Grave Markings: 20th Anniversary Edition

by Arnzen, Michael A.

  But it still felt like it was there.

  Bonz shook his head. He needed a drink. A big drink.

  Naked, he sat on the living room floor and chugged tequila straight from the bottle, nearly finishing it. Chewy came up to him and growled, baring spit-dripping fangs. Bonz stared at the Doberman, horrified. “What’s the matter, Chewy? Aren’t you my friend anymore?”

  The dog yelped in reply.

  He looked down at the floor beneath him. It was the very spot where Mary’s body had given up on life. No, Chewy couldn’t possibly know that, could he? “Are you mad because I’m sitting where Mary died? Do you miss her or what?”

  Bonz jumped back.

  The dog’s face split open down the middle, its skull dangling veins. The face of bone before him glinted with a psychotic sheen of pink blood as its furry flesh fell and hung from its neck like a cheap rubber mask. Wild eyeballs rolled in the exposed sockets, like wet marbles. The dog’s tongue continued to wag as it swung side-to-side from its terrible, thrashing jaws. The dog…the thing it had become…snapped at him, no longer barking or growling, but screaming at him, screaming with the voice of a human.

  Bonz convulsively shot to his feet and headed toward the bathroom. In the blur of the chase, he did not miss seeing the nametag that hung from a collar beneath the carnage of the creature’s head: PATRICK in twisted metallic letters. PATRICK.

  He slammed the door behind him, the beast’s teeth taking a final bite from his ankle before he got inside. The dog screamed again, scratching at the thin wooden door, digging its claws into the frame.

  Bonz panicked…where’s the fucking bathroom window?

  And then the noise suddenly stopped.

  He looked at himself in the mirror. He was definitely not the same man he had been earlier this afternoon. His eyes were different—red, almost, and encircled with rings the color of blood. No, it was not the same man who faced him in his reflection at all. And he was still changing, his skin getting tighter and tighter, as if something was stretching its arms beneath his flesh, trying to find something—his eyelids maybe—to latch on to and pry its way out.

  He suddenly knew why Mary had been so desperate to burn off the tattoo. Not because it was ugly, or reminded her of her ex-husband’s vow. Because it was alive. It was alive and it was Patrick.

  A claw burst through his nostrils, ripping through his sinuses. The inside of his head felt suddenly cold, suddenly empty.

  Nearly blind, he slid open the bathroom mirror, wrapped his shaking hand around a plastic jar, and thumbed the cap. His head was splitting now, falling apart on itself, collapsing. There was no pain; the world was numb.

  All was emptiness, all but the pills themselves, which burned like fiery coals as they seared down his throat, one by one, burning Patrick from the inside out.

  V.

  Corky stumbled into the living room as if the floor had suddenly tilted beneath his feet, stiff-arming the living room wall for support. “Man, that’s some good shit!”

  Roberts leaned back to look up. His stomach felt queasy, weak. Reading the biker mag on a buzz had been like trying to speed-read War and Peace in a moving car. A dizzying blur, his stomach churning as if he’d swallowed a bushel of unpeeled onions. He wanted to puke, to purge himself of the disgusting images that still lingered in his mind, the squiggly letters still burned inside his eyelids.

  He stood up. “I gotta go, Corky. I don’t feel very good.”

  “Well you’d feel great if you woulda came upstairs with me. That Jocko’s got some good shit. He’s a riot, to boot…”

  “No, it’s my stomach. Way too much Jack. You shouldn’t have left me alone with that bottle, man.” Roberts leaned over, using Corky’s strong shoulder for a crutch. “You got a phone? I’ll call someone to come get me.”

  Corky turned pathetically serious, trying to hold down his high. “You want a ride? I could take you on the scooter, just like we came here…”

  “No thanks. I had a friend who got killed in a drunk driving accident years ago, back in high school. I’ll never get in a car loaded again.”

  “I can respect that, I suppose. I lost a lotta good people that way, too.”

  Silence throbbed between them.

  “Anyway…phone?”

  “Yeah, it’s in the kitchen.”

