Condemned: A Thriller

by McBride, Michael

  The intent was to help hunters track a wounded animal at night, and soldiers stalk prey of a different kind. In my case, it told me that I was the only one who’d passed through that doorway since all of the blood had been dumped over the entryway. Either Dray entered this underground chamber from the outside and descended staircases sealed by a dozen feet of rubble, or the gateway was designed to make me believe he was waiting for me down here, when really he wasn’t.

  Plink…plink…

  I silently stepped on the heel of each shoe—one, and then the other—and slid my socked feet out onto the cold concrete. They made no sound whatsoever as I ascended the ramp once more. I made every effort to avoid the blood, and yet still I felt it soaking through the saturated cotton. My feet were already starting to prune by the time I reached the top and again passed through Dray’s gate.

  The carnage looked dramatically different in the blue light. While before the bodies had stood out in stark contrast to the floor, they were now almost anonymous shapes beside the spatters and puddles of blood around them, on the ground and all over their clothes. I clearly saw my footprints following a wending course through the corpses.

  The skulls to either side of me looked like monsters drenched with the blood of their victims. It was truly a vision of hell that frightened me on the most fundamental, instinctual level.

  Plink…plink…

  The distinctive pattern of the tread of my shoes stood out from the dried blood, where the top layer had come away with the gooey layer beneath. The transferred designs on the concrete were irregular. Some were question mark-shaped, while others were mere smudges where the toes contacted.

  The wounds themselves stood out from the bodies. There were black amoeboid shapes on shirts and jackets, tears where the bullets had parted fabric and penetrated flesh that had never had a chance to heal. The back of one man’s head was split open like a baked potato, the white crescents of his calvarium riddled with ruptured vessels and gray matter. I saw high-velocity spatters on the walls where they’d been indistinguishable before and fissure-rimmed holes in the concrete where the bullets that passed straight through their targets impacted.

  I shined my light up into the rafters, but unless there was a ladder stashed where I couldn’t see it, I could think of no way for him to get up there and nowhere for him to hide if he did.

  Plink…plink…

  I was about to head back out into the arcade when I saw something on the ground. My chest tightened and my breath grew heavy in my lungs.

  There were footprints in the blood.

  And the tread was different than mine. Thick and wide. Like from hiking or work boots.

  I glanced up from the ground, but saw no movement. Nothing at all to suggest that I wasn’t alone in the room with the dead men.

  I crouched and touched the nearest footprint with my fingertips. Drew them away damp. It was fresh. Every bit as fresh as my own.

  The tracks appeared to have no origin, as though whoever left them had simply materialized from thin air in the middle of the room, in a patch of blood smeared where one of the victims had left it behind as he crawled off to die.

  I glanced up every few seconds as I followed the footprints. The buzzing of the flies frayed my nerves and their incessant movement made the shadows around me seem to come to life.

  Plink…plink…

  The tracks were large, but indistinct. I could tell little beyond the fact that whoever left them had been moving fast enough that only the balls of his feet contacted the floor. And the gaps between them were significant. Longer than my stride. Whoever left them had been running. Had these footprints been here when I arrived and I simply hadn’t seen them or had someone made them while I’d been descending into what I initially believed to be Dray’s hell? Regardless, whomever they belonged to had to be somewhere in here with me now. Only all I could see were the corpses at my feet and the shadows swarming at the fringes of my blue light.

  Plink…plink…

  My socks were sopping wet. The blood squelched between my toes. I was on the verge of losing whatever advantage the decision to take off my shoes had afforded me.

  The footprints stopped.

  I turned cautiously in a full circle as I inspected the ground. I expected to find the next track several feet away, but saw nothing beyond a smear where a body lay facedown on the concrete. The back of his hooded sweatshirt was saturated with blood from an entrance wound high up on his neck.

  Plink…plink…

  I looked back toward where I originally entered the room, toward the smear of blood at the edge of my light’s reach where I found the first footprint, where it looked as though someone had recently been sprawled.

  My heart pounded so hard it was all I could hear.

  The bloodstained sweatshirt.

  The gunshot wound to the neck, near the base of the skull.

  The truth hit me so hard that I let the arm holding the flashlight fall to my side, illuminating the bloodstained floor. And the distinct tread of the work boots.

  I closed my eyes when I spoke.

  “Hey, Dray.”

  I felt the barrel of a pistol press against the back of my head.

  “S’bout time you showed up,” he said from directly behind me.

  TWENTY -NINE

  “Turn around,” he said. “Slowly.”

  “You don’t want to do this.”

  “You have no idea what I want.”

  “We’ve been best friends since we were kids.”

  “Best friends, huh? Where the hell were you when Janae died?”

