Hollister had outmaneuvered the state. By weaponizing a corrupt local judge, he had effectively locked the state investigators out of the county. Miller couldn't come in to save me or secure the evidence.
Waiting for the law to arrive was no longer an option. The law was parked twenty miles away, blocked by an invisible jurisdictional line. If I stayed in this town with this box, Hollister’s deputies would hunt me down, kill me, burn the records, and say I died resisting arrest.
I looked at the heavy gray box resting on the passenger seat. It was the only thing keeping me out of a federal penitentiary.
Silence wouldn't protect me. Hiding wouldn't save me. There was only one route left. The boundary line at Route 9 was a narrow bridge over the Washita River. It was the only way out, and I knew Hollister would be waiting there.
I shifted the truck into gear, gripping the steering wheel until my knuckles ached. I had to break Hollister's perimeter and carry the proof across the county line myself.
CHAPTER 2 CONTINUED
Through the tree line, the evening shadows were pierced by the unmistakable strobe of red and blue LED lights.
I eased down on the brake pedal, bringing the heavy F-150 to a crawl behind a thick stand of mature oak trees, about a quarter-mile from the Route 9 bridge. I killed the headlights, plunging the cab into instant darkness, and grabbed my binoculars from the glove compartment.
Two county cruisers were parked diagonally across the narrow two-lane span, their steel push-bumpers interlocked to form an impassable barricade. Four deputies in tactical vests stood in the glare of the headlights, holding pump-action shotguns at the low ready. They weren’t checking licenses. They weren't setting up a standard traffic filter. They were hunting. Hollister had completely sealed the choke point. There was absolutely no way a battered 1998 Ford was going to ram through four tons of police steel.
I lowered the binoculars, my chest heaving against the steering wheel. I looked down at the heavy gray firebox resting on the passenger seat. The carbon-copy work orders inside proved conclusively that the phantom vehicles had never entered my bays. But sitting here in the dark, I realized a terrifying legal vulnerability. Without secondary proof, Hollister could easily claim I fabricated these copies after the fact to cover my own embezzlement. In a local courtroom, it would be a seventy-two-year-old mechanic’s word against the entire county sheriff’s department.
I needed something from Hollister’s side of the ledger. I needed a structural contradiction built directly into his own system.
I picked up my shattered phone. Investigator Miller’s final automated transcript was still visible through the cracked glass: Hollister is authorizing the destruction of the impound lot files as we speak.
The county impound lot was situated on an isolated gravel patch right off the riverbank, barely two miles from where I was currently parked. It was the holding pen for every seized vehicle Hollister claimed I had repaired. If I could secure the lot's physical intake manifest—the master log signed by the tow drivers when a car was first chained up—it would perfectly contradict Hollister’s forged invoices. The intake manifest would prove those specific cars had never left the chain of custody to visit my shop. It would lock my carbon copies into an undeniable, corroborated fact.
But going to the impound lot meant turning around and driving directly back into the center of Hollister's expanding dragnet.
I gripped the gearshift. The sensible choice was to abandon the vehicle, hide in the deep woods, bury the firebox, and wait out the night. But Hollister controlled the hounds, the search helicopters, and the dispatch radios. By dawn, I would be a convenient casualty of a tragically botched manhunt, and the firebox would be sitting at the bottom of the Washita.
I threw the truck into reverse, backing silently down the dirt path until the tires found enough clearance to turn around. I didn't turn the headlights back on until I was a full mile down the county road, steering blindly by the moonlight reflecting off the cracked asphalt.
The smell of burning plastic and diesel fuel hit me before I even saw the towering chain-link perimeter fence.
I pulled the truck into a dry drainage ditch across the street from the impound lot, killing the engine and pocketing the keys. A thick, churning column of black smoke was billowing into the twilight sky from the very center of the yard.
Through the diamond mesh of the fence, I could see the source. The administrative trailer, a rusted double-wide that served as the lot’s main processing office, was completely engulfed in violent orange flames. Heat warped the aluminum siding, and the front windows had already blown out from the pressure, showering the gravel with blackened, sharp glass. Hollister wasn’t just authorizing destruction; he was erasing the entire facility's history with fire.
A single county SUV was parked near the front gate. The gate itself was heavily chained shut from the inside, a thick brass padlock securing the loop. I grabbed a pair of heavy-duty bolt cutters from the truck-bed toolbox, ignoring the searing, breathless flare of pain in my ribs as I reached over the side rail. I sprinted in a low crouch toward the overgrown rear of the compound, using the tall weeds for cover. I snipped the bottom tension wire of the back fence and rolled under, dragging my chest across the sharp, oil-stained gravel.
Inside, the lot was a sprawling graveyard of rusted sedans and wrecked delivery trucks. I used the tightly packed rows of impounded cars as physical cover, moving rapidly and silently toward the burning trailer.
A figure emerged from the thick curtain of smoke. It was Chief Deputy Riker, a man with a reputation for casual brutality that easily rivaled Hollister’s. He was tossing empty kerosene jugs into the bed of a county pickup truck, watching the trailer burn with complete, bored indifference.