"Drop the phone, Walter," Ryder commanded. His voice was stripped of all its previous mocking warmth, replaced by a flat, dead sound. "Kick it under the gate and back away."
My heart hammered against my ribs, but I gripped the prepaid burner tighter. I could hear the faint, tinny voice of the state investigator bleeding through the earpiece, urgently telling me to step out of the line of sight. I didn't move. If I backed down now, he would destroy the phone and burn my livelihood to the ground.
"It's already streaming, Ryder," I lied, my voice shaking just enough to betray my terror. "The audio goes straight to a secure server. You shoot me, you're not just a dirty cop taking a bribe. You're a cop murdering an unarmed civilian on tape while Internal Affairs listens live."
Ryder’s finger twitched near the trigger guard. The silence between us stretched, suffocating, broken only by the hum of his cruiser. He looked at the heavy padlock securing the gate. Any forced entry turned a quiet shakedown into a chaotic, public bloodbath.
Then, the distant wail of a siren cut through the dry afternoon air.
Ryder flinched. The calculation in his eyes shifted. He holstered his weapon with a sharp snap.
"You think this is over because you made one phone call?" Ryder spat, stepping back. He patted his pocket, feeling the envelope of my five thousand dollars. "I have the cash, Walter. And your two freight liners are still sitting in my county impound. I'm going to crush those rigs, and then I'm coming back for you."
He sprinted to his cruiser, threw himself behind the wheel, and sped away, kicking up a blinding cloud of dust.
I collapsed against the chain-link fence, my knees giving out. I dragged the phone back to my ear.
"Walter? Talk to me," the investigator's voice demanded.
"He ran," I gasped. "He took the envelope and he ran. Tell me you got the audio."
"We have it," Agent Miller said, his tone clinical. "But audio of a veiled threat and a cash drop isn't a guaranteed conviction. Ryder will claim he was working an undercover sting, that you were attempting to bribe him, and that he fled to preserve evidence. His precinct captain will back his play."
"I just gave him my last five thousand dollars," I said, anger burning through the adrenaline crash.
"We spooked him. But to put Ryder away permanently, we need the paper trail. We need to prove he falsified the safety citations that put your trucks in the county impound. If we prove the impound records are fake, the extortion motive becomes undeniable. I have units converging on his cruiser, but we need the physical logbooks from the yard before his friends shred them."
"The yard is closed. The clerk locks up at four."
"Then you need to get there," Miller ordered. "We can't get a warrant until Monday. Get eyes on those files. If the records are being moved, we need to know exactly who has them."
I hung up and sprinted to my pickup truck. The county impound lot was twelve miles away, hidden behind an aging industrial park. It was a sprawling graveyard of seized vehicles, managed by a civilian contractor named Greg Thorne. Greg and I used to drink coffee at the same diner. I had thought he was just a guy doing his job.
I drove recklessly, pushing my rusted Ford well past the speed limit. If Ryder called Greg to scrub the logs, the only proof that my trucks were illegally seized would vanish forever.
I pulled onto the access road behind the yard and killed my headlights. The sun was dipping below the tree line. My two white freight liners sat near the back of the lot.
My eyes were drawn to the small, corrugated metal office near the front gate. A single fluorescent light flickered inside the window.
I grabbed a heavy steel flashlight, slid under a washout gap in the perimeter fence, and crept across the asphalt. The heavy, rhythmic thumping of a commercial paper shredder vibrated through the thin walls.