Punishment

by Scott J. Holliday

  It was the very thing Ricky had feared, even as a young boy. Irrelevance. Maybe he’d had a sense he wouldn’t live long. He’d always asked, “What if I was gone? What would you do?”

  Barnes had always made a joke of it. “I’d eat your dessert and sell your GI Joes to Candy Harper.”

  Ricky would hug his knees to his chest and stare off. “Would you really eat my dessert?”

  “Hell yeah.”

  “What if Mom stopped making dessert? I mean, because I was dead and all.”

  “What if I body-slammed you on a bed of thumbtacks?”

  A smirk. “You can try.”

  Reyes’s apartment was on the first floor of a twenty-story apartment building. The superintendent shook his head when they described Reyes.

  “Sounds vaguely familiar,” he said. “I’ve only been the super here a few years, though. He pays his rent, fellas. That’s all I can say.”

  The SWAT team was collected outside the apartment door. The super tiptoed down the hall with his master key. He tried it, but the lock wouldn’t turn. He whispered, “Must have changed the locks.”

  The SWAT commander signaled for the compact battering ram. Two uniforms brought it up. They slammed the door open, and SWAT stormed the apartment while Barnes and Darrow waited in the hallway.

  A moment later the SWAT commander came out, shaking his head. “No one lives here, boys.”

  Barnes went inside. The apartment seemed set up for a new renter. The walls were painted stark white and were seemingly untouched. No furniture. No bed. No silverware in the drawers. An empty canvas.

  “What about his mail?” Barnes said. “His paychecks from the cemetery? They have to go somewhere.” He went back down the hall to the building’s foyer. There were several mailboxes along the wall—the flat, aluminum kind with a slot for sliding in letters. One of them was stuffed to the point where no more junk mail could fit inside. It had several official notices stuck to it, letting the occupant know they could pick up their undelivered mail at the post office.

  Barnes approached the box. He lifted a folded-over letter to read the name. REYES.

  “Don’t touch it,” Darrow said. He turned to a nearby officer. “Have it dusted.”

  Barnes went back to the empty apartment.

  Kendra MacKenzie felt the emptiness of the room like suffocation. It reminded her of the room in which she’d spent so many years as an invalid. “I want out of here.”

  “Shhh.”

  Barnes stood in the living room while the crime scene techs buzzed here and there, printing what they could, tweezing strands of hair from the sinks, scooping dust bunnies from the corners of the closets. Captain Darrow stood watch, arms folded, scowling. The apartment felt more like a tomb than the Rutherford crypt. It was a whitewash devoid of life, warmth, or anything remotely human. It might as well have been outer space or a sensory-deprivation chamber. The walls could be padded.

  “Excuse me, Detective?”

  Barnes turned to the voice. It was the building superintendent. He stood behind the yellow-and-black tape loosely hanging at waist height across the doorway. “Yes?”

  “I remembered something about Mr. Reyes. Something I didn’t think of before.”

  “What is it?” Darrow said.

  The super moved his eyes to the captain. “He had his name changed a while back. We had to do paperwork to get everything straightened out. Did it all over the phone. He sent me his new documents in the mail.”

  “Do you remember his old name?”

  The super shook his head.

  “Do you have the paperwork?”

  “It’s not kept here, but the building owners might have it.”

  “Who are they?”

  “I work for a company. Rock Hill Management. Based in Florida.”

  Barnes closed his eyes, gripped the bridge of his nose.

  “Thanks,” Darrow said.

  The super left.

  “I’ll have Flaherty follow it up,” Darrow said.

  “Flaherty? You kidding me?” Chunk Philips’s voice.

  Darrow stared at Barnes, unblinking.

  It took a moment for Barnes to realize Chunk Philips’s voice had escaped his mouth without his consent. The thought had moved too fast, had taken control, if only momentarily. Barnes felt a new weight on him, something clawing at him, pulling him down by the arms and shoulders. It felt like he was standing knee-deep in the ocean, holding a Ping-Pong paddle and hoping to beat back the waves.

