Scouting some of the Hot Spots

[no_leaf]

There's something to be said for genuinely wanting to hurt the people you're hunting, when it comes to asking around. The search only takes a couple of days before Mack hits paydirt in the form of a low-ranking mafia distributor with a chip on his shoulder about the same people Mack's looking up. He operates out of Corktown, has Irish heritage himself, and something about Mack just sets him at ease enough to open like a book.

    "I mean," he hedges, as the question is floated, "probably not your guys /specifically/, the description's... well who knows, right? But you've just described someone who's a dead ringer for this new crew that showed up in town like... last year, I guess. No fanfare, no introductions, no sign - and definitely no warning. They started snapping up warehouses and industrial properties that nobody was usin' and turned 'em into distribution centers. Scuttlebutt says they're probably just getting started, too. But God save you, if you cross these fuckers. I hear they get most of their hardware through the fuckin' Zs. Got some kind of a deal brokered out where they stay out of Southwest, Delray, and Mexicantown - in exchange, the Zs are doing training and bringing in shittons of guns."

"So these new guys got a deal with the Zs. Christ that /is/ a big deal there. How're the others feeling about the new arrivals? Shit blowing up, or they hanging low for now? Wasn't there some big shit that went down just before Christmas? Same guys ya think?" Mack pauses, shaking her head briefly. "You wouldn't happen to know off hand where any of these scooped up warehouses are now, would ya?"

"All over," he says, nodding. "And yeah, that was one of theirs. The way it was hit, I'dve sworn it was MS-13 or the Z's that hit it, but the Z's are selling 'em those guns and MS-13's in the Z's pocket. Wasn't us... not our style. Could've been Vice Lords, I guess? They don't usually have their shit together that well, and they're not the presence they used to be... 'cept for the Mickey Cobras but they're small time. But that place got /torched/. Nothing left there, 'cept for a hole in the ground, now."

"Damn man. That's just fucking weird." The woman lets out a short sigh at that. "Why'd they torch it? Just to make a point, or was it under someone else's control, or what? That's a big fuss just to make an entrance, no? And no name attached to them at all?"

"Cops are saying something in the warehouse got lit by accident," he's clearly skeptical. "The way I see it? Accidental fires with a gunfight going on around it? That shit spreads. Especially in this town where there's tons of abandoned buildings and litter and shit?" As if to make his point, he drops the butt he's been puffing on and stomps it underfoot. "It's a miracle this town hasn't seen a fire rage well and truly out of control yet. City knocks buildings down to make sure that doesn't happen but they've got no money to get 'em all. So a fire like that, not spreading? That has /deliberate/ written all over it. And then the next day, the poor sods that put the fire out comin' down sick? That's salt-the-earth, if you ask me. That's a message. Well, more like a promise. That's complete annihilation. Whoever it is, though? They picked a fight with the wrong dog."

"Good point there," Mack offers with an easy nod. "Any idea on the numbers they got in town already or if they're recruiting here? Or any word that someone's looking to knock 'em down a peg or two?"

He's thoughtful for a moment. "I mean, obviously someone's keen to take a shot at 'em. I've heard they're recruiting, mostly because they like to poach from other crews, small timers mostly but supposedly they've got more than a few ex-cops or somethin'. They're connected, that's for sure. They're moving guns like they're getting ready for a war and not one whiff of a fed. I can't take a shit without having to worry about a RICO warrant." He shrugs. "Why you so keen on these guys anyway? None of my business, but I'm curious."

Mack folds her arms across her chest and shrugs her shoulders. Her features harden just slightly at this point a well; her lips forming a tight frown. "If it's the same guy as I was describing? He put a friend of mine through some bullshit and I'd like to see him repaid in kind." A meaningful look is given to the other, "You know how it is. You go after one of mine, you go after me." Another short huff follows, "Course I wasn't expecting the little turn to be part of such a big shit operation."

He knows how that goes, certainly. He nods. "Glad it's not me," he half-jokes. "If your friend ran afoul of these guys though?" He trails off, shaking his head. "Bring some more friends, and make sure you know what you're about. 'cause they do not play gentle."

