Ink

by Jonathan Maberry

  The part of town where a lot of these newcomers settled was one that had been virtually obliterated during the Trouble. During reconstruction new streets and neighborhoods had been created. The main drag through that part of town was Boundary Street, though Crow could never quite figure out what it was a boundary of, or between. If there was a meaning to it, then only the nutbag who kept posting fake street signs understood the joke. It was lost on Crow.

  “Just kind of came to me in a dream,” the planner liked to say. “Woke up and there was that name in my head.”

  Boundary Street it became, and over time it became an actual boundary. The Fringe—as the new neighborhood was informally called—was on the other side of it, and pushed itself away from the town proper into municipal scrub that had never been developed. New stores, some nightclubs, and other businesses sprang up with surprising speed, and the Fringe took on its own unique personality. More like the way Chelsea had been in New York City in the late 1960s, New Hope, Pennsylvania, in the late seventies, or 1980s South Street in Philly. Some of the locals called the new residents freaks and geeks, or some variation of that. But since none of the Fringe-dwellers caused any problems, they became part of the Pine Deep landscape. Their stores and clubs brought in a new wave of tourists, and although these visitors spent the majority of their dollars in the Fringe, there was spillover to all of the town’s businesses. Nothing, in Crow’s experience, created a bond like increased income in a financially distressed town.

  That said, there were a lot of raised eyebrows at the type of businesses in the Fringe. A retired drag queen bought an old grain warehouse and turned it into a burlesque club featuring male and female dancers, including a strong contingent of body-positive performers. Then a lesbian couple opened a bar with the best selection of craft beers in the county. A former Amish guy and his boyfriend opened a signature pizza place. Other clubs sprouted up seemingly overnight, bringing with them the kinds of stores that supported their themes—clothing boutiques, piercing studios, electronics stores, vape shops, art galleries, and more.

  What was unusual was that most of these Fringe groups—even the ones that in other cities did not necessarily mix—seemed to cluster together in the new community. A second wave of newbies—mainly hipsters, some tech start-up guys, and artists—were drawn to Pine Deep’s new vibe, but they went more for integration with the locals. Many bought the big farmhouses left empty by the Trouble, getting them for pennies on the dollar from distant relatives of the deceased, or at public auction for back taxes.

  Crow’s wife, Val, owned the biggest working farm in town, but it was framed on three sides by farms that grew nothing except wildflowers and unharvested pumpkins and wild corn. If people wanted to stop and pick any of that stuff, the residents usually just smiled, waved, and told them to have at it.

  Even so, there wasn’t a lot of mixing with most of the newcomers and people who’d lived through the Trouble. Crow knew that the newbies were aware of it, and of that tragedy years ago. Hell, everyone in the country knew about it. The story—the government’s official version—had been the only news for weeks. Reporters made careers and won Pulitzers on the Trouble. Books had been written—nonfiction and fiction; there were movies and one series on Netflix that lasted four years. Everyone knew of it, but no one talked about it. Not in town. The longtimers never ever said a word beyond using the Trouble as a chronological reference point. Something was either “before the Trouble” or “after the Trouble.” None of them spoke about the Trouble itself. No, sir. Not here and not ever. If one of the newbies ever broached the subject the longtimers would go cold and silent and without saying as much told the newbies to go fuck off. Mostly the newbies did, in fact, fuck off. The two populations intermingled when they had to, but otherwise it was like two towns superimposed over one another without ever being actually one unified thing.

  If anything, Crow mused as he walked, he and his officers were the only people who had to move and interact with both groups. Nature of the job.

  He reached his office and went in, jangling the little bell above the door. Gertie was at the dispatch desk, obviously bored, playing Angry Birds or some shit on her phone. She gave him the briefest of looks.

