Machine City: A Thriller (Detective Barnes Book 2)

by Scott J. Holliday

  “What makes you so sure?” Barnes said. He glanced at the clock on the dashboard: 9:12 p.m. “I still have a few hours.”

  “But you’re. Not close,” Leo said.

  Barnes pulled onto Troy Street. He was on the 7000 block. He drove west and the numbers went down. “Maybe I’m right outside your door.”

  “Let me check,” Leo said. “No. I don’t see you.”

  Barnes pulled to the curb and parked in front of 6034 Troy, a few doors down and on the opposite side of the street from 6025. “Look again.”

  “Aw,” Leo said. “Quit fucking. With me. If you were out there. You’d be. Kicking in the door.”

  Barnes disconnected the call and got out of the vehicle. He eased the door closed until it clicked. He crouched behind the cars and moved up the street until he was in front of 6025 Troy. The rain soaked through his clothing, made his movements heavy. He peeked over the top of a sedan parked on the street in front of the house. The lights were on, but the drapes were closed. There was no screen door. An aluminum awning covered a concrete porch. He pulled his gun, steadied his breathing, and ran across the yard.

  Two steps up to the porch and he kicked in the door.

  Barnes stepped into the living room sweeping his gun. The carpet was worn down to the crosshatch. A cheap couch sat on the far side of the room, plus a love seat, a little flat screen on a stump of an entertainment center, and generic prints on the walls. An end table held up a lamp with a stained shade. A second stain could be discerned on the wall behind the couch. Barnes moved quietly through the living room into the kitchen beyond. A cell phone sat next to a box of doughnuts on a kitchen table with chipped veneer and steel legs. The stove was clean, like it’d never been used. The refrigerator was a base model without magnets. The cupboards and Formica countertops, cheap. Apart from the worn-out carpet and stains on the walls, the place could have been a model.

  Off the edge of the kitchen, two steps led down to a landing. Brass treads. The stairs turned from the landing and headed toward the basement. Opposite the basement stairs was an open door to the backyard.

  Barnes moved through the door and found himself on a patio. The chain-link fence at the back of the yard was still shimmying from recent weight, raindrops flicking off it. Barnes ran across the yard and hopped the fence. He landed on the other side, the fence rattling behind him. A jungle gym here. Green plastic slide. Slick and wet. Yellow rope. He ran past it. Started down the driveway. The scent of food from inside the neighboring house. Corned beef. The tink of silverware against a plate as he passed beneath a window.

  A shadow passed beneath a streetlamp.

  Barnes chased it. He came out on the sidewalk. Saw the shadow up ahead and to his left.

  “Freeze!”

  The shadow didn’t stop. It split two parked cars and dashed to the other side of the street. Barnes crossed, too, as the shadow ducked between the houses. Barnes followed, passed through an open fence gate, stomped through a puddle, crossed another backyard, scaled another fence, caught sight of the shadow as it moved between more houses.

  Barnes chased. He came out on the next street.

  No shadow.

  Barnes scanned the street left to right, right to left.

  A dog barked over the rain.

  Barnes ran toward the sound. He came to the yard and slowed down. The dog was a yellow Lab barking up into a tree in a backyard. The gate was open. The homeowner appeared at the side door. A woman in pajamas and a pink robe. She said, “Moose, be quiet!”

  “Ma’am,” Barnes said.

  “Oh Jesus!” the woman said. She clutched a hand to her chest.

  “Police,” Barnes said. He took a glance her way, saw her face had gone catatonic. “Please stay in your home.”

  Beyond the woman there was a man, presumably her husband, maybe her adult son, looking out the rain-soaked window into the yard. His hair was sweaty and plastered to his head. Hat hair. He wore a bulky Michigan State sweatshirt.

  Barnes passed through the gate and approached the tree slowly, aiming his weapon up into the canopy.

  “Don’t move,” he said, searching for a shadowed mass as he checked the dog’s line of vision. He arrived beneath the tree to find a man sitting on a branch about ten feet off the ground. “Get down from there.”

  “Don’t,” the man said, breathing hard, “shoot.”

