Machine City: A Thriller (Detective Barnes Book 2)

by Scott J. Holliday

  Cherry Daniels lay on a padded table in front of the boxes and Eddie heads, hooked into a machine. Her hands and feet were bound. Her tiny body arched with the electric flow. She had a leather bit in her mouth, stretching her lips to cracking beneath fluttering eyelids. The suction cups were attached to her temples, a needle in her arm.

  A voice came over a speaker system. “I’m Eddie, and I’m able!”

  “Come on out, Leo,” Barnes said, stepping closer to Cherry, sweeping his weapon across the boxes and discarded fiberglass heads, pressure on the trigger. His heart pounded hard enough to shake his arms.

  “Being friends is twice as nice,” the recorded voice responded, coming from what sounded like multiple speakers.

  Barnes approached the machine near Cherry. The stacks of Eddie heads watched him from the shadows.

  “You’re looking. For me.” Leo.

  Barnes reached the machine and turned the dial from “Transmit” to “Idle.” A moment passed, and then the little girl came blinking out of her coma. When she saw Barnes standing over her, Cherry screamed through her bit.

  Barnes put a finger to his mouth. “Shhh.”

  The girl continued screaming.

  Barnes showed her his badge. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’m here to help.”

  It was the last thing he said before every video game and pinball machine turned on. The room burst into a disorienting cacophony of colorful lights and sounds. Barnes stumbled backward, found his balance, and spun a full circle, his finger ready to squeeze. The sounds of the games ignited the voices in his head—a dozen people screaming, yelping, hooting. The lights were like a laser show, shooting bursts at his eyes, causing him to blink and shake his head.

  There must be a fuse box.

  Gotta find it. Cut the electric.

  The girl on the table howled.

  Barnes kept turning, aiming, blinking. Ghost visions of each Eddie Able head emerging to reveal a body below, standing, coming toward him.

  “Untie me,” Cherry cried, almost unintelligibly through her bit. “Please!”

  “Calm down,” Barnes screamed, his eyes still on the Eddie heads, trying to pick out movement, trying to spot the fuse box. His lungs expanded, collapsed shakily.

  “Please,” Cherry said.

  Barnes dropped his flashlight on the table and pulled out her bit. “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’m going to cut you loose.”

  “Hurry.”

  One-handed, still covering the Eddie heads, the games flashing and catcalling, Barnes produced his jackknife, flicked open the blade, and cut through the plastic ties on her wrists and ankles. She sat up and ripped the suction cups from her shaved temples, yanked the needle from her arm. Blood and serum splattered the table and the floor.

  Barnes handed her a handkerchief. “Wrap it around.”

  “Don’t take. Her away.” Leo.

  “Fuck you.”

  Cherry Daniels tied off the handkerchief using her teeth. She slid off the padded table to her feet. She clung to Barnes’s waist, her face buried in his hip.

  “Why do. You hate me?” Leo.

  “You kill innocent children.”

  “I have never. Killed any. Children.”

  The childlike voice on the speaker was louder than the pinball and arcade machines, louder than the voices in Barnes’s head. It said, “Wouldn’t it be bliss if you never got old, like me?”

  “How old are you?” Barnes.

  “Twenty.” Leo.

  “Stay behind me,” Barnes said to Cherry Daniels. He corralled her behind him as he backed through the room toward the entrance to the video game and pinball maze, gun aimed and sweeping.

  “You’ll be a killer someday.” Barnes.

  “No. I have never. Hurt anyone.” Leo.

  “You will.”

  “Anyone. But mother.”

  “I can help you. I can stop you.”

  “How?”

  “Tell me where you would hide.”

  Barnes kept backing up with Cherry, moving her along. The Leo in his head remained silent among the whispers and shouts of the other voices. Again, Barnes thought, “Tell me where you would hide.”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  The lights of the games and pinballs went out. All sound stopped. The girl screamed. Barnes cursed. His flashlight was on the padded table, several feet away. The beam was focused on a few of the Eddie Able heads against the wall.

