Miller took one slow step forward, crowding my shoulder until his chest nearly touched the edge of the open trunk lid. "You talk too much for a man who doesn't have a phone to call his wife."
"You've been storing the survivors on the salvage parcel," I continued, holding my ground even as the iron smell of his coat filled my throat. "And when the culvert gave out after the October rains, the runoff started draining straight into the municipal reservoir feed. You didn't pull me over because my sedan looked abandoned. You pulled me over because Clara logged the intake results onto the state server at six tonight, and your brother-in-law saw the notice on the county water portal."
Miller’s smirk vanished, replaced by a rigid, white-knuckled stillness. His right hand dropped to his duty belt, his fingers wrapping around the grip of his heavy aluminum flashlight. He didn't unholster his pistol; he didn't need to. A skull fracture on a dark shoulder could easily be explained by an intoxicated driver stumbling down the quarry embankment before the tow arrived.
"Hand me the binder, Vance," Miller whispered.
"No."
"I'm not going to ask you twice. Give me the book, step across the rail, and walk toward town. You do that, and maybe the report says you panicked and abandoned the car on foot. You don't, and you get found at the bottom of the pit with thirty gallons of volatile chemical in your trunk."
He lunged forward, his left hand snatching the top edge of the vinyl binder while his right arm cocked back the heavy flashlight.
I didn't try to pull the binder away. Instead, I drove the bottom steel corner of the heavy metal clipboard straight into the hinge of his left thumb. The metal caught the joint with a sickening crack. Miller grunted, his grip tearing loose from the vinyl as he stumbled back half a pace, his boot catching the lip of the asphalt shoulder.
Before he could regain his footing, I reached into the open trunk, slammed the lockbox lid shut, and jammed my field key into the deadbolt. The lock engaged with a clean, unyielding thud. I snatched the duplicate custody receipt from the side pouch—the pink carbon slip bearing the county water board’s embossed metal seal and the exact time-stamped barcode from Clara’s lab terminal—and shoved it deep beneath the lining of my inner boot.
Miller recovered, his jaw clenched, the heavy flashlight coming up level with my eyes. The glass lens caught the glare of his cruiser’s high beams, turning the world into a wash of blinding, white fire.
"You're done, Vance," Miller snarled, his voice stripped of every trace of smugness. "You're dead in the dirt."
From the crest of Route 9, two miles north, the air split with the low, grinding roar of an unsilenced diesel engine. Twin halogen beams crested the ridge, sweeping across the pine tops and cutting through the quarry fog. It wasn't the county wrecker. It was an eighty-thousand-pound tri-axle gravel hauler, its chrome grille bearing the black-and-orange stencil of the Miller family quarry fleet, rolling toward our shoulder with its air brakes hissing like a pit of snakes.
CHAPTER 2 CONTINUED
Miller backed away from me, nursing his left hand against his holster. Blood seeped through his glove where the clipboard corner had split his thumb. "Vance wouldn't hand over the paperwork. The custody receipts are in his binder."
Garrick raised the heavy forged hook, his small eyes fixing on my face. "He doesn't need to hand over anything. The state inspector is thirty minutes out. If this car is on the shoulder when troopers hit Route Nine, every manifest in my office gets seized. You logged the vehicle as abandoned and locked. We hook the rear frame, ram it through the cedar rail, and let forty feet of quarry water bury the whole mess. When the wrecker arrives, you report the car slid down the cut before you could secure it."
"You do that," I said, keeping my heels locked against the gravel, "and you explain why the lab’s GPS transponder pings from the bottom of a flooded pit on your property. It transmits to the state tower every ten minutes."
"It can ping under forty feet of mud," Garrick sneered. "Nobody dredges private quarry water without an EPA warrant, and by Monday morning, the lime slurry will dissolve every serial number." He looked at Miller. "Grab his arms. Take the book and shove him over the rail. If he breaks his neck on the riprap, he was drunk and lost his footing."