“And then I’ll maybe head to Doylestown and see this Spider.”
“Looking for what?”
“Fuck if I know. But I got to start somewhere. I mean, do you want to let this stand unanswered?”
That volcanic heat was still there in her eyes. “I need you to find this person. This Lord of the Flies cocksucker. I want you to—”
“Kill him? Oh, you can count on that.”
“No,” she snapped, “I want you to bring him here. To me.”
They stared at each other with all the meaning in her words filling the room, crowding it, forcing mercy out the door.
Neither spoke for a long time, and then Patty’s eyes softened. When she spoke her voice seemed far away. “I always loved going to the Fire Zone in my dreams. She was always there, you know. Always. I could always find her there.”
She. Not Tuyet. It stabbed Monk through the heart that Patty was slipping back to where she was yesterday.
“She wasn’t there. That’s how I found the Fire Zone in the first place. She took me there in a dream. I remember that much. That part. But not … I mean, I can’t really remember…”
Patty pressed the bandage to her mouth. It was all she could manage for a long time. The rain strengthened, turned, blew almost horizontally past the window. There were pops of white seeded in with the gray drops. Hailstones, big as pearl onions. They popped and pinged against the cars. The flashers from Monk’s car painted every other one red.
“I can’t see her face,” said Patty, her voice nearly buried beneath the weight of pain.
“Say her name,” urged Monk gently. “Say it aloud. Keep saying it all day.”
Patty braced herself and forced the two syllables out.
“Tuyet…”
She touched her lips as she repeated the name, feeling the shame of it. Frowning, frightened. But also hopeful.
“It’ll come back,” promised Monk. “She’ll come back. Tuyet isn’t gone.”
“You lost her, too,” said Patty.
“And we’ll both get her back.”
“What if we don’t?”
Monk had to bite back the answer to that. There was one thing he hadn’t told Patty about Tuyet. About their shared understanding of the little girl. He wanted to tell her but was afraid to, because if he was wrong, then maybe she was lost for good.
So he kept his secret for now.
He went over to her, took her hurt hand, kissed the tips of each finger without touching the bandage itself. “We’ll get her back. Believe that. Hold on to it. And we’ll find whoever did this to us.”
Patty Cakes studied him, searching his eyes, then slowly nodded.
“Good,” he said and released her hand with a final kiss. He stepped back. “Look, can I trust that you won’t do something crazy while I’m out?”
She nodded.
“Kind of need to hear you say it, Pats.”
“I’ll be okay,” she said with exaggerated exasperation.
“No beer? No mad dash to the liquor store?”
“I promise.”
“If I order food from Door Dash, can you at least try to eat something?”
“I’m not hungry,” said Patty.
“Not what I asked,” said Monk firmly. “Will you eat something?”
She sighed. “I’ll try.”
He gave her a look.
“Jeez, you’re a bully,” Patty said. “Okay, okay, I’ll eat something. Hand to God.”
“That’s a start,” said Monk warily. “No drinking, either.” He loaded the food delivery app on his cell, searched for an Italian place, and ordered salads, sandwiches, a pasta bowl, eggplant parm, and garlic bread. He ordered enough for ten meals, looking her in the eyes while he did it. He topped the order off with ten bottles of water and a bunch of sports drinks. The ones with the salt and electrolytes. Then he paid by credit card and added a tip, upping it to 25 percent because of the rain. That way all Patty had to do was open the door for the delivery guy.
“Whatever you don’t eat goes in the fridge,” he said. “No sneaking it into the Dumpster and then lying to say you binged.”
“You’re a bastard,” she said bitterly, then softened and offered a weak smile. “But I love you anyway.”
He kissed her forehead, caressed her cheek, and then went out.
