Chapter 12 - The Walk of Shame
By two o'clock that afternoon, the sun was blazing high over Mercer Pass.
The heavy equipment had already arrived—not to break my barriers, but to clear them under my instruction. Toby sat in the cab of his Caterpillar excavator, expertly hooking chains around the massive red granite boulders and swinging them off the roadbed, clearing a single-lane corridor just wide enough for heavy car haulers to pass.
Down at the gatehouse, Sheriff Owens had set up an official checkpoint. Sitting next to him on a metal folding chair was my neighbor, Frank Miller, holding a wooden cash box for the high school agricultural scholarship fund.
The first vehicle to come down the mountain wasn't a supercar.
It was Victoria Mercer’s personal Range Rover. But Victoria wasn't driving.
Behind the wheel was a county transport deputy. Victoria was sitting in the back seat, her designer coat bunched around her shoulders, staring straight down at her lap as two state patrol cruisers escorted her toward the county jail for booking on water tampering and municipal fraud charges.
As the cruiser passed my porch, where Toby and I stood leaning against the rail, she didn't look up once.
Behind her came the supercars.
Stripped of their roaring speed, the multimillion-dollar machines crept down the gravel road at five miles per hour, crawling behind Toby’s tractor. The Pagani, the McLarens, the Ferraris, the Bugattis—each one covered in white mountain dust, their low-slung carbon fiber bumpers scraping cautiously over the cattle guards.
Every single driver stopped at the gatehouse.
Julian Vance, the young influencer, stopped his Pagani Huayra right in front of Frank’s folding chair. He rolled down his window, handed Frank five crisp one-hundred-dollar bills instead of the required two hundred, and turned toward me on the porch.
Julian took off his sunglasses, gave me a respectful nod, and raised a thumbs-up. "Fair play, Daniel," he called out over the idling engine. "Best lesson in property law Colorado ever saw."
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"Drive slow across the creek, son," I shouted back. "The cows have the right of way."
By four o'clock, the high school scholarship fund had collected sixteen thousand dollars in cash, Mercer Pass was clear, and the eighty-million-dollar playground on the ridge was completely deserted.