  I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that the night she propped herself up in bed with a gun and painted the wall with her brains I’d been sitting in my car outside the old Vanity Ballroom on East Jefferson, taking pictures of three men loading the stripped wiring, glazed tiles, and Aztec-styled sconces onto the back of a panel truck. I’d run the story with the pictures the same day news of her death first broke, only I’d been too busy patting myself on the back for outing the scavengers that I hadn’t even noticed.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Nothing I can say will change anything now.”

  I raised my hands out to my sides and turned to face him. The flashlight pointed up into the rafters did little more than limn his features with an ethereal blue glow. He looked worse than when I last saw him. His cheekbones were even more pronounced, his eyes sunken into pools of shadow. Even beneath the far-too-large hoodie I could tell his frame had diminished to a startling degree. He looked old in a way I would never have imagined he could. And in that moment I realized that whatever past we shared belonged to the two boys we could never be again.

  “I understand your pain.”

  “You don’t understand a god damn thing!” he shouted, and pressed the barrel of his gun against my cheek so hard it forced my head all the way back and to the side.

  His eyes were wide and wild. The man I saw looking back at me from inside them was a stranger to me.

  “It isn’t fair. And it isn’t right. We both know that. But this isn’t how to effect change.”

  “Listen to you. Effect change. Nothing ever changes. You know why? Because no one wants it to. Tell me you haven’t figured that out by now.”

  “The Dray I know wouldn’t believe a word of that.”

  “Yeah? Well, the Dray you know died the night his wife was raped on her way home from work by two of the pieces of shit she was trying to help.”

  “I’ve been in your attic. I’ve seen…what you did to them.”

  “They deserved worse than they got.”

  “They deserved to go to prison.”

  “So they could learn their trade and be back on the street a year later, worse than when they went down?”

  I cautiously placed my hand against the barrel and eased it far enough away from my face that I could look him squarely in the eyes.

  “You were the one who said that without the law we might as well just h
and the city over to the criminals. And I believed you. I believed you could change this city, even if you had to do it by yourself.”

  “The law is broken. It’s designed to make lawyers rich and protects the rights of the criminals, not their victims. You think those two assholes would have seen a single day behind bars without the testimony of the lone witness, who put a gun in her mouth when she found out she was pregnant?”

  I opened my mouth, but no sound came out.

  “That’s right. You know how I found that out? She wrote it in a note. Left it on the dresser where I would find it after…” His jaw muscles bulged. “After I found her body.”

  I stared into his eyes and understood I would never know the depths of his pain.

  “You know what that’s like? Huh? Coming home from work to find the love of your life like…like that? One second your life is fine and the next everything’s gone to shit. Everything! You know what it’s like to suddenly find yourself alone? To realize that everything you believed in was bullshit? That everything you did with your life has led you to a place where everything that mattered is gone and nothing that’s left matters?”

  “You should have called me.”

  “You think I didn’t?”

  I was struck by memories. Of sending Dray’s calls to voicemail while I was in a meeting with Special Agents from the FBI, who wanted to use my collection of photographs to launch an investigation into a ring of scrappers making a fortune by driving their haul to Indiana, where it was melted down and shipped to Ohio to be sold as new. Of silencing my ringing phone while I was sleeping during the day in preparation of going out again that night. Of promising myself I would call him back when I got the time. And, ultimately, of forgetting entirely when the calls stopped coming in.

  “I needed someone. I needed you. And you couldn’t be bothered to answer your damn phone.”

  I couldn’t hold his stare.

  “I couldn’t even count on you to show up for her funeral, let alone report her death in a way that might get everyone’s attention.”

  “Killing white girls. That got everyone’s attention.”

  “You’re damn right it did. Funny how that works, isn’t it? A black woman gets raped and takes her own life? That’s not even a blip on the radar. Page 4B. 4-fucking-B! Something goes and happens to every white boy’s wet dream? Now that’s news. That’s important. So important that even my best friend is willing to drop what he’s doing to cover it. Tell me, best friend, how is it that a bunch of lowlife thugs ripping off garbage from a condemned building is more newsworthy than the death of my wife?”

  His lips writhed over his teeth. It was an expression I’d seen countless times before, one that generally preceded a right hook, but in this case potentially heralded even worse.

  “I didn’t know, for Christ’s sake!”

  Dray pressed the barrel against my temple so hard that I was certain either the bones would break or my neck would snap from the pressure. I closed my eyes against the pain and the revelation that the friend I’d come here to save was gone. In his place stood a being of pure pain and rage, a monster I had no doubt would be capable of pulling the trigger.

  He made a sobbing sound and jerked the pistol away from my head. It shook in his grasp and I saw the reflection of the light from the tears on his cheeks.

  “It took me a month to track them down. The guys who…who raped Janae. I was going to do things by the book. I had them hooked up in the back of my car, but they knew…they knew they’d be out in no time. They knew that even if there was DNA evidence, without Janae’s testimony, the worst they could expect was a year in a juvenile facility before they were released. And they were right. I knew they were right. And I knew they’d just do the same thing to someone else when they got out.”