  Out of the shadows came a cli-cli-clicking sound. A safe dial turning. Barnes aimed his weapon in the direction of the sound. He continued to back up with Cherry behind him. They flattened against a row of arcade cabinets.

  The squeal of a hinge.

  “To your right,” Barnes whispered to Cherry. They slid along the cabinets until they found the opening that led back through the maze toward the stairs.

  A cardboard box fell and banged against the padded table. It knocked the flashlight to the floor. The light rolled and came to a stop, the beam left aiming at a life-size Eddie Able standing in the center of the room, pointing a handgun at Barnes.

  “Run!” Barnes said. He pushed Cherry back and leaped to the side.

  Gun blasts strobed the room. Leo shooting.

  Barnes rolled along the floor.

  Sparks burst and glass shattered from where Leo’s bullets ripped through the arcade cabinets.

  Barnes rolled to a stop. Ears ringing.

  Aim where you last saw him.

  Shoot.

  Barnes’s weapon bucked in his hands.

  The flash of light revealed that Leo was moving, the fiberglass head facing Barnes as the body was caught turning, retreating. Barnes moved his aim and fired again. Another miss. Leo was revealed in the strobe of light, diving behind the mass of boxes and Eddie heads.

  Barnes scuttled quickly across the floor and scooped up his flashlight. He rolled and took cover behind the padded table, covering the flashlight’s beam with his hand while turning away to keep it from Leo’s sight.

  Leo fired three times, opening holes in the poured concrete wall where Barnes and the flashlight had just been.

  Barnes’s ears rang in the silence. No way to know if Leo was moving again.

  Create a distraction.

  Barnes dropped low, reached up, and placed the flashlight on the padded table, the beam aimed at the pile of Eddie heads. He pulled his hand away quickly, expecting shots.

  Leo didn’t take the bait.

  Barnes chanced a look. The flashlight revealed the rows of heads, any one of which could be occupied. He sought movement as he scanned the eyeholes, searching for a glint in the darkness.

  Only dead black eyes stared back.

  But one head was different, wasn’t it? The one with the bloody finger mark beneath its nose and over its lips. The one that scared Freddie Cohen in Whitehall Forest while Ricky lay knocked out in the leaves. Leo may have watched Ricky that day from across the river, may have seen him there, helpless. It would have been so easy to take him.

  He had taken him, though, in a way. Leo’s presence in those woods, at that moment in time, caused Freddie Cohen to drop that coin purse. The goddamn coin purse that stopped Johnny and Ricky from spending the afternoon building a ladder to their tree fort. Instead they took the purse and ran, first to home, then to Calvary Junction.

  Instead Ricky died.

  Barnes took aim at the Eddie head. He leveled his sights on that old brown blood over the fiberglass lips and squeezed the trigger.

  The head rocked back from the blast but didn’t fall. A hole appeared just below the nose. Burnt cordite in the air.

  Suddenly the head rose up from the pile of others like a ghost. The body beneath stood to full height and staggered out and away from its hiding spot. It dropped its weapon and put up two hands to what remained of its real face beneath. Blood fell in gouts over the man’s chest, down across his belly and waist. He stepped out of the light from the flashlight beam and merge
d into the shadows.

  Barnes heard a whump over the ringing in his ears. Leo hitting the floor?

  A hollow thunk followed, then a sound like a bowling ball. The Eddie head rolling away?

  Barnes came up to his knees, gun aimed at the dark spot where he’d heard Leo go down. His chest heaved. Adrenaline pulsed. The ringing abated. Scuffling sounds. Writhing sounds. In the corner? He aimed there. Heard ragged breathing. He closed his mouth and breathed through his nose to hear better.

  A wet, whistling sound.

  Words.

  “Eht . . . hu- ur- ur . . . sss . . .”

  “It hurts.” Leo.

  “Shhh.”

  Barnes found Cherry Daniels curled in a corner near the basement door, shivering. The contrast between the girl cowering before him and the confident contestant on Starmonizers almost unnerved him. He helped her to her feet and lifted her into his arms while the uniforms used a battering ram to knock down the door. He carried her up the steps and out of the basement beneath building A into an ambulance. She refused to release him as he set her down on the gurney.

