Machine City: A Thriller (Detective Barnes Book 2)

by Scott J. Holliday

  The stage went dark.

  Several days had passed before young Johnny was willing to pull the string on Ricky’s Eddie Able doll again. He was certain it wasn’t geared to say the words that the real live Eddie had signed off with, but he wasn’t taking any chances.

  That first episode was the only time that sign-off was used. In the second episode, and thereafter, Eddie ended with a simpler, “Hey, kids, don’t grow up too fast!”

  “You all right?”

  It was Dawn. Her voice cut through Barnes’s fog to draw him out of his reverie. He blinked his eyes and sat up, spat the bit into his hand.

  “Ended kinda rough there,” Dawn said. “All that time you were happy, and then whammo, you were screaming.”

  “I was?”

  “You know what?” Dawn said. “I think I do know you. You’re a cop, right?”

  “Used to be,” Barnes said.

  “I remember your face,” she said. “You were with the boys that busted that crack house on Fenkell. I was just a girl then, but it really helped clean up the street. My parents talked about it for months.”

  Barnes nodded. He didn’t recall that particular case, but crack-house busts were as common as morning coffee to Detroit cops before the machine changed the drug world landscape. One day they were kicking in the doors on baseheads with glass pipes, the next they were arresting anyone with a set of clippers and a strong internet connection.

  “Wouldn’t have pegged you for a munky,” Dawn said.

  Barnes reached up to pull the suction cups from his temples but stopped short. “Do me a favor. Check to see if there’s anything from an Adrian Flaherty in there.”

  “You got the money?”

  Barnes handed her a fifty. “Will this cover it?”

  “Sure,” Dawn said, “but keep your pants on. I gotta run this card again.” She slid the card through the reader and pressed “Enter.” They waited in silence for a moment, and then the machine made a negative noise, the death of a video game sprite.

  “Shit,” Dawn said. “Danny’s luck just ran out.”

  Barnes looked at the machine’s screen to see that the green bar across the top had gone red. “What’s that mean?”

  “That means our only option is to go bare balls in the Echo Ring,” Dawn said, “and I won’t be doing that for fifty bucks. Harrison will kill me.”

  “You’ve done it before,” Barnes said. “Else you wouldn’t be hiding this machine down here in the basement. You’d be running this operation like a real memory shop.”

  “You know so much, huh?”

  “What don’t I know?”

  “Remember that show To Catch a Predator?”

  “They entrapped pedophiles by posing as kids in chat rooms, right?”

  “Right. Well, they’re doing the same on the Echo Ring now. Used to be it was just harmless sharing, everything was underground and no one cared, but once the crackdown got serious, the FBI started setting traps. Try tapping into a juicy memory, you could be inviting the feds right to your door.”

  “How could they find you?”

  Dawn winked. “Big Brother is always watching.”

  “Well,” Barnes said, “you willing to take a chance?”

  Dawn held out an open palm.

  He sighed. “I’ve got twenty more, but my kid is waiting on a double pepperoni from upstairs.”

  Dawn shoved the keyboard back in. “Business is business.”

  “Even for the guy who helped clean up your street?”

  She stared down at the machine for a moment, drumming her fingers on the plastic. Without looking up, she said, “My parents had already decided to move, you know? They couldn’t afford much, but they were going to find a way to get us off that street. They had their eyes on some shack in mid-Michigan, nothing around but trees and campfire rings. I didn’t want to leave my friends behind and sure as hell didn’t want to start a new life in some backwards hick town who’d view me in a black shirt as satanic panic, end up like the West Memphis Three.” She looked at Barnes. “You boys saved my ass.”

  “Glad to be of service,” Barnes said.

  “What was that name again?”

  “Flaherty.” The breathless voice, speaking from within.

  “Shhh.”

  “Adrian Flaherty,” Barnes said to Dawn.

  Dawn pulled out the machine’s keyboard, started typing. “F-L-A-H-E-R-T-Y?”

  “Yep.”

  “Locations?”

