"You like playing with county property, Vance?" he barked, lunging forward to wrench the tablet from my grip.
I didn't pull back. I shoved the corner of the heavy frame hard against his sternum, driving him off balance. His heel caught the loose edge of the ditch, and he stumbled back onto the shoulder, his flashlight beam slicing wildly across the overhead pines.
"Dale Miller is in my house, Garrett," I said, stepping out of the cab onto the road. "And your cruiser's Wi-Fi router just mirrored his entire live feed into the county server cache."
Nolan stopped dead. The hard confidence in his face slipped, replaced by the rigid stillness of a man realizing his own setup had backed him into a corner. His glance flickered toward the open cruiser door, where the laptop screen continued to glow against the dark dash.
"You're making baseless accusations," he said, though his hand remained stiff against his hip. "You assaulted an officer. You're going into holding."
"Put the cuffs on me, then," I said, holding out my wrists in the cold air. "Take me straight to the county station. We'll let the shift sergeant pull your vehicle connection log and your Toughbook cache in front of the whole department."
A long silence settled between us, broken only by the hum of the cruiser’s cooling fan.
Then Nolan’s shoulder radio crackled to life. Dale Miller’s voice, rough and strained, cut through the mountain air: "Garrett, the safe is bolted through the floor joists. I need the heavy pry bar from your trunk. Where are you?"
Nolan’s hand moved instantly to kill the volume, but the voice had already echoed down the empty asphalt.
CHAPTER 2 CONTINUED
"Miller just identified the target," I answered, stepping past the front tire of my F-150 until the beam of his idling cruiser lit my chest. "He told you the safe was bolted into the subfloor. My sister is asleep twenty feet above his head."
Nolan didn't look back toward the open cruiser door. His gaze stayed fixed on the amber status light blinking on the bottom edge of my tablet. "Your sister isn't part of this, Vance. Dale is there to retrieve regional property before you turn personal disputes into a state audit."
"A four-million-dollar emergency requisition isn't personal property," I said. "And the master key hanging off Dale's belt didn't come from your office."
Nolan took one step forward, the limestone gravel grinding under his sole. "Give me the hardware."
"If I touch this screen, the entire network packet routes through the State Department of Transportation compliance gateway," I said, holding the tablet level against my ribcage. "You know how the automated integrity upload works. The second a field unit flags an active project file under suspicion of tampering, the telemetry vault locks the data against local deletion. It copies the county server, the state inspector general’s office, and the district attorney's regional portal at the same exact second."
That was the procedural barrier Raymond Nolan had spent five years trying to bypass on the county board. Under standard road maintenance protocol, once an inspector flagged a core report as compromised from the field, no supervisor could amend the entry, dismiss the surveyor, or sign off on construction disbursements without an independent state review.
Nolan’s jaw worked, the muscle ticking against his ear. "You hit that trigger and you kill your career in this county. Uncle Raymond sits on the pension board, Vance. You won't run a line or pull a core from here to the state line. You’ll be blacklisted from every municipal contract in the tri-county area before sunrise."
"Then you’d better call Dale and tell him to drop the pry bar," I said.
A heavy diesel engine hummed somewhere three miles south on the ridge, the exhaust brake clattering faintly through the pine trees. It wasn't Dale Miller’s pickup. The sound belonged to one of the six-yard dump rigs Nolan Aggregates kept staged near the Miller’s Creek bridge site. They weren't just sending Miller to steal the papers; they were staging heavy haulers to tear into the culvert footing before dawn, burying the granite bedrock under sixty tons of crushed limestone fill. Once the fill was dumped and packed, no state inspector could reach the core hole without a court order and two weeks of heavy excavation.
My phone, sitting flat on the dashboard inside my locked truck cab, began to buzz against the glass. The vibration was faint, a dry rattle against the windshield.
Jenna.
She had my direct work ringtone set to bypass silent mode. She had woken up. She had heard someone moving across the floorboards downstairs.
The screen on my tablet mirrored the call alert through the DOT Bluetooth tether: INCOMING: HOME LOFTS.