Ink

by Jonathan Maberry

  Work was calming. Work was orderly and normal and even searching for a freak like Owen Minor had a comforting structure to it. It’s why Mike liked puzzles. Sudoku, jigsaws, cryptics, nomograms, explicit and implicit math problems, Masyu … all of it. He scored exceptionally well on the kinds of IQ tests that skewed toward patterns and logical problem-solving. Less so on abstractions, but police work was mostly logical.

  He found Owen Minor’s name on an attendee list at a tattoo convention in Anaheim, California, more than a dozen years ago. When Mike cross-referenced, that he found that Malibu Mark had been at the same event.

  “One down,” he said aloud.

  “What’s that?” asked Gertie.

  “Nothing.”

  “That wasn’t me,” she said. “There’s old egg salad in the trash.”

  “I was talking to myself,” he assured her.

  Mike worked through the other lists and found no other mention of that name.

  “Plan B,” he said, but kept his voice too low for Gertie to hear. One of the most well-known things about people—criminals and civilians—was that when they picked a fake name for any reason there was a statistically high likelihood they would use either one or both of their initials. John Doe might pick Jack Dole, or something like that. Even though Web security people warned against this all the time, the practice was a mnemonic. People remembered easier when some part of their name, particularly their initials, was the same. So, he did a search on that and found a fair few O.M. or M.O. names, and worked his way through them, eliminating most by simple Net searches using interjurisdictional search engines.

  A few oddities emerged and he added them to a special list. They included Orson Mouche, Orlando Mosca, Omor Musculiţă, Oliwier Mucha, Ohit Māchi, and several others. All specifically ethnic names. French, Polish, Bangla, Romanian, and so on.

  Mike sat and looked at the list. There were seventeen names like that, scattered all across American tattoo convention records. Mike tapped a pencil eraser against his teeth and thought about it. Sure, tattoos were a worldwide thing, with long histories, but the pointedly ethnic names seemed wrong to him. Contrived. When he checked, there was a smaller percentage of overall names at each convention that were ethnic in both given and surnames, with exceptions for Indian, Pakistani, Chinese, and Western European. Few of these names, though, fit into those categories.

  So the next step was to match those names against Agent Richter’s list of conventions where possible victims had attended as either guests or professionals.

  By the fifth name he checked Mike could feel his pulse quickening. Four out of five. Then seven out of nine. Then fourteen out of seventeen.

  “Holy smokes,” he said.

  “I’m not smoking,” said Gertie curtly. “You know I gave that up.”

  He ignored her and began plugging those names into the police search engines. He searched all seventeen just to be sure.

  He got three hits. The other fourteen were fake names.

  Then he searched the surnames for clues, to see if there was anything there beyond an ethnic name that started with O. That came up with nothing useful. Then he tried the surnames.

  The very first one he tried was Mucha.

  And time seemed to stop.

  Mucha was the Polish word for “housefly.”

  “God,” he breathed.

  He plugged in the Spanish name, Moscarda.

  Blowfly.

  The French name, Mouche.

  Fly.

  All of them.

  Fly.

  Lord of the damn Flies.

  “Got you, you bastard.”

  “That’s not a nice thing to—”

  “Gertie,” he snapped, “please.”

  She lapsed into a hurt silence, but Mike didn’t care. He was onto something. He loaded a translation program and began searching for foreign-language words for fly, horsefly, housefly, and blowfly. And found every single name on his list of fourteen.

  Mike was excited now and his fingers trembled as he began focusing his search. Looking for someone with one of those names who lived here in Pine Deep. He knew that Owen Minor used that name when booking a reading at Dianna’s place and at Patty’s, but he did not own a house under the name. He tried DMV, real estate and tax databases, and others.

  And twenty minutes later he found the name.

  He found the home address.

  He found where the man worked.

  Mike found everything.

  He grabbed his hat and ran for the door, yelling orders to Gertie over his shoulder.

