Machine City: A Thriller (Detective Barnes Book 2)

by Scott J. Holliday

“Sorry I pulled through and screwed up your speech.”

  Franklin hesitated a moment, his eyes searching Barnes’s face, his teeth gnawing at his lower lip. Finally, he said, “You still left. You quit on me.”

  Barnes dropped his eyes.

  “Want to hear your eulogy?” Franklin said.

  Barnes shrugged.

  “Dumbass went and got himself killed. Amen.”

  Barnes harrumphed. He reached for the bottle of whiskey on the nightstand but stopped short. He drummed his fingers on the wood.

  “LeeAnne left me,” Franklin said. “Said she’d had enough of nights like this. Three a.m. and I’m in a shitbag motel room trying to figure out God knows what. Could be home. Should be home.”

  “I’m sorry,” Barnes said. “I didn’t know.”

  “Fuck your sorry,” Franklin said. “I’m only telling you as a word of warning.” He pointed at the divorce papers. “She’s not bluffing. This shit doesn’t end well even in the best of scenarios, and that kid doesn’t need to grow up without a father.”

  “A divorce won’t mean I’m not around. I can still be there.”

  “This fucking thing will be there,” Franklin said. He kicked the TV stand holding up the machine. “Or you’ll be up at Bracken with Watkins and Calavera, or Andy Kemp or Reyes or whoever the hell he is this week, being whoever the hell you are this week. Flaherty will be gone, and Cherry Daniels will be dead.”

  Barnes found the red pulsing eye of the machine. “I don’t know what went wrong, Billy, between me and Jessica. She’s not the same as she used to be.”

  “None of us are.”

  Barnes looked up. “What happened?”

  “Nothing,” Franklin said. “Everything?”

  “Can I get her back?”

  Franklin stood. “She said if I can get you supervised by Dr. Hill she’d at least try. She said if I can bring you back—the real, actual you, not some guy trading time with the voices in his head—she’ll tear that paperwork up. Otherwise, you might want to start filling that shit out.”

  “I am the real me.”

  “Who are you trying to convince?” Franklin said. He started toward the motel room door.

  “What do you know about Dr. Hill?” Barnes said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Barnes thought of that scene in the diner. Jessica and Dr. Hill. His guts tightened. “She was . . .” He shook his head.

  “She was what?”

  “Jessica was with him,” Barnes said.

  Franklin lifted an eyebrow.

  “How long has it been going on?” Barnes said. He held out the divorce papers. “You must know.”

  “I know she hasn’t been happy for some time,” Franklin said. “You were all good, you know? You beat the voices and got your focus back. But I guess she feels like you’re not the same anymore.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “And I don’t know what else to tell you,” Franklin said.

  “She told him she loved him.”

  “I’ll talk to him.”

  “Do more than that,” Barnes said. “If I’ve got any shot, you’ve got to do more than that.”

  “I’ll make sure he understands,” Franklin said. He left the room.

  Barnes folded up the divorce papers and stuffed them back into the envelope. He plucked the fifth off the nightstand and drank. His throat burned. His guts swam. He set down the bottle and waited for the numbing effect.

  His cell phone rang.

  UNKNOWN.

  Barnes let it ring until it stopped.

  The phone started ringing again.

  Barnes snatched it up and spoke into the receiver, “Not now.” Then he disconnected the call.

  It started ringing again.

  Barnes picked it up, put the phone to his ear.

  “Hang up. Again,” Shadow said. “And Flaherty. Bleeds.”

  “What do you want?”

  “What have. You got?”

  “Another riddle,” Barnes said.

  “Splendid. Let’s hear it.”

  “The Madrox Project.” The familiar voice.

  “Shhh.”

  “I come out in spring,” Barnes said. “I make a loud crack. I give stitches their wings, while onlookers react.”

  “It’s from Ricky. Yes?”

  “Cute,” Barnes said. “Like you don’t know.”

  “Hmm,” Shadow said. “I come out in spring. What comes out. In spring?”

  “All I’ve got so far is flowers,” Barnes said. “But that’s not Ricky.”

  “Okay,” Shadow said. “What else?”

  “I’m thinking about ‘I give stitches their wings.’ It’s too odd a sentence. Makes me think the answer’s in there somewhere.”