  “Probably Detroit and Detroit.”

  “Let’s see,” Dawn said. “I’ve got a Homicide Detective Flaherty in here with three files. That your guy?”

  Barnes nodded.

  “You gotta be kidding me,” Dawn said. “You want me to go Echo Ring on a cop’s files?”

  “There’s no way they’d be dumb enough to entrap you with a cop’s files, right?”

  Dawn stared at him.

  “I’m trying to save that cop’s life,” Barnes said.

  “Sure you are.”

  “Cherry Daniels,” Barnes said.

  “Oh, come on,” Dawn said. “Don’t sell me that shit.”

  “This cop, Flaherty,” Barnes said. “He was on Cherry’s case. Suddenly he disappeared. If I can find him, I can find her.”

  “You said you weren’t a cop anymore.”

  “I’m not. I . . . It’s complicated, all right, but I am trying to save him. And her.”

  Dawn sighed. She looked at the screen. “I’ve got ColdCase, all one word, plus Franklin, and FiveLives, also one word.”

  “Franklin? That’s my old partner.”

  “That’s what it says.”

  “Gimme Franklin,” Barnes said. He chomped his bit and lay back.

  “Want me to sing again?”

  Barnes shook his head.

  “Okay then,” Dawn said. “We’ll do it my way.” She tapped “Enter” and turned the dial. A click and a hiss. She leaned in close to Barnes’s face. “Good night, sweet prince.”

  Barnes’s body arched. The Vitruvian Man returned to his closed eyes.

  The scent of disinfectant. Stainless steel doors. Muzak. Barnes felt butterflies in his guts, like when Mom used to take the backcountry roads and speed over the intersection hills. The elevator doors opened to reveal a hospital hallway. Adrian Flaherty stepped out and showed his badge to a nurse at the reception desk. She nodded. He turned the corner and kept walking.

  The hospital hallway felt familiar to Barnes.

  Flaherty was at Sinai Grace.

  He took a left into Franklin’s single-bed room. Barnes’s former partner was sitting up in bed, watching the overhead television. There were circles shaved into his temples and a plastic mug with a bendy straw on the table by his bedside along with a half-eaten meat loaf and some dire mashed potatoes on a plastic plate. To one side sat a dormant squeeze box that had once done Franklin’s breathing for him; to the other side was a computer monitoring his vitals and feeding an oxygen tube to his nose.

  “Aw, hell,” Franklin said. He picked up the remote and turned the TV off. “What happened?”

  “Calavera,” Flaherty said. “Barnes got him.”

  “You’re shittin’ me.”

  Flaherty shook his head.

  “But they sent you?”

  “Barnes took three rounds, point blank. Ambulance took him to Providence.”

  “He gonna make it?”

  You’re damn right I am.

  Flaherty shrugged.

  “So what’s this, then?” Franklin said.

  “Follow-up.” Flaherty produced a notepad and pen. “We need to start building our case. We got a three-day memory pull off Barnes, but we’ll need more to convict Calavera. Whatever you’ve got on him, whatever you guys discovered.”

  “Bullshit,” Franklin said. “There’s plenty of time for that after I’m out of this bed. And you won’t need Barnes’s pull. He’s gonna live.”

  Flaherty pulled up a chair, sat next to the bed. “Okay then, m
aybe I’m here for something else.”

  “Shoot.”

  “I’ve been on the machine.”

  “So?”

  “As you.”

  Franklin’s face darkened. “And?”

  Flaherty held Franklin’s gaze, said nothing.

  “Tyrell Diggs, right?” Franklin finally said.

  Flaherty nodded.

  “You gonna arrest me for shooting a crack dealer a hundred years ago?”

  “No,” Flaherty said. “As far as I’m concerned, you did the world a favor that day, never mind the statute of limitations. I want to know what else you knew about him.”

  “Diggs?”

  Flaherty nodded.

  “Just a boogeyman who lived on my block. Sold crack to good people. Cost them their lives, like scumbags do.”

  “Anything other than crack?”

