"It wasn't an accident," Arthur wheezed, coughing blood. "He came round the hairpin running eighty... completely blacked out. Crossed the double yellow and clipped my quarter panel. I stopped to get his unit number for dispatch. He got out stumbling, reeking of bourbon. When I told him I had to report it to the watch commander, he climbed back into four-fourteen, backed up twenty yards, and rammed me straight over the edge."
"He told dispatch you were dead," I said, reaching into the torn harness beneath the dash. "Called in a ten-seventy-nine to bring the morgue van."
"The telemetry..." Arthur coughed. "He thought the roll severed the lines."
"He’s wrong," I replied. I had installed the District Four upgrades myself. The main harness had sheared, but behind the glovebox sat a crash-hardened aluminum module with an independent lithium battery that buffered sixty seconds of pre- and post-impact data.
I ripped through the mangled dash plastic until my fingers found the module's mounting bracket. Loosening the thumb-screws, I pulled the heavy rectangular unit free. On its edge, a green diode blinked steadily: the crash file was intact, recording the exact millisecond Morrison struck the bumper, the speed vectors, and the secondary ram that shoved Arthur over the ridge.
Above us, the wail of a heavy siren cut through the fog, followed by the rumble of a diesel engine: Coroner Unit Two had arrived at the marker. Through the trees, Morrison’s voice boomed through his cruiser’s megaphone: "Coroner Unit Two, hold at the guardrail! The scene is an uncontained hazardous spill! Nobody descends the embankment until my precinct supervisor arrives!"
He was sealing the rim. If Morrison kept the coroner’s team on the asphalt, Arthur would suffocate in the crushed cab within twenty minutes while Morrison dictated the narrative from the roadway. And if I stayed beside the wreckage trying to pry Arthur free with bare hands, Morrison would surround the ravine, declare me an intruder tampering with a fatal crime scene, and seize the black box before any independent investigator laid eyes on it.
I couldn't lift two tons of crushed steel off Arthur's legs alone, and I couldn't save his life by waiting in the mud for Morrison to bring down a body bag.
I pulled Arthur’s wool cap over his ears, squeezed his shoulder, and wedged the heavy tire iron beneath his seat frame so he could keep tapping if his strength held. "Hang on, Arthur," I whispered. "I'm bringing them down here whether Morrison likes it or not." Then I wrapped the aluminum telemetry module and the amber lens inside my dry inner vest, zipping the heavy canvas tight against my chest.
Instead of trying to scramble back up the slick shale face into Morrison’s halogen glare, I turned toward the mouth of the concrete culvert drain that tunneled directly beneath Route 9, cutting two hundred yards north toward the county road junction. It was three feet wide, choked with rushing snowmelt, and pitch black. But it was the only route that bypassed Morrison’s armed blockade, leading straight toward the coroner van idling on the open highway.
CHAPTER 3: Proof He Could Not Bury
The concrete culvert was three feet wide, lined with corrugated steel at the mouth and choked with six inches of rushing, glacial snowmelt. I fell to my knees in the dark channel, the freezing runoff soaking through my canvas work pants and chilling my kneecaps down to the bone. Ahead, the pipe stretched two hundred yards in complete blackness, curving beneath the roadbed of Route 9 like the throat of a buried furnace. Behind me, trapped in the shale wash, Arthur’s tire iron struck the floorboard again: three dull, metallic clangs against the engine hum overhead, faint but stubborn.
I pressed the heavy aluminum telemetry module against my ribs, keeping it wrapped in my dry inner wool vest alongside the jagged shard of amber polycarbonate. Crawling forward on palms and knees, every movement sent waves of burning cold through my palms as sharp gravel tore through my work gloves. The air inside the pipe reeked of iron oxide, rotting swamp grass, and the sour petroleum tang of highway runoff. Above my head, the concrete ceiling vibrated with every heavy rumble of idling diesel engines on the asphalt: Cruiser 414, the coroner’s transport, and whatever backup Morrison had summoned to seal the perimeter.
Water surged against my chest as the conduit narrowed near the culvert's midline. I kept my chin up, watching the distant, pale circle of moonlight where the drain emptied into the cattail marsh near the county road junction. If Morrison realized I hadn't scrambled up the shale bank into his spotlight, he would check the drain outlet. But Morrison was an officer who avoided mud; he believed gravity and freezing water were enough to keep an unarmed mechanic contained until his precinct allies arrived to scrub the ridge.
My left boot caught a submerged tangle of barbed wire twenty yards from the exit, tearing the leather cuff and slicing my calf. I yanked free with a muted grunt, lunging through the final curtain of hanging willow roots into the marsh basin. The icy water dropped away to my shins. Shivering violently, my teeth clicking like loose tappets, I scrambled up the northern embankment, using frozen sumac branches to haul myself out of the ditch and onto the gravel apron behind the Route 9 junction sign.