  “It’s okay,” he whispered into her ear.

  For a while she kept him in a vise grip, trembling madly, but eventually she loosened and allowed her weight onto the bed. She held Barnes’s gaze but flicked her eyes to his bald temples and the circular suction cup marks.

  “You’re safe now,” Barnes said.

  The girl blinked and shook her head. She tried to sit up on the gurney, but Barnes held her down.

  “Mother, stop!” the girl said. “You’re. Hurting me.”

  Barnes continued to hold her down. Two paramedics joined him as the girl kicked and flailed at them, snapped her teeth at them. “You. Can’t take her. She’s mine!”

  Barnes put his body weight on the girl’s chest while the paramedics strapped her legs down. She went into a full body seizure, which lasted for half a minute, and then she went still.

  More paramedics entered the ambulance.

  Barnes started toward the back door to give them room to work.

  “You were there,” the girl whispered.

  Barnes stopped. He came back to her. “What’s that?”

  “In his memories,” Cherry said, calm now. “At the arcade. You and another boy.” She closed her eyes, fought back a shiver, and seemed to hold on to herself. “He watched you from behind the counter. You were always playing that wrestling game.”

  “At Vacationland?”

  Cherry nodded.

  A memory bloomed in Barnes’s mind. He and Ricky exchanging dollars for quarters with the man who never spoke. Ricky had nicknamed him Boo Radley, while others called him Stinkpot due to his constant smell.

  “He gave me his memories,” Cherry said. “’Cause he wanted me to know he was once good.”

  “He was a bad man,” Barnes said.

  “He was broken,” Cherry said. “That other boy at the arcade. He was your brother?”

  Barnes nodded.

  “He was nice to Leo. The other kids were unkind.”

  “Ricky was a good kid.”

  Cherry gripped Barnes’s hand. “So were you.”

  37

  Jessica was sitting cross-legged on the couch reading a book when Barnes came through the front door. He noted that the book was upside down. She hopped up and met him on the foyer tiles before he could kick off his shoes. She hugged him tightly. “Oh, thank God.”

  Barnes returned her hug, held her for a moment, and pulled back. Their foreheads came together, their eyes closed.

  “Is she safe?” Jessica said.

  Barnes nodded. “She’ll be fine.”

  Tension fled Jessica’s body. She opened her eyes and looked into his, rubbed her hands over his bald head. “Are you okay?”

  “No.” Leo.

  “Shhh.”

  “Yes. Where’s Richie?”

  “Down for a nap.”

  Barnes finished kicking off his shoes and took Jessica’s hand. Together they walked down the hall to Richie’s bedroom. The door was open a crack. Barnes pushed it open another couple of inches to reveal his sleeping son’s face in a shaft of soft light. He put his arm around Jessica’s shoulders, pulled her close. Together they watched their boy for a moment, just as they did their first night home from the hospital. They’d giggled about how cliché they were, standing over their newborn like a couple of mushy dopes, people from a commercial. Jessica had quit teaching to stay home with the baby and taken to motherhood unexpectedly well. Having spent her youth on the run from substandard parenting, Barnes half expected her to withdraw from the responsibility, but her own experiences seemed to make her that much more dedicated to making sure Richie was well taught, well groomed, well loved.

  For John it hadn’t been so easy. It felt like betrayal as Richie grew into the spitting image of Ricky, displaying at a young age the same head-butt-the-world attitude of Barnes’s kid brother. He felt like he was in some sci-fi story where a couple replaces their dead child with an android in the boy’s image, all to some horrible end.

  But the feeling of betrayal was erased when Richie, only three years old at the time, asked, “Dad, do you love me?”

  “Of course I do, kid.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re my son.”

  As the words left his mouth, it struck Barnes how true they were. This was his son. Not his kid brother, not some dream of what might have been, not some apparition, but a human being. A life. A boy who needed his father.