  “Nothing’s happening,” she said. Gertie was forty-something, but had looked fifty-something since high school. She was very tall and thin and angular and Crow thought she looked like a stick bug who’d semi-evolved into a human being. Her clothing choices shuttled between pastel yoga pants with heavy sweatshirts or leggings with heavy sweatshirts. Even in summer. She did not—nor had she ever, as far as Crow knew—attended a yoga class. Her hair was a taboo subject. For the last few weeks Gertie had been going to one after another of the hair salons along Boundary Street. Instead of coming into work rocking some cool color—Crow loved all the dynamic hues he saw on the streets—she kept her own mousy brown but sported a series of bizarre styles. The current ’do looked like a bed of hair in which weasels had been having ugly makeup sex. Crow was getting mouth scars from biting his lip.

  “Okay,” he said. “Hey, is there coffee?”

  “If any’s left,” she said, not looking up again from her game.

  Crow mouthed kiss my ass silently.

  “I heard that,” said Gertie.

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “I did.”

  He went over to the coffeemaker, saw that the pot was almost empty and cold. He manfully resisted the urge to fling the carafe at her, and instead cleaned it and made a fresh pot. Just to be pissy he made hazelnut, which he knew she didn’t like.

  Above the coffee station was one of a dozen different inspirational posters Crow bought once at a police convention. They were intended to encourage best practices. After years they had faded so thoroughly into the background that no one took notice. Except now. The one Crow stared at as he rinsed out his mug read: NOT ALL CRIMES LOOK LIKE CRIMES (THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX).

  He stared at those words as if seeing them for the very first time.

  He put a plastic stirrer in his mouth and chewed it thoughtfully for a few moments.

  When the coffee was done, he poured a cup, added three packets of sugar, all the while considering those words. then Crow went to his office, left the door open, turned on his laptop, accessed a couple of interjurisdictional databases, and did a very thorough background check on Patricia “Patty Cakes” Trang and Gerald “Monk” Addison.

  56

  Home. Kind of.

  Monk had only been to the place three times before. Twice with a realtor, once with Patty. Most of the paperwork was done at the realtor’s office in Doylestown. Monk wasn’t sentimental about the place. It was a house and the odds were pretty sucky that it would ever become a true home.

  It was at the edge of town, off Corn Hill, down a crooked lane, alone on a cul-de-sac. That’s what the realtor called it. Fancy name for a dead-end street.

  He turned around and carefully backed the U-Haul to within a foot of the garage door. Installing an electric opener was on his to-do list, right behind “give a fuck.” He killed the engine, rolled down the window, and sat for a few moments, listening to the day. Getting a sense of it. There were four other houses on the street, but they were clustered by the main drag. Everything in between were vacant lots where homes had burned down during the Trouble. Those lots were thick with uncut grass, weeds, shrubs and hedges run wild, scrub pines, and the ubiquitous maples that always seemed to spring up when lawn-care crews took a five-minute break. Older trees, the ones that survived the fires, stood crooked and dispirited.

  The nightbirds were in the trees already, as if they’d flown ahead to wait for him. Anyone else would have been freaked by that, but Monk accepted their presence. He knew those kinds of birds. Or their cousins in other places he’d been. Not places exactly like Pine Deep, but places that were wrong in their own kinds of ways.

  “What the hell are we doing here, Pats?” he asked aloud. Dust motes, silent and unhelpful, swirled in the we
ak sunlight beyond the windshield. He leaned forward and followed the slanting beams up and watched as the last holes in the clouds closed, leaving a complexity of gray covering everything.

  Monk sighed, got out, and spent the next several hours unpacking and arranging. There was already some Ikea furniture here. Stuff he’d had shipped. The realtor had accepted some cash to have someone here to let the delivery guys in. None of the stuff was assembled. Monk wondered how much bourbon it was going to take for the Ikea assembly instructions to make sense. He had plenty, though. His drinking buddies back in New York had sent him off with a six-pack: Knob Creek 100, Maker’s Mark, Elijah Craig Small Batch, I.W. Harper, Henry McKenna Single Barrel ten-year-old, and a lovely bottle of Elmer T. Lee Single Barrel. Good stuff, but it made a statement. Disposable gifts for a disposable friend. In a year he’d be nothing more than an anecdote for them to tell one another, and in two years he wouldn’t even be that.

