Dusk
ABOUT DUSK
A fear so deep that it makes Death Row seem like a reprieve.
From the corrupt streets of Palm City to the barren wilderness of the Mojave, a drifter and a girl from nowhere fight for their lives against a darkness from time’s abyss.
MIDNIGHT IN PALM CITY
The Mojave Desert 1984.
Rolling past on the interstate, you could mistake Palm City for a cinderblock ghost town, and you’d be half right, for it’s a place where the living don’t know they’re dead yet.
Dust Devils whip tumbleweeds and trash down its streets — deserted except for the scavenging coyotes. Driven by hunger, they stalk down Main St. with its closed businesses, some for the night — others boarded for eternity.
Beneath the dead orange glow of the streetlights, their feral eyes can flash fiery white, but only for an instant. Then they turn tail — swallowed once again by the darkness.
Palm City exudes that vague 1950s “Town that Time Forgot” vibe, but not in a good way. Everything here is on the wrong side of the tracks.
Everything except for the jail. Incarceration is a growth industry, and the Palm City Jail is a first-class rat trap, all shiny and new. It squats in a weird pride-of-place location at 7th and Main, next to the dowdy old courthouse.
The taxpayer’s devotion to Law and Order can be seen in the jail’s landscaping — grass out front and tall palm trees at each building corner. Despite the drought and water restrictions, the community has left the half-dead ornamental foliage.
City jails, especially in the sticks, are Cracker Jack boxes. Palm City has one of those rare hi-tech lockups — windowless, six stories tall with cameras, security checkpoints, and no way in or out except through the electronically locked steel doors at ground level. It’s as close to a supermax as any jail can get. It broods over this town, a faceless gray monolith, a message in poured concrete for the transient population, the poor, the migrants, the drifters — stay in line.
This jail, the fortress-like Main Sheriff’s Station out along the highway, and the substations scattered throughout the county are all part of Sheriff Don Carstairs’s personal, political fiefdom. The Sheriff works both ends of the law. Zero tolerance for the slightest infraction keeps the county work farm full while running all the prostitution, gambling, and drug trade.
On the Palm City Jail’s top floor is the Administrative Segregation Unit (AD-SEG), where the most violent offenders are housed.
I’m one of them.
I know everything about this place. I’ve studied it for the past two months as they shuttle me in shackles between the courthouse and this cell.
My name is John Starrett. I’m going to be dead in eight hours.
