When Gregg reached the foot of the shaft he felt agitated, uneasy at being in such damp surroundings. But still, he had a job to do, a job that could quite possibly turn out to be his last. Nevertheless, he would see it through to its conclusion, what ever that might bring.
Standing at the bottom of the steps in an inch of muddy water, he turned entering the cinema tunnel. When he arrived at the hatch, he found his way out already open. A clear indication that Sheldon might well have come through there. But no indication if he’d been alone or not.
He waited for a minute, listening for any slight sound of movement, his ears only being met with a deathly silence. Moving slowly, and with great caution, he ascended the steps whilst holding out his hat on the short barrel of his gun, at the top of the steps, he poked it through the hatch.
No takers.
As soon as he left the shaft, Gregg felt the black void envelope around him, ensconcing his whole being, offering him no sense of his surrounding dimensions, only emptiness, cold, black, emptiness. After shining the flashlight around the auditorium, he flicked the widening beam across the viewing screen, only to see it hanging in shreds.
These people were kidnappers, murderers, and rapists capable of the most unpredictable evil he’d ever come across. But what made them more dangerous, and even more unpredictable, was their total disfunctionality. Their once, obviously structured, society, now broken down, and, very much like the screen before him, in complete tatters.
Gregg walked to the top of the centre aisle and brushed aside a hefty curtain, behind which, he found two solid wooden doors. He pushed them open and entered into the much brighter foyer of the cinema.
Through the large external glass doors, and across Main Street, he saw the windowless wooden building labeled Chambers. Thinking again of those poor souls swinging from their hooks, brought back that haunting memory he’d supressed when he’d first discovered the girls. Only now, there was little or nothing to distract him from slipping into that morbid reverie.
*
Gregg was a Rookie, just two weeks into his baptism of fire, and three hours into his day. He and his assigned experienced partner of thirty-five years, Officer James Sanderson, were just about to take their first break when a call came through. They were instructed to attend a domestic disturbance just a couple of blocks from their current location. Sanderson was your average overweight cop, at age fifty eight; he stood five-feet-nine in height, and had a girth so substantial; it almost had its own weather system. His rose-red face and blood-shot Cheeks, brought on by his drinking habit, looked ready to burst due to high blood-pressure, and he always had a box of cream, or jam-filled, sugary doughnuts, somewhere in the patrol car.
When they first arrived on the street, they were greeted by a woman in a pair of pink shorts, and a white sleeveless T-shirt. Her hair was bleached almost white, with at least two inches of black roots visible. She was in her mid to late twenties, sported a fresh looking black-eye, and looked like a good, solid meal, might go a long way on her. She held a smouldering cigarette in one hand, and was continually biting the nails of the other. Her name was Anne Newcomb, a known prostitute. Her neighbour, Angela Eastman, was a large black woman in her forties. She was standing beside, and almost behind Anne, and was the one who explained to Gregg and Sanderson, what exactly had taken place.
Apparently, the ex-partner/ex-pimp of Anne Newcomb, Leroy Tobias Fletcher, had just been released on parole after serving two years for drugs offences. During which time, she’d moved house again and again, in the hope he’d never find her, or their two children. But somehow he had, and now he wanted to take the children from her.
He forced his way into the house, and when he refused to leave without the children, Anne Newcomb signalled to her neighbour to call the police. A signal they already had in place, should he ever show up. And now he’d concealed himself somewhere inside the house with the two children. The oldest being five, the younger one being three.
Sanderson told Gregg he’d been in a number of situations similar to this one, and instructed him to call for back-up and a trained negotiator. Sanderson then disappeared around the back of the house, claiming he was going to assess the layout. After the call went through, Gregg placed Anne Newcomb in the rear of the patrol car where he asked her questions about her ex-partner, just so he could understand the situation a little better.
Gregg noticed she had a red petalled flower tattooed on each of her forearms, with the names of her children, Kyle and Bobby, below them. He also noticed the underside of her arms, and how needle-scarred they were. She also had scars on her wrists, indicating she may have attempted suicide in years gone by. He thought then about the children, and wondered what sort of life they must have had so far.
After his questions were over, he looked at the front of the house, and in particular, the upstairs windows. One of them was open about six or seven inches. Through the gap he saw the face of a child, and below the child’s chin, he could just make out the darker flesh of a large forearm.
Then a glint of sunlight reflected off something beside the right side of the child’s head. It could have been a knife, or a gun, or even some jewellery, but Gregg wasn’t about to take that chance. He instructed the woman to stay in the patrol car while went to find Sanderson.
He made his way to the rear of the house expecting to see him looking around, but he wasn’t, and the back door lay wide open. Gregg withdrew his gun moving inside the house via the kitchen. He wanted to call out for Sanderson, but if he did, he feared Fletcher might take drastic measures.
Moving further inside, he caught sight of Sanderson’s shadow on the wall of the stairs as he disappeared up them. Gregg followed, wondering why he wasn’t waiting for back-up. That’s when it struck him; Sanderson was doing this for the glory. He was due to retire within the year, and was overlooked time after time for promotion. He obviously wanted to go out with a bang.
Gregg, quickly and quietly, rushed up after him, managing to get his attention as he reached the top. He whispered for Sanderson to return downstairs and let the trained negotiator handle it when he arrived. Sanderson was standing just before the bedroom door the man and the children were in.
