by Jeff Johnson
“That’s about the size of it,” I confirmed. “I did managed to get him to talk briefly about Roland Norton, but he passed the buck, so to speak.”
“Isn’t that, like, totally suspicious?”
“Not really.” I sighed. It was time for a tattoo history lesson. “See, it’s like this. We can all agree that most of the tattoo artists in Wally’s generation were just garden variety carnies running a cartoon scam, right? Midway cabbage people next to the Ferris wheel, sell you a discount midget kind of guys? Small-time P. T. Barnums?”
“Midgets? What the—”
I shook my head. “What I mean is that by and large they were the kind of people you couldn’t trust. They didn’t trust each other either. For them it was all about the cash, but also the equally important poon. Crank, too. None of them could draw very well and they knew it. It … it’s just …”
“Slow down,” Delia said calmly. “Think.”
“Okay. Let me offer a string of examples. Wally and those guys, they were filthy. Like, dangerously, biologically dirty. Before Wally hung up his machines, I saw him do shit all the time that put his customers in mortal danger. Them and everyone around him. I couldn’t fire him because he was my boss, and if I left … if I left. All those customers would have never stood a chance. It was like he was a germ dispensary, a friendly helping hand to bacteria and viruses everywhere. Now, Wally knew better. So why did he do it, time and time again? Because he didn’t care.”
“So …”
“Wally would also screw any woman who would have him. Fat, skinny, junkies, vomiting drunks, it didn’t matter. He even fucked his wife Maureen, and she weighs so much she has breathing problems. He would recklessly put a stranger’s life on the line for twenty bucks a dozen times a day and I bet he still collects empty rum bottles. He’s that sort of dude, Delia.”
“I almost get it. But keep going. Add it up.” She cocked her head, fork paused.
“See. A guy can lie to his wife every day. And then he can go to work and lie to his customers. But no one can do that kind of shit forever.”
“Wall Street. K Street. The EPA. The—“
“Fine,” I interrupted. “But those are groups, sweetie. They have mutual daily reinforcement. Like-minded villains to lean on in times of weakness. But Wally and his so-called pals, well, no such luck because of the internal trust issues. No way were they going to have support group meetings. Fucking place they had the meeting would have been struck by lightning if they survived the initial bombing.”
“So they needed something different.”
“Bingo.” I frowned. “And they found it. Lots of people have found the same thing, I guess. See, Wally can sleep at night for one reason. He learned how to lie to himself. Convincingly. He actually believes anything that comes out of his mouth, just because he said it. It’s at the heart of his rambling.”
Delia didn’t have anything to say, but she looked both alarmed and disgusted.
“People wonder what evil is, and that’s my guess in a nutshell. But even if a guy like that isn’t a war criminal or a serial killer, even if he’s just a Wally, it also means something else.”
Delia arched an eyebrow. I nodded.
“You guessed it. I wouldn’t believe anything he said, because he himself would have absolutely no idea if it was fact or fabrication. Since he believes both, or neither, depending on how you look at it.”
“Jesus.” She shook her head.
“Yeah. I did get the number for some guy who tried to pump me with the cash-for-old-news boomerang, but … maybe Norton died of a mosquito bite in a Panamanian prison. He might have been a drug smuggler. And then the guy I talked to might have made it up looking for an angle. Maybe Wally even got to him first.”
“So back to your plan.” Delia loved it when I talked shit about the old guys, but now she was focusing. I forked up some migas before it got cold.
“I thought it over,” I said, chewing, “and I have limited options. Central theme has to be surprise. I’m leaning toward going back down there and going crazy on the fucker. Hit the fast forward button. Make some chaos and then hope I can find the back door faster than anyone else when the shit hits the fan.” I spun my fork around and chewed. “You know … cops all freaked out because of anonymous call … bomb squad … Aryan Nation looking for their lost meth lab at the same time. Fire department … Chicano gang all riled up about prostitutes, maybe a few dozen rattlesnakes let loose in the grass to light the fuse … all kinds of terrible shit could happen right then.”
“Hmn,” Delia murmured. “That’s kind of what I was expecting. Making things up as you go along is sort of your default setting. It gives you an advantage because it comes so naturally to you. Almost everyone else tries to avoid it.”
I kept eating. Delia was a fabulous cook. The eggs were at the perfect point between too loose and rubbery, right in the butter zone seldom nailed by anyone except for grizzly old short order cooks. The tortilla strips were crispy and she’d added a dash of crunchy cumin seeds.
“Whatever. The feds are going to leave me out there dangling like shark bait. I’m just a big piece of chum as far as they’re concerned, and knowing I have that kind of value gives me an advantage. The next shithead Dong-ju sends out will probably shoot me after what happened to the last two, and maybe shoot you and whoever else is around for good measure. Fuck that. So on to my default setting, as you call it, the sooner the better. I’m officially pissed at this point anyway. I don’t give half a shit what Bling got himself into. I want this over with. I have you and the guys to consider. And the cats.”
Delia tucked her legs under her and took a tiny bite. She chewed it while watching me, swallowed.
