Ink

by Jonathan Maberry

  “Past tense,” said Crow. “We’re pretty chill these days. Arts and crafts. Gearing up for our first fringe festival.”

  “Uh huh,” said Twitch in exactly the way someone would say “bullshit.” “What’s Monk into?”

  “I can’t comment on an active investigation.”

  “Is Monk in custody?”

  “No.”

  “Is Patty okay?”

  Crow paused. “You know Ms. Trang?”

  “Patty Cakes, sure.”

  “Can you tell me, please, about the nature of her relationship with Mr. Addison?”

  “Is Patty okay?” Twitch repeated, leaning on it a little harder. And there was something in the tone that made Crow wonder if Twitch already knew the answer. Had Monk called him? Probably, he decided.

  “She was brought into the emergency room of the Pinelands Regional Medical Center,” explained Crow. “She’s in stable condition.”

  “What happened to her?”

  Crow said, “I’m going to be frank with you, Mr. Twitch … Ms. Trang came in with bruises on her face and body, a variety of small cuts, and a minor head injury. She claims that this is all self-inflicted during a drunken blackout, which is also the story Mr. Addison tells. Her blood alcohol content was .34, so that bears out some of it.”

  “What about other drugs? And, before you stonewall me, Chief, Patty’s my client, too, and I’ll get any test results I might need.”

  “I didn’t call to stonewall you, Mr. Twitch, I’m looking to make sense of this. So, no, there are no traces of cocaine or other drugs. No Rohypnol, either, but I have some concerns about Mr. Addison and—”

  Twitch’s sharp snort of laughter cut him off. “Fuck me to tears, Chief, but if you think Monk Addison beat up Patty Cakes, let me set you straight. Monk only looks like the kind of guy who would cut your liver out with a dull spoon and make you buy it back while thanking him. He’s a big, scary, deeply dangerous son of a bitch and that’s me, his friend and lawyer, saying it. But—and this is a big twerking but—Monk is one of the good guys. Not a nice guy—God, don’t ever get that impression—but if he has your back, then you never need to look over your shoulder.”

  “As you said, you’re his lawyer…”

  “Sure, you think I’m hyping him because he pays me. Sure, sure, and no. I know Monk. Not as well as Patty, but well enough. And, let me say this, if someone in your freaky-deaky little town has hurt Patty, then you do not want to get between that unfortunate asshole and Monk Addison. No, sir, you do not. Monk has this thing about people putting hands on women and kids. Let’s call it a zero tolerance policy.”

  “So he’s what? Captain Hero?”

  Twitch laughed again and it sounded genuine. “Tell you what, Chief Crow,” he said, “you go ahead and investigate all you want. If you like Monk for what happened to Patty, knock yourself out trying to sell that. It’s your time to waste. But once you realize that he’s the one person who is never going to be a legitimate—and I’ll use your phrase here—person of interest—and start looking for the actual asshole who might have done it? When you get there, take some friendly advice and just step out of Monk’s way.”

  “I think we can handle ourselves, Mr. Twitch.”

  The lawyer was still laughing when he hung up on Crow.

  The chief sat at his desk and frowned at the phone. Then at the computer screen. And finally down into the depths of his coffee. There were no answers anyway. He got up and walked over to the big picture window and stood looking out at the day. The words PINE DEEP POLICE were written in big, fancy silver and black letters across the glass and he stared out through the O.

  Where there had been sunlight not an hour ago now there were storm shadows. Every store and building across the street was painted in bruise colors.

  “Going to rain soon,” he said aloud. Not really talking to Gertie, though she answered.

  “It rains every day now,” she said. “Probably that climate change stuff.”

  No, thought Crow, I don’t think so.

  59

  Monk lay on the couch, his whiskey tumbler resting on his chest, eyes staring at the jumble of half-empty boxes, packing material, and newly assembled furniture. Seeing none of it.

  He was only half awake.

  Maybe less than half.

