I stepped out of the LeSabre. The heat off the asphalt pressed through the soles of my sensible walking shoes, heavy and sharp with creosote. I walked around the front fender until I stood six feet from Reed, holding the yellow carbon sheet in my uninjured hand.
"My brother ran the irrigation pumps on the southern canal for twenty-eight years, Vance," I told him, keeping my tone as even as if I were measuring feed at the co-op counter. "When he died in March, you stopped his widow at this same culvert and took eight thousand dollars he had set aside for his burial plot in Arcadia. You gave her an orange receipt with no case number, told her the county would mail her a summons, and walked away. When she went to the courthouse, the clerk told her there was no record of a stop, no vehicle impound file, and no cash in the registry."
Reed didn't look at the paper in my hand. His eyes flicked nervously toward the brush line, calculating the distance to the canal, before settling on Cole’s two agents who now stood flanking the cruiser’s rear quarter-panels.
"She was eighty-one years old, Vance," I continued. "She spent two months believing she had misplaced the money in her own house because she couldn't imagine an officer in uniform would steal it from her lap. She died in June thinking her mind had failed her."
"I don't know what you're talking about," Reed muttered, though the sweat was now running down the groove of his temple, soaking the collar of his tan uniform shirt. "People get confused about paper. It happens every week."
"It doesn't happen when the paper is numbered," Cole interrupted. He reached into his pocket and produced a thin manila folder, flipping it open against the cruiser's roof. "The serial numbers on the cash currently sitting in your evidence bag match the federal reserve transfer batch Thomas Vance logged with our office yesterday morning. But more importantly, the audio chip on that center band has been transmitting directly to our recording van parked behind the fruit packing shed two miles north."
Cole leaned in slightly, his eyes holding Reed’s with cold finality.
"We have your voice, Vance. We have you telling an elderly woman that paper doesn't talk, that possession is the law, and that her verified bank receipt was worth nothing out here. You claimed the cash for the precinct impound fund before you even ran her plate. That is not an administrative seizure. That is robbery under color of authority."
Reed’s jaw worked silently. His right hand twitched once toward his cruiser door, perhaps thinking of the radio mic, but Cole stepped smoothly into the gap between Reed’s hip and the cruiser frame, his presence an immovable wall of grey cotton and quiet federal leverage.
"Unclip the belt, Vance," Cole said.
Reed didn't move for three seconds. The only sound across the highway was the dry, rhythmic rasp of cicadas in the slash pines and the soft idle of the four Chargers keeping watch over the empty blacktop.
Slowly, his fingers trembling against the heavy leather, Reed unbuckled the brass tongue of his duty rig. The heavy belt, loaded with cuffs, pepper spray, and his sidearm, dropped with a dull, metallic clatter onto the crushed limestone road.
CHAPTER 2 CONTINUED
Marcus Cole did not raise his voice. He took two slow steps toward the fallen duty belt, his boots crunching methodically against the loose stone, and used the toe of his shoe to push the heavy holster four feet clear of Reed’s reach.
"Sheriff Arrington isn't signing anything today, Vance," Cole said. He reached inside his charcoal shirt, withdrew a folded sheet of heavy legal bond bearing the blue embossed seal of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida, and held it waist-high. "At eight-fifteen this morning, two teams from the Tampa field office served a federal preservation subpoena on the DeSoto County Sheriff’s Department headquarters in Arcadia. They took custody of the physical ledger, the desktop terminals in the impound division, and the secondary escrow account at First State Bank of Arcadia. The account where you've been depositing thirty cents on every hundred-dollar note you skim off this highway."
Reed’s eyes twitched toward the radio housing visible through the open window of his patrol car. A burst of static sputtered from the dash speaker, followed by a faint, garbled dispatcher code that clipped off into dead air before completing. Nobody answered the carrier wave. The channel was dead, muted at the trunk tower by a direct supervisory override.
"The radio won't help you," Cole continued, his voice calm, level, and entirely devoid of theatrical heat. "The county console was patched into our regional communications hub forty minutes ago. Every transmission originating on Route Seventeen is routing straight through our mobile operations van parked behind the packing plant. There is no backup coming down the canal road."