Punishment

by Scott J. Holliday

  Franklin opened his suit jacket, which was lined with silk. He spun his large frame as if modeling his get-up at the end of a runway. The suit had been custom made for his large body, and it was sharp. His button-down shirt was Brooks Brothers, his tie a Lardini, his shoes Allen Edmonds. “You’re just jealous, mofo.”

  Barnes smirked. He wasn’t jealous. In a way, he felt sorry for Franklin and his impeccable clothes. Once, on a stakeout, Franklin had confided that in the black community, style was more important than a white boy like Barnes could imagine. “If I roll up in a choice ride, step out of the car in the best suit money can buy, and flash some gold, I’m a well-respected guy, even if my bank account is all zeros. On the other hand, if I pull up in a Honda and some blue jeans and a T-shirt, it won’t matter if I got a million bucks in savings, dig?”

  Growing up white trash, Barnes had only three T-shirts and one pair of jeans, duct tape on his sneakers, and he and Ricky got their haircuts on a back patio that was more weeds than brick. He couldn’t imagine what Franklin’s custom-fit clothes must feel like, or what it would mean to walk into a tailor’s and start pointing at things on racks.

  “Ready?” Warden said. He was holding up the suction cups on the second machine parked near Barnes’s bed, the one that’d been out at the Wilson home that morning. After some time in the field, machines took their bumps and scratches, somehow found stickers or bits of paint or nail polish, and gained personalities. Barnes had nicknamed this one Eddie. It had an Iron Maiden bumper sticker on it, plus a long scratch down the side where a cokehead had once tried to shank it, believing it was a robot attacking him from out of the future. The new female tech was attaching fresh tubing and a new needle.

  “Who’s this?” Barnes said.

  She looked up. Her cheeks turned a hard red.

  “That’s Martinez, Sheila M.,” Warden said. He pressed his two suction cups against Barnes’s temples. “New kid, setting her own records. First in the state getting certified for machine administration. They got college courses for it now. Can you believe that?”

  “So, what’s this, then, an internship?”

  “Paid, even.”

  Martinez nodded at Barnes but said nothing. She loaded a bottle of serum into the machine and threw a latch to secure it.

  “Who’s up?” Barnes said.

  “The wife,” Warden answered.

  “No. The husband first.”

  “He ain’t gonna have shit.”

  “Load him,” Barnes said.

  Warden shrugged. He typed on a keyboard and turned one of Eddie’s dials. “A’ight, then.”

  “Shee-it,” Franklin said, shaking his head at Warden.

  “What, I can’t say a’ight because I’m white?”

  “That’s exactly right.”

  Barnes put out a fist for Franklin to pound. Franklin obliged. Warden rolled his eyes. He handed Barnes the bit—a wooden dowel rod, maybe four inches long, an inch in diameter, wrapped in leather, and riddled with Barnes’s teeth marks. He put in the bit and lay back on the hospital bed as Warden approached with the needle. He started it toward Barnes’s right arm, where the tracks were less fresh than those in his left—those still recovering from Calavera’s last strike just three days before.

  The prick of the needle brought back the vision of Officer Flaherty slapping his arm like a heroin junkie.

  “I really hate that bastard.” Chunk Philips’s voice.

  “Shhh.”

  Barnes crunched new dents into his bit.

  Though the serum went into his veins at room temperature, room temperature was still more than twenty degrees colder than Barnes’s blood. His arm grew numb as the liquid traveled toward his heart. The organs inside his chest suddenly felt artificial. It brought to mind his post–high school days when he lived in a shoe-box apartment and used to donate plasma for beer money. To make up for the lost plasma, they’d pumped a saline solution back into the body, again at room temperature. You could feel the coldness spreading across you, tracking the veins, frosting the machinery. Now the serum moved up through his neck toward his brain, where it provided the conductive material to allow another’s memories to enter his brain and become part of his own consciousness.

  The lab door opened. Jeremiah Holston appeared in the doorway.

  Franklin said, “What’s he doing here?”

  “Captain’s orders,” Warden said. “He’s covering the effect of the machine on police detectives. Here to observe.”

  Barnes spat out his bit. “No way. I won’t do it with him in the room.”

  “You will.”

