Ink

by Jonathan Maberry

  “I’m Malcolm Crow,” he said, “chief of police here in Pine Deep.”

  Monk stood up slowly. He towered over the cop, who couldn’t have been more than five-seven and maybe not that tall. Monk was a bit over six feet but knew he looked taller. People told him that. Probably because most of his mass was in his chest and shoulders. The cop did not seem particularly impressed.

  “Okay, Chief,” he said.

  “People call me Crow.”

  “Okay, Crow.”

  “Welcome to Pine Deep,” said the cop. There was a flavor of irony in his inflection that Monk could not identify. Like it was some kind of old joke, but he didn’t know the context. “You brought in Ms. Trang?”

  “Yes.”

  “Name?”

  “Gerald Addison. People call me Monk.”

  The chief’s left eyebrow lifted. “Monk? Like a gorilla, because of the shoulders?”

  “No,” said Monk, but he didn’t offer any other explanation and the cop didn’t press it.

  “What’s your connection to Ms. Trang?”

  “Patty’s an old friend.”

  “What kind of friend?”

  “We go way back.”

  “That’s not an answer,” said the cop.

  Monk thought about it. “We’re close. Like family.”

  “You bust her up?”

  “No,” said Monk flatly, expecting the question, knowing this was the kind of cop who would try to blindside him with that sort of stuff. He had poker player’s eyes and was looking for a tell.

  “Lovers’ quarrel?”

  “No,” Monk repeated, leaning on the word.

  “She say no and you didn’t hear her?”

  “Fuck you.”

  The cop’s smile widened a millimeter. But he also nodded. Then he said, “You look the type who’d know the drill. Will I have to insist?”

  “I’m strapped,” said Monk. “But you already spotted that. Or the doctor told you. I have a Sig in a shoulder rig and a backup piece on my left ankle.”

  “Yup,” said the cop, “I can see the bulge. Let’s do the dance.”

  “Me or you?”

  “I need the practice,” said the cop. Monk gave him three seconds of a flat stare, then turned around, placed his palms flat on the wall, and spread his feet. He felt expert hands pat him down. The cop was professional and thorough. He was not unduly rough.

  Both guns were removed. As was a Buck 898 Impact folding knife Monk wore in a leather holster on his right hip. The questing hands also removed a small leather case from Monk’s left front trouser pocket, unzipped it. Crow made a small, soft grunt. Not of surprise, more of appreciation. The set of lockpick tools was high end.

  “You can turn around.”

  Monk pushed off the wall and turned. The cop had moved back out of range of a sucker punch or kick. The two guns—the big Sig Sauer P226 Scorpion and the .38 Smith & Wesson five-shot Chief’s Special—the little zippered case, and the knife were on the far edge of the coffee table. The cop had removed the magazines and ejected shells from each weapon. The snap on the cop’s own gun was undone, but he hadn’t drawn.

  “You can sit.”

  They both sat, facing each other across the table.

  “Now,” said the cop, “let’s see your carry permit, ID, and anything else you want to show me. Put it on the edge of the table near you.”

  Monk complied. When Crow got to the fugitive apprehension license he gave that a small tap-tap with his forefinger.

  “Yup,” said the cop, “I figured you for a skip-tracer, hence the lockpicks. Besides, you have the look.”

  Monk shrugged.

  The cop used his foot to hook a plastic chair over. “You can take the cards back and have a seat.”

  “What about my guns?”

  “When we’re done talking.”

  “Okay,” said Monk, standing to gather the cards and put them back into his wallet. He settled into the chair.

  Chief Crow studied him for a few moments. “Tell me what happened with Ms. Trang,” he said. “Tell me all of it. And tell me why it was you who found her. Maybe tell me why you have a stab wound in your hand, and let’s not pretend it was a punch press. Oh, and tell me why your car outside has a trailer hitched to it.”

  “Sure. But before I do all that, how about telling me how Patty’s doing?”

  The smile flickered just a little. “How about you go first?”