  He found that the fridge was already turned on and the automatic ice maker had filled the plastic tray. Monk unpacked a box of drink-ware, found a chunky tumbler, dropped two cubes in, cracked the seal on the Maker’s Mark, and poured three fingers. He stood in the kitchen and took a sip, letting it soak his tongue, enjoying the full-bodied oakiness, then getting those hints of the caramel and vanilla notes. Then the spicy burn made itself known, which is when he swallowed. That burn went all the way down to his soul.

  The first sip was for him, and maybe for the house.

  Then second sip, though …

  He raised the glass for a moment. “Love you, Patty Cakes,” he said. “Don’t you fucking leave me. Don’t you fucking lose your shit and leave me all alone. Don’t you do that.”

  He pressed the glass to his chest so tightly he could feel his heartbeat. On his skin the faces watched, the way they did. Around him the ghosts of the murdered stood watching him. Every now and then one of them opened its mouth and screamed. Monk listened for the voice of a little girl amid the shrieking. She was there, on his chest. One of his oldest tattoos. He thought he heard her weeping.

  Or maybe it was himself he heard.

  He drained the glass.

  Thunder rumbled again, but far away. Monk refilled the glass, took only a small sip, set up his laptop and loaded a playlist of Nawang Khechog on Tibetan flute, and picked up the damn instructions.

  57

  Her name was Tuyet.

  Or so everyone told her.

  Patty cowered under the blankets, glad the female cop was gone. Glad to be alone. Terrified to be alone. Wishing Monk were still there. Glad he wasn’t.

  Because of Tuyet.

  Tuyet.

  Her left hand was swathed in bandages. That helped. She could not see the crude smiley face she’d drawn. Patty told everyone—the doctors and nurses, the cop—that she didn’t remember doing that new tattoo, but that was a lie. In her mind she crouched naked in one of the barber chairs in her studio, a pot of ink open, the needle buzzing like the open line of an old-style phone, sending only noise after someone else hung up.

  The memory of that was as clear as memories associated with the little girl were hazy and fleeting. Everything connected with Tuyet was as splintered as pieces of a broken mirror on the floor of her mind. Drawing over the other face. Trying to use new lines to trap the little girl’s face as it faded. Too drunk, too crazed to do it—or anything—right. Failing. Feeling her memories and perceptions shift like furniture in a house caught in a mudslide. As that sensation grew worse and the alcohol polluted her blood, her skills failed. Going a bit crazy. More than a little. The little girl’s face warped, became distorted by her new lines, and then there was a time of blackness when she must have turned the attempted cage of lines into that stupid, ugly, mocking smiley face.

  There was nothing after that until she woke up on the bathroom floor.

  The memories of Tuyet were still fading, becoming nothing more than a plaintive voice crying in her thoughts. On some deep level, though, Patty knew that her attempts to save her memories was successful. Partially. Enough? She didn’t know and with each hour she was losing hope that she could cling to at least some of the memories of.…

  Of …

  What was the name?

  Tuyet. Yes. That was it. Tuyet.

  Her daughter.

  On the drive to the hospital Monk had kept talking, explaining Tuyet, clearly hoping to say something that would be the key that opened the lock on whatever box or chamber held those memories. He was crying, too. Monk. Crying. Tuyet had been murdered, he said. Monk had killed the killers. He’d been with Patty through the process of identifying the body, and then burying the little girl and Tuyet’s own grandmother. Patty remembered her mother, remembered that she’d been killed. But not why. And there was nothing in any box, or room, or anywhere. The memories were gone. Something had opened her head like an October pumpkin and scooped out every last bit of who Tuyet was, leaving her only the awful knowledge that she could not remember a single thing about her only daughter. It was worse than rape, worse than being stabbed through the heart.

  “Tuyet,” she murmured and hated herself—deeply, passionately loathed herself—because she barely remembered that poor little girl who’d died half a world away.

  “Ám ảnh tôi,” she begged. “For God’s sake … Ám ảnh tôi.”