  It was Captain Darrow. He’d come into the room behind Holston. Early sixties, chiseled skin, short gray hair. A junkyard dog in its waning years.

  “Cap,” Barnes said, “this guy’s going to run a hard-line morality story to shut down the machine. That’s what you want?”

  “Maybe that’s precisely what should happen,” Holston cut in. “Look at you, Barnes. Tell me the machine isn’t affecting you negatively.”

  “Tell me cheeseburgers aren’t affecting you negatively,” Franklin said.

  Warden snickered.

  “You’re one to talk,” Holston said, slapping his notebook playfully against Franklin’s belly. Franklin adjusted his shoulders and buttoned his custom-cut jacket, unamused.

  “Look, Barnes,” Captain Darrow said, “just do your thing and let the chips fall. You’ve got no choice.”

  “Like hell I don’t.”

  “Like hell you do. You walk from this, you grab a uniform and start walking a beat, understand?”

  Barnes glared at Holston. The reporter shrugged and turned up his palms.

  “Write the truth,” Barnes said.

  “Always.”

  Barnes lay back on the hospital bed and closed his eyes. He replaced his bit. The machine clicked and hissed, beginning to transmit. His nervous system reacted to the flow. Visually, the effect was not unlike that of a defibrillator—his body arched, head to heels. A silent, electric scream. For a moment he saw nothing, heard only the hum of the power coursing through him, and then the Vitruvian Man test pattern, overlaid with the words Please Stand By, appeared in his mind. Then came Eddie’s generic, female voice. “Prepare for transmission.”

  6

  Darkness.

  Barnes smelled soap, heard grunting. Dale Wilson’s final dream state was like a television tuned to a bad channel—white noise and blurry lines. The distorted memories came in flashes. In the first flash, Wilson was having sex with a young woman who wasn’t his wife. Cute. Great figure. The source of the soap scent. Their hands were interlocked, up by their shoulders, gripping tightly with each of Wilson’s thrusts. Barnes became dimly aware of his own growing erection. Wilson and the woman were working toward a collective climax, her enthusiastic calls forcing him to the brink, but the dream broke apart too early. The scene shifted.

  Now Wilson was mopping a bathroom floor. Barnes reeled from the ammonia scent, heard the squeak of the bucket’s wheels moving across the tiles. Wilson pushed open a stall door. Barnes gagged at a shit-clogged toilet. The scene shifted again.

  Back in darkness. There was a wet scent, like mold. Wilson blinked his eyes. A white ceramic sink came into focus. Its drain was rimmed in rust and a buildup of green lime. Colorful drops fell down to the ceramic and slid toward the drain. Wilson gripped the sides of the sink. Cold. He lifted his head to see a clown in the mirror across from him, its face demented, its makeup smeared and dripping. It opened its mouth to speak but was interrupted by the sound of splintering wood.

  Dale Wilson came out of his dream state, out of sleep. He rose up on an elbow in bed and listened. Barnes felt the arthritis in the janitor’s hands, the bursitis in his right elbow. He drew in the musky scent of sex in the room, detergent from the bedsheets. Wilson looked at his wife. Still asleep. The man felt the shame of his sex dream with the newly hired fourth-grade teacher who had smiled at him in the hallway that afternoon. It was her
face he’d imagined with his wife earlier that night, her body that he’d consumed with so much pleasure, more than he and Andrea had shared in years. When he came, he’d held tight to the teacher’s image, forced his ears to hear her imagined cries of ecstasy. He’d held and held until the dam broke and his body shuddered. He collapsed next to his wife, hoping she wouldn’t speak.

  When Dale Wilson looked back toward the bedroom door, Calavera was already coming through it. Barnes seized up. Wilson felt fear and confusion at the white sugar skull racing toward him in the darkness. He threw a hand up to shield his face. Barnes’s head banked to the side when the pickax impacted Wilson, driving through his temple and clipping him at the atlas. Bolts of pain shot down through his neck and shoulders, down to his fingertips, to his groin. His heart walloped. Blood whooshed like ultrasound in his ears.

  The memory went black, and for a moment there was silence. Finally, the machine’s voice said, “End of transmission.” The Vitruvian Man test pattern reappeared on the insides of Barnes’s eyelids. Please Stand By.

