Condemned: A Thriller

by Michael McBride

  “Promise me you’re going to talk to me before you run off and do anything stupid again.” He smirked. “I don’t have so many friends I can afford to lose any more.”

  I smiled and shoved him off of me.

  A clattering sound overhead.

  I glanced up to see Aragon climbing out of the pipe chase, zipping a plastic bag. She caught me looking and tucked it into the cargo pocket on her right thigh. I turned away before I invited more trouble.

  Dray wandered away and spoke in a quiet voice into his transceiver so I wouldn’t overhear.

  I removed my cellphone from my pocket and woke up the screen. The vibration signaled I had a new message. It had come through my Twitter account from a sender named magic3124. I read the message twice and looked up just as Dray clicked off his two-way and slid it back into his jacket pocket. His face looked old in a way I never imagined it ever would. His eyes were so bloodshot that I wondered when he last slept.

  “We done here?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “We’re done.”

  He turned his back on me as though I’d already left. I knew my cue to exit.

  I read the message again.

  He had enough on his plate without me adding any more to it. If anything looked sketchy, I’d call him. Besides, the message seemed harmless enough.

  Hear u pay cash for tips. Someone busted out a bunch of windows at the Metro. How much that worth?

  TEN

  The personal message had been sent to my account more than half an hour before the notification reached my cellphone, presumably due to the spotty signal inside the Eastown. I replied that I’d pay a hundred bucks if the tip led to a conviction. I didn’t expect a reply and wasn’t surprised when I didn’t get one. Half the time tips like this one turned out to be an attempted cash grab. I’d arrive to find the broken glass beneath the windows buried under a year’s worth of dead leaves or the arson so old you couldn’t even smell a hint of smoke. What it came down to, though, was I needed every tip I could get. Despite the venom with which she said it, Aragon was right; mine was only one of a growing number of independent news outlets—which some might dismissively call blogs—fighting for a share of a finite market, and a diminishing one at that. I was rapidly reaching the point that if I didn’t get an influx of cash soon, I was either going to have to lean on my advertisers to pay me in cash—although I could probably get decent money on eBay for another bullet proof vest—or do the one thing in the world I least wanted to do.

  Get a real job.

  After I was laid off from the DFP, I spent a handful of years teaching high school English. It wasn’t a bad gig, all things considered. I didn’t have to be there until eight, I could teach pretty much anything I wanted as long as it fell within the established curriculum, and I was home before rush hour ramped up. I even got to devote an entire quarter to medieval and renaissance literature, and not just Chaucer and Shakespeare. I thought maybe if I exposed them to some of the darker works—the kind to which pop culture still paid homage in its twisted way—I might be able to inspire them. Hell, there was even a video game based on Dante’s Inferno. But I didn’t reach them, and the experience left me miserable and demoralized.

  Theirs was a generation that no longer even felt the need to pay lip service to those who came before them. Their attitude was a symptom of what I considered a disease of society, a woeful acceptance of the inevitability of their journey to ashes. I simply reached a point where I couldn’t take it anymore and had to step away, find a path that allowed me to effect change, if only in my own mind.

  The mere thought of going back made me sick to my stomach. I could always take the first random job that presented itself, but dividing my time meant I’d be scooped at every turn and there was no way I could go on for very long punching a clock during the day and staying up all night chasing leads, especially if they looked no more promising than this one.

  The Metropolitan Building occupied a wedge of land shaped like a slice of pizza on John R. Street, between Broadway and Woodward, at the terminus of Farmer Street. The twelve-story neo-Gothic building always reminded me of the final battle with the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters, with its spires and creepy terra cotta knight’s head leering from the high-peaked gable.

