Grave Markings: 20th Anniversary Edition

by Arnzen, Michael A.

  Situation:

  They were nowhere. Clueless. After three days, the investigators had come back empty-handed. Rumors were beginning to spread among the city’s population, but no public scare existed. Yet.

  Lockerman considered the scenario and the situation. These were the “facts,” but there was still the element of truth to be discovered, if at all. Lockerman knew well that fact and truth were never one in the same: no police report could reflect the pain a victim had gone through or the true motive of a perpetrator. Facts were words on a piece of paper. The truth was something entirely different.

  But it was both factual and true that Tina Gonzales was now deceased. Dead; a name in a police file, a photograph, a body. She was gone forever.

  And it was also a matter of undeniable fact that John Lockerman was crying his heart out over her death.

  He felt all the darkly familiar guilt and remorse churning in his mind like a bad memory—the loss of his wife five years ago had been more than he could bear; the loss of his private and secret lover was entirely worse.

  In the early days after his wife’s death, Lockerman had worked hard to develop a relationship with Gonzales as an informant—and she soon learned to enjoy his dependency on her, society’s refuse, for information. But she knew she depended on him, society’s trash collector, for protection as well. So she ended up giving him information free of charge. Months later, she was giving him herself free of charge, too. They weren’t a couple by any means; just two people who lived desperately on opposite sides of society’s imaginary fence, playing the false roles they had taken, and finding solace in each other’s arms when the masks and uniforms were removed to reveal naked and needing human beings.

  He didn’t sleep with her often, or on purpose. It just seemed to happen, accidentally, usually after nightlong chats in her hotel room about the latest on the streets or long silent drives across town in his squad car. Inevitably, Lockerman would find himself trying to convince her to get a legitimate job—nearly to the point of offering her one as his assistant or his maid—but Tina would brush away such notions with a kiss on his lips.

  And John fell for it every time.

  Lockerman wondered if the truth of his occasional flings with Gonzales would ever come out. He hoped not. He knew more than anyone that such a relationship was more than just unethical, it was taboo: a middle class guy and a chick from the streets, a cop and a criminal, a black man and a Hispanic woman…It wouldn’t only look bad, it would get him fired.

  So at once he had two opposite priorities: to cover up the truth, and to get at the facts. But fact and truth aside, there was one mission that Lockerman would accomplish regardless: to find the bastard who caused Tina’s death.

  II.

  Where’s my goddamned creation? My masterpiece?

  The corny jingle that signaled the end of the evening’s news poured out of the tinny speaker of Kilpatrick’s black-and-white set. He violently punched the plastic on/off switch, the image of the KOPT logo swallowing itself into a glowing white dot in the center of the screen, slowly fading. He gulped down the remainder of a bottle of gin, and tossed the bottle into the trash can in the corner of the bedroom.

  He looked up at his shrine—the photographs tacked neatly on his wall of Coolie and the hooker—and cursed. “These are fucking classics! How could they not put them on the air? What in God’s name do I have to do?”

  He fell back onto his bed and stared at the Polaroids. It was comforting to see the gallery portraits that were once in the center of his mind now right there on his wall, trapped in time, where he could see them and control them, and know with absolute certainty that they were not controlling him.

  But they needed to be public. The wall in his bedroom was not enough.

  He was certain that they’d report his latest effort on the news. Since he’d inadvertently killed Coolie, and that ended up on the tube, why didn’t they report on the hooker? Especially after he went out of his way to kill her this time, taking the time and effort to inject her with all that dope. Working the ink into her skin was his lifelong achievement as an artist—so much detail, so much intricate, beautiful detail—and he couldn’t believe that he was being denied the chance to go public with his greatest erotic skin mural ever. It just wasn’t fair.

  He was giving the people what they wanted. Why didn’t they appreciate his effort?

  He pondered the photographs, the glossy prints of naked forms, the tattooed flesh shining on his wall. Kilpatrick realized that it didn’t matter if these two had not gone public yet. They were the parents, the procreators—man and woman, machine and nature. They would mate secretly in his bedroom, like most couples rutting in the dark, and spawn the future of Kilpatrick’s mission. And like a family tree the collection of photos, the gallery tacked on his wall, would grow and spread indefinitely, forever.

  They were his Adam and Eve. His creation. Creation itself. And all the rest to follow would be his family, his children. His lovely, dead children.

  Kilpatrick looked over at the television set, its gray blankness reflecting his face in miniature. Black rings encircled his eyes like a macabre clown’s face paint. Black lines stippled his unshaved chin. His lips were flaking and chapped, purple. Clumped together from four days’ worth of grease, his hair was clotted in triangles, a black crown.

  Four days. No story on Tina the Tease, the Birds and the Bees.

  Something had to be done.

  His reflection in the TV screen mutated, attaining color. The image twisted, a whirlpool spiral of red, black, and silver.

