The car started down again. It didn’t make a stop hi the basement but kept on going. The deeper they went, the darker it got The two torches in the elevator barely cut the gloom. As they descended, they could hear the sound of gears clacking, chains creaking and men
groaning. The sounds of labor and pain grew louder, the farther down they went
“By the Three Kennedys,” Doc said, “what’s that hellish commotion?”
“Tell him, Lester,” Ryan said.
“Shut up.”
“It’s the wheel,” Ryan answered for him.
“I said shut up,” Lester growled.
When they stopped at the bottom of the shaft, the mechanical sounds ceased. The groaning continued, but softly.
Lester and the sec men pushed Ryan and company out into the dim corridor. Its dripping concrete walls were unpainted; it was bathed in flickering half-light from the torches stuck in stanchions along the walls. Water in the corridor was ankle deep in places, and it reeked of decay and mildew.
“Dark night, it’s colder than a dead stickie’s butt down here,” J.B. stated.
“Now you know why they call it the cooler,” Ryan said.
As they were quick-marched along the corridor, they could see steel doors open on both sides, but die light was too poor to make out anything inside the rooms. They followed the corridor around a dogleg to the right and came upon four rooms in a row with closed doors and no doorknobs. Wired to screws bored into the steel at eye level were bunches of sorry-looking plastic flowers.
White lilies.
“What’s in there?” Mildred asked. “Looks like a tomb.”
“Good guess,” Ryan said. “Baron WUlie Elijah locked his first wife down here years ago. Left her to starve to death. Probably did the same to his three daughters when they got too long in the tooth for him.”
“All right, hold it there,” Lester ordered. He stepped around the others and over to a door locked with two big bolts. Then he opened the door and showed them the cooler’s prison cells in the ten-by-ten room. The two iron-barred cages had been constructed on-site. Each stood about four feet high, and one was stacked on top of the other. Three inches of water covered the barred floor of the bottom cage. Even in the weak torchlight they could see the bloated corpse facedown in the far corner.
Lester opened the door to the top cage and started shoving his prisoners in. Once inside, they had to crawl or crabwalk forward as there wasn’t enough room to stand.
“Faith, it stinks to high heavens in here!” Doc said, fumbling in his frock coat for a hankie to cover his nose.
“That’s because your toilet is underneath you,” Lester said. “Be glad you don*t have to sit in it”
He saved Ryan for last He actually let him get his head in the top cage before jerking him back out “No, I’d better not put you up there,” Lester told him. “Might overcrowd the other prisoners. Might cause them unnecessary distress. Can’t have that”
The sec man shut the top cage and opened the bottom one. At blasterpoint he forced Ryan to crawl inside on his hands and knees. There was no way to stay out of the vile water or avoid the rank, soft stalactites hung from the bars of the cage floor above his head. Ryan hunkered down, making himself as small as he possibly could.
Lester clanged the door shut. “Like it, Cawdor?”
Ryan stared up at him. “Look on the bright side, Lester/’ he said, “mebbe the stickles will overrun Wil-lie ville tonight Mebbe you won’t live long enough to do your time on the wheel.”
Lester slammed the hallway door, plunging them in total darkness.
For a long time no one said anything. Talking meant drawing extra breath, and no one wanted to breathe more than necessary.
“Ryan,” J.B. asked from somewhere above him, “what’s the wheel, anyway?”
“It’s what the baron calls his elevator motor.”
“Is it as bad as this?”
“No. It’s worse.”
“Good.”
Chapter Eight
Jak had two alternatives in mind as he walked out the front of the Freedom City Motor Hotel and Casino: to escape or die trying. Daylight was completely gone; the color had all but drained out of the world. Jak’s ruby red eyes worked better at night than most other people’s. If he could put some distance between himself and the sec men, he knew he could evade them and reach the wall. True, he was unarmed and without food or water, facing an army of stickies in the dark. But any death he could think of was better than a life sentence in the baron’s zoo. He couldn’t count on Ryan for a rescue. The one-eyed man had his own troubles. The sec men didn’t make it easy for him. Figuring that their captive would try to make a break for it, they stopped long enough to bind his wrists together with a thong. They tit their hand torches from a stanchion, then led him across the fractured parking lot toward the entrance to the Independence Park Amusement Zone. As Jak glanced back, he saw the baron’s men running out of the hotel with torches in their hands. On orders of their feudal lord, they were setting alight every lamppost that they passed. If the stickies broke through