Machine City: A Thriller (Detective Barnes Book 2)

by Scott J. Holliday

  The thought brought a chill.

  Barnes stepped through the rain to the back door at Ziti’s, his old machine haunt. There was a time when outlawed machines could be found in secret joints like this all over Detroit, but since the crackdown it was nearly impossible to find an unlawful place to hook in. The machine’s trajectory was like that of marijuana. At first everyone knew someone who used, and probably knew someone who dealt, but then the government got involved, started handing out medical cards to those they determined were in need. Now a med card could get you into any memory shop in the country, but merchants who played it straight had bullshit memories to sell. Running a memory shop was like running a movie theater that only showed G-rated films. Candy-coated recollections from kids at theme parks, crunchy people on nature walks, hour-long hugs, workplace affirmations, missionary sex. People with med cards wanted escape from the horror of their real lives, the physical destruction of their bodies, or the slipping gears in their minds, and the only legal place to go was inside a kid on a Tilt-A-Whirl? What a scam.

  To get the hard stuff you had to go underground. At Ziti’s, that meant literally.

  Barnes rapped his knuckles on the gray steel door. There was a flash of shadow through the peephole, and then a voice from behind the door. “Fuck off.”

  Barnes took a beat and knocked again.

  The voice came again. “The two words were fuck and off. When you put them together, you get fuck off.”

  “Come on, man,” Barnes said. “I know Raphael.”

  “Who?”

  “Look, I don’t know his real name, but he keeps two katana blades tucked into his pants, so he’s like Raphael with his sais, you know? The Ninja Turtle?”

  Locks clicked and clacked. The door swung open, releasing the scent of french fries and pizza from within. The man standing there was dressed in a stained apron and a T-shirt ringed in sweat. His face was scruffy. He held a bread knife in one hand, a sub bun in the other. “You know Danny?”

  “I mean, yeah, from back when I used to come by here more often.”

  “Have you seen him?”

  “Not since, I don’t know . . . it’s been a while.”

  The man cocked his head, knitted his brow. “You ain’t seen him?”

  “Is he missing?”

  “Motherfucker ran off with Brenda and a week’s take. I find him”—he brandished the bread knife—“he’s fuckin’ dead.”

  “Duly noted,” Barnes said.

  “What do you want?”

  “I ordered a large double pepperoni to go,” Barnes said, and then he showed the man a fifty-dollar bill. “But first I’d like a ride.”

  The man’s expression changed. “A ride on what?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  The man leaned out into the alley and looked both ways. “That your truck?”

  Barnes looked back at his old pickup. The wheel wells were rusted out, the windshield was cracked, and the paint job was a study in nicks and scratches, but the engine kept purring. Tucked against the cab was a secure toolbox, the only thing less than fifteen years old. “Yep.”

  The man nodded at the fifty. “Double that.”

  “Really?”

  “You got a med card?”

  “Think I’d be here if I did?”

  The man pursed his lips. “Maybe.”

  “No,” Barnes said. “I wouldn’t.”

  The man nodded. “Still, though, the price doubles.”

  Barnes produced another fifty.

  The man snatched the money and stepped back to let Barnes inside. To Barnes’s immediate left was the familiar dank stairwell that led to the machine room beneath Ziti’s. He stood at the top of the steps with his heartbeat building to a frenetic pace, his elbow pits tingling, his throat suddenly dry.

  “Go on, then,” the man said, clapping Barnes’s back. “Munky see, munky do.”

  Barnes stepped down into the darkness.

  The cellar contained boxes of onions, stacked cans of tomato sauce, and a chest freezer poorly lit by a dusty overhead bulb on a wire. Barnes maneuvered through the maze of boxes and pallets until he came to the back wall. He slid sideways behind an industrial-size refrigerator and made his way along until he found the familiar hidden door. He knocked. A head-level mail slot slid open, revealing a woman’s eyes.

  “Do I know you?” the woman said.

  “Don’t think so,” Barnes said.

  “You paid Harrison?”

  “The guy upstairs?”

  “You tell me,” she said.

