Miller’s hand came down on my shoulder, heavy and flat, shoving me forward an inch against the truck bed.
"You think you're an investigator, Mercer?" Miller’s mouth was at my ear now, the metal edge of his badge cold against my neck. "You're a service contractor on a county road. You think Alvarez is driving up here from Austin tonight? By midnight, this truck is on a flatbed heading to the Salado yard. By sunrise, that dashboard is stripped to bare sheet metal, and you're sitting in a precinct cell on an aggravated interference warrant."
He pulled the heavy yellow envelope from his belt and tapped it against the back of my neck.
"Nobody looks for evidence in an impound fire, Ray," Miller whispered.
Down the highway, a pair of high-mounted halogen spotlights crested the hill, moving slow along the access lane toward our overpass. It wasn't an emergency cruiser. The amber rooftop beacon flashed once: a heavy-duty county commercial wrecker, rolling down the shoulder to take my truck.
CHAPTER 2 CONTINUED
"You're going to step behind the push bumper, Ray," Miller said, his voice dropping into that rhythmic, practiced cadenza he probably used on drunk drivers right before he took their car keys. "You're going to cross your ankles, keep your forehead against the grill guard, and let Mack hook the front axle. You reach into that utility body, you reach into your coveralls, or you try to touch that secondary line, and I will put you on the concrete for active resisting. You understand me?"
"Mack runs the salvage contract out of Salado," I said. My voice sounded thin against the thrum of the two idling diesels, but I didn't drop my chin. "The county commission voted down his towing renewal in April because five impounded farm trucks turned up in Mexico with their VIN plates ground off."
"Mack has an emergency interdiction permit signed by the precinct magistrate," Miller answered without hesitation. He shifted his weight, his heavy black utility boot nudging the severed data wire deeper into the ditch gravel. "Now turn around."
I didn't turn around. Instead, I took a half-step sideways toward the rear wheel well, bringing my right hip against the side of the steel utility box. In my right jacket pocket, my thumb found the worn brass ring of my master service padlock.
The lithium power unit behind the glove box was still broadcasting. I could hear the faint, high-frequency coil whine from the inverter under the dash—a sound nobody hears unless they’ve spent thirty years tracking electrical parasitic draws through twelve-volt automotive systems. But the cloud buffer was only good if the transmission completed its cyclic handshake. A sixty-second data packet meant the first twenty seconds of audio were sitting in the packet queue waiting for an acknowledgment ping from the Austin server. If Mack hooked my front axle and drug the truck fifty yards south under the steel girders of the lower bridge deck, the concrete overpass and the structural rebar would kill the cellular band stone dead.
The handshake would drop. The queue would purge on system power-down. And Officer Miller’s yellow envelope would end up in a desk drawer in Salado while my truck was cut into salvage pieces behind an unlisted scrap yard.
"I asked you once, Miller," I said, sliding my right boot backward into the loose caliche rock until my heel caught the ridge of the asphalt apron. "What happened to Pete Walker’s trailer?"
Miller’s mouth tightened. The indifference broke, replaced by the ugly, sharp twitch of an authority figure whose schedule was running three minutes behind. He stepped in, his left hand coming up fast to grab the collar of my canvas work coat, his knuckles twisting the heavy fabric into my windpipe.
"Pete Walker was an unlicensed hauler hauling stolen agricultural equipment," Miller spat, leaning down until his sunglasses scraped against my forehead. "His paper was bad. His equipment was bad. And nobody in Williamson County gives a damn about a two-bit hotshot driver who couldn't pay his diesel bill. Now get against that truck before I put a knee in your back."
He shoved. The force rattled my spine against the side of the utility compartment, my shoulder striking the heavy padlock bracket.
The pain flared hot and familiar through my bad knee, the cartilage grinding like dry gears. But as my shoulder struck the steel door, my right hand wasn't empty. When I had stumbled back, my fingers had hooked the mechanical emergency release lever—the manual cable pull I had installed directly above the rear wheel arch to dump the air suspension in case of an overhead shop hazard.
I jerked the cable down with the full weight of my shoulder.
The primary air tanks dumped with an ear-splitting, violent roar of compressed atmospheric pressure.
Seventy pounds of regulated air blasted straight down out of the suspension valves into the loose ditch dust, creating an instantaneous cloud of blinding white caliche powder that engulfed the entire rear third of the truck.
Miller flinched, his hand instinctively breaking away from my collar to cover his eyes against the stinging limestone dust. "What the hell was that?" he shouted, his right hand tearing his sidearm clear of the holster leather as he stumbled back into the lane.