Marked

by S. Andrew Swann

  She nodded, but from her lost expression, I could tell she didn’t have any faith in my reassurance. She walked back toward the doorway, toward Jacob’s silhouette. As I watched her walk away from me, I found myself gripped by an unexpected anger at the person who had done this to her father. She was right. I dealt with things like this all the time. This wasn’t any different. No matter how I felt right now, this was just another armed robbery that had ended badly.

  That’s what I kept telling myself.

  At the door, she turned around and pointed past me, toward the far wall. “The light switches are by the back door there.”

  “Thank you.”

  She vanished into the daylight with Jacob, leaving me alone in the tattoo parlor. I turned around and walked into the darkness.

  Past the screen, I bumped into a padded chair and had to feel around to find the back door. After some fumbling, I found the switches.

  When I flipped on the lights, I suddenly found myself facing a photo of a full back piece of a blue-skinned Shiva: fangs, bloody swords, skull necklace, and all. The picture’s appearance was so sudden and violent that I took an involuntary step back.

  That brought more pictures into my field of vision, dozens of them, photos of this guy’s work. He was good. Very good. The intricacy of what he did was awe-inspiring at every level of detail, mandalas and Buddhas, tigers and dragons, abstract floral designs, and at least one demonic creature that must have come from a seventeenth century Japanese print.

  I turned around and faced the alcove where he had done his work. There was one adjustable padded chair behind the screen, a magnifying lamp on a swinging arm, and a rolling cart with needles, ink, and various other tools laid out with surgical precision. It was spotless and orderly back here, and if it wasn’t for the pictures on the wall, I could have been standing in a hospital’s examination room.

  I felt as if I stood in the heart of a man’s life.

  I glanced up and looked past the screen. It blocked the front of the shop, but I could see the shadows of Jacob and Mrs. Kim moving across the window in the front of the shop.

  I was completely hidden from them.

  I shouldn’t do this now.

  I felt raw and angry. Just being here, standing in this place, was driving splinters into my need to do something. The Mark felt it as well; I could feel it rippling across my skin, long hot fingers pushing at me, wanting to be used. I bit my lip.

  Now wasn’t the time.

  Then my gaze fell on one particular picture. The image showed a unique tribal pattern across someone’s back. The stark black pattern of the abstract lines stood out amid the other, more colorful pieces. I saw the swirls and arcs of a branching design that never self-intersected.

  Ever since I had walked into Asia FX, I had felt the memories bubbling up, memories of my dad taking me to places like this, showing my back to men marked in their own ways. I remembered how my own Mark seemed to frighten and fascinate them.

  Seeing that stark black pattern in the midst of all that color, I couldn’t help imagining the artist being influenced by the bizarre pattern he had seen on the skin of a lost little girl. It was easy to believe that I had once stood on this spot while Mrs. Kim’s father tried to give my dad some clue as to who had drawn the Mark on my back and where it had come from.

  That man who had tried to help me now had his life taken as senselessly as my dad’s had been. His daughter had been dropped without warning into the same chaos of grief and bureaucracy I had just gone through with Mom.

  I wanted to deal with the punk that had killed Mrs. Kim’s father, and I wanted to do it now.

  I decided to hell with what time it was.

  TWO

  THE MARK WARMED on my back, anticipating my thoughts. I sensed every twist and curve of the pattern, as if some invisible companion traced his fingers across its surface. The pressure was light, warm, familiar. I breathed shallowly and opened myself to the sensation. The caress sank deeper than my skin, to brush parts of me nothing else had ever touched.

  I flushed, and my breathing became rapid as I pulled the Mark into me. It pushed against me, and I responded by taking a step forward.

  The room around me blurred and dimmed, as if suddenly I was seeing a thousand different overlapping tattoo parlors, all slightly different. I focused on the wall in front of me as I placed my foot down, allowing the Mark’s touch to withdraw almost as quickly as it had come. It left an unfulfilled ache behind itself as it pulled away.

