by Ethan Cross
A glance passed between them, and then Andrew kicked the door near the handle. The striker plate burst from the jamb, and the door swung inward. Marcus followed it through the opening.
He analyzed the scene within a millisecond. A bare mattress lay on the floor. It was yellowed and stained. The whole room stank of body odor and urine. The girl sat atop the filthy mattress, and duct tape bound her hands and feet and covered her mouth. Her blond hair was greasy with sweat, and her eyes were red from crying. A purple bruise covered her cheek. To her right, a dark-skinned man in a faded black Raiders sweatshirt sat in a dirty old recliner that looked like it had been left on the curb for the garbage man to retrieve. An Ithaca shotgun with a pistol grip rested across his lap.
The man’s eyes went wide, and his hand flew toward the shotgun.
Marcus squeezed the trigger, the P226 bucked, and the man fell back into the chair. Marcus fired two more shots into the man’s chest, just to be sure.
Andrew was already at the girl’s side, cutting through her restraints. She pulled away from him like a wounded animal that didn’t understand he was trying to help. The girl’s head jerked around as if she was searching for a way to escape. Her once beautiful blue eyes had gone feral. It was the sixteen-year-old, Paula. Andrew reached for her, and some part of her finally realized what was happening. She started to sob.
“Get her out of here. I’ll find the other girl and meet you back at the car.”
“You can’t go up against these guys on your own.”
“Look at her, Andrew. We can’t just leave her here. Besides, I know what I’m doing.” Marcus pulled off his leather jacket and tossed it to Andrew, who wrapped it around the girl’s trembling shoulders. Without another word, Andrew lifted Paula from the mattress and headed toward the back door.
The sight of the girl and the thought of her sister in a similar condition somewhere in the building propelled Marcus forward. The rage was building in him now, but he tried to beat it down and stay calm. He needed to remain objective and focused, but the feral look in Paula’s eyes kept filling his mind. Physically, she would be fine. But the events of the past two days would stay with her for the rest of her life. On the surface she might appear normal, but she would never again feel safe. Her body would heal, but a piece of her soul would never return. He knew from experience.
He entered the main part of the warehouse and could hear rap music thumping and crackling out of a set of small underpowered speakers. The ceiling of bare supports and metal loomed thirty feet above his head, and tall shelves containing bins for parts lined the space. The smell of old oil and rust hung in the air. Past the end of a row of shelving he could see dust-covered tables and machinery. Vise-grips, sanders, and various metalworking tools still covered the work benches. Apparently, they had been trying to sell the equipment along with the real estate. The hum of a portable space heater droned within the open area in between the shelving. He could see a heavyset man in a red puffy coat sitting at a beige card table playing solitaire next to the heater. His large legs jutted over the sides of the small chair. The man’s dark brown hair stuck up at odd angles, and a skullcap rested on the table next to the rows of cards.
Marcus quietly worked his way behind the man and raised his gun.
A scream cut through the air. High and shrill, the sound of a young girl crying out in pain or fear. Or both.
The man in the red coat chuckled at the sound of the girl’s pain and played a ten of clubs on a jack of diamonds.
The anger in Marcus welled up again.
He placed the barrel two inches behind the man’s skull—sighting in on the medulla oblongata, where the spinal cord broadens at the base of the brain—and squeezed the trigger. The sharp thump wasn’t the little plink that was typically portrayed in the movies. It was difficult to truly silence anything more powerful than a .22 caliber pistol. But he refused to wield anything beneath a 9mm, and usually carried a .45 for stopping power. Opting for stealth on this operation, he had loaded the P226 with subsonic ammunition and an SWR Trident suppressor. It made little difference to the end result.
The fat man fell forward onto the card table, and its legs bent inward under his substantial bulk. The table shot out to the side as the man slammed to the concrete floor.
“Jeff? You okay over there?”