  “I don’t know what went on in that house besides drugs, man. It ain’t like I hung out there.”

  “But you were there.”

  “One time,” Franklin said.

  “I know. I saw what you saw.”

  “Then what’s this about?”

  “Think back, Billy,” Flaherty said.

  “You think back, you know so much.”

  “You know more than I do,” Flaherty said.

  “What do you want me to tell you?”

  “Think back.”

  “No. First tell me what this is about.”

  “Just help me,” Flaherty said. “Do me a favor.”

  Franklin harrumphed. He shook his head, rolled his eyes, and then closed them. “I tell you one thing, that place smelled like piss.”

  “And the floorboards creaked,” Flaherty said.

  “Where there were any. It was a total shithole.”

  “Was there anyone else in the house when you shot Tyrell?”

  Franklin ruminated for a moment and then shook his head. “None that I saw, but it was a crack house. Could’ve been baseheads upstairs, downstairs, wherever.”

  “Tell me about the walls.”

  “They were just walls, man. I mean, the wallpaper was for shit, and there were holes punched out here and there, but basically they were just walls.”

  “No art?”

  “Shee-it,” Franklin said, smiling, eyes still closed. “You ever taken down a crack house, Flaherty?”

  “What about posters?”

  Franklin rubbed his chin. “Wait. Yeah, there were a few posters. Scarface, The Godfather, gangster paraphernalia. Every crack house in the world.”

  “Eddie Able?”

  Franklin opened his eyes. “Eddie Able?”

  “You know, that doll for boys? Came out around that time, maybe a couple years before. It was a big hit. Mothers fought over them at the toy stores. Still does pretty well today, from what I understand.”

  “So?”

  “There was an Eddie Able poster on the wall in Diggs’s crack house. You saw it. I saw it through you.”

  “Okay,” Franklin said, “now that you mention it, sure. Blond hair, dressed like a policeman or something.”

  “In that poster, yeah, but not all of them dressed like that.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Eddie isn’t just a doll,” Flaherty said, “but a concept. The character was successful enough that they rented out life-size versions for kids’ parties and such. Some guy inside the suit.”

  “Like Mickey Mouse?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “So, what?” Franklin said. “One of these dressed-up Eddies do something?”

  “Question is, why would a crack dealer like Tyrell Diggs have an Eddie Able poster on his wall, stashed in there with all his gangster shit?”

  “It was a crack house, dude. They probably thought it was funny.”

  “No,” Flaherty said, “think back. That poster wasn’t stuck up with thumbtacks like the others. It was framed in glass. Professionally done.”

  Franklin sighed. “My partner’s been shot, I got one tube in my nose and one in my dick, and you’re coming at me with this doll crap. What’s up?”

  “You were already gone when they took Diggs’s crack house down,” Flaherty said. “Back to college, I assume. I was in middle school. But just this morning, out of curiosity, I pulled the file. Found out Diggs was involved in something other than drugs. Something our guys never released to the public. I’m not even sure what to call it. The basement of that house was set up like a dreamland for children—puzzles, toys, dollhouses, arcade games, pinball machines, you name it. The door at the bottom of the steps was dead-bolted like a prison, and there was a photo album containing pictures of neighborhood kids reported missing.”

  “Kiddie porn?”

  “Not that we know of, but our boys obviously liked Diggs for the missing kids. Only they couldn’t pin it on him.”

  “That’s why they didn’t release the case facts?”

  “Right. They were looking for Diggs’s silent partner. Never sniffed him out, but a couple of the kids in those pictures are all grown up now—those that survived, anyway—and they’re coming out of the woodwork to talk about what happened.”

  “And they ain’t talking about Diggs?”

  “They’re talking about Eddie Able.”

  “What else did they say?”

  “Haven’t gotten that far yet.”

  “I don’t get it,” Franklin said. “These guys abducted kids so they could . . . what? Play dress-up with them? Show them their cool toys?”

  “That’s the part that doesn’t click. That’s why we need to look harder. Discover the motivation, create the profile, and track this silent partner down.”

