Punishment

by Scott J. Holliday

  Maybe she had.

  Barnes followed her in.

  His feet went cold when they touched the ground on the other side. The sensation sent a chill up through him, brought back the same pain from earlier that day. He backed up against the fence, shook his head.

  “I got you,” Jessica said, returning her arm to his. She pulled him close and walked him down the gravel path. They stopped at the first fork in the road. Barnes clicked on his flashlight and shined it up and over toward the distant Rutherford crypt. It was closed off by crime scene tape. Barnes recalled the smell of Franklin’s blood, felt it on his hands. He swallowed hard and wished for a drink. Jessica pulled him along. They took a right at the fork, and then another right at the next. Soon they were in the Land of Cherubs.

  Barnes stopped walking. “You don’t understand.” He heard Ricky’s voice in his ears, “Come on, Johnny,” followed by a sound like gunshot. He heard stained glass shattering, then Franklin’s voice, wet and weak, “Barker just gonna pop another one up.”

  “I do understand,” Jessica said. She turned to face him, put a hand on either side of his face. “You’re wounded, John. I can see it in you. You’re haunted.”

  “I don’t see how this will help.”

  “It will.” She grabbed his wrist and pulled him forward, but he didn’t move.

  “It didn’t help before.”

  She stared at him, still clutching his wrist. He could feel she was a little shaky, maybe a little scared. “Trust me,” she said, and tugged again at his wrist.

  Barnes let her drag him along. Eventually he took the lead and walked with his head down. He hadn’t come to his brother’s grave in more than ten years, but he weaved his way through the headstones as though following a beaten path.

  RICHARD MATTHEW BARNES

  My candle burns at both ends,

  It will not last the night.

  But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends,

  It gives a lovely light.

  Barnes and Jessica stood before the grave. The light from his flashlight revealed the words chiseled into the stone. She gripped his hand to the point of pain. There were no flowers in Ricky’s brass tube. A pang of guilt struck Barnes over it. His brother’s remains had spent ten years alone. A decade of indifference. The coin purse in his jacket pocket seemed to pump on its own, countering the rhythm of his heart.

  Jessica released his hand and produced the bag of salt she had prepared. She opened it.

  If she throws salt on his grave, Barnes thought, I can’t love her. I can’t let her curse my brother.

  Jessica handed Barnes the salt. “Throw some over your left shoulder.”

  Barnes sighed. He’d seen the same move in a hundred cooking shows. He’d seen his mom do it. It was a stupid trick, something to do with warding off bad luck. “That’s it?”

  “Do you know what it means?” Jessica said.

  Technically, he didn’t.

  “When you throw salt over your left shoulder,” she said, “you’re throwing it in the face of the demon standing there.”

  He looked down at the salt, hefted it.

  “I know it seems silly,” she said, “but all rituals are. They exist to force us to take action. In your case, to physically respond to what’s haunting you.”

  Barnes tucked his flashlight into his armpit and pinched some of the salt. He threw it over his shoulder, heard it shower against the grass and the backs of the nearby headstones. He stood for a moment, waiting for something to change, some feeling of absolution.

  “How do you feel?”

  He shrugged. The light from his flashlight shifted with the movement. It came to rest on the flowerless brass tube at Ricky’s grave. From the corner of his eye, Barnes saw something there, a bit of white cresting the rim of the tube, which was corroded green and brown. He closed the salt bag and pocketed it, gripped his flashlight and moved closer, knelt before it. There was a triangle of paper sticking out from the brass. He pinched it between his fingers and pulled it out. It was an index card, damp from the recent rain. Written on it, in big black letters, was DEMASIADO TARDE.

  18

  Barnes stalked down the gravel drive, still in the Land of Cherubs, Jessica on his heels. It had started raining again. He had pocketed the index card and was moving his flashlight across the rows of headstones, spotlighting their brass tubes, which were now reflecting raindrops like jewels in the metal. Most of the tubes contained flowers, either freshly cut or only beginning to sag; nothing was wilted or brown.