  It must have truly been a sight to behold when it opened in 1925, an imposing architectural marvel the likes of which few ever imagined would rise from the Midwestern plains. Its marble lobby featured an ornate medieval ceiling and windows looking into the finest jewelry stores in the downtown area. The first four floors were like self-contained malls featuring beauty parlors and dress shops and wholesale jewelers, while the fifth through tenth were known as the Jewelers Courts and were once filled with diamond cutters and goldsmiths, watchmakers and repair shops. The eleventh and twelfth were significantly smaller and offered exclusive patio space on the staggered roofs to advertising, real estate, and insurance agencies.

  The Metropolitan changed hands numerous times until the fortunes of its tenants turned with the rest of the economy and the glittering Jewelers Building, as it was known, closed for good in 1979. It’s been vacant ever since, this monolithic structure built to survive the worst either man or nature could throw at it. The walls would probably crack a wrecking ball and the reinforced floors, which had been designed to withstand the combined weight of countless locked safes, would take nothing shy of an act of God to bring down. The phrase “they just don’t make them like the used to” always springs to mind, but the sad reality was that they would never be made this way again. Ours had become a disposable society—from cells phones to computers and our cars to our houses—made to last just long enough to outlive their warranties before either falling apart or being replaced by a newer model. I often wondered if any portion of the city would be left for archaeologists to discover ten thousand years from now or if the totality of our communal existence would be one enormous midden heap of technology.

  I parked against the curb on Farmer and craned my neck to see all the way to the top of the Metropolitan. Surprisingly, even after more than three decades, the majority of the windows remained intact. Most were spray-painted from the inside, not with the vulgarities one would ordinarily expect, but with large red hearts that could be seen from blocks away. Every time I saw them it made me think there just might be hope for us yet. And then I saw all of the gang tags and graffiti covering the front façade and remembered where I was.

  The most recent picture of the building on my iPad was from six weeks ago and showed forty-one of one hundred fifty-six windows boarded over. Only the fifth floor had been spared, for whatever reason. From where I sat now, I could see no differences, other than a fresh application of paint by a gentleman who went by the name of Five Finger—singular—and a row of windows that now resembled and enormous face and hands, as though some bulb-nosed caricature were peering over a fence into the yard of a neighbor who had no intention of watering his dead lawn or picking up the dog crap.

  There was no doubt in my mind I was wasting my time. At least I was close enough to grab a burger at Foran’s Grand Trunk Pub while I was down here, so the trip wouldn’t be a complete bust.

  I climbed out of my car and slammed the door. I locked the doors by remote and adjusted my vest so no one could see it under my shirt, let alone come up with the wise idea of testing its effectiveness. It was like wearing a brisket on a scuba dive, I know, but one of these days I was going to surprise some crackhead wired to the gills in one of these old places and we were going to find out how well two hundred fifty bucks in ad revenue stood up to nine millimeters of steel.

  There was no one on the street, at least that I could see, and even the sounds of traffic on Woodward seemed sluggish and subdued.

  I crossed John R. onto the sidewalk in front of the Metropolitan. There was no glass, not of the kind they used for windows anyway. The plywood barricading the front door was just warped enough that I could see where people had pried it back to squeez
e through. I hopped the chain link fence blocking the alley between the Metropolitan and the Wurlitzer Building and looked straight up.

  There were no fancy hearts on the eastern elevation, nor were there any other decorations in the windows. No one had made any effort to board up the ones that were broken. The ground was covered with shattered bricks fallen from the rotting siding and the graffiti was of the you-kiss-your-mother-with-that-mouth? variety. A splay of broken glass sparkled from the oily alley maybe fifty feet ahead. I found the source and marked it on the fourth floor, fourth unit back.

  I returned to the front of the building and wriggled through the gap beside the door, near the ground. My light stained the cracked marble tiles and ornate friezes crimson, as though the building itself were on fire and just didn’t know it yet. Entire ceiling panels and large pieces of plaster leaned against the walls where they’d been cast aside by the scrappers who carved the metals from the carcass. It smelled of ammonia and bird crap, and a faint haze of dust hung in the air to be collected by the thick cobwebs swaying with the movement of air caused by my passage. I walked past storefronts with faded names above the doors and elevators the color of rust on my way to the wrought iron-enclosed staircase.

