Ray's Hell: A Crime Action Thriller

by Matt Rass

  The thug turned his gun sideways like they do in the movies. “I’ma cold killa,” he said. “Get ready to say hello to your partner.”

  Ray pulled a snubnosed revolver from his left ankle holster. “He ain’t my partner,” he said, and shot the young thug in the heart. The thug’s face twisted as he went down and Ray fired again. The woman at the end of the hall caught Ray’s eye and he pointed his pistol at her next.

  Her arms had shot out straight like Frankenstein’s monster. But she wasn’t hit. She was reaching for something. And Ray could see behind the dead thug lay a toddler boy, not any bigger than a backpack, slumped against the wall. The woman shrieked and fell to her knees, scooping up the child, she cradled him in her arms and rocked back and forth. Back and forth. Praying. “Please God, gimme back my baby. Please, please, please. Give me back my baby boy.”

  THE RESIDENCE

  It was noon. Ray was given the time to go home before having to report back to his captain. He drove in a daze; the ghetto receding; the highway teeming; Detroit’s skyline disappearing in his rearview mirror.

  When Ray entered his suburban neighborhood he felt guilty that he had left the war—and its dead—behind. It was like this for him most nights when he returned from work: he felt guilty to be living in the safety of the suburbs. He felt like he was cheating.

  He parked in his double-wide drive in front of his split level house on this predominantly caucasian street and barely took notice of the utility van taking up the spot beside. The neighborhood and the house was his wife’s doing. She was the moneymaker. An entrepreneur who imported hair and beauty products specific to the ethnic black community. She had created a need for black women to buy from another black woman, and had been one of the first to create a genuine online presence. She was confident and beautiful and smart. They had been married now for seven years. No kids. Just Ray and Jayneen.

  Ray entered the house and heard the moans. She shouldn’t be home, he thought. She had an office ten minutes away, but never came home for lunch. The utility van? He hung his gun belt up in the front closet and stared at it, listening as his wife’s moans quickened. He turned the lock on the front door and took a deep breath, exhaling long and slow. His heart was beating on his chest to be let out.

  He broke the four foyer steps into one with a single jump and snuck down the hall toward the bedroom. But the moaning was coming from her office. He turned on his heel and faced the closed office door.

  “Like this?” he heard Jayneen say through the door. “Like this?”

  Ray didn’t hesitate further to break the goddamn door down. He stepped back and delivered a boot with the weight of a hundred sledgehammers, blasting it off its hinges.

  His wife shrieked and spun in her office chair to face him, the cord of her headset wrapping around her neck. Apart from the headphones and the pink dildo sticking out of her twat, she was buck naked.

  Ray ran over to her and raised his fist. Behind her, on the screen, was a middle-aged white dude in his office chair, also buck naked, choking his chicken. Ray ripped the webcam from its perch atop the monitor and snapped its cable in two. He flung the traitorous tool at the nearest wall and turned to his wife. She was covering her face with her hands and shaking her head, her knees pulled up to her chest, the pink dildo still sticking out of her. Ray saw the headphone cord wrapped once around her neck and decided it deserved to be wrapped more. He pulled her chair away from the desk and started spinning her, holding the cord so it stayed on her neck.

  “You gonna play me like this,” he said and pulled the cord taut.

  Jayneen released her face and croaked, grabbing for the cord. Her legs unfurled from her chest and the wet, pink dildo dropped out of her vagina and twitched on the floor. He looked at its ridiculousness: hot pink and curved with pebbled surface and tickling appendage. It was all too futile. From what he had experienced today—his whole life—to return home to find your wife having online sex with an out-of-shape white dude while she fucks herself with a rubber toy.

  Ray released the cord and turned to go. Jayneen erupted into fits of coughs followed by ‘fuck-you’s’. “You think it’s easy livin’ with you?” she asked. “You don’t touch me no more!”

  Ray entered his bedroom and took his locked gun box from the bottom drawer of his dresser then moved to his closet. Jayneen continued to berate him from down the hall for things she had perceived he had done wrong. Things related mostly to his not being intimate. “You don’t fuck me no more!”

