Machine City: A Thriller (Detective Barnes Book 2)

by Scott J. Holliday

  He picked up his cell phone and dialed Franklin, waited through the rings until he got to voice mail: “You’ve reached Lieutenant Detective Franklin, Detroit Homicide. If this is an emergency, please dial 911. Otherwise, you know the routine.”

  After the tone, Barnes said, “You’ve got some explaining to do. Call me back.”

  Barnes dropped the phone onto the pizza box and started the truck. When the headlights popped on they revealed a Melodian standing next to the dumpster. He was soaking wet from the recent rain, staring at the back door to Ziti’s.

  Melodians were members of Melody Sharpe’s angel squad. They were easy to spot because they all wore reverse Mohawks to indicate their non-use of the machine. Initially it just looked like male-pattern baldness (though the look was strange on her female followers), but after some time the hair on their temples grew long and they ended up with the same style as men of the Hasidim. Many wore hats while at their jobs or running errands.

  Melody Sharpe was an inmate psychologist who ran an independent study of the machine’s effects on the criminals who were forced to use it. She was the first to suggest it wasn’t only memories that lingered in the brains of machine users but that personalities were beginning to form. Melody’s findings were initially dismissed, but then one of her most ardent opponents, a California senator named Randall Shakely, became less and less vocal in defiance of her results. Turned out he’d been spending time on the machine as a teenage girl in rural Arkansas, and Melody scared her.

  The girl’s name was Brittany Tuck. Her memories were a collection of her sitting around painting her toenails while listening to electronica, playing video games, and occasionally prancing around in front of her bedroom mirror wearing nothing more than a set of butterfly wings, but she figured they may be worth a couple of bucks, so into the Echo Ring they went.

  Randall Shakely, having essentially become Brittany Tuck through his use of the machine, stopped showing up at Congress and his own office, and one day he didn’t come home for Prince Spaghetti night. His wife reported him missing. The police picked him up at a high school sweet-talking some of the boys on the football team. He inadvertently became the poster boy—poster girl, as it were—for Melody Sharpe’s antimachine stance, and a new faction of the Sharpe angel squad was born: the Brittanians. Men and women dressed as teenage girls, sporting high socks, skirts, and high-schooler backpacks. Melodians and Brittanians often banded together to protest at memory shops or known underground machine locations. Mostly they were harmless picketers, but this guy? He was at a crossroads.

  Barnes pulled forward. The Melodian either had to move or get run down. The man stepped to the side but held out his hand, indicating Barnes should stop. He did. The man gestured for Barnes to roll down the window. Barnes obliged.

  “There’s a machine in there,” the man said. His jaw shook as he spoke. Raindrops glistened on his bald head and dripped from his chin. “Right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “It’s not worth it,” Barnes said.

  “Who were you?”

  Barnes sighed. “Does it matter?”

  The man took a beat and then quickly uttered, “I don’t like my life.”

  As Barnes rolled up the window, he said, “Join the Brittanians.” He pulled out of the alley and turned toward home. His cell phone rang as he accelerated down the street. He snatched it up and answered. “You bastard.”

  “Is that. Any way to talk. To a friend?”

  It wasn’t Franklin. Barnes pulled the phone away from his head and checked the caller ID. UNKNOWN. He put the phone back to his ear. “Who is this?”

  “Oh, John,” the caller said. “My feelings. Are hurt.”

  “Gee, I’m sorry. Now who the fuck is this?”

  “I know. What you must. Think.” The voice was weak and whispery. The caller struggled to speak. He took sharp intakes of breath between his stunted phrases. “You think Franklin. Is toying with you. You think he wrote. The letter from Cohen.”

  “Say what?”

  “You think he’s. Trying to pull you. Into an. Investigation. Using Ricky as bait.”

  “Look, jerk-off,” Barnes said. “I don’t know who you—”

  “Using the fact. That you failed. Your kid brother.”

  Barnes went silent. His mind raced as he tried to place a face with the voice.

  “And then,” the voice said. “There’s that. Terrifying. Eddie Able. In Cohen’s. Twenty-five-year-old. Memories. Plus the poster in. Diggs’s crack house. No way it’s. Coincidence.”

