I ran low along the drainage swale behind the wash shed, keeping the rows of decommissioned county salt spreaders between me and the dispatch trailer. When I reached the south perimeter line, the jagged opening Macklin’s crew had cut with jaw shears hung wide open, the chain-link mesh trampled flat into the red clay ditch.
My personal service rig was parked fifty feet away on the auxiliary gravel pad. I threw myself into the cab, keyed the starter, and felt the six-cylinder diesel roar to life with a clean, shuddering rumble. I didn't touch the headlights or the radio. I dropped the transmission into granny gear, cranked the wheel hard right, and sent eight tons of steel through the cut gap in the fence, the tires biting deep into the clay ditch before clawing up onto the cracked asphalt of Old Highway 31.
In the side mirror, Vance threw open the driver's door of his cruiser, his hand dropping toward his sidearm, but I was already rolling through the turn, gathering speed on the southbound blacktop toward Verbena.
My phone rang against the dashboard mount. I punched the speaker button with a grease-stained thumb.
"Clanton Medical Supply," a woman’s voice crackled through the speaker. "Mr. Grier, we have your mother’s oxygen concentrator on the dock. If the delinquent balance isn't cleared by twelve-fifteen, the route supervisor has to pull the delivery."
"Take it off my personal debit card," I said, reciting my sixteen-digit number and routing code without looking down from the highway. "Three hundred and twenty dollars. Run it right now."
"Payment approved," she said after four agonizing clicks of her keyboard. "The driver will hook up the tanks within twenty minutes."
The bank notification popped up immediately on my phone screen: Account balance: $41. 18.
I had bought my mother three weeks of clean breathing, and I had forty dollars left to my name.
Ten miles south, where Highway 31 intersected County Road 22, the Verbena Urgent Care annex sat behind an overgrown row of loblolly pines. The single-story brick clinic shared a gravel parking lot with a decommissioned rural fire station. Outside the clinic’s double glass doors, an empty white Chilton County utility van—the exact maintenance runabout assigned to Macklin’s yard—sat idling in the fire lane, its driver-side door cracked two inches.
I pulled my truck into the weed-choked space behind the dumpster, killed the engine, and stepped down onto the burning gravel. The utility van’s cab was empty, but the vinyl passenger seat was soaked through with dark, tacky hydraulic fluid, and on the rubber floor mat lay a pair of heavy leather work gloves caked in fresh yellow grease from Unit 4's fifth wheel.
I pushed through the clinic’s front doors. The lobby was freezing, smelling heavily of bleach and rubbing alcohol. Behind the bulletproof acrylic intake window sat a middle-aged woman wearing faded green scrubs and a plastic county health badge.
"I need to see Jesse Grier," I said, laying both palms flat against the reception counter.
The clerk looked up from her screen, her glasses sliding down her nose. "Are you the supervisor who brought him in?"
"I'm his brother," I said. "Cole Grier."
Her expression shifted instantly, her jaw tightening as she glanced toward the locked corridor door. "The man who drove him here didn't say he was a brother. He said he found a transient mechanic collapsed in the ditch outside the county depot. He tried to pay the four-hundred-dollar emergency deposit with that boy's commercial card, but the system kicked it for an unverified electronic PIN."
"Who was the driver?" I demanded.
"Older man. Stocky. Gray mustache, wearing a Chilton Road & Bridge polo," she said, checking her clipboard. "When the card declined, he got nervous. Said he was going back out to his truck to get cash from his glove compartment. He walked out the front door and never came back."