Punishment Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright 2018 by Scott J. Holliday

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503949058 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1503949052 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781542047449 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1542047447 (paperback)

  Cover design by Damon Freeman

  First Edition

  This is where it begins, so this is for Nichole, who will be there at the end.

  Zub.

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.

  ―George Orwell

  1

  Detroit homicide detective John Barnes sat in an unmarked sedan, squeezing a fifth of bourbon by the neck. He stared through the windshield at the closed gas station where his vehicle was parked. It was dark outside. The food mart was full of shadowy shapes outlined by the glow from the pop coolers and coffee machines. The OPEN sign just inside the plate glass was a formation of dead bulbs. Barnes closed his eyes. He dropped his forehead to the steering wheel and rubbed a hand over his scalp, now bristling with a few days’ growth. The cooling engine clicked and hissed. An uninvited vision came to the detective then—a Vitruvian Man test pattern, overlaid with the words Please Stand By. The test pattern was reminiscent of an old television station experiencing technical difficulties, but instead of an Indian head, there was da Vinci’s ideal form. He heard a female voice from inside his mind: “Prepare for transmission.”

  Barnes chuckled, flipped the door handle, and stumbled out of the car, catching the frame to stop his fall. The bourbon in his guts sloshed in time with what remained in the fifth. He wore a leather jacket over a button-down shirt and tie, a shoulder holster containing a .45-caliber Glock, black pants, and black boots. His badge hung from a chain around his neck. It rested heavily against his chest bone. He took a pull from the bottle, swallowed the burn, and looked up the darkened street. Just beyond the gas station was Calvary Junction—the three-way intersection of Eight Mile Road, a Canadian Pacific railway crossing, and the Rouge River laughing through a culvert beneath the two. The silhouetted hardwoods and evergreens of Whitehall Forest, which lay beyond the junction and spread out for miles, looked like black smog rising from the earth. The station added gasoline to the odors of ozone and red cedar in the air. As a boy, Barnes had loved that gasoline scent. He spread his arms now and breathed it in, expanding his chest and filling his lungs.

  The candy-striped barrier arms at the railroad crossing stood straight up. They swayed in the wind like the jousting poles of medieval knights, frozen in near confrontation. A few feet down the tracks, three short white crosses stood in a semicircle, the middle one slightly taller and set back from the other two. Their bases were littered with decaying flowers, their perpendicular arms tattooed with the names of the dead. The roadside crosses memorialized those lost at the junction over the years—some by car, some by train, a few by water. Their formation gave the intersection its de facto name. The junction had once been home to temporary tripod wreaths and crosses in all directions, but the city had removed them and set up these three permanent memorials, declaring them sufficient. People now used Magic Markers to commemorate their loved ones in list format.

  Barnes tossed his bottle toward the crosses. It landed with a pop and shattered at their feet. He stood still until he smelled the spilled bourbon wafting back toward him, until the river’s laughter was drowned out by a sound like rising wind.

  The train.

  The asphalt beneath Barnes’s feet began to shiver. He pulled a rubber coin purse from his jacket pocket. There was a Batman logo on the purse’s outside, six quarters inside. It was the kind of purse you could squeeze and its mouth would open like a gasping fish—the kind preferred by kids and old men. Barnes hefted the purse as though testing its weight. He clenched it inside a fist as the railroad crossing came alive. A bell sounded like someone hammering steel—ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding. Red lights blinked. The barrier arms fell to horizontal with mechanical efficiency. The rising-wind sound turned into that of a thousand galloping horses.

  Barnes moved toward the tracks. The asphalt went from shivering to quaking as he stepped around the near barrier arm. His soles crunched cinders on his way toward the steel rails gleaming with reflected moonlight. He stopped between the tracks, both feet on a wooden tie, and faced the oncoming train. The cold air made icicles in his nose. It cooled his chest. The crossing’s blinkers turned the scene red, then dark, and then red again until the train cleared the bend a quarter mile off and the light from its front lamps washed the blinkers’ glow away.

  His cell phone buzzed against his leg. The thought of answering it made him laugh out loud. What message could matter now? Still, his fist opened and retrieved the phone from his pocket.

  He flinched when the train sounded its horn in three blasts. The first two were quick ear-shattering bursts. The third was a sustained scream, long and loud enough to jangle bones. The train’s silhouette grew larger behind the lamplight. Shafts of white moved up and spread out over the tracks and the nearby trees. The light intensified from a candle to a flashlight to an interrogation beam until it was splashing Calvary Junction like an atomic-bomb blast. Detective Barnes squinted and shielded his eyes. His breathing had turned erratic. He gritted his teeth and forced his shielding hand away from his eyes, balling it into a fist. The cinders between the ties at his feet began to rattle and hop. He lowered his head and prepared for the damage.

  His thumb clicked on the cell phone. In the blinding light, and with his eyes turned down, he could barely make out the words on the screen:

  Calavera, again. 1124 Kensington St.