He refused Gregg’s request, whispering he’d done this kind of thing a dozen times before, and the negotiator could take too long to get there. In which time the children could well be dead. Gregg heard them crying in the bedroom, and repeatedly calling for their mother. Then a loud bang rang out as a bullet pierced the thin wooden door, just missing Sanderson.
Gregg looked on as Sanderson raised his gun, he then watched as six shots penetrated the bedroom door. Then total silence fell on the house, the upstairs landing, choked in blue smoke. Gregg ran to the bedroom and stopped to listen, but still there was silence. With his gun outstretched, he kicked open the bullet-riddled door to find the man on his back, gasping his last few breaths.
Still held in his arms were his two young children, both now dead. Sanderson’s shots had passed right through them. The younger one suffered fatal head wounds, and the older one had been hit three times in the neck, and upper body.
Gregg heard a scream coming from the street outside, and knew instantly it was the children’s mother. She’d obviously realised what might have happened, and the thought made her hysterical.
Sanderson was standing in silence as the sirens of the back-up could be heard arriving on the street. That’s when he started to babble about how it wasn’t his fault. How he’d been shot at first. How he was acting in self-defence. And if Gregg stood by him, as any good partner should, the internal investigation which was bound to follow would also see it that way.
Needless to say, Gregg willingly testified, against Sanderson. However, to the disgust of every other officer at the precinct, the department did its best to brush the incident under the carpet. Sanderson was offered early retirement, and on the advice of his superiors, took it.
Around six weeks later, Gregg received an anonymous phone call telling him to pay a visit to Sanderson’s place. When he and another officer arrived there, the door was locked and music could be heard seeping through it. Gregg knocked a number of times but got no answer.
They finally had the superintendent open the door, and that’s when they found him. He’d been stripped naked and hung upside-down on a large rusty meat hook from underneath a doorway. The hook had been pushed into his anal passage and exited through the rear of his pelvic bone.
His hands and feet were bound with tape, and a baseball had been forced into his mouth, snapping five of his teeth. More tape was then wrapped around his head to ensure the ball stayed there. He’d also been stabbed with an ice pick, 1,837 times, in his legs, his buttocks, and his arms. This way they wouldn’t puncture any vital organs allowing him to die too quickly.
The soles and the tops of his feet were used as an ashtray, sustaining over 80 cigar burns, and on Sanderson’s back, were eight much deeper burns, created by the use of a hot iron. The pattern they’d attempted to make, resembled that of a flower head with petals; obviously a tribute to the children.
Sanderson had been dead for almost a week, so the stench of death should have been unbearable, but it wasn’t. That was because the whole apartment reeked of vinegar, as did Sanderson’s flesh. Scattered around the floor below his body, were five large empty bottles, it seems the pain sustained from the injuries alone, wasn’t enough to satisfy his attackers.
The coroner estimated it would have taken around three to four days for him to die in this way. No one knew who’d done this to Sanderson, although, thanks to the flowered design, the police did have a good idea. Unfortunately, they had no evidence to back it up. The man he’d shot and killed, along with his two young children, was a drug dealer with connections. It’s thought a couple of those connections carried out the torture, and eventually, the brutal murder of Sanderson.
*
Hearing someone shouting outside, brought Gregg back from the blackest of his memories. He looked from the large glass doors but saw no one out there, then he heard it again, it was Jill shouting for Nick. How he’d lost himself over such a short distance was beyond Gregg. Could his sense of direction be as bad as his sense of humour? “I see you two are dodging the posse, huh!” very funny, NOT! He listened some more but never heard it again. Either she’d found him, or given up.
Gregg moved across the foyer to a door marked “Projection Room”, he opened it to see a set of narrow stairs leading up into darkness. Next to the stairs was an open door to a small office, the place had been ransacked. A single desk and a chair were overturned against the back wall, the floor was scattered with loose papers, one corner of the room held an open and empty safe, and in another corner sat a spring-loaded occupied rat-trap. The only part of its unsuspecting occupant remaining though, was it’s head. Thinking what might have happened to the rest of the rat, actually turned his stomach. He left the office and turned to the stairs for the projection room.
Shining the flashlight around this small room, he found the place in as much mess as the office. The projector still had two reels fastened to it, one of them empty, the other half full. The film on the reel had expanded due to moisture, and was strewn over the projector and most of the floor. The can the film came from, lay open on a table close by. Gregg turned the two halves over and, reading the label attached to one of them, he smiled.
“Night of The Living Dead”
“Cert: R”
‘You gotta be kidding me?’ he said, aloud.
Satisfied the cinema was empty, Gregg left the projection room and headed back to the foyer. There he stood by the glass doors watching the rain and scraping his dry tongue over his teeth, that’s when he realised his thirst was beginning to make itself known.
After looking up at the dark clouds he wondered how long the storm was going to hold out for, and if he’d have enough time to try a rescue attempt on the girls? He decided wether time was against him or not, one way or another, he was going to rescue those girls.
With no idea how long he’d spent standing there, the sound of three muffled gunshots snapped him back to life. It was the unmistakable sound of Jill’s 3.57 Magnum. Holding his hat to his head, he ran into the auditorium, down the centre aisle, and into the tunnel. Racing along he splashed through puddles causing his jeans to become damp, and warming his skin considerably.
He reached the garage shaft managing to spring up the steps only touching three of them as he went. When he reached the shutter he hit the up button, stopping it at around six-feet. He then sat in front of the fan heater drying his jeans, looking out, and waiting anxiously in the hope they would both return safe. No more than two minutes later, another two shots rang out. Again he recognised the sound, it was definitely the 3.57.
