The sections of concrete were jagged and cut my skin. They shifted beneath my weight, gave way, sent me sprawling for more secure leverage.
My head grew light, the rubble slick with my blood. I was coughing so hard I couldn’t catch my breath. My entire chest felt as though it were filled with superheated fiberglass. And still I crawled higher. My fingernails bent and tore. I dug at the stones like an animal, clawing for the edges and hurling them aside. The concrete clattered down behind me into the suffocating darkness. What little air remained after fueling the fire was rapidly being displaced by the smoke and whistling past my head.
A column of light burst seemingly from my hand and knifed into my eyes. I moaned and thrust my hand through the tiny gap, tearing the skin from my knuckles to my wrist. I pulled on the surrounding rocks and barely turned my head in time. Stars bloomed in my vision and I heard a crack, felt my scalp split. I looked up and saw the red and blue aura of police lights diffusing into the smoke before my blood trickled through my eyebrows and into my eyes.
I didn’t care. I crawled toward fresh air I could positively feel, toward the riot of sirens and shouting voices. My shirt ripped and something sharp cut into the meat of my shoulder as I dragged my torso out of the ground and onto the black gravel and coal dust where the tracks had once run.
The smoke billowed out from around my waist. I managed to pull my legs out before I was engulfed by it. I tried to shout for help, but what little voice emerged felt like a razor stropping my trachea and deteriorated into an uncontrollable cough.
I rolled onto my side and wiped the blood from my eyes. I was right about the station. The entire back half of the eighteen-story complex had fallen down into the concourse, which was now a five-story mountain of flaming rubble I could only intermittently see through the cloud of smoke and dust that expanded away from me toward Roosevelt Park and the line of emergency vehicles streaming down Vernor and converging upon the front of the building.
I stood and stumbled toward the aura of lights. Conscious thought gave way to animal instinct. Every breath was an exercise in pain. The ground teetered beneath my feet. I fell. Pushed myself up with palms slick with blood. The coal dust formed a black paste on my wounds.
The back of Michigan Central Station reminded me of a dollhouse. The smoke swirled through rooms missing their rear walls. A portion of the upper floor gave way and brought down a cascade of debris even as flames burst from the lower floors and raced up through the walls.
I heard the thupping sound of a helicopter I couldn’t see. The smoke billowed downward and away from it, clearing a path ahead of me toward the front of the station and what had to be every police cruiser in the state. In the glow of their lights I saw silhouettes converge upon the side of the building. Fire trucks launched hundred-foot flumes of water that rained down upon a cluster of shadows gathered in a wash of headlights.
I brayed like a dying beast and shambled toward them. None of them so much as looked in my direction. I was nearly upon them when I realized why.
A firefighter strode toward the group, his helmet and overcoat black with ash and soot. He gestured off to his left toward where the flames swept up the eastern side of the building. Two uniformed officers shielded their eyes against the glare and sprinted toward the side door from which the fireman had emerged. A third officer turned away and shouted into his transceiver.
“…have to get someone in there! They could still be alive!”
The other officer pushed the firefighter in the chest.
“What if it were your guys trapped in there? Get your ass back in there and—”
“We already have every available body in there searching for them,” the fireman said. The sound of his voice caused my blood to run cold. “And it’s only a matter of time before that entire building comes down—”
A section of bricks crumbled from around one of the windows on the top floor and rained down on them.
His voice. The firefighter’s voice.
The fireman pushed past the officer and headed toward where two more fire trucks rumbled into the lot.
My legs gave out from beneath me and dropped me to my knees.
The firefighter glanced over his shoulder and I caught a glimpse of his eyes through the Plexiglas shield, above the breathing apparatus over his mouth and nose. Like his voice, I would have recognized them anywhere.
The badge and the blue shirt. They hadn’t been his uniform as a detective.
The helicopter swooped around for another pass over the station, blowing a curtain of smoke between Dray and me.
