Punishment

by Scott J. Holliday

  Barnes nodded and closed his eyes.

  “Here it comes,” Raphael said.

  A click and a hiss. The Vitruvian Man. “Prepare for transmission.”

  Barnes’s body arched.

  Antonio Reyes sat in a lawn chair in his empty apartment. The sliding-glass door was closed, drapes pulled across it. The only light source was a single lamp on the floor. The carpet was covered in clear, thick plastic, and lying in the center of the room there were two men, facedown. Each wore a dark leather jacket and black pants. With their faces turned away, they were nearly indistinguishable from each other.

  Barnes looked down to find his hands screwing a silencer into the end of a handgun. Slowly, methodically, his fingers turned the silencer down into the barrel. Barnes’s vision was limited by two holes. His face was hot and sweaty. Something on it. A mask.

  “Umph.”

  Reyes looked up. One of the men was moving now, squirming like a worm. His strange hands—more like hooves, really—were bound behind the back. His ankles were bound as well.

  Reyes stood up. He went over to the man and helped him into a kneeling position from behind. The man said something, but only a muffled sound came out. There was duct tape wrapped several times around his head, over his mouth.

  The other man stirred. Reyes helped him into a kneeling position as well. He stood behind the two men while they struggled with their restraints and screamed muffled threats from their taped mouths. From behind, it seemed their heads were improperly shaped. Their ears were huge and all wrong; their shoulders were sloping and strange.

  Reyes walked around in front of them, the handgun trembling in his hands. Barnes felt confused by what he saw. The two men were not men at all, but pigs. This was no Hollywood makeup job, no CGI. The things before him were pigs dressed and loosely shaped like men. Their eyes were beady and black, their snouts wet and searching, their ears pink and wide.

  Their muffled sounds were squeals.

  Reyes placed his silenced handgun against the first pig’s forehead. He said, “Squealer,” and pulled the trigger. The sound was like a punched pillow. The pig’s body rocked back and then fell forward as Reyes stepped out of the way. It slumped down and the blood began to seep onto the plastic.

  The other was screaming now. Its black eyes were wide and moving crazily. Its body quaked. It closed its eyes when Barnes placed the gun against its forehead. Its squeal was still muffled beneath the tape, but a single, repeated word could be made out. “Please.”

  Reyes said, “Napoleon,” and pulled the trigger. Whump. The pig’s body fell straight back over its cracking knees.

  Reyes stood still, listening to the sound of blood pooling out over plastic. In his mind’s eye there was a girl. Twelve years old, maybe thirteen. She was dark-skinned and pretty, plucking petals from a daisy beneath an apple tree. A tightening pain gripped Barnes’s chest. His skin tingled. Endorphins rushed his mind. Reyes’s love for this girl was overwhelming.

  Reyes blinked. The scene in his mind turned to horror. The girl was no longer beneath a tree, but tied spread-eagle to a twin bed, her naked body slashed apart, her faced carved into a sugar-skull mask.

  Darkness and silence.

  “End of transmission.”

  The Vitruvian Man test pattern.

  Please Stand By.

  17

  Barnes walked through a set of automatic doors at Sinai Grace Hospital, a half-empty pint of Jim Beam in his jacket pocket. The hallway floor had been recently buffed. It reflected the overhead fluorescent lights like squiggly equals signs chasing one another around. He entered Franklin’s single-bed room to find Warden, Martinez, and a doctor crowded inside. Warden and Martinez monitored the machine’s progress. The doctor stood at the foot of the bed, holding a chart and scowling at the technicians. The machine’s suction cups were attached to Franklin’s fresh bald spots, the needle in his arm. His big body was tensed from the flow. The heart monitor blipped slowly. An accordion-like machine seemed to be breathing for him.

  “Take that thing off him,” Barnes said. His breath tasted boozy coming out.

  “Captain’s orders,” Warden said without looking up. “You know that.”

  “Take it off!” Barnes’s hand came halfway to the butt of his handgun.

  Warden turned to match Barnes’s gaze.

  “Who is this?” the doctor said to Warden.

  Warden gave no reply. He kept his eyes on Barnes.