"Yeah. Seems that way." Mack straightens up then, "Hey man, thanks. Appreciate the heads up on this. If I catch ya around again, I'll let ya know if I've found anything new. So hey, pretty much any old abandoned warehouse along Riverside's probably been poked at by them?"

"River," he says, nodding, waving off the implied favor as if it weren't a big deal. "East side in general. They don't mark their territory like the gangs do, and they don't keep turf. But you'll know one of theirs when you see it - because the people who do keep turf give 'em a pretty big no-man's land."

Mack offers a final nod and a casual, loose handed wave in farewell. "Gotcha." With that she heads out and makes her way back the few blocks where the Yukon had been left, intent to look over her maps and figure out where next to poke her nose.

While the map may be useless for determining what parts of Detroit are, actually 'Detroit' these days, it is an excellent guide for those places that were once industrial in nature - specifically, they're the areas that have nothing of interest marked there, just the canary-yellow 'City' background color. The river, unsurprisingly, hosts most of these sites, though they are scattered all over the former footprint of Detroit itself.

Her mafia contact in Corktown wasn't joking around. The warehouse by the river, on Jefferson Avenue - West, is nothing more than a crater in the ground surrounded by blackened chain-link fence, biohazard/brownfield signage, and yellow 'CRIME SCENE - DO NOT CROSS' police tape that's already come down and is just laying flaccidly on the ground.

The signs of the fire are hard to spot, but there: the striping on what was once a sizable parking lot (perhaps a motor pool, the newspapers said this was a shipping company's warehouse) is still fine along the edges, but against the crater, the cracked pavement features the ashen residue of paint that blistered and oxidized in the heat of it all. There's still the glint of brass here and there - the fight obviously spilled out into the streets.

Most people, true to his suggestion, are giving the property a wide berth and now, these days after the event itself, all has largely returned to the quiet status quo that existed before the violence.

Mack's pass through this area is slower than what most people might be comfortable with, but not so slow as to look as if she were casing the joint. She seems intent to try and gather up as much visible information as she can, from the safety of her car. What she's looking for most right now, is whether other cars or people can be spotted in the area, and if there are any uncondemned buildings or businesses still trying to eek out their survival here.

Perhaps every third or fourth building shows signs of economic life, though not in the manner originally intended for the structures. Many are home to what little fabrication still exists within Detroit, the lights of arc welders and showers of sparks from grinders revealing small-scale metal working. At least one warehouse on this stretch is full of Wal Mart trailers. The traffic here is consistent with these concerns. By and large, though, most of the buildings lay fallow.

Once she's found signs of legitimate life, she settles on the direction of the Wal Mart trailers and uses that lot as her temporary parking place. From there, she pulls out a small point and shoot camera and starts walking from the sea of trailers toward where the big scene went down. While the firearm stays safely stowed, she is concealing three of her knives under the jacket she wears.

During the day, traffic here is trucks of every description, presumably hauling empty trailers or freight to and from the various functioning businesses. Car traffic is very light, often features folks carpooling in suits, the sort of folks who're probably doing site visits. At least one trio gets out of a BMW near a dilapidated trio of corrugated steel sheds, and the driver very clearly begins a hard-sell on the two passengers for the property.

At the site itself, though, Mack finds brass - less inside where the police presumably cleaned up, but plenty on the outside - and a fence that will do nothing to stop her from simply encroaching - although the sinister radial symmetry of the signs that read: BIOHAZARDOUS CONTAMINANT and urge people not to tresspass certainly deter people from even walking by it. A white girl with a camera checking the place out, though? Not one eye turned her way - Detroit sees a lot of tourists documenting it's slow decay.

She's no criminal investigator, and in fact, the camera was more for show than anything else, but she starts snapping up pictures of the damage and remnants of the fight. It leads her deeper toward the thick of it, and right up to where signs warn of imminent contamination. Signs that she pays little heed to as she maneuvers past the fence to get a look at what lies past.