  Slowly, the room warbled and shimmered, and he felt his mind being sucked toward the vacuuming television screen, an impossible vertical drain. He could feel the familiar pulsation of electricity in the room. The power suddenly overwhelmed him. He pulled back with all his strength…but his cheeks were puffing out from his face, the sinew that held his eyes in his sockets wrenching the orbs out and straining the optic nerves, and the air was being sucked out of his lungs as he struggled, his flesh being yanked free from his body….

  It wanted him to be on TV. It wasn’t the television itself, trying to eat him, he knew that much—it was something far worse, far more real than that….

  And it let go.

  He flopped back on the bed, feeling as if his skin had been removed, each nerve ending in his body on fire and exposed.

  And then he saw it: the monstrous three-faced demon he had tattooed on the walls of the cavern in his mind, its mouth a pit of hellish tortured souls. The souls turned to worms, writhing maggots which its slowly swirling head spit out from the TV set and onto Kilpatrick’s lap.

  “I’m doing it, leave me alone,” Kilpatrick said to the undulating, transmuting faces of the beast on his television screen. He was calm—no need to be frightened of the thing he had created. This wasn’t the first time it had visited him; he had been punished by it before, but now they had reached an understanding. If he achieved his mission of going public, it would permit him to exist outside of his gallery of hell. The horrid demon was his friend, a work of art in itself. Beautiful in its unworldliness. A part of himself, of his own creation, just as God creates evil in order to exist.

  The colored television screen was silent.

  “I know, I know! I’m going public but it takes time, dammit! There will be no more screw ups. Be patient.”

  The demon’s eyes were grotesque clocks, spinning forks marking time. Kilpatrick saw himself in the beast’s mouth, being tortured as he had been before—razors slipped into his eyes and nostrils, barbed tentacles lashing his skin in the lonely and dark-dripping prison cell chambers of his hellish skull.

  Time was running out. If he didn’t go public soon, the whole world would close up on him, the escape hatch he had once drawn would slam shut, and he would be trapped inside eternally. Going public was th
e only way to be free. Getting rid of those portraits of his past—inking them away flash by flash would be the only way to truly regain self-control. He knew now—it was fact, objectified in the photo gallery on his bedroom wall—that the portraits in his mind needed to be removed not only because they were influencing him, but because they were tampering with his art, his talent—they were other people in there, restricting his creativity, his life. Once they were gone, he would truly be free.

  His wrists began to itch. Kilpatrick looked down to see that the tattooed handcuff of barbed wire he had started to draw last week was now complete, twisting, digging its sharp spikes and jags into his flesh. The punctures began to bleed thick black ink….

  “No, wait!” he screamed. “I’ve got a plan. No one will stop me. All will see.”

  The demon on the television screen faded. But he could feel it burning inside his skull, scraping the bone with its sharp claws as it retreated to the core…and squirmed.

  He blinked and the room felt terribly bright. He checked his wrists—the unfinished tattoo was back to normal. He reached for his needle, and clicked it on. The hum was loud in his ears, but reassuring. He pressed the needle against the soft fleshy underside of his wrist and began to complete the handcuff, working out the details of his plan.

  Later, he sat in front of his photo gallery, admiring his work. His wall looked painfully bare. The empty space reminded him of how far he still had to go; how little space he had freed inside his mind.

  He shut off the lights, and urged them to mate in darkness.

  III.

  Roberts was typing, forcing the words out of his brain. Words to adequately explain the latest events in the city: workers for the Colorado Springs Transit System—the bus drivers, basically—were on strike; there was a drive-by shooting at a local high school (no casualties, but apparently gang-related); and some soldiers out of Fort Carson had died in a drunk-driving accident, which ironically involved a collision with cadets from the Air Force Academy.

  And a psycho tattoo killer was on the loose, which he couldn’t report on.

  No matter how much he wanted to tell the world the story of Tina Marie Gonzales—to warn the public of the forming pattern of suicides, which he felt was his journalistic duty—he would not let his desire to do so break his promise to Lockerman. They had shook hands on the deal, and Lockerman promised to give him an exclusive on the case after he caught the guy. Roberts swore not to report on it—or even to discuss it with anyone but Schoenmacher—until the crisis was over.

  In essence, the deal sucked.

  But Lockerman was right: reporting on the Gonzales death (Suicide? Or murder?) could stir up mass paranoia, which might make things even worse. And they didn’t want another copycat killer on their hands, like the time they reported on the Ski-Slope Strangler years ago, which resulted in chaos and five preventable deaths. No, neither Lockerman nor Roberts wanted that to happen again at all.

  But someone was out there. Causing death.

  It scared the piss out of him.

  He tried to finish typing the news story for the anchors to read: pyramid format, answering the Five W’s, and using clear, concise, eighth grade diction.

  What does it matter that the friggin’ bus drivers are on strike when people are dying for no apparent reason?

  Roberts lit another cigarette, taken from his second pack of the day. The Five W’s (who, what, where, when, and the ever-allusive why) swirled in his mind like cast fish hooks, coming back baitless, fishless…but chewed up and mangled. Who was doing the horrendous tattoos? What was his purpose? Where would he strike next? When would Lockerman catch him? Why was the psycho doing this? WHY?

