Outside, the red and blue emergency flashers of a second county cruiser flared against the sleet, painting the diner's front windows in sickening pulses of crimson and neon blue. The second car didn't pull into the lot. It stopped dead in the center of Route 9, blocking the eastbound lane to the state police barracks, its headlights high and blinding.
I turned away from the glass.
The family that was supposed to bury me had already divided the ground, and the deputies who had killed me on paper were standing fifty feet away with loaded sidearms to make sure the paper stayed true. Silence was gone. Apologies were gone. Waiting for a trooper on the highway was just a slower way to die in the mud.
I looked at Cal.
"Where does that cellar root-door come out?" I asked.
Cal reached under the register, pulled out a heavy brass flashlight, and laid it in my hand. "Dumps out into the old coal chute behind the dumpster. Puts you directly in the drainage culvert behind the diner, sixty yards below the road grade." He paused, his old eyes hard as flint. "Culvert runs three miles under the state highway, straight into the back fence of the county road depot."
I gripped the flashlight, zipped my canvas collar against my bruised throat, and stepped toward the basement stairs.
CHAPTER 2 CONTINUED
Cal didn't answer. The screech of his heavy butcher block sliding across linoleum told me he was barricading the front door to buy me sixty seconds.
At the bottom of the stairs, the cellar smelled of rotting potatoes and standing water. Cal’s brass flashlight found the cast-iron door of the old coal chute half-buried behind split oak firewood. The latch was rusted, but someone had recently greased the hinge pins. I set the light down, threw my weight against the iron handle until the mortar crumbled, and squeezed feet-first into the cold concrete trough that emptied into the highway drainage culvert.
I slid through the chute and dropped hard into eight inches of freezing slush. Agony flared through my diaphragm, dropping me to my knees in the dark while sleet hissed against the galvanized steel pipe. Behind me, sixty feet up the slope, the diner’s back door flew open. A halogen beam sliced through the hemlocks as the second deputy shouted down into the ravine.
I shielded the flashlight lens with my fingers, letting only a narrow slit guide my boots through the rushing water. For forty minutes, I moved in a painful crouch beneath Route 9. Overhead, traffic rumbled like muffled thunder, drowning my steps while freezing runoff dripped through storm grates onto my neck. Miller hadn't alerted the state police; he couldn't explain a living woman after signing her death certificate. He was keeping the hunt local, using his brother’s road crew and Boyd’s deputies to track me before dawn.
The conduit widened into an old stone arch behind the Mercer County Road Maintenance Depot. Yellow vapor lamps glowed through blowing sleet, illuminating rows of plows, black-tarped salt domes, and Miller’s idling pickup parked beside Sheriff Boyd’s utility vehicle. They weren't patrolling the highway; they were staging here.
I crawled through a storm-washed gap in the chain-link fence, briars tearing at my canvas coat, until I reached the corrugated siding of Bay 4. The side service door was unlatched. I slipped inside and eased it shut.
The heated air smelled of hydraulic fluid, kerosene fumes, and scorched sheet metal. In the center of the bay, jacked three feet off the concrete on heavy timber cribbing, sat my 2012 sedan.
The front was crushed, the windshield starred, and the driver’s door hung bent on its hinges. But the rear of the car stopped my breath entirely.
Imprinted into the blue paint of my trunk and bumper were two deep vertical gouges, spaced thirty-four inches apart, scored down to bare steel. Trapped in the sheared plastic of my right tail lens were thick flakes of black enamel matching the heavy steel push-bumper Miller had bolted onto Cruiser 214 last August.
Miller hadn't discovered my wreck. He had rammed my rear axle while I was braking for the Blue Creek bridge, spinning me through the rotted guardrail.
"Looking for your registration, Nora?" a voice asked from the office landing.
I spun around, my boot slipping on slick concrete.
Standing at the top of the metal stairs outside the foreman’s booth was Dale Miller—Travis’s older brother and the county road commissioner. He wore a quilted county coat, depot keys jingling at his belt. He didn't draw a weapon. He just took a slow sip from a paper cup, his small eyes tracking the dried blood along my hairline.
"Travis said you were tough," Dale said, walking down the steps. "Figured the creek would’ve drowned the fight out of you."
"You took the 1974 ledger," I said, backing against the crushed fender. "You stole the easement maps before Travis even hit my bumper."