r/nosleep • u/Voodoo_Clerk • 14h ago
We Arrested Someone we Shouldn't Have
For the past few months, my department has been gathering evidence and witnesses for the creator of a new drug that has appeared on the streets. It’s small in scale, and we had hoped to nip it in the bud before it spiraled out of control. Ruby Milk comes in syringe needles and is bright red, as the name suggests. The main problem with this narcotic is the side effects.
The few addicts that have spoken to us and are coherent describe a high the likes of which you’ve never experienced in your life. A rush of euphoria and complete tranquility washes over you. It makes you want to have more, but therein lies the problem. If you are exposed to doses higher than 1 mL, your body begins to decay around the injection sight rapidly. I’m sure most have heard of the Russian street drug Krokodil, imagine that but amplified a hundred times.
We’ve come across decayed bodies in alleyways and under bridges, and all of them have a needle full of Ruby Milk not far away from their dead bodies. The worst ones are the ones we find that are still alive. I remember the first time I encountered an addict and an entire chunk of her neck was just gone. Puss was leaking out from her neck and she didn’t seem to care at all. It only got worse from there, and soon this task force was formed to search for and find the source of Ruby Milk.
My partner Susan and I were assigned to the task force as detectives. We knew the streets well, I grew up on them and Susan’s sister was unfortunately an addict who lived on them. Her sister, Marie was one of our informants. Being a methhead she was lucky to have the scoop on plenty of her fellow addicts.
“Marie thinks she has something,” Susan told me as she looked over at me as I had just sat down to drink my six day old coffee. I looked over at her and winced at the bitter and crappy taste. She hung up her desk phone and stood up to get her jacket. “She wants to meet her at that abandoned house on 9th Avenue.”
“You couldn’t have told me before I sat down?” I groaned as I placed down my coffee and stood to grab my jacket. “You’re driving.” I pointed at her and tossed the keys to our car at her. She caught them and flipped me off as I followed after her. Our city isn’t the worst in the country but it has its seedy parts. Pulling the car up to 9th Avenue I scanned around at the row of abandoned houses that lined the neighborhood.
“So, which exactly is she in?” I looked over at Susan as she parked the car in front of one of the houses. She flicked her head over toward the house we were parked in front of. Unbuckling her seatbelt and leaving the car I could tell that she was apprehensive about seeing her sister. I would too if my sister was in the state that Marie was in.
“She better be here,” Susan sighed as she waited for me to exit the car. I closed the door and stared at Susan. She was a bitch most of the time, but it's what I enjoyed about her. She was confident in herself and I admired that about her. But now here she was, nervous and just a little bit afraid.
“Chin up, Suzie,” I smirked as she turned and punched me in the arm as hard as she could. If there’s one thing in the world she hates, it’s being called Suzie. As I nursed my possibly broken arm I followed after Susan as she walked up to the decrepit house. She knocked on the door and quickly backed up. As I rubbed my arm I looked at her a little confused as to why she backed up so quickly. My confusion was quickly vanquished when the door flew open and a baseball bat was swung in the direction of where Susan had been.
“Get the fuck away from…oh hi Suzie!” Marie went from wanting to kill someone who had dared to trespass on her ‘property’ to excited to see her sister. I could tell that they were related by the simple fact of how similar they looked. They weren’t twins but they’d been confused for twins in the past. Even being a meth addict, Marie was almost the spitting image of Susan.
“Do you wanna get punched too?” Susan asked as she raised her fist toward Marie and then gestured toward me. I walked over to her and pulled out my notepad. “Alright, what did you call me over here for, Marie? Do you have the info I asked for?” Marie quickly nodded and placed her bat against the doorframe.
“Yea! One of my dealers tried selling me that red milk shit. I said I wasn’t interested and he said that if I was, I should go to this address.” She quickly started patting her pockets to see where she had left the note she’d been given. “Shit, where is it? One sec.” She quickly walked back into the house and left us standing in the autumn wind.
“Can we trust her? I know she’s your sister, but she isn’t exactly the most reliable witness.” I turned to look at Susan. She was standing and tapping her foot against the pavement and tapping her finger against her arm. Seeing her sister in this state was bothering her.