For something covered in so many ominous signs and police tape, when Mack crosses the threshold, she feels no different for having done so. No pustules or boils erupt on her skin, no second head grows, she doesn't even get queasy. As she walks on the heat-weakened blacktop, her inside-the-fence perspective yields one more piece of information: two outbuildings on this same property survived the blaze: one has the appearance of an electrical substation - being a series of cordoned-off transformers with connections to the old telephone and power poles that run through this neighborhood. The other is a single-wide mobile home trailer, apparently converted as an office.

Click-click. Picture of electrical substation, and picture of the mobile trailer. The substation gets her more immediate attention, and quite to herself she says, 'You were supposed to have fallen prey to the fire, now weren't you?'. She makes a slower approach toward this building, and does so in a way that will not pass her too close to that trailer.

No lights, no whirr of the wall-mounted air conditioner (not that there should be, in this seasonal cold), no signs of life from the trailer as she makes her way around it. Out here, there's still broken glass and fragments of colored plastic that were once a turn signal. The pattern looks nothing like what she's seen of gunfights, and more like what she's seen in the aftermath of an automobile crash. Perhaps this is why it's still here, and the brass isn't. Blood, however, clings to the pavement as she crosses it, here and there, telling signs of lives lost as she approaches the electrical substation. Signs warn of new dangers here, vividly depicted as lightning bolts striking stick figures from multiple directions at once, the figure flailing and failing backwards as if slipping on a banana peel.

The camera gets pocketed for now as she starts to focus more carefully on her approach. She watches both where she steps, and where she's going as she nears the electrical jungle. She doesn't get too close though- she's stopping a few paces away and just giving it a thorough visual examination. Are theres signs at all of the fire reaching this structure? Any evidence of something crashing into it?

As she closes, the blood stains on the pavement take on a peculiar note. When someone is shot badly enough to drop them, they lay there and bleed. Blood pools. Here, however, the victims' blood is widely dispersed, in smaller pools here and there, and smears and sprays. Whatever went down here, at the heart of the matter it wasn't as clean or pretty as a gunfight.

The substation is silent, no signs of fire can be seen, nor any signs of impact, either. It is, however, offline - perhaps switched off by the power company after their customer had no further use.

The camera comes out for some of those blood stains, and a few pictures are quickly taken before it's tucked away again. A deep breath follows and she gives the whole area a slow look around. Finally, she settles on the trailer and makes her approach quietly in that direction. She eyes the converted office and gives any windows or doors a deeper scrutiny.

The trailer is silent, dark, windows don't have shades drawn and Mack can make out the shapes of empty desks and chairs. The door is padlocked, a basic keyed affair with a steel flange. The trailer has a small propane tank which, despite the fire here, shows no signs of stress.

A deep breath is taken, and after a moment of steeling her nerves, she approaches the trailer straight on and moves toward the door. A closer look inside her intended action for now.

Empty. Perhaps a thin layer of dust is the only inhabitant left. The four desks with matching chairs, and steel wardrobe/closet/cabinet are the only things inside. Stray remnants, cruft, bent paperclips, a power cable, and the like, show signs that the place was once used - but has since been emptied, perhaps in the wake of the property's abandonment.

Satisfied that there are no evil men lurking behind that door, Mack turns around and decides to make her way back out. She got a good look at the area, and the blood stains alone have confirmed any small notion that there was more going on than a simple gunfight. With the few pictures she has on camera, she'll take them back to the truck to look over them more later. For now, it's time to pack up for the day before the tolerated welcome of a curious tourist is warn too thin.

The road noise of passing truck traffic continues, occasionally rocking the Yukon on it's wheels as she studies the photos. They're not professional-grade, not with a point-and-shoot, but someone might be able to extract some additional insights from them, with enough time.

A nod is given to herself, "Alright. Let's go see about making some money this weekend." Everything is stowed away into its proper place and she turns the key in the ignition. Back the way she came for one final drive through, then off to the more tourist friendly part of town in hopes of setting up a spot on the sidewalk for a little busking.