"Cole!" a harsh, commanding voice barked from the edge of the highway. "Status!"
"He's in the creek bed, Sergeant!" Cole yelled back, keeping his flashlight trained on the far wall. "He fired at me! I returned fire!"
"Hold your position," Sergeant Miller shouted down into the dark. "I'm bringing the thermal unit. We finish this right now."
I pressed my face against the cold, rough bark of the stump. The shift supervisor had arrived, and he wasn't carrying handcuffs. He was carrying the tools to ensure I never made it out of the canyon alive. The trap had expanded, and the entire corrupt weight of the county was now standing at the edge of the cliff.
CHAPTER 3: The State Blockade They Could Not Hold
The beam of Sergeant Miller’s heavy flashlight cut off abruptly, plunging the deep canyon back into heavy, suffocating darkness. Above me, I heard the sharp, metallic click of a hard plastic case snapping open on the highway shoulder. The shift supervisor had retrieved the thermal imaging unit from the trunk of his interceptor.
I pressed my spine deeper into the decaying hollow of the dead cottonwood stump. My ribs throbbed with a dull, sickening heat from the violent crash, but I forced my muscles to remain completely rigid. As a veteran combat engineer, I knew the physical limitations of forward-looking infrared technology. Thermal cameras read surface temperatures; they could not see through solid, dense mass. The thick, rotting wood of the stump was my only structural shield against the electronic eye, but my body heat was already radiating outward into the freezing desert air.
I reached down and dragged silent handfuls of the loose, freezing gravel from the dry creek bed. I packed the freezing dirt frantically against my chest, neck, and thighs, smothering my thermal bloom under a heavy layer of cold earth.
"I'm powering the unit up," Miller’s voice echoed down the sheer limestone walls. The heavy, rhythmic crunch of his boots joined Cole's on the loose shale. They were descending into the wash together.
"He can't have gone far," Cole muttered, his breath hitching slightly in the cold. "He's seventy-one years old. He hit that drainage ditch at sixty miles an hour. He's bleeding out down here somewhere."
"Keep your weapon raised," Miller ordered, his tone entirely devoid of standard police procedure. "If he moves in the brush, put him down immediately. I'll sweep the rocks."
A faint, high-pitched mechanical whine filled the freezing silence as the thermal camera booted up. I closed my eyes, regulating my breathing to a slow, shallow rhythm. Through the jagged gaps in the dead roots, I watched the faint green glow of the unit's display screen reflect off Miller's tactical vest. He swept the sensitive lens across the far rock wall, then panned it slowly toward the dense, thorny sagebrush.
He stopped. The green glow locked exactly fifteen feet to my left.
"I have a heat signature," Miller said, his voice dropping to a tense, predatory whisper. "Base of the cliff. It's small, but it's glowing."
My heart hammered a bruised, painful rhythm against my ribs. He was looking directly at the burner phone I had shoved deep into the thorns. It was a live cell phone battery generating just enough electronic warmth to register against the ambient freeze of the desert floor.
"Is it him?" Cole asked, raising his black steel service weapon, his finger slipping inside the trigger guard.
"It's too small to be a man's center mass," Miller said, taking a slow, deliberate step forward on the gravel. "Might be a fresh blood trail pooling on the rocks. Or he dropped something warm. Cover me."
They advanced together, their heavy boots grinding over the loose stones. They were walking directly toward the live Internal Affairs microphone.
I held my breath, the freezing dirt biting into my skin. If they found the phone and realized the screen was dark but the call timer was active, they would instantly understand that their entire corrupt conspiracy was being broadcast to the state capital. They would destroy the device, and I would lose my only direct lifeline to Sarah. But they would also know the state was coming for them, and a cornered, desperate cop was the most dangerous animal on earth.
Miller stopped three feet from the sagebrush thicket. He lowered the thermal camera, unclipped his flashlight, and shined the blinding white beam directly into the tangled thorns.
"There's nothing here," Miller grunted in frustration. "Just a pile of dead wood and some animal scat. The camera must be picking up residual heat trapped under the rocks."
He didn't see the matte black casing of the phone buried deep in the shadows. He clicked the flashlight off, plunging them back into darkness.
"Sergeant, we are running out of time," Cole said, his voice tightening with a sudden, rising panic. "County dispatch just gave me a ten-four warning on the secure encrypted channel. The state police tactical units just drove their armored command vehicles right through our roadblock on Route 9. They didn't even slow down for the fake hazmat barricade. The sheriff's deputies had to jump into the irrigation ditches to avoid getting crushed."