  “Gimme a break,” Barnes said. “I just parted with a yard to some dude pining about a girl named Brenda running off with—”

  The man from upstairs called down the steps. “Dawn! Let him in! Use Danny’s med card!”

  The slot closed and the door opened.

  Barnes stepped inside the machine room. The last time he’d been in the space there’d been three hospital beds inside, three machines. They were down to one machine now and an old, padded leather table. A bald-headed man in a button-down shirt and tie sat on the lone table with his head hung low, hands at his sides, palms to the padding. His sleeves were rolled up and a cotton ball was taped to his right elbow pit, old needle tracks around it.

  “Shhh.”

  Barnes looked at the woman who’d let him in. Dawn. She held a finger to her bright red lips, shushing him. He noticed a spiderweb tattoo on her knuckle. Her wrist was inked as well. Chickadees on branches. The art traveled down her arm and up into her sleeve. She was tall and physically fit with black hair cut into a Mohawk, black pants, and black boots. An imposing presence in the small room. Sticking out from the waist of her jeans was the yellow butt of a Taser.

  “He’s just coming out,” Dawn said. She gestured to a chair along the near wall. “Have a seat.”

  “I’m fine standing,” Barnes said.

  The man sitting on the table looked up at them without lifting his head, only his eyes. They were bloodshot and mostly hidden by his brow. His facial skin was slack, his lips wet.

  “You all right, Jack?” Dawn said.

  “You know,” Jack said, his speech slow, “a long time ago being crazy used to mean something. Nowadays, everybody’s crazy.”

  Barnes turned to Dawn. “Manson?”

  She nodded. “Ol’ Jack used to come in here for Tom Brady and Mike Tyson.”

  The man stared at the side of her face as she spoke to Barnes.

  “Predictably, he graduated on to Peter North,” Dawn said. “At some point all of you men do. That lasted a few weeks, and then one day he asked if I had Dennis Rader.”

  “The BTK Killer,” Barnes said.

  “That’s the guy. So I go, ‘No, Rader hasn’t sold his memories yet . . . but I got Manson.’ He sold his stuff a couple weeks before he kicked off, you know? Anyway, you should have seen this guy’s face light up.” She turned to the man. “Ain’t that right, Jacky boy?”

  “Everyone’s got something to blame,” Jack said, his eyes shifting between Dawn and Barnes, “because no one wants to look inside themselves.”

  “Hey,” Dawn said, “snap out of it.” She snapped her fingers in front of his face. He blinked and recoiled. The skin on his face began to tighten, his hanging jaw slowly closed. He dropped his forehead into a hand and squeezed his temples.

  “Give him a second,” she said. “He was on a binge. They tend to hold on a bit longer.”

  “A binge?”

  “You never tried one?”

  Barnes shook his head.

  “I guess some hacker figured out a way to stitch snippets from a bunch of memories together in one file, like cut and paste, you know? Saves you from going under a bunch of different times for the different memories you want. Jacky here binged on a series of Manson snippets in one go. It’s like mixing a whole bar-night’s worth of shots into one big glass.” She gestured throwing back a glass and then rolled her eyes. “Intense.”

  Barnes turned his eyes to Jack, w
hose body was beginning to shiver. He’d seen the transformation before, felt it before, more times than he cared to recall. He scratched at his scalp. “You sure he’s all right?”

  “He’s fine,” Dawn said.

  From behind his hand, Jack said, “Believe me, if I started murdering people there’d be none of you left, because . . .”

  “Because what?” Dawn said, leaning into the man’s face and smiling. Her teeth were dazzling white. “Because your children are coming, Charlie?”

  Jack pulled his hand away and gazed at her with eyes that were somehow both fierce and dispassionate. You could imagine him playing curiously in a brutalized victim’s blood, steam still rising from the gore. Barnes instinctively reached into his armpit where a .45-caliber Glock used to hang. Nothing there now.

  Still shivering, Jack blinked and his eyes changed, his demeanor shifted. To Dawn he said, “What did you say?”

  She patted his knee. “Just wanted to know how you feel.”

  Jack smiled. “I feel great.” He turned to Barnes. “Hi there.”

