket entries into a desktop terminal. Her gray hair was pulled back into a severe bun, and her reading glasses hung from a braided cord around her neck. She looked up when the brass latch rattled, her expression hardening at the sight of my grease-stained work jacket before she saw Ryder stepping through the threshold directly behind me.
"Walter Briggs?" Evelyn said, her pen pausing mid-air over a yellow docket ledger. "Court adjourned at four. Judge Miller is reviewing regional drainage appeals before the fiscal audit tomorrow morning."