  He stepped toward the apartment’s sliding glass door, which led to a tiny concrete-slab patio that ended a few feet short of the parking lot. He pulled the handle to slide the door open but found it wouldn’t budge; a wooden dowel rod was laid on the tracks. Barnes smirked. He picked the rod up off the tracks, opened the door, and took the rod outside with him. He stood on the slab and looked over a parking lot filled with sedans, pickups, and cruisers while turning the dowel in his hand. He stopped turning it when his fingers brushed something against the side. He peeled away a USB drive taped to the wood. On the drive, written in black Magic Marker, was BARNES.

  16

  Barnes parked in the alley behind Ziti’s Sub and Grub in Corktown. He killed the engine and rubbed his hands over his face. The alley stank of grease and rotted onions. The dumpster against the cinder-block wall, which separated the alley from a barren field, had seen cleaner days, maybe during the Carter administration. Barnes tucked his badge and holster beneath the passenger seat. He got out of the car and walked past the dumpster, looked over the wall through curled, rusty barbwire. The field beyond had once been a crime scene. A teenage boy, Andy Kemp, had been kidnapped and killed, his body concealed in an abandoned house that was once out there among the weeds and chattering insects.

  Kemp had started out as an Amber Alert, shifted to a missing person, and ended as a homicide. The case had lingered in the news for weeks after the body was found, not just for obvious reasons but also for the fact that the boy was discovered with $10,000 in his pocket. That brought national attention—reporters from bigger cities.

  Years later the boy’s murder was still unsolved, the money never explained. It’d been Barnes’s first case as a detective, though only as an assistant lent to Homicide from Vice as part of rotation training. His primary job was to observe, take notes, and keep quiet while Franklin and Watkins did their thing. Secondarily, he was to follow up with the boy’s extended family members and friends to get an idea of what the kid was like.

  Turned out Andy Kemp was a bad seed. Parents and teachers spoke highly of him, said he loved the arts, excelled at writing, and even talked of becoming a police officer someday, but a few cousins and the kids at school told tales of trouble. Some bore witness to animal abuse and pyromania. One cousin showed a scar Andy had given her. She’d lied to her parents about it, scared of her cousin’s retaliation. She was one of many who felt Andy Kemp got what he deserved in that abandoned house.

  The machine was in its early stages back then; only a few precincts in Michigan had one, though the black market was burgeoning nationwide. They’d used it on what was left of Andy Kemp, hoping to glean something of his killer’s identity. Watkins had been the one to get hooked in. He’d reported that the boy’s memory pull was a dud. Considering the state of the body, there was no wonder.

  Several years ago a gang of local parents had burned down the abandoned house in some misguided protest. Something about it being a place for evildoers to lure children, as though there weren’t dozens of similarly abandoned homes nearby. They stood around the blaze with picket signs and grim faces, speaking to reporters about how Andy Kemp was the victim of a system gone wrong and how his murderer was a product of corrupted government. There was a black crater there now, where the building had burned down, where the boy had rotted. No plan to rebuild.

  Apart from a handful of the boy’s friends and cousins, Barnes was one of the few people who knew Andy Kemp was no one’s victim but a bully and likely a burgeoni
ng sociopath. The cousin with the scar had told him Andy was good at hiding. “He knew how to act,” she said, “for parents and teachers and stuff. But most of the time it was like he wasn’t there. Like, he’d have this blank look on his face all the time, like he was one of those chocolate Easter bunnies. Empty.”

  A munky appeared at the alley mouth. He was fidgeting in a Pistons jersey worn over stained jean shorts and loose-fitting high-tops. His head was shaved completely bald; suction-cup marks stood out on his temples. “Hey man, hey,” he said, “you got a fifty spot? I’ll pay you back. I need a tank of gas.”

  “A tank of gas?”

  The main pointed aimlessly. “My family’s right around the corner, waiting on me.”

  “Where are you headed?”

  He blinked and found focus. “Huh?”

  “You and your family,” Barnes said. “Where are you headed?”

  “Oh yeah, yeah, yeah,” the man said. “We’re going down to Ohio. Pick up some fireworks for the Fourth.”

  “It’s September,” Barnes said.

  “Next year, man, next year. Ha, ha, ha.”

  “I don’t have any money for you.”

