The steel outrigger step beneath Julian’s boots shuddered with a deep, greasy rumble as Coach 404 crept along the North Gate turnaround apron.
The Detroit Diesel Series Sixty engine was idling at six hundred and fifty revolutions per minute. It wasn’t the clean sixty-cycle hum of the hospital generators, and it wasn’t the fifty-eight-hertz death rattle of Dean Sterling’s dormitory bells. It was a rough, fifty-eight-point-two-hertz transit vibration that rattled the loose change in Julian’s pockets and vibrated in the fillings of his molars.
Outside the North Gate perimeter wall, University Heights Avenue was choked with mist.
There were no clean streetlamps beyond the turnaround curb.
There were only drifting banks of sulfur-yellow river fog that pressed against the stone loading walk like wet cotton batting. Every few seconds, the coach’s high-beam headlights caught the rusted iron roof of the Oakhaven North Gate Bus Shelter twenty yards ahead, reflecting flashes of wet galvanized zinc before the mist swallowed it again.
Julian stood on the external service step with his boots planted just outside the diamond-tread rubber flooring of the open front vestibule.
His right hand was locked around the vertical aluminum stanchion beside the open inspection doorway. Directly ahead of the toes of his work boots, across the threshold of the front standee bay, lay a two-inch-wide strip of faded, chipped yellow paint.
