Ink

by Jonathan Maberry

  Yes, it said.

  Monk pulled the car to the curb, killed the engine, got out, opened his trunk and took his gun from the safe, slapped in a loaded magazine, shoved the weapon into his waistband, and went running to Patty’s store. The echo of her sobs—of the destroyed sound of her voice—was a knife in his heart.

  There was a guy standing outside Patty’s trying to peer inside. He held a sample case and looked like a salesman of some kind. The man turned as Monk came running up.

  “Say,” he began, “would you know if—?”

  “Fuck off,” snarled Monk in exactly the kind of way that leaves nothing ambiguous. The man blinked once, and then fucked off.

  Monk pounded on the door. Got nothing. He tried the phone. Not a damn thing. He was half a second away from kicking the door in when he thought to try the knob. It would be locked, of course. It was early, so no way it wouldn’t be locked.

  The knob turned.

  He whipped the door open and went in at a run, yelling Patty’s name. The place was small, his voice was big, but the shadows somehow swallowed the sound. He frowned into the gloom, not liking it worth a damn.

  There was something wrong here. He drew the gun, racked the slide to put one in the chamber. There was someone here who should not be. Every instinct he owned told him that. Some motherfucker had come here to hurt Patty and they were waiting for him.

  He stopped, alert, his body tensed, gun raised in a two-hand shooter’s grip, finger extended above the trigger guard. Something was wrong. He looked around, pivoting on the balls of his feet. The room was washed in brown and gray tones. The three barber chairs, the stacks of boxes, some closets. The door to the customer bathroom ajar. No one in sight. No sound.

  But …

  Monk had spent most of his life in somebody’s uniform, humping battle rattle through jungles and deserts, pulling triggers and cutting throats. He didn’t do that now, but once a soldier, always a soldier.

  He’s watching me, he thought.

  He. Whoever he was.

  Wherever.

  The gun barrel tracked with the turn of his head.

  You want me, motherfucker, you’re going to have to earn that shit.

  And he went looking for something to hit.

  The walls were covered floor to ceiling with sketches and photos of some of her best work. Patty’s best was the best. Monk had been in tattoo parlors on six continents and he had strong opinions on the subject. Half of the ink on his flesh was hers.

  He stopped by the small fridge in the corner. It stood open and there were empty, half-empty, and smashed beer bottles clustered around it like soldiers after a failed siege. There was some blood, too.

  He called Patty’s name again and got exactly the same nothing of a response.

  Beaded curtains—cheap plastic and bamboo—stood motionless at the entrance to the hall. No. Not entirely motionless. They moved a little. Was it from the change of air pressure when he’d come in? Or were they settling to stillness after someone passed through?

  Tough or not, he was scared to go into the black hallway behind. Tough never meant being without fear. Only idiots think otherwise.

  “If you’re in there,” he said in a quiet voice, “I’m going to fuck you up.”

  The silence and the darkness said nothing.

  It did nothing.

  Except waited for him. His move.

  Monk took one hand and hooked fingers around the last strand of beads. They rattled and he waited to see if the sound sparked movement.

  Monk pushed through the beaded curtain into the black hallway. He didn’t turn the lights on, preferring darkness most times anyway. The hall was empty. A bedroom was empty of everything except boxes. What he guessed was Patty’s bedroom was empty, and the bed hadn’t been slept in. But there was a single handprint on the wall by the light switch. The print looked like it had been made with motor oil, but Monk knew different. He could smell the coppery stink of blood in the air.

  The feeling of being watched was still there. Still strong, but he was running out of places for anyone to hide. The only thing that moved were a few flies crawling down the wall. Absolutely nothing else that he could see.

  That did not make him feel better. Just the opposite.

  The door to Patty’s bathroom was closed. Monk put his ear to it and listened. He heard two sounds.

  The slow drip of water. And …

  A faintness of weeping.

  He tried the door handle and this time it did not turn. But it was a cheap-ass Kwickset and he busted it open with a hard shoulder and a curse. The door banged inward twenty inches and then jerked to a stop.

  Patty lay naked on the floor, curled like an island in a sea of beer and blood.