  51

  Patty stared at the ceiling, seeing the white speckled acoustic tiles in negative. The white became black and the dark holes became stars.

  She ignored the sounds coming through the open door, just as she ignored the policewoman seated outside reading stuff on a cell phone. She tuned out the noises from the nurses’ station and the small beeps and pings of the machines that lurked around her bed. None of it was entirely real to her.

  Patty tried to ignore the pain signals from her hand. Not because she was afraid of pain—that kind of pain was nothing to her anymore—but the pain threw memories at her.

  Just not enough of them.

  Tuyet.

  There was still a ghost of a little girl in her mind. Small, pretty, dressed in a pale-blue dress over darker-blue leggings. There were little white flowers on both. A matched set. A gift from bà ngoại—Grandma—on Tuyet’s last birthday. She was starting to grow out of the leggings but cried every time Patty wanted to move them on.

  “They’re my favorites!” wailed Tuyet. “They keep me safe.”

  Safe.

  The clothes still smelled a little like smoke after fifty washings. Tuyet had been wearing them when the house next door caught fire and then spread to their place. Tuyet had run around waking everyone else up and they all got out safely.

  They keep me safe.

  When they found Tuyet in the road she had been wearing that dress. The police found the leggings later, in a trash can behind the house where six men lay dead. A house where no one had been safe.

  Patty’s fists were clenched so tightly the IV port in the back of her hand stung like a wasp. Not that hand. The other one. The one she could bear to look at.

  Why could she remember every detail of that dress and so little else?

  Why?

  How was that even possible?

  There was a soft ping and the cop outside laughed quietly at something that popped up on her screen.

  She’s there to make sure I don’t kill myself.

  Patty looked up at the reverse star field on the ceiling. After a long time it seemed like the holes really were white dots against an infinity of black. The stars began to move. Slowly at first, then faster, swirling more like sparks.

  But by then Patty was asleep, sliding down a long slanted tunnel in the floor of the world, toward a darkness so complete there was not a word for it in any human language.

  She was just about to fall forever when there was a sound that pulled her back. Not a voice. Not a scream. Something more mundane. A knock. Then the soft creak of hinges as the door opened.

  Patty forced her eyes open, suspicious that this was actually part of some trick of the demons in the dark. She opened her eyes, the merest of slits, afraid that if she saw a monster it would know, and then it would pounce.

  A head and shoulders leaned in through the door.

  “Ms. Trang?” asked a soft voice.

  It was not Tuyet. It was not Monk.

  It was a cop.

  52

  Monk gave Chief Crow a version of what happened. It wasn’t exactly a pack of lies; more like a cluster of carefully sculpted half-truths. The cop seemed willing to let Monk tell it from the beginning, clearly appreciating context. There was no sense of urgency, which made Monk wonder about who was doing some other kind of checking elsewhere. Was there someone already at Patty’s place? Or spooking his car outside?

  He was acutely aware of Crow’s dark-blue eyes and how closely they watched everything, while the chief’s body language sold the fiction of a la
zy, mildly dumb hick cop. Monk wasn’t fooled for a second. Crossbreed a rat terrier with a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel and it’s the laziest lapdog in creation until it decides your nutsack looks like something that needs biting.

  Monk stuck to the truth for as far as it worked. He said that his friend Patty Trang—known as Patty Cakes—had moved her tattoo business from New York to Pine Deep. Looking for the quiet life.

  “Why Pine Deep?” Crow asked when he was done.

  “Why not? It’s a nice little town.”

  “No,” said Crow, “it’s not. A tourist who doesn’t know how to use GPS might wander this way thinking they just drove into an Andrew Wyeth painting, but anyone moving here would have a better take.”

  Monk shrugged. “Been quiet around here for a long time. The Trouble—isn’t that what you locals call it?—was way the hell back, right? Only time Pine Deep makes the papers anymore is around the holidays or on slow news days when some reporter gets a Throwback Thursday itch and wants to drag it all back out. That was then, and this is now. Besides … Pine Deep’s got a big fringe community, right? Got that Fringe Festival thing coming up. And, a big LGBTQ presence, too.”