  “If you’re not necessary to the operation of his device,” the doctor said, “then please leave.”

  Barnes wouldn’t release Warden’s stare.

  “I said get out,” the doctor said.

  “You know it’s not what he wanted,” Barnes said.

  “Don’t tell me what I know,” Warden said.

  “You’re making a mistake.”

  “Am I, munky? Or is it drunky these days?”

  “Oh, hell no.” The crack addict.

  “Shhh.”

  Barnes left the room. He sat down outside, eyes fixed on Warden through the plate glass. The doctor left and a nurse went in. She maneuvered around the technicians to tend to Franklin’s life-preserving instruments, unable to conceal her annoyance at the police presence.

  Barnes drank from his pint.

  Martinez came out of the room. She took the seat next to Barnes and sighed.

  “What are you sighing about?” Barnes said.

  No response.

  Barnes turned to her. She looked tired, and she looked Mexican. “You celebrate the Day of the Dead?”

  “Gimme a break,” Martinez said.

  “Maybe you know this Reyes, huh?”

  “Hey, asshole, I was born in this country, just like you.”

  “You didn’t answer my first question.” Barnes faced forward, took a pull.

  “I don’t celebrate the Day of the Dead.” She paused for a moment. “But my parents do. At least, they used to.”

  “I’ve researched it,” Barnes said. “Read a hundred books, a thousand web pages. A celebration and remembrance of those who have passed. Tell me something I don’t know.”

  Martinez shrugged. “My parents were illegal immigrants. They crossed over in California, where they had my brother and I. We stayed maybe ten years, and then came up to Michigan for the farming seasons. While we were still in California, they used to take us down to the border on the second of November, which was as close as we could get to the graves of our loved ones. We’d bring coffee and tequila, and my mother would make sugar skulls. Dad would spill the drinks out onto the ground.”

  “I said tell me something I don’t know.”

  Martinez shifted in her chair. “My mother cried for days afterward. She thought it was shameful that she couldn’t actually visit her mother’s and father’s graves. Now we don’t even go to the border anymore. Can’t afford the trip. Instead they just put up an altar, and we celebrate Christmas and pass out Halloween candy, just like you.”

  “Calavera mentioned an altar. I’ve read about them, but tell me, from a personal standpoint, what’s the significance?”

  “Basically it’s what you’ve read. A memorial. Framed photos, colored candles and sugar skulls, tamales and tequila and sweetbreads, whatever else the dead preferred in life. It’s not supposed to be sad but joyful.”

  “Don’t be sad. Be joyful.” A killer’s voice.

  “Shhh.”

  “Your parents,” Barnes said. “Did they ever lose their accents?”

  Martinez laughed. “You kidding? To this day they hardly know two words of English.”

  The nurse came out of Franklin’s room. “Detective Barnes, you’re wasting your time here. Please go. Sober up. Come back tomorrow.”

  “He’s my partner,” Barnes said.

  “And he’s my patient,” the nurse said. She was a hardened warrior of the ICU, used to dealing with emotional family members, drunks, angry outbursts. Barnes could make no argument she wasn’t ready to knock down. He studie
d her name tag. JUDY. He stood and held out a card for her to take. For a moment she stared at the bottle sticking out of his pocket. Eventually she took the card.

  “Please call me with any news.”

  John Barnes grew up in a trailer park called Flamingo Farms. The park was nestled deep in the trees of Whitehall Forest. There was no sign at the road, only a gravel two-track that you’d probably miss if you weren’t looking for it. As boys, Johnny and Ricky didn’t know they were poor. They lived in a forest, for Pete’s sake. All those suckers on the other side of Calvary Junction lived in subdivisions where the lawns were mowed diagonally and the neighbors shook fists at kids who ran across them. Those kids took vacations to the kind of place Johnny and Ricky lived year-round. They could keep their jet skis and campers; Johnny and Ricky Barnes had their imaginations, their rivers, their trees. They played in them every day, and each night, around five thirty, Mom would lean out the side of their trailer and clang a triangle dinner bell, just like in some old TV show. The boys came flying back home like boomerangs.