95
Patty sat in the chair for a long time after Monk left, one foot braced against the counter where her inks were stored in rows, slowly moving the chair sideways and back. Outside the wind was blowing like the end of the world. It must have whipped through someone’s yard and snatched up all the clothing off the lines because there were pieces of colored cloth sailing past. She saw blue jeans, a violet padded bra, socks in a zebra pattern, a man’s royal-blue sweatshirt, a lacy thong. Then they were all gone. The rain intensified until it smeared the windows’ specific images.
Like the scar of a tattoo.
She could feel something behind her eyes. Not more tears. Those had turned to dust. Nor was it a migraine. No … this was something else. It was as if she could feel the place where the memories had been cut out of her. Not the memories themselves, just the wound. Bleeding awareness of loss.
Patty slid from the chair and landed with a thump on the floor. It hurt the bones in her ass, but she didn’t care. Sometimes pain was the best sensation. The rain blew and she sat on the floor and time moved at its own moody and abstract pace.
Her iPad began singing to her and Patty turned to look at it. She hadn’t touched it, and was positive Monk didn’t turn it on when he was here. But the music filled the air of her shop. An old song. “I Will Take You Home.” The saddest lullaby in the world, sung by the Grateful Dead. Sung from the point of view of a father telling his frightened daughter that nightmares can never hurt her because he will always be there, he will always guide her safely back to her bed and to his protective love. The song had been cowritten by Brent Mydland, and sung with heartbreaking honesty, his dedication to the promise absolute. Two years later the singer was dead from a drug overdose. The video of Mydland’s little daughter joining him onstage, sitting beside him on the piano bench as he gave his oath to her, was unbearably sweet, and unbearably tragic.
Her iPad, cruel and insightful, played the song for her.
On some level she was frightened that it was playing by itself, but she didn’t care. Making sense of things belonged to yesterday, or the day before. She listened to it play, and then the music fell silent.
It took her a lot to get to her feet. It cost more coin than she wanted to spend. The account was seriously overdrawn.
“Please,” she asked of the air, or maybe the storm, but the word just hung there.
Patty went over to the iPad and checked the playlist. That song wasn’t cued up. Of course it wasn’t. It probably hadn’t played at all. It was just her sliding farther down the toilet pipe. She picked something nondescript. Some indie pop nonsense. Then she walked through the rooms, not at all sure what she was looking for, or looking at. Rooms with boxes, with the tools of her trade, with books of tattoo art, with clothes, with old stuff she’d carried from one apartment to another. The kinds of things she took out and put on shelves or in closets but never really looked at. Books she would never read again. Little figurines from a religion she’d left long before she emigrated from Vietnam. Photo albums from the days before digital pics.
Patty Cakes was not at all aware of what her hands did with the photo albums. Her mind slipped out of gear and into a fugue as she lifted them, carried them to the tiny second bedroom, and put them on a shelf that was mostly hidden whenever the door was open. She stacked them in a row, with all of the ones from Tuyên Quang closest to the wall. Unless she closed the door and turned to look at the shelf, she would never see them. No part of her surface awareness was part of this process. That consciousness slid back into gear when she was in her bedroom, rooting through a box of winter clothes. The transition from awareness to fugue back to awareness was seam
less.
She found a pair of old leather gloves Monk bought her years ago when they’d had motorcycles and drove from New York to Canada, following the smallest lines on the map. She sat on the edge of the bed, kneading and working the gloves to soften the leather, and then took a pair of fabric shears and cut off the fingers. She let the severed canvas fingers lay where they’d fallen.
She pulled the gloves on. The left took effort because of the thickness of her bandage, but she managed.
Then she got up, walked into the store, flipped over the sign and switched the neon on. COME IN!, it said. WE’RE OPEN.
She turned away but then heard the door open and the bell above it tinkle.
“Patty…?” asked a tentative voice.
Patty turned back to see a woman standing there, her eyes filled with tears, her arm held out, sleeve pushed up, to reveal a tattoo that was almost completely faded.
“Help me?” begged Dianna.
96
Crow paced like a caged animal in his office. He could feel his blood pressure rising but didn’t care. The information April Chung shared with him was setting his brain on fire.