  The man shook his head violently. “No, no, no. I gotta get back to Marie.” He crossed his arms over his chest, gripped himself as though he were freezing. He blinked and shivered. “Who are you?” His voice had become like that of a woman.

  “Go home. Get some sleep.”

  “Eat me, buddy, huh?” the woman said. “You prick. Don’t tell me what to do.” She gripped her crotch and jostled it obscenely.

  “Don’t forget your family.”

  The man’s face dropped. “My family? What you talkin’ now?”

  “Around the corner.”

  “Boy, you on something. You’re the one who needs to go home and get some sleep.” She sauntered away, hips swishing, elbow cocked to support an imaginary purse strap, palm up.

  Barnes went to the back of the sub shop. He knocked on a gray steel door, waited a moment, saw a blink of shadow behind the peephole. He waved. Locks clicked and clacked. The door swung open. A tattooed man with a buzz cut stood in the doorway, his arms folded over his chest. He wore a black T-shirt, army-green shorts, and combat boots. He side-nodded, letting Barnes know he could enter.

  Barnes stepped inside. He looked past the boxes and canned supplies to see into the kitchen. The shop hustled and bustled. Orders were shouted, knives banged against cutting boards, soup vats steamed. The scents were mouthwatering. To his immediate left there was an old stairwell—steep, thin, damp. He stepped down into the darkness.

  The first room at the bottom of the staircase was akin to a root cellar. Boxes of iceberg lettuce, bags of onions, crates of tomatoes. At the far end there was an industrial-size refrigerator. Barnes went to the fridge, stepped around and behind it, moved along the back wall. The space was hardly big enough for him to squeeze through. He came to a steel door and knocked on it. There was no peephole, but a mail slot cut into the door at eye height. The slot opened. A pair of familiar eyes met Barnes’s own.

  “Mr. Hyde!” the man behind the door said. “What’s shakin’?”

  Barnes produced a fifty-dollar bill and held it up to the slot.

  “Well, then,” the man said, “come on in.”

  The door opened and Barnes entered the room. The man who’d let him in stepped aside, showed him the way forward with an outstretched arm. Barnes didn’t know the man’s name, had never asked and never would. He’d dubbed him Raphael, due to the two katana knives he always wore, which resembled the weapons of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle of the same name. The blades were crisscrossed and tucked into his jeans below a plain white T-shirt, the shirt bunched up behind the handles. He wasn’t bald and his temples weren’t shaved. Barnes assumed he followed the old drug dealer’s code: Don’t get high off your own supply.

  Along the far wall there were three machines and three hospital beds. One of the beds was currently occupied. A woman. She was hooked in, up on her knees and elbows and looking back with her eyes open but seeing only what was being pumped into her skull. She thrust back repeatedly against whoever was there in her mind. Her eyes fluttered in ecstasy. She gnashed at the bit between her teeth.

  Barnes looked at Raphael.

  Raphael popped his eyebrows and said, “Keisha Clarke.”

  The woman was tapped into the Hollywood starlet, now disgraced. She’d dated a litany of leading men in her time, and had been threatening to sell her memories for years. Barnes said, “She finally cashed in?”

  “Sure did. Her time with Brad Cousins has been selling like . . . you know what, what the hell is a hotcake?”

  Barnes shrugged, handed Raphael his money.

  “So what’s it going to be then, Mr. Hyde?” Raphael said. He slipped the fifty into his back pocket. “Pinball Pete’s? Marvin’s Marvelous?”

  “Putt ’n Games.”

  “Ah, yes,” Raphael said, “the old standby. Get comfy, will ya?” He patted the nearest hospital bed and began typing on the nearby machine’s keyboard.

  Barnes removed his jacket, rolled up his sleeve. He sat down on the bed, the Batman coin purse concealed in his left hand.

  “Got you a clean one,” Raphael said, handing Barnes a bit with only a few teeth marks. “Did I ever tell you the one about the barber and the shaving ball?”

  “Only every time I come in here,” Barnes said.

  “It’s a good one, though, ain’t it?”