  Barnes nodded back.

  Jack hopped down from the table. He rolled down his sleeves, plucked a suit jacket from a nearby hook, and put it on. “See ya tomorrow.”

  Dawn held the door open for him. “See ya.”

  She closed the door behind him, locked it, and turned to Barnes. “You want Manson, too?”

  “You can’t let him out of here like that,” Barnes said.

  “Why not?” Dawn said. “He’s in the Sect. He’ll be fine.”

  “The Sect?”

  “The Sect of Shifting Sands,” Dawn said. “Duh.”

  Barnes raised his eyebrows.

  “Gabriel Messina? The Shivering Man?”

  Barnes shook his head.

  “Let’s put it this way,” Dawn said. “If you’re in the Sect of Shifting Sands, you can handle a little Charlie Manson.”

  “What are they, a bunch of machine nuts?”

  “Forget I mentioned it. Who are you looking for?”

  “Freddie Cohen.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Figured that.”

  “Personal?”

  Barnes nodded.

  “Man,” Dawn said, “I haven’t served a personal in months.” She went to the machine and pulled out the keyboard tray beneath the bulk of the apparatus.

  Barnes looked closely at the machine. First time he’d seen one in a while. Basically it was a black box, almost like a desktop computer, but with a few tubes here and there, a bottle of serum, suction cups, and the needle. An artificial heart pumped somewhere inside, sending serum through the body into the brain. The machine may have seemed like an ordinary device, but the goddamn thing had presence. Above its power switch was a red LED light that blinked slowly, as if monitoring a dying pulse.

  “No med card, eh?” Dawn said.

  Barnes turned up his palms.

  “We’ve been using the shit out of Danny’s card,” Dawn said, “not that he doesn’t deserve it. Dumbass ran off so fast he forgot it. Anyway, if it comes back canceled you may be out of luck. What’d you say the name was, again?”

  “Cohen,” Barnes said. “Freddie. Maybe Frederick.”

  “Should I even bother searching CogNet?”

  CogNet. Short for Recognizant Network. It was where all legal memories were stored, accessible to anyone who had a med card and bought from a licensed memory merchant. A great place to hook in if you wanted to experience life inside a Stepford Wife. You could spend an hour high-fiving teammates as Tom Brady or painting happy little trees from within Bob Ross. If you wanted to get really crazy, you could be J. K. Rowling reading a book. Not writing one, though. Those memories weren’t for sale.

  “Doubt it,” Barnes said.

  “Okay,” Dawn said, “then it’s straight to the Echo Ring.”

  The Echo Ring was the illegal side of memory sharing. Peer-to-peer, like Napster in the beginning. Licensed machines could be jailbroken to tap into either CogNet, the Echo Ring, or both, but there was risk. Tapping the Echo Ring using a med card was akin, penalty-wise, to a misdemeanor, while tapping without a card was more like a felony. Prison time instead of a fine. A cuff around the wrist instead of a slap.

  Dawn flipped a handmade switch on the machine, turning the connection over from CogNet to the Echo Ring. She typed on the keys for a moment. “Got a few Frederick Cohens in here. You know his date of birth?”

  “No,” Barnes said.

  “Know his middle name? Maybe his location?”

  “You can find him by location?”

  A smile built slowly on Dawn’s face. “You sure you’ve done this before?”

  Barnes deadpanned.

  “I can find him by location three different ways,” she said. “One, by his address. If he was willing to give it, which I doubt. Two, by the location where he hooked in. Or three, the location of his memories.”

  “What do you mean, location of his memories?”

  “It’s a recent upgrade,” Dawn said. “If there are any visual or audible clues in a memory the machine can pick them up and try to determine the location. Like, say someone remembered walking past a street sign or eating at a particular restaurant”—she patted the machine—“this baby can likely figure out where they were in the world.”

  “Can you search by Louisiana for hook-in location, Detroit for the memory?”

  Dawn tapped some keys and pressed “Enter.”

  “One hit,” she said, “no pun intended. The file’s called Ricky.”