  133

  It took the three of them a long time and a lot of booze to get around to talking about last night. They came at it from odd angles. Dianna asked Gayle why she had a gun.

  “It’s one of the few things Scott and I do together,” said Gayle. “We’re both army brats, so we grew up with guns. We go about four times a year. Sometimes more often. He hunts, but I don’t. Not my thing. At the range we’re about the same in terms of target scores.” She faltered and dabbed at her eyes. “I … can’t believe I actually … shot someone.”

  “If you hadn’t,” said Patty, “Crow, Monk, and I would all be dead. You, too.”

  “I know, but … at the range it’s just paper. I don’t even use the targets that have the drawing of the robber on it. You know the one with the old-fashioned cap and Lone Ranger mask? Scott has some zombie targets, but that’s him. I only use regular bull’s-eyes, you know?” She shivered. “Shooting those men. Those poor men…”

  “Those poor men were drug-running gangbangers,” said Patty. “So, okay, they were under some kind of spooky mind control thing, but on any other day they’d have done every bad thing to you in the book. I know that type, believe me.”

  And later …

  Dianna looked at Patty. “Did you really use blood for Monk’s tattoos?”

  “Yes,” said Patty. “That’s the only way it works.”

  “But how do you know that?” asked Gayle, sipping her second vodka and cranberry juice. Her words were already starting to slur. Not much, but enough that she had to make herself overpronounce to keep from being mush-mouthed.

  Patty shrugged. “It’s hard to explain. My grandmother taught me the way, and her grandmother before her, going way, way back. It skips a generation.”

  “Had you ever done it before Monk?”

  “No,” laughed Patty. “Until him I don’t think I even believed it.”

  “You used your daughter’s blood?” asked Dianna.

  Patty nodded gravely. “Yes.” She reached into her blouse and pulled out a chain on which was a vial of pinkish liquid. Dianna recognized it from before, when Patty had showed her chest tattoo. The vial sparkled as if frequently polished.

  “If he steals the rest of my memories,” said Patty, “this will be all I have of Tuyet.”

  “Well,” said Gayle slowly, “couldn’t you use some of that to—I don’t know—redo the tattoo of her?”

  “No, that wouldn’t work.”

  “Why not?” asked Dianna.

  Patty stared at her, then at Gayle, and then at the vial.

  “I—” she began and the doorbell rang.

  “Hold that thought,” said Dianna, springing up. “Actual food!” She grabbed her purse. “Can you guys get some plates and napkins? In the kitchen.”

  She was smiling when she opened the door.

  Owen Minor’s smile was even bigger.

  134

  Monk Addison slept so deeply that there weren’t even dreams down there.

  He was asleep when they wheeled him to the room and only vaguely aware when orderlies helped him into the bed. He immediately dropped back down into that lightless, soundless place where even his ghosts couldn’t follow. He had not been aware when Patty left.

  Nor was he aware that a man in a wheelchair sat watching him.

  “You are one strange cat,” said Malcolm Crow. He was hooked up to an IV stand and had a bottle of Yoo-hoo resti
ng on his thigh. A gift from Val. There was a cooler with more of them, and if anyone at the hospital had an issue with it, the hospital administrator was Val’s best friend. So they could go piss up a rope.

  Crow had an aluminum frame around his shattered nose and his face was already beginning to look like a tropical sunset. And it hurt. A lot.

  Karen, the shift nurse, came in and checked the readout on machines but did not try to wake Monk. She nodded to Crow, smiled, and left without saying a word. Crow wasn’t sure why Monk had come here, but it felt right. Monk was strange, sure, but he was a good man, and Crow felt a kinship with him.

  But the meds in his own system began to wear on him and he was dozing when another nurse came in. Not Karen. This one looked like a nursing assistant who might still be in school. Slim, pretty, but with zero personality.

  “He’s asleep,” said Crow. “If you don’t mind, can you get an orderly to help me back to my room?”