  He found an empty tube. They went to it. He put his finger inside. No index card.

  He searched again and found another empty tube. Again no card.

  “The Day of the Dead,” Barnes said, ranging his flashlight beam in search of another empty tube, “is for remembering our loved ones lost, for celebrating their lives. If he’s bent on this concept—” He stopped walking. “Oh, shit.”

  “What?”

  “This is Calavera’s pattern.”

  “Calavera?”

  “The Pickax Man,” he said while digging in his pocket for his phone. “Demasiado tarde. Too late.” He produced the phone and dialed Captain Darrow. The phone rang twice before the call was connected.

  “Captain Eugene Darrow’s phone.”

  It was Darrow’s wife, Molly. She oftentimes picked up Darrow’s cell phone when he was off duty and indisposed. She and Barnes had met at a precinct barbecue after he’d commented on her excellent taco salad. Since then they’d met a few different times, and he always felt a bit like her son. He envisioned her now in the elderly couple’s small kitchen, wearing one of Darrow’s old Detroit Police T-shirts, something boiling on the stove. “Hi, Molly. It’s Barnes. Can you get him?”

  “He’s in the shower. I’ll take you to him.” There were sounds of movement on her end of the line. “How are you, Johnny?”

  “I’m good,” Barnes said. He looked at Jessica, rolled his eyes toward the phone against his ear.

  “I mean, with what happened to Billy.”

  “I’m okay.”

  Over the phone Barnes heard a door creak open followed by the sound of rushing water. “Eugene!” Molly yelled so loudly Barnes pulled the phone away from his ear. “It’s Johnny.”

  There was a fumbled exchanged before Darrow came on the line. “Whaddya got, Barnes?”

  “He’s been watching their graves,” Barnes said. “At Parkview.”

  “I’m not following.”

  Barnes opened his mouth to speak but found he was incapable. His body shook and he fell to his knees as Dale Wilson’s broken memories, from so much damage to his head, finally came together like random gears finding one another inside his mind.

  Jessica came to his side. “Are you okay?”

  Barnes held up a palm. Dale recalled the letter he’d received from the cemetery, asking whether he’d like to pay for special maintenance on his first wife’s grave. The service included scrubbing the stone of stains and buildup, weekly flowers, and plucking the weeds. Remarried by then, Wilson had torn the letter in half and tossed it in the trash.

  “Ten years after she died.” Dale Wilson’s voice from within.

  “Got the same one. Ten years after.” The crack addict.

  “Me, too.” Edith MacKenzie.

  “Yep.” Chunk Philips.

  “Ten years after.” The attorney.

  “Me, too.” The mother.

  “Ten years,” Barnes said into the phone. He spoke his next words as the realizations hit him. “He’s been working here thirteen years. The murders started three years ago.” He spotted another empty tube, went to it, found no card. He checked the date of death. “Only a few years old.”

  “Detective,” Darrow said, “you better start making sense, or you’ll find yourself in mandated rehab.”

  “He’s killing people who don’t visit their loved ones’ graves. Ten years. After that, it’s too late.”

  Darrow was silent for a moment. The only sound was tha
t of his abandoned shower. Barnes imagined him with one foot in the tub, one out, water dripping on Molly’s bathroom mat. “He can’t be there around the clock,” Darrow said. “How does he know who doesn’t visit?”

  “No flowers,” Barnes said. “No upkeep.”

  “Look into it,” Darrow said. He disconnected the call.

  Barnes looked at Jessica, who was kneeling with him.

  She said, “You’re on his list.”

  They pulled up to Jessica’s apartment building. The rain spilled down over the passenger-side window in wavy sheets. The working street lamps looked like sparklers in the spray. Barnes turned to tell her good night, but Jessica leaned in and kissed him. He pulled her close by the back of her arm. Moved his hand to her back, felt the softness of her side, her ribs, the strap of her bra.

  She pulled back and said, “You’re coming up.”

