Grave Markings: 20th Anniversary Edition

by Arnzen, Michael A.

  Roberts’ face crinkled up. “So what are you saying? That you know where he’ll attack next? Doesn’t that mean that he’d have to kill someone in order to catch him? Do you know who he’s targeting now or something…”

  “Now, now, calm down, Roy.” Lockerman leaned back, the leather recliner farting beneath him. “Not exactly all that. See, we have a car patrolling Dan’s…Birdy’s…house night and day. Nothing’s turned up yet, but if it does, those guys will be all over him. But I was thinking of something altogether different—instead of waiting for him to come to us, we can go to him. Why don’t we set him up? Why not lure him into a trap, and then catch him in the act, before he goes too far?”

  Roberts’ face brightened. “So what’s the plan, Lock?”

  “Lock, huh? What is it with you and nicknames today?” Lockerman shook his head, accepting the new name. “Anyway, no plan, exactly. I thought we all could come up with something together. First off, we know this bastard pretty good by now, don’t you think? He sees himself as the greatest artist known to man, and he also wants like hell to get exposure in the media. On the news. And I was figuring that since both of you guys work for the news, then maybe you guys could provide some sort of bait on the news.”

  “Huh?” Schoenmacher asked, scratching his beard and squinting the baggy flesh around his eye sockets. “What bait?” He punctuated the question with a crack of his neck to one side, popping the bones in an audible snap.

  “I don’t know. I’m sure we can think of something together. How about a KOPT art contest, with the winner getting his art on the news…or maybe announce some artistic event saying that KOPT will be covering it the next day. Who knows, maybe he’ll show up and walk right into our trap?”

  Schoenmacher looked at Roberts. “Do you think he’d fall for something so obvious?” He now pulled on his knuckles, nervously trying to work out more bone noises.

  Roberts shrugged. “It’s gotta be worth a try. Buckman would let us run anything we came up with—he thinks we’ve got the best coverage on the Killer, and he’s been running related stories daily. He’s hard-up for tattoo shit.” He thought about something he’d seen in one of the biker magazines. “I got an idea. How about this: we mention on the air that KOPT will be sponsoring a Tattoo Convention?”

  “Tattoo Convention? What the hell is that?”

  “You know, tattoo artists gathering around, showing off their stuff, setting up booths, things like that.”

  “Hmm…that sounds good.” Lockerman toyed with the creases on his pant legs. “He’s bound to come out of the woodwork for something like that—tattoos are his life!”

  “Well, I better check with Corky first, to see what he thinks of it. He knows the community of tattoo artists pretty well. He’d know if anyone would show up—maybe he could help pass the word, get others to look for anyone suspicious. I’m supposed to go see him tomorrow anyway, so I’ll check with him then. Hmm…”

  Lockerman stood and straightened out his uniform. “Good.” He finished his beer. “Well, guys, I’m supposed to be on duty, and I gotta run. Thanks for the beer.” He moved toward the door. “Listen, why don’t you two try to work out some details. Get on the horn and see if you can find a place that we could run this out of. Make sure it’s indoors, so we can keep the place contained. The department might foot the bill, I don’t know. I’ll check with the D.A. to see if it’s all legal…we gotta do this legit, if we’re gonna do it at all. Check with your boss to get it okayed. Whatever it takes, we’re gonna smoke this guy out.” He opened the door. “See you guys later.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Maybe…I might put in some overtime.”

  “Don’t work too hard,” Schoenmacher said, grinning behind his new beard.

  “Bullshit, Birdy!” He swiftly closed the door behind him.

  Together, Schoenmacher and Roberts meted out the possibilities for the rest of the afternoon. Planning the tattoo convention, staging the event: a call to Buckman got the KOPT seal of approval for sponsoring the project (as long as the station got exclusive rights to cover it, and they didn’t have to foot the bill); the local convention center near the airport turned them down because they were booked up until September, but Roberts found a local school willing to loan out their gymnasium for Sunday afternoon; Schoenmacher drew up a flyer for the event, which he’d take to a print shop Thursday, and then post them all over town.