  I stood in the same room, yet not the same. The lights were off, and the sun was lower in the sky so that the dawn light reached deeper into the tattoo parlor. On the wall I faced, the rosy light shone on a Buddha seated in a lotus blossom floating above a woman’s navel.

  There was no sign of the tribal pattern that echoed my own Mark, and its absence was near confirmation of the sense I had connecting me to Mrs. Kim’s father.

  I glanced around until I saw a clock mounted on the wall. It read 6:45, a little over three hours before Jacob would drive us up to meet Mrs. Kim here. Yet I knew that if I waited here those three hours I wouldn’t see myself arrive. Jacob might show up and meet Mrs. Kim, but I wouldn’t be his partner and that Jacob wouldn’t even know who I was.

  I stood in the past, but it was a past where I didn’t exist.

  It was also a past where I could move around without worrying about being observed by Jacob or Mrs. Kim. I knew the front door was locked, but over by where I stood, there was another door. I tried it and made my way past a back office and a bathroom to find a rear exit. It let me out into an alley which was perfect for my purpose.

  I checked my own watch and noted I’d been gone less than three minutes.

  It was the first thing I learned about the Mark. When I left home and traveled to a place that looked like the past or the future, time itself marched on without me. My Jacob had been talking to Mrs. Kim for three minutes. When I returned home, the same amount of time would have passed for him as it had for me. So if I was going to take care of this, I probably had about fifteen minutes or so before Jacob wondered where the hell I had disappeared to.

  Not that I was thinking about that now. I didn’t think about what would happen if Jacob noticed me missing, or how I’d explain myself if he did. I was consumed with one thought—finding a version of that gun-wielding punk in the hoodie and the torn jeans.

  I let the Mark push me further, inviting its probing touch just enough to flush my skin as I walked down the alley.

  The walls of the buildings remained clear, as smaller objects became blurred. Around me, the world had become a video shooting by in fast reverse. At the mouth of the alley, cars and people moved by too fast to be more than a blur. After one step the sun disappeared. After a few more steps I stopped.

  A car drove by the mouth of the alley, booming its apocalyptically loud stereo. The sky was ink black beyond the glare of the streetlights, and I could hear people talking out on the street. After the heat of the day, the night air was blessedly cool.

  I sucked in a breath and allowed the intimate touch of the Mark to fade. If I had paced myself correctly, I was standing in a place about eight hours earlier than when I started. Close to eleven the previous night.

  Before the time stamp on the security camera video.

  Soon a guy with a gun would be walking into Asia FX.

  I checked my own watch and saw I’d been gone a total of eight minutes. Jacob was probably still talking to Mrs. Kim. I walked up to the mouth of the alley and looked to my right. Asia FX was open, light leaking from the windows. I started to glance about, looking for a clock to get my bearings. I have a good sense of how far I travel, but not a perfect one.

  However, I didn’t need it. I saw a guy crossing the street about half a block away: Gray hoodie, jeans with hole on the right knee, crossing toward my side of the street and headed right f
or Asia FX.

  I bit my lip. I don’t know why it made a difference seeing the guy, but it always did. This wasn’t my world, just one of thousands of imperfect copies of the past and future I could travel to. I had no idea how many different times this kid was going to walk into Asia FX, or even if it was always going to end with Mrs. Kim’s father dead on the floor.

  This tragedy could be playing out an endless number of times in unseen worlds. But this was where I was, and I knew what was about to happen. I knew, because the Mark always steered me toward what I was looking for. In the world next door, this kid might decide to knock over the liquor store or the payday loan place; in this one, the one I came to, he would walk into Asia FX.

  I started walking nonchalantly down the sidewalk, toward him, past the darkened payday loan place. He came from the other direction and stared into the liquor store, hand drifting toward his pocket. But the door jingled, and he quickly stepped away. As he continued walking toward me, a guy who looked underage walked out of the liquor store carrying a 24-pack of Bud Light.