Marcus swore under his breath and ran forward into the rows of shelving on the opposite side of the open area. He knelt low so that no one walking down the adjoining rows would be able to see him through the shelving. Heavy footfalls slapped against the concrete, the sound moving in his direction. He aimed back toward the fat man, hoping that his accomplice would go to check on him.
But the man must have been smarter than that.
The muscles in Marcus’s forearm started to burn as time stretched out. His prey knew he was there and was waiting for him to make a mistake.
He heard a grunt and the sound of metal clacking onto concrete. At first, the domesticated side of his brain didn’t know what had just happened, but the animal part registered the danger.
The crashing noises cascaded toward him, and he rolled out into the open just as the row of shelving where he had been hiding collapsed over onto its neighbor.
His gaze darted around the room, and he glimpsed a black man in jeans and a gray hooded sweatshirt at the far end of the rows of shelving. The man raised a Heckler and Koch MP5-K and, with the gun on full auto, unleashed a spray of 9mm bullets in Marcus’s direction.
He ran toward the opposite side of the shelving past the dead man in the red coat. The bullets sparked all around him, ricocheting off the concrete and striking the parts bins. He reached the door leading to the back offices and scrambled inside as bullets chewed into the frame. The hallway stretched ahead, and he instinctively ran toward the room where they’d found Paula. The sound of tennis shoes slamming down onto concrete chased him inside.
Once in the room, Marcus grabbed the Ithaca shotgun from the dead man’s lap and pumped back the forestock to make sure that the weapon was loaded and ready. Then he grabbed hold of the filthy mattress, pulled it up onto its end, and shoved it toward the room’s entrance. Before the mattress had even struck the door frame, he had slid to the floor to the left. He lay there flat against the concrete with the shotgun pointed at the doorway.
Bullets struck the door and mattress. He heard the sound of an empty MP5-K magazine striking the concrete and a new one being slammed home. More rounds ripped through the walls, blanketing the room with drywall dust, the tiny particles filling his eyes and nostrils.
He waited.
Time stretched out.
Then the man in the hoodie pushed the mattress away from the doorway and started to step over it. He hadn’t made it a foot into the room when Marcus fired. The man’s chest exploded into red, and he flew back against the door frame, landing in the hallway.
Marcus dropped the Ithaca and followed the man into the hall, with his Sig Sauer held out in front of him. The man’s eyes stared into oblivion, and crimson stained the center of his gray sweatshirt. Marcus stepped over him and headed back to the main section of the warehouse to find Kristy.
He passed the dead heavyset man, the broken card table, the downed shelving, and the scattered and rusty parts. A set of stairs that led up to what he guessed was the factory manager’s office sat next to another series of workstations. Windows were set all around the raised room so that the manager could look out over his workers and supervise their activities.
Marcus had no illusions that Ty Phillips wouldn’t be ready for him. Rosemary’s grandson was smart and bloodthirsty, so there was little doubt that he was the leader of the Bank Crew. Ty would be set up in the manager’s office with his choice of the girls.
Marcus ascended the stairs and listened for any movement from above, but he could detect nothing beyond the hum of the space heater and the thump of rap music. A suspicion of what he would find within the office crept through his mind, and he thought about how
he should handle the situation.
He stayed to the left on the stairs and kept his weapon at the ready. At the top, he pushed through a glass-fronted door into the manager’s office. An empty desk sat along the back wall with several blank corkboards hanging above it. The room smelled musty, and the walls were a pale yellow.
Ty Phillips stood next to the desk with his left arm wrapped tight around Kristy’s neck, a Glock 19 pressed against her right temple. Phillips stood two feet taller than the girl. He was shirtless, and Kristy was crying. Phillips was thin and prison tattoos snaked across his arms and chest. Kristy was still dressed, but her clothes were torn and her lip was bleeding.
Phillips smiled and tightened his grip around her. “Stupid cop. You should’ve known to bring the SWAT team if you were coming after me. Now drop the heat, or I’ll splatter this girl and do the same to you.”
