"Step back, Thomas," Vance barked, his voice finally losing its practiced edge. "I’m not telling you twice. Step back to your vehicle."
"I don't believe I will," Thomas said. He walked around to the passenger side of the cruiser, pulled a small red utility flashlight from his hip pocket, and clicked it on. He leaned over the hood and aimed the beam directly through the cruiser’s windshield, illuminating the terminal mounted between the front bucket seats.
The patrol car's mobile data terminal was running, its screen casting a pale blue glow across the vinyl dashboard.
"He hasn't called the stop in, Jesse," Thomas said, his voice completely flat. "Screen's sitting on the station standby loop. No plate run, no mile marker logged, no call to county dispatch. According to the board, his car hasn't moved off the depot lot since seven-thirty."
Vance lunged two steps toward Thomas, his face dark with sudden blood. "Get away from that cruiser, Keller! That is county property!"
"And you're standing on state forestry right-of-way," Jesse countered, stepping directly into Vance's path and cutting him off. Jesse was half a head shorter than the deputy, but he had the thick shoulders of a man who worked high-lead cables all summer. He didn't raise his hands, but he didn't give an inch of dirt. "This shoulder belongs to the Department of Natural Resources from the tree line to the white stripe. My father’s truck is parked on state timber reserve land. You don't have secondary jurisdiction out here without a logged request to the Athens desk, and you know it."
Vance froze, his chest heaving against the stiff nylon of his vest. His gaze darted from Jesse's face to Thomas, then back to my door, where the steel lock pin remained firmly seated in its plastic bezel.
"You think a recording of numbers means anything to the magistrate?" Vance said, a thin, ugly grin breaking across his mouth, though his eyes stayed wild. "An old man mumbling into a farm radio doesn't prove where the money came from, Arthur. It doesn't prove who put it in my pocket, and it sure as hell doesn't prove what you promised me to keep your junker off the flatbed."
He thought he still had the line held. He thought that because it was dark, because there was no third party with a badge standing on the shoulder, it would come down to his official incident narrative against an old timber hauler and his family.
"The money didn't come from my farm account, Lyle," I said through the glass.
Vance frowned, his head tilting slightly. "What are you talking about?"
"Look at the bills," I told him. "Before you try to ditch them in the ditch grass, take them out of your vest and look at the serial numbers on the top twenties."
Jesse turned his clipboard around so the white carbon page faced the deputy under the wash of the halogen beams.
Penciled down the left-hand margin, directly beneath the date and the Athens weather advisory, were eight serial numbers, written in my son's tight, mechanical hand: the state forestry petty-cash withdrawal log from the depot office in Greensboro, signed out at four o'clock this afternoon to replace the hydraulic seals on the county creek pump.
"You didn't take an old farmer's pocket cash, Vance," Jesse said, holding the paper steady in the headlight glare. "You just pocketed state-marked timber maintenance funds on an unlogged stop, sixty seconds after the county desk in Watkinsville started running a diagnostic on your cruiser’s disconnected GPS transponder."
The deputy's left hand twitched, his fingers brushing against his zipped pocket as the blue light from the cruiser's console flickered against his neck. Across the blacktop, the quiet sound of a second pair of sirens started climbing up through the valley floor, still two miles out, but heading straight for our ridge.
CHAPTER 2 CONTINUED
"I don't care who works the switchboard," I answered, keeping my hands resting on the hard curve of the steering wheel. "The state repeater doesn't route through county dispatch. It dumps straight into the Department of Public Safety archive in Milledgeville. It logs time stamps, dead carrier intervals, and signal wattage. When Jesse held the microphone key, that system recorded you reading off twenty-dollar serial numbers before you realized where you were standing."
Vance’s face darkened, the red flushing hard under the stubble along his jawline. "I didn't read any numbers aloud, old man."