  The guy with the hoodie stopped in front of Asia FX, and I knew he was looking at a single elderly man sitting behind a case of jewelry and a cash register. Completely unaware of me, the guy stared into the tattoo parlor.

  He had close-cropped black hair and the edges of a gang tattoo crawling up from his neck. He couldn’t be more than eighteen, and the patchy attempt at a mustache made him look younger. Local kid, I thought, and not particularly bright.

  His eyes narrowed, and I could almost hear the switch click as he made his decision. He threw the hood of his sweater up over his head and shoved his hand into a suspiciously bulky pocket. He took a step toward the door, toward his destiny of pumping three bullets into the chest of a 74-year-old man.

  But even if this act was going to be echoed before and after, countless times in countless other realities, here it was going to be different.

  Before his left hand reached the inner door, his right still buried clumsily in his pocket, I had my own gun out.

  “Freeze! Police!” I yelled.

  I had played out this scenario many, many times. When I first started using the Mark like this, as a cop, I had intended to simply watch each crime as it played out, ID the suspect, and follow to determine where any evidence was stashed. That worked fairly well with breaking and entering, car theft, vandalism, and other relatively petty crap. But with my first murder I discovered I couldn’t go back and just watch some asshole kill someone.

  And it wasn’t like I was going to change the future I came from.

  When I confront a creep before he does the deed, it can play out one of two ways. Some of the time my target hears “Freeze” and plays dumb and compliant—after all, I reached them before they did something illegal.

  Most of the time, though, the perp is either too hyped on adrenaline—or less natural substances—to make that fine a distinction, or they’ve come across my path already having several good reasons to avoid the cops.

  This guy fell into the latter camp. He turned and ran.

  I chased after him. He probably was sure he was going to outrun me. The teenagers usually think that. But the sort of guy who holds up a tattoo parlor is generally not the type of person with the discipline to run a couple of miles a day. The guy ran flat out and was panting before I had even hit my stride.

  Sprinters only win a timed event.

  He dodged into an alley, and when I turned the corner, he was five feet up a rusty chain-link fence. He was quick, but the chase was over. I gave myself a second to aim and repeated the warning, “Freeze!”

  He didn’t listen, and he placed his hand on the top of the fence.

  I don’t think he expected me to shoot.

  I fired my Jericho 941 and put a 9mm round into his left hand as he was pulling himself up. His arm spasmed, and he lost his grip, falling backward. As the gunshot’s echoes faded, I caught the trailing syllable of an obscenity. Then he hit the concrete with a thud.

  He was still for a moment, stunned, as I walked up to him. Cursing as he was, I saw he was pretty lucky. My shot had hit him in the finger. He’d never flip off anyone again, but he’d retain full use of the hand otherwise.

  I kept my gun braced, my aim squarely on his skull. Had he made a move for his pocket, it would have been the last thing he did. Fortunately for him, he grabbed his bloody left hand and started screaming. “You shot me. You bitch! You shot me!”

  He was on his back, head pointed in my direction. I stood above him and squatted so I was holding the barrel of the Jericho about an inch above the bridge of his nose. “It’s far away from the heart. You’ll live.”

  “I didn’t fucking do anything.”

  “I know,” I told him. “That was the point. You were going to walk into there and pull out that .45 in your pocket. Whatever you intended to do, it was going to end badly, and you were going to put three shots into the guy behind the counter.”

  His eyes bugged out at me even as he said, “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. . . .”

  “Yeah, that’s why you ran. But this is your lucky day because you’re not going to have to live with that old man’s murder on your conscience. Of all possible worlds where you made that bad decision, and no one tried to stop you, here you get a reprieve. You get a choice now. Do you turn around whatever disaster your life is, or do you end with a 9mm slug in your brain?” I pressed the barrel into the bridge of his nose. “Frankly, I don’t care which.”