  In the closet, he pulled down two pairs of pants and his suit under plastic. He hadn’t worn the suit in years, but after what happened today, he would probably need it for court.

  “You don’t love me,” Jayneen shouted at him from the doorway. “You haven’t loved me for a long time… that’s why I have to do this.”

  “I’m sure you’ve been doin’ a lot more,” Ray said as he looked the room over one last time.

  “The fuck do you know?” Jayneen asked. “You barely even talk to me anymore.”

  Ray pushed past her, “Don’t make this about me,” he said.

  “It is about you, you fucking asshole!”

  Ray didn’t want to encourage her. He always lost when it came to arguing. His thing was kicking ass, not word wars.

  He went to the garage and pulled a gym bag down from the shelf. A shelf he had bought from Amazon, installed himself, and now was gonna have to leave behind along with all of his MMA trophies and mementos. He was glad his motorcycle was still in storage—he wouldn’t want to have to return for it—everything else could be abandoned.

  Jayneen was in the frame of this door now, too. “If you leave I don’t ever want you to come back.”

  “I won’t,” he said.

  “You call yourself a fighter, but you never want to fight for me.”

  “I should never have to fight for you,” Ray said, stuffing the bag with the clothes he took from his bedroom.

  “What?” Jayneen challenged him. “I’m the only one you should be fighting for.”

  Ray pushed past her once again, “That’s not how I see it,” he said.

  “’Cos you don’t see anything you don’t wanna see,” she countered. “You’re blind to everything outside those broke-ass motherfuckers in the city. I know you hate the suburbs, but we have our problems too, ya know!”

  “No one has problems like the people from the city. Stuffed into buildings, living on top of each other…”

  “Boo-fucking-hoo!”

  “And maybe I make myself blind ’round here so I don’t have to see the bullshit you’re getting away with…”

  “Getting away with? Wake up, Ray. I’ve been trying to get you to notice me for the past year!”

  “Well, this is one helluva way to get me to act,” he said, opening the front door.

  “So, that’s it?” Jayneen asked. “You’re just gonna leave?”

  “Yes,” Ray said.

  “And where the hell you gonna go? You ain’t got nobody but me!”

  “Maybe I don’t need nobody,” he said. “But me.”

  THE PRECINCT

  Ray sat in his cruiser in the police department parking lot, scanning the Facebook posts on his phone. He stopped scrolling when a notice popped up from a former girlfriend from high school, Mandy. She was inviting him to join a group created to help locate Sam, his younger brother.

  “Missing?” Ray said, his finger hovering over the accept request button. Ray hadn’t seen or talked to Sam in close to ten years… But missing? He wasn’t buying it. The kid either lit out or was hiding from someone. And Mandy? Shit, Ray couldn’t believe she would reach out to him—not the way he himself took off out of town without telling anyone.

  Accepting the Facebook invitation would be inviting a whole world he had left behind a long time ago, he thought. A world he had promised himself he would never return to—and a woman he never wanted to have to explain himself to—again.

  A knock at his window and Ray almo
st jumped out of his skin. “Sonuva—!”

  He fit his phone back in his pocket and looked up. It was the chief, a stick-thin black man with salt and pepper hair and moustache. He leaned down as Ray lowered the window.

  “Whaddaya say, Ray?”

  “I gave my statement upstairs,” Ray said.

  “And how’s the bullet wound?”

  “Barely broke the skin,” Ray said. “Caught the bottom of the vest and tore a six inch strip of skin along my side.”

  “Lucky… Well, you can’t stay here and you can’t go home,” the chief said. “Whaddaya gonna do?”

  “I think I’ll get a room for the night.”

  “You don’t have a friend to call?”

  Ray shook his head.

  “I’d invite you to our place,” the chief started, but Ray waved him off.

  “That’s fine, Chief. I don’t want to put you out.”

  “I know what you don’t want to do son, it’s what you do want to do that needs answering.”