  Barnes wondered whether Jessica had grown up having dinner at five thirty, too. He hoped so, because it was five thirty and he found himself on the steps of her apartment, a finger above the doorbell next to her name. The umbrella woman on the second floor had smiled when he came up the sidewalk. He pressed the doorbell. He had stopped at a convenience store and guzzled a coffee in the parking lot, then packed his mouth full of those painful mints that came in a tin. He had checked his eyes in the mirror, too, but decided they were beyond repair.

  Jessica’s voice came through the speaker, only it was some kind of impersonation. Sounded like Julia Child. “Who is it?”

  Barnes smiled. “Detective Mackey.”

  She held the impersonation. “What seems to be the trouble, Officer?”

  “I received a call from this address,” Barnes said. “Housewife in distress. Needs assistance.”

  “Well,” she said, “in that case—” She coughed, laughed, dropped the impersonation. “My God, I can’t do that for long. Come on up.”

  A buzzer sounded. The door latch clicked. Barnes pushed through and headed up the stairs. When he arrived on her floor, he found her peeking at him through her cracked-open apartment door. He could see just one eye, big and blue, and the scar on her eyebrow. A section of her smile was there, too. Her lipstick was red, her teeth a brilliant white. She opened the door fully as he approached. She was wearing an apron hand-printed in flour, and beneath that a dark-green blouse and blue jeans. Her skin glowed softly, backdropped by the light from inside her apartment. Her shape was accented by the middle tie of the apron.

  “She’s amazing.” A lesbian’s voice.

  Jessica was so slight, Barnes wondered how she’d gotten him up the stairs and to her couch last night without him remembering it. It felt strange that a woman he barely knew had taken care of him like that.

  She backed away from the door to let Barnes through. Her smile was playful and somehow familiar.

  He said, “Hi.”

  She came close, looked up into his eyes, put a hand on his cheek. The sensation of her touch spilled down him, made his shoulder and chest muscles tingle. “Hi.”

  They stood there for a moment, unmoving, like bronze statues in a park. Alice in Chains was playing softly in the background, one of their lighter albums, Jar of Flies. The song was “Rotten Apple.” Barnes felt both at home and uneasy in Jessica’s presence. He said, “We barely know each other.” It wasn’t a word of warning, but of wonder.

  Jessica’s eyes brightened. “I know!” She laughed and spun away from him toward her small kitchen. He peeled off his jacket and holster, threw them over the back of a chair. Her apartment smelled of marinara sauce. He looked at the couch where he’d spent the night. Last night? It didn’t seem possible. Surely a week had passed since then.

  Jessica sighed as she stirred a wooden spoon in a saucepan, concentrating on the task.

  “You okay?” Barnes said.

  She stopped stirring and looked up. “I’m sorry I come on so strongly.”

  “No need to be sorry.”

  “No,” she said, “it’s important for me to say. My mom used to tell me I”—she threw up air quotes, one hand still holding the sauce-coated spoon—“‘move too fast.’ She said I create high expectations only to find disappointment, and that I should learn to take things more slowly.”

  Barnes fiddled with a pepper grinder on the countertop. “Sounds like good advice.”

  She watched him for a moment, pursing her lips. “I don’t mind being hurt. What I mind is dishonesty. When I met you, I felt something. I’m acting on that feeling. Should I not?”

  He shrugged. “I’m a guy.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Define feeling.”

  She smirked. “Okay, let’s try this. Do you feel like eating steak?”

  “Sure.”

  “Then you’re effed; we’re having spaghetti.” She poured the sauce over a ceramic bowl of steaming noodles. “I know it’s messy, and probably a terrible choice for a third date, but what the hell.”

  “This is a third date?”

  “Yep. That’s the rule these days. You don’t sleep with a man until the third date, right?”

  Barnes stood there pulling a dumbstruck face, hung on a hook like a skeleton in a science class.

  Jessica laughed.

  The table was set for two. Nothing fancy, but there was care in the placement. Blue-collar class. She twirled her spaghetti on a fork and took to eating with passion and joy. She crunched into homemade bruschetta and seemed to genuinely savor the taste. It was a wonderful thing to watch. For Barnes, the individual spices and textures came alive for him like they never had before. They drank a bottle of Pinot Noir that tasted better than its price tag. He was careful not to overdo it, knowing, after the pint of bourbon, too much more alcohol in his system and he’d be sloppy.

