The asphalt ribbon of Highway 80 sliced through the desolate heart of the Texas plains like a scar that refused to heal. Gray and unyielding under a sky the color of bruised iron, the road was a place where Deputy Ryan Miller spent his life watching for predators. For Miller, the highway wasn’t just a jurisdiction; it was a hunting ground. Beside him, in the specialized kennel that replaced the rear seats of his cruiser, Duke—a seventy-pound Belgian Malinois with a coat of burnt toast and midnight—shifted restlessly. The dog was bored, but Miller knew that in their line of work, boredom was merely the calm before a storm.
Miller was a man shaped by a singular, calcified guilt. Five years prior, he had let a white van go with a simple warning for a broken tail light, only to discover days later that it had been transporting abducted children. Since then, he had become a master of interdiction. He didn’t just see vehicles; he saw physics, psychology, and the minute deceptions of the human pulse. He looked for the slight sag of a suspension that didn’t match a manifest or the twitch of a facial muscle in a driver’s reflection.