A crippling sense of sorrow overwhelmed me. It was a physical sensation unlike any I’d ever experienced, one I equated with my heart breaking.
When the smoke cleared again, he was gone.
I turned away from the burning building and the police, from the fire trunks and the ambulances, and walked on numb legs back in the direction from which I’d come, wishing I’d just closed my eyes and let the flames take me.
THIRTY -TWO
I followed the main tracks a quarter-mile to the southeast, to the point where they disappeared into the Detroit River Tunnel. On the other side of the darkness lay Windsor, Ontario, assuming the tunnel remained patent that far. I climbed the concrete stairs to the retaining wall and hauled myself out into the urban prairie behind a stretch of abandoned industrial buildings on Rosa Parks Boulevard. From the cover of the trees I watched the remains of Michigan Central Station for several minutes. Two more helicopters had joined the first and circulated the smoke in such a way that it reminded me of a mushroom cloud. Their spotlights played upon the vague outline of the office tower, which looked several stories shorter than it had when last I saw it. There were police lights everywhere as far as I could see. The only sirens now came from the few straggling emergency vehicles rocketing through the surrounding neighborhoods, where groups of onlookers gathered at a safe distance to see what all of the commotion was about.
It would take time to pull the bodies out from underneath so many tons of rubble and Lord only knew what kind of condition they would be in when they did. It would take days to identify all of them, even longer to determine that my body wasn’t among them, if they ever did at all.
I emerged from the trees onto the sidewalk on Rosa Parks, where several cars had pulled to the curb for a better view of the light and smoke show. None of the passengers appeared to notice me as I limped between the vehicles and crossed toward Howard. Lafayette was a block to the south. Not a single car passed, even during the time it took to reach the Burger King, three blocks to the northeast.
There was a Goodwill donation box around the side by the Dumpsters. The lock was broken and inside I found some clothes that looked like they’d fit well enough. I changed in the alley behind the drive-thru and used the spigot on the back of the liquor store to wash my face, hands, and what little remained of my hair with mercifully cool water. I cleaned my wounds as best I could and clenched used napkins in my fists to stanch the renewed flow of blood from my palms. I transferred my wallet and keys into my new pants and stuffed my old clothes into the garbage.
I stopped when I saw my reflection in the window of the dark store. I looked like complete and utter shit in a pair of jeans I had to hold to keep from falling off and a pair of shoes saturated with filthy water and caked with soot, but the sweatshirt concealed the burns on my arms, which were only now beginning to hurt like a mother as the surge of adrenaline waned. The hood concealed my patchy hair and the grunge I couldn’t scrub off. I looked more of less like anyone who’d be out on the streets this time of night.
I waited for the 48 Bus off of Trumbull. I thought about my car, sitting there in the middle of all those police cruisers with a quarter-tank of gas, while I turned my bus pass over and over in my hands. If there were something ironic about this situation, it was beyond my ability to appreciate.
The bus arrived more or less on time, as far as I could tell anyway. The driver didn’t take his eyes
off the road once as I boarded and swiped my pass. I sat in the back and slumped down so he wouldn’t be able to see my face or the shuddering of my shoulders as I cried.
I disembarked near my apartment and passed through throngs of neighbors I didn’t recognize. They’d gathered on the sidewalk to watch the red and blue-stained smoke dissipate into the night sky two miles to the west. The lights from the choppers cut through it like scythes. Several people had the live coverage on their cellphones, but no one seemed to have the slightest idea what had actually transpired. As far as the media knew—at this juncture, anyway—this was just another case of arson in a city renowned for it. Soon enough the details would begin to leak and Dray would get his wish. He’d get to watch this whole city burn.
Every inch of my body hurt so badly I had to sit down in the elevator. I crawled out when I reached my floor. My skin felt as though it had been turned inside out and I was now wearing all of my nerves on the outside.
Turning my key in the lock sapped me of just about everything I had left, emotionally as well as physically. I knew this would be the last time I entered this place. Crappy though it was, it was mine.
