He reached for the ignition key.
Up on the dark ridge, three thousand feet north through the rain-soaked timber, two high-intensity halogen beams sliced horizontally through the mist, illuminating the wet crowns of the pine trees. A split second later, the deep, mechanical whistle of four ceramic turbochargers echoed off the canyon wall.
They had crested the gap. They were two minutes from the turn.
I shifted my hips against the vinyl, sliding my right arm downward until the flat metal edge of my auxiliary brass badge—still hooked in the leather fob tucked inside my inner waistband—pressed against the lower seam of my trousers. When Vance turned to put the cruiser in reverse, his elbow brushed the dash-mounted camera switch, cutting the interior audio feed to the municipal recorder.
He thought he was burying a simple trespass on an empty road.
He hadn't looked at the passenger floorboard of my car. Beside my inspection log, lying facedown in the mud beneath the glovebox door he had kicked open, lay my secondary handheld recorder—its red recording LED glowing steady behind the cracked plastic casing, powered directly from the auxiliary fuse block, capturing every word that passed between us since he stepped out of his car.
CHAPTER 2 CONTINUED
Vance reached out with his right gloved hand and knocked the center rearview mirror straight up toward the acoustic fabric of the headliner, cutting off my face. "I don't take tactical advice from a pensioner with a blown shoulder and an expired badge. You spent forty years fixing district boilers and thinking you were part of the county command. You aren't. You're an old man sitting in the dark, and you're about to sleep off your hero complex in a basement cell."
He dropped the transmission lever down into reverse. The differential clunked under the chassis, the rear tires digging into the wet shale.
He didn't pull back toward the cut. He swung the cruiser’s nose three feet farther to the left, squaring the heavy push-bumper directly perpendicular to both yellow centerlines, barricading the absolute center of the roadway. He set the parking brake with an angry, ratcheting stomp of his boot.
He wasn't trying to park. He was creating a dead-stop blind wall.
Through the rain-streaked glass of the rear door, I saw the twin halogen ribbons sweep across the upper hemlock line again. The convoy was out of the high switchbacks. They had hit the three-percent grade above the timber trestle, their heavy suspension units compressing as they took the reverse-camber turn. The wet air carried the raw, high-pitched mechanical whistle of their superchargers—no longer a distant vibration, but an immediate physical pulse vibrating through the Charger’s floor pan.
They were less than ninety seconds out.
"Tyler," I said, keeping the shake out of my throat, forcing my voice into the dry, level tone I used twenty years ago when an eight-hundred-pound pressure valve was screaming toward critical failure. "The recorder under my passenger dash has a forty-eight-hour loop battery. It's wired to the ignition switch relay. It logged your boot on the door. It logged your voice reading that federal route manifest. It logged the paper tearing. If those trucks hit this bumper, every agent on that detail has an open transponder feed dumping audio directly into the state attorney’s dispatch bunker in Carlisle. You won't be answering to your brother-in-law's township committee. You'll be answering to a federal magistrate under emergency highway sabotage codes."
Vance didn't flinch, but his fingers tightened visibly on the hard vinyl of the steering wheel until the black synthetic leather bunched under his knuckles.
"There isn't any recording," he said. He didn't turn around. His voice dropped half an octave, losing its smug small-town edge, tightening into something harsh and thin. "Your car is salvage. Everything in that cabin is abandoned property on an unposted municipal road."
He reached his left hand toward the cruiser's dash console, feeling blindly for the release toggle that popped the trunk latch. The solenoid gave a muffled electric snap behind us.
He meant to get the heavy iron pry bar from his emergency kit. He meant to go back to my Crown Victoria, rip the lower dash cover off its brackets, and smash the recording module into scrap aluminum before the headlights hit the lower turn.