Chapter 6 - The Weight of Steel
The scales at the Petersburg weigh station hummed with a low, bone-deep vibration that you could feel through the soles of your boots even thirty yards away.
I stood beside Inspector Cole—a heavy-shouldered man with a gray crewcut and skin the color of well-cured harness leather—watching a twelve-wheel flatbed loaded with structural steel roll off the hydraulic platform. The digital readout above the lane flickered green: WEIGHT OK. BRAKE TEMP: 310F. LOG STATUS: VERIFIED.
"That’s the fourth one this morning that would have slipped through under the old rules," Cole said, wiping his thumb across his forehead to clear away a smear of hydraulic fluid. "Before the foundation bought these thermal rigs, a driver could run twenty hours straight on three hits of crystal meth and a prayer, and nobody’d look twice unless he blew a steer tire or put his rig through a guardrail."
"And now?" I asked, pulling my wool coat tighter against the wind blowing off the Appomattox River.
"Now they know the camera doesn't care about their cousin’s birthday," Cole grunted, spitting a stream of tobacco juice into the gravel by the drainage ditch. "They know the system doesn't take lunch breaks at Le Diplomate."
He looked sideways at me, his small, dark eyes glinting beneath the brim of his state-issued trooper's cap. "Your old man’s firm is handling the defense for the trucking association down in Norfolk. Did you know that?"
"I heard," I said. "They need the retainer."
"He tried to file an injunction against our automated thermal logs last Tuesday," Cole said, a dry, barking laugh escaping his throat. "Said the cameras violated the constitutional rights of interstate carriers to 'unimpeded commercial transit.' Federal judge threw it out in five minutes. Said the only right a trucker has that supersedes public safety is the right to pull over and sleep when he’s tired."
I looked down the interstate, past the rows of yellow warning lights and the high chain-link fence that protected the inspection bays. A half-mile down the median, the traffic was moving at a steady, rhythmic clip—semis and sedans and delivery vans spacing themselves out naturally, as if the road itself had learned how to breathe after years of holding its breath.
My phone vibrated in my coat pocket. Not an insectile buzz this time, but a heavy, solid thrum.
It wasn't my mother. It wasn't my father.
It was Margaret, calling from the office in Shockoe Slip to say that the state senate had just passed the Miller-Lily-Noah Safety Act by a unanimous vote of forty to zero.
"They didn't even call for a roll call," Margaret said, her voice unusually bright through the static of the cellular connection. "The minority leader stood up and said Virginia had spent fifty years protecting the people who owned the trucks instead of the people who shared the road with them. The vote was over in two minutes."
"Are you coming down for the signing?" I asked.
"I’m already in the car," Margaret said. "I’m bringing a thermos of coffee and that lemon pound cake you like from the bakery on Broad Street. Arthur’s junior associate was outside the legislative chamber when I left. He looked like he’d lost his last client and his dog on the same afternoon."
"Leave him be, Margaret," I said softly.
"Oh, I didn't say a word to him," she replied, her voice sharpening with a dry, iron click. "I just walked past him, looked at his briefcase, and told him the roads were getting too narrow for lawyers who couldn't read a logbook."
She hung up before I could answer.
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I stood by the scale for a long time after the call ended, watching the trucks go by. Every one of them had two headlights, two high-beams, and a driver who had to stop whether he wanted to or not.
I reached into my pocket and touched the small, smooth stone I’d picked up from the shoulder of Interstate 95 six months ago—the one that still had a tiny speck of gray asphalt ground into its grain. I didn't squeeze it until it hurt. I just held it in my palm, warm and steady, while the traffic rolled north toward home.