My computer was a labor of love and pretty much the only thing of value I owned, outside of my car, neither of which I expected to see again anytime soon. I grazed it with my fingertips as I walked past and commenced packing a bag. More than anything I wanted to pass out in my bed and pray to awaken into a different world, but I still had an important role to play in Dray’s endgame. I understood that now, and whether or not he believed it, this had always been about the two of us. It was only fitting that it should end that way, too.
I packed my old laptop, everything with pain-killing properties from my medicine cabinet, all of what passed for food from my cupboard, several changes of clothes, and the Colt 1911 pistol my father gave me as a parting gift before setting off for Ohio and a new life. I took a handful of ibuprofen with water from the sink and slathered my arms, legs, and face with a layer of Neosporin, which did nothing for the pain itself, but did eliminate the live-wire sensation.
I stood in the doorway for several minutes, trying to commit to memory the life that once was, before closing the door behind me for the last time. Soon enough there would be forensics teams poring over every inch of the interior and examining every file on my computer. Profilers would spend countless hours attempting to piece together the sequence of events that caused a lower middle class kid from Boston-Edison to become a serial killer. They’d scrutinize every facet of my life from my mother dying at an early age to me being essentially raised as a brother to the black cop who had halted my murderous spree. They’d go on talk shows and spout theories regarding my failed newspaper career and my descent into what could only be considered abject poverty by the most liberal of standards, where a considerable portion of my income was paid by the barter of goods better suited to a third world country, or perhaps ideally suited to this city.
The smart ones, though, they’d understand. They’d read my blog and they’d find my soul bared for all to see. They’d find a man out-of-synch with his surroundings, a man who longed for a better time that would never again be, a man who wanted nothing to do with modern society or the world around him. They would define that “better time” using the buildings I tried to save and the timeframe during which I was raised. And then they’d look at the victims: the daughters of the men who had ruined my father’s life—and mine by extension—and had cost him his livelihood and his house and sent him packing for a job that was beneath him. They’d see the dead gangbangers from the security video inside the American and they’d make the correlation. They’d see me birthed into a population fairly equally divided between the races and they’d say I believed the decline of the city I professed to love mirrored the rise in the percentage of the black population.
And they’d look at a city in ashes and say that even in death I’d won. I’d completed my own personal quest for vengeance and I’d created my own vision of hell for the world to see.
No one saw me exit the complex by the side stairs or hurl my keys into the hedge, nor did anyone so much as glance in my direction as I walked to the north through the Lafayette Plaisance and vanished into the night.
THIRTY -THREE
I begged a couple of dollars off of some strangers on the street and found a pretentious, low-rent coffee shop where I could abuse the free-refill policy and the Wi-Fi for several hours without anyone caring too much. The floor was sealed-concrete and rather than tables and chairs they had mismatched couches and recliners. The guy behind the counter had his hair done up like Johnny Bravo, a hipster beard in a color that didn’t match, and a tight T-shirt rolled at the shoulders to show off tattoos I had no doubt he’d selected from a book. He asked me what kind of coffee I wanted, openly mocked me when I said “Black,” and directed me with a dismissive wave toward a chalkboard with the day’s selection of beans. I opted for the Tanzanian Peaberry, largely because I recognized both words and could pronounce them without incurring further disdain, and took a seat as far away from the other patrons as possible, while still being able to see the TV. It was tuned to CNN for the barista, who was obviously so in-tune with the greater world that he didn’t need the sound on.
The images on the screen were more than enough for me, too. I recognized Michigan Central Station, or rather what was left of it. The remainder of the office tower had fallen, leaving the crime scene investigation team countless tons of rubble through which to sift. Fortunately for them, their narrative had already been written for them.