  Through the fog of Dale Wilson’s receding memories, Barnes heard Warden. “I’m loading the wife. Just relax.”

  Barnes lay still, the bit in his mouth, saliva dripping down his cheeks. His head ached where the pickax had impacted Wilson’s temple. He tried to recall what Wilson had intended to say to the clown in the mirror. The words in Wilson’s head were no better than garbled phonetics. An illogical dream, but what other details had there been? The clown’s face was a variety of colors, unlike Calavera’s mask. The nose was red, the hair blue, the painted smile in fact a frown, rough over the clown’s unshaven cheeks. The clown’s outfit was not colorful, but dark coveralls like those of a janitor. There was a rectangle stitched above the left breast: DALE.

  Barnes made a mental note to go to the school where Dale Wilson had worked and speak to the principal and the staff. He also noted the wet, moldy smell. He’d sniff out the school for that, too.

  “Here she comes,” Warden said.

  Barnes’s body tensed with the flow, drew up into the arch. The Vitruvian Man test pattern blinked in and out. “Prepare for transmission.”

  Barnes felt more at ease as Andrea Wilson than as her husband. The pickax’s physical damage had broken Dale’s memories and made them hard for Barnes’s mind to accept, like pouring unmixed gas into a two-cycle engine. Andrea’s damage had been equally as severe but inflicted upon less vital sites. Her engine was humming, her gas mixture spot-on. She was dreaming of a garden, was down in the thick of it, in the mud, on her hands and knees. Barnes smelled flowers, soil, cut grass. He felt the wet earth squelching between her fingers. She dug a trowel into the dirt and popped a weed from its stronghold, smiled at the satisfaction of plucking the roots out. She tossed the weed into a wicker basket with a twisted wooden handle arching over the top. Beyond the basket was the gingham blanket Andrea had laid out; beside it, a small cooler. Lemonade in there. Tito’s Handmade Vodka, too. Barnes savored the taste of her future drink, a reward for a job well done.

  Andrea looked at her house. In her dream it was a mansion on the estate she owned. She had let the staff off for the day, declaring that she would do today’s gardening herself. Her benevolence gave her a sense of superiority, and with it came calmness. Her striving for something better was over. Their lives were now full.

  She flinched at a cracking sound, turned to see a tree branch falling. It flopped against the manicured grass just this side of the koi pond where her husband, Dale, the same man she’d married but with a strength she hadn’t seen in him in years, had been cleaning the pond with a pool skimmer. He was looking curiously at the fallen branch. It seemed to be moving, like a snipped worm. The massive pecan tree that had dropped the branch suddenly came alive. It turned and bent toward them. It opened its previously unseen eyes over a previously unseen mouth and said, “You don’t belong here.”

  Andrea Wilson drew back. Barnes pressed back hard against the hospital bed, threw a hand to his chest. The audacity of the tree to accuse her of, of . . . She looked down to find she was in maid’s clothing, and she certainly hadn’t been given the day off.

  The tree uprooted itself. It let loose a primal scream and stalked toward her. The ground shook with its deranged and powerful steps.

  She awoke from the dream. The bed was moving, squeaking. Blood in the air. Her skin was cold and wet. She rolled off her side of the bed and stood, shivering and blinking in her lingerie. There was a white mask above Dale, a body clad in all black. A man. He was yanking at something attached to her husband’s head. Dale’s body jerked like a hooked fish. His legs and arms flailed like tentacles. The masked man pulled out the fishhook and showed it to her. It dripped.

  Kerri.

  Barnes’s subconscious knowledge slipped into the memory. A flash of Kerri Wilson in the hallway, the weight of the pickax tilting her forward, the pink drizzle on her arm.

  Andrea ran. Barnes’s legs moved like a dreaming dog’s. She rounded the bed and started for the door, but her body went limp. Barnes felt a pop as the pickax entered his back. She fell. His legs tingled. She pushed herself up with both hands and tried to bring up a knee, but the damn thing wouldn’t come. Her legs were deadweights. She clawed forward, dragging her body along, until a voice stopped her.

  “It’s over now.”