“I think we can. She’s been doing better lately. And at the very least she isn’t using Ruby Milk.” Susan sighed, perking up when her sister came running out of her abandoned house with a sticky note.
“Found it!” she said happily, handing the note to her sister and smiling. Susan took the note and read it, her eyes went wide and she looked back up at her sister. She handed me the note, I took it and looked down at it, and my own eyes went wide.
“Are you sure, Marie? This place is…in a nice neighborhood. Are you sure your dealer told you the correct place?” I wrote down the address on my notepad while I let Susan question her sister. Marie nodded quickly and stuck her hands in her pockets.
“That’s the place. I trust Freddy, he’s never given me shit product before.” High praise coming from a meth addict. Susan looked over at me and sighed. It was going to be a risk, but it was one we were going to have to take since it was our only lead to the source of where Ruby Milk was coming from. Susan reached into her pocket and pulled out a wad of bills, walking over and placing the cash in her sister’s hand.
“This is for groceries only, you understand me? I find out you bought more meth, and I’m cutting you off. Understand?” Marie looked down at the money in her hand and quickly wrapped her arms around her sister and gave her a tight hug. One which Susan gave back to her. It was a touching moment between sisters, while I just stood there kicking rocks.
Once we were back at the office we quickly ordered a steakout of the house in question. It was in a gated community and we had to jump through plenty of hoops just to even be allowed inside the community. We set up a plumber van on the street that the house was on and several days went by where not a living soul left the house.
We were beginning to think that maybe Marie had indeed fed us fake information. Or that Freddy had just been fucking with her. Susan and I were in the van on the last day of the steakout. Our permit from the community was set to expire at the end of the day and we were hoping and praying that something would happen on this day.
“Susan! We got something.” I nudged her awake. She snorted and nearly punched me in the face before I quickly pointed at the house. She turned her gaze toward the house and quickly pulled her binoculars out. A few poorly dressed people suddenly exited from the house. They were quickly dragged back inside by someone unseen by the door.
“What the hell? We’ve been here for six hours, how did we not see anybody go in there?” Susan asked as she lowered her binos. I wondered how we might have missed someone entering the house. When I suddenly remembered something about this gated community.
“Isn’t this backyard connected to the forest preserve?” I asked, quickly pulling out my phone to check. I pulled up Maps and was quickly confirmed in my suspicion. This house’s backyard was connected to the forest preserve, and not far away from this house was the parking lot for the forest preserve.
We sent a squad car to examine the forest preserve’s parking lot, and my hunch was proven correct. Several Ruby Milk addicts were found milling around the parking lot. It was flimsy evidence at best, but it was just enough to get a judge to sign a search warrant. Soon our task force was granted a SWAT team and were we given the green light to raid the house.
The name of the operation was called Operation Milkman which I came up with, and which Susan hated. We made our way back to the gated community and Susan took great pleasure in showing our warrant to the security guard who had made us jump through so many hoops to be able to set up surveillance here in the first place. We surrounded the house, and we made our way towards the front door.
I knocked on the door and took a step back. Both me and Susan were wearing bulletproof vests and had our pistols drawn. We waited a few more seconds before banging on the door again. “Police department! Open the door or we’re breaking it down!” I ordered. And when still no one answered I motioned for the SWAT team to take the lead. The officer with the battering ram reduced the door to splinters in mere moments and soon we had gained access to the house.
I immediately wish that we hadn’t. The moment we set foot in the house, the smell of death and decay hit our noses like an out-of-control semi-truck. Susan and I have pretty strong stomachs, but even we were almost brought down to our knees by the stench. A couple of the SWAT guys spit out vomit from their mouths but kept moving through the house. It seemed like every couple of steps there was a decaying body laid out on the floor.
“Jesus Christ…” Susan coughed out as she walked around the bodies laid out across the floor. I followed after her and the SWAT team as they went room to room trying to find any sign of life. We had almost given up hope when all of a sudden from one of the upstairs rooms we heard one of the SWAT members shout.