  Roberts exited the living room, and grabbed the phone off its cradle from where it hung on the kitchen’s egg yolk colored wall. The white handset was slick and black with oil, a phone that belonged in a gas station rather than a kitchen. Roberts gagged, tasting the mix of oil and food on his tongue as he dialed his house. He gave Schoenmacher directions, and hung up. Then he walked over to the kitchen sink, closed his eyes, and swallowed his spit until he regained equilibrium.

  By the time he returned to the living room, Corky was snoring. He found the old biker sitting up, his eyes closed and rolling behind their sockets, dancing REMs as his nostrils buzzsawed.

  He waited outside, sitting on the hard cement stairwell. The summer air was sobering, clean, and thin. He expected a Doberman to jump out at him from the darkness at any time, when Schoenmacher finally pulled up in front of the quad. Roberts rushed back inside, and placed a small nappy throw pillow beneath Corky’s head, to make sure he wouldn’t choke in his sleep. Corky snored the whole time, buzzing in his dreamworld, and Roberts didn’t feel too guilty when grabbed a handful of magazines from his coffee table before he left, locking the door behind him.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I.

  Roberts woke up Wednesday morning with the worst hangover of his life. The inside of his skull felt brittle, as if lined with razor blades which cut into the soft tissue of his brain if he moved a mere fraction of an inch. In exquisite pain, he called KOPT (“Picked up a virus, can’t come in…”). He returned to bed, the downy pillows absorbing and numbing the pain like ice cubes on a bruise.

  And then Schoenmacher—who had been sleeping on the living room floor—woke him up again around noon, playing one of Roberts’ old Led Zeppelin records, John Bonham’s sharpened drumsticks jamming into his earlobes. “It’s been a long time…”

  Rock and roll might never die, Roberts thought as his head throbbed, but it sure does hurt like hell.

  After a long, cold shower, several pots of bad coffee and a conversation with Schoenmacher over how to adjust the volume knob on the stereo, the afternoon mellowed and turned Roberts numb to it all. They sat together in the living room, reading Corky’s magazines, enjoying the air conditioner as it blasted beside them.

  Schoenmacher flipped through the pages of an Easyrider, stroking his beard. “Check out the tattoos on this babe,” he said, handing the glossy magazine over to Roberts in the other leather recliner.

  He looked at the woman, nude, but covered with glorious vines and flowers. She stood with her arms outstretched, as if yawning at the false, yellow morning sun in the backdrop. The vines that followed her muscular ripples and curves thickened when they reached her armpits, turning into scaled snake skins which coiled lovingly around her breasts, meeting above her sternum. In the middle of her chest, they wrapped around each other twice, twisting till they faced each other, flicking forked tongues. It wasn’t as good as the one he’d seen at Corky’s the night before, but then Roberts knew—that like snowflakes of white steel, or fingerprints in a mugshot book—no two tattoos would ever be exactly alike.

  “Nice tits…I mean tats.” Roberts’ cheeks dimpled as he grinned.

  “Tit for tat, she’s nice,” Schoenmacher said, reaching forward to retrieve the magazine. “She’s got nicer tats than Judy, that’s for sure.”

  “Oh, give it up, would ya?”

  “Sorry.” Schoenmacher lowered his head in mock shame, a sad puppy dog pose.

  Roberts continued to flip through the magazines, ignoring Schoenmacher’
s pity. He was in no mood to get conned into stroking the weatherman’s ego.

  He searched through the magazines—he would return them to Corky the next day, Thursday, when he was due to get more work done on his back. He scanned every page, looking for tattoos to compare to his own. He could find very few that were as good as Corky’s. Every artist was good, he supposed, but not as unique as Corky. Something he couldn’t quite put his finger on made Corky’s work special—he had a style that was different from the usual panthers, eagles, skulls, and flags. His work reflected the way he saw the world; he could take a small, insignificant detail on the average things (such as a bald eagle) and transform it into the main part of the piece, the part that tugged on your eyes and forced you to look at it. Corky was more than just unique, though. He was…likeable. Intelligent, but not overtly so. He was….