  “It is,” Barnes said. He lay down on the bed, giving his arm to Raphael. The man tied on a rubber strap and inserted the needle, slick as a nurse. He applied the suction cups to Barnes’s temples. Barnes put in his bit and closed his eyes.

  Edith MacKenzie thought of the rubber tie-downs that’d held her in place in that chair in her living room. “I don’t like this.”

  “Shhh.”

  “Here we go,” Raphael said.

  The serum moved through Barnes, cooled him. He heard the click of the machine, the hiss.

  “Take me out to the ball game,” Raphael sang, his voice whispery, dreamlike. “Take me out with the crowd . . .”

  Barnes smiled. Through the bit he sang, “Buy me some peanuts and Cracker J—” The machine’s surge arched his body. The Vitruvian Man test pattern appeared. “Prepare for transmission.”

  Barnes smelled the plastic of new arcade-game cabinets, like the interiors of new cars. The man who’d sold this particular memory, Eli, had a photographic mind—an extremely sellable talent in this black market. While sitting on the machine and being recorded, he’d been able to recall an entire youthful afternoon at the arcade. Inside Putt ’n Games it was warm. The sounds of the arcade games layered upon one another with bleeps and lasers and explosions. The casual ear could pick out Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, maybe Galaga. The trained ear, however, could tell right away whether someone was playing Karnov, Arkanoid, or Gauntlet, even though Gauntlet was all the way in the back corner. Barnes’s ear was tuned in for the pro-wrestling game Mania Challenge. He’d have to wait to play.

  Young Eli started with Tecmo Bowl. The football game was against a wall and tucked between the skee-balls and drop-claws. The sound was broken. He played while stealing embarrassed glimpses at the bikini poster halfway hidden behind one of the drop-claw machines. It was an ad for the movie Ski School 2.

  Bored with football but with his hormones raging, Eli moved over to Rampage. At the console he took control of Lizzie, the giant lizard, while his friend Marky took Ralph, the giant wolf. They dropped in their quarters and set out to destroy Peoria, Illinois. Another kid came by and almost made it a three-man game by taking over George, the giant gorilla, but he chose to play Contra instead, which was situated right next to Rampage. There were thunderous crashes, screams, whizzing bullets. Eli and Marky crushed buildings and saved distressed damsels. Marky forced Ralph to punch a neon sign and get electrocuted, which in turn made the boy giggle. He laughed even harder when he made Ralph eat a s
oldier carrying a flamethrower to give the giant wolf heartburn, making him spit flames. Eli made Lizzie knock helicopters from the sky and pulverize towers.

  A few more games and the boys quit. They wandered over to the food counter where they ate pizza off greasy paper plates. Barnes tasted the gummy cheese, the bland pepperoni. Eli’s fountain Coke was watery but good and cold.

  Once Eli was down to his last quarter, he went to Mania Challenge. As the boy approached the game, Barnes’s heart began to pound. It’d taken him years on the machine to find the game, and then to find Eli, the man with the vivid memory. As a boy Eli had mastered Mania Challenge. He could take on all comers, and the computer didn’t stand a chance, even at the highest levels. He played for an hour while Barnes sat in placid fascination. He’d memorized all Eli’s moves but still reveled in every punch, every kick, every flying leap from the top rope. The referee counted “one, two, three” over and over again as Eli defeated all who stood in his path. And then, very abruptly, the boy just walked away from the cabinet.

  Darkness and silence.

  “End of transmission.”

  The Vitruvian Man test pattern.

  Please Stand By.

  Barnes opened his eyes to find Raphael sitting back in a rolling chair, smiling at him. “There’s Dr. Jekyll.”

  The room was empty now. The woman who’d played the part of Keisha Clarke was gone, but the scent of her virtual encounter hung in the air. Barnes fished in his pockets to find another fifty-dollar bill and the USB drive he’d collected from Reyes’s empty apartment. He held them out for Raphael to take.

  “What’s this?” Raphael said. He took the money and the drive.

  Barnes shrugged and lay back, the bit still in his mouth. He closed his eyes to the sound of Raphael inserting the USB drive into the machine. Heard the turning dials, the clacking keys. Raphael said, “Looks like just one file on here. It’s named Napoleon and Squealer, all one word.”