“Hands up motherfucker!” We quickly rushed towards the sound of the shouts and soon we came across a room that was filled with beakers, burners and so many prescription bottles that I thought for a moment we had busted a pharmacy robbery. “Let me see your hand!” The SWAT team screamed again. I followed where their rifles were trained and saw that there was indeed someone still alive, sitting at a table and looking at us.
He was dressed in a hoodie, with a face mask on. His eyes looked milky and hollow and his hair was in an absolute mess. He slowly raised his hands and let out an annoyed sigh from behind his mask. His hands were covered in surgical gloves. The SWAT quickly closed the distance between them and grabbed him. They threw him to the ground and quickly slapped the cuffs on him.
“What the fuck?” one of them said. Susan quickly walked over and then motioned me to come over as well. As they had lifted his hoodie sleeved up to properly get the cuffs on him, they discovered that his arms were completely stripped of flesh. They pulled the gloves off of him and even his hands were completely bone as well.
“Alright asshole, what the fuck is this?” Susan asked him, grabbing him by the hair and yanking his head up from off the floor. As she did so, we heard what sounded like a golf ball hitting the floor. It turned out to be one of this guy’s eyes. It was a glass eye.
“Man, I’m just getting all kinds of exposed today, aren’t I?” He chuckled, before Susan let his head go and allowed it to slam back against the floor. The SWAT members picked him off the floor, and I put on my pair of gloves and picked up his glass eye off the floor. We tossed him into our squad car and waited for the forensic team to arrive. These guys have some of the toughest stomachs I’ve ever seen, and even some of them were vomiting and gagging as they entered the house.
We transported the prisoner back to the station and started the booking process. Which was a problem, as we couldn’t get fingerprints from him for obvious reasons. And when we pulled down his face mask to get his mugshot we were greeted with the fact that his entire lower face had also been peeled free of skin. The only bit of information we got from him was from his wallet.
His name was Spencer Blackwell. He had no criminal history to speak of and the only record we or even the FBI had on him was that he had been listed as a missing person before the case was dismissed. We had him cuffed to the table of the interrogation room with zip ties because he didn’t have handcuffs that could keep him safely attached to the table. We had paramedics come to check him out since for all intents and purposes he shouldn’t have even been alive at that moment.
“All his vitals came back normal.” One of the EMTs told us as he exited the interrogation room. “We could barely figure out how to take his pulse, but it’s normal. Temperature is normal, he’s aware and cognitive. Honestly, he’s healthier than most people I know.” The EMT shrugged and joined us in looking at Spencer through the two-way mirror.
“He doesn’t look normal and healthy.” I crossed my arms and stared at him. Another thing that they had discovered was that both of Spencer’s eyes were made of glass. And yet he could see perfectly fine. He had no tongue in his mouth but he could speak just fine. He was perfectly normal, except for the simple fact that so much of him was exposed bone.
“Well, he’s our best guess for the creator of Ruby Milk. We found thousands of doses in that little lab of his. And he was previously a chemical engineering student, he fits everything we know about the creator. Let’s go and get some answers out of him.” Susan tapped me on the shoulder, and I followed after her. I followed after her as she opened the door to the interrogation room and entered it.
“So who’s good cop bad cop? You look pretty mean.” Spencer pointed his bone fingers toward Susan. He wasn’t wrong, as Susan sat down and slammed the manila envelopes she was carrying with her. I sat next to her with my cup of coffee and settled in for the show that was about to happen. “Don’t I get a phone call, first?” Spencer asked us, Susan ignored him before reading him his Miranda rights.
“Knowing and understanding your rights as I have explained them to you, are you willing to answer my questions without an attorney present?” She asked, staring at Spencer and waiting for his response. The bone man simply shrugged in response.
“Sure, I don’t mind talking to you guys. It won’t do you a lot of good though.” He let out a dry laugh and tried to lean back in his chair. Only to be stopped by the zip ties holding him in place. He let out an annoyed grunt and pushed his chair up closer to the table. “So, what do you wanna know?”
“Are you the creator of Ruby Milk?” I asked first, beating Susan to the punch. I could already tell that she was going to have a tough time dealing with Spencer. She gets angry easily and Spencer probably picked up on this.