  36

  “Ah, Jesus,” Monk said, forcing himself through the opening, kneeling down, bending close. “Ah, Jesus, Patty…”

  His words were gruff, his tone gentle and sad. He gathered her in his arms and picked her up. She weighed nothing at all. Tears ran from her eyes but her lids were closed. She shivered constantly and her golden skin was patterned with goose bumps. Monk held her close, sharing his animal warmth with her. Patty was so cold. Like death, but not yet dead.

  She turned her face into the cleft between his chin and shoulder and began to weep. Much harder and louder than before. Big, terrible sobs that punched jagged holes in the walls of the new day.

  INTERLUDE SEVEN

  THE LORD OF THE FLIES

  After that first time, that first night, Owen Minor was convinced that he was insane. Given that he believed he’d somehow stolen someone’s tattoo, had that tattoo appear on his skin, and then had dreams so vivid that they were as real as memories—just not his own—there was a case to be made.

  When it happened the second time—after brushing the tattoo on the forearm of someone on a crowded elevator—he thought he was losing his grip on reality.

  It wasn’t until the fifth time that he wondered if he was a mutant, like in those X-Men movies. Someone born with extraordinary abilities that could only be explained away by weird science.

  Those five times happened over a period of eleven months. Owen went to a therapist and tried to explain it. But when he showed the spots on his body where the tattoos appeared, the doctor started giving him the look. The skin was always bare, unmarked, without even the ghost of an image. He told the shrink that these borrowed tattoos always vanished completely after he’d dreamed his way through the equally borrowed memories. The result should have not surprised him—the doctor scheduled him for CT scans, blood work, and when all of that came back negative, the next step was a sheaf of prescriptions. More sessions and more drugs were to follow. Risperidone, Aripiprazole, Olanzapine, Ziprasidone, Quetiapine, Pimavanserin, and the old fan favorite, Clozapine. Xanax was also a hoot. He enjoyed the drugs at times, even some of the more uncomfortable side effects. Explosive diarrhea, for example, broke up a slow day.

  But the most recent dose changes made him sick and sleepy, dried his mouth out, and gave him such awful constipation that he developed hemorrhoids. He threw the rest of the drugs away and stopped going to therapy sessions.

  He was afraid, though. The thought of going mad was terrifying. His mind was the only thing he liked about himself. His body was a disappointment. He’d grown from a pallid child to a pallid man. Fleshy and sickly. Going to the gym made him hurt, and it was also like sweating to little effect while in a spotlight. The only way he got dates was through a deeply phony set of details and doctored pictures on Tinder, and he’d already been reported twice for deceptive profiles. The only sex he’d ever had was with hookers, and they never kissed him. Owen had never once been kissed on the lips. Well, maybe his mother had done that when he was a baby, but he didn’t remember.

  Owen searched the Net for cases of any kind similar to his own. He found nothing on WebMD, nothing in articles or news stories. Lots about lost memories, but nothing about borrowing them.

  Then he made a strang
e discovery.

  One Tuesday night after working all day slicing deli meats at a Jersey Mike, he had the idea of looking backward to see if there were any clues. This all started with that big guy at the funeral of the soldier who’d committed suicide, so Owen pawed through the thick file folder of obituary and funeral announcements he’d kept. He found the obit, which listed the names of the deceased’s surviving family. No parents, but there were two sisters and one brother, Grant Buckley. Owen put that name into the search windows for Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. And he was there. Grant’s Twitter comments were mostly retweets of Breitbart and Sean Hannity. Nothing personal. The Instagram feed was mostly pictures of Grant and his buddies in various places where the military sent him. He was some kind of sergeant in the army. Owen knew next to nothing about the army, and less about the various wars going on around the globe. On Facebook, though, he struck gold.

  Very strange gold.

  There were a series of posts on Grant Buckley’s feed in the weeks following his brother’s funeral. Some talked about the dead man, but they were soon completely overtaken by posts about Grant’s tattoo.

  Grant’s missing tattoo.

