"That man is alive down there," I whispered, muscles tightening against the doorframe. "He's bleeding out while you stand here rehearsing a lie." Morrison drew his heavy aluminum flashlight, strike bezel leveled at my throat. "You take one step toward that ditch and I’ll drop you for resisting with violence. Stay right there." He unclipped his shoulder mic with his left hand to contact the transport wagon, turning his head just enough to break line of sight with his push bumper.
In that fraction of a second, my right hand lunged into the crumpled steel cattle guard of Cruiser 414. My fingers wrapped around the jagged shard of amber polycarbonate wedged beneath the bent bolt. With one sharp jerk, I tore the lens fragment free, ripping the plastic from the sheared bracket, and shoved the sharp, clay-coated evidence deep into my inner coat lining before his flashlight whipped back toward my eyes. The sharp edge bit hard into my ribs, cold and undeniable.
"Unit four-fourteen," dispatch crackled through Morrison's collar, static hissing across the empty highway. "Coroner Unit Two is six minutes out via North Ridge Cutoff. Corridor secured." Morrison unclipped a pair of heavy nylon flex-cuffs from his tactical vest, his expression hardening into stone. He wasn't waiting for a statement. He was going to bind my wrists and lock me in his cruiser cage.
He intended to let the man in the ravine die in the freezing mud while he controlled the scene. Standing on the gravel of Route 9 with the stolen amber fragment pressed against my ribs, I knew with absolute certainty that waiting, cooperating, or begging for reason would only guarantee two names on the coroner’s transport ledger before dawn. Silence was no longer protection; it was an accomplice.
CHAPTER 2 CONTINUED
The descent was a brutal slide through wet shale and freezing red clay. I dug my boot heels into the slope, but the mud gave way like grease under an axle. Tree branches whipped my forehead, opening a cut above my left eyebrow. On the shoulder above, Cruiser 414’s searchlight snapped on, slicing the fog into white ribbons as Morrison bellowed: "Halt or I’ll fire! You're fleeing a felony stop!"
He didn't fire. Discharging his weapon would trigger a mandatory ballistics review—something his fabricated single-car fatality could never survive. Instead, his flashlight beam stabbed through the hemlocks, hunting my silhouette as I broke through a blackberry thicket and crashed into the rocky wash at the bottom.
I landed hard in three inches of snowmelt running over creek stones, knocking the breath from my lungs. Pushing up onto hands and knees in the freezing runoff, I looked up into the shale overhang.
The county maintenance rig was wedged sideways between two massive river boulders, its utility bed pitched at a steep tilt. It was a white Ford F-450 Super Duty bearing South Yard's municipal crest on its crumpled door. The cab roof had collapsed inward, and the stench of hot antifreeze and scorched transmission oil hung heavy over the rocks.
I scrambled up the slick rocks to the rear bed. The left taillight bracket was crushed backward into the wheel well. Reaching under my wool vest, I pulled out the jagged amber shard taken from Morrison’s cattle guard and aligned it with the severed base bolted to the bed.
The fracture lines mated seamlessly, clicking into the surviving housing with the precision of a machine key. Across the truck’s white tailgate, three broad horizontal gouges tore through the enamel down to bare metal. Deep within those fresh furrows clung thick streaks of high-gloss black paint—the exact baked finish of county patrol cruisers. Morrison hadn't merely clipped the truck; he had driven his push bar directly into the tailgate, using mechanical force to shove three tons of machinery over the drop.
From inside the wreckage, the metallic ringing suddenly ceased.
"Who’s out there?" a voice rasped from the broken window. "I can’t move my legs."
I pulled myself up to the crumpled cab, balancing on the buckled frame rail. Trapped behind the bent steering column was Arthur Vance, fifty-two, senior night-shift maintenance supervisor for District Four. I had serviced Arthur’s plow trucks for eight years in the South Yard shop; he was a meticulous county veteran who logged every mile and every hydraulic line repair by the book.
Arthur was pinned under the buckled firewall, his face gray beneath dried blood, his right hand still locked around the tire iron. His chest rose in shallow hitches that signaled fractured ribs.
"Arthur, it’s Frank from South Yard," I said, touching his cold wrist. "Keep still."
His bloodshot eyes focused through shock. "Frank... thank God. He ran me down. Morrison."
"I know," I said. "I found his bumper paint on your gate."