  “That’s the one,” Barnes said. He took a beat and then asked, “Is it a binge?”

  “No way to tell.”

  “Let’s have it.”

  Dawn picked up a green-and-white med card from atop the machine. It depicted Danny’s familiar face in black and gray, plus a series of numbers. She slid the card through a reader on the machine and theatrically tapped the “Enter” key.

  “How did Danny get one of those cards?” Barnes said. “Last I knew, he was healthy.”

  “He got cancer,” Dawn said. “Didn’t you know?”

  Barnes shook his head.

  “Actually, maybe it was Alzheimer’s,” she said, smirking. “Or was it dementia? Oh, I remember now, it was kidney failure.”

  The machine made a positive noise, like collecting coins in a video game, and a bar across the top of the machine’s small screen went green. “Looks like we’re good to go.” She picked up something from the machine’s table, turned, and smiled mischievously at Barnes, the item hidden behind her back.

  “What?”

  She showed him a set of battery-operated clippers and popped her eyebrows. “Mr. T or Breakdown Britney?”

  “Shit,” Barnes said. He’d forgotten about the suction cups to the temples, the inescapable evidence of a munky’s machine use. He rubbed his hands through his hair and scratched his head. “Screw it. Take it all down.”

  Dawn was as quick as an army recruiter with her clippers, all the while whistling an ancient pop song Barnes vaguely recognized, something to do with feeling like tonight will be a good night. In minutes he was as bald as a PFC, rubbing a hand over the bristle on his scalp.

  “Lose that jacket and hop on up,” Dawn said, slapping the black bonded leather of the padded table.

  Barnes peeled off his jacket and hung it on a hook. He reached to roll up his shirtsleeve before recalling he was only in a T-shirt, so no need. He sat down on the table, swung his legs up, and lay back. Dawn held out a short dowel rod for him to take. The thing was riddled with enough bite marks to rival a third-grader’s pencil. Barnes gripped it in his fist while Dawn snapped on black surgical gloves and brought the needle toward his elbow pit.

  “I guess you do know the drill,” Dawn said, noting Barnes’s needle tracks. But she stopped short of piercing his skin. She cupped a hand on his arm. Her touch was warm, despite the latex. “You need to relax. You’re shaking all over.”

  “Sorry,” Barnes sai
d. His mind was suddenly overrun with incoherent whispers, like a tangle of snakes, hissing and sinking their fangs into his brain matter.

  Voices.

  Some words could be heard in the din.

  “Why?”

  “Please.”

  Barnes felt sick to hear them again. He considered hopping up from the table and running off, but . . .

  . . . It’s about Ricky.

  He squeezed the dowel hard enough to whiten his knuckles. He locked eyes with Dawn. “Been a while.”

  “Take a deep breath,” she said.

  Barnes closed his eyes and tried to still his mad heart, to quiet the voices. He breathed deeply and slowly until he felt the needle sting his skin. Then he held his breath until Dawn said, “All set.”

  He exhaled shakily as the cold serum mingled with the blood in his arm. The whispers faded.

  She applied the machine’s suction cups to his temples. “You ready?”

  Eyes still closed, Barnes nodded.

  “Better put in that bit.”

  Barnes brought the dowel rod to his mouth but stopped short of biting it. He opened his eyes and said, “Can you sing?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Can you sing?”

  Dawn pinched her face. “I ain’t exactly Little Cher, God help the poor girl, but I can hold a note or two. Why?”

  “Raphael used to sing.”

  “Danny, you mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’d he sing?”

  “Anything,” Barnes said. “Whatever came to mind, I guess. Not Britney Spears.”

  Dawn smirked and nodded. “Fair enough.” She put her hand on the machine, ready to turn the dial and connect Barnes with whatever Freddie Cohen had in store.

  “Put in that bit,” Dawn said, “and close your eyes.”

  Barnes bit down on the rod. He closed his eyes.

  Dawn turned the dial. The machine clicked and hissed. The serum moved through his veins. She began singing, softly and slowly, “There is a house in New Orleans, they call the Rising Sun. And it’s been the ruin of many a poor boy . . .”