  The nurse didn’t answer. She bent over the side of Monk’s bed and stared down at the sleeping man’s face, her hands in the pockets of her scrubs. Crow frowned because she wasn’t looking at the chart or the machines. Then he saw it.

  The fly.

  It was crawling on the back of her neck.

  No. Crawling inside her skin.

  “No!” cried Crow as she pulled her hand from her pocket. He saw light glint on the blade of an oyster knife and lunged for her.

  One second too late.

  135

  Owen Minor punched Dianna in the stomach with shocking speed and strength. She was not prepared for it and it folded her, buckling her knees. Before she could fall he shoved her roughly backward. She crumpled to the ground, face purple, gagging and gasping.

  “You fucking witch,” he snarled and spat full in her face. He back-kicked the door shut and stepped over her. Gayle and Patty shot to their feet, but Gayle immediately lost her balance and sat back down with a thump. Patty instantly hurled her glass at Owen, but it was a long throw and he dodged easily. He was not a powerful or fit man, but he was filled with a towering rage. Adrenaline coursed through him, making him strong, giving him a total belief in his strength. He was a man and these were three women. Three whores. Three witches.

  They were no better than his whore of a mother.

  No better than the witches on the block where he grew up. So much for it taking a village to raise a child. They never gave a flying fuck about him. Not at her funeral and not after. None of them offered to take him in. They stood and watched and Child Protective Services took him away and fed him to the foster care system.

  He hated them all for that, and hated them even more for what they were doing to him. Conspiring against him. Trying to spoil everything.

  He had been at the hospital when they brought in Monk and Crow. Those pricks. God, how he’d wanted to slit their throats. Or, better yet, inject something nasty into their IVs. Hydrochloric acid. Bleach. Something fun. But they were both still in the ER when he went off shift. The funny thing was that neither of them—not the bounty hunter or the chief of police—knew that the person taking their vitals was him. The Lord of the Flies.

  They looked at his name tag and stopped fucking thinking. Nurse Oeznik Mäsiarka. Ozzie to the staff. A nice Slovak name—a country Owen had to look up on the map after he found the name on one of those baby name sites. The site even gave the meaning.

  Oeznik.

  Butcher.

  He grinned a butcher’s smile at the women. Flies buzzed around him and on his skin. One crawled across his face, in one nostril and out the other. It tickled. It made him smile.

  Gayle struggled to her feet and grabbed an unopened wine bottle. Patty just stood there with her hands opening and closing. The hatred on her face and in her eyes was so fucking delicious. Owen felt himself growing hard. Maybe he’d do more than kill them. Maybe he could do a lot more.

  “You stole her,” said Patty in a voice so choked, so raw that it came out as a whisper. “You stole my daughter. You stole my baby.”

  “Yes,” he said, grinning.

  “You’re just as bad as those men who killed her.”

  “Oh, no,” he said, “I’m ten times worse. She lives in my head, you stupid cunt. I get to fuck her over and over and over again every time I close my eyes. I’m going to fuck her every day for the rest of my life.”

  Patty’s scream was a towering shriek of unbearable rage and hurt and horror and she launched herself at Owen.

  His grin never wavered. He was expecting this, hoping for exactly this kind of delicious drama and even before she took a single step he reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a gun.

  And then he screamed.

  He spun and looked down in absolute shock at the screwdriver sticking out of his calf. Blood—his blood—pumped out over the bright-yellow handle. The pain was immense, bigger than anything he had ever felt in his real life. It was memory pain. Dream pain. Stolen pain. But it wasn’t fun. It wasn’t delicious.

  It was awful.

  It was so big that he was lost in that pain for two very long seconds.

  Long enough for Patty Cakes to hurl herself like a panther at him. Long enough for Gayle, drunk as she was, to race over with the wine bottle held high. Long enough for Dianna to claw her way up the bookcase by the door and grab the knife she’d hidden there.

