CHAPTER 23
Ariel could hear Mordechai walking around the warehouse, opening cabinet doors and moving things. “Ah, this will work.” He looked around to see Mordechai pick up a can from a cabinet and a hammer from a shelf.
Mordechai walked over to the front door. “Ariel, come help me.” He set the can and hammer on the floor, then lifted one of the gang members and propped the corpse against the wall by the door. “Come hold this up. Try not to step in the blood.”
Ariel stirred himself to walk over and put a hand on the corpse’s chest to keep it in place, wondering what Mordechai was going to do. There was a wooden beam that ran horizontally about five feet above the floor. Mordechai picked up the hammer and pulled a rusty spike about a centimeter thick and twenty centimeters long out of the can. He pulled the gang member’s arm up against the beam, and with two blows had the head of the spike flush against the wrist. Another spike, two more blows, and the other arm was nailed to the beam.
“What are you doing?” Ariel demanded, stepping away from the body and letting it sag against the spikes.
“Leaving a message,” Mordechai said. “Come on, this shouldn’t take long.”
And it didn’t. Ten minutes later, Ariel looked around the warehouse to see a dozen of the gang members spiked to the walls. The one that had been transfixed with the crowbar still had it projecting from his body, which he had to admit looked weird. He turned to see the body of Cord Campbell still lying on the floor.
“What do we do with him?”
“Well, we’ve run out of open wall space,” Mordechai said, “and we only have one spike left. But there’s something we can do. Go rip that filth off the wall.” He pointed to the swastika flag.
By the time Ariel had done that and returned to the center of the warehouse, Mordechai had retrieved a bundle of rope from one of the back cabinets. “Here, hold this.” Mordechai took the flag from Ariel and thrust the rope into his hands. A minute later, one end of the flag had been tied around Campbell’s neck, and Mordechai was knotting one end of the rope to the other end of the flag. When that was done, Mordechai tossed the other end of the rope up through the lattice of one of the roof support beams.
Two taps with the hammer, and the last spike was protruding from the frame around the front door. Mordechai dropped the hammer, pulled on the rope one-handed to hoist Campbell’s body so that his feet were hanging four feet off the floor, and tied off the rope to the spike. Ariel joined him where he stood before the door, and they took in the sight. “A worthy job, if I do say so myself,” Mordechai said. “Just one more thing to do. Clear everything out from the center of the floor.”
It only took a few moments for the two of them to kick the garbage and debris and detritus of the gang’s occupancy toward the side walls. Ariel understood what the purpose was after Mordechai picked up a spray-paint can and began shaking it. He watched as Mordechai painted a message in large red letters.
THEY
WERE
WARNED
The air in the warehouse was already becoming noisome with a fetid sewage reek; a number of the bodies had released bladder and bowel contents moments after their deaths. Now the hyper-pungent chemical smell of spray paint began wrestling with it in the air. Ariel blew his breath out and wrinkled his nose. To say it was unpleasant to vampire senses understated the matter significantly.
“Can we get out of here?”
“One more thing.”
Mordechai stepped forward one step and pulled his mobile phone out. “Stay behind me,” he said as he began a video recording with a slow pan around the room, capturing imagery of all the corpses on the wall as well as Campbell suspended in midair, with a final long shot of the message on the floor. Ariel dwelt on that as well as he pivoted behind Mordechai’s turn. The phone light went out, and Mordechai tucked it back into his pocket.
“We’re done,” the older man said with a certain note of satisfaction in his voice. “Let’s go.”
They exited through the back door into the alley. Mordechai flipped the master power switch back on as they did so. “The emergency light batteries will only last so long,” he said. “We want this to have its proper effect when the police arrive.”
Ariel said nothing, only nodded as he took a breath of clean air. They walked together back down the alley to the cross street, then retraced their steps to the car. Once they settled in, Mordechai started the car and drove off. Ariel was fairly certain they weren’t done, but Mordechai hadn’t told him what the next step was.
Mordechai drove for a few blocks until they were on the main road to the nearest bridge over the river, when he finally spoke.
“There’s a burner phone in the console. Call the police and tell them there are bodies at the warehouse.”
Okay, that made some sense. No reason to leave a message if it isn’t delivered, after all. Ariel opened the console, pulled the phone out, closed the console, and dialed 9-1-1.
The phone clicked, and a brusque matter-of-fact female voice said, “911, what’s your emergency?”
“I just saw a bunch of dead people,” Ariel said in a breathless high-pitched tone.
“Dead people?” That certainly got the dispatcher’s attention. “What location? Where are you?”
“1206 Fairway Avenue,” Ariel said in the same tone as before.
“1206 Fairway Avenue,” the dispatcher repeated.
“Yeah. You better hurry, there’s a bunch of them.”
“Are you there now?”
“You better hurry,” Ariel repeated, and ended the call.
“That should have gotten their attention,” Mordechai murmured. “Well done.”
The car slowed down as they neared the crest of the bridge. The river wasn’t very wide, so the four-lane bridge wasn’t very high, and they were in the outside westbound lane. “Throw the phone in the river,” Mordechai directed as the passenger window rolled down. Ariel waited until they were at the center of the bridge, then flung the phone out with a snap of his wrist. It easily cleared the side barrier and dropped into the night headed for the waters of the river.
The window rolled back up, and the car picked up speed. The trip back to the hotel passed in silence.
“Meet me in the bar in twenty minutes,” Mordechai said after parking the car.