He opened his driver's door, stepping out into the driving sheet of rain. The cold, wet draft swept through the cruiser again, bringing with it the sharp smell of burning ditch-brush from where my flares were still hissing in the culvert.
The moment Vance’s boots hit the mud, I twisted my entire torso against the rear seat.
The steel links between my wrists were ratcheted down tight, but Vance had made the mistake common to small-town patrolmen who only handle Saturday night drunks: he had cuffed me with my hands behind my back without locking the center ratchet pins with his key tip. When he hauled me backward off the hood earlier, the extra link hadn't set.
I hooked my right boot heel beneath the cruiser's rear seatbelt strap—the heavy nylon webbing bolted to the unyielding steel rocker panel. I pulled my knees into my ribs, driving my weight downward against the leverage of the belt. The coarse metal teeth of the left cuff slipped a millimeter, biting deep through the skin of my wrist bone, tearing the flesh across the tendon. Warm blood ran down into my palm, slick and hot.
The pain was sharp, an electric white jolt that traveled straight up into my separated collarbone, but the blood acted as grease against the nickel-plated steel.
I ground the ball of my left hand forward against the metal loop, ignoring the tearing cartilage, until the ring slipped over the thickest part of my thumb joint.
The cuff popped free with a wet metallic scrape.
My left arm swung loose. The shoulder felt unhinged, hot needles flashing behind the blade, but my right hand was free to move. I reached down into the hidden inner seam of my waistband, behind my belt buckle, and closed my fingers around the small steel tool I had carried since my second year on the county boiler maintenance crew: a six-inch hardened tension pick with a flat-filed pry head.
I lunged forward against the heavy wire partition.
Vance was six paces away, his back turned, his heavy utility flashlight beam fixed on the trunk lid of his Charger as he lifted the heavy steel lid to reach for the tool tray.
I shoved the flat tip of the steel pick through the wire mesh, directly into the manual slide toggle of the cruiser’s interior emergency partition lock—the mechanical override designed for transport vans to drop the heavy wire divider in case of a submerged rollover. The pot metal bolt was stiff with rust and dry grease, but I threw my shoulder weight against the pick, driving the flat edge into the latch cam.
The internal spring gave way with a sharp, iron clack.
The entire center section of the partition swung forward four inches, exposing the top of the cruiser's center radio console.
I didn't reach for Vance’s service weapon. I didn't reach for the door handle.
I reached for the red emergency rocker switch mounted beneath his dashboard radio console—the state-mandated auxiliary bypass that every municipal cruiser in Pennsylvania is required by law to maintain, a switch wired directly into the roof-mounted secondary antenna array to broadcast an open carrier distress tone on the inter-agency tactical band.
Vance had turned his local radio off. But he hadn't pulled the master circuit breaker on the firewall.
I slammed the base of my palm down on the red rocker.