CHAPTER 1: The Cash On The Floorboard
Deputy Vance stripped the five hundred dollars from my glovebox with the practiced flick of a man cleaning fish, his heavy thumb counting the worn twenties against his ballistic vest. He dropped the empty vinyl registration sleeve onto my passenger floorboard, kicked my ruined front tire hard enough to rock the rusted frame of my 1998 Ford, and leaned into my open window until the tobacco on his breath crowded out the sweet pine smell of the Georgia roadside.
"Consider this your official roadside warning, Arthur," he said, tapping the flat of his flashlight against my driver's side door panel. "You tell the judge in Oconee County that your steering gave out, or you tell him you shouldn't be hauling timber scrap after dark with an expired safety decal. Either way, this five hundred covers the county impound escort I’m not calling."
I did not pull my hands off the steering wheel. My knuckles were swollen from forty-two years of pulling green pine out of saw pits, the skin paper-thin and spotted with age, but my fingers stayed locked at ten and two. Through the cracked wing mirror, I could see his patrol car idling on the shoulder of Route 44, its dash-camera lens blacked out by a square of heavy black electrical tape cut clean at the corners.
"That cash was for the pump repair down at the creek cistern, Deputy," I said. My voice was level, thin with the dust from the gravel cutoff, but it did not shake. "My boy left that envelope on the kitchen counter this morning before his shift started."
"Your boy can work an extra turnaround at the mill," Vance said. He shoved the folded bills down into the inner pocket of his tactical vest, right beneath his brass nameplate, and zipped the seam shut. He gave the rusted quarter-panel another solid kick with his steel-toed boot, denting the brittle primer. "You sit tight until sunrise, old man. Try limping that flat into town on the rim, and I’ll have state patrol pull you in for reckless endangerment before you clear the river bridge."
He turned his back on me, taking two broad, careless strides toward his cruiser. He thought I was just another broken farmer stalled out on a washboard shoulder two miles outside of county jurisdiction, too slow and too tired to argue with a badge.
I dropped my left hand from the wheel to the stiff canvas collar of my chore coat.
Under the frayed seam where the winter flannel lined the neck, a thin wire ran down into my inner pocket, clipped tight to the auxiliary lapel unit my son had wired into our farm dispatch radio three weeks ago. I pressed the copper toggle switch once, feeling the familiar mechanical click under my thumbnail.
"Dispatch heard every single dollar count, Vance," I said into the cab.
The deputy stopped dead on the asphalt shoulder.
His shoulders stiffened beneath his dark uniform shirt. For three seconds, the only sound between us was the hot ticking of my Ford's cracked exhaust manifold and the steady hiss of the crickets down in the ditch grass. Then he spun around, his jaw locked hard, his hand dropping straight to the retention snap on his service holster.
"What did you say into that collar?" he barked, covering the gravel between us in three frantic strides.
He reached for my chrome door handle, his thick fingers hooking underneath the latch to rip the cab door wide open. But before his weight could catch the hinge, my right hand found the central lock slider on the armrest and shoved it down. The heavy steel rods inside the doors slammed home with a solid, echoing thud.
Vance jerked the handle upward with a violent heave, rattling the window against its felt track. "Unlock this goddamn door, Arthur! Unlock it right now!"
I didn't reach for the glass. Through the windshield, over the curve of his patrol car's light bar, two pairs of high-beam headlights crested the dark rise of the Oconee ridge half a mile out, sweeping down the blacktop toward our shoulder. Vance saw the glare hit my side glass, his face going pale in the white wash of the approaching beams, his boots frozen on the edge of the ditch.
CHAPTER 2: The Approaching High Beams Lit The Tape Covering Vance's Cruising Camera
Vance dropped his hand from my driver's door handle, but he did not step back toward his cruiser. He planted his boots into the soft red clay of the roadbank, using his broad shoulders to block the driver's side glass while he reached into his vest with his left hand.
The headlights cresting the Oconee ridge were moving fast, cutting through the Georgia scrub pine with the steady, level sweep of heavy utility suspensions rather than civilian sedans.
"Arthur," Vance said, his voice dropping an octave into that tight, flat tone men use when they realize a ditch has no bottom. "Roll this window down three inches. We’re going to handle this between neighbors right now."