  After that there were few words, inside Barnes’s head or out. She walked Barnes up to her apartment, unlocked the door, let him in, and threw her keys aside. She pulled him over to the couch, pushed him down, and stood above as she had before, her hips level with his face. She dropped to her knees on the couch and straddled him. She placed one hand on either side of his head, pulled him up, and looked down into his eyes. Her cascading hair caressed and tickled his cheeks, his shaved head. “This really is our third date, you know?”

  “You’re counting the principal’s office?”

  She nodded.

  He placed his hands on her back. She closed her eyes to his touch, tilted her head back. Her eyelids fluttered. He moved his hands up and over her chest, then back down again. She bit her bottom lip, then surged forward for another kiss. Barnes stood up with her in his arms. She wrapped her legs around him and dropped her head to his shoulder and kissed his neck as he carried her into the bedroom.

  Barnes slept and dreamed of Ricky. His brother’s face wasn’t as clear to him as it once had been. Spots of the vision were missing—his hair, his neck, his ears—like someone had been slowly erasing his face at the edges. He was at Calvary Junction in his dream, watching the train go by—click-clack, click-clack. The back wheel on his BMX spun. He found the scents of steel and smoke. The certainty of what he’d heard behind him—Ricky’s cry, suddenly silenced—echoed in his ears and seeped into his mind like water through a basement’s walls.

  Click-clack, click-clack.

  The scene shifted. Now Barnes was Calavera’s eighth victim, Roberta Jensen. Roberta waited tables at Johnny’s Coney Island on Five Mile. She walked home from work to her apartment in grease-stained clothes and on exhausted legs, wanting only a hot bath, a gin and tonic, and the season finale of Dexter on her DVR. She cringed and sucked through her teeth as she slid into the scalding water up to her neck, closed her eyes, and reached for her icy drink. There was cool air from the window above the tub. She’d opened it a crack for contrast against the water’s heat. A sound popped her eyes open. Had it come from the next room? She turned to look through the doorway, heard that window slide open behind her.

  Click-clack, click-clack.

  Now Barnes was Amanda Jones, Calavera’s sixth. Her memory began with the sound of a flushing toilet while she washed her hands in the sink. She walked out of the bathroom, stepped onto the carpet in her hallway, and felt it warm and wet beneath her feet. Confused, she flicked on the hallway light and looked down. It was then she felt a jolt against her back. She found herself on the floor with a strange hunk of iron poking out of her chest.

  Click-clack, click-clack.

  Now Barnes was Jeffrey Dunham, a local defense attorney and Calavera’s ninth victim. His home alarm system had not awakened him on the night he died. Hearing sounds in his kitchen, he ran down the stairs in a silk robe, wielding a baseball bat, ready for the wrong man. Dunham had been envisioning a man in a courtroom, someone he’d been unable to successfully defend. In his memory the man wore a suit that didn’t fit right, and his Sunday-school hair fought hard against the gel keeping it in place. The man smirked at Dunham as the jury foreman read the guilty verdict, and after the case was over the man vowed to make the attorney pay for his ineptitude. Dunham charged down the stairs, expecting to frighten the man off but wet himself at the sight of a different man altogether—a man in a sugar-skull mask, standing casually in his kitchen.

  Click-clack.

  Barnes was back at Calvary Junction. The train had passed, and a zombie version of Andy Kemp—the murdered teenage boy who scarred his cousin and scared his classmates—stood on the other side of the tracks with the forest behind him. His decayed body was outlined in red from the morning light. There was a $10,000 bulge in his pants pocket. He was standing over Ricky’s smashed bike.

  Barnes woke up. He sat up in bed, naked. He turned and put his feet on the floor, reached for a bourbon bottle on the nightstand but found nothing there. He remembered where he was, dropped his head into his hands. His ribs ached from where Roberta Jensen had taken the pickax, his shoulder and neck from Jeffrey Dunham’s blows, his back from Amanda Jones’s. Something about the dreams nagged at him. A whisper of familiarity more than the usual remnants, something he was missing. He rolled the visions around in his head, trying to get a feel for what it was.

  Jessica stirred beside him. “You okay?” Her voice was sleepy. She put a hand on his back.