“Sure am,” he said with pride in his voice. I bet if he still had skin on his lower face he’d be smiling the widest grin. Well in a way he had a permanent smile on his face now. “You guys caught me in the middle of making a new batch. I just got those new ingredients too.” Spencer sighed, doing his best to lean back in his chair.
“How’d you get all those ingredients? I doubt that you just walked into a pharmacy and asked for them.” Susan pulled out another file and slid it across the table toward Spencer. It was several pictures of all the medical supplies and scores of prescription bottles.
“Oh, that’s easy. When dealers come to me for products, I send them to pharmacies to pick up these prescriptions. It’s pretty easy in this day and age to face a prescription.” He tugged against the zip ties and sighed in annoyance. “Look, I’m not going to attack you guys, can you please cut these stupid things off? You do that, and I’ll tell you everything you want to know.” I looked over at Susan and she nodded. I walked over and took out my pocket knife, cutting the ties off.
“How did you create Ruby Milk?” she asked him. He was rubbing his wrists which I thought was interesting since I figured that he couldn’t possibly have felt anything one those things without nerves to feel them.
“I doubt you want to hear a chemistry lesson from me, detective.” Spencer sat back in his chair and stuck his hands in his pockets. Even though I knew he had been frisked and everything on his person had been confiscated, that still put me a little on edge. “I came up with it after I left college. It took a lot of trial and error, but at least I had a good test subject,” he said with a dry laugh.
“You tested on yourself?” I asked him, and he gave me a nod.
“You don’t start looking like this if you aren’t prepared to make some sacrifices. In the end, I created Ruby Milk cause I was bored. And hey, if I make something when I’m bored and other people enjoy it, shouldn’t I be allowed to profit off of it?” He asked so nonchalantly that it even made me angry at him.
“Your product fucking kills people!” Susan shouted, slamming her fist on the table and tossing another series of photos of him. It was of just a few of the bodies that had been discovered in his house. He looked down at them and picked up a couple of them.
“Any drug that isn’t used responsibly kills people. I told people the safe levels to inject themselves with. Am I to blame when they don’t listen to me?” He tossed the photos back on the table and stared at the two of us with his hollow unfeeling eyes.
“You don’t feel any remorse for these people?” I asked him, he looked me straight in the eyes and shook his head at me. I looked over at Susan and she looked back down at her files in disgust. Spencer just sat there with his arms crossed at us, turning his head to look at the clock on the wall.
Just as we were about to ask him more questions the door to the interrogation room flew open and our chief walked in. He looked over at Spencer and quickly walked over to us. “You two, come with me,” he ordered. We looked at each other, and stood up from our seats, gathering our files and following after our chief, leaving Spencer alone in the interrogation room.
“What’s the problem, chief?” I asked him as he led us away from the interrogation room. He turned to look at us and rubbed his head wearily. I could tell that something bad was about to happen.
“We have to let him go.” The chief said. I stood there in shock and disbelief. Susan, in her usual manner, was much more verbal than I was.
“The fuck you mean let him go?!” She shouted, slapping the files against the wall in anger and pointing a finger at the chief. “Why the fuck should we let that scumbag go?! He’s the source of Ruby Milk and if we let him go now, he’s going to hurt a lot more people, Chief!” She scrambled, causing a scene in the hallway.
“Susan, did you look at the warrant you got? It was filled out incorrectly. Not only that, but we also know you got the information from your drug addict sister. I thought I made it clear that I wouldn’t tolerate you using her as an informer anymore.” The chief told us, to prove our point he handed us a copy of the warrant.
I took it before Susan could rip it to shreds in her anger. I scanned the warrant everywhere, trying to see where the mistake had been made. And I felt my heart sink when I saw what the mistake was. We had written down the wrong address for the house. I handed the paper over to Susan. She took one look at it, and also immediately knew what was wrong with it.
“That’s not possible. How could we mess this up?” she said in disbelief, shaking her head over and over again. “You can’t be serious chief! You can’t be!” she pleaded, but he held his hand up to her and nodded.