  Barnes took his foot off the gas pedal. “Who are you? How could you know these things?”

  “I’ve been them, too,” the caller said. “Cohen. Flaherty. Franklin. I’ve even. Been you. Detective.”

  “That means you’re police.”

  “Perhaps. I’m just a concerned. Citizen.”

  “Last chance, pal,” Barnes said. He stepped on the accelerator again. “Your name or I’m gone.”

  “Find the shoebox. John.”

  Barnes slammed the brakes. The truck screeched to a halt. “What?”

  No reply.

  Barnes took the phone away from his ear and stared at it. The call had been disconnected. The LED screen was blank. Barnes sat in silence but for the running engine and the keys swinging in the ignition. The black screen seemed to grow bigger, the world around it went out of focus. A high-pitched sound from far away. The screen grew wider, deeper. A hole.

  A car horn honked as the driver pulled around Barnes’s truck. “Get off the road, asshole!”

  Barnes set the phone down on the passenger seat. The pizza box was on the floor. He pulled a U-turn and headed north toward Whitehall Forest.

  The overgrown two-track came to a dead end in the woods west of Featherton Road. The pickup truck’s headlights blasted through the white birch and pine trunks, exposing zigzag branches like gnarled fingers. Barnes killed the engine and the lights went out. He got out of the cab, reached behind his seat to find a Maglite and a spare claw hammer. He closed the door and checked that the flashlight worked. He turned off the light and went to the front of the truck where he stood in silence, allowing his eyes to adapt to the darkness.

  A breeze hushed through the trees and whistled in the undergrowth. The river rushed in the distance. The truck’s engine ticked as it cooled. The purple ghosts on Barnes’s eyes began to fade. More and more of the forest could be seen—the tree trunks, the branches, the lilting ferns. His body became taut, as though the cool earth beneath his feet was filling him up like a balloon, testing the strength of his skin. Stand still long enough and he might burst.

  Barnes clicked on the flashlight and began moving through the trees toward the sound of the river. When he arrived at the bank, he followed it west until he neared a clearing. The markings were familiar here, even in the dark. The trees, the rocks, the boulders. He would soon step into the clearing where Calavera had lived in his boxcar, where Barnes had apprehended him.

  His scars burned. Memories of the killer’s deeds emerged, the brutalized victims once thriving inside Barnes’s head. He no longer heard their voices, or so he had thought, but their presence was always felt. His spine went numb where he’d psychosomatically taken the pickax. His ribs throbbed. His head ached. Flashes of the weapon swinging toward him, his eyes closing, his head banking to the side, their screams like distant calls. He’d been suicidal that day. Willing to die at the hands of a serial killer so long as he made his collar. It was only luck that’d kept him alive, maybe divine intervention. The brush with death had changed him, made him cherish the life he’d so foolishly pushed across the table, all in on a bad hand. He’d fought like a dog to recover, to win himself back, to outlast the voices and the pain, hadn’t he? Memories of his time in the hospital were spotty at best. Just flash details—an IV bag touched by the sun, faces looking down at him, the distant blip of a machine, a bendy straw in a plastic cup, meat loaf and mashed potatoe
s. They said recovering munkies experienced lost time during the days and weeks—even months and years—they’d walked around as someone else. How much time had he lost? More flash details had eventually emerged. Jessica in her wedding dress. I do. A tear on her cheek, trailing down toward her smile. The scent of pink paint as it was rolled onto a kid’s bedroom walls. Takeout Chinese on an overturned cardboard box. The house empty but theirs now, the mortgage said so. Richie, just a baby, crying in the middle of the night. The sting of a milk bottle tested against a forearm.

  How much time had he really recovered? However much it was, he’d be damned if he’d let it fall away again.

  “Then why are you here?” A voice from within.

  Barnes stopped at the edge of the clearing. He vaguely recognized the voice. Someone he thought he’d edged out. Apparently someone growing in strength from his time on the machine.

  “Shhh.”

  He waited for the voice to reply, but it didn’t.

