Tom didn't step down from his cab, but his driver-side window rolled down three inches into the cold mist. Through the gap, I could see the glow of his CB radio dial and the silhouette of his heavy shoulder against the glass. He had seen my Peterbilt in the ditch lights; he had seen Cole’s cruiser nose-down in the mud; and he had seen the sheriff of Choctaw County sitting in irons on the bumper of a state car.
The news was already moving. In twenty minutes, every hauler with a live radio between the Tombigbee River and the Mississippi line would know that Harlan Cole was locked down on the shoulder of Route 84 with his own seizure books spread across the hood of a state patrol unit. The fear that had kept thirty independent operators writing checks into the county general fund was breaking like brittle pine beneath a crawler track.
"Jesse," Vance said, turning away from the caged cruiser and walking to the edge of my truck's running board. He looked tired, the hard lines around his eyes deepened by the cold halogen wash, but his movements were methodical, guided by twenty years of procedural habit that no county politics could derail. "We need to clear this lane. The secondary recovery wrecker from Post Four is twenty minutes out from Grove Hill. But before they touch that ditch, I need you to climb into this cab, set the mechanical PTO lockout, and sign the field witness deposition."
"I'll sign it, Sergeant," I said. "Every line of it."
"There's a cost to it, son," Vance added, his voice dropping so low that the wind nearly took the words into the weeds. "Cole’s deputies are still on shift in the north end of the county. His chief deputy, Wade Tucker, has two brothers on the county grand jury. When we book Harlan in Linden tonight, they aren't going to let your rig cross this county line without a commercial escort until the federal indictment comes down. You're going to lose two weeks of hauling while the state attorney takes depositions."
I looked back at my Peterbilt. The steel flatbed was bent two inches at the tail where it had crushed Cole’s quarter-panel, the hydraulic oil was still dripping from the ruptured return line onto the clay, and my work boots were ruined with road sludge. Tomorrow morning’s medical transport run for my brother wasn't going to happen in this truck; I’d have to rent a flatbed out of Mobile on credit and pay twice the rate just to keep the contract alive.
It was going to cost me everything I had saved since the spring thaw. It was going to put my shop account into the red by Friday. But if I let Cole walk away from this shoulder with that brown envelope and that pre-dated voucher, the road would never belong to honest men again.
"Get the clipboard, Sergeant," I said. "I have my own pen."
I climbed up onto the driver-side step, reached into the cab through the broken window frame, and clicked the master electrical toggle to kill the screaming halogen floods. The harsh white glare died instantly, leaving only the rhythmic, pulsing sweep of the state troopers' blue light-bars cutting through the darkness and the red eyes of Cole's disabled taillights bleeding into the kudzu.
Cole watched me from the bumper, his teeth bared in an ugly sneer that had lost its power to terrify. "You signed your own bankruptcy, Vance," he hissed into the wind. "You won't have a single tire on this blacktop by Christmas."
I pulled my yellow grease pen from my coat pocket, stepped into the light of Trooper Calloway's cruiser, and took the state affidavit form into my hands.
"I might be broke by Christmas, Harlan," I said, pressing the point down until the ball broke through the top sheet to mark the second carbon beneath. "But tomorrow morning at six o'clock, you won't be writing my name on that river voucher."
CHAPTER 4: What The Morning Cost
The heavy transport carrier out of Grove Hill did not arrive until two in the morning, its yellow overhead strobes painting the wet pine branches in long, revolving arcs of amber. By the time their winch operator hooked Harlan Cole’s crushed Interceptor and dragged it out of the kudzu roots, the red clay had set like mortar around the rocker panels. The metal groaned as the cruiser cleared the ditch lip, leaving behind a deep scar of sheared sod, broken turn-signal plastic, and a dark, shimmering rainbow of hydraulic fluid where my Peterbilt’s return line had bled out into the drainage culvert.
Trooper Calloway took my formal statement on the hood of his patrol car, his clipboard resting against the cold steel while the wind blew mist across the carbon forms. I gave him every detail in plain, functional terms: the exact four-forty bank withdrawal in Gilbertown, the serial numbers stamped by the teller, Cole tailgating my mud flaps through the curves below Silas, the unpinned safety clevis, and the yellow voucher dated for six o'clock tomorrow morning at the river landing. When I signed my name at the bottom of the third copy, my hand was stiff with cold, but the script was level.