  27

  Barnes dragged Leo through the back door at 6025 Troy. He pressed him up against the wall at the landing and pointed down the stairs. “What’s down there, huh?”

  Leo shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “Sure you don’t,” Barnes said. Now that they were in the light he examined Leo’s face. Hard to say if it was the same man he’d seen in Flaherty’s memory. He was in his forties, his face was soft and the eyes dark and beady, but he didn’t seem to have that detached look. He started down the steps, dragging Leo by the hair. They arrived at the bottom of the staircase, where there was a door. Barnes tried the handle but found it locked. He slammed Leo against the door. “No funhouse in there, right?”

  Leo’s lips quivered. “I don’t know. I’m telling you.”

  “Where’s the key?” Barnes said.

  Leo shook his head.

  “Never mind,” Barnes said. He drew his gun. “I’ve got my own.” He blasted a hole in the doorknob and used Leo’s body weight to shove the door open, sending the man to the floor, where he curled up into a ball.

  The basement was dark. Barnes found a light switch and flicked it on.

  There were no video games, no pinball machines, no toys. The floor was concrete, painted brown. The ceiling was open, exposing rafters, copper piping, PVC. No washer, no dryer, no utility sink. Just a blank space. Barnes shivered where he stood, closed his eyes, stood still for a moment while his guts went icy. He opened his eyes, went back to Leo and squatted next to him, his elbows on his thighs, his gun dangling in the space between his knees. Leo maneuvered his way up to a sitting position.

  “Where is she?” Barnes said.

  “Who?”

  “You know damn well who.”

  Leo sighed. He looked at Barnes. “You want answers?”

  “I want justice.”

  “There is no justice.”

  “No?” Barnes said. He placed his gun against Leo’s temple. “Why don’t we skip the electric chair and I’ll deliver your justice here and now.”

  Leo closed his eyes. “Killing me is not justice.”

  “Where’s the girl?”

  “She’s gone.”

  “Murdering people makes you feel better, doesn’t it?”

  “I’m no different than you. No different than any man who ever thought of killing.”

  “Bullshit,” Barnes said.

  “I have just been willing to act on my feelings.”

  “You kill kids.”

  “Why does the lion chase the smallest zebra?”

  Barnes drove the weapon hard against Leo’s head, forcing him to tilt. “Because it’s easier, right? And all because they wouldn’t play with you.”

  Leo nodded.

  “No.” The breathless voice. “Because. They wanted. To leave.”

  “How about it, then?” Barnes said. He applied pressure to the trigger. Felt its minimal resistance. “You ready to leave?”

  “Why is it,” Leo said, staring blankly, despite the barrel against his head, “you people equate long life with good life? All the good of life ends when you age. You spend your adult lives only wishing you could be young again.”

  “You don’t get to decide what’s good or bad,” Barnes said.

  “You stole my machine,” Leo said, his eyes turning slowly to Barnes. “Where is it?”

  There came the sound of footsteps charging through the house.

  Barnes shook with coldness, closed his eyes, opened them, saw things differently. He looked at Leo. “Seems like you’re speaking pretty well these days.”

  Leo just stared back.
r />   Barnes rubbed his own shaved head. “Where’s your Mohawk?”

  Leo’s Adam’s apple traveled up and down.

  Barnes brought up his pistol and dropped the hilt on Leo’s head like a hammer. Leo fell sideways.

  “Holy shit!” A uniformed officer appeared at the mouth of the stairway. “He shot him!”

  “I didn’t shoot him,” Barnes said. “He’s fine.”

  Two more uniformed officers appeared. All three came down the stairs. They began lifting the unconscious Leo to his feet. One placed him in cuffs. They helped him up the steps. Barnes noticed the price tag was still attached to the tag inside Leo’s T-shirt, hanging behind his neck. Barnes followed the officers up, went into the living room, and threw back the drapes on the front window. No cruisers were outside, no gumball lights spinning. He turned back and examined the room—the stain on the lampshade, the stain on the wall behind the couch. He’d seen stains like that before. Stains that’d been soaked and scrubbed but were too stubborn to go away completely. Bloodstains.