  At five-thirty, Schoenmacher dropped everything to watch Eyewitness News. The plot to capture the Tattoo Killer was a pleasant diversion, but there was no way he was going to miss Judy’s little visit over the airwaves.

  Roberts grabbed a stack of Corky’s magazines, and went off to his bedroom. He couldn’t stand to watch the news on his days off—he knew he’d spend the entire time discovering obvious grammatical mistakes, stylistic flaws, and other nit-picking errors in the anchor’s speech, due to the lack of good editorial discretion as a result of his absence. In essence, he’d be working, even on his day off. And he didn’t want to do that. He had better things to think about, more important issues at hand.

  Actions speak louder than words, he thought, the timeworn cliché spitting out of his thoughts like a computer print-out, but it was a truism, nonetheless. And it’s time for me to scream!

  In his room—he sat up in bed, instead of reading at his desk—he eagerly read through the biker magazines. It reminded him of being in the hospital (tonsillitis, when he was ten), post-operation, and just spending the time reading. It was a good feeling, a relaxing time. He found himself longing for ice cream, the ice cream he never got when he was ten.

  Surprisingly, Roberts found two other stories in the batch of magazines penned by the illustrious J.R. Corcorrhan. He read these with interest, but “Burn Out” was still the one that stuck in his mind.

  Because it reminded him of the Tattoo Killer. A villain who forced people to wear his tattoos, an enemy who kept coming up at the wrong times, a vicious, angry person. The parallels were there, the story matching the reality around him, like train tracks headed nowhere, with Roberts standing between them.

  Despite the story, he still envied the tattoos that were in the magazines. Artwork that belonged in museums, imaginations that deserved media attention, images that made you think. Almost as good as Corky’s work. Or the Tattoo Killer’s.

  Roberts recalled the photos of the Killer’s work—sloppy and horrifying—but effective. They brought out a reaction, and that was what art was really about, wasn’t it?

  But the Killer lives inside his art…. HE causes the reactions, the art KILLS….

  Roberts briskly rubbed his temples, not believing that these thoughts were his own. He was putting the Killer in the same category as the tattoo artists in the magazines, as Corky, even. Treating him like a member of the subculture, not an independent variable, a psychopath who subverted all culture, all society, all life. Who made all art useless.

  An artist surrounds himself with art, he recalled thinking at Corky’s house…and here he was again, putting the Tattoo Killer and Corky in the same box…and Roberts found himself wondering what sort of art the Killer surrounded himself with, what sort of posters or paintings or pictures he kept on the wall, what sort of artistic objects he had for best friends. Roberts looked around his own bedroom, seeing nothing but a few journalism awards and yellow wallpaper.

  He closed his eyes, wondering if he could find any art inside, where it really counted.

  He was half asleep when Schoenmacher knocked on the door, tapping it like a woodpecker with the tip of an index finger. “You busy, Roy?”

  Roberts opened his eyes, slid his hands up behind his neck. “Nope. Just resting. C’mon in.”

  Schoenmacher entered, pulled the wooden chair out from beneath Roberts’ writing desk, and sat on it backwards. He looked glum, staring down at the floor—Rober
ts knew he was either off on a depression kick, or guilty for invading his bedroom. “I should go visit her,” he said.

  “Huh?” His guesses were wrong. Schoenmacher had something else cooking.

  “I should go visit Judy. She’s been rejecting my phone calls—the only time I’ve seen her since the date is on the damned television every night.” He scratched his beard. “How can I prove to her how much I want her?”

  Roberts sat up, leaning his backbone against the hard wood of the headboard. “Listen, you want me to talk to her tomorrow or something?”

  “I don’t know. I’d feel kinda dorky having you talk to her for me. I don’t want her to think I’m too immature to do my own dirty work.”

  Roberts chuckled. “Well, I don’t know. Maybe you should go see her then.”

  “But…” He expelled the breath he had held in his lungs. “Oh, never mind.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Spill it.”

