I reached up, held my breath, and pulled.
The lock gave with a soft, mechanical thud. The door swung out into the dark.
Inside the cab, the green dashboard glowed faintly against empty vinyl seats. The glove compartment sat directly in front of me, its cheap plastic latch held shut by a piece of red surveyor's tape.
I pulled the compartment door down.
A thick manila folder fell forward into my lap. Across its tab, written in black permanent marker in Ray Harlan’s unmistakable, sloping handwriting, were the words: NORTH FORK DISPOSAL – CONTRACT VOUCHERS / CLOSED FILE.
I snapped the folder open under the dashboard light.
Stapled to the first page were three certified cashier's checks drawn on the county road fund, totaling eighty-four thousand dollars, made out to Miller's private hauling outfit. Tucked beneath them were the rail company's internal chemical profiles for forty tons of trichloroethylene residue, along with a handwritten memo on official county letterhead addressed to Ray Harlan from the regional health officer:
Intake 4 shutdown cannot be delayed past dawn. The contamination plume is already past the lower culverts. If the school opens at seven, we have a public poisoning on the record.
At the bottom of the letter, Harlan had written two words in red ink: Burn this.
A heavy hand suddenly clamped down onto the open truck door, rocking the chassis on its suspension.
Vance Miller stood in the downpour not two feet from my head, water streaming off the brim of his oilskin cap, his eyes wide and dark as he looked straight down into the cab.
"You're a long way from the pie case, Nora," he said.
CHAPTER 3: The Reservoir Gate They Padlocked
Vance Miller’s fingers clamped into the meat of my shoulder, his wet wool glove smelling of heavy fuel oil as he dragged me sideways out of the passenger seat.
The gravel gouged through my uniform stockings, biting raw into my kneecaps. I kept my left arm folded tight across my ribs, pinning the manila folder and the county radio against my chest with both forearms while rain hammered straight down through the open cab door.
"You should've stayed by the pie case, Nora," Miller said, his boots grinding into the slush as he twisted my arm back toward the truck bed. "Ray Harlan doesn't pay me to run footraces through ditch mud with diner help."
He reached his free hand down to rip the manila folder from under my elbow, but his boot heel hit a slick patch of transmission runoff pooling under the frame. His balance slipped an inch. That single inch gave me room to drive the sharp brass corner of the county clipboard—still caught in the crook of my wrist—straight upward into the hollow beneath his collarbone.
Miller gasped, a short, wet rattle, and his grip tore loose from my shoulder.
I didn't try to stand. I scrambled backward on my hands and heels through the freezing puddle, ducking beneath the high chassis of the second Suburban just as a dull metallic crash shook the gravel thirty yards away.
Arthur Cole stumbled out from the diner’s side service alley into the yellow glare of the truck’s idling headlights.