"I didn't touch that bus, Marcus," Dave said coldly. "And I don't do remote diagnostics. Have a good afternoon."
Dave reached out and ended the call. He sat back in his chair, exhaling a long, shuddering breath. He had just thrown his pension on the tracks to protect a driver he barely knew.
"He's going to fire me, Jonah," Dave whispered, staring at the black screen of his phone. "He's going to pin the whole failure on me and drag me into court."
"No, he won't," I said, stepping closer to the desk. "Because we are going to pull the camera footage from Bay 3."
Dave nodded slowly. He reached for his mouse with his awkward left hand. "My portal access should still be active until HR processes a termination. Let's see what Vance was doing at one o'clock."
He navigated to the district employee intranet, typed in his credentials one-handed, and clicked the security tab. The page loaded slowly. Dave clicked on the archive for Bay 3.
A grainy, overhead video feed appeared on the screen. The timestamp read 1:04 PM. Bus 42 was parked over the grease pit. There was no mechanic in a blue uniform working on it. Instead, a man in a white button-down shirt and a dark tie—Marcus Vance—was standing by the left rear wheel. He was wrestling a massive yellow pneumatic impact gun, struggling with the sheer weight of it.
"He didn't use a torque stick," Dave said, watching the screen in absolute horror. "He just put the heavy socket on the nut and held the trigger down. He was rushing. He was trying to force the bus back on the route to avoid a DOT fleet-availability penalty."
I reached out to stop the video so I could take a clear photograph of the monitor.
Before my finger touched the glass, the video froze. A spinning wheel appeared in the center of the screen. Then, the entire browser window snapped shut, replaced by a stark white screen with bold black text.
SESSION TERMINATED. CREDENTIALS REVOKED. CONTACT SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR.
Dave clicked the mouse frantically. "He locked me out. He's purging the local server right now. He's deleting the video."
I lowered my phone. The digital proof was gone. Vance was already building a paper trail to discredit Angela's screenshot.
"The video doesn't matter," I said, my voice hardening. "The metal doesn't lie. A metallurgical test on that sheared stud will prove exactly how much torque was applied, and it will prove it was freshly snapped today."
Dave looked up at me, his face pale. "Jonah... Vance didn't have the bus towed to the main yard. The wrecker dispatch logs I saw before it crashed... he sent it to the South Annex."
I knew the South Annex. It was an abandoned municipal garage down by the river where the district stripped dead buses for parts before crushing the frames.
"He's not repairing it," Dave said. "He sent it there to pull the entire rear axle assembly and drop it into the smelter scrap bin tonight. If that wheel hub gets melted down, there is no physical evidence. It becomes your word against a district supervisor."
I turned toward the door, my heavy boots thudding against the carpet. The sun was already starting to drop outside, casting long shadows across Dave’s overgrown lawn. Vance thought he had the system locked down. He thought he could erase the digital trail and melt the physical proof before anyone could stop him.
"Lock your doors, Dave," I told him without looking back. "I'm going to the South Annex."
CHAPTER 3: The Evidence They Tried To Melt
The rusted chain-link gates of the South Annex were dragged wide open, and the heavy tire tracks of a commercial flatbed wrecker had already chewed through the wet gravel of the entrance.
The Annex wasn't a maintenance yard. It was a desolate municipal graveyard tucked against the muddy banks of the Scioto River, an acre of cracked concrete where the district dumped wrecked district vehicles to be stripped for parts before the frames were sold for scrap. There were no security cameras here. There were no digital logs. It was a place where heavy metal went to disappear.
I rolled the Harley through the gates, keeping the RPMs low, letting the heavy V-twin engine rumble quietly beneath me. The sun was dropping fast, casting long, jagged shadows across the rows of cannibalized bus chassis.