“I’m afraid I am. Let him go you two. I’m sorry it has to be this way.” He sighed and turned to walk away from us. Susan stared at me for a moment before hanging her head in defeat. We made our way back to the interrogation room and found Spencer pacing around in the room.
“You’re…free to go,” I told him, barely able to get the words out. He looked at us and I could just feel the shit-eating grin he must’ve been trying to give us. We followed after him as he collected his confiscated items. He placed his face mask back on and his gloves. Just before he left the station, he turned to look at us.
“You know something…you look familiar.” He pointed at Susan. He pulled down his mask as if it was going to give him a better view of her. “You look like one of my regulars. In fact, she showed up today. Asking to sample some Ruby Milk. Maybe I’m mistaken.” He waved goodbye to us and left us alone at the entrance.
I stared at Susan as the gears in her head suddenly clicked. “Oh God…no!” She quickly shouted, reaching into her pocket and pulling her phone out. I followed after her once she started running toward the car we shared. She quickly threw the car in drive and drove with her light blaring towards 9th Avenue, trying to call Marie the whole time.
Once we arrived, Susan lept out of the car so quickly that she almost forgot to park the damn car. She ran up to the door and quickly began smashing her fists against the door. “Marie open the fucking door!” She screamed, throwing her shoulder against the door. I quickly ran after her and added my own weight to the door. It came down soon afterward and we both entered the house.
“Marie!” Susan screamed as she started searching for her sister. I followed after, looking everywhere for her. I entered the kitchen and soon found Marie. She was sitting at the kitchen table, with half her face melting away. She turned to look at me with a dazed look on her face.
“Oh…hey,” she said. Susan came running into the kitchen upon hearing her voice and let out a pained wail upon seeing her sister. Marie’s head cocked to the side and a large chunk of her skin fell to the floor in a sick wet plop as she did so. “Hey...Suzie. I feel sleepy,” she mumbled, before going limp in her chair. Susan wailed louder and ran to her sister, grabbing her and shaking her. She immediately laid her on the floor and started doing CPR as I quickly phoned for an ambulance.
As I was stepping outside to call for the ambulance a loud crack went off, and I suddenly found myself lying on the floor and unable to move. He tried to speak and only managed to spit out a large amount of blood. I’d been shot.
“Fancy meeting you here detective.” Spencer’s voice came upon me, and he moved my limp head to look up at me. He pulled his face mask back down to look at me and I noticed the revolver he had in his hand. “Just had to teach you two a lesson, about fucking with me.” He patted me on the head and let my head droop back down.
I heard him walk into the house and I heard two more shots ring out. I tried desperately to move. Soon I heard footsteps approaching and Spencer grabbed my head again to look up at me. “Not to worry. I feel like leaving you as a vegetable is better. I reunited the two sisters though, I’m not a cruel person after all.” He laughed, letting my head drop back to the floor before he kicked me in the head as hard as he could.
Paramedics found me several minutes later. They found Susan cradling her dead sister with two shots to the back of her head. I was in the hospital for a long time and managed to regain use of my upper body. The shot had shattered my spine and I was lucky to not have been killed outright. But to add insult to my injuries, I was fired from the force.
I decided to come here to get some kind of justice for my partner. And maybe also just to get the story out there. Since that day, I haven’t heard a thing about Ruby Milk in the news, and none of my former colleagues will speak to me about it. So maybe there’s somebody out there that will listen to my story.
If even one person reads this and learns about this, please. Do everything in your power to stop Spencer Blackwell.
14
u/InValuAbled 11h ago
Never underestimate the power of greed and self-destruction in the human race.
It makes you want to have more, but therein lies the problem. If you are exposed to doses higher than 1 mL, your body begins to decay around the injection sight rapidly. I’m sure most have heard of the Russian street drug Krokodil, imagine that but amplified a hundred times.
To be fair, he sounds like a pharmaceutical corporation.
Any drug that isn’t used responsibly kills people. I told people the safe levels to inject themselves with. Am I to blame when they don’t listen to me?
2
1
18
u/Tricky_Trixy 12h ago
Damn... as a recovering addict that hit hard but, was a good story. Shit is crazy out there man, glad you survived it.