Chapter 1

"Nobody's coming to help you," Deputy Colton Reedy said, and drove his shoulder into Emmett Sorrell's back.

Emmett's chest hit the truck panel hard enough to knock the breath out of him in one flat note. On the hood, his registration, his insurance card and two loose pages of a pocket log slid sideways into the ditch grass. The wind took one page end over end down the shoulder of Route 9 and left it there.

It was 5:38 on the last Thursday in October, 1.4 miles east of the Delphia Springs city limit. The sun had already dropped behind the oak ridge and left a thin orange band along the top of it. The ditch grass was dry and cold, and it crackled when the deputy's boot moved.

"You know what a plate lamp is?" Reedy said. His voice was loud the way a young man's voice gets when he wants the road to hear him. "It's the little light over your license plate. Yours is dead. That's a hundred and twenty-five dollars and a court date in Vine County."

Emmett looked at the truck. It was a 1978 Ford with green paint gone chalky, and the lamp over the rear plate had been out since Tuesday. He'd meant to fix it. He had the bulb in the glovebox. He'd had it since Tuesday.

"Or," Reedy said, "you hand me a hundred and fifty in cash and I forget I saw it."

Emmett didn't move. He was seventy-six, six feet of thin bone and big scarred hands, and he had spent forty-one years inspecting every vehicle in this county. He had heard that pitch before, twice, both times from men who were no longer deputies. He had never once taken it.

"You hear me?" Reedy said.

"I hear you."

"You got the money or not?"

Emmett's eyes went past the deputy's ear. Not to the road, not to the ditch. To the windshield of the cruiser parked at an angle behind them, light bar dark, engine still ticking as it cooled.

"Who signed the sticker on your windshield?" Emmett asked.

"State inspector."

The answer came too fast, the way a man answers a question he has been asked before.

"Which one?" Emmett said.

Reedy's neck went red. "What?"

"Which inspector. They print the number on the sticker."

"You think you get to ask me questions?" Reedy took Emmett's left wrist and bent it up behind his shoulder blade, one hand flat between his shoulders. The cuffs came off his belt with a hard snap of leather. "Turn around. You're under arrest."

Emmett turned. He didn't pull, didn't argue, didn't say the thing he had been about to say. He put his forehead against the cold side of his own truck and let the steel close around his wrists, and through the open door of the cruiser he could see the glovebox hanging down over the seat, and inside it a fat rubber-banded brick of blank inspection stickers, white as new teeth.

Reedy keyed the radio on his shoulder. "Unit Twelve, Route 9 at the county line, ten-fifty-one, resisting."

The radio crackled back.

Then headlights came up over the rise to the west, slow and steady, one car, no light bar, and Emmett watched them come in the side glass.

"That'll be the sheriff," he said.

"Shut up."

"He's early," Emmett said. "You might want to stand up straight."