  When dinner was over, Barnes went straight for cliché and helped her with the dishes, picking up the drying towel. She playfully plopped soap bubbles onto his nose and then said, “Oh my God, look at me. I’m like a desperate cougar on the Lifetime channel.”

  “Is that the channel with all the feelings?”

  “You’re gonna get it,” she said, threatening him with the wooden spoon she was washing.

  He took it from her and dried it.

  Jessica took a long drink from her wineglass and then grabbed Barnes’s wrist. He threw his drying towel over his shoulder as she pulled him across the room toward the couch. She guided him to it and set him down, stood above him, leaning in with both hands on his shoulders. She smelled like wildflowers and dish soap. She lowered her head. Her lips came to his ear. “I like you, Detective Barnes.”

  He shuddered, pulled an intake of breath. He felt something fall away inside, like a door knocked off its hinges and collapsing backward into his chest. A light shined in on the darkness and dust that was there. His body filled up with its warmth. Dale Wilson wanted to tell Jessica Taylor he loved her, but Barnes felt it was silly to say. His own love for her was not the love of a man and his wife of thirty years, not the love found in some movie where it takes two hours of pain and hilarity for Harry and Sally to admit it, but the simple love of a moment. This moment. The understanding of its gift. It was love in the only sense John Barnes understood it. His life was defined by a few blinding moments with long periods of darkness in between. This moment here, with her, could end right now, and it would still be one of the most brilliant pieces of his existence. He loved her for that gift and needed nothing more.

  She backed away and sat down across from him on an armchair. She crossed her legs and smiled, took another sip from her glass. “Tell me more about Detroit homicide detective John Barnes.”

  Barnes shrugged. “What’s there to say?”

  “Anything,” she said, gesturing with her wineglass. “Everything. Like, what’s your favorite color?”

 
He glanced at her blouse. “Green.”

  “Favorite movie?”

  “Memento.”

  “Oh my God.” She sat forward. “That’s the only movie I’ve ever watched where I immediately started it over and watched it again. It was totally insane. Favorite band?”

  “Whatever’s on WCSX.”

  “Any brothers or sisters?”

  Barnes looked down, examined the floor, the tops of his shoes. He took a sip of wine.

  “Eee . . . bad question?”

  “No,” he said, still looking down. “I have—had—one brother.” He looked back up at her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to pry.”

  “It’s okay. It’s been a long time.”

  “He passed?”

  He nodded.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Twenty years ago, last month. We buried him at Parkview Memorial. It’s crazy; I was just out there today, following a lead.”

  “Did you visit him?”

  “No.”

  She held his gaze for a moment, and then said, “Did you want to?”

  Barnes took a beat. “I don’t know.”

  Jessica sat back. She seemed to read him, like there were words all over his body. She set down her glass and stood. “Let’s go.”

  “Where?”

  “To Parkview Memorial.”

  “What? No.”

  “Bullshit. We’re going.”

  Barnes checked his watch: 8:30 p.m. “It’ll be closed by now.”

  “So?” She went to the kitchen, began rummaging around in the drawers. After a moment she found what she was seeking. Out of a drawer came a Ziploc sandwich bag.

  Barnes went to her. “What are you doing?”

  “Just give me a second.”

  Jessica went to the cupboard and found a blue canister of Morton salt. She poured about a quarter cup into the sandwich bag, then zipped it up. She pocketed it.

  “What’s that for?”

  “You’ll see,” she said. She put her arm inside of his and pulled him out of the apartment. They walked together down the stairs.

  The cemetery was, as expected, closed. Visiting hours had ended at 8:00 p.m. Barnes drove around to the employee parking lot he’d noted earlier that day. They got out and walked toward the fence. It looked easy enough to hop and gain entry. Barnes scanned the area, saw no cause for concern; the security camera on the nearby fence post was a fake. He offered to help Jessica over, but she shoved him aside and scaled the fence like she’d done it a thousand times.