  My footsteps echoed from the marble and came away with a layer of dust. There were other prints here, too, one on top of another on top of another, nearly forty years of trespassers. The second level had been stripped to the bare floor and walls, all of which were black and looked like they’d been rubbed with charcoal and sprayed with gobs of ash, a consequence of early remediation efforts to clean out the radioactive residue of the radium the watchmakers used and Lord only knew what other carcinogenic chemicals jewelers kept on hand a century ago. I saw a bed of newspapers and an impressive pyramid of bottles, but nothing that warranted detouring from my course.

  The third floor might as well have been its twin. All I could see from the landing down the long corridors were open doorways through which the light from the windows sparkled with dust and threw fans of light onto floors so thick with dust it looked like industrial winter.

  The fourth floor felt different. There was just something about it, something hard to define. Where the other levels felt abandoned, this one lent the impression that no one might have been there now, but might be coming back at any second. And there was a smell, one I’d encountered in countless buildings like this one. It positively filled the air, as though every rodent within a hundred miles had crawled inside the walls and ceiling to die and liquefy into a crusted stew of viscera. I had to cover my mouth and nose to keep from vomiting. If I had one glaring weakness outside of my control—and, to be honest, part of the reason I would have made a lousy doctor—it was an über-sensitive sniffer and a hair-trigger gag reflex.

  I heard the distant traffic from Broadway through the broken windows of the rooms to my right, and beneath it, a buzzing sound that reminded me of fluorescent lights.

  There were several other sets of tracks, indistinct like fresh prints in recent snowfall. I counted the storefronts as I passed. The sun shone through the windows of those on my left, while a cold darkness overflowed from those on the right. There was a safe and a push broom in the second room to my left, a pile of crumbled ceiling to my right. An orange chair sat in the center of the third room to my left, while the right housed an old desk that looked like someone had attacked with a hatchet.

  The breeze through the broken windows blew the dust and stench into my face. My stomach clenched. I tried not the think about the hook-toothed vermin in the walls, their bellies bloating to the point that all of the fur stood on end, swelling and swelling until their skin could simply no longer contain the vile fluids of decomposition—

  I closed my eyes and focused on regulating my breathing until the nausea passed.

  The buzzing grew louder and began to dissociate. What originally sounded like a steady electronic hum was actually myriad distinct sounds with slightly different tones.

  I bumbled in my pocket for my cellphone and prepared to take the pictures of the vandalism I would post on my site and send to the police, for documentation’s sake. Often, I could get a clear shot of a fingerprint on a pane of glass or the frame of a door. I knew no one was going to run them through the IAFIS or anything, but maybe somewhere down the line they’d prove to be the difference between serving time and a slap on the wrist.

  I rounded the corner and crossed the threshold.

  A cloud of flies erupted at my intrusion. I dropped my phone in my hurry to cover my mouth, to no avail. I turned and sprayed the hallway with the residua of my breakfast and a belly full of acid.

  My head was spinning when I retrieved my phone and speed-dialed a number I knew by heart.

  Dray picked up on the second ring.

  “You said to call you,” I said. “Well…I’m calling you now.”

  ELEVEN

  I leaned against the cold wall and cradled my face in my hands. Even through my closed eyes I could see the red and blue lights from the cruiser parked across the mouth of the alley. As much as they served to intensify my burgeoning headache, they were vastly preferable to the lingering images of the girl I’d seen upstairs. The mere thought of her remains made me gag. I stood and paced the alley to create something resembling airflow. Even with the reek of the Dumpsters and the haze of exhaust that hung over the Motor City, I could still smell her. What was left of her anyway. I recalled reading that all smells were particulate, which meant that microscopic particles of her were still inside of me. In my nostrils, my sinuses, my eyes. Lodged where no one could reach them, infinitesimally small pieces of rotten flesh and decay. Of death itself.