  A strange calm came over Andrea then. A restfulness she wouldn’t have expected in such a moment. Her eyes focused on her left hand, her wedding ring and the engagement ring above it, glinting in the darkness. Dale had gone all out for the diamond, a round solitaire that’d cost him dozens of Friday nights with the boys. He tried. He wanted more for us. She recalled the smile on her husband’s face when he rubbed his rough-hewn hands together in their small kitchen and said, “I’m cooking up something to get us out of this shithole.”

  She turned toward the masked man now standing above her. His face was a skull with ornate patterns carved into the cheeks, forehead, and jawline. The teeth were fully exposed, the eyes black holes. He was again removing his fishhook, only this time from Andrea’s own back. Barnes felt the pressure release as Calavera retrieved his weapon.

  “Hey, buddy,” Calavera said.

  Buddy? Andrea Wilson thought.

  “See you in a minute,” Calavera said. He flipped the pickax over and showed her the wider, flatter blade before he reared it back.

  Andrea turned away from the blow. Her mind raced back to her wedding day, to a moment just before the ceremony. Her father hadn’t come to get her yet. She’d stood on the back porch of the small chapel they’d chosen on a whim. It overlooked a pond. There was a single swan in the water, its neck formed into one half of a heart. She’d wondered whether the swan had been placed there for the ceremony. She wondered whether, somewhere under the water, one of the swan’s legs was shackled to an anchor.

  Barnes yelped and then saw darkness. He felt carpet against his cheek.

  A moment passed.

  Andrea Wilson opened her eyes. She saw her bedroom’s carpet fibers up close. First out of focus, then in. She heard feet shuffling around in the dark, could see their shapes, the legs above them. She blinked and felt tired, just really sleepy. God, if only I could get a bit of rest, I’d feel so much better. Let me just close my eyes for a moment, just a moment, and then I’ll get up and figure out what the heck is going on. Where’s Kerri? She should be at school by now. She better not have missed the bus. I need a drink. I nee—

  Darkness and silence.

  “End of transmission.”

  The Vitruvian Man test pattern.

  Please Stand By.

  A voice cut through the fog. “You all right there, buddy?”

  Buddy?

  Barnes jolted straight up in the hospital bed. Calavera was standing before him. Barnes went for the Glock in his armpit, but it wasn’t there. He found himself being tackled down. He rabbit-punched his assailant, who stank of Warden’s aftershave.

  “You idiot!” Warden ye
lled at Holston. He kept all his weight on Barnes while the detective socked his back and sides.

  “Sorry,” Holston said.

  Barnes emerged from the fog of Andrea Wilson’s memories. He stopped punching, released Warden, spat out his bit.

  Warden did a push-up to remove his body weight. He watched Barnes’s eyes. “You there?”

  “I’m here.”

  Warden stood up and straightened his shirt. “You okay?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Jesus, man,” Warden said. He stretched and put a hand against his back where he’d taken Barnes’s punches. He turned to Holston. “You don’t speak to him until he’s fully out of the memory, understand?”

  Holston rolled his eyes. “I got it. My bad.”

  Franklin chimed in. “My bad?”

  “I said I was sorry.”

  “You’re a reporter,” Franklin said. “So report. Otherwise, shut the hell up.”

  Warden turned to Barnes. “Still wanna do the daughter?”

  “Just give me a second,” Barnes said. He steadied his breathing and closed his eyes. He felt Warden checking the IV in his arm. He mentally noted Andrea Wilson’s memory of her husband’s plan to get them out of this shithole. He poked around inside her memories, searching for clues like a kid searching for Waldo. Had she seen Calavera’s shoes? Yes, but the brand name was lost to the darkness. What about the mask? She’d gotten a good look at it. He’d have another sketch artist draw it up from the memory in case it differed from the others.

  What else, what else?

  Warden said, “Martinez. Set him up.”

  Barnes heard feet moving in the lab, heard typing on a keyboard. He heard the clicks of Eddie’s dials as they turned. Martinez said, “Are you ready, sir?”

  It was the first time Barnes had heard the young technician speak. Her tone was sweeter than he had expected, and there was the hint of a Mexican accent, likely gained inside her household as opposed to growing up south of the border. He nodded and put in his bit.

  His body arched. The Vitruvian Man test pattern appeared, then faded.