  Roberts shifted in the leather chair, uncomfortably. He still couldn’t quite understand what it was about Corky that made him so different. Words couldn’t sum him up. Corky was just…Corky.

  He’s your friend, Roy…why are you so scared to admit it? Why do you have to distance yourself from him like everyone else in your life?

  Schoenmacher burped. Roberts looked over at him, wishing he could distance himself from him. It had only been a few days since he’d moved in, and it was beginning to feel as if he were taking over the whole house.

  Accidentally, Roberts stumbled upon the story he had read the other night, “Burn Out.” He couldn’t imagine actually burning a tattoo off like that Mary chick wanted to do. It didn’t seem very realistic—you’d have to be pretty damned desperate to go to such lengths. It was total overkill, like burning down an entire building to get rid of a little graffiti instead of just painting over it. And what was it that Corky had said in the interview? That tattoos could be used to conceal, just as much as they could reveal? Exactly. Why take a flame to your own flesh when you could just mask it with something better?

  Roberts imagined that if he had been inked by the Tattoo Killer’s pen, then he might just be that desperate. And not just with a flame, but with a blowtorch. Even if it was covered up with the best tattoo in the world, a damned tattoo by Picasso himself, the psychological damage could never be erased. The Tattoo Killer’s work would be a permanent scar, like One-Eyed Jack’s eyeball still buried beneath the flesh that covered his socket, itching under the skin, sooner or later working its way out with a life all its own.

  The story made sense, then. He could see that the fictional Patrick and the Tattoo Killer were similar people. And again, Roberts felt his stomach well up like it did the night before.

  He looked over at Schoenmacher, who was smiling behind his stubbly, patchy beard at another nudie picture in the biker magazine. How could he be so silly and immature when the Tattoo Killer had tattooed his very own cat? When he knew that the Tattoo Killer knew where he lived? When KOPT was stroking his tragedy for all it was worth, putting his pet Clive on the air every day?

  But then, Schoenmacher wasn’t anything like Roberts, and he knew it. The weatherman’s moods were always shifting, one moment ecstatic, the next sullen and depressed. Like high and low pressure systems. Perhaps he was trying to avoid the issue altogether, denying the existence of the Killer by obsessing over Judy?

  Roberts figured that that was exactly what he himself needed to do: avoid the issue. Quit personalizing it all. Quit making such a big deal out of it, kind of like that guy in that weird horror story—what was his name? Bonzo? Banzai? Bozo?

  Roberts couldn’t come up with the name—Boozo?—and he scanned the page, looking for it.

  His eyes fell upon a sentence. Bonz—oh, Bonz—was saying, “But first, a little anesthesia…”

  Where had he heard that before?

  Roberts dropped the magazine onto his lap. Anesthesia. Who had he heard call booze anesthesia?

  Corky.

  He remembered it all now, vividly: Corky had called the bottle of bourbon anesthesia the first day he met him. He remembered how much he thought he’d need it, how painful he expected the tattoo needle to be, how he drank the whole friggin’ thing to numb up, not even caring what the big, gray-haired biker was drawing on his back….

  Anesthesia.

  What did it mean? Why was he so preoccupied with one little word?

  Schoenmacher interrupted. “You thought that other chick had tats, wait till you get a load of this one!” He flashed a magazine centerfold into the air, waving it like a glossy flag. Roberts had inadvertently picked up a copy of Hustler from Corky’s place, and Schoenmacher was now drooling over it.

  Roberts smirked, returned to his own magazine. He suddenly knew what had bothered him so much about Corky using the same phrase from the magazine story: it meant that Corky wasn’t as wise and unique as he pretended to be. Corky stole phrases and witticisms from biker magazines. Has everything he ever told me been a cheap cliche, stolen from someone else’s mind? Was his pride completely manufactured, totally plagiarized?

  Roberts couldn’t believe that he was thinking these things about his friend, but the thoughts were there nevertheless. That could be the only explanation; it couldn’t be mere coincidence that Corky had used the same word—albeit a fantastic catchphrase—for booze, could it?