  Barnes stepped off the tracks.

  The train screamed by, clacking and grinding and sending leaves up into a frenzied wind. The barrier arms rippled as though the jousting knights had just clanged them off each other’s shields.

  Barnes pocketed his phone and moved outside the barrier. He turned back and watched the train pass. Its wind was strong and cold. It carried the scents of steel and smoke. Bits of emerging morning light blinked between the boxcars like he was watching a spinning zoetrope. He was taken back to a moment, some twenty years before, when he stood in the same spot as a twelve-year-old boy. The back wheel of hi
s BMX bike had spun where he’d thrown it down. He’d peered through the gaps between the passing cars then, just as now, hoping to catch a glimpse of his ten-year-old brother, Ricky, on the other side, one sneaker on a pedal, one on the ground, waiting for the train to pass.

  After the last car rolled by, the first sliver of sun peeled up from the horizon beyond the edge of the forest. Airborne leaves spun as they fell back toward the ground in pendulant motions. The blinkers ceased and the clanging bell fell silent. The candy-striped barrier arms moved back up. The train’s fading Doppler effect was bullied aside by the river’s rush.

  A voice cut through the morning. “Whatcha doing out there, pal?”

  Barnes turned to find an elderly man standing in the gas-station doorway, a silver key ring in his hand. Blue coveralls. His voice was nasal and full of distrust. No doubt years of stick-up jobs and local kids snatching candy bars had justified the old guy’s razor-cut eyes. Without moving from the doorway, he yanked a small chain beyond the glass, and the OPEN sign came alive in blue-and-red blinks. He flicked on the interior lights to confirm that the store offered slushies, chips, and little jars of mayonnaise and peanut butter you might take camping. A soda-fountain machine stood where there had once been two arcade cabinets.

  Barnes called over to him. “How long to make coffee?”

  2

  Barnes pulled up to 1124 Kensington Street just as the technicians were walking the machine out the front door. He swished black coffee in his mouth to mask the bourbon. The house was a cookie-cutter ranch. The neighborhood looked like a giant Play-Doh press had been used to squeeze out its houses through a home-shaped template, and then a car-shaped template for the base model sedans in the driveways. The only noticeable differences between the homes were their shutter colors. Barnes imagined a real estate woman with big teeth and too much lipstick telling some sixties-era couple that—with their choice of shutter colors—they could individualize.

  The shutters at 1124 Kensington were beige.

  Barnes surveyed the neighbors’ homes. Blue shutters, green shutters, mauve shutters, and more beige. People stood on porches in their robes and slippers, T-shirts and pajama bottoms. Hands cupped mouths or necks, eyes were wide and dazed, some heads slowly shook. How many shocked faces had Barnes seen in his career? Hundreds? Thousands? They never changed. Murder and death were resistant to desensitization, which explained why the evening news always led with blood. Tell us the globe is boiling or the ozone is Swiss cheese, we’ll yawn and flip to The Big Bang Theory. But tell us someone ax-murdered our neighbor, and we’ll press “Pause” to toss a bag of popcorn in the microwave.

  Yellow-and-black crime scene tape was stretched between a street lamp at the far edge of the yard and a hedge this side of the one-car garage. Barnes stooped while showing his badge to the uniformed officer holding the tape not quite high enough for him to walk under.

  The technicians were now in the driveway, prepping the machine to be loaded into the back of a van. “How much?” Barnes said, lifting his chin toward Warden, the machine’s lead tech.

  “Maybe three minutes on the girl,” Warden said. “Could be pretty good.” He had raccoon eyes. His face was hatchet-shaped, his nostrils long against his nose. The way Warden looked and moved reminded Barnes of an ROUS—a rodent of unusual size. He always imagined Warden hiding in some alley when he wasn’t at work, snarling and waiting to attack pedestrians from a four-point stance. “Thirty seconds, tops, on the mother, and likely nothing but disjointed dreams on the father. Bad attachment—not much to work with.”

  Barnes nodded. He’d sipped coffee as he listened, swished it around, swallowed. He watched as Warden and the other tech, an almond-skinned woman who appeared to be of Latin descent, packed up the machine. He’d never met her. She was young and mostly pretty. Her black hair was snatched back in a severe ponytail, her eyes a medium brown when caught by the morning light. Her tightened jaw muscles twitched as her hands moved quickly to their tasks. She was dressed to be taken seriously in a pantsuit that hid more than it revealed. Smart. Cut too close to the curves and they’ll throw you behind a desk and ask you to smile and make coffee while the men in leather chairs lean back for a better look at what their wives no longer have.

  The machine was situated on a gurney-style cart with retractable legs. The technicians slid it into the van.