  I heaved again, but there was nothing left in my stomach. A strand of saliva stretched from my lips. One foot. Two. I wiped it away with the back of my hand and flung it to the ground.

  The flash from a camera strobed the alleyway from the fourth-story window. It reminded me of lightning. For the first time, I realized the sun had set. The sirens and lights must have disguised its descent.

  I leaned against the brick wall and slid down to the asphalt. Pulled my knees up to my chest and rested my forehead against them. All I wanted to do right now was go home. Crawl under the covers and sleep the rest of my life away. I felt sick. More than sick. I felt diseased, as though some vile pathogen had seeped through my pores and infected my very soul. Finding the girl last night…finding Lindsay…that had been different. She’d been so recently deceased she seemed almost peaceful, as though she had merely fallen asleep and been unable to awaken. And there’d been a sense of mystery, of adventure, and—I freely admit it—a little excitement. I’d felt almost like the protagonist on a TV show, the unwitting hero drawn into a battle of wits with the sadistic killer, whose ultimate denouement was never in doubt. But this girl…this poor girl…

  Shouting from the front of the building. I looked up to see the gathered reporters silhouetted by the blinding lights of the video cameras behind them as they rushed toward the officers who reinforced the line of police tape around the front of the Metropolitan. They’d given up shouting for my attention, either because they’d tired of my lack of response or worried I’d throw up all over their shoes.

  I closed my eyes and again buried my face. I didn’t want to think about this anymore. My pulse was racing and I couldn’t seem to catch my breath. I felt cold, despite the sweat that dampened my brow and palms, which I wiped unconsciously on my thighs. I was in shock and there was nothing I could do about it. At least not until I’d played my part here, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that the worst was yet to come.

  The responding officers had arrived within minutes of my call. I’d still been standing in the corridor, my back pressed against the opposite wall, when I heard the sirens and saw the lights. They filtered through the painted windows and stained the haze of dust hovering around me. It wasn’t until I heard the thunder of footsteps on the stairs and stared blankly into the flashlight beams of two officers shouting for m
e to show them my hands and get on the ground that I was able to look away from the girl. The same thoughts just kept playing in my head on a continuous loop: this was someone’s child, someone’s daughter. This was a girl whose father had pushed her on a swing and whose mother had tied ribbons in her hair. This was a girl who’d made wishes on shooting stars and birthday candles, who’d sung in the shower and danced in the rain, who’d dreamed of a life that didn’t end alone in a decrepit building, where even God couldn’t see her. And now she was nothing. Everything she had been, everything she had wanted to be, had been stolen from her.

  I only remembered bits and pieces after that. Being hustled down the stairs and out the door. Sitting in the back of a cruiser, staring down Farmer as news vans arrived and their satellite dishes ascended into the sky. The flash of cameras photographing me through the window before the officers realized what was happening and ushered me into the alley. I must have given my statement a half-dozen times and yet I could hardly recall a word I’d said. All I could think about were the gates of hell and the knowledge that somewhere up there, the monster who killed that girl had left something for me.

  “How you holding up?”

  I raised my head to find Dray standing over me. His expression was one of genuine concern, but he looked through me when he spoke as though his mind were someplace else.

  In answer, I held up my hand so he could see it was still shaking.

  “I’m going to need your help. You know that, right? You up for it?”

  I nodded and allowed him to pull me to my feet. He caught my eyes and held them.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ll be fine. Let’s just get this over with.”

  He guided me around the building and past the throng of reporters. The board had been removed from the front door and the CSRT had erected high-wattage lighting arrays to either side of the lobby. A man in a full-body white jumpsuit directed us to a table with boxes of shoe covers and rubber gloves. They’d already marked a path where we were allowed to walk, through the lobby and past the elevators, and along the side of the stairs all the way to the fourth floor, where the evidence response team crawled all over the place like ants at a picnic. I saw a plastic bag containing what I was certain was my vomit and cringed at the thought of someone having to not only collect it, but go through it later.