  “Well…shit. I wish I could go back to work. If I tried to talk with her there, then maybe she wouldn’t be able to ignore me. On the other hand, if I went to her house, I could imagine her not even opening the door. I couldn’t take that kind of rejection.”

  “Are you sure you’re not overreacting just a little bit? She was probably just scared shitless that night when Clive jumped on her. Heck, maybe she’s just embarrassed, I don’t know.”

  Schoenmacher looked up at Roberts. “Could you find out for me? Test the waters a little bit, without even hinting that I’m the one behind it?”

  “Sure thing, man. No problem.”

  “Great.” Schoenmacher stood up, pushed the chair back in place at the desk. “It’ll make me feel a lot better. And promise me, even if she says she hates my guts, to tell me everything she says. Okay?”

  “Okay, Birdy.”

  “Okay. Good night, man.” He shut the door and went back to the bed roll he had in the living room. Roberts could hear the muffled theme song from The Cosby Show through the walls.

  Roberts stretched out on the bed, curled over on his side. He was beginning to wonder how far Schoenmacher would go to use him, when sleep slammed down like the hood of a car over the engine of his thoughts.

  III.

  He saw the dream from a distance, like an old man returning to a long-forgotten hometown. A hometown in a box. The visions that passed before him were framed with a round black border, like watching it all through a pair of binoculars…or through two round circles cut into a wall. His eyes felt like the eyes of a framed portrait in a low budget Gothic horror movie…the eyes that move to follow the unwary people in the room of his dream.

  The room was a tattoo shop. He saw himself in it.

  He was the tattoo artist. Corky was the flesh-baring client. In the waiting room, a giant red cardinal with ruffled feathers sat on a leather sofa reading magazines, Schoenmacher’s face stretched out over the beak and squeezed backward, his ears, jagged-cut triangles of flesh. The bird wore gold jewelry, the most obvious piece was the necklace with a rectangle of golden letters dangling from it. Through the prison-barred windows, he could see a police car outside, with Lockerman trapped inside, trying to beat his way out of the windshield…as if suffocating. It was dark, everywhere—the only light was the constant rush of mutating red and blue from the police car cherries, which entered the room through the front window pane.

  The Dream-Roberts smiled. He was etching ink into Corky’s apparently tattooless flesh—random doodles: with red and blue inks he drew a little clown face on Corky’s bicep—the clown would laugh and tell silly jokes when Corky flexed; with the squid ink, the sepia, he sketched a large squid on Corky’s hairy gut, tentacles whipping down toward his pubic region—Corky’s lint-packed belly button was the squid’s ugly dead eye; on Corky’s back, the Dream-Roberts outlined a large black picture frame.

  “What are you gonna do with that?” Corky asked, his voice innocent and childlike, more like a young girl’s than an old man’s.

  Dream-Roberts chugged a beer—YOU ARE DOOMED beer, according to the label—and crushed it violently against his forehead. The can stuck there, as if inserted into his skull. “Freestyle, buddy. Whatsamatter? Don’t you trust me?”

  “Oh, I trust you, Roy. I trust you.”

  The cardinal in the waiting room chirped: “When am I going to be complete? When am I going to be complete?”

  “Let me work in peace!” Dream-Roberts filled in the frame with a grotesque imitation of the Tattoo Killer’s throned king. Only this time, the king was sitting on a toilet, petting a Doberman with a roll of toilet paper clutched in its teeth.

  Roberts watched from behind the wall of black, through the two circle-slits. STOP, he shouted voicelessly, YOU ARE MAKING THINGS THAT ARE NOT REAL!

  The Dream-Roberts did not look up.

  Roberts watched helplessly, clawing at the wall of black that prevented him from entering the dream. The black wall was wet, slick, getting slime under his fingernails.

  And Corky screamed…as if being scratched from the inside.

  The Dream-Roberts reached for his belt and withdrew a sharp, serrated fish knife.

  NO!

  The Dream-Roberts slipped the knife effortlessly into Corky’s back, slicing around the black-framed tattoo, his elbow rocking as if sawing it out.

