We moved down the hallway. Tucker was ahead of me and he stopped by a blue-colored doorway. He waved me over and nodded in at what had been an office. An attempt had been made to clean the window, but a light aqua tint persisted and the room washed in soft blue light. A bed was laid against one wall, and there were several pairs of shoes lined up along the bottom of a bookcase filled with hardcovers, paperbacks, and magazines, all shelved as neatly as a library. On the other side of the bed was another set of shelves that held toiletries and john paper. A fine coating of dust covered everything and it looked as though the occupant hadn’t been home for a long time. A Free Press next to the bed was dated July 2000. We moved on.
The seventeenth floor was empty. All of the hallway and office walls had been removed, the entire level stripped down to the thin concrete support columns. Snow fell past the naked windows in the dimming afternoon light. We moved carefully through the huge empty room, the columns breaking up our sight lines. Tucker suddenly stopped and nodded toward the far corner. There was a doorway to another stairwell, a twin to the one we’d climbed. I glanced back at my partner, who looked impatient. He nodded at the corner again, at something beyond this other stairwell. Off in the shadows, I could just make out the flat panel of a hardwood-trimmed wall. As we got closer, I could see a darkened doorway with an open transom. One of the level’s old offices had been left intact. Tucker and I knew this was where we would find David Wilkins.
We came up on either side of the old room, guns drawn, flashlights out. There was no door in the frame and nothing to stop us from moving in quickly, guns covering opposite ends of the interior. Nobody home.
An old army cot and space heater stood at one end, just as Lonnie had said. A couple of milk crates had been turned over to make a table for a hot plate, and a battered old pot hung from a nail in the wall. Empty soup cans and paper waste filled a tiger-striped trashcan that said Bless You Boys! on the side. Opposite the room from the cot was a stack of cardboard cartons.
Tucker pulled up the flaps of the topmost box and looked inside. I stood with my back to the doorjamb so I had a clear view of both Tucker and the empty floor beyond. Tucker held up quart-sized containers filled with tablets, capsules. The names were dull in the flashlight beam, but I made out Dilau-did, Percocet, and several other Schedule I and II drugs. It was the mother load.
I was about to say something smart, when we heard a scrape coming from the stairwell just outside the office. We froze. The scrape came again, then became footsteps pounding up the flight. We flew out of the room guns first. The pounding crossed the floor above us. We took the stairs two at a time.
As with the level below, the eighteenth floor was stripped bare. Even the windows had been removed. Dimming light leaked in from the holes that once held windows and snow flurries drifted across the concrete floor. Through the window openings we could see the façades of other empty buildings, their edges softened in the falling snow and the late afternoon dusk.
We were running for the footfalls echoing in the opposite stairwell when we heard the boom of what sounded like a heavy door.
“The roof,” said Tucker between breaths.
Across the floor and up the first flight, we paused at the landing to listen. There was only the silence of the falling snow. The roof door stood partially open sending a thin shaft of light into the upper flight. Through the gap, we could see footprints trailing away in the thick snow. Tucker crept up the stairs and spread his large hand against the steel door. He looked back at me. I nodded and raised my gun. Tucker slowly pushed open the door.
We could see the entire rooftop. It looked like a frosted cake with all the snow. Tucker stepped though the doorway and for a moment the stairwell went dark. Then he was out, moving deliberately, his head fixed straight ahead. I followed, ranging off to his right. The flurries were coming thicker now, but I could still see my partner. And beyond him, David Wilkins, the priest.
Wilkins stood at the eastern edge of the roof. His back was to us and his long black coat hung nearly to the snow. He was framed on both sides by the empty towers that surrounded Grand Circus Park, and in the distance we could see the orange glow from the new baseball and football stadiums.
“David.” My voice was only a hoarse whisper and that surprised me. Or maybe the thickening snow ate the sound. Tucker stood about ten yards to my left. He was looking at me, his eyebrows raised. My mouth was dry and I swallowed to get some spit going.
Tucker turned his head and said, “David Wilkins,” in a clear voice that carried over the rooftop.
When I remember the moment, I am struck by the silence. The vacant towers around us seemed to bear witness through their dark windows. Streetlights glowed from far below, and the falling snowflakes softened the hard edges and planes of the concrete that surrounded us. Wilkins seemed to cant forward, then disappeared over the edge. I looked up into the sky, into the snow. There was a flapping sound as his coat caught the wind on the way down.
It sounded like wings.
The night watchman is asleep
by Joe Boland
Downtown
Mitchell, the other night watchman at the Guardian Building, was a moonlighting cop. The night Stoner started, Mitchell gave him the once-over — height and build, age, haircut — and decided that Stoner must be a moonlighting cop too.
Stoner let him think what he wanted.
“You from the Northwest District?” Mitchell asked.
“I’m from Downriver,” Stoner said.
“Well sheeit,” Mitchell said, putting a twang into it.
Mitchell was an enormous black man, and Stoner wasn’t certain if he was trying to be funny. When Stoner didn’t laugh, Mitchell said, “Don’t wanna double in your own bunk, huh?
That’s smart, rook. I’m from Farmington Hills. You from Taylor-tucky? Wyan-tucky?”
“Beautiful Brownstown,” Stoner said.
Mitchell seemed to decide that Stoner wasn’t going to be trouble.
“Oh no,” he laughed. “You in beautiful Brownstown now.”
Stoner was from Wyandotte, twenty miles south of Detroit. His family and most of his neighbors were originally from Tennessee, not Kentucky. He’d really only been to the city a few dozen times before, for Tigers or Red Wings games, or to check out the casinos when they first opened. His idea of the city came from the news, and from the bad word-of-mouth he heard every day. As far as he could tell, Detroit hadn’t changed much in his lifetime. It was no longer the nation’s murder capital, but it didn’t seem like a city on the rebound either. He always thought of it as dirty and abandoned-looking, and a couple new buildings and stadiums downtown didn’t do enough to change his impression: You were still only a block or two away from being surrounded by black people who hated you.
He had never been in the Guardian Building before, an office highrise two blocks from the Detroit River with a tiled façade the color of light coffee and a lobby like a cathedral. Stoner had to admit it was beautiful.
Mitchell walked him through the building. At first Stoner was apprehensive, wondering if the tour was going to be an excuse for Mitchell to talk cop-shop with him, but Mitchell only seemed interested in talking on his cell phone, which rang every few minutes. Half an hour after their shift began, Mitchell put a hand over the mouthpiece and said, “Listen — you got this, right?”