  One of the uniforms appeared in the kitchen doorway. He flicked back his hat and put his fists on his hips. “Good work, Barnes.”

  The officer’s face was familiar. His hair was plastered down to his head beneath his hat. Jesus. He was the same man as in the house two streets over, the man in the MSU sweatshirt.

  “Thanks,” Barnes said. He looked past the officer to see Leo in handcuffs, sitting at the kitchen table, eating a doughnut with a lump on his head. Probably some convict getting time sliced off his sentence to pose as Barnes’s target. The other two officers were leaning up against the counters with their arms crossed over their chests. Too casual.

  “Good thing we got here when we did,” the officer said.

  “They’ve been here all along.” The familiar voice.

  “Yeah,” Barnes said absently.

  A memory came to Barnes with painful clarity. A memory within a memory from when he was on the machine as Billy Franklin. Franklin and his former partner, Watkins, were standing on a sidewalk outside a house. This house. 6025 Troy. Franklin said, “We’re just gonna talk to him, that’s all.”

  The memory faded, but Barnes knew the story of what happened next. As Franklin told it, “Watkins walked into the house with a .45 and blew a hole through Gerald Dawson’s head. There are still bloodstains on the lampshade and on the wall behind the couch in that safe house in Ferndale.”

  Safe house.

  The uniformed officer smiled at Barnes.

  “Looks like my work is done here,” Barnes said. He turned toward the door, which was still wide open from when he’d kicked it in.

  “Hold up,” the officer said, putting out a hand. “Aren’t you going to wait for Franklin and them?”

  “Nah,” Barnes said. He kept moving.

  “Wait,” the officer said.

  Barnes stopped. He looked back over his shoulder. The officer had unsnapped the button on the sidearm holster on his waist. His hand was hanging in the air above the gun.

  “What is it?” Barnes said.

  “Just . . . wait.”

  Barnes ran.

  He heard “Son of a bitch!” from behind as he crossed the yard and slipped between two parked cars, heard the click and static of a police radio, the officer speaking, “Franklin, this is Jones. Yeah. He’s running.”

  Barnes crouched and moved through the rain along the street toward the Fusion parked a block down. He got into the car, started the engine, and pulled up the street to the next turn. Headlights were coming down the street, both in front and behind. He hooked a left, drove a block, and pulled a quick right. He drove another block and pulled another left. He drove several more blocks and found himself at Eight Mile, where he turned right and drove slowly, blending into traffic.

  He cruised for a few minutes, constantly checking the rearview mirror until he felt he was clear of tails. He kept up with the steadily thinning flow of cars until he found he was getting close to Whitehall Forest. The woods spread for miles to the north and east, stretching nearly to Lake Huron on the state’s east side. At the spear-tipped bottom edge of the forest it crossed Eight Mile and died before reaching Seven Mile, heading south toward Detroit proper.

  Barnes found his bearings easily, and soon he was at the entryway to the Flamingo Farms trailer park. He pulled down the two-track and located his old family trailer. It looked so small now. Impossible to believe all four of them had lived there. The trailer was just one of thirty or forty of the same style, all stacked together like matchsticks in a box. Somehow his childhood home looked wrong without Dad’s Bondoed Camaro sitting out front. Mom and Dad had moved out some years back, found a similar trailer in a similar park in Florida, where they set up camp in the warm weather. What were they up to these days?

  His phone rang.

  UNKNOWN.

  Barnes picked up the call and said, “I guess you’re back to Shadow now.”

  “I’m sorry,” Shadow said. “To not be Leo. Rather, that Leo.”

  “Who are you, then?”

  “Are you still. Certain I’m not. In your head?”

  “I don’t know anymore,” Barnes said. “I don’t care.”

  “And what. About Ricky?”

  “What about him?”

  “Is that what. You thought. When you let. Him die? I don’t care?”

  A searing pain emerged at the base of Barnes’s skull. It traced down through his neck and up over his head. “No. I didn’t let him die.”

  “So you say. And so you would. Tell anyone. Who might listen. But down inside. Down where. The heart holds sway. Where the truth lives. You didn’t care enough. To save him. You let him die.”