Missing tattoos.
Missing memories.
He stalked over and stared at the sign over the coffeemaker again.
NOT ALL CRIMES LOOK LIKE CRIMES
(THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX)
“Holy shit,” he said. A few moments later he said, “Holy God.”
Then he called Mike Sweeney.
“Where are you?”
“Usual place, boss,” said Mike, “looking for speeders and being bored out of my mind.”
“Do you know if that old vet with the missing tattoos is still in the hospital?”
“Sure. The nurse said she’d call me if they were going to cut his discharge papers. Why?”
“Because a weird week just got a whole lot weirder. Meet me at the hospital.”
“When?”
“Now.”
Crow hung up and started to turn then saw another of the signs, this one over the row of file cabinets. Like the other it had become virtually invisible to him over the years, but now stopped him in his tracks.
A GOOD COP IS ALWAYS READY BECAUSE
A COLD CASE CAN CATCH FIRE AT ANY TIME
He grinned at it. “No shit, Sherlock.”
And was out the door.
97
Monk went to the Scarecrow Diner and approved of it at once. He was a diner snob and this one was a classic. Lots of stainless steel polished to mirror brightness but showing scars from the lives and years that had passed through the place. There were twenty swivel stools at the counter, each with brown vinyl seats. Some diners had the traditional red, but this was farm country and it was a Halloween town, so pumpkin orange was perfect. What made it better was that the seats were patched, worn in spots. Not a trendy choice to give them a faux distressed look—time and a lot of asses had stressed them out just fine, thanks. The counter was Formica made to look like Carrara marble. And there were high-backed booths reaching away from the well-lit counter into the softer shadows on either side. The place smelled of coffee and bacon and that weird but yummy yellow gravy they put on diner turkey platters. The very nature of the place was a balm to his frayed nerves.
A sign told Monk to seat himself, which he did, heading to the booth farthest from anyone else. There were maybe thirty people in the place, but it was big and they were scattered, creating a feeling of privacy. You could talk about anything in a place like this.
A waitress appeared. She had a brown uniform dress with orange piping, an apron, a paler orange cardigan with a couple of cloisonné pumpkin pins on the left breast, and a tag that read BRENDA. Perfect.
“Getcha?” she asked. Brenda had scrambled yellow hair, a few little scars high on one cheek that looked like someone had been unkind to her a long time ago while wearing a ring, dark-red lipstick, and perhaps the kindest gray eyes Monk had ever seen.
“Coffee with milk.”
“Whole, two percent, or skim?”
“Whole. And whatever’s the special. If it’s a meat dish, bruise it but don’t kill it.”
“Sec,” she promised and vanished only to return almost at once with a big porcelain cup, saucer, cutlery setup, and a little metal pot of whole milk. The coffee was perfect. There was no coffee anywhere in world better than diner coffee from a real goddamn diner; of this Monk was certain, because he’d drunk coffee on six continents. And really good coffee could anchor you to the moment. It made so much sense that it clarified a lot of things. Not everyone knew that consciously, Monk was certain, but people like him did. People from the storm lands.
While he waited for his food, Monk made a call. Four rings and then a voice said, “Monk…?”
There was always a bit of caution when Dr. Jonatha Corbiel-Newton answered his calls. A bit of unease. Sometimes she didn’t answer, and he figured at those times she saw his name pop up on the screen display and did not have the personal bandwith to deal with whatever he wanted from her. That was fair. He didn’t call her often enough merely to shoot the shit. He called when he needed something for one of his cases. Not the bail skips … but the ones related to the faces he wore on his flesh. She was one of the very few people who knew about those faces, and about some of his more extreme gigs.
“You alone?” he asked out of the blue, as if there hadn’t been radio silence between them for almost ten months.
A beat. A sigh. Then, “Yes.” It was a single word but it had a whole lot of Christ, now what? in it. Again, fair enough.
“I got something freaky going on,” he began.