  Maybe there was another explanation. Maybe it was coincidence. Or perhaps it was biker jargon—a slang word as commonplace as “cool” among his own group of friends.

  Roberts muttered curses under his breath, realizing that he was getting tripped up by words. Even if Corky had stolen the idea from some magazine, it was still a good idea to focus on images rather than words. Because Corky was right, even if he got the philosophy elsewhere: words were inexact, symbolic…about as unreal as things come.

  He looked over the illustration to the story. The Doberman could have bit him on the nose. He could smell its steamy breath. That’s how much more powerful an image could be.

  And then he noticed the story’s byline, and took it all back.

  J.R. Corcorrhan.

  Corcorrhan.

  Corky.

  A word that you could never get around. Your name.

  II.

  Roy Roberts convulsed when something pounded on the door, as if a hammer had been slammed on his head.

  He stood, wiped his hands on his pants and went to the door as Schoenmacher continued to gawk at the skin pics.

  “Hey, fellas! What’s doin’?” It was Lockerman. And he was smiling, color in his cheeks. He looked better than he had since the entire Tattoo Killer thing started.

  Roberts reflected the smile. “Yo, Lock!” They high-fived, the loud clap of their palms getting Schoenmacher’s attention.

  Lockerman took long strides as he entered the living room, the badge on his uniform shining as bright as his eyes. He cocked his hips, looked at the biker mags scattered around the living room. “What the hell is all this?”

  Roberts lied. “Just leftovers from my research. I wanted to be prepared for my interview yesterday. Catch it on the news?”

  “Yeah, man. Congrats.” They exchanged the club handshake, Roberts wondering why Lockerman was being so touchy-feely. “One hell of a story. That guy…what’s his name?”

  “Corky.”

  “Yeah, Corky…heh heh. Anyway, that Corky guy did a good job of taking down that psycho’s monopoly on the news. Probably scared him a little, too. I dug the scene where he threatened the fucker…that means that the bikers are on our side for once. Shit, this guy’s backed into a corner!”

  Roberts nodded. Lockerman didn’t know the half of it—he hadn’t really seen Corky’s violent side like Roberts had. Roberts remembered the look in his eyes, the angry sound of his voice…the way he overreacted to the whole Tattoo Killer information by going down to a bar and beating his frustrations out on someone.

  Schoenmacher stro
ked his beard, and said, “That’s great news! Hope you catch the bastard soon. No offense, Roy, but I can’t wait to go back home, safe and secure.”

  Roberts grinned. “I’d like you to fly back to the nest, too, Birdy. You woke me up this morning like a damned rooster.”

  “Birdy?” Schoenmacher squinted his eyes. “I haven’t been called that in years…Well, as long as you don’t call me a cock, I think I like it!”

  “Well, cockle-doodle-do,” Lockerman added.

  “It’s a helluva lot better than ‘Schoenmacher’…what kind of name is that, anyway?”

  “Let’s see…it’s German, I think. My mother was Spanish, and my father was pure-bred German. So I guess that makes it a Sperman name…”

  They all laughed. Lockerman broke out in tears, and they didn’t stop laughing until Roberts returned, holding his sides, and handing out beers to plug into their mouths.

  They sipped and slurped in silence, forcing away the laughter, each in his own way wondering how long it had been since they’d felt so good.

  “Guys,” Lockerman finally said. “I think I have a plan.”

  “For the Killer?” Roberts looked over at Birdy, who only seemed mildly interested. Then he looked back at Lockerman. “What is it?”

  “See,” Lockerman said. “I was thinking yesterday that this perp is your typical antisocial—not only is he against society in general, but he hates any and all social groups—and yet he needs society in order to exist, in order to be what he is. So that means that he works alone, but expects people to notice what he’s doing. Normally, that would be bad news, and it sorta is, because we have no way of tracking the bastard.” Lockerman sat down, rested his arms over his kneecaps as he leaned forward. “So, anyway, I was thinking that the only way to catch this motherfucker is to catch him in the act.” He looked into both of their eyes.