county officials liked to speak of independence as though it were a virtue that protected them from outside questions. Eleven thousand people lived there. The median household income hovered near thirty-one thousand dollars, and the sheriff's department employed twenty-two sworn deputies to cover a territory that looked deceptively simple on a map.
Coulter had one traffic light in its old downtown business district. It had a chicken-processing plant on the east side, a Dollar General beside an empty storefront that had once sold appliances, and a courthouse built of brick darkened by generations of summer heat. It had churches whose attendance lists told you which cousins had married into which families and farms whose property lines were remembered more reliably than their owners' birthdays. It had a county newspaper that still photographed school award ceremonies and printed high school football scores across the front page when the team won.
It was also a county where a driver could lose a thousand dollars in twenty minutes and spend a year trying to learn whom to ask for it back. That part did not appear on the welcome sign.
Sheriff Dwight Coleman called Hollister his most productive highway officer. Coleman was a man with thinning hair, a fondness for county-fair speeches, and a remarkable ability to smile while avoiding direct questions. At public budget hearings, he displayed colored charts showing the value of property seized along the interstate. The charts made the sheriff's office look active, efficient, and financially resourceful. They did not show whether the people whose property had been taken had committed crimes.
Hollister had been a deputy long enough to understand the difference between what looked impressive in a report and what stood up under scrutiny. He liked numbers that grew. He liked commendations. He liked the photograph of himself shaking Coleman's hand at a county meeting, the caption underneath announcing that Coulter County had led the region in highway seizures. He kept that clipping framed on the wall near his locker, close enough to see whenever he changed out of his uniform.
The county's highway-interdiction team consisted of Hollister, Gallagher, and a rotating third deputy. The arrangement gave Hollister a small kingdom within the larger department. Other deputies answered calls about domestic disputes, storm damage, collisions, missing livestock, and frightened people who needed help. Hollister spent much of his shift on the interstate, searching for drivers who could be persuaded, pressured, or frightened into losing whatever cash they carried.
He told anyone who asked that large sums of cash were suspicious. He said that drugs moved through the corridor, that traffickers used ordinary vehicles, and that determined officers had to trust their instincts. Sometimes he spoke about the dangers of organized crime until people forgot to ask him how many narcotics cases the unit had actually produced. The department's annual reports celebrated dollars seized without making an equally prominent place for charges filed or convictions secured.