  Ray nodded. “I appreciate your offer, sir.”

  “You need me to give you a lift somewhere?”

  “I’ll call a taxi. I just came down to see if I left anything in the car before I sign her back over.”

  “You gonna be alright till Monday when we get back at this thing?”

  “Of course.”

  “Keep the receipts for the hotel. I’ll see what I can do to get you reimbursed.”

  “Say Chief,” Ray said, picking his locked gun box up off of the passenger seat. “Could you hold onto this for me?”

  “Sure thing,” he said and reached through the window. “You’re a good cop, Ray. Don’t forget that.” The chief patted the windowsill as if it was Ray’s shoulder before he reluctantly turned to go find his own car in the crowded parking lot.

  Ray’s phone chirped and he pulled it from his pocket. His request to join the Facebook group had been accepted. “Oh shit,” he said.

  “Hey Ray,” an Arab cop in uniform called out. “I need those wheels to go to work.” The cop’s name was Samir, but everyone called him Sammy. It was a nickname Ray had used with his own brother Samson, when they were boys. That and Samsonite. Or Samson-lite. Ray had been a lot more playful back then. Loose. Free. Funny. But of course Iraq and Afghanistan had changed all that.

  “No problem,” Ray said, rising from behind the wheel of the police cruiser. “She’s all yours.”

  “You need me to drop you anywhere?” Samir asked.

  “Yeah,” Ray answered. “How ‘bout driving me over to the rent-a-car.”

  “Train station’s just over there,” Samir pointed as Ray rounded the rear of the cruiser.

  “You’re funny. But that wasn’t a question.”

  Samir laughed. “I’m just fuckin’ with you.”

  “I know,” Ray said. “I know.”

  “Where you goin’?”

  “Back home.”

  “Back home, where?”

  “You a Sherlock Holmes muthafucka, aren’t you?”

  “Ah, shit,” Samir said. “I ain’t gonna make detective if I’m scared to ask questions.”

  Ray slid into the shotgun seat and Samir sat behind the wheel. “You’re right,” Ray said. “Benson Bridge is back home.”

  “You got a death in the family?”

  Still not convinced his younger brother was actually missing, Ray said, “I got dumb in the family.”

  “I hear that,” Samir said.

  HOME FOR GOOD

  Benson Bridge has a population just shy of 50,000. The city is actually made up of two very distinct towns; Benson Bridge, the low-income, mainly black inland town, and across the river, on the banks of Lake Michigan, the smaller, predominantly white—and exceedingly wealthy—St. Andrews. A small, man made island on the river further separates the two with a permanent police presence in the form of a cruiser, its push bars directed at the Benson side—so the people are told—in an attempt to discourage speeders, but everyone knows what their real motive is: intimidation.

  To add insult to further injury, the bridge connecting the two distinct neighborhoods was made too narrow for public busing.

  Shy of a sign, the message to the black citizens of Benson Bridge was loud and clear: black people are not welcome in St. Andrews.

  Ray finally entered the city limits behind the wheel of his rented Cadillac. The first signs of life—or more accurately, the receding lack thereof—was the shell of a city motel perched atop a single rolling hump on the side of the highway. The Silver City Motel had been a down-and-out hourly rental for as long as Ray could remember, the kids used to call it Sinner City ’cos you could rent the rooms to have sex, drink, and get high for half the day before crashing at home. Now the motel’s windows were boarded up and spray painted with shitty graffiti and indecipherable tags. As he drove by, Ray read the words “Fuck Me” sprayed in red over the entirety of the chained doors. It was the closest thing to art he could imagine—the words representing everyone who had contact with the place: the kid who painted it, the motel’s past guests, and even Ray himself. Fuck Me.

  THE WELCOME

  Night was almost an hour old when Ray pulled up outside the Welcome Tavern Hotel and parked. He had watched as a young hooker with a big afro exited a car and snuck off into the shadows of the parking lot. He checked the time on his cell phone, then watched as the hooker squatted like a pregnant cat and pissed.