  The big man’s first posts were of the “hey, guys, this is weird” kind, because the tattoo of vines and insects began disappearing over a period of days. There were tons of posts from friends and friends-of-friends who had thoughts, opinions, speculations, and solutions that solved nothing. Within a few days of his brother’s funeral, the tattoo had vanished completely. All that remained on the man’s wrist and hand were faint smudges, like a watercolor left out in the rain for too many days. Grant was amazed, pissed off, and, Owen sensed, scared.

  He scrolled through the man’s feed until he came to a post five weeks later, in which Grant went on a diatribe to say what a rotten tattoo artist Malibu Mark was. Grant was threatening a lawsuit, and some of Malibu Mark’s other customers jumped onto the thread to tell Grant he had his head up his own ass and to basically fuck off and die.

  Owen was puzzled, but there was a little tingle of excitement in his loins.

  He could not find anything on the other four people whose tattoos he’d accidentally taken. They were random strangers. Owen thought long and hard about what to do next. How to research this.

  The following morning he went looking for people with tattoos. There was a lot of skin art around, more than he thought, but he couldn’t exactly walk up to perfect strangers and ask to touch them. And if he did, how would he make the touch? Some of the people in the tattoo world scared the hell out of him. Men and women. Nor did he want cops called on him.

  He knew that there was a way, but he had to think it through.

  He needed new ink. He craved new memories. And he wanted to know how the whole process—weird as it was—worked.

  From that moment on, Owen Minor was on the hunt. Always. Every day, every hour.

  37

  Gayle Kosinski dropped her kids off with her mother. Mom had blocked out the day to bring the Halloween decorations down from the attic and turn her cottage into Spook Central. The kids were delighted.

  As Gayle was leaving, her mother stopped her by the door. “You okay, honey?”

  “Sure,” said Gayle, forcing a smile. “Just tired. I need some me time. Maybe a little retail therapy.”

  Mom’s brow furrowed and she almost asked a question, but didn’t. Instead she kissed Gayle and told her to go melt that AmEx card. Gayle could feel her mother watching through the blinds as she got into her car and drove off.

  She was, in fact, planning on burning through some money. There were so many new shops open along Corn Hill and down Boundary Street. Jewelry might make her feel better. It used to.

  Gayle called two of her friends to see if either was free, but Joanie and Karen were busy. She debated calling some of the second-tier friends, the ones she only ever got together with once or twice a year, but decided against it. They would want to play catch-up and Gayle wasn’t yet ready to discuss her sexuality with them. Maybe not even with Joanie and Karen. Joanie was a church lady, so she might be judgmental, and Karen was a bit of a gossip. Too risky in either case.

  So she prowled around until she found curb parking at the outer edge of the new area everyone was calling the Fringe. The sky was patchwork, with bits of blue and clumps of gray. There was rain in the air, so Gayle stuffed a little fold-up umbrella in her shoulder bag.

  Walking felt good, though there was hardly a spring in her step. Resentment is heavy.

  She spent an hour browsing scarves and hats in a boutique staffed by an indifferent Goth girl who did not once look up from her phone. Gayle didn’t buy anything and drifted out, certain she hadn’t registered on the girl’s radar in any meaningful way.

  The next four stores were clothing, but most of them tended toward stuff in size zero. Stick-figure mannequins and equally emaciated shoppers turned Gayle away. The fifth clothing store, though, was perfect. The name above the door was Get Real, and the clothes ranged from size ten on up. Way on up. Gayle saw a pair of five-pocket skinny jeans in a stretch fabric with back yoke stitching. They were distressed and faded and looked awesome when she tried them on. She did not have a big butt and her legs were slim. She stood in front of a three-panel mirror, turning to look at herself, extending one leg and looking over her shoulder at her ass.

  “Yeah,” said a voice behind her, “those work real good.”

  Gayle jumped and turned to see another woman behind her. A truly gorgeous black woman. Also very curvy, with wavy black hair. She was heavier than Gayle, but it looked incredible on her. Full hips and very large breasts—much bigger even than Gayle’s—so that the woman had a true hourglass silhouette. She wore black tights with swirls of glittery dark-purple coiling like smoke around her calves and thighs, and a long black tunic cami, over which was a complexity of interwoven scarves, draped like a shawl. All of it was off set with silver and amethyst jewelry. She had a tattoo of a vine of roses—from delicate buds to glorious bloom—on the inside of her left forearm. On her chest, just visible between the drooping curve of the scarves and her cleavage, was a flawlessly inked lotus flower, and on one delicate petal was a honeybee.