“Weeelll,” she said, trailing off. She leaned across the table and plucked a cigarette out of my pack. “Sounds like a small slice of a vague plan, anyway. It’s a dramatic start.”
“I know,” I agreed. She fired the smoke with an impressive thumb switch off the matchbook. I watched her smoke tendril up to the ceiling to avoid her gaze. “I got a day or two to fill in the details. A day, anyway. Hours, for sure.”
“Everyone at the Lucky is on high alert,” Delia said. She set her smoke down in the ashtray and carried her plate into the kitchen. “Alex and Dwight are totally freaked out, but it turns out Dwight is a gun nut, so …”
“Wait,” I said. “Why the hell aren’t you at work?”
“It’s my day off, genius. Jesus Christ, that isn’t the same brain you’re planning on using to figure our way out of this shit, is it?”
She washed the breakfast dishes in silence. I finished the migas and added my plate to the sink, then went into the living room and peeked through the blinds. Patches of blue were visible between low, dark clouds. The streets were wet and clear. No one had slashed the tires on my car or bashed the windows in. I could feel the gears in my head click and grab. The coffee was digging in.
“There was one other thing,” I said. “Kind of a little weird.” I sat back down at the table. Delia refilled our cups and picked up her cigarette, settling like a bird across from me.
“Please continue.”
“They asked about all of you. Everyone at the Lucky. It looks like we have files now. I mean, I’ve always had one, and of course Nigel, but you … Cordelia Evelyn Ashmore?” I raised an eyebrow. “Private school. Graduated from Cal Arts. Daughter of some LA big shot? What the hell are you doing working at a tattoo shop in Old Town? How come you never told me about any of this?”
Delia’s face warped into a kabuki mask of barely contained fury. Her lips peeled back from her white teeth and she hissed cigarette smoke. I’d apparently just made a huge mistake. “Those cops tell you all that?” Her eyes drilled into mine.
“Well, yeah,” I said defensively. I turned my attention to my coffee cup.
“Hey. Look at me, asshole,” she said quietly. I slowly raised my head.
“You never talk about your family, Darby. Why is that?”
I shrugged. “I don’t have one.”
“Lies. And in the three years we’ve known each other, did I ever pry into that? Did I ever ask how they died, or if they even died at all? Even one time? No, I didn’t, did I?”
“Ah, no.” I squirmed a little.
“And do you know why I never asked?” She leaned forward. I could smell her shampoo and something like blueberries. “Do you? Can you even fucking guess?”
“Well.” I paused. “No.”
“Because I don’t fucking care,” she spat. She sat back and crossed her arms.
I was stunned. And somehow hurt. Deeply. Her anger cut me to the bone. After all that had happened in the last week, that was by far the worst. More awful than beating on Bling, more terrible than being hassled by the feds. I fumbled a cigarette out of my pack and stared at it.
“I was talking to you,” Delia whispered. I looked up and met her smoldering gaze.
“You really mean that? Delia, I thought we were friends. Way more than that. You mean you never even wondered about, I don’t know … me?”
She shook her head in disgust and smashed her cigarette out, then plucked a new one from my pack. When she lit it, she slapped the matches down on the table and blew twin jets of smoke through her nostrils.
“Darby, I know you as well as I’ve ever known anybody. Better. Who you are today hasn’t got a damn thing to do with your past and you know it. Free will and all that shit.” She brushed the air. “Everybody gets to decide who they are. You did. You actually embody that concept, which is why you seem so crazy. Everything else is just a shitty excuse, or worse, it’s destiny. So don’t you sit there and mouth off to me about some idiot profile the cops fed you. In fact, don’t you do anything like that to me ever again. Ever.”
We sat in silence, Delia smoking and looking at the nail on her index finger, me mentally kicking myself and afraid to speak.
“I went to an all-girls private school for twelve years. In upstate New York. So did my two sisters.”
“Delia,” I interrupted, shaking my head, “you don’t have to tell me this.”
Her eyes snapped up, glittering. “You asked, Darby. Didn’t you?”
I closed my mouth.
“We went home to LA for the summers and the holidays. It was all very, very dull. My mother likes to start the day with a martini, but she’s not really a drunk, if you can understand that. My father is a tall, wimpy pussy of a gentleman who enjoys spending his free time on his boat. When I graduated from the long-distance finishing school mill I went on to Cal Arts, because all the Ashmore kids go to college. And that was a pretty stale experience, too. Somewhere along the line I learned how to be myself, who I actually was. Just like you did. But all of that, that … life. That was my fate. I was programmed to be … them.”
I took a deep breath, let it out. I didn’t know what to say.
“My older sister Margaret lives in Tulsa. She runs a law firm, the best one in the city. My younger sister Marie is married to an accountant and lives in Delaware. She likes to fuck around with boats, too. Real Daddy’s girl. We exchange Christmas cards. My mom gets elective surgery every January.”
I raised my hand for her to stop.
“No, damn it,” she snarled. “I’ve seen those scars you have, Darby. Don’t think I haven’t been watching every time you change your shirt, and you’re not even wearing one right now. I know you know how to hotwire a car. You scare people sometimes when you go to the dark side, even Big Mike and Nigel. So you know why I never told you about my dry little sterile childhood, with all the ponies and lawn parties and piñatas?”
