The heavy steel steering wheel of Bus Number Zero-Four vibrated against the hard nickel-plated palm of Mac’s prosthetic left hand.
Marcus “Mac” Cole loved the sound of a heavy-duty turbo-diesel under load. It didn’t purr like the modern computer-controlled junk they put in commuter shuttles. It screamed. It was a brutal, sixty-cycle iron growl that shook your collarbones and rattled your teeth right down into your jaw.
Behind the cracked glass of the bus depot at the foot of District 2, fifty union dockworkers and night clerks stood on the gravel shoulder, waving their flashlights in the dark.
Mac slammed the pneumatic floor shifter into third gear. The big 1994 Gillig Phantom coach surged forward at twenty-six thousand four hundred pounds gross weight -- two thousand four hundred pounds over the twenty-four-thousand-pound waybill limit. Its twin six-inch steel channel cowcatchers plowed through a frozen puddle, sending black water splashing twenty feet into the air.
Ahead of them, rising through the sulfur-stained fog like the spine of a dead whale, was the concrete approach ramp of Skybridge One.
Twenty-four years driving the graveyard loop, Mac thought, his right boot pressing the accelerator pedal flat against the greasy rubber floor mat. I’ve carried drunks, night nurses, steelworkers, and ghosts. But I’ve never driven a twenty-six-thousand-pound battering ram into a billionaire’s front yard.