  His phone lit up and he answered the call before it sounded. “Chief.”

  “Whaddaya say, Ray?”

  “Just waiting for your call, sir.”

  Ray wiped his slick forehead with the back of his clammy hand. You could smell the humidity in the air, but still his throat was drier than ice. He coughed to try and loosen it then immediately regretted not having gone into the hotel bar to get a drink. He’d known the Detroit chief of police for going on twenty years now, but he still felt nervous every time he talked to him. It was reverence. Chief Foley was Ray’s mentor and the person most responsible for Ray’s advancement through the ranks of the Detroit police. The chief’s son had been Ray’s best friend in college, and now that the real son was gone, Ray felt like his surrogate.

  “Well, I got some bad news for ya,” the chief said.

  Ray waited for it.

  “They’re gonna go public with your name tonight and there wasn’t a goddamn thing I could do about it. I’m sorry, son.”

  And there it was, the chief calling him son. Ray stopped spinning the wedding band on his finger, conscious for the first time in a long while that he even had it on. He pried it off and let it drop outside the window. It clinked against the sidewalk.

  “Where you at right now?” the chief asked.

  “Back home,” Ray said. He looked over at the hooker in the parking lot as she duck stepped her feet wider. She was still pissing. It was a great, big ol’ piss. A piss for the ages. Like a dog locked in a car in New York and only let out in California.

  “Back home? Where back home?”

  “Benson Bridge.”

  “The fuck you doin’ back there?”

  “I got a situation with my brother. He’s missing.”

  “He the brother you had trouble with in the past?”

  “Sam.”

  “And you’re sure he’s missing and not just up and gone?”

  “That’s what I’m here to find out.”

  “You check for movement on his cards?”

  “Nothing.”

  The hooker braced herself with one hand against the chain-link fence, reached out for a discarded napkin with the other, and wiped. Ray scanned the side of the hotel looking for surveillance cameras—something that would have witnessed his brother’s abduction, or escape—but Ray didn’t see anything.

  “Well,” the chief said, “we can’t choose who our family is. And the good Lord says it’s who we leave behind, not what we leave, that truly matters. But I want your ass back in Detroit before Monday roll call, ya hear?”

/>   The hooker shimmied and stamped her feet as she tried to get her tight denim skirt down off her high hips.

  “I’ll think about it,” Ray said.

  “Just don’t think too hard, son. We’ll get you back and try and square this thing up so no one else ends up on fuckin’ CNN, okay?”

  “Thanks, Chief.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Ray ended the call just as a message buzzed on his phone. It was from his union rep: Channel 9 going with your name tonite. Sorry. Kevin.

  Kevin was an asshole. Never trust a union rep to tell you something you didn’t already know.

  Ray stepped out of the car and looked down at his wedding ring on the ground, his mind exhaustingly blank, and shoved the gold band into the gutter with the toe of his boot. If his wife was in the midst of a mid-life crises, or whatever, and needed to cheat on him then fuck it. He was tired of fighting. It was good to be back home. To start fresh again. Be the real Ray for once, not the badass Detroit cop, but the loose and happy-go-lucky cat of his youth. No strings. Too many strings in the city. He just hoped his brother would show up soon.

  CROOKED HOTEL

  The Welcome Hotel and Tavern was a shit hole. If the building had ever stood straight it was only because the sidewalks out front were so crooked. Once upon a time before graduating high school, Ray had lived in the hotel for nearly a year. His father had a room at the opposite end of the hall. A recently paroled drunk, he taught Ray how to live on liverwurst sandwiches when you wanted to dedicate what little money you had to drink. The liverwurst would leave such a terrible taste in your mouth that you didn’t think of eating food for at least two days afterward. Unbeknownst to the old man, he also taught Ray that it was good to have a job so you didn’t have to eat no fucking liverwurst sandwiches. Sam woulda been twelve or thirteen at that time, Ray reminisced. Just before he was sent away to juvie for a bullshit breaking and entering misdemeanor for smoking pot at a friend’s house while the parents were away on vacation.