"Window crank is stripped, Deputy," I said, keeping my wrists flat across the steering wheel. "You know that truck. You inspected it behind the feed mill back in November."
He didn't answer. His fingers worked frantically inside the tactical pocket, tugging at the seam where he had jammed my five hundred dollars. He wasn't reaching for his sidearm now; he was trying to drag the bills back out so he could shove them through the quarter-inch crack at the top of my weather-stripping. If the cash was lying on my seat when the ridge cars pulled up, it was an old man's forgotten withdrawal. If it stayed zipped beneath his county badge, it was an extortion charge under color of authority.
The Velcro snarled, loud and dry in the humid air. The flap caught against his duty belt. Before he could work the wad free, the first vehicle off the ridge didn't drop its high beams. It swung wide across the center stripe, throwing two thousand lumens of halogen directly across the cab of my pickup.
It wasn't the sheriff's department. It was a white Ford F-250 with the green state forestry shield on the door panels, followed immediately by an unmarked county utility pickup hauling an open trailer with a hydraulic winch.
My son, Jesse, cut the wheel hard, planting the forestry truck's steel bumper eighteen inches from Vance's rear quarter-panel, boxing the cruiser against the culvert pipe. Behind him, Thomas Keller—the chief mechanic for the county road depot and my wife’s first cousin—dropped his transmission into park, leaving his yellow safety flashers strobing against the pine trunks.
Vance pulled his empty hand out of his vest and smoothed down the pocket flap with a jerk of his wrist. He turned around slowly, letting his thumb hook over the leather edge of his duty holster, slipping back into the posture of a patrolman interrupted during a routine motorist assist.
"Jesse," Vance called out, squinting into the halogen glare. "You tell your daddy to keep his hands where I can see them. He blew an inner seal on that steering box half a mile back. I’m out here trying to keep him from rolling off into the wash."
Jesse didn't turn his engine off. He stepped down from the running board carrying a heavy yellow clipboard, the kind the state timber wardens use for field scaling. He was still wearing his grease-stained canvas field trousers and his work boots, but his state identification card was clipped squarely to his breast pocket.
"He didn't blow a seal, Vance," Jesse said, walking past the patrol car without looking at it. He stopped three feet short of the deputy, his eyes fixing on the front left wheel of my truck, where the fresh lug-wrench scratches showed bright and silver against the red road dirt. "He called our depot radio ten minutes ago when you stepped out of your car with your shoulder unit turned off."
"His radio isn't registered to an emergency band," Vance said, stepping forward to close the distance between them. "Operating an uncertified frequency on a state highway is an FCC violation, Jesse. You ought to know that before you go flashing a forestry commission tag at a county deputy."
"It wasn't an uncertified band," Jesse said. He held up the clipboard. Under the heavy spring clip sat a carbon-copy field log, but beneath the paper, held in place with two thick bands of green electrical tape, was a pocket frequency receiver with its digital display glowing amber. "He called through the state agricultural repeater on Blackwood Ridge. Every transmission going through that tower hits the district timber office recorder in Athens. It’s an automated safety feed for the night crews."
Vance’s face twitched once at the cheek. He looked down at the small amber screen, then shifted his eyes toward Thomas Keller, who was walking up from the second truck with a four-way lug wrench hanging loose in his right hand.
"You boys are making a serious mistake," Vance said, his hand remaining rigid on his holster. "I’m conducting an official county traffic enforcement stop on an unsafe vehicle. You’re obstructing an active officer."
"Then conduct it," I spoke up, raising my voice enough to carry through the glass. "Write the equipment citation, Deputy. You’ve had my registration in your hand for eight minutes."
Vance turned back to my window, his jaw working. "Where’s your copy, Arthur?"
"You dropped it," I said, pointing down at the rubber floor mat. "Right after you pulled the envelope out."
Thomas Keller stopped beside Vance's rear bumper, his boots crunching on the gravel. He pointed the end of the four-way wrench at the square of black electrical tape covering the cruiser's dash camera.
"That tape looks pretty fresh, Lyle," Thomas said quietly. He had known Vance since they were boys playing junior varsity ball in Madison, back before Vance got fired from the Clarke County jail and drifted down here to take the night patrol shift. "You put that on before you turned off the blacktop, or did it just blow off an oak branch and stick itself square over the lens?"