  Barnes cringed and bent forward, let his head fall to the steering wheel. “You don’t know me. You don’t know how I—”

  “Six quarters. In that purse. Six. One-player games.”

  “He was right behind me! He should have made it!”

  “But he didn’t.”

  “You can’t know these things.”

  “That chain gave out. Detective. That weak link. Was you.”

  “You rode my memory.”

  “I am your. Memory. Living and. Breathing. I will haunt you. As Ricky haunts you. All your days.”

  “That might not be so long.”

  “The riddle, please.”

  “Flaherty’s going to die,” Barnes said. He checked the time: 10:27 p.m. “In an hour and a half you’re going to kill him.”

  “The riddle,” Shadow said.

  “Why?”

  There was a pause on the line, and then, “It’s no fun. Unless you try. To stop me.”

  “Fuck you,” Barnes said. “You’ve had your fun.”

  “You can. Still save him.”

  Barnes gritted his teeth. “Will I get to kill you?”

  “That depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On whether. Or not. You believe. I’m a voice. In your head.”

  “Life presence,” Barnes said.

  Shadow chuckled. “Okay. Life presence.”

  “What about the girl?”

  “You’re still stuck. On her?”

  “You know I am.”

  “The riddle.”

  “My age minus one,” Barnes said. “Midnight’s younger cousin.”

  “What’s your age?” Shadow said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Barnes said. “It’s Ricky’s riddle. He made it up when he was ten, so the answer is nine. Another I on the decoder ring.”

  “WILL-I?”

  “And if midnight is twelve, its younger cousin could be any number lower, but I’d guess eleven, making WILLIK.”

  “Does that. Mean anything. To you?”

  “No.”

  “Are there. Any other clues?”

  “I don’t think so,” Barnes said.

  “What about. The watch?”

  “What watch?”

  “You said. There was a watch. In the envelope.”


  Barnes reached into his jacket pocket to find Ricky’s old army watch. The battery was still plenty dead, but the face showed the time in twenty-four-hour format. It displayed noon with a value of “12” in the position where “6” would normally be, and midnight a value of “24” at the top. Barnes said, “Midnight’s younger cousin is twenty-three.”

  “WILLIW?” Shadow said.

  “That second I can’t be right,” Barnes said. “My age. She kept saying that.” He grabbed the green note and read it, the circle around my.

  “Who is she?”

  “Candy Harper,” Barnes said. “I thought Ricky was stressing that it was his age. But it wasn’t his age, it was Candy’s.”

  “How old. Was she?”

  “At that time she was sixteen.” Barnes turned the decoder ring on his finger to 16. P. “My age minus one.” He turned the decoder ring back one slot to 15. O. “Willow.”

  The phone went dead.

  28

  Barnes returned to the dead end in the woods west of Featherton Road. The car’s headlights exposed the white birch trees, pines, and windswept undergrowth. He cut the engine and sat for a moment in the car, taking in the silence. Sometimes, when he and Ricky entered the woods after having been away for a while, Ricky would stop him with an outstretched arm and say, “Wait.” The two boys would stand still, Ricky with his eyes closed, taking in the scents of cedar, river, and soil, the sounds of rustling leaves and the calls of birds. After a few deep breaths Ricky would release Barnes’s arm and say, “Okay, let’s go.”

  Barnes got out of the car. No flashlight this time. He’d have to make his way through the trees in darkness. He waited for his eyes to adapt and then took it slowly, finding familiar markings on his way to the riverbank. Once there, he moved forward carefully and silently, ducking branches and climbing over fallen trees until he came to the familiar clearing.

  The rain had stopped. The graffitied boxcar sat at the edge of the open space, the hard lines of its silhouette intersected by the shadowy shapes of trees, rocks, and bushes. The thought of the thing alone out here, night after night, touched a nerve.

  He turned away from the boxcar and continued along the riverbank toward the willow. Soon he was there. The tree was still on the wrong side of the water, still tilting, still dying. He stepped into the water and barged across to the other side. Once again he located the two roots between which Ricky had buried the time capsule, a hole there now where Barnes had dug it out.