Condemned: A Thriller Read online

  CONDEMNED

  A Thriller

  Michael McBride

  Condemned copyright © 2015 by Michael McBride

  All Rights Reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from Michael McBride.

  For more information about the author, please visit his website: www.michaelmcbride.net

  Also by Michael McBride

  NOVELS

  Ancient Enemy

  Bloodletting

  Burial Ground

  Fearful Symmetry

  Innocents Lost

  Predatory Instinct

  Sunblind

  The Coyote

  Vector Borne

  NOVELLAS

  F9

  Remains

  Snowblind

  The Event

  COLLECTIONS

  Category V

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  CONDEMNED

  CONDEMNED

  A Thriller

  Michael McBride

  Dedicated to the memory of the American Dream

  R.I.P

  Special thanks to Paul Goblirsch, Leigh Haig, John Foley, and Kyle Lybeck, the incredible team at Thunderstorm Books; Shelley Milligan; Andrea Rawson; Jeff Strand; Kimberly Yerina; my amazing family; and all of my friends and loyal readers, without whom this book would not exist.

  PROLOGUE

  The past is a weapon with which we continually wound ourselves. It is that very infliction that instills within us a sense of belonging to something greater than ourselves, something that was never meant to last. So we romanticize it and in doing so create memories of a place that never really existed, a place that can’t possibly be held accountable for what has become of it in time, much as the body cannot be blamed for the ravages of age and disease. The truth is simple: everything that lives must die, and in the vacuum created by its absence, an unlimited number of pasts converge at a point from which an infinite number of futures diverge. In this momentary state of otherness, we are gifted with both a new collective past and an altered future, for better or worse. In clinging to what could have been at the expense of what is, we commit the most grievous of crimes against ourselves, for we exist in a perpetual state of presents, with the ever-fluctuating future and its limitless paths spread out before us. Yet not one of them leads to a past that exists only in the faded colors of memory. The intervening years that have wrought physical deterioration upon everything we once held dear, but can no longer remember why.

  If we look back, we can clearly see our footprints in the dust of the ages, and all of the forks where we could have chosen a different path. Maybe one of them would have led to a better place than where we are now, a place where the past bleeds through into our everyday lives in comforting and reassuring ways, rather than as the lingering scent of feces to remind us that the walls are filled with rats. We blame others for what has become of our idyllic past, and yet ours remain the only footprints to be seen. Ultimately we are forced to accept that no amount of longing will resurrect a bygone era and nothing we do can forestall the inevitable. That is the definition of growing up: the recognition that our days in the sun are now done, that they’ve been usurped by another generation with a different past, one we didn’t know enough to prevent. It is their past that is the direct consequence of our own and their future we failed to ensure would never come to pass. Or maybe we’re all guilty of deluding ourselves into believing that we ever had control of our own destinies.

  T.S. Eliot believed that end would come not with a bang, but a whimper. I always knew the world would end with the wail of sirens and the sound of gunfire. There was never any other way it could come to pass. Not for this city. Ours has always been a collective fate, despite our best efforts to slow the countdown to our own inevitable self-destruction.

  My name is Peter Webber, and I’m no longer convinced that obliteration isn’t in our best interests.

  THREE DAYS EARLIER

  ONE

  I left my car at the Mobil station on Van Dyke and paid the guy behind the glass ten bucks to keep an eye on it. The street lamp across Harper was busted. The weeds growing from the cracks in the sidewalk were easily two feet tall. Broken glass crunched underfoot as I jogged across the deserted street and ducked into the trash-strewn lot between a church with a hand-painted sign and the old Eastown Theatre. I watched for the electric-blue glow of an acetylene torch above the roofline or the flicker of sparks around the seams of the boarded windows and prayed I wasn’t too late.

  Birch and maple trees grew wild against the graffiti-covered western wall of the theater. It was so dark I could barely see the narrow path leading between them and into the cracked-asphalt and gravel courtyard, which was riddled with charred debris and shattered bottles. Power lines hummed overhead and the whole area smelled like piss. The windows of the adjacent apartment building had all been boarded over long ago, even before the fire burned the front half to the ground maybe five years back.

  I always carried a micro Gerber recon flashlight. It had an LED bulb and four colored lenses that could be changed with the turn of a dial. The red lens wasn’t especially bright, but it allowed me to see into deep shadows without sacrificing my peripheral vision or advertising my location. I swept it across the back of the building and into the recessed corner. The upper half of the entryway was still boarded over. Someone had pried off the bottom half and covered it with a mattress with rusted box springs. I tightened the Velcro straps on my bulletproof vest, shoved the mattress aside, and ducked out of the way. Pressed my back against the brick wall and listened. All I heard was the rushing of blood in my ears.

  I shined the red light into the theater and crawled inside before I could change my mind.

