"I didn't give you my name," I said, leaning my back against the wall to take the weight off my wrenched shoulder. "My driver's license was still inside the sleeve when you grabbed the card. You knew who I was before you tackled me at the gate."
Vance stepped into the room and kicked the door closed with his heel. He didn't lock it, but he stood squarely in the frame, thumb resting casually on the top ridge of his utility belt.
"Don't start building an imaginary lawsuit," Vance said evenly. "You were flagged by automated passenger screening at checkpoint four. The gate agent notified port authority that an individual with an unverified domestic ticket was lingering near the jet bridge without boarding. We ran the passenger manifest against the gate scan. David Miller. Fifty-four. Water authority maintenance."
"My name is David Vance," I said, staring at his nameplate, then directly into his cold, pale eyes. "My last name is Vance, Officer Vance? No. My name is David Ross. And your dispatch didn't run any manifest, because I bought this ticket forty minutes ago at the cash counter with a voucher."
The room went dead quiet.
Vance didn't flinch, but his eyes narrowed a fraction of an inch. He pulled his leather patrol gloves off finger by finger. "You're confused from hitting the deck, Ross. Sit down and shut your mouth."
Across from him, Miller set my canvas duffel on a metal table and unzipped it. He dumped the contents onto the scratched laminate: three rolled work shirts, two clean pairs of wool socks, a brass pressure-gauge calibration key from my South Bend toolbox, and a sealed manila envelope containing Leo's personal effects, returned to me by the county coroner three days after the crash on Route 12.
Miller picked up the manila envelope. His fingers moved with practiced efficiency, sliding past the inventory receipt and pulling out the single plastic evidence bag inside. The bag held Leo's water-damaged work log from the freight depot where he had worked graveyard shifts as a ramp mechanic before his pickup rolled into the drainage culvert outside the county line.
"Where is the second one?" Miller asked quietly.
He wasn't speaking to Vance. He was looking down at the logbook, then directly at me.
"The second what?" I asked.
"Don't waste my time," Miller said. The calm, professional cadence he had used out on the concourse was completely gone. His voice was flat, mechanical, and cold. "The card in your wallet was registered to terminal relay sector three. It was deactivated fourteen hours after your kid went into the ditch. The sector records show two access passes were cloned from the municipal authority's sub-grade terminal bypass. You had one in the billfold. Where is the mate?"
My breath seized in my throat.
For eleven months, the county sheriff had told me Leo fell asleep at the wheel. They told me he had worked a double shift, missed the turn on the icy gravel near mile marker eight, and hit the concrete abutment at fifty miles an hour. They had handed me his wallet, his crushed watch, and a plastic tote full of wet tools. I had found the silver card tucked deep inside the inner lining of his wallet four months later while cleaning out his bedroom closet. I had kept it because it was the last thing his fingers had hidden, an odd little piece of industrial plastic with an eight-digit punched barcode stamped across the bottom edge.
I had assumed it was an old entry tag from his first job at the rail yard.
"I don't know what you're talking about," I said, keeping my chin level despite the dull throb behind my temples. "He was a mechanic. He fixed baggage loaders."
Vance stepped away from the door, reached down, and took the calf of my left leg, kicking my boot out from under me so hard my hip slammed the concrete floor. The sudden pull on my cuffed arms sent a bolt of white-hot agony through both shoulders.
"Listen to me carefully, David," Vance whispered, leaning down until the stiff brim of his patrol cap was an inch from my nose. "You're five minutes away from being processed for felony battery on a peace officer and attempting to breach an active security zone. If you go through that intake door down at county central, you don't get bail until Monday afternoon. By Monday afternoon, whatever you think you're holding from your boy's locker won't exist, and neither will your pension. Give us the second card."
I lay on my side, gasping against the cold concrete. My right hand was numb, but my fingers could feel the stiff canvas hem of my jacket where it bunched beneath my ribcage.
In the small utility pocket sewn inside the left breast lining—the place where boiler technicians keep emergency pipe-thread seals and extra lead pencils—sat the folded carbon copy of Leo's final shift manifest. Leo hadn't just fixed loaders that night. On the back of that pink slip, written in his scratchy, left-handed ballpoint scrawl, was a list of six tail numbers, four times stamped between midnight and 3:00 AM, and an eight-digit number: 4409-8812.
The exact same number stamped into the barcode of the silver card Miller had just stolen from my wallet.
"I left the rest of his gear with his mother," I lied, the words coming out rough and dry. "In Elkhart. In the lockbox."
Miller glanced at Vance. There was a brief, razor-thin hesitation between them, the kind of quiet calculation people make when they realize a task is going to take another phone call.