  Most of him stood at the edge of a dream, and in that dream he stood at the bottom of a long hill. The road was steep and crooked and shrouded in dense shadows that clung like weeds to the path. Far, far above him there was a place of light and movement. He could hear beautiful melodies floating down on the night breeze, but they were indistinct and he could never quite place the tune or hear the words. He knew that if he could they would tell him so much. They would open doors for him. They would turn keys in the shackles he wore.

  But he was down there in the fetid darkness, and they were way up there. Up that impossible hill. He knew that he could not climb all that way. Others could. Others had. Better people than he. There was a woman named Rain Thomas, a sort of client from back in New York, who made it all the way to the top. Patty had been there, too. She told him about it sometimes, after she’d dreamed her way there in the Fire Zone. Tuyet was already there, if she was anywhere at all. She deserved to be up in the light.

  For a while, after Monk had torn himself loose from the blood and gunfire, the screams and fire of his former life as a soldier and private military contractor, he thought he would be able to make it there. During those years he followed the mystic’s road from temple to temple, from priest to shaman to healer on six continents, Monk thought that he would earn his way there. He used to think the shadows were the world and the light was some kind of heaven, but he knew better now. The light was chaos. It was a fire that burned away who you thought you were and let you forge who you wanted to be.

  That’s why he wanted to go. People called him “Monk” because of his journey. He took the nickname and used it, hoping that it would be his ticket for a ride across Boundary Street and up that hill.

  So far, though, the weight of his crimes was too heavy a burden for any form of transport. And so he stayed down in the darkness. Looking up.

  Looking up at the multicolored lights of the Fire Zone.

  Outside his house, on the porch rail and eaves, in the trees and on the roof, the nightbirds, lashed by rain and shoved by wind, stood witness to his dreams, seeing everything. Mourning with him.

  60

  Night came to Pine Deep like a thief.

  It stole in behind storm clouds, quiet and sly, and it crept onto rooftops and along alleys and peered into every window. Dressed in threadbare clothes of shadow, it pretended to be mundane and ordinary and not at all like the villain it was. But this was night in Pine Deep, and it has never been anyone’s friend.

  Some people—longtimers who had lived through a couple of the Black Summers—understood this. Surviving blight and heartbreak opens doors to certain insights. These people bought little charms at the right shops. Not the knockoffs, but the real ones. Corn crosses with a ball of garlic pressed in the crosspiece. Spikes of thrice-blessed hawthorn they drove into the wormy dirt on all sides of their homes—not in the four directions of east, west, north, and south, but where the ley lines cut across the troubled land. Little stone figures of old gods set in shrines framed by holly and wild rose. Fairy homes that did not look at all like dollhouses—not to anyone who had eyes to see.

  Night and the threat of a new storm lay heavily over Pine Deep. The wise locked their doors and kept the lights on. The unwary lay down and bared their throats to the night.

  61

  In her dreams Patty Cakes often went to the Fire Zone.

  That’s what the place was called. She knew that without knowing how she knew it.

  It was a place she kept trying to find when she was awake but could only ever find in dreams. That never deterred her, though, because at her best and most lucid waking hours she was absolutely convinced the place existed. Not as a met
aphor or some cryptic symbolism, but as stone and wood, as neon and asphalt, as flesh and beating hearts. The Fire Zone was out there somewhere. All that she needed to do was find the way when she was awake, but that path always eluded her,

  In dreams she knew the way, though. It was a simpler journey.

  Those dreams always started with her down in the shadows along Boundary Street. The version of it here in Pine Deep; the other Boundary Street in New York. And the one back in Tuyên Quang. Always a Boundary Street. Always shrouded in shadows, as if they defined the people who lived there. Like her. Like Monk.

  As the dream began to unfold, Patty began climbing a long hill up to where the lights from the Fire Zone shone out. She sometimes ran up the hill, even though it was steep and hard. There was Music up there. Music with a capital M. Music that was alive, awake, aware. There were also stores and libraries and nightclubs. Lots of clubs. Café Vortex, where people danced on air. Torquemada’s, owned by the Bishop, where you could actually die right there on the dance floor. And Unlovely’s, where the beautiful Mr. Sin helped you find whatever it was that you lost, as long as you were willing to risk everything to get it back.

