Blood Abandon (Donald Holley Book 1) (2 page)

“I’ll work my way through, Mr. Manor,” I said. “Dishes, laundry, whatever it takes. Just give me a shot to learn. I’ll do whatever it takes.”

“I know you will, Mr. Holley. I know you will.”

***

The Forward World School, as it was called, was paramilitary in nature; everything ran and functioned like a small military base. Lessons began at five a.m. each day, with physical conditioning, which consisted of running, push-ups, sit-ups and weightlifting on alternating days. After this, we ate breakfast and had classroom book lessons on combat, weaponry and nutrition until ten a.m, at which time we were trained in close quarters and hand-to-hand combat. What I lacked in physical presence I made up for with intensity and by being a quick study. In the afternoons, we had more classroom training related to preparing ourselves to be employable in the security industry, followed by real firearms and weapons training. The knowledge was incredible; Manor was an expert in fighting and warfare, and the education was more valuable than anything I had ever received in my entire life up to that point. As the weeks went on, I began to feel as if the things that had transpired in my life had been for a reason. I was quickly rising to the top of the class in terms of effort, leadership and abilities. Even slightly overweight, I was the best fighter and shooter among the ten students at the school.

In a strange way, the Forward World School was an alternative job-readiness education and training program for students with a different set of circumstances than most. At the end of two months, our training was over, and we were each prepared and set up with the opportunity to interview with different security employers. Each student was given a list of employers whom Manor believed would be a good fit to interview with. He then contacted them, arranged tentative interviews, gave us our diplomas, and set us up with bus tickets home.

On the morning we were to leave, Manor stopped by my room in the dormitory and asked me to hang around; he said he wanted to talk to me and would drive me to the bus station himself later. I wasn’t sure what this meant, but I agreed. He nodded his head.

“Good,” he said. “I’ll be back after breakfast, and we can talk then.”

There are moments in life when things change forever, irrevocably, and what followed was one of them. And that is important because what happened next at the Forward World School made me into what I am today.

Chapter Four

Bit and I hurtled down the road to Mangum Street in Durham in my black Tahoe. Tee had told us where we could find the bouncer, whose name was Damon. Damon hadn’t answered the call when we had Tee call him, so he gave us the address. I had figured the odds were good Damon had skipped town after getting his share of the money, but Bit hadn’t received any money, and Derrick said he hadn’t distributed any. If a man were going to risk everything for some cash, he probably wouldn’t leave without his share even if it was stupid to stick around.

We arrived at Damon’s house, a single story brick bungalow on Mangum. I parked on the street, and Bit and I each tucked our weapons inside of our coats. Mine was a SIG Sauer P220 handgun with a custom silencer; Bit carried a
Glock 37 pistol, which was a .45 caliber firearm. I surveyed the house before we walked up; everything seemed quiet;
too
quiet. There were no cars in the driveway, and the yard was past-due for a mowing. The darkened orange-red brick looked old and dirt-smudged, and the porch had chairs scattered about haphazardly. Bit and I looked at each other, and I motioned for him to follow behind me.

Once on the porch, I realized we weren’t the first people to visit Damon. Partially obscured by the metal storm door, I noticed the door jamb was split, and the door itself was damaged, but had been pulled closed. I opened the storm door, looked around, drew my weapon, and pushed the door open slowly. I hoped it would make noise, and the door hinges did not disappoint. If there were someone in the home now, they were aware we were there, also.

I fanned through the house, Bit behind me covering, going room to room, but there was no sign of Damon, or anyone else. We went out on the back deck, looked at the yard, and again saw nothing. If not for the door, it would have seemed that nothing was amiss.

“What do you think?” Bit whispered.

I exhaled quietly. “He’s dead, or someone has him.”

“Shit,” Bit said. “This is bad.”

I looked at my kid brother for a minute, and didn’t say anything; I just nodded lightly. There wasn’t much to say. He was correct, this was a bad situation. I tried to wrap my head around how he could have been so stupid, but taking it out on him now was pointless. Bit needed my help, and turning my anger and sarcasm on him wouldn’t make me feel better. I turned and went back in the house. As we passed into the kitchen, I caught something on the floor out of the corner of my eye. I had almost missed it; a speck on the floor, a small dark spatter. I kneeled down, pulled a set of rubber gloves from my coat pocket and put them on.

“Put your gloves on and find me a knife,” I told Bit.

He put his on, and rifled through the kitchen drawers for a moment until he found one and handed it to me. I scraped at the spot with the knife, and after a few swipes a flake came off of the linoleum onto the blade. I put it to my nose and smelled it.

Blood.

Bit looked at me, and I just nodded.

“There’s more over there in front of the fridge,” he said. He walked over to the refrigerator, looked back at me, and I motioned for him to open it. He stepped back, and put his forearm over his mouth. “Oh man,” he stammered.
“Oh, no.”

The inside of the refrigerator was filled with Damon’s dismembered body parts. Both arms, his hands and feet, torso and separated legs were wrapped in plastic and put on the shelving. It was all done very neatly; there was very little spatter or fluid in the wrappings. I stood up, walked over and looked at it closely. This wasn’t the way a street gang would do it; this was something different.

“Where’s his head?” asked Bit.

I opened the freezer. “In here,” I said.

I was preparing to shut the freezer door when I noticed a piece of paper folded up next to the head. I pulled it out and flipped it open, reading it silently.

“What does it say?”

I looked at Bit, then back at the paper. “It’s a list of the five of your crew’s names, with Damon’s marked through,” I said. “And at the bottom, there’s a phone number.”

“Fuck,” he said, slumping over, and putting his head in his hands. I folded the piece of paper up and put it in my coat pocket for later.

“Come on, time to go,” I said, grabbing him by his arm. “Get up. We need to get out of here.”