  “Ricky was ten. When he died. Yes?”

  “You know he was.”

  “Complicated riddles. From such a. Young boy.”

  “He was smart.”

  “An old soul. You might say.”

  “Mom used to say that about him,” Barnes said. He smiled. “‘You’ve been here before, Ricky Barnes,’ she’d say, and then she’d chuck his chin. He’d fall back in slow motion.”

  Shadow laughed. A sound not so breathless as his speaking voice. “Maybe he had. Been here before. Maybe he’ll come back. Again.”

  “How’s that?” Barnes said.

  “If a soul can live. Two lives. Why not three. Or four? Why not. A hundred?”

  Barnes sat up. “Why not five?”

  “Sure,” Shadow said. “Why not five? It’s just as. Arbitrary as any. Other.”

  “I have to go,” Barnes said.

  “Did I help?”

  “Yes,” Barnes said.

  The line went dead.

  Barnes pulled out the machine’s keyboard and typed in the same search criteria that Dawn from Ziti’s had used: Flaherty as the keyword, Detroit for hook-in location, and Detroit again for memory location. The same three files appeared. ColdCase, Franklin, and FiveLives.

  “Don’t.” The familiar voice.

  “Shhh.”

  Barnes selected the FiveLives file and tapped “Enter.” He checked the needle in his arm, still there. He checked the suction cups. Everything was in order. He picked up the Gideon Bible, bit down, turned the machine’s dial from “Idle” to “Transmit,” and lay back.

  A click and a hiss.

  Barnes’s eyes were closed. His tongue felt thick in his mouth. He ran it along his upper teeth, swallowed saliva. Nervous. He wrung his hands together. They felt as big as softballs and were covered with some kind of cloth. His nose found the tangy scent of old sweat.

  His eyes opened. He could see, but his vision was hindered by something black. It was like he was looking through a screen or through . . .

  . . . Jesus. He was looking through mesh.

  Barnes was sitting in a stairway, a few steps up from a dead-bolted steel door. The air inside the fiberglass head was stifling. Sweat poured down his forehead and dripped off his nose. He stood and examined his white-gloved hands, looked down at his clown-size shoes. His legs were shaky. His heart thumped madly.

  The door at the bottom of the stairs opened. Tyrell Diggs was there, smiling. He stepped back and pulled the door fully open. He bowed theatrically for Eddie Able’s grand entrance into the funhouse.

  Barnes walked down the steps, stopped for a moment on the landing, and then leaped into the basement. He made a show of it by spreading his arms and twirling. When the twirling stopped, he depressed a joy buzzer hidden in the glove on his left hand. The toy didn’t buzz, as Barnes expected it might. It clicked and a speaker box inside the fiberglass head sounded off in an excited, childlike voice. “I’m Eddie, and I’m able!”

  He clicked the buzzer twice.

  “Let’s play!”

  Barnes looked down at a boy no more than ten years old, sitting with his legs out sideways on the indoor/outdoor carpet. His cheeks were awash with fresh tears following the tra
cks of those already fallen. His eyes were like those of a sullen dog. He wore a Transformers T-shirt and dirty blue jeans. Among the lights and sounds of the pinball machines and arcade games the boy seemed out of space and time. He could have been Ricky, could have been Richie, could have been any sad boy, ripped away from his family and held captive.

  The boy said, “I don’t want to play anymore.”

  Eddie clicked the joy buzzer. The speaker box sounded off again. “Being friends is twice as nice!”

  The boy’s head dropped. He said, “Please, mister. I want to go home now.”

  Barnes held back a cry. He willed his legs to step toward the boy, to lean down and scoop him up, to tell him it’s going to be okay. But it was no use; the memory was immutable.

  The man posing as Eddie Able licked his lips. Flakes of dry skin. The inside of the fiberglass head seemed to grow more stifling. His throat felt constricted. Eddie clicked the buzzer three times and the speaker box sounded off. “This is your home now.”

  “No!” the boy said, his eyes fierce. “I want to go home. I hate you!”

  The man in the suit was perplexed and agonized by the boy’s response. His mind had been filled with the sounds of laughter, a vision of him and the boy running in a green meadow beneath a cartoon-blue sky, a feeling of togetherness that can only be shared with a friend. No obligation. No contract. No force. Just two pals. He clicked the buzzer. The speaker box sounded off. “Buck up, little camper.”