  And then the Dream-Roberts held it aloft, shaking off the gore on the other side. The red-and-blue lights quickened their strobe, combined, turned purple iridescent. The Dream-Roberts turned, faced the spying Roberts behind the wall, so that the carpet of flesh canvas was revealed. It wasn’t the porcelain-throned king any longer.

  It was a portrait of him, perfectly rendered. As if the square of flesh were a perfect mirror.

  Corky, unaffected by it all, turned to face the Dream-Roberts. “Let me see! Let me see!”

  The Dream-Roberts threw it nonchalantly into the air like a pizza dough. The wet square of skin landed on top of Corky’s head, draping down over his ears, dripping red down his neck.

  The Dream-Roberts laughed, turned toward Roberts himself. The blade gleamed purple and silver. The Dream-Roberts now wore a black patch, a modern pirate. He moved forward, slowly, menacingly toward the space where Roberts helplessly watched.

  He tried to push away. His fingers had melted into the wall of black. His face, too, was attached at the cheeks and temples.

  The blade came closer.

  And then a rush of red feathers overtook his vision, the cardinal coming from nowhere, pecking out his eyes…and somewhere, inside of the pulp of swirling purple, he could still feel the jagged bite of cold wet steel, shredding his mind like laughter.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I.

  “The D.A. says that the tattoo convention’s gotta be legit, or else we’ll never have a case that sticks.”

  Roberts pressed the phone harder against his ear, trying to hear Lockerman over the clacking typewriters and chitchat of the newsroom. “I don’t understand. Why wouldn’t it stick if we caught the guy in the act?”

  “It’s entrapment, Roy. Just like we can’t hide behind billboards anymore, to catch speeders. It sucks, but I guess it’s an infringement of someone’s rights to set up a trap for them. Not that our Tattoo Killer deserves to have any rights…”

  “Well that sucks!”

  “I know it does. But we can still have the convention. We’re gonna have to get KOPT to foot the bill, or take out loans to pay for it ourselves. Whichever way, the thing has to be real, and we’re gonna have to do it up right. Otherwise any judge would throw the case out. And then the bastard would be protected by double jeopardy laws.”

  “Can we have police there, though?”

  “Yeah. You’ll have to requisition a squad car, though, and I’ll make sure that I’m there undercover, fo
r security purposes. After all, many of these tattoo artists are bikers right? And we all know how much bikers like to get drunk and get into fights. Getting security should be no problem.”

  “Good.” Roberts lit a cigarette. “Do you think we’ll be ready by Sunday? It’s only three days away…”

  “Hell, yeah. I’m ready now to tell you the truth.”

  “So far so good, then. Listen, Lock, I’ve gotta run. I’ll let you know if I can con Buckman into paying for it.”

  “Got it. Later, man.”

  “Later.” He hung up the phone, and acted busy, smoking his cigarette in front of his typewriter. He looked up at the clock. Almost lunchtime. Time to go do Birdy a favor.

  He went to her office and opened the door without knocking. “Good morning, Judy.”

  She looked up from the polished glass of her desk. “Oh, hi there! How are you, Roy?”

  Roberts pulled a director’s-style chair back. “May I?”

  “Of course! Have a seat.” Judy pushed her chair back a little and crossed her legs. Roberts could see her nicely tanned thighs through the glass tabletop, and averted his gaze to look her directly in the eyes.

  “What’s up?”

  “Well, I was just wondering how you were taking the Tattoo Killer story. I know that you were there when Dan’s cat came home all messed-up. It really threw Dan for a loop. He’s staying with me, so I know how badly he’s taking it.” Roberts felt like he was lying, though he did know that Schoenmacher was troubled by Clive, even if he did a good job of hiding that fact. “I was just curious if you were the same…”

  “I’m fine. Really. That silly cat didn’t affect me at all.” She ran a comb of fingers through her brown hair. “In fact, I brought the cat some breakfast backstage this morning. You should see how her hair is growing back. I wish my hair would grow like that, but…”