  I felt the pain in his voice as though it were my own.

  “So I drove out to the lot behind the Eastown. Made them get out of the car. One at a time. I beat the first until he was out cold. While the other one cried in the car. Then I dragged him out of the back seat, and I hit him. And hit him. The hardier he cried, the harder I…” He drew a shuddering breath. Steadied himself. “I took them to my house. Dragged them inside. And I showed them…showed them where Janae…where she…” He thrust out his chin. “Then I took them up into the attic and I…and I…”

  “Dray…”

  His face suffused with anger. The speed with which he transitioned between emotions frightened me. He was unstable, unraveling before my very eyes.

  “Think anyone went looking for them? No one even reported them missing. Two black kids? If they’d been dogs, there would have been posters on lamp posts, but no one gives a fuck about missing black kids.”

  “It’s not about race and you know it.”

  “Look around you, Webb. It’s all about race. It was whites who pulled all their money out of the city and took their jobs with them. Whites who left this town to rot while they went on to live like kings in Dearborn and Sharonville and Flat Rock, forcing hard-working families like ours to walk away from their lives, let the banks foreclose on their homes. Making them start all over again with nothing. So you tell me none of this is about race!”

  “It’s never been about race between us, Dray. Between us. It was always you and me against the world. You want things to change? This? This won’t change a thing.”

  “You’re wrong about that. This will change everything.”

  “If everything you say is true, then all people are going to see is a black man who killed a bunch of white girls. A cop who shot all these kids. A murderer, Dray. And even if they don’t care about whoever these guys are—”

  “You don’t recognize them from the American? We sat right across from them. We all look alike to you?”

  “Screw you. You’re only going to convince them that everything you claim they believe is true.”

  He smirked. It was an expression that went against the flow of the conversation, one totally at odds with the situation.

  And suddenly everything became clear.

  “That’s not what they’re going to see at all,” he said. “They’re going to see a heroic black cop who brought down a white serial killer, despite their lifelong friendship. They’re going to see a grieving widower who sacrificed everything for the city he loved.”

  “Aragon’s been in your house, too. She’s seen your attic. She’s seen what happened up there.”

  “Who do you think helped me track them down?”

  “She knows?”

  “She knows better than to ask.”

  “No one will ever believe I did these things.”

  “They’ll see a man obsessed with preserving these old ruins at any cost. All they’ll have to do is read your blog—”

  “It’s a legitimate news outlet.”

  “—and they’ll see just how far you’re willing to go to bring attention to your cause.”

  “Killing innocent people? No one in their right mind will believe that for a second!”

  “Maybe not, but they will believe the evidence.”

  “What evidence?”

  As soon as I said the words I realized just how screwed I was. My body sagged and I closed my eyes.

  “We’ve got crime scenes straight out of old books about hell you knew so well you could quote the passages off the top of your head. Three separate crime scenes you led us to, by the way.”

  “The tips came from external social media accounts.”

  “That were closed after sending them and set up using public computers, as further investigation will show.”

  “Christ.”

  “We have four white girls abducted and murdered on nights for which your only alibi is that you were either alone in your apartment or supposedly ‘investigating’ petty crimes at abandoned buildings all by yourself.”

  “Dray…”

  “We’ve got a bunch of dead ‘bangers, the same ones security video from the American will show you had a confrontation with
, as the arresting officer will attest. And we got a fourth and final crime scene you were still in the process of completing when I arrived and interrupted the construction of your own personal hell.”

  “Aragon won’t buy it.”

  “You tell her you were coming here?”

  I let my head hang.

  “Yeah, I figure she’d already be here if you had. No one else knows how you found this place, and no one will have any reason to look into it. All they’ll see is a white boy who couldn’t hack it as a reporter and decided to draw attention to his blog—”

  “It’s a legitimate news outlet,” I whispered out of habit.

  “—by hurting the people he felt were responsible for the ruination of the city he loved. Lindsay DeWitt, daughter of Leland DeWitt—the current district attorney of Mason County and former in-house lawyer at Ford—who made a fortune negotiating the relocation deals that sent more than ten thousand jobs to Kansas City and Louisville. Alexandra Snow, daughter of Taylor Snow, founder of the Snow Group Limited, the asset liquidation company responsible for stripping the insides of these old buildings and selling off their history piecemeal for the corporations that abandoned them. Samantha Kent, whose family sued Chrysler for millions of dollars after one of the drivers from their warehouse caused severe brain damage to their youngest daughter in a car accident, contributing not only to the filing of Chapter 11, but to the PR disaster that caused the fall from grace of their warehouse supervisor. Your old man, Webb. And Andrea Irving, whose father Charles Irving is—”

  “The building inspector.”

  “You got it. The building inspector who declared each of these buildings uninhabitable and condemned them.”

  I felt the world come crashing down on me.

  “We’ve been best friends since we were six years old.”