  The kid stood up. More tears streamed down his face. He wiped them away defiantly. “I wish you were dead.”

  Barnes’s chest ached. Eddie’s shoulders slumped.

  Echoes of different children’s voices sounded off in the man’s head, chanting, “Shitty pants, shitty pants, shitty, shitty, shitty pants.” Barnes endured a memory, this man inside the Eddie Able outfit, just a kid, standing in an alley encircled by boys. Fire escapes overhead. Dumpsters against a chain-link fence. The stench of diarrhea. The warmth of it trailing down the backs of his legs, cooling as it neared his shoes. Two of the boys held stickball bats.

  “Hey, shitty pants. Why don’t you shit your pants again, huh?”

  Laughter.

  The boy’s stomach gurgled. More diarrhea. Tears on his face.

  “Look at him crying! What a pussy!”

  More laughter.

  “You know what we do to pants-shitters?” one of the boys said, brandishing his stickball bat. He could have been Freddie Cohen’s brother. “We beat more shit out of them!”

  Continued laughter as the bully stepped forward and brought the bat over his head. Barnes felt remnant points of pain on his skull and back as the man pushed the memory away. He walked in goofy shoes to the combination safe on the wall and dialed 19-1-4. He opened the safe and pulled out a handgun. He walked back over to the boy and pointed it at his face.

  The boy pissed his blue jeans dark.

  “Leo,” Tyrell Diggs said from behind, “what are you doing?”

  “Shut up,” Leo said. His words came out of Barnes’s mouth with difficulty, requiring all his lung power, all the strength of his diaphragm. He cocked back the hammer and lowered the barrel to the boy’s chest.

  “Mister,” the boy said, “quit playing around. I’m scared.”

  Leo clicked the buzzer. The speaker box sounded off. “Wouldn’t it be bliss if you never got old, like me?”

  “What?”

  A shot rang in Barnes’s ears. He cried out in the motel room. His body trembled as he wept. He wanted free of the memory, free of the machine, but there was no escape.

  Leo’s gloved hand shook wildly, still holding the gun. The scent of burnt cordite had filled up the room.

  “Jesus Christ,” Tyrell said. “What the fuck have you done?”

  Leo wheeled on Tyrell and pointed the gun.

  Tyrell put up his hands.

  “Clean it up,” Leo struggled to say. “Double. Your pay.”

  Tyrell Diggs hesitated for a moment but then bobbed his head.

  Leo put the gun back in the safe, closed it, and spun the lock. He gestured toward the basement door. “Let me out.”

  Tyrell produced his keys. His hands trembled so much he struggled to get the right one into the keyhole, but eventually he finished the task.

  Barnes walked out of the basement on weak legs. He started up the stairs but fell to his knees and turned to sit on the steps. Leo reached up and took off the fiberglass head. Barnes felt the cool of the basement air, smelled the cordite emerging from the room below, the scents of piss and blood. Leo rubbed his gloved hands over his face. Echoes of laughter still in his mind. His head ached. His imagined meadow was empty now. The grass had turned brown, the sky gray.

  Barnes screamed, “Let me go!”

  A vision emerged in Leo’s mind. A room in an apartment. Scents of old carpet, cigarette smoke, and booze. A woman in a navy-blue-and-white maid’s outfit, the skirt cut short and low at the chest. She was slightly overweight, but shapely. Early forties. Shotgun makeup. She blinked slowly and leaned against a yellow stove in the kitchen.

  Mom.

  “What are you looking at?” the woman said, her speech slurred.

  “Nothing, Mom,” Leo said in his memory. He was looking down upon her, taller than she was. When he moved his underwear crinkled. Adult diapers.

  “What?” Mom said. She angrily gripped her crotch through her outfit. “You want some of this, too?”

  Leo shook his head.

  She smirked and staggered forward. “Not old enough for that, are you, boy?”

  Leo shook his head.

  “You’re a fuckin’ midget, huh?” She reached up and rapped her knuckles on the top of his head. “Up here?”

  “Don’t. Do that. Mom.”