  “Yeah.”

  “John, you’re sweating.”

  She called me John. Not Barnes, not Vic Mackey. John.

  “I’m okay,” he said. Through his fingers he stared at the glowing red numbers on the alarm clock on her nightstand. Only ten thirty? He would have guessed it was well past midnight.

  She sat up and scooted over to him, wrapped her arms around him from behind, laid a cheek against his back. Her eyelashes tickled him when she blinked. “What is it?”

  “I was dreaming of my brother.”

  Jessica pulled herself closer, gripped her naked body tightly against his. “Tell me.”

  Barnes lifted his head out of his hands. He looked out through the bedroom door into Jessica’s darkened apartment. He could make out the shape of the couch, a chair, a lamp. The city lights threw a yellow hue on them all. These things looked like beings to him, like watchers in the dark. He said, “Ricky loved video games. We both did. I guess it was the time when we grew up, you know? We had the forest nearby, and truth told we spent a lot of our time out there in the trees, making forts, fighting, and exploring, but we had an Atari from when we were young, and a Nintendo once we could afford it. We played those home machines until they wore out, but most of all we loved the real-deal arcade.”

  “I bet,” Jessica said.

  “We lived on the other side of Middlebelt,” Barnes said, “just a couple miles from Vacationland, the local arcade, but this was a time when arcade games were big, so you could find cabinets just about anywhere. There were two at the gas station near our house. One was Ms. Pac-Man, which was cool, but the other was a game called Mania Challenge, and it was . . . my God, I must be boring you.”

  “You are not boring me,” Jessica said. Barnes felt her jaw moving against his back when she spoke. She clutched him tighter than before. He could feel her chest heaving with her breaths.

  “It was the sequel to a wrestling game we loved called Mat Mania, which might have been the greatest arcade game in history, but it was only one-player. Strange that they would make a wrestling game only one-player, but they realized their mistake and created Mania Challenge soon after. It was two-player. Ricky and I couldn’t have been more excited. We used to collect ten-cent Faygo bottles, you know? And we’d bike up to that gas station every time we had at least five, return them for two quarters, and wrestle each other on Mania Challenge. The characters were Dynamite Tommy and Hurricane Joe, but to us they were Dynamite Ricky and Hurricane John.”

  “Hurricane John,” Jessica whispered.

  “One day we found a coin purse at the edge of the river behind our home. It was a black rubber thing with a Batman lo
go on it. You could squeeze it and the mouth would open. You know the type?”

  She nodded against his back.

  “It was sitting there on top of the leaves, like someone had just dropped it. I thought it might even be warm when I picked it up, but it wasn’t. I’d be a liar if I said we stuck around, waiting for whoever had lost it to come back. We were kids, and there were six quarters inside the purse. I looked at Ricky, he looked at me, and we ran straight home to get our bikes. When we got there I hopped on mine, but Ricky hesitated. His bike chain was badly rusted. Dad had bought us new chains, and I’d already changed mine. But I’d refused to help Ricky change his, giving him some line about him needing to grow up and take care of his own things. It’s hard to remember his face anymore, but I can still hear his voice so clearly. He said, ‘Come on, Johnny, help me.’ I said, ‘It ain’t my fault you didn’t change it already,’ and I rode off toward the gas station, hardly looking back. I had the coin purse, and God help me, if Ricky didn’t show up, I’d play all six quarters myself.

  “He came after me, though. Pedaled his heart out trying to catch up. I could hear him coming, pumping like crazy on that rusty chain, breathing hard, and when I crossed over the tracks, just as the barrier arms were coming down, I assumed he was right behind me.”

  Jessica stayed silent. Barnes watched the alarm clock go from 10:41 to 10:42, and then 10:43. When it turned to 10:44, he continued. “When I heard his chain snap, I didn’t know what it was. It was buried in the sound of the train’s engine, but it was loud, like a gunshot. I heard him call my name. Just John. He always called me Johnny. The train had cut him off. I kicked my brake and skidded, turned back to Calvary Junction and looked for him, but he was gone.”