Bruce turned on him, and for the first time that day, the confidence was gone from his face. What was left underneath looked a lot like fear trying to disguise itself as anger. "You didn't say nothing about this being classified!"
"You didn't ask what was in the trailer. You asked for $500." Nathan let that sit a second. "Then you cut a federal seal without a warrant, without cause, and without anybody's permission but your own."
"Shut your mouth!"
"That seal has a tracking chip in it, Sergeant. The second it broke, it sent a signal to the carrier, to the contractor, and to whoever's watching this shipment on their end—which I promise you is not nobody." Nathan's voice never rose. It didn't need to. "You didn't just stop a truck today. You tripped a federal alarm."
Langston's phone kept buzzing. He finally looked down at it, and his face went pale reading whatever was on the screen. "Sarge, it says... it says security breach. Chain of custody violation. It's asking for a badge number."
"Give me that!" Bruce snatched the phone, scanned it, and his jaw worked like he was chewing on something bitter.
For a second, just a second, Nathan watched a man realize the ground under his boots had disappeared. Then Bruce did what men like him always did: he got angry instead of honest.
"This is on you," he snapped at Nathan, jabbing a finger at his chest. "You should have told me the second I walked up! You think I'm psychic?"
"You didn't give me the chance. You gave me a price."
"Don't you talk to me like—" Bruce caught himself, glanced at the traffic still rolling by, at the drivers slowing down to look. He lowered his voice, but the venom in it didn't shrink one bit. "You think this makes you clever? You think this gets you out of trouble?" He stepped in close, close enough that Nathan could feel the heat coming off him. "I decide what happened out here today. Not you. Not that little camera of yours. Me."
"Sergeant," Langston's voice was thin, uncertain. "Maybe we should just call it in. Explain what happened. It was a mistake. We can—"
"There's no mistake!" Bruce rounded on his partner so fast Langston flinched. "You hear me? There is no mistake! Far as anybody needs to know, this driver was uncooperative, combative! We had reasonable suspicion of contraband, and he resisted the stop!" He said it slow, like he was carving each word into stone. "That's the story. That's the only story."
Langston looked at Nathan, really looked at him: cuffed with nothing but his own two hands, still free at his sides, calm, quiet, cooperative in every way a person could be. And Nathan watched something in the younger officer's face crack right down the middle: guilt, real guilt, the kind that doesn't wash off easy.