  Barnes stepped into the clearing to find the boxcar was still there, rusty red in the darkness and now coated in graffiti. Barnes stood still, unable to proceed. He thought the boxcar would have been lifted away by a police chopper years ago. The circular beam of his flashlight only lit parts of the structure at a time. The elaborate and colorful graffiti, jumbled, crazy, mostly illegible. But there were instances of gang signs, at least one skull and crossbones, and an Adidas logo. Someone had painted a series of cartoon faces going from calm to angry to insane. Someone else had painted Fuck the Police! in white letters. His flashlight revealed that the door was closed and locked. The torn remains of blaze-orange crime scene tape stuck across the opening. He supposed the land and car might be caught in a probate dispute involving Calavera’s remaining family, most, if not all, of whom would be living across the border in Mexico. To them the relatively low value of a dented and rusty boxcar on a half acre of useless land might seem like an estate. Could take a decade or more to sort it out.

  He turned his flashlight away from the car and pointed the beam into the woods beyond. The trees crowded the river at the far edge of the clearing. One step at a time he trudged forward, gaining back the strength being near the boxcar had robbed from him. He snapped and cracked through the branches that closed off the clearing to the banks of the river. Nocturnal creatures cleared a path, some dashing away with a startling sound, others simply stepping aside and curiously watching him go, their eyes aglow with his artificial light.

  The willow was on the opposite side of the water. Barnes flashed the trunk and then slowly moved his light up into the canopy. The tree was dying. It tilted out over the water more than it ever had before. Falling over glacially. One day it would just topple.

  There were no logs or stones to help him across without having to step into the flow. He’d have to get wet, like it or lump it.

  His shoes were soaked through and his pants were wet to the thighs when he reached the other side. He’d come an inch away from freezing his nuts. He squelched around to the far side of the willow and located the two roots between which Ricky had buried the time capsule. He dropped to his knees and set down the flashlight, pulled out the hammer and turned it around so the claws faced forward. He hacked at the ground. Once the soil was soft enough he began digging at it with his hands, scooping away muddy black earth between his legs like a dog.

  His fingertips scraped something solid. He picked up his flashlight and pointed the beam into the hole to find a line of gray duct tape. He dug around until he found the edges of the box. He outlined it, pried it loose, and placed it on the ground next to the hole. The tape had held up well over the years. Barnes brushed off the mud, and the shoebox looked nearly as new as the day it had been buried. He produced a jackknife and sliced away the tape that held the top in place. He removed the lid and pointed his flashlight inside the box.

  Staring up at him was a little Maltese dog on a couch, its eyes as black as piss holes in snow. The Polaroid picture was on top of a Twinkie. The shape of the treat was intact, but when Barnes picked it up it felt as light and brittle as Styrofoam. The snack had a green-gray hue now.

  Destro and Zandar were in fine shape. The two Cobra-affiliated action figures were ready to battle G.I. Joe and his American Heroes. Barnes set them aside with the Twinkie and Rufus.

  The prices on the Mancino’s menu made Barnes shake his head. Was there really a time when you could buy a cheeseburger for sixty-nine cents? He supposed you could find one that cheap today, but it wouldn’t be a Mancino’s burger.

  A quick flip through the TV Guide brought a rush of memories Barnes hadn’t expected, not the least of which was the ceremony associated with the small magazine showing up in the mail each week. To retrieve the guide Dad would stand in his socks and reach out the front door to the mailbox attached to their trailer. He’d then open a little leather booklet cover, pull out the old guide, toss it into the trash, and slide the new one in. The contents of that old guide were dead and gone. Never had information been rendered so useless. And the new guide, well, it held the future. At least for a week.

  Beneath the TV Guide was Ricky’s manila envelope—“Johnny” written in Magic Marker in Ricky’s handwriting. Barnes set it aside, choosing to examine what remained in the box first. Freddie Cohen’s comic book was down there. Giant-Size Fantastic Four, number four. Mint condition. The cover depicted the members of the Fantastic Four battling Madrox, the Multiple Menace. He flipped through the pages and read a couple of speech bubbles—Who are you? What do you want from me? I don’t care if you’re the tooth fairy, meatball!—but nothing seemed to take hold. He set the comic book down.

