He reached out, his bare hand cold against my wet shoulder, his grip firm for two seconds before he let go. "The director read the telemetry log from your Charger's frame sensors. He saw the time stamps. You held that ditch for twenty-four minutes with a county unit blocking your radio."
"Mitchell thought he had six hours," I said. "He thought Gentry owned the road until the morning shift came on at six."
"Mitchell is currently being processed in the holding cell at the Culpeper state barracks," Donald said, pulling a dry woolen blanket from the back of his vehicle and draping it over my shoulders. "He started talking the moment the state troopers took his belt. He gave up the private phone number, the safe deposit box key in Warrenton, and the four thousand dollars Gentry paid him to leave his terminal dark. He thinks if he testifies against Gentry, the Commonwealth’s attorney will let him plead down to official misconduct."
"He won't," Vance said, walking back from the ditch line with my recovered Pelican case. "The United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia signed the multi-count conspiracy indictment twenty minutes ago. Interference with an Executive protection detail, destruction of federal communications property, and attempted treason under Title Eighteen. Mitchell won't see the outside of a federal penitentiary until he's seventy."
Vance set the Pelican case on the ground between us. The black plastic was scarred from its roll down the limestone riprap, and the corners were stained with red clay, but the pressure valve had kept the interior completely dry.
I reached down with my left hand, opened the latches, and lifted out the orange transit certificate. The Department of Transportation seal was still crisp, the black ink untouched by the floodwater that had roared through the culvert pipe. Beside it lay the carbon duplicate of the tow slip Mitchell had carried in his pocket—the paper trail that had proven, before a single shot could be fired, that the ambush had been scheduled hours before my car ever crossed the state boundary.
"Take this to the field office," I said, handing the slip to Donald. "The impound company’s license is listed on the bottom margin. The owner of that yard is Gentry’s brother-in-law. If you pull the gate logs from midnight, you'll find the second flatbed was already idling by the scales, waiting to haul my Charger into the shredder the second Mitchell gave the word."
Donald took the paper, folded it carefully along its original creases, and slid it into his leather credential case. "Go get that shoulder set, Marcus. You're off the advance roster for thirty days."
"I have the return leg on Sunday," I said.
Donald looked at me, his weathered face softening by a fraction of an inch, the gray eyes steady beneath the brim of his hat. "Sunday is covered by Vance and Miller. You did your shift in the ditch, Hayes. The road is clear."
The state wreckers fired their hydraulic winches with a high, whistling strain that echoed across the wet valley. The steel cables went taut, groaning under the weight of the ten-wheel dump truck as they dragged the heavy chassis off the centerline, clearing twelve feet of clean, open blacktop beneath the concrete railway bridge.
The rain had finally stopped. The low, ragged gray clouds were lifting from the timber ridge, revealing the jagged line of wet pines against a pale, washed-out morning sky.
I turned back toward my Charger, which had just been pulled from the ditch by a state maintenance truck. The black sedan sat on the gravel shoulder, its dark paint streaked with red Virginia clay, its rear bumper scuffed where Mitchell’s cruiser had crowded it into the culvert.
The driver's door was still open. On the center console, resting right where I had left it before Mitchell yanked me out into the dark, lay my leather credential folder, its gold seal catching the first cold shaft of November sunlight through the wet windshield.
I didn't reach for it. I stood on the edge of the crushed stone shoulder, the woolen blanket pulled tight against the damp chill in my bones, and watched the first civilian cars begin to trickle south across the newly cleared blacktop, their drivers completely unaware of the iron and the fire that had been waiting for them in the dark three hours before.
FINAL THANK-YOU NOTE
Thank you for making room for these pages today.