  The Eastown Theatre opened back in 1931 to a full house clamoring to see Clark Gable in Sporting Blood. It was an architectural marvel designed by V.J. Waier, an elegant blending of Renaissance Revival styles, chief among them the Spanish and Italian Baroque. I imagined it how it once was: men and women dressed to the nines climbing out of gleaming Model As and passing the box office beneath the flashing lights of the marquee. Crossing the imported marble tiles of the lavish lobby and ascending the ornate, sweeping staircases to the mezzanine. Some couples filtered off into the grand ballroom with its arched windows and band shell for a night of swing dancing across the polished oak floor, while the majority crammed into the 2,500-seat theater, modeled after a Parisian opera house, its ceiling and balconies gilded with gold.

  It served as a symbol of the opulence and prosperity of Detroit until the summer of 1967, when the 12th Street Riot kicked off the white flight to the suburbs and the city took its first steps toward ruination. The seats were ripped out and the theater stripped to the bare concrete and two years later it reopened as one of the most notorious rock venues in the country, where bands like the Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd, The Who, MC5, and The Stooges played to packed houses of blue-collar kids high on whatever drugs they could find to take the edge off the angst that spread like a pandemic in the wake of the riots. By the nineties it was little more than a deathtrap housing the occasional rave.

  I ascended a concrete staircase covered with mounds of plaster and cigarette butts into a curving tunnel through which Alice Cooper, Jim Morrison, and Robert Plant once strode toward the electric hum of a generation willing to go to war for them. The black paint on the walls was chipping, the drug-fueled render
ings in psychedelic colors of wizards and dragons and clowns and landscapes were barely recognizable in the dim flashlight beam. The ceiling was torn open in an attempt to salvage any conduits or wiring that could be melted down and sold.

  I emerged onto a stage buried under the rubble of the fallen roof and stared out upon a vision of ruin on an almost apocalyptic scale. Where once rows of seats were packed beneath the balcony, there were now mountains of mildewing plaster, broken bricks, and chunks of concrete, where sections of the balcony had succumbed to water rot. Six moldering easy chairs the red of arterial blood were arranged in a half-circle at the foot of the stage. Bare brick showed through walls eroded by the elements; the few remaining angelic busts mounted high up on the walls were mottled with rust. The golden dome above the balcony had partially collapsed—a consequence of scrappers carving out the support girders—and hung like a picked scab, admitting a crescent of the night sky.

  An almost crippling sensation of loss struck me as I surveyed the destruction in the crimson glow. It was a feeling with which I was becoming increasingly familiar, one I likened to lying in a grave and staring up at the headstone, but being unable to read the name through the overgrowth of weeds and moss to tell if it was my own.

  A drop of water struck my shoulder.

  How much longer would the roof hold up before simply acquiescing with a sigh and bringing the walls down with it?

  I never knew this place in its prime. By the time I was born, its name had been changed to the Showcase Theater and featured adult films for the trench coat and comb-over crowd, which didn’t mind rubbing elbows with strangers. I don’t know why I felt such a strong sense of attachment to these old places. I think it was more what they represented than what they actually were. I’ve been told I have an old soul. The way I see it, I’m simply out of synch with the times. I wish I could have lived back then, when people had civic pride and took ownership of their place in the world. I was tired of standing knee-deep in the blood of a society exsanguinating from countless self-inflicted wounds.

  But I wasn’t willing to give up on it yet, either.

  Another drop struck the ground in front of me. I shined the light down at the puddle near my right foot. The fluid turned bright red in the beam.

  Several more drops struck the fluid as I watched. I followed their trajectory up toward the exposed rafters and shined my beam upon the body suspended halfway in between, swinging gently from the rope tied around its ankles.

  A drop of blood swelled from the index finger of the lifeless hand a dozen feet above me. I watched helplessly as it streaked through the darkness and struck my cheek.

  TWO

  I was sitting on one of the stinky chairs with my cellphone in my lap when I heard the sirens and saw the revolving red and blue aura through the holes in the ceiling. The Eastown fell under the jurisdiction of the Eastern District of the Detroit P.D. The station was roughly a mile to the northeast on Gratiot. It took more than ten minutes for the first officer to come through the main entrance behind me. His spotlight threw my shadow across the ground toward the stage, on top of which his partner appeared several seconds later.

  After a whole lot of shouting and a few minutes with a knee in my back and my face smashed into the concrete while they cuffed my wrists behind my back, I was given the opportunity to make a statement.

  By the time Homicide arrived, my mental clock was up to somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty minutes and I’d already told my story five times. The repeated flash from the crime scene photographer’s camera reflected from the sparse copper paint remaining on the great proscenium arch, from which the filthy tatters of the screen hung.

