Ink
Page 13
“How did you hurt your hand?”
“Working in my basement,” said Monk, repeating a lie he’d told the nurse. “Was punching holes in some sheet steel for a shed I’m building.”
Argawal frowned at the wound, flicked a glance at Monk, and then bent closer to take a second look at the puncture.
“Punch press?” the young doctor asked, trying his level best not to let a skeptical eyebrow rise, but he wasn’t practiced enough at it. Monk kept a smile off his face.
“Yeah. Very fine bit, almost like a needle,” said Monk. The punch press thing was a stupid idea that he’d pulled right out of his ass, but once it was said out loud he had to stick to it.
“There’s quite a lot of bruising.”
“Yeah, well, when I do something I do the hell out of it.”
Dr. Argawal gave him a small smile and sent him for X-rays. When the pictures came back negative for broken metacarpals, the doctor put six stitches in, all the time telling Monk how lucky he was he didn’t have a broken hand.
“Yeah,” said Monk sourly, “people are always telling me how lucky I am.”
“The stitches can come out in a week or so. I can prescribe something for the pain if—”
“How’s Patty?” interrupted Monk.
“Miss Trang?” asked Argawal, suddenly very polite and formal. “We’re running tests.”
“Didn’t ask what you were doing, Doc. I asked how she was.”
The doctor’s expression went from young and feckless to middle-aged suspicious in the space of a blink. Then shutters dropped behind his eyes.
“We’ll know more when we get the test results,” he said without inflection.
And that was that. The big nurse showed Monk to the waiting room and then Monk was alone again. For a long time.
INTERLUDE NINE
THE LORD OF THE FLIES
Owen Minor saw that the mail was scattered on the floor inside the door and he hurried over to it, smiling, because the latest issue of Inked was right on top. He snatched it up and saw that another magazine, Tattoo Life, was nestled under it. Now he was doubly happy.
He took both magazines with him, leaving the rest of the mail on the floor, and ran upstairs to his bedroom. The bed was littered with other periodicals, both commercial and industry. Apart from older copies of the ones that had come in today’s mail, there were back issues of Inked Girls, Freshly Inked, Skin Deep, Tattoo Energy, Paperchasers Ink, Urban Ink, Skin Shots, Rebel Ink, Tattoo Society, Things & Ink, Tattoo, and Tattoo Master. There were reams of printouts of people—men and women—from tattoo websites. Owen was not entirely sure he was heterosexual but acted as if he was, more out of habit than anything else. Photos of either gender, or the gender neutral, with tattoos turned him on. And not the people, exactly. It was the ink that intoxicated him.
Because ink was a pathway to memories. If he couldn’t have his own, then he wanted any he could take.
Since going looking for people to touch, he’d found more than forty. All strangers, though, and the frustration level was mounting. The memories were so scattershot, and some were almost toxic.
When he brushed a waitress at a truck stop in Colorado he took a tattoo of a hummingbird. Because she had such sad eyes, Owen thought it might be tied to something important—a lost love or a lost child. But the woman simply loved hummingbirds and he spent a whole night trying to wave the fucking things away from him while he cowered under blankets. If he’d been able to actually touch them he would have swatted them out of the air and crushed their little bones in his fists. But he could not touch the dreams in that way.
Another time he took a shamrock from the shoulder of an old man on Venice Beach. The kind of guy who looked like he’d been all around the block and had some real stories to tell. Real memories. Owen pretended to lose his balance on the sand and grabbed the guy’s shoulder for support. That night he thought he’d dream of maybe something like a bunch of Irish guys drinking and carousing. Instead he found himself sitting bedside as a small girl of about ten lay fighting for every breath. The man, then a priest in a neighborhood in Chicago, held her hand and prayed with every atom of his being. He bargained with God for the life of the little girl. He staked all of his faith and all of his need against a tiny flicker of mercy from something vast and unseen. He believed completely that God would answer, would spare that fragile child. But, in the deep darkness after midnight, those small and weary lungs simply could not take the next breath. The frail chest settled back and the tension in her limbs evaporated, leaving a shell filled with nothing.
The priest’s faith had been eroded for years, and this was his dark night of the soul. However, instead of a light of understanding or a rekindling of his sputtering faith, a black wind brought only cold darkness. His priesthood did not end that night, but his belief in a loving God did. The man fell away from the church in slow degrees, and twenty years later he was a bitter English teacher in an inner-city school in California. He drank but was not a drunk. He wept, but he was not entirely broken. The shamrock behind his shoulder was there to remind him of the luck that had failed him. In the dream, Owen could see that the green flower had once been a cross the man had gotten inked when he was contemplating the priesthood. It was modified into a four-leaf clover during one brief spell of optimism, but was now forgotten.
All through that night Owen fed on the memories of that little girl, and of others who had come to the priest hoping that he could intercede with the Lord or with saints. It was a symbol of loss that ran as deep as the soul.
And it was so fucking delicious.
Owen went back to the beach the next day and the next, looking for the old priest, but he never found him. The stolen dreams came and went. Some annoyed him. Some fed him. The best ones fed him. His only real regret was that once he’d devoured the memories, the tattoos faded entirely. No second helpings.
