He stepped away from the cruiser, flashlight beam held low, slicing across the water rushing in the road gutter. He didn't answer. He walked directly toward the rear tires of the lead hauler.
The cold galvanized cable of the guardrail bit through the sleeves of my jacket, scraping raw patches onto both forearms every time I pulled against the chain links. My service weapon was sealed inside the cruiser's locked glovebox, along with my state transport credential folder. My phone had slid under the front passenger seat when Garrett forced me face-down on the damp asphalt.
I didn't have thirty seconds.
I stopped fighting the steel links directly. The bridge guardrail on State Route 9 wasn't modern box-beam; it was forty-year-old woven steel cable anchored to creosote timber posts driven into the shale shoulder. The post directly behind my left boot was rotted at the grade line, splintered open by years of road salt and freezing runoff.
I dropped my center of gravity, planting the heels of my work boots into the packed silt, and slammed my hips sideways into the timber.
The wet wood groaned. A sharp, sour odor of old creosote burst into the rain. The upper bolt sheared with an ear-splitting snap, the iron washer clattering down into the brush below. The cable sagged three inches.
It wasn't freedom, but three inches gave my forearms enough horizontal play to twist my wrists from the parallel lock. I dragged my hands down along the wet cable until the steel ring reached the rusted bracket of the next post. The metal dug into the meat of my thumbs, peeling skin, but the extra clearance let me turn my torso completely toward the road.
Through the streaming rear window of Garrett’s cruiser, the red terminal light on the dash console glowed steadily. The relay box he’d mounted beneath the radio stack was still warm, its secondary indicator light blinking an unencrypted amber sequence: FREQ-LOCK 414.85.
That was not a state frequency. It was a closed industrial band used by the Blackwood Quarry gravel pits two miles up the ridge.
Out on the bridge deck, Garrett paused beside the cab of the first hauler. He didn't climb the step. He reached up, took a magnetic lockbox off the underside of the fuel tank, and slipped it into his jacket pocket. Then he tapped his heavy flashlight twice against the hauler’s steel bumper.
From the dark timberline across the road, a second man emerged.
He wasn't wearing a uniform. He wore high-visibility utility bibs covered in stone dust and heavy rubberized rain gear. He carried a commercial chain binder in his left hand, the heavy iron lever swinging inches above the gravel.
"He secured?" the man in bibs shouted over the rising rumble of the river below.
"Tied to the cable," Garrett replied without raising his voice. "Pilot vehicle went into the retention ditch at the four-mile marker just like Vance told them. The heavy limousines are already past the interstate split. They’re running sixty on the lower gravel bypass right now."
"What about the state board?" the man asked, coming to a halt near the front bumper. "The dispatch in the capital isn't blind. They lose carrier on the transponder for three minutes, and they trip the statewide interlock."
"They won't trip anything," Garrett said, his tone entirely level, completely devoid of hurry. "Vance logged an auxiliary road maintenance order under my sector code an hour ago. To the state board, this looks like a routine slide clearance. They think the detour is fully staffed with county escorts."
I held my breath, sliding my left knee into the shale mud to brace against the post.
The man in bibs glanced toward Garrett's cruiser. For a second, the yellow beam of his work light skimmed across the hood, catching the wet spray coming off my shoulders. He paused.
"You should've put him in the cage, Garrett. He's Secret Service advance detail. When this clears, federal inspectors are going to turn this county inside out."
"He was outside his boundary without a verified county liaison stamp," Garrett said coldly. "He refused an order to hold his position during a hazardous materials clearance. If he gets clipped by road debris while resisting, that’s on his own reckless conduct."
Garrett reached down to the belt on his hip, pulling a brass padlock key from his pocket, and handed it to the man in bibs.
"Unlock the air valves on the trailer tandems," Garrett instructed. "Drop the landing gear right onto the asphalt. Once those pins seat in the concrete, a ten-ton wrecker couldn't budge these beds before dawn. That forces Vance's tail-end chase vehicles to bottle up behind the limestone crusher."
The man in bibs nodded once and turned toward the hauler’s undercarriage.
I had ten feet of slack on the sagging cable. If I tried to jerk the rusted loop over the sheared post, the iron would screech against the galvanized washer and bring Garrett's sidearm up before I cleared the shoulder.