  Franklin looked off in thought. “Who owned the house?”

  “Diggs. Thought maybe he got it for a song when the real estate market tanked, but no. He paid fifty thousand, cash.”

  “No way,” Franklin said. “That kind of money? Someone fronted him.”

  Flaherty nodded.

  “And we never got this other guy?”

  “Case went cold, but it’s still open. Guy’s probably still active, all these years. Could be linked to dozens of missing children’s cases.”

  “What’re you gonna do?”

  “I’m gonna start digging.”

  Darkness and silence.

  “End of transmission.”

  The Vitruvian Man test pattern.

  Please Stand By.

  6

  Barnes sat on the edge of the padded table, his feet dangling above the concrete floor of the basement at Ziti’s. The noise in his head was too loud. Impossible to think. The needle had been removed from his arm, a cotton ball and a Band-Aid put in its place. The suction cups had been taken from his temples. His muscles were sore, his eyes burned.

  “—pperoni home to your kid.”

  Barnes turned toward the sound. A woman standing there. Pretty. Tattooed. Mohawk. Sunrise or something. “What’d you say?”

  “I said, you better get that double pepperoni home to your kid. Before it gets cold, you know?”

  Barnes nodded slowly. The movement was exhausting.

  “Come on,” the woman said. “Here we go.” She helped him off the edge of the bed to his feet.

  “Thanks,” Barnes said. He felt wobbly. He tried to recall her name. “Um . . .”

  “Dawn,” the woman said.

  “Right.” He stabilized himself against the table.

  “Here’s your jacket,” Dawn said. She held it out to him.

  Barnes didn’t take it. He closed his eyes and gripped his forehead with one hand. His body trembled. Cohen. Ricky. Franklin. Tyrell Diggs. Flaherty. Eddie Able. Voices whispering from within. The science was understood now, the danger of the machine had been determined, the reason it was outlawed. Neurons were forming in Barnes’s brain, connecting to their new host and growing. Not just other people’s memories, as Barnes well knew, but their personalities. Over time he could hold them back and with disuse they would eventually fade, but as of
now he was a reformed munky fresh on relapse.

  As the junkies of old might say, What a rush.

  He held still and fought not to shiver. The noise in his mind began to fade. The fog cleared away. He released his head and looked at Dawn.

  She smiled and showed those brilliant whites. “Back with us?”

  “I think so,” Barnes said.

  “At least you weren’t screaming this time.”

  He took his jacket from her and put it on.

  She opened the door and let him out. “You seem like a decent guy. Maybe don’t come back for a while, huh?”

  Barnes nodded.

  Dawn nodded with him. “Maybe not at all.”

  Barnes started out the door but then stopped. He turned back to Dawn. “This Echo Ring,” he said. “It’s definitely peer-to-peer?”

  “Yep.”

  “So those memory files are on someone’s home computer?”

  “Most likely.”

  “Can you get the IP address?”

  Dawn went back to the machine. She pulled out a notepad and wrote down the IP from the peer computer that contained Flaherty’s stashed files. She came back and handed him the note.

  64.199.1.7

  “Thanks,” Barnes said. He pocketed the note, left the room, and slid along the wall behind the refrigerator. He made his way through the dimly lit basement and back up the stairs. His pizza was waiting on a ledge near the back door. He fished in his pocket for his wallet while looking into the kitchen to find Harrison. The man was tossing dough into the air, spinning it out. Their eyes met. Harrison nodded at the pizza box. “On the house.”

  Barnes picked up the box and backed out the door.

  Outside was dark. The rain had stopped. Barnes set the pizza on the passenger seat and climbed inside the truck. He dropped his head to the steering wheel and closed his eyes. His body ached. Adrenaline rolled like napalm. He was sweating, but cold. He couldn’t release the vision of Ricky standing happily on that ridge in the woods, couldn’t release the joy he felt followed by the pain, the guilt. He was Ricky’s monster, Ricky’s Lenny Small, the thing that loved him to death.