The auto-stop mechanism slammed shut.
A terrible silence filled the room.
I looked up at Cole, my chest aching. "You sat at my kitchen table, Greg," I whispered. "You brought my dad Jesse’s watch. You looked him in the eye and told him Jesse died instantly on the wet curve."
Cole stared at his boots, his jaw working helplessly. "You don't understand, Clara," he mumbled. "Kyle had the shifts locked down. If I went to the state police, my cruiser would have gone over the bridge next."
"You let them call him a drunk," I said, straining against the steel cuff. "You helped them push his truck into the water."
Miller ejected the tape and shoved it into his pocket. He picked up his heavy flashlight and smashed the Olympus player into jagged plastic fragments with two savage blows.
"Jesse was an hourly grease monkey who couldn't mind his own business," Miller whispered, his eyes dark. "He dug his own grave."
He turned on Cole. "Fire up the waste-oil burner. Melt this tape to ash. Then we take her Civic to the gravel pit and leave her with an open bottle of rye. Nobody questions a family pattern."
Cole hesitated, terrified, but Miller’s glare drove him backward through the doorway. A moment later, the metallic clang of the burner echoed across the bay, followed by the dry click of an electric igniter failing to catch cold oil. Miller stepped out into the bay to curse at the feed line, leaving the office door half-open.
My right wrist was locked to the frame, but my left hand was free. Jesse had built this bench with our father. Beneath the bottom metal drawer, in a hidden magnetic trough welded against the foundation leg, Jesse always kept his personal carbons.
I reached down the cold iron pillar. My fingers slipped into the recess and pinched a folded sheaf wrapped in heavy plastic.
It was Fleet Work Order 404-B, dated October 12, detailing the illegal UHF tap and tampered tie-rod assembly, complete with Miller’s radio barcode and Jesse’s final signature flagging the vehicle for state impound.
I slid the plastic packet down into my left boot, wedging it flat beneath my arch. Out in the bay, the burner sputtered again. Waiting for mercy or an apology would only put me in the river beside my brother; if I was going to survive the night, I had to bring down the men who killed him.
CHAPTER 2 CONTINUED
Cole waited six paces back, gloved hands buried in his coat pockets, watching the frosted windows that opened onto the dark haul road. I didn't wait for the fire to climb. My right wrist was chained to the steel bench leg, but my left hand had full reach along the underside of the oak apron.
Jesse had rebuilt county cruisers in this bay for four years, and our father had taught both of us where a working mechanic hides spare iron. Two inches behind the front support beam, pressed flush into the recessed channel where the frame met the timber, my fingers struck a strip of magnetic rubber. I pried it loose with my thumbnail.
Taped to the magnet was a brass ring holding two keys: a small padlock key for Jesse’s roll-cab and a flat, double-notched universal cuff key. My fingers were stiff from the November frost, but I guided the notched stem into the keyway of the secondary cuff locked around the leg. I twisted counterclockwise.
The internal pawl gave a faint, muffled click against the spring, and the ratchet released. I didn't let the metal rattle. I eased the jaw open, freeing my wrist, then looped the open cuff loosely back around the steel post so that from the doorway I still appeared bolted down.
The brass ring went into my jeans pocket alongside the plastic sleeve containing Fleet Work Order 404-B wedged under the arch of my left boot. The work order proved Jesse had caught Miller tampering with steering assemblies, but paper signed by a dead mechanic wouldn't hold if Miller claimed Jesse forged it to cover his own theft. To break Miller’s story before the county prosecutor, I needed the physical corroboration Jesse logged before his truck took the eighty-foot dive into Black Creek Ravine.
Jesse’s red Snap-on chest stood four feet away, wedged against the parts shelf. Keeping below the wired glass, I slid the brass padlock key into the cylinder of the top drawer. The tumbler turned smoothly in fresh graphite.
Inside the shallow tray lay his micrometers, feeler gauges, and a dark blue spiral logbook labeled County Fleet Inspection Ledger: Units 400 through 412. I flipped the grease-stained pages backward from October. On October tenth, Jesse had written in his clean drafting print: Unit 404 brought in by Miller reporting steering vibration.
Found inner tie-rod threads ground down to cause steering failure under load. Replaced assembly. Preserved damaged tie-rod in lower parts locker, Bin 14.