  During that long night in the hospital Patty Cakes climbed the hill and stepped from shadows into the swirling, multicolored light. That first step always tore a gasp from her. Being pulled from the water at the very edge, the very last twitch, of drowning and clawing in a breath of air. It hurt in exactly that way. It was terrifying and beautiful in that way.

  Going to the Zone was only partly for that breath of clean air.

  Mostly it was to escape.

  Her dreams in that hospital bed started out sick and sad and then turned vile. She couldn’t bear to look at the bandage on her left hand. She remembered the stupid cartoon face she’d drunk-inked onto it last night. But it was so fucking hard to remember why.

  Fragments came back to her, and then dragged her down the hill and across oceans to a town in the jungle. To a memory of a little girl. Not of her daughter, which was maddening. But about her. About that morning the police knocked on her door to say they’d found her little girl. Found. That was what they’d said.

  “Ms. Trang, I’m sorry to inform you that we found your daughter.”

  Found.

  As if they were talking about a missing dog. We found her and here she is, have a happy day.

  They found her. They found Tuyet.

  Someone named Tuyet.

  This morning, at home, Monk had yelled at her, telling Patty that Tuyet was her daughter. That it was Tuyet’s face inked so carefully by Patty’s own hand, that had been marred by the cartoon image. He snatched up pictures and showed them to her. Pictures of Patty with a little girl.

  Tuyet?

  We found your daughter.

  The police had found her that day. Monk could find pictures everywhere of her. But as for Patty … she was certain she’d lost her. When she opened her head and heart and looked in, shining her brightest flashlight of introspection, there was no little girl hiding, waiting to be found.

  There were shadows. There was a smudge of blood. A discarded shoe. Stained underwear. A broken bracelet.

  But there was no one named Tuyet anywhere to be found.

  So, Patty climbed up the hill and stepped into the neon glow of the Fire Zone clubs, looking.

  Hoping to find a little girl named Tuyet amid all the swirling color and movement and hope.

  62

  When Crow was finished chasing down every last crumb of information on Monk Addison and Ms. Trang, the sun was down and the clouds were strangling the last bits of twilight from the sky. The weather report said that it was already raining here and there across the sprawl of Pine Deep, but there were only indifferent patters against his window. Even without stepping outside to smell the air Crow knew it was going to be another bad storm. The day had that kind of vibe. A slow threat, like walking around a tiger who was nowhere near as asleep as he pretended to be.

  There was a stack of accident reports on his desk from tourists who for some reason forgot how to drive when two drops of rain fell. That was a Philadelphia metro-area thing that always perplexed him. Philly was a humid and rainy city and always had been, but as soon as it started drizzling people acted totally surprised and, he was sure, lost forty IQ points at the first crack of thunder. Snow was even worse. Didn’t matter if there were a dozen measurable snows the previous year, a half-dozen tiny flakes would make them all lose their damn minds. There would be fender benders all the way to the closest convenience stores, to which the citizens were hurrying for milk, bread, and toilet paper. God only knew how many—if any at all—would survive an actual catastrophe. Crow was sure this was Darwin in action.

  Luckily no one in Pine Deep had killed themselves on the roads. Worse injury so far was a guy who had cracked his head on his windshield after hitting a cow. Crow only glanced at that, saw Mike had handled the incident, and left it, figuring Mike would tell him about it over dinner or breakfast. Mike was Crow’s adopted son as well as his senior patrol officer.

  He looked around the office. Gertie was gone for the day and the night shift operator, the ancient stick figure that was Mrs. Langston, sat at the desk reading a battered old copy of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. She was always Mrs. Langston. Never Joan. Never anything else. In terms of personality she was the exact opposite of Gertie in that she almost never spoke except to handle dispatch duties, wasn’t chatty, had zero personal warmth but also zero animosity. Mostly just zero. A monotone robot would be a cheerier office companion. Crow knew that Mrs. Langston had buried three husbands and both of her children and figured that life had crushed the chattiness out of her.

  “I’m heading home,” said Crow.

  No answer.

  “I’ll lock the door on the way out.”