  The machine. An assortment of dials and switches, tubes and suction cups, and one IV needle. It reminded Barnes of an electroshock device straight from the early days of mental-health therapy, only this machine didn’t fry the brain—it pulled from one and pushed into another. Barnes didn’t fully understand the science behind it. Something to do with the cerebral cortex, with intercepting impulses traveling inside the hippocampus. Some impulses were memories, and somehow the machine was able to detect whether an impulse had come from memory or imagination. Even more impressive, the machine stitched memories together to represent them chronologically. It retrieved and stored memories from the living, the dying, and even the recently dead. Hook a different person to the machine and reverse the flow, and they’d relive the other person’s memories. The machine was invented and designed as a tool for investigative purposes, but announcing the technology had been like announcing fingerprinting. Then, criminals just shrugged their shoulders and pulled on gloves; now, practically all premeditated crimes were committed by men in masks.

  All too predictably, criminal-justice applications were only the beginning for the machine. Its existence gave society a new underbelly, a new drug for a new millennium. Machines were stolen—warehouses robbed of their stock and delivery trucks stopped and relieved of their payloads like trains in the Old West. The machine’s technology was reverse engineered, the serum’s ingredients replicated. Homemade machines were illegally produced and sold. Black markets arose. A new form of crack house appeared on the American landscape—one with a good network connection. Celebrities began to sell their memories. Be a Kardashian for a day. To hell with Internet sex tapes—be the actor banging the starlet. Be the starlet getting banged. High-profile athletes soon joined in. Pummel your opponent. Get pummeled. Pitch a no-hitter. Score a touchdown. Dunk a basketball. B-level celebrities were right on their heels—porn stars, circus acts, street performers, daredevils—and it wasn’t long before everyday people saw the same monetary opportunities as celebrities. Get a promotion. Smoke crack. Shoot heroin. Get a tattoo. Eat all day and never gain weight. Want to know what it’s like to die?

  The options didn’t end with recreation. Scientists were investigating ways to medicate patients with other people’s memories or even their own taken from a happier time in their lives. A way to distract us from pain while under the knife or undergoing chemo. Militaries were looking at new ways to torture prisoners of war. The rich were conceiving ways to live forever, collecting a lifetime of memories to pump into a host body after death.

  And then there was punishment. Hundreds of machines were being used not just by police forces and homicide detectives for investigative purposes but also by prisons and mental-health systems for rehabilitation. At any moment in America, there were dozens of murderers, rapists, and domestic abusers having their crimes pumped into their skulls from their victims’ points of view. The feeling of a punch that breaks a nose, the sledgehammer impact and burn of a bullet, the indescribable feeling of one’s neck being opened like a zipper. They smelled the blood and cordite, felt the pheromones of fear. They heard the screams, the cries, the unanswered pleas for mercy. A Clockwork Orange had nothing on the machine, and Barnes had experienced all varieties of its punishments.

  Barnes turned to find his partner, Big Billy Franklin, standing on the sidewalk in front of 1124 Kensington Street. Big was an appropriate term for the lieutenant detective. He’d been an offensive tackle at Wayne State, where he had majored in criminal justice. The NFL hadn’t come calling, so Big Billy had put his degree to use. He’d started out as a beat cop but soon applied his brain to the situation a
nd made detective. He was in his fifties now and still big—only slightly less muscular. The morning light threw a red hue on Franklin, making him look like a statue of unpainted clay. He nodded at the machine in the back of the van. “You two lovebirds will be together soon enough.”

  The statement made Barnes’s needle-marked elbow pits tingle. His head ached, and his teeth rang with soreness, like they’d been struck by a tuning fork.

  “We should have her ready in a few hours,” Warden said, his rodent head sticking out from the back of the van. He patted the machine lovingly, then winked and drew back inside, pulling the two doors closed behind him. Two uniforms stepped on the crime scene tape to force it under the tires as the van pulled away.

  “What do we got?” Barnes said. He stepped in next to Franklin as they approached the home’s front doorway.

  “You okay?” Franklin said.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Been drinking?”

  No response.

  Franklin shook his head, then nodded at the house. “Three dead.” He looked down at the small black notepad in his hand, flipped back a page. “The Wilsons. Dale; his wife, Andrea; daughter, Kerri. Father was hit first. In bed, probably still sleeping. Never saw it coming. Seems like the wife made it halfway across the bedroom but was dropped just short of the hallway. Spined. Might have seen something when she first woke up, might have turned over after she went down. After that, it was the back of the head.”

  “And the girl?”

  Franklin flipped forward a page. He drew a breath and sighed. “Found hiding in the closet, dragged into the hallway. Maybe awakened by the noise. She managed a scream. Neighbors say they heard it.”

  “They dialed?”

  “Yep.”

  “We got ’em?”

  “Yep. Flaherty took their statements. Don’t ask; they ain’t got nothin’ more.”

  Barnes gripped the bridge of his nose. “We don’t know that.”

  “Drink your coffee and investigate your scene,” Franklin said. He walked off the porch toward one of the uniforms at the crime scene border. “Wexler, let me know when the coroner boys arrive.”