  “Is Ms. Trang gay?”

  “She’s whatever she is. None of my fucking business.”

  “It is if you’re sleeping with her.”

  Monk leaned back in his chair. “The fuck’s that to you?”

  “Maybe nothing. Maybe motive. Working on figuring it all out.”

  “Ask Patty.”

  “Someone is,” said Crow.

  The second hand chased some silence around the face of the big wall clock in the corner.

  “Get to the part where you show up with a U-Haul,” suggested Crow.

  “Maybe I’m looking for the quiet life, too.”

  “And you’ve made so much money chasing bail skips that you can retire to the country and paint pretty landscapes.”

  “I’m not retired.”

  “People just visiting tend to pack a suitcase, not their whole apartment.”

  “That’s my business, isn’t it?”

  Crow’s eyes were hard as fists, but that little smile was still there. It made Monk itch. “To be determined,” he said mildly. “Let’s go back to your story. Tell me about the two of you moving from New York to here, of all places. I promise not to interrupt.”

  So Monk took a breath and explained how Patty moved to Pine Deep a couple of months ago and set up her shop, building it on the bones of a failed barbershop. He said that she lived alone and quietly and was building a clientele, mostly drawing on the people living and working in the Fringe. She ran a clean shop, was chatty and social during office hours, but after that she liked to turn the rheostat to whatever level she wanted. Hard to do that in New York; easier to do it out in the sticks.

  “As for Pine Deep,” said Monk, “for some reason Patty fixated on it as a place to reset her clocks.”

  “Even a broken town like this one?” asked Crow, and there was a hint of something in his voice that Monk couldn’t quite identify. Some species of sadness, maybe; but if so it was the kind that came with the wrong kind of familiarity.

  “Especially a broken town like this,” said Monk. “Patty’s been through some shit. She understands broken more than most. Don’t know if she could live in a Polly Perfect town.”

  Crow nodded. “And you?”

  “I get along wherever,” said Monk. “But New York’s used up for me. I needed a new start, too. Plenty of work for a cat like me in Bucks County, down in Philly, up in the Poconos if I want to go that far, and over in Jersey. I bought a place and moved down here, too. Took me longer because I had some open gigs that needed handling.”

  “She knew you were coming, though?” prompted Crow.

  “Sure. And while I drove down I kept trying to call her. Got mostly no signal or shit-poor reception.”

  “Again I say, welcome to Pine Deep.”

  “Then the storm hit and I pulled over to wait it out.” Monk described exactly where. Then he explained everything that happened at Patty’s place, from the unlocked door to finding Patty to picking glass out of her and bringing her to the ER.

  Crow listened. He took no notes and only gave the occasional nod. Monk wondered if the chief already knew this from Patty herself.

  “And it’s your opinion that she mutilated her own hand?” asked Crow after a long moment of reflection.

  “Yes.”

  “Mangled the tattoo of her own daughter?”

  “Tuyet. Yes.”

  “How did her daughter die?”

  Monk met his eyes. “Badly.”

  Crow nodded. A tiny movement. “Tell me.”

  It took a lot for Monk to figure out how to tell it. There was so much sewn into the fabric of the memory. How he met Patty. How he became who he was. And what he was. It was odd that in all these years he’d never had to tell the story to anyone. Not a soul. But there was no way out of this room and out of the moment without telling at least some of it to this strange little cop. He looked Crow in the eyes and said the things that slowly wiped the smile off the man’s face.

  “Tuyet was abducted from her grandmother’s house. The people who did it beat the old lady to death and shit on her corpse. Over the next eight days and nights, they gang-raped the little girl and then one of them choked her too hard while sodomizing her. Tuyet died. They left her body in the middle of a dirt road. Animals found her before the authorities did.”

  The room was utterly silent.

  It was impossible to tell whether Crow knew any or all of this. His face showed absolutely nothing. No emotion of any kind.

  Finally, Crow said, “When did this take place? And where?”