He opened the new copy of Inked and began reading. Learning more about the art and science of tattoos. About the politics of them. About the different frequencies of tattoo culture. People who got tattoos because they were into Star Wars or Pokémon or other pop culture stuff. People who get them because they belonged to a club, or a group, or shared an identity.
He read for nearly forty minutes before he found an article that literally took his breath away. The focus was on tattoos representing loss—people whose children had died, friends/family of murder victims, relatives of vets KIA, friends of suicides. The writer included fragments of interviews that cut right to the heart. One sidebar, though, cut even deeper. It was about a marine and three close friends who’d been through Parris Island with him, who shipped out with him in the early days of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and who’d all died on the same bad night in Nasiriyah. The marine had their names inked onto his forearm and after that no bullet touched him, no mine killed him. Because his friends were there looking out for him, watching over. A brotherhood of ghosts. However, five years after he was discharged, the marine lost that arm in a farming accident, got it caught in a thresher. The lost of that tattoo absolutely crushed him, because he’d come to believe it was a very real connection with his dead friends. The man said he hit the bottle and then spent years in personal and group therapy, battling the demons of PTSD, survivor’s guilt, and unrelenting grief.
Owen read that article ten times, back-to-back.
He was crying. He was laughing.
He had never been happier.
47
Gayle fussed around the house. That’s all it was. Fussing.
She straightened pictures on the walls that didn’t really need straightening. Chopped down on decorative pillows. Sent unimportant emails. She was aware that this was killing time, but that was fine. What mattered was tonight.
In the middle of the night she’d made a very important decision. A secret one. A dangerous one. When she was along in the house, Gayle removed the folded pamphlet from the back pocket of those skinny jeans.
Tank Girl.
Did that make it a lesbian bar or one welcome to bi-curious?
Suddenly Gayle realized that she didn’t even know if the distinction mattered. Or existed. Then she paused and felt a chill of uncertainty. Would someone like her be welcome in a place like that? Would her total lack of experience shine like a prison break spotlight?
She almost tore up the pamphlet.
Almost.
Did not.
Instead she put it back into the pocket of those jeans and found more things to keep herself busy. She’d already contrived a credible escape plan for tonight—a seminar on meditation that was likely to run late. Scott’s lack of interest in that could not be more comprehensive. He called everything even remotely related to that aspect of her life “New Age woo-woo horse crap.”
Gayle decided to sand and restain the patio furniture that was currently sitting in the garage. It didn’t need to be restained, but it was that or scream as she climbed the damn walls.
48
Monk’s cell rang as he was getting really bad coffee from a machine in the hall. The display read S&T. Shorthand for the bail bondsmen who gave him most of his good-paying jobs. He debated letting it ring through to voicemail, but Patty would be a while yet and he had to fill the time, so he punched the green button.
“Yo,” said Monk, “is this urgent? ’Cause I’m busy.”
“Checking in to see if you’ve found our boy yet,” asked Twitch, one of the two partners in the bond firm. Sadly, his real name was Iver Twitch. His parents were, Monk knew, total assholes. Twitch’s partner wasn’t much luckier—his name was J. Heron Scarebaby. Apparently it was something else before his grandfather went through Ellis Island, and either the immigration clerk was a dick or clueless. Either way, the name stuck. The universe pushed the two of them together and Scarebaby and Twitch was a thriving bail bond business with offices in several cities. Monk never bothered to ask why neither of them changed their names, or used something less outright bizarre for their business. Why not? Who the hell would forget bail bondsmen named Scarebaby and Twitch? It was like something out of Harry Potter, but without the wit or charm. Just the weird.
Monk shifted around to check both ends of the hall. Couple of nurses at the station and a female cop with soft red hair and hard green eyes standing outside of the ER entrance. Those green eyes were staring at him but she wasn’t close enough to hear any of the call. He lowered his voice anyway.
“No,” said Monk
“Are you looking?”
“I just got to town, man,” complained Monk. “Give me two goddamn minutes, will you?”
“We have this matter and then there’s a couple of other skips we need you to find,” said Twitch.
“Day ends in a y,” said Monk.
“And let’s not forget,” continued Twitch, “there’s a lot of money in play here. With the pending case, I mean.”
“I know.”
“A lot of my money if you don’t catch this little cocksucker.”
“I’ll catch him. I have a few good leads.”
“In Pine Deep?”
“One of ’em, yeah,” said Monk. “But I think he’s holed up somewhere nearby. Black Marsh, maybe. Somebody said something, and it feels like a solid tip. Don’t worry, I’ll find him.”
“Are you looking right now?” demanded Twitch. “I mean, as we speak?”
Monk sighed. “No. Look, something else came up. Had to deal with it.”
“Did I mention that this is a lot of my money? I mean, that has come up in our discussions, right?”
Monk sighed again. “I’m at the hospital with Patty.”
There was a hard beat. Then, “Is she okay?”
Monk gave him a rough cut of the story, and finished with “They’re running tests.”