The screen flashed to images of the station in its heyday, with men in military uniforms bounding off of trains and into the arms of the women who’d picked up the slack in their absence. The following pictures demonstrated its decay. Black and white became color, and color faded to tombstone-gray. And, finally, again to the rubble, where far beyond the line of police tape, the medical examiner’s men carted off gurneys bearing silver body bags zipped fully closed. The time stamp in the corner read 8:51 a.m., a full hour ago. The words across the bottom read “Remains of at Least Six African-Americans Exhumed from Collapsed Concourse.”
I was actually glad for the lack of sound when the next picture appeared on the screen. It was the headshot I’d used for my byline back when I worked for the Free Press. I’d worn my hair shaggy back then and had a goatee that made me look like a cross between Robert Downey, Jr. and Ming the Merciless. It was an unveiled attempt by the media to demonize me, I knew, and I had no doubt it would work perfectly. When they started showing pictures of the women I’d supposedly murdered, I turned my attention to my laptop and the reason I’d come here in the first place.
There was still one article left to write.
I told my story in my own words, knowing full well that no one would believe it. At least not until they looked inside Dray’s house, if it was even still standing when all of this was over. At the root of that disbelief was the single most glaring question, the crack in the foundation of my story that caused it to crumble beneath even the most casual scrutiny. Why would my professed lifelong best friend set me up? Why not pick any other person on the planet, any of the countless people he neither knew nor cared about? The answer was simple, and yet at the same time completely contradictory. It was because he knew me so well that he was able to set me up so perfectly, and why it never would have worked had he selected a stranger off the street.
Regardless of what he said, I don’t think his motives were personal. Granted, I should have been there for him when he needed me, but I genuinely believed that in his broken mind he thought that he was doing what we both would have wanted, what was best for the city we had both set out to save.
Detroit no longer resembled the fictional place I’d crafted in my own personal narratives. It was a town with a dead past and a future not beholden to it. This was not the magical land of our childhood; it was just another city like any other, a society populated by would-be victims like myself,
who were just waiting for someone to hand them a match and give them a reason to strike it.
That was exactly what Dray had done. He’d given the black population their match in the form of a white demon, one who murdered their children and represented everything that was wrong with their world, while simultaneously showing white America that their daughters weren’t safe, that it was the very success they’d spent their whole lives achieving that made them vulnerable, that the devil wore a mask that looked just like their own. And all because of what this city had done to him after he’d given his life to it.
I concluded with the one thing I needed to write more than anything else: a eulogy for a woman whose life hadn’t mattered to this city, but to whose death its own was inextricably linked.
I time-delayed the post to go live at midnight, knowing that once it did, no one would believe that my remains were among those the authorities continued to pull out of the station. They’d already identified several of the victims by their personal possessions. One by an engraved ring, another by the distinctive cross he wore around his neck, a third by a gold tooth right in front. Their faces appeared on the screen above names I didn’t recognize, but would never forget. They were pictures chosen by mothers who saw their children as the angels they once were and could have been again, not as what they had become. It was all a part of the game. The media put a face to the victims with which people could identify. They wanted to make their viewers feel the loss on a personal level, as though their world would never be the same for the loss of these boys. I’d done the same thing many times. I could al-most hear the words of the victims’ families and neighbors as they cried in front of the cameras, playing their part in the show. I envied them their tears, for I had none left to give.
The screen inevitably filled with a montage of events stolen from my worst nightmares—as I always knew it would—the kind of images that would have convinced Dante that the depths of hell were infinite and he’d only just dipped his toe in its waters. I watched everyday people smash through the window of a liquor store; kids wearing ski masks and hoods topple a police car; the body of a storeowner lying on the sidewalk as looters trampled his corpse in the process of stealing his wares; crowds shouting and raising their fists as tear gas swirled around them; officers with riot gear indiscriminately firing rubber bullets; the governor denouncing the violence from the safety of Lansing, even as National Guard vehicles descended the I-75 off-ramp toward Michigan Central Station. And the one thing that stood out more than anything else was the rage and hatred on the faces of these people. Black faces. White faces. All faces, as though every single person had a vested interest in his own obliteration.
Condemned: A Thriller Page 16