  “Ten years ago,” said Monk, and he heard the eroded sound of his own voice. It hurt to talk about this. So much. “In Tuyên Quang township, northeastern Vietnam, northwest of Hanoi.”

  “Who committed the murders?”

  “Six guys. Local gang.”

  “Police ever catch them?”

  “No.”

  “So, they got away with it?”

  Monk just looked at him.

  Crow said, “Ah.” Then he asked, “Why were you there?”

  “Tourist.”

  The smile flickered back. “Somehow you just don’t look the type to be uploading tourist pics to your Instagram. You’re too young to have been in-country during the war, but you do have the military look. PMC?”

  Monk smiled. Private military contractors was a much less threatening term than mercenary, even with all the shit Blackwater and Blue Diamond did over the years.

  “In Vietnam?” said Monk. “No. I was a tourist when I was there.”

  “But you’ve been in that line of work?”

  “Once upon a time.”

  “Ever regular military?”

  “Sure. So what?”

  “Honorable discharge?”

  “My tour ended and I didn’t re-up. End of story. No drama.”

  That lie was easier to tell because Monk had told it a thousand times. The real story was buried deep in need-to-know files, and no country cop was ever going to get a whiff of it.

  “How did you get involved with Ms. Trang and the murder of her mother and daughter?”

  “It just happened.”

  “Nothing ever just happens,” said Crow. “And don’t try to dick me around. Please answer the question.”

  Monk shrugged. “Sure. Patty was working in a tattoo place. Her family’s business. I had some ink scheduled but she didn’t show up for work. One of the other women working there told me what happened.”

  Crow studied him for a while and Monk allowed it, meeting the cop’s eyes.

  “And you became friends?” asked Crow, one skeptical eyebrow raised. “Child molestation and murder aren’t your typical bonding experience.”

  “It is what it is, Chief, and I don’t need to explain any more about it to you.”

  “When did she move to the Stat
es?” said Crow.

  “That year. Too many memories in ’Nam. Patty needed to start fresh.” Monk paused. “But before she left she inked Tuyet’s face on her hand.”

  “She did it herself?”

  “Yes. I saw her do it.”

  “That could not have been easy.”

  “Fuck, man, nothing about that whole time was easy. She had to identify what was left of her little girl’s body,” said Monk bitterly. “That was the image she carried around. It’s what she took to bed with her and what she woke up to. Doing that tattoo was the healthiest thing Patty could have done. I’m sure you saw the tattoo. There’s enough of it left under the junk she inked last night. That’s the face of a smiling, happy little girl. Alive and full of joy. It’s the face Patty needed to remember, you dig?”

  Crow nodded. He pursed his lips for a moment then nodded at Monk’s hand. “You left that part out.”

  “When I got to Patty’s place this morning she was totally freaked,” said Monk. “She’d gotten smashed as all hell and defaced the tattoo of Tuyet. I don’t know why. She wouldn’t talk about it. And when I was getting ready to come to the ER, she grabbed a tattoo needle and tried to stab her own hand with it. Not sure if she wanted to finish obliterating Tuyet’s picture, or to destroy the new one. Or maybe punish herself. Either way, I got to her before she could.”

  “And took the hit yourself?”

  “Better me than her.”

  “Atonement?” suggested Crow.

  “No,” said Monk. “And fuck you.”

  Crow nodded as if acknowledging that point. “And instead of telling the truth to the intake nurse and Dr. Argawal, you whipped up a crock of shit about a punch press?”

  “Neither of those fucks needed to know. Not sure you do, either.”

  “It’s my job.”

  “This is Small Town, USA. Your job is to give out tickets.”

  “Here’s one of my problems, Monk,” Crow said after a pause. “Ms. Trang says that she doesn’t remember ever putting that tattoo on her hand.”

  “She did it last night while she was drunk out of her gourd.”

  “No,” said Crow, “I mean the other one. The original one.”

  Monk said nothing and looked away for a moment. Then, “Yeah, I know.”