  Roberts looked down at the old-fashioned typewriter he chose to write with. It smiled at him, as if teasing him for not being able to write the story. He punched the keys with a balled-up fist, wanting to knock its grinning teeth out, and the keys inside clumped together from the impact. The letters MKJL stained the page inside.

  “I need a coffee break.”

  He went into the break room, a closet-sized room with a corny brown table and three hard plastic, cigarette-burned bile yellow chairs. The soda machines hummed loudly in the room, drilling their metallic buzz into his ears. Roberts smoked, killing time.

  He tried to focus on the bus driver strike. The car crash. Were these things as important as a psycho killer? He knew they were. News was bad, always. It was a cardinal rule of journalism to dig up dirty laundry and take victims to the cleaners. And people needed to know about it. It made society stable.

  Or so he was told. He didn’t believe that academic bullshit one bit.

  Roberts ran his fingers impatiently through his hair. He knew that the problem was more than just an unfounded need to report on the tattoo killer. It was the job itself. He couldn’t concentrate on the other stories because he didn’t want to. His mind was stalling on him, not allowing him to spit out the words necessary to tell the stories of the day because he knew, deep inside, that his job was one big gimmick to get people’s eyes glued to a particular network’s deluge of mindless trash. The news and the sitcoms weren’t very different—the only exception was that the news was founded in a precarious link to facts. Terrible facts.

  Dan Schoenmacher waved his hand in front of Roberts’ eyes, as if checking to see if he was awake. “You all right, Roy?”

  Roberts looked at Dan, buttoned down in a blue blazer and red knit tie. Schoenmacher flashed him a hundred dollar grin.

  “I dunno. Just tired, I guess.”

  “The old news blues, eh?”

  “I suppose.” Roberts snuffed a filter in the clogged black ashtray. “This job is killing me. If I could only find something outside of broadcasting, I’d be outta here, man…”

  Schoenmacher frowned. “And leave your good buddy?”

  Roberts faced him. Schoenmacher had a pathetic look on his face, like a child being told to go to his room. With the way you couldn’t trust Dan’s emotions, Roy wasn’t sure if he was acting or not.

  “No, Dan-o, I’d never do that. Just didn’t get enough sleep last night, I guess.”

  “That’s the spirit!” Schoenmacher turned giddy, tickling Roberts by poking his armpits. “What do you say we go get us some beers at O’Connor’s after work?”

  Roberts almost drooled at the thought of a good cold beer.

  They exchanged handshakes, and Schoenmacher exited the break room, his walk polished and performed. Roberts thought about the Birdy tattoo on his ankle, the tattoo that no one could guess would be there beneath his silk socks and shiny shoes.

  He returned to his desk and forced the words out of his brain, finishing the copy. Shitty as it was, he knew that Judy Thomas could make horseshit smell like perfume with the way she delivered material. So he packed it into her pretty little mouth.

  Usually, he stuck around the studio to watch the monitors as the anchors delivered what he had written that day. But fed up with it all, he clocked out early to go home and shower away the day’s problems before meeting Schoenmacher at O’Connor’s.

  He took his usual route home, past the strip malls and supermarkets on Academy Boulevard, and through the crowded neighborhoods and schoolyards on Bijou Street. The traffic was scant, save for the usual teenage kids driving cars too swaggardly on their way home from school—summer school, most likely, since it was the end of May.

  And then he saw it: CORKY’S TATTOOS.

  It was a storefront he’d seen daily on his routine drive home from the station. One small, smeared glass windowpane beneath a loud and gaudy hand-painted sign in the same sort of curvy letters that an ad for a strip joint might use. It was smack dab in the center of a group of three office buildings, and the other two were clearly out of business.

  Roberts had seen it daily, but this was the first time he really saw it
, acknowledging its presence as if it were a new employee at the station, or a new next-door neighbor, a name and personality attached to a face. Seeing the tattoo parlor brought home just how anesthetized to the city he had become, how commuting back and forth to his shitty job had erased his cognizance of the familiar route home that breezed by his car windows every day, living a life all its own. The city had become distant to him, an outsider, and he was supposed to be a city news editor, for crying out loud.

  He purposely trained his eyes on the newly discovered tattoo parlor that had been there for God only knew how long.

  The double O’s of the word TATTOOS were red-veined, sharpened eyeballs. Daring black pupils—like curved daggers—stabbed out at him, as if looking deep into his soul, and discovering the writhing wimp hidden inside. The eyes challenged him to enter the tattoo shop. And as he drove past the storefront, the eyes followed him, not letting him go….

  Roberts turned his own eyes back to the road and stepped on the gas pedal.

  He was scared. By the eyes, and their accusatory stare. And because he realized that inside that tattoo parlor—behind those tinted glass and barred windows that loomed beneath the stark eyes of the sign like an open mouth—the tattoo artist who had desecrated the flesh of two innocent people might be lurking, might be murdering, might be brutally abusing someone this very minute. On this very street, so close to his home.