  The minutes dragged past with cold indifference.

  Ám ảnh tôi.

  She said it again in English. Pleading.

  “Haunt me.”

  In the wintry graveyard of her memories the only sound or movement was an empty wind that had no voice with which to speak.

  58

  Crow got a lot of information about Patty Trang and Monk Addison, but no insights. Her backstory was a lot of nothing details—driver’s license, immigration, naturalization, work history. Crow sent requests through Interpol and directly to the police in Tuyên Quang, Vietnam, asking for details about the murder of Trang’s mother and daughter. That would take time.

  For Monk there was less than there should be. He was able to confirm that the man had been born in New York, enlisted in the army at eighteen, ran with the Airborne Rangers for three years and then with Delta Force, and received an honorable discharge eleven years later. His service record read like the fiction it had to be. According to what Crow could find, Monk’s MOS came up as 63W, a job code that meant he was a wheeled-vehicle repairer. He’d been a sergeant and a mechanic? Crow smiled. Sergeant he could buy, but that was about it.

  His guess was that the military occupational specialty on record was horseshit. Everything about Monk screamed special ops. And not an obvious branch like the Green Berets, because the database Crow was accessing would have said that. Could Monk have been Delta? Those guys were cagey about what personal details were ever revealed. There was a guy Crow knew named Joe Ledger who was some kind of black ops and background checks on him were fiction, too, and unbreakable.

  Was that what Monk was?

  Maybe, Crow thought. Monk had hinted he’d also been a PMC, but those companies were even more squirrelly when it came to revealing employee information. Safety concerns, sure, but a lot of it was hidden behind walls built by the various intelligence and military agencies who hired private contractors. Even if Monk was in custody for a provable crime, none of those agencies was going to share data with a small-town cop.

  As he dug deeper he was able to confirm that Monk really did work chasing bail skips, and Crow actually laughed out loud at the name of one of the firms who had him on retainer: Scarebaby and Twitch.

  The company was owned by J. Heron Scarebaby and Iver Twitch. Actual names. Crow sniggered all the way to the coffeemaker and back. How fucking unlucky do you have to be, to be hung with names like that? Did their parents hate them? Were both families cursed by witches?

  “What’s so funny?” yelled Gertie.

  “Nothing,” said Crow.

  “You better not be laughing at my hair, Malcolm Crow. I told you about that
before.”

  “I’m not laughing at you, your hair, or anything in that whole corner of the office.”

  “You better not be.”

  “Hand to God.”

  Gertie lapsed into the kind of silence where it was clear she did not believe Crow and was going to be listening for validation of her suspicions. Her hair really did look like weasels were committing unspeakable acts in it.

  Crow called the bond firm and got Mr. Twitch on the line. Scarebaby was, according to his partner, at another fat farm and hadn’t bothered to bring his phone. Crow murmured a sympathetic noise and asked about Monk Addison.

  “Why?” asked Twitch. “Is he is trouble again?”

  “Again?”

  There was a pause as Twitch probably suddenly realized what he’d just said to a cop. “Just a joke,” he said quickly. “Monk’s great. How can I help?”

  “Doing a routine background check on him,” said Crow. “Confidential.”

  “Uh huh. Is he okay?”

  “He’s fine. This is just routine and—”

  “I’m an attorney,” interrupted Twitch. “Criminal law. Don’t talk to me like I’m a tourist.”

  “Is Mr. Addison your employee or your client?”

  “He is both,” said Twitch with a touch of asperity. “So, again I ask, is he in trouble?”

  Crow drummed his fingers along the side of his WORLD’S GREATEST DAD coffee cup for a moment. “He is a person of interest in a matter we’re investigating.”

  There was a soft hmmm-hmmming from Twitch, then he said in a quick rapid-fire, “You’re Pine Deep PD. Monk just moved there. Pine Deep is where the Trouble was. Pine Deep is a notoriously weird little town. I’ve read the articles. The Most Haunted Town in America. What’s your advertising slogan? ‘Visit America’s Haunted Holidayland’?”