Dean Koontz - Lost Souls

“Come this way, all of you,” said Jarmillo, and he returned to the door between the garage and the office hallway.

Their eyes were wild with terror and their faces were bleak, but the nineteen obeyed the chief without hesitation.

One of the doors off the hall opened onto stairs that descended to the basement. Although the prisoners wore no cuffs or shackles, the chief turned his back on them without fear and led them down to the last place they would ever see.

A wide corridor divided the windowless subterranean realm. To the left were storerooms, the furnace room, and a lavatory. To the right lay three large cells with bars for front walls, each with a recommended capacity of ten.

On the main floor were six small cells, each able to house two prisoners. They were rarely all in use at the same time.

These lower pens were for overflow, specifically designed for use in the event of civil unrest.

Rainbow Falls and the surrounding county were not hotbeds of political activism or home to utopian movements with the usual violent proclivities of those who believed they had a better plan for the ordering of society. Bar fights, assaults on spouses, and incidents of drunk driving were the primary crimes with which Rafael Jarmillo and his officers had to deal.

Because a U.S. government grant had paid for more than half the construction of the police station, however, the building included the additional cells to satisfy a federal mandate. The real Chief Jarmillo had sometimes wondered why the feds were insistent that even small-town America overbuild its jails: as if those officials were not being merely prudent but were preparing for an event of their own design.

The new Chief Jarmillo didn’t worry about federal intentions. The days of the human race-and therefore of the federal government-were numbered. The plans of politicians would soon mean nothing.

The nineteen from the truck were herded into two of the large basement cells. As instructed, they sat on the wall-hung bunks and on the floor, terrified and anguished yet docile.

Locking the cell doors was unnecessary. Sergeant Rapp locked them anyway.

After returning to the main floor, the chief and the sergeant visited the wing that contained the six small cells. Two prisoners were currently housed there, and the chief woke them.

The first, a vagrant named Conway Lyss, had ridden into town in a railroad boxcar and had stayed to burglarize houses. He was caught during his third break-in.

Forty-five, Lyss looked sixty-if seventy was the new sixty. Lean to the point of emaciation, brittle gray hair, skin like time-crackled leather, large ears as misshapen and stiff as rawhide dog treats, gray teeth, fissured yellow fingernails: He looked like a construct of gristle and horn and jerky, parched to the point of desiccation. But his eyes were ocean-blue and watery, and in them swam cunning and calculation, the never-sleeping shark of deception.

The second prisoner was Norman O’Bannon, whom locals called Nummy for reasons lost in time. Nummy was thirty years old, with an IQ below eighty. Slightly pudgy, with a round freckled face and a cheerful manner, he was being held overnight not as a consequence of any crime that he had committed but instead for his protection.

The new Chief Jarmillo had no affection for Nummy O’Bannon and no intention of protecting him from anything. Quite the contrary.

Sergeant Rapp opened both cells, and with the chief, he escorted the two prisoners to the basement.

Conway Lyss quarreled his way to the lower floor, grumbling one question after another. Neither the chief nor the sergeant replied to anything he asked them.

Throughout the short journey, Nummy smiled and said nothing. To him, every change was potentially the start of an adventure. And he trusted Chief Jarmillo.

Lyss wore an orange jail-issue jumpsuit. Nummy wore jeans and a sweatshirt. Both men shuffled, one because he was a burnt-out case who used his limited energy to scheme and complain, the other because poor coordination was a consequence of his simple intellect.

On the way to the third subterranean cell, Lyss was little interested in the occupants of the first two cages. He remained focused intently on the chief, whose refusal to answer questions enraged him.

Besides, the chief knew the vagrant’s type: a misanthrope, a people-hater, interested in other human beings only when he hoped to get something from them. Lyss could spend a day in a bustling city and really see only five or six people, those who were the easiest marks, the most vulnerable prey, the saps who would give him twenty bucks when he tried to panhandle just one dollar, the clueless from whom he could extract a wallet even with his second-rate talent as a pickpocket.

Nummy was interested in the quiet nineteen until he glimpsed the topless librarian, whereupon his face reddened as though a web of capillaries had burst from ear to ear. Thereafter, he kept his gaze on the floor.

As the sergeant locked the vagrant and Nummy in the third cell, Conway Lyss gripped two bars with his hands and raised his voice. “I demand to see an attorney.”

“You’re not going to get one,” said Chief Jarmillo.

“I have a right to an attorney!” Lyss declared. “I’m an American citizen!”

“Not anymore.”

“What? What do you mean-not anymore?”

“All you are now,” said Jarmillo, “is livestock.”

Beyond the warehouses was a stone quay that butted to a wooden wharf from which a series of industrial docks projected into San Francisco Bay. Dating to the first half of the previous century, no longer as well-maintained as the city’s other shipping facilities, inadequate to serve newer generations of container ships, these docks were marked for demolition if the current economic downturn ever gave way to a prosperity that justified the expense of new facilities. And in fact, at the moment, they appeared derelict, with no cargo vessels tied up at any slip.

Rusting lampposts with cracked and dirty lenses poured out a cold bluish incandescence that the night challenged everywhere across the wharf, and the one moving shadow, slipping from pool to pool of light, was Chang with his money and his secrets.

Carson O’Connor closed to within twenty feet of her quarry and saw him stumble, stagger, winded and vulnerable. He turned off the wharf, away from the seawall, and followed one of the docks into the bay and into a sudden mist.

The cool night on shore must have been no warmer than the chill on the water. In the dead-calm hours before dawn, fog wasn’t drawn inland by a temperature differential, but remained confined to the bay, a cloak with many cowls and folds and sleeves. Chang vanished into one of its pockets.

The widely spaced lamps were not extinguished by these dense and fallen clouds, but their glow was substantially diminished. The mist refracted the light in strange ways that further bewildered the intuitional compass on which Carson relied.

Visibility abruptly declined to ten feet, then less. The dock was perhaps thirty feet wide.

If Carson stayed close to either the right-hand or left-hand railing, Chang might turn back toward shore, following the railing opposite hers, twenty feet beyond her range of vision.

She could try to stay to the middle of the dock and hope to glimpse a moving figure along either railing. But the thick fog was disorienting, and she had nothing to guide her on a straight course.

Anyway, almost certainly, Chang had hurried away from shore along this particular dock because he had arrived-and intended to depart-by boat. He wouldn’t double back any more than he would climb a railing and leap into the drink.