"Defense Department lady's on her way."
"Furious, from what I hear. Bruce is going to have some explaining to do."
"Not my problem, thank God."
Nathan closed his eyes and let himself breathe out slow for the first time in hours.
Two hundred miles north, Yolanda Pendleson sat at her dispatch terminal long after her shift should have ended, staring at a screen she couldn't look away from. The footage had synced clean, every second of it: Bruce leaning into the window; the words "$500" clear as day; the bolt cutters; the trailer doors swinging open; all the way through Bruce dictating a lie to his partner like it was nothing. Backed up, timestamped, sitting on a server no highway patrol officer could reach, no matter how badly he wanted to.
She picked up her phone and called Nathan's cell, knowing full well it was sitting somewhere in an evidence locker, not in his hand. She left the voicemail anyway, because some things needed saying out loud, even into silence:
"Nathan, it's me. I got it all. Every second, start to finish. And it's safe. Wherever you're at right now, you hold on. I'm not letting this go. Not for one second."
She hung up, wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, and picked up the phone again. This time, she dialed a number she'd saved for exactly a moment like this one: a civil rights attorney a friend had used years back, a man named David Austin, who didn't back down from fights like this. It rang twice before he picked up.
Back at the precinct, the front desk phone rang sharp through the quiet hallway. An officer answered, listened, and his face changed fast. "Yes, ma'am. I'll—yes, I'll let him know." He hung up and looked toward the back offices, toward wherever Bruce had holed up filling out the rest of his paperwork. "Sergeant Bruce, front desk. Now."
Bruce appeared a minute later, tie loosened, looking like a man who hadn't slept in a week even though the sun had barely finished setting. "What?"
"That was dispatch again. Colonel Ashley's confirmed. She's on her way here personally. Not calling. Coming. Says she wants answers about a shipment that went dark on federal satellite tracking during a highway stop." The officer swallowed. "She used your name, Sarge."
Bruce's jaw tightened until the muscle in his cheek jumped. He didn't say anything. He just turned and walked back toward his office, shoulders squared like a man bracing for a storm he'd built himself and now had nowhere to hide from.
In the cell, Nathan heard the name through the thin door: Ashley, carried on the officers' hushed voices as they hurried past. He didn't know who she was yet; didn't know what she'd bring with her when she walked through those doors. But he knew what it meant: that a Defense Department colonel was driving through the night because of what happened on that highway shoulder. It meant Bruce's lie had a ceiling, and that ceiling was getting lower by the hour.