Marcus’s aim didn’t waver. “I’m not a cop. I’m a Shepherd. I keep wolves like you from hurting good people like this girl.”
Phillips laughed. “A Shepherd? That’s the craziest sh—”
The Sig Sauer bucked in Marcus’s hand. Phillips’s head jerked back, and he dropped to the floor of the office. Kristy twitched at the sound but barely reacted beyond that. She just stood there, glassy-eyed, like a trembling statue.
Marcus approached and kicked Phillips’s gun away. There was a nice neat hole above his left eye. A pool of blood was forming behind his head where Marcus imagined the medical examiner would find a large and ragged exit wound. The eyes were blank and lifeless.
Marcus put his arms around the girl. She tried to pull back, but he held firm. Eventually, she fell against him, gripping a handful of his shirt and burying her face in his chest. He placed a hand on the back of her head and said, “You’re safe now. We’re going to get you home.”
Even as he spoke the words, he realized that she no longer had a home to return to. Her parents were gone. Her old life was gone. The person she was and would become had been forever changed.
His gaze drifted down to the body of Ty Phillips. Maybe these men deserved to die for what they’d done, but was it his place to carry out their punishment? He caught sight of his reflection in the office’s many windows. He looked into the eyes of his doppelganger and wondered what he had become, what he was becoming. There was no one to blame for his choices other than himself. He was a killer. He was a monster.
Marcus wondered what separated him from men like the Bank Crew. Was he any better than them? Was he any better than Ackerman?
Day One – December 15 Evening
3
Sandra Lutrell felt a pinch on her arm and awakened from a horrible dream. She felt strange and groggy. Her head ached. She tried to reach up to rub the sleep from her eyes, but she couldn’t move her arms.
Her eyes fluttered as she tried to pull herself into full awareness. At first she didn’t recognize her surroundings. The space around her was small with gray metal walls. There was a Coleman lamp on the floor that cast a sparse puddle of illumination onto the concrete. The room was longer than it was wide, and eventually she recognized it as the interior of a storage container like the one she had used to store some extra furniture when she had first moved to Chicago from Nebraska. The job had been an upgrade, but the apartment had been a downgrade. She hadn’t been able to find a house she liked right off and had used a storage facility outside Jackson’s Grove for six months until she found the perfect place. She had fallen asleep in that same house last night.
Sandra tried to move her head but discovered that it was restrained as well. She felt cold and glanced down to find that she was still in her pajamas. Her mouth opened to scream for help, but then she saw the man in the shadows at the opposite end of the container. The darkness obscured his face, but she could see that he was dressed all in black. A syringe dangled from his right hand.
She remained completely still, her eyes wide and her muscles frozen with fear.
His words cut through the cold, moist air and sent shivers through her body. His voice was soft and lacked confidence, as if he were vying for her approval. “I just injected you with a small dose of adrenaline to counteract the other drugs that I gave you and speed up your recovery.”
Other drugs? Awareness of the implication of those words came slowly. Sandra’s thoughts were still scattered and only semi-coherent. But when realization struck her, it hit with the force of a freight train. She had been kidnapped. A man had come into her home while she slept and had stolen her away. But what would happen now? What did he plan to do with her?
She opened her mouth to plead with him, but the words wouldn’t come. Fear gripped her tongue.
He stepped forward into the light. A pair of oval wire-rimmed glasses rested on his nose, and his face was thin and pale. His brown hair was short and combed neatly to the side. All of which gave him a bookish appearance betrayed only by the above-average muscle tone showing beneath his tight black clothes. He had one of those ageless faces where he could have passed for early twenties or late thirties without anyone questioning him. He could even have passed for a teenager if it hadn’t been for the thick shadow of stubble that covered his cheeks and chin. He didn’t appear angry or insane in any way. In fact, if Sandra had passed him on a lonely street at night, she wouldn’t have felt the least bit threatened by him.