“Freaky by normal standards or your standards?”
“Definitely the latter.
“Ouch,” she said. He heard her take a steadying breath. “Tell me.”
He did. Patty, the Duncans, and his own missing ghost. He gave her every single detail he could remember. “Any of this ringing any bells with your sort of thing?” he asked when he was done.
“Honey, you’re my sort of thing,” she countered, “and I mean that in a purely academic sense. You’re a bit of grumpy real-world folklore. I could—and probably should—write a book about you.”
“Which you won’t,” he said.
“I never made that promise,” she said. “All I’ll grant is that I wouldn’t use your name.”
“Whatever.”
Jonatha laughed.
“Okay,” Monk said, “do you have any clue to what’s going on here? Something or someone who steals tattoos?”
“Is that what you think is happening here, Monk?”
“Sure, I just told you that—”
“No, I mean, are you sure it’s the tattoos that are the point?”
“I…”
“Sounds to me like something is stealing memories.”
“But—”
“Memories for which the tattoos are a cue, a mnemonic.”
The waitress arrived with his food. A thick slab of steaming meat loaf covered with melted Cheddar, diced scallions, and sides of roast potatoes and steamed broccoli. Monk leaned down and inhaled the smell, nodded, smiled at the waitress, and accepted a refill on the coffee. She left him with a smile but did not interrupt his conversation.
“Who or what steals memories?” asked Monk when he was alone again.
“Well,” said Jonatha, “that’s tricky. There’s nothing I know of that specifically does that, but if you’re seeing this accurately, then we may be looking at some kind of psychic phenomenon. A psychic vampire of some kind.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” said Monk, cutting a piece of meat loaf and stuffing it in his mouth. “I don’t want to hear about vampires.”
“We’re not talking about Dracula or Lestat,” said Jonatha quickly. “No fangs and opera cloaks. Nothing that sparkles. No beautiful immortals lamenting eternity.”
Monk chewed and swallowed. “Well, that’s a relief.”
“Not really,” she said. “Psychic vampire
s are a theory. There’s no actual documentation. And most of them are charismatic types who more or less feed off of attention.”
“Yeah, we elected one a few years ago.”
“I didn’t elect shit,” said Jonatha crisply. “Be that as it may, we’re talking about real people with various kinds of emotional disorders. These are sometimes called ‘energy vampires,’ and they’re part of psychoanalytic science not folklore. There are martyr types who cast themselves as victims and feed off either guilt or excessive sympathy. There are narcissistic vampires who lack the capacity for empathy and feed on attention in which they are cast as the central figure in any situation. There are dominator vampires who act as if they are alphas but really crave validation from people who view them as leaders. Then there are melodramatic vampires—drama queens—who seek out a crisis because it allows them to be the victim. The judgmental vampire subtype feeds on bringing other people down with what they call ‘brutal honesty’ but which is really an attack on the insecurities of others. And, of course, the innocent vampires, the ones who appear to be so fragile or vulnerable that others will leap to protect them in words or actions. They drain everyone around them.”
“Not what we got here.”
“I know. I’m thinking out loud.”
“Are psychic vampires—”
“‘Psi vampires’ is the common nickname.”
“Are psi vampires an actual thing?”
“Documented? No. Not in the way you’re asking. Psi vampires and energy vampires are mostly pop-culture nicknames for different kinds of charismatic manipulation that is often pernicious but not always. The British occultist and author Dion Fortune wrote extensively about this kind of predation in her 1930 nonfiction book Psychic Self-Defense. In her view—and I’m paraphrasing here, not quoting—it’s somewhere between a parasitic attack and a symbiotic relationship, often requiring some conscious or subconscious participation on the part of the victim. A folie à deux, or a shared psychosis.”
“This isn’t Patty thinking she lost a tattoo, Jonatha—”
“Let me talk, damn it. I’m trying to work my way through what I know to see if there’s anywhere to get firm footing,” she said. “Where was I?”
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