I shook my head. Her eyes were moist when I met them, and her voice almost cracked.
“Because I was afraid you would think I was boring. My history can be just as confusing to other people as yours is.”
I took a sip of coffee. A kind of hurt broke inside of me, a wave that crashed on the rocks and sprayed and took my breath in its explosion. I closed my eyes, and when I set the cup down I was grinning. And then I laughed. I couldn’t help it. Great waves of gulping hysteria almost crippled me. I reached out and grabbed one of her hands, gradually steadying myself.
“Oh sweetie,” I gasped, wiping tears from my eyes with my free hand. “That’s just about the most fucked-up thing I’ve ever heard.”
Delia snatched her hand back, but she smiled a little.
“You,” I continued, “are just about the most interesting person I’ve ever known.”
“Don’t you fucking forget it, either,” she said, and laughed a little herself. “And if you tell Nigel or Mike about any of this, I swear to you, Darby Holland, that you’ll regret it for a short few seconds after I hear about it.”
I held up my hands. I could almost feel the rare October sunlight touching my bones.
“I got things to do,” Delia said, rising. I turned around and watched as she walked to the door and slipped her boots on, then tugged her jacket over the shirt she had stolen from me. She gave Chops a kiss on the head where he was draped on the back of the couch and then fixed me with a firm look.
“Thanks,” I said. “Sometime soon, when all this is over, maybe we can … I don’t know. I owe you a story.”
She looked at me and a slow progression of things went through her eyes. It finally settled and became unreadable.
“Get your shit together,” she said finally, opening the door. A fresh breeze gusted in, rippling through her maroon hair. “Don’t plan the massacre trip until we go through it all again. I’m going to lamp these feds, too. And you better go see Dmitri.”
I did sit-ups and pull-ups until I was breathing hard and my abs ached and my hands felt like sweaty metal hooks, then took a second shower and got dressed all over again. The exercise was how I fought off the hangovers, and it made my clothes fit better. Plus, morning endorphins were a terrific buzz. While I was lacing my boots, I did a mental inventory. I too ostensibly had the day off, but it never worked out that way, and with everything else going on actual work would have been a relief.
When Wally had run the Lucky Supreme, I’d been free to tattoo all day without a care in the world, except for disease, chemical-related poisoning, death by gunfire for fucking up, and of course getting ripped off by Wally. There were other low-grade concerns, like getting ink in my eyes, the chemclave blowing and taking a finger, that kind of thing, but not too many. Those were good times and I knew it. Now I watched as my employees got all the choice jobs. While Nigel was tattooing the crotch of some giggling, nubile coed with two of her friends waiting, I was hammering away with a monkey wrench in the bathroom, fixing the toilet. While Big Mike worked on a sleeve with a lush gambling theme, I was at the bank, standing in line, being eyed by security. While Delia was brushing in the delicate grays of one of her truly enormous and masterful ongoing pieces, full of wind and light and elements, I was replacing floor tiles or patching the roof for the millionth time. And most galling of all, when the new guys were soaking up the super-easy money that came off of the constant flow of names and kanji symbols, I was often preoccupied with issues like tracking down thieves, maintaining diplomatic relations with the nightworld, and dealing with bummers like Dmitri.
I’d known Dmitri for almost twenty years, from way back to when Wally owned the Lucky Supreme. Dmitri was an eccentric even back then, and Wally’s way of dealing with him had been to leave him alone as much as possible, and out-crazy him when he couldn’t. Over the years Dmitri had gotten worse until he’d finally deteriorated into his potently wretched present state. Ignoring him or out-crazying him hadn’t been an option for a few years. I had to take both barrels in the face every time I dealt with him.
To begin with, Dmitri was a consummate fatalist, always depressed about something, and always amazingly stubborn about it. The very topic of depression was one of the few things that could inspire him into lucidity. In addition to the sagging brick building that housed the Lucky, Gomez’s bar to our left, and the Korean convenience s
tore to our right, he owned a small four-story tenement down the street where he ran “mitri’s izza,” his personal brainchild masterstroke of innate business acumen, designed to springboard him into the world of pizza so he could destroy Domino’s, an outfit that had righteously pissed him off one too many times. It was on the west corner of the ground floor and it was almost always open.
Dmitri was the cheapest man I’d ever known. He’d inherited the two buildings from his father, Foti, and it was rumored a sizable chunk of money in the single digit millions as well, but to look at him you’d think he was just another old street lunatic who’d lost his shopping cart. His big, curly hair had grayed and gone wild over the years, and he wore the worst clothes the Goodwill had to offer, garments so awful that they were almost certainly given away for free. He eschewed showering in favor of Dollar Store cologne, and proudly claimed to have never purchased toilet paper.
I tolerated Dmitri because I had to, and evidently the sentiment was mutual, but in recent years I’d found myself in the uncomfortable and reliably volatile position of being his squeamish confidant, as had Gomez to a lesser degree. Gomez had his uninspiring ten