He reached into his cargo pocket with his free hand and slammed a clipboard onto the hood of a disassembled Ford Mustang I was restoring. "Sign the compliance waiver. We shut you down peacefully, you walk away with the buyout, and I don't put you in the back of a cruiser."
My chest tightened. The threat of losing the shop—the place I had painstakingly built, the place I planned to leave to my grandson—was a crushing weight. But as I forced myself to breathe through the pain in my collarbone, my eyes naturally focused on the gold shield on his chest.
It had a seven-point star, but no state seal in the center. There was no department identification number engraved at the bottom.