  Nothing.

  “Have a wonderful evening filled with joy and rollicking laughs,” he said.

  Nothing.

  “There’s a live pterodactyl in the break room.”

  Mrs. Langston lowered the book and looked at him without expression as she turned the page, then the book rose to cover her face again.

  “Right,” said Crow. He grabbed his umbrella, tugged a Phillies cap down over his salt-and-pepper curls, and went out into the windy street. His car was a vintage 1970 Buick Gran Sport 455 Stage 1, a classic muscle car that had, at some point, been painted an absurd shade of puce but was otherwise in superb condition, with 400 horsepower and 510 pound-feet of torque on tap. He’d bought her from a dealer in Levittown and named her Middy in celebration of the midlife crisis he did not try to hide. She sucked gas but could run a quarter mile in 13.38 seconds at 105.50 mph. Not that Crow, chief of police and pillar of the community, ever exceeded the posted speed limits. At least not outside of the jurisdiction of officers whose paychecks he signed.

  Middy roared to life and as soon as he was out of town and into farm country he opened her up and let her bash her way through the storm. But almost at once the rain stopped. In a reversal of its recent pattern, the storm was squatting down over the town but hadn’t yet stretched out over the farms. Crow was okay with that and put the pedal down.

  As he drove he mulled over what little he’d learned today. There was plenty of information in the various databases he checked, but at the end of the day what did he really know about Monk and Trang? Apart from Mr. Twitch vouching for Monk—which as his lawyer and employer the man was bound to do—there wasn’t a lot there to help Crow shape an opinion.

  And the hospital staff was no help. No one who spoke with Ms. Trang held the belief that she had been abused by Monk Addison. The staff shrink didn’t even think the Trang woman had attempted suicide. The whole thing might dwindle down to a borderline-anorexic woman drinking way too much and doing some self-harm during a blackout. There wasn’t even much to justify holding her overnight, let alone for much longer. The head injury, minor as it was, gave the docs the small leverage they needed to convince her to sta
y in for observation.

  “What about her memory loss?” Crow had asked the psychiatrist assigned to the case.

  Dr. Maddie Wolfe explained about traumatic amnesia, the memory loss that can occur after a blow to the head or other systemic shocks. “Most likely those memories will return. Could happen overnight or it could take months. She should see someone, though. I’ll print out a list of names of therapists.”

  “What’s going to happen when those memories come back?” asked Crow. “What with her having defaced the portrait of her daughter?”

  Wolfe had looked truly pained. “It’s going to be awful for her.”

  Yes, thought Crow, no doubt about that at all.

  He wished Wolfe had gotten the chance to talk with Monk Addison. Her insights on him would have been useful. Crow wasn’t actually sure he believed Monk was a danger to the woman.

  But the man was dangerous. The potential for violence clung like a bad smell to the guy. He was the kind of man cops would always take note of. What they used to call a “cronky” way back in the day. Someone who had been in trouble, was in trouble now, or would inevitably be in trouble sometime soon. Now, whether that made him a bad guy or a good guy who flitted close to a dark flame was uncertain.

  The Trang woman’s story clawed at Crow’s heart. He and his wife had buried two children. His wife had tattoos of her own to remember them. What fires had to be raging inside a mother’s head to make her want to deface a memory tattoo of that special kind? What level of hell was Patty Trang walking through last night when she did that?

  He topped a rise and below he saw the near edge of the vast sprawl of the farm owned by his wife. The Guthrie Place. Endless stalks of tall corn blowing in the wind. Garlic and pumpkins and other crops. Lush from all the rain. Still standing despite the storms. Every time he caught this glimpse it sent a wave of emotions flooding through him. So much of his childhood was spent on that farm. First making comic book and soda pop money working alongside the migrant workers picking corn. Later, after he and Val became friends, the two of them and their friends sitting on the porch, listening to Oren Morse—an itinerant worker and blues singer—fill the later afternoon air with song. Blues and soul, and even old folk. Maddie Wolfe’s father, Terry, had been in the little pack that Val and Crow ran with. Crow’s older brother, Billy, too. And some others.