  “I stopped by the apartment,” Barnes whispered. He gestured with his head toward the kitchen as he pulled the bedroom door quietly closed. They went back down the hall and sat across from each other at the kitchen table. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of facial tissue. He situated the tissue in the center of the table and peeled it open like a gift. Inside was a half-carat round diamond. He smirked to recall Flaherty coming at him in the parking lot of that shuttered Kmart. “Almost got my ass kicked for it.”

  Jessica smiled. She picked up the diamond and examined it. “I can’t believe they didn’t just sell it.”

  “Some people know a cubic zirconium when they see one.”

  Jessica rolled her eyes. She compared the diamond to the empty prongs on her engagement ring just the other side of her wedding band. She would reset it herself, Barnes knew. She’d picked up a set of handyman skills in the years since walking away from teaching. She’d even been hired a few times to fix porches, repair roofs, and wire a surround-sound system for one of the neighbors. He could already see her setting the ring between the clamps of the vise on the workbench in the basement, one eye shut and biting the tip of her tongue as she examined the issue up close. “Where did they say it was again?”

  “In a crack between the boards on the back deck,” Barnes said.

  She snickered and shook her head. “How many people would have just taken it?”

  “Not everyone is a thief,” Barnes said.

  She smiled sadly. “I guess we see too much of the bad around here, eh?”

  Barnes looked off. “Maybe.”

  “Tell me,” Jessica said.

  He held her gaze. “I shot him.”

  Jessica looked down.

  “He’s dead.”

  She set the diamond in the wadded tissue and took his hand.

  “He never had a chance, you know?” Barnes said. “His father was a john he never knew, his mother was a hooker keeping up appearances as a maid. She couldn’t have cared less for him, was cruel. Smart kid, though. At eighteen he took out a life insurance policy on her. Paid off big when her body was found in a dumpster outside the Corktown casino.”

  “He killed her?” Jessica said.

  “Yes.”

  “Probably,” Barnes said. “We’re still working it out, digging through his stuff. She dumped him when he was sixteen. I guess he lived on the streets and then spent some time in juvie, which is where he met up with Tyrell Diggs. Got himself a job w
ith The Eddie Able Show, but it didn’t pan out. Things went south from there. He’d already bought one house with his mother’s payoff, the one on Heidelberg. He gave Diggs the money to buy another in his own name.”

  “The crack house on Caulfield,” Jessica said.

  Barnes nodded. “He slowed down after the bodies were discovered there. Must have been low on funds. Must have been scared. My guess is he worked odd jobs for a while, enough to pay the taxes and utilities on his houses, until he found maintenance work at Machine City and set up his funhouse in the abandoned basement. Kept a low profile, though I’m sure we’ll be able to pin some missing persons on him going back twenty or thirty years. Anyway, by selling memories on the Sickle Web, suddenly he could make serious money again, get himself a car, get his operation back. All thanks to the machine.”

  “The machine?”

  “Shhh.”

  “He’s with you now,” Jessica said. “Isn’t he?”

  Barnes nodded.

  She squeezed his hand. “We’ll be okay?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Jessica waited.

  “When I first got that letter from Freddie Cohen’s estate, I was afraid to go back on the machine, remember?”

  Jessica nodded.

  “We used the letter to help Flaherty, but I recommended it because I had to find out what Freddie wanted me to know.”

  “And did you?”

  “From what I gathered from Flaherty, Freddie wanted me to know he was sorry for hurting Ricky. Something he couldn’t say while he was still alive.”

  “Some things are too hard to admit,” Jessica said.

  “But that’s just it,” Barnes said. “I needed Flaherty to ride that memory because I still can’t admit that Ricky’s death wasn’t my fault. I had to know if there was some loophole that would set me free.” He took a rattling breath, regarded his wife. “But I’ll never be free, will I? I’ll always be chasing Ricky’s riddle.”

  There was a knock at the front door.

  Barnes checked the time. It was nearly noon, though it felt like next Tuesday. He pushed out his chair, went to the door, and opened it.