  “Every swingin’ dick on the block has had a piece of this,” Mom said, gripping her crotch again, rubbing it horribly. “But not you, though, huh? Just a boy. Don’t you wish?”

  “Stay home. Today. Mom.”

  “And do what?” She gripped his cheek and shook his face. “Watch cartoons wif my wittle baby boy?”

  “I’m not. A baby!” Piss trickled out of Leo’s penis. The wetness was soaked up by his diapers. His sphincter tightened. Heat there.

  “Who do you think pays the rent around here, huh? Who puts food on the table?” She thumbed her chest. “Me.”

  Barnes closed his eyes as she reached for her crotch again. Leo clutched at his pant legs with sweaty palms. Tears pressured at the backs of his eyes.

  “This!” she said. “This is what pays for you to sit in your diapers all day and play with your dolls and games. This is what pays for your little sewing kits and gadgets. Open your eyes, you little maggot. Open them!”

  Leo opened his eyes. Tears rolled down his cheeks. She had pulled up her skirt to reveal her womanhood, brown and furry with gray hair. His stomach tightened. Bile rose in his throat. He swallowed it down.

  “No diapers here, huh?” she sneered. “God, if only you’d slipped out early. Don’t I wish?”

  “I’m sorry. Mom.”

  “I’m sorry. Mom,” she repeated in a mocking tone as she pulled down her skirt to cover herself. “What’s sorry gonna get me? Grow up and get a job, ya fuckin’ bed-wetter. You got no friends, no skills, no spine. Goddammit!”

  “I’m sorry,” Leo said through gritted teeth. His jaw was clenched so hard it clicked and shot pain down through his neck.

  The vision died and everything went blank and silent. Barnes stayed under the machine’s spell. He was paralyzed in darkness for what felt like minutes, and then he was back in the stairwell, fiberglass head back on, looking out through the black mesh. The door at the bottom of the stairs opened again, just as before, and Tyrell Diggs was there, just as before.

  No. What’s wrong? There must be a glitch.

  Leo stood, just as before. Nervous. His heart thumped madly. Diggs stepped back and opened the door with a similar flourish, but not quite the same as the first time. He w
as wearing different clothes. Leo leaped into the room and did his twirl. He clicked the buzzer in his left hand. The speaker box sounded off. “I’m Eddie, and I’m able!”

  He clicked the buzzer again.

  “Let’s play!”

  Barnes found he was looking down at a little girl, not the boy from before.

  Not a glitch. Not the same memory.

  The girl’s face, just as the boy’s, was awash with tears. Her clothes were dirty. She’d been there awhile.

  Terror set in when Barnes recalled the memory’s file name. FiveLives.

  A binge.

  The man named Leo, posing inside the Eddie Able costume, went through a conversation with the girl that was nearly identical to the one he’d had with the previous boy. The result was the same. His internal wish the same. His painful memories the same. Echoes of bully laughter. The girl no longer wanted to play and stood up to him. Leo opened the safe, 19-1-4, retrieved the gun, aimed at the girl’s chest, and clicked the buzzer.

  “Wouldn’t it be bliss if you never got old, like me?”

  The girl screamed.

  -Record skip-

  Barnes was in the stairwell again. Sweating in the fiberglass head again. Nervous again.

  Tyrell Diggs opened the door again.

  Leo entered again, twirled again, clicked the buzzer again.

  “I’m Eddie, and I’m able!”

  “Let’s play!”

  A boy said no.

  The safe was opened. 19-1-4.

  “Wouldn’t it be bliss if you never got old, like me?”

  The boy screamed.

  In the motel room Barnes sobbed through the echoes of gunshots. His body twitched on the bed. His hands clutched the filthy sheets. He silently said no, no, no around the Bible in his mouth.

  -Record skip-

  Barnes in the stairwell.

  Sweating.

  Nervous.

  Tyrell opened the door.

  Barnes entered.

  Twirled.

  Clicked the buzzer.

  “I’m Eddie, and I’m able!”

  A girl said no.

  The safe. 19-1-4.

  “Wouldn’t it be bliss if you never got old, like me?”

  A scream.

  Barnes curled into a fetal position on the bed. His sobbing turned over to a soundless, open-mouthed wail as the Bible fell out. His face was an image of anguish.