  It was her deep brown eyes, though, that made Gayle’s breath catch in her throat. They were so … knowing.

  She’s seen so much.

  That thought, quick and irrational and unfounded, flashed through her mind. And yet she knew it was true. Just as she knew the follow-up thought was true.

  She sees me.

  “Um,” she said, scrambling for something clever to say. “Thanks. I’m, um, just trying them on.”

  The woman smiled. There was amusement bordering on wickedness in that smile, then she turned away and vanished into the rows of clothing. Gayle caught sight of her own face in the mirror and saw how flushed she was. Face, throat, upper chest—all red as flame.

  She hurried back into the changing room, put her skirt back on, and went out. She went up and down every row, but the black-haired woman was gone. Gayle crept to the front window and leaned toward the glass, craning to look left and right, but no one outside looked like her. Everyone else seemed paler, less real.

  Feeling oddly defeated, Gayle walked back to the changing room where she’d left the jeans. They were expensive, an extravagance. And a bit too showy, too overtly sexy.

  She bought them anyway.

  On the way out of the store she paused, caught by a stack of glossy pamphlets on a free literature table by the door. A woman’s eyes were the only thing on the cover of one pamphlet, but they were compelling. Dark, amused, knowing. Staring right at her. There was nothing written on the cover, so she opened it and saw a handful of stills of a crowded bar, of a singer with a guitar perched on a stool, of someone either doing stand-up or maybe reading poetry, of a sleek bar with gleaming bottles and smiling faces.

  Every face was female.

  The name of the place was Tank Girl. Gayle was only vaguely aware that it was a refe
rence to an old comic book. Or a movie. Or something. Something postapocalyptic with a female punk lead character.

  That didn’t matter much to her. What drew her, compelled her, lit her up inside, was the total lack of men in the place.

  A woman’s place.

  Would it be the kind of place she needed to find?

  Gayle’s pulse was hammering as she folded the pamphlet and tucked it into her pocket.

  38

  Patty let Monk pick her up and carry her into the bedroom. He sat her on the edge of the bed, and gently removed pieces of broken glass from the soles of her feet, her calf, and her left thigh. Before he picked up the tweezers, though, he helped her into an oversize NYU sweatshirt and a pair of underpants. There was no modesty in play, she knew. That ship had sailed a long time ago. No, this was Monk being Monk.

  He also put a pot of water on the tiny two-burner stove and fished tea bags out of the belly of the big broken ceramic Buddha on the bureau. The head was designed to lift off and the body was hollow, but the head had been broken years ago. Now Buddha was fat and headless and full of good teas.

  Monk squatted down beside the bed, refusing the offer of a chair. Patty watched him as he worked. The tweezers hurt but not because he was clumsy. He wasn’t. Monk, for all his size, was very gentle. Those big, knuckly, scarred hands were deft and clever and they moved with practiced efficiency. She didn’t even know her feet were full of glass splinters until he told her.

  “Sorry if this hurts,” he said.

  Patty just shook her head. The splinters weren’t what hurt. She slid her right hand under the edge of a pillow, watching Monk’s eyes to see if he noticed. If he did, he didn’t say anything.

  Her room was small and cramped. It was decorated with no coherence or theme. Pictures were elegantly framed or thumbtacked or taped, and hung with no thought to contrasting or complementary colors. A twin bed and two mismatched dressers. No built-in closets because the apartment was a barely converted commercial space. There were still some boxes in the basement, left over from long-ago tenants—a BDSM sex toy repackager and then a small independent printer who made homophobic religious tracts. The last tenant had been a barber shop, and the swivel chairs were still upstairs, though down here were stacks of hairstyle posters being eaten slowly by roaches. She hated going down there because it was musty, dark, and there were too many roaches. The only time she had been down there was to oversee the installation of a sturdy double-deadbolt lock. Patty did not want anyone breaking in. Intruders had done enough damage to her family.