Another pause, and Monk could almost hear the gears grinding as the small, fragile, decent part of Twitch warred with the lawyer-turned-bail bondsmen aspect.
“You mentioned some raised eyebrows. Local cops going to be a problem?”
“To be determined. Bet you ten bucks and my left nut they’re going to think I knocked Patty around.”
Twitch cursed quietly but with eloquence. “You need me to run interference, you call me.”
“I won’t let this get in the way of the job.”
“That’s not what I meant,” said Twitch, clearly offended. “You and Patty are family. Anyone moves against you and I’ll drop the house on them.”
“Thanks. I’ll keep you posted.”
“Okay,” said Twitch, and the line went dead.
Monk pocketed the phone, cut a last look at the red-haired cop, and went back to the waiting room.
49
Patty always thought that emergency rooms should be called waiting rooms.
Once they did their tests and dressed her cuts, they left her to wait. And wait. And wait.
It was not a kindness most of the time because it made the people in those triage bays remember how they got there. Those were seldom happy memories.
Memories.
Patty tried to understand what was happening. Tried to logic her way through it in hopes that a practical approach would keep the screams tamped down into the bottom of her lungs.
So she drifted back into the memories that were still anchored to her mind. Her life. Her family.
Patty was the middle daughter from a family of tattoo artists who’d been sinking ink since the fifties. A family whose needles had created some of the most intricate and beautiful artwork carried back to France, England, Australia, and the United States on the arms, chests, and shoulders of the young men who’d survived the rat holes and rice paddies of what became known as the Vietnam War. Dragons and tigers, pretty girls and laughing devils. And other things, too … beautiful flowers and the faces of girlfriends a world away.
When Saigon fell and the Communists took over the country, the family was decimated and scattered. Many were killed or sent to labor camps because other villagers labeled them as collaborators.
Patty was born after that. By then the family was much smaller and they worked the tourist trade. Their work was inspected at random and any infraction was punished with swift brutality—something the smiling tourists were not allowed to see. Patty’s life had been hard, but with the irony of enthusiastic American tourism, there was more money flowing into even the smallest villages.
Patty fell in love with one of the tourists, the son of a Vietnamese national who’d fled the country in the stinking hull of a fishing boat. The son, a pharmacist, had always wanted to visit the country. When his parents talked of Vietnam they seldom mentioned the war. Instead their eyes would glaze over as if they were looking at the lush forests and endless rivers, the towering mountains and the ten thousand varieties of beautiful flowers. They spoke of its history and of the music and dance. His father would then roll up his sleeve and show the tattoo he’d gotten in a village outside of Ho Chi Minh City. A dragon and a phoenix in an eternal dance. It was the most beautiful piece of skin art the young pharmacist had ever seen, and when his father died of cancer, he made it a mission to find that village and get the same tattoo.
A knowledgeable tour guide had brought him to the small studio Patty’s family shared with five other artists. The three oldest artists in the place all recognized the design and the work. Tattoos, like any other kind of art, were unique to the people who had made them. Any really experienced eye could see it. The artist had been Patty’s grandfather, and now she was the last artist in the family.
He hired her to do the same tattoo on his back. She did, and everyone who saw it said that Patty was every bit as skillful as her grandfather. A few—including the hardest sell in the village—said she was better. The young man stayed in town longer than he intended and had other pieces of Patty’s art inked forever onto his bod
y.
That man was Patty’s first real lover, and though they never married, she got pregnant. Sadly, the young pharmacist confessed that he had a wife and children back in the States. He fled, and Patty’s family treated her like a whore. When Tuyet was born, they fawned publicly over the beautiful little child, and privately ignored her. A whore’s bastard.
But as Tuyet grew, she charmed them. No one was as sweet as her. A light that shone all the time. A smile that could melt ice. A laugh that drew smiles even from the most stone-faced relatives.
Somehow Patty could remember some of that.
Fragments.
Mostly they were memories of the reactions of her sisters, mother, and grandmother. But those were borrowed. She lay there and fished for her own memories. Surely they must be down there in the dark. Misplaced, yes, but lost? That wasn’t possible.
“Làm ơn đừng quên tôi…”
The words echoed in her mind, but even the voice was unfamiliar.
Please don’t forget me.
Patty closed her eyes and balled her fists and refused—absolutely refused—to scream.
50
Monk felt the man before he saw him.
It was something in the way the air changed in the waiting room. A shift on a level that he could sense but not name. He turned fast, expecting trouble, the magazine falling from his lap to slap against the scuffed linoleum.
The man stood a few feet inside the door. He was short, lean, compact. Somewhere north of fifty, with streaks of gray in his curly black hair. Dark eyes. Some small scars on his face. And a warm smile that did not reach his eyes at all.
“Morning,” said the man. He wore naturally faded jeans, New Balance running shoes, a flannel shirt in a lumberjack plaid, and a chief’s badge. A gun belt was cinched around his narrow waist. Not the kind with pouches and slots for Tasers, pepper spray, or cuffs. Just the gun—a big old Beretta 96A1, a brute of a .40 handgun.