His quiet appearance gave her a boost in confidence, and she said, “Please, just let me go, and we can forget that any of this ever happened. No harm, no foul. You don’t want to go down a road that you can’t come back from.”
His gaze strayed away from hers, but then he said, “I’m sorry. I wish it didn’t have to be this way.”
He reached into a small leather bag sitting near the Coleman lamp and brought out two clamp-like devices that seemed vaguely familiar. He moved toward her.
“What are you doing? Please don’t—”
Her words became a scream as his left hand grabbed her face with surprising strength. Using his thumb and forefinger, he held her eyelids open. She tried to blink and pull away, but the restraints held her in place. With his right hand, he inserted one device into her eye, and she remembered where she had seen such an instrument before. Her eye doctor had used something similar to hold her lids open during her last visit.
Sandra bucked and cried out for help, but she could do little to prevent him from repeating the procedure with her left eye. Tears rolled down both her cheeks and clouded her vision, but she was unable to blink them away.
The man reached back toward the leather bag, and she caught the glint of something shiny in his hand.
“Please don’t do this. I’ll do whatever you want.”
“There’s no point in screaming. No one can hear you. I realize you’ll try anyway, but I would suggest that you use your last breaths for a more useful purpose.”
His hand moved toward her leg, and Sandra saw the scalpel. Her screams reverberated off the metal walls. A terrible pain sliced through her inner thigh. Then he leaned in close, and his eyes burrowed deep into hers.
“I’ve just made a deep diagonal incision through your femoral artery. It’s one of the primary paths of blood flow. You’ll be dead within a moment unless I seal the wound.”
Sobs racked her body. “Please, no. I—”
“I’ll stop the bleeding and release you if you answer my questions honestly.”
“Anything you want! Just let me go.”
“Okay, Sandra. Why are you happy?”
“What? I don’t understand.”
“We don’t have time, Sandra. You only have a moment before you die from blood loss. Tell me now. What is the key to your happiness?”
She was beginning to feel light-headed, her leg pulsing and gushing blood with each beat of her heart. The room spun, and a nauseous feeling snaked through her abdomen. Her mind fought for an answer. “I don’t know. I guess I just try to focus on the good things in life and see the best in people.”
He smiled. “That’s a goo
d, simple answer. Thank you, Sandra. Maybe, after I take your soul, I’ll be able to do the same.”
“What? You said you’d let me go.” Her leg throbbed and ached. “You need to stop the bleeding!”
“Again, I’m sorry, but I lied. Even if we were sitting in a hospital right now, there’s little they could do for you at this point.”
He reached back to the leather bag and retrieved a small cup. He filled it with some of the blood gushing from her leg. Sandra watched in horror as he raised the cup to his lips and dumped its contents down his throat.
A part of her couldn’t believe this was actually happening. This was something that happened in the movies or in those true-crime documentaries. It wasn’t something that she had ever even considered could actually happen to her. Was this really the end? There was so much that she still wanted to do. So much life left.
Her vision faded in and out, but she fought against the coming darkness.
He pulled up another chair across from her, and then she felt a cool liquid splashing over her bare skin. The strong smell touched her nostrils, but her mind couldn’t identify it.
His stare drilled deep into her, and Sandra was unable to look away. For the first time, she noticed his beautiful green eyes. Those eyes were the last thing she saw before he sparked a match and flames engulfed her body.
4
After the girl was dead, Harrison Schofield recited the words and painted the symbols onto the walls of the storage container, always following the Prophet’s exacting specifications. Then he left the storage yard. He passed a beige and white guardhouse, where he had killed the nightwatchman, and made his way down the street to his blue Toyota Camry. The neighborhood was quiet and mostly industrial—a lumber yard, a block building that housed some produce supplier. It was painted bright green and red like a watermelon. The only residences were a row of cheap townhouses on the far side of the street. The storage yard had camera surveillance, but Schofield had disabled the unit. He was familiar with the model, an AVMS 2500. No remote backups, just a simple digital recording onto an onsite hard drive.