  The headline on the newspaper’s front page was benign, something to do with foreign automakers kicking Detroit’s ass. Same headline could be printed today. He flipped through the sections—Sports, Metro, Lifestyle—unable to connect with what he saw.

  His mind was on that manila envelope.

  He packed all the contents back into the time capsule and crossed back through the river, making his way east along the riverbank on wet feet, willfully ignoring the clearing and the boxcar where he’d taken down Calavera.

  He came to his truck, got inside, and turned on the overhead light. He pulled out the envelope and unwrapped the red string that held the seal. There was a sheet of ruled notebook paper inside, the scent of which took Barnes back to doodling on the edges of his assignments while his teachers sounded like they were straight out of Charlie Brown. At the bottom of the envelope was a metal ring and what looked like a wristwatch. He tipped the envelope sideways. The ring and watch fell into his hand. The watch was a cheap army-style thing Ricky used to wear on occasion. The ring was a brass decoder Ricky had ordered from the back of a wrestling magazine. He’d saved up enough in loose change and battered one-dollar bills to get Mom to write a check and send it off to God knows where, delivery in four to six weeks.

  Ricky went nuts when he got the ring, leaving numbered messages all over the house. Trouble was, it was his ring, so initially he was the only one with the means to decode his messages. Mom had threatened to take the ring away after she found the code 6-1-18-20 on notes all over the house. Using the decoder ring while Ricky was at school, and discovering its simple cryptography, she deciphered F-A-R-T, F being the sixth letter of the alphabet, A being the first, and so on.

  After a scolding Ricky got to keep his ring, but any more FART or BALLS codes around the house would result in permanent ring disposal. This threat had been driven home by the nunchaku (or numb-chucks to any preteen Detroiter who’d stayed up past midnight for Martial Arts Theatre with Charlie Lum), Water Weenies, and plastic handcuffs from Gibraltar Trade Center that’d mysteriously gone missing over the years.

  Barnes slid the brass decoder ring over his left pinkie finger. It barely fit, but he found he could slide the alpha ring to reveal an individual number in the digit slot. He set the ring to A-1.

  The watch wasn’t much of a sentimental piece. Ricky had won it from Er
ic Shield, who dared him to play ding-dong-ditch-it at the Masterson trailer. The boys stole a bottle of root beer schnapps and spent all night sipping courage to hype themselves up for the event, which had become a rite of passage for kids from the park. You couldn’t call yourself a man from Flamingo Farms if you didn’t have the sand to ring the Masterson doorbell and run like hell while Earl Masterson or one of his brood screamed obscenities and shook a fist on the porch.

  Johnny recalled when he himself had rung the bell and run only the summer before. At the end of his run he felt like a king, despite having puked up his share of apple pucker behind Gary Baldwin’s inflatable pool.

  But this time it was Ricky’s turn. Johnny and Eric watched as he silently approached the Masterson front door, which was wooden with a diamond-shaped window, and as he stepped onto the porch Eric shined his dad’s deer-spotting flashlight on the door to reveal a terrifying face peering out at them through the diamond window. Ricky screamed and all three of them ran. The next day Ricky and Johnny came back to see that the Mastersons, having endured too many ding-dong-ditch-its, had taped a record sleeve of Ted Nugent’s Cat Scratch Fever inside the window. Uncle Ted’s crazy face was what had scared them so badly.

  Though Ricky never technically rang the bell, Eric Shield still gave him the watch. (He felt bad, having known about Nugent’s face in advance.) There was nothing special about the watch other than it kept time on a twenty-four-hour clock instead of just twelve. The battery was long since dead. Barnes put the watch in his jacket pocket and pulled the ruled paper from the envelope. A note. Ricky’s handwriting.

  Johnny,

  If you’re reading this, you’re either a bastard or I’m dead.

  Don’t double your trouble. Go balls out. Solve the riddle or suck an egg:

  I am not in closed drawers,

  But I do cut a shine.

  I am yours,

  But you are not mine.

  Ricky

  Barnes thought on the riddle for a moment, but he came up empty. He smirked. Ricky, the clever little punk. He slid the note back into the envelope and put it back in the shoebox. He set the shoebox on the passenger seat and retrieved his cell phone to find a voice mail from Franklin.