  “What kind of cop are you?”

  “You ever see Dirty Harry?”

  He just stared at me, bug-eyed. Probably not a movie buff.

  “Are you going to do exactly what I say now?”

  “Yes, just don’t—”

  “Then take the gun out slowly and set it on the ground. You even think about pointing it at me, you’re never going to think anything else.”

  He reached down into his pocket, took it out by the barrel, and set it on the ground next to him.

  “Shove it over there,” I said.

  He pushed it, hard, and the weapon skidded across the concrete, coming to a stop by the base of a dumpster.

  He looked up at me, and I couldn’t bring myself to feel bad for the fear I saw in his eyes.

  “Now your wallet.”

  “What?”

  “You want to continue breathing, you’ll take your wallet and toss it over with the gun.”

  “You’re mugging me?”

  “I can take it off your corpse easy enough,” I started tightening my finger, and I swear he may have pissed his pants.

  “Wait,” he shouted and scrambled to pull his wallet out of his back pocket. He held it up toward me. “Take it.”

  I shook my head. “Next to the gun.”

  He tossed it aside like it was on fire.

  I stood up, watching him. Two red arcs marked the bridge of his nose where I had pressed the barrel of the Jericho.

  “Now what?” he asked me.

  “Get up.”

  He rolled over, pushing himself upright with one hand, clutching his wounded hand to his stomach. He stood a little unsteadily, facing me. I cocked my head back toward the entrance of the alley. “Get out of here.”

  “What?”

  “Move it.” He stood, staring at me in disbelief, and I pointed the Jericho at his chest. “Five. Four. Three.”

  “What are you—”

  “Two.”

  He finally ran, past me and out the alley.

  In the distance, I heard the sound of sirens getting nearer. I holstered my gun and pulled on a pair of latex gloves to retrieve the guy’s .45 and his wallet.

  Fifteen minutes. Jacob would be wondering by now.

  * * *

  —

  HIS driver’s license gave me a name for the suspect, Roscoe
Kendal. The license I pocketed, the rest of the wallet went into the dumpster. All I would need now was some probable cause to check up on “my” Roscoe Kendal, the guy who went through with the murder. There was a good chance that if we did, we’d find something from the scene.

  The gun was more of a problem. I couldn’t just drop it in a dumpster for some random kid to find. And I’d be kind of obvious lugging the huge gun around back to the station. I needed to put it somewhere safe, where I could retrieve it after work.

  I decided that it made the most sense stashing it back in Asia FX. It was going to be closed and locked up for a while. I walked back to when I had the back door propped open, and let myself back in. Then I slipped into the bathroom and took the last step back home.

  I knew “home” because I could feel it, a familiar comfort like my body sliding into my own bed. Even the touch of my Mark relaxed, brushing against me slightly as if only the lightest touch was needed for me to slide back where I belonged.

  I also knew “home” because I heard Jacob calling, “Dana.”

  I cursed. I had taken too long. I looked around for a hiding place for the hand-cannon I had brought back with me and glanced at the acoustical ceiling tiles. Climbing up on the toilet seat, I pushed one of the tiles out of the way. I was just putting the gun up in the ceiling when the door to the bathroom opened.

  Damn, should have locked it.

  “Dana? What are you doing?”

  I froze, precariously standing on the toilet seat, one latex-gloved hand holding up the ceiling tile, the other gripping the barrel of a very large handgun. I slowly pulled the gun out from the opening.

  “Holy crap,” Jacob said, “You got an evidence bag for that?”

  From behind him, I heard Mrs. Kim ask, “Detective Hightower, is everything all right?”

  “Yes, I found her.”

  I stepped down from the toilet, still holding the gun by the barrel. My heart pounded, and I barely heard as Jacob asked me how I found the gun. I babbled something about seeing one of the ceiling tiles askew.

  “Didn’t you hear me calling for you?”