We hustled back through the house, out to my Tahoe, peeling off the gloves and tucking
them in our pockets as we went. I started the truck and throttled the gas as we took off down the road. The streets went by in a blur; I was focused on getting us back to my house in Chapel Hill. It was a gated, private community so anyone coming for us who didn’t have a way in would at least give us time to get a head start. I didn’t want that to be what transpired, but we needed to regroup and get a plan. Whoever had killed Damon was already ahead of us, and knew who they were looking for. They were after my brother and his cohorts, and soon enough, they would have them, if they didn’t have most of them already. And I, of course, was now part of this.

“Call Derrick, tell him what happened, and tell him to get ahold of the others,” I said.

“I don’t have his number saved in this phone.”

I glanced over at him, incredulous. “You stole two-million dollars and you don’t have the phone number of your ‘partner’ who has it?”

Bit said nothing.

“Where does he live?”

He lives on a little street off of Main, near the tobacco warehouse district,” he said. “I don’t remember the name, but I can get us there.”

I followed Bit’s directions, and again we changed gears from what I had in mind. I really didn’t like how disorganized this was; this wasn’t how I did business, and we were already behind the eight ball. I thought about the phone number on the sheet; we needed to call, but we needed to get a handle on as many of these guys as we could before this spiraled further out of control.

“Down here,” Bit said, motioning down a side street that veered sharply off of Main Street. In the time since we had left Damon’s house, it had begun to snow, something that didn’t happen much of the time in North Carolina. The flakes fell heavy, acting as a natural dampener on the sounds of the city. It was just after five p.m., and the evening dark was coming.

***

We put our gloves back on, and Bit followed my lead up to the duplex door. The home was in a decrepit state from the outside; broken, rusted toys sat to the sides of the cement walkway leading up. The brown paint flaked off the cypress wood that was used to build the structure. There was no storm door on this residence, and as I came upon it, I instantly noticed the similarity to our first stop.

The doorjamb was broken.

“
Draw
,” I whispered to Bit. We withdrew our weapons, and on my ready signal, I pushed the door open and after a second, we stepped inside, instantly getting hit with an overwhelming scent not unlike copper pennies. The lighting overhead had been smashed, and glass littered the floor. Furniture was overturned, and slashed open. Several pictures hung haphazardly from the tan walls; others lay broken on the floor. I looked at Bit, he nodded, and we moved from the living room into the kitchen. It was empty as well, but the scent became stronger. A dark hallway fed straight off from the kitchen, and the carpet lining it was stained with a dark spatter, which appeared to get heavier as it led to a door at the end, which was partially cracked open, minimal light coming through the opening. I pulled my cellphone out, turned on the flashlight app, casting light down the dark hallway. Ropes of dark, drying blood wove patterns on the walls, ceiling and floor, smaller fingers running off of the larger patterns, downward like icicles. It looked as if someone had taken a large paint brush and tossed it in a rhythmic motion throughout. A smiley-face with dollar signs in place of the eyes was crudely drawn in blood on the door.

“
Oh man
,” whispered Bit.

I pocketed my flashlight, trained my gun chest-height, and with a burst of speed, I threw the door open. I quickly stepped back upon seeing what lay inside; Bit doubled over.

I had seen and taken part in many bad things during my life, but this had to be among the worst. Bit's partners, Derrick, Melvin and Tee were tied to chairs with their backs to each other, in a triangle, their mouths duct-taped closed. They were nearly unrecognizable from one another; their skin had been nearly completely flayed off of their bodies, while countless vicious slash wounds littered what remained of their torsos, groins, legs and heads. Blood was everywhere, chaotically sluiced around the room in a similar manner as the hallway, only more intense here, covering the walls and carpet. What struck me as the most vivid was that Derrick's eyes were still open, permanently wearing a visage of utter horror in death. His mouth and jaw muscles had fought against the tape, ultimately frozen in a grinding agony. There was a folded piece of paper stuck into one of the wounds on his chest. I withdrew it, opened it, and saw what I expected; the same phone number, same list of names, all crossed out except for Bit’s. However, this time, there was another space below his name, a blank line, with a question mark next to it. And the phone number was written again.

I looked at the scene, understanding this was something so far beyond what my brother had
realized he was getting into. I looked at him; Bit stood expressionless, gun at his side, not speaking. He seemed out of it, thinking about something else.

“Bit.”
No response; I waved my hand in front of his face. “Bit.”

“What?”

“Where was he keeping the money?”

“
Here.”

“Not all of it.”

“What?”

I pointed at the bodies in front of us. “Whoever did this wouldn’t have gone to this length to torture these guys if all the money was here. They would’ve collected the cash and put a bullet in their heads.” I shook my head. “This is anger, and making a point. The cash wasn’t here. Or, if it was, some of it was missing.”

I handed Bit the piece of paper. “Hold onto this, and let’s get out of here. Cops will be onto this place soon.”

***

The ride back to my home was quiet; neither of us said anything. I wondered if my home was safe for us at this point. The only occasions I had seen anything remotely like what we were now embroiled in involved brutal, powerful organizations. This most resembled something I had seen in South America one time; a Cartel had arranged a similarly brutal scene involving a small crew who had intercepted their drugs mid-shipment. The only other time was...during my training. I wasn’t sure if that was what we were up against, but we would know soon. The disposable phone that Bit had was a good thing, I decided. We could make the call from that line. And that would be our next move.

Chapter Five

Jeremy Manor came back to my room on graduation day at the Forward World School shortly after breakfast, as he said he would. He came in with two other men, both in their late forties, whom I had never seen before. They were dressed in jeans and tee shirts, which seemed casual for the environment. Only Manor spoke when they entered the room.