  I recognized DPD Detectives Aundray Rogers and Marcela Aragon from a distance. He was tall with broad shoulders and could pass for Taye Diggs in a pinch, while she couldn’t have been more than five-foot-two, even with those platform heels she always wore, and a hundred pounds. I breathed a sigh of relief. I’d known Dray since we were kids in Voigt Park, part of the Boston-Edison District, which served as the buffer between the city proper and the suburbs. Both of our fathers worked for Chrysler—his in purchasing, mine in the warehouse—clear up until the very end. His became a casualty of the company filing for Chapter 11 protection, while mine survived the purge, but was ultimately held accountable for one of his drivers getting high on the job and nearly killing a family of four. My old man had no choice but to move to Toledo and return to the assembly line, a job that couldn’t have been further beneath him. He tried to sell his house for nearly a year before finally walking away from it. Last I heard, Dray’s father was managing an auto shop in Scranton and his mother was checking groceries at a Gerrity’s.

  “Cut her down.”

  Dray’s deep voice reverberated in the hollow chamber.

  “We’re still waiting on Northville,” the officer who’d introduced his knee to my spine said.

  The DPD’s crime lab was shut down back in ’08 as a consequence of a double-digit error rate on ballistics tests. Its duties were transferred to the Forensic Science Division of the Michigan State Police out of Northville, off 7 Mile Road.

  “You want your little girl hung up there like that?”

  The officer stared at him for several seconds before turning away and calling for his partner.

  Dray turned to me for the first time and looked me up and down. His stare was like a ray of light shining through the window on a hot summer day; I could positively feel its heat traveling over me.

  “You going to give it to me straight, Webber, or do I have to pull out the rubber hose?”

  He smirked at the inside joke regarding his phallus, but the momentary expression didn’t last.

  “You know I can’t talk without using my hands.” I shrugged my shoulders and wiggled my elbows. “I’ve lost all the feeling in my fingers.”

  He came around behind me and cut the zip ties with the blade of a knife I felt against the tender skin of my wrists. I nodded my thanks and rubbed the notches where the plastic had burrowed into my flesh.

  “So talk already,” Aragon said. She had a voice that sounded permanently out of tune and a scar through the right side of her lip that tented it upward toward her nostril. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail that had come loose on one side. When she spoke, she tilted up her chin as though daring you to take a swing at her. She was attractive in a sharp-edged way, yet somehow even more intimidating than her partner. She kind of had to be considering she grew up in the Mack Ave./Helen Street area, where your odds of being shot on any given day were better than getting fresh fries at McDonald’s. “Or I’ll put those cuffs back on you myself.”

  I looked up at the dead girl. She seemed minimized by death, as though deflated of whatever intangible quality animated her. It felt like the mere act of viewing her in such a state was an unforgivable violation. I looked away and recited the details by rote.

  I owned and operated an independent online investigative news site called Wake the Puck Up, Hockeytown! It might have been small potatoes compared to my previous gig at the Detroit Free Press, but as editor-in-chief I answered to no one and had complete control over content and assignments. In the first year alone we had three investigations picked up by the national syndicates, two of which ended in convictions and the third an ongoing FBI sting operation. As the other reporters worked on a freelance basis, I relied heavily on our website and social media accounts for tips from our readership.

  At approximately 10:40 p.m., I received a tip via our Twitter feed that scrappers were having their way with the Eastown. In my esteemed opinion, scrappers were a plague upon the city, scavenging the structural elements of our history itself and liquidating it for a fraction of the money we spent on it in the first place. It wasn’t a victimless crime like so many would have you believe; it was theft on a grand scale from the entire city, from my generation and all those that came before and would come again. I even offered a hundred-dollar reward for anyone whose tip led to the arrest
of any of these thieves. In truth, I wanted nothing more than to post their faces for the whole world—or at least my fifty-three thousand unique visitors and twenty-six thousand subscribers—to see, in hopes of shaming the others of their ilk into seeking another form of income or a different city to scavenge.

  “So did you see any sign of these scrappers?” Aragon asked. She alternately bit her thumbnail and scribbled in a tiny notebook held together by a rubber band.

  I gestured vaguely toward the entire theater.

  “You know what I mean. Did you see anyone or any indication that anyone had been here recently?”

  I shook my head.

  The uniforms had found where the rope from which the body was suspended was tethered to the pin rail—the brackets to which the lines attached to the various screens were once secured—mounted on the wall beside where what remained of the loading galley clung to the wall. One of the officers was balanced precariously on the lattice track and attempting to belay the body down to his partner, who stood beneath it, waiting to guide it to the ground.

  “You didn’t even smell any smoke?” Dray said.

  I understood the implication. If someone had been carving out girders or pipes with an acetylene torch anytime recently, then this whole place would still reek of molten metal. And since it didn’t, the only conclusion that could be drawn was I’d been deliberately summoned here to find the body of the dead girl.

  I was just about to say as much when I heard a shout, the buzz of unraveling rope, and a dull thud. I looked up to see the cop crawling out from beneath the crumpled remains, holding his arms away from his body as though covered in something foul.