  Two seconds was all the time in the world. His finger jerked on the trigger and the gun barked, but the barrel was pointing nowhere useful. He screamed louder than Patty had. He screamed so loud it tore blood from his throat.

  He screamed for a long, long time.

  EPILOGUE

  1

  Crow wrestled the nurse to the ground and she fought him with the same mindless ferocity as the Cyke-Lones had done at Patty’s place.

  She fought and fought.

  And then she stopped fighting. All at once.

  In the space of a single heartbeat she went from murderous monster to a teenage girl who was absolutely terrified. A girl who, as far as she knew, was being attacked by some strange man.

  Nurses and orderlies and hospital cops came running.

  It took a lot of time to sort out who the young woman was. Not a nurse at all. She was a high school student named Alexa Clare, and the girl could not then, or ever, explain why she was in the hospital at all. No idea why she was dressed as a nurse. No idea why she had an oyster knife or why she had stabbed a patient with it.

  Or why she had a tattoo of a fly on the back of her neck.

  No one else could explain why the tattoo began to fade and was entirely gone by that evening. If Chief Crow had any explanations, he did not share them with anyone.

  2

  Monk Addison was rushed into surgery with a stab wound that tried very hard to kill him. Sucking chest wounds are like that. Mike Sweeney was one of the first on the scene, having been running to find Crow anyway. He applied pressure until the right people could hustle Monk down to the ER.

  It was close.

  Very close.

  3

  Val Guthrie answered her door very cautiously. She’d only been back from the hospital for forty minutes. Her husband had told her everything, because Val had been through the Trouble and had the sawdust to take anything.

  She looked through the peephole and frowned, recognizing a neighbor standing on the porch looking a bit dazed and confused. Val opened the door as far as the chain would allow. She had the barrel of a Glock 26 pressed up against the panel, aimed right at the man’s heart.

  “Burleigh?” she asked. “What are you doing here?”

  Burleigh Hopewell rubbed the back of his neck. “I … I really don’t know, Val.”

  4

  Monk Addison lay propped up in bed, holding the hand of a very pretty Mexican American woman named Sandy. When Crow came in to visit him and asked who his guest was, Monk introduced her as his girlfriend. It came out so naturally, but hearing it aloud seemed to surprise him and the woman. She kissed him for that
.

  “Can I have a minute with your, ah, boyfriend?” asked Crow.

  “Sure,” said Sandy, “but Monk … if he bothers you, just call me and I’ll throw him out. Badge or no.” She gave Crow a ninja death stare and then left the room. Both men watched her go. Everyone in the hall watched her go.

  “Wow,” said Crow.

  “I know,” said Monk and laughed. Then winced because every damn thing hurt. Except holding Sandy’s hand. That hadn’t hurt at all.

  Crow lowered himself carefully onto the guest chair. He had been discharged from the hospital four days ago. But there was so much to do that this was the first time he’d been by to see Monk.

  “World’s stupidest question … how are you?”

  “They tell me I’ll live,” said Monk.

  “Nice to hear. Has anyone brought you up to speed yet?”

  Monk nodded. “Mike Sweeney was here for a couple of hours this morning.”

  “So you know how it played out.”

  “Yeah. All of it.”

  They sat with that for a while.

  “I’ve been all over the world,” said Monk finally. “And there’s this nasty bit of folk wisdom. You hear it in movie dialogue sometimes and there’s a tendency to dismiss it as melodrama, but.…” He shrugged very carefully. “If a tribe or village captures someone, an enemy—a real son of a bitch, or someone from an army who thinks rape is a perk of being a soldier—if the community is merciful they cut the prisoner’s head off or hang him. If they are not merciful, they gave him to the women.”

  “Yeah,” said Crow, “I heard that.”

  It was all that really needed to be said.

  5

  They kept Monk for another week, and he spent two weeks at Sandy’s doing nothing much except binge-watching stuff on Netflix and eating too much of the food she prepared. She was the kind who liked to cook and expected her guests to overeat. How she stayed so thin was a mystery.