on the seats. No trash container on the floor. No scrap of discarded candy wrapper. No air freshener or decorative geegaw hanging from the mirror.
This didn’t have the feel of a truck that anyone drove for a living or in which anyone spent a significant amount of his day.
When I got out from behind the steering wheel, the foreman said, “Where’s your driver? He didn’t leave me a manifest, and the box is locked.”
I went around to the back of the truck, which featured a roll-up door on the cargo trailer. A key lock in the base bar of the door secured it to a channel in the truck bed.
“I’ve got other shipments due,” he said. “I can’t let this just sit here.”
“Do you have a power drill?” I asked.
“What’re you going to do?”
“Drill out the lock.”
“You’re not the guy drove this in here. Are you his crew?”
“Police,” I lied. “Off duty.”
He was dubious.
Pointing to the sobbing woman around whom so many workers had now gathered, I said, “You hear what she’s been saying?”
“I was on my way over there when I saw you.”
“Two maniacs with machine guns shot up the mall.”
His face drained of color so dramatically that even his blond mustache seemed to whiten.
“You hear they shot Chief Porter last night?” I asked. “That was prep for this.”
With rapidly growing dread, I studied the ceiling of the immense receiving room. Three floors of the department store were stacked on top of it, supported by its massive columns.
Scared people were hiding from the gunmen up there. Hundreds and hundreds of people.
“Maybe,” I said, “the bastards came here with something even worse than machine guns.”
“Oh, shit. I’ll get a drill.” He sprinted for it.
After placing both hands flat against the roll-up door on the cargo box for a moment, I then leaned my forehead against it.
I don’t know what I expected to feel. In fact, I felt nothing unusual. Psychic magnetism still pulled me, however. What I wanted wasn’t the truck but what was in the truck.
The foreman returned with the drill and tossed me a pair of safety goggles. Electrical outlets were recessed in the concrete floor at convenient intervals across the receiving room. He plugged the drill into the nearest of these, and the cord provided more than sufficient play.
The tool had heft. I liked the industrial look of the bit. The motor shrieked with satisfying power.
When I bored into the key channel, shavings of metal clicked off my goggles, stung my face. The bit itself deteriorated, but punched through the lock in mere seconds.
As I dropped the drill and stripped off the goggles, someone shouted from a distance. “Hey! Leave that alone!”
Along the elevated loading dock—no one. Then I saw him. Outside the receiving room, twenty feet beyond the foot of the long truck ramp.
“That’s the driver,” the foreman told me.
He was a stranger. He must have been watching, perhaps through binoculars, from out in the employee garage, past the three lanes that served the loading docks.
Seizing the two grips, I shoved up the door. Well-oiled and efficiently counterweighted, the panel rose smoothly and quickly out of the way.
The truck was packed with what appeared to be hundreds of kilos of plastic explosive.
A gun cracked twice, one slug cried off the truck frame, people in the receiving room screamed, and the foreman ran.
I glanced back. The driver hadn’t come any closer to the foot of the ramp. He had a pistol, maybe not the best weapon for such a long shot.
On the truck bed in front of the explosives were a mechanical kitchen timer, two copper-top batteries, curious bits and pieces that I didn’t recognize, and a nest of wires. Two of the wires ended in copper jacks that were plugged into that gray wall of death.
With a shrill kiss of metal on metal, a third shot ricocheted off the truck.
I heard the foreman fire up a nearby forklift.
The coven hadn’t rigged the cargo to explode when the door was opened because they had set it on such a short countdown that they didn’t think anyone could get at it fast enough to disable it. The timer had a thirty-minute dial, and the ticking indicator hand was three minutes from zero.
Click: two minutes
The fourth shot hit me in the back. I didn’t at once feel pain, only the jolting impact, which drove me against the truck, my face inches from the timer.
Maybe it was the fifth shot, maybe the sixth, that slapped into one of the bricks of plastic explosive with a flat, wet sound.
A bullet wouldn’t trigger it. Only an electrical charge.
The two detonation wires were set six or eight inches apart. Was one positive and the other negative? Or was one just a backup in case the first wire failed to carry the detonating pulse? I didn’t know if I had to yank out just one or both.
Maybe it was the sixth shot, maybe the seventh, that again tore into my back. This time pain hammered me, plenty of it, excruciating.
As I sagged from the brutal impact of the bullet, I seized both wires, and as I fell backward, I jerked them out of the explosives, pulling the timer and the batteries and the entire detonator package with me.
Turning as I fell, I hit the floor on my side, facing the truck ramp. The shooter had ascended farther to get a better shot.
Though he could have finished me with one additional round, he turned away and sprinted down the ramp.
The foreman roared past me and descended the ramp in a forklift, somewhat protected from gunfire by the raised cargo tines and their armature.
I didn’t believe that the shooter had fled from the forklift. He wanted to get out of there because he couldn’t quite see what I had done to the detonator. He intended to escape the underground docks and the garage, and get as far away as luck allowed.
Worried people hurried to me.
The kitchen timer still functioned. It lay on the floor, inches from my face. Click: one minute.
Already my pain was subsiding; however, I was cold. Surprisingly cold. The underground loading docks and the receiving room relied on passive cooling, no air conditioning, yet I was positively chilly.
People were kneeling beside me, talking to me. They seemed to be speaking a host of foreign languages because I couldn’t understand what they were saying.
Funny—to be so cold in the Mojave.
I never heard the kitchen timer click to zero.
STORMY LLEWELLYN AND I HAD MOVED on from boot camp to our second of three lives. We were having great adventures together in the next world.
Most were lovely romantic journeys to exotic misty places, with amusing incidents full of eccentric characters, including Mr. Indiana Jones, who would not admit that he was really Harrison Ford, and Luke Skywalker, and even my Aunt Cymry, who greatly resembled Jabba the Hut but was wonderfully nice, and Elvis, of course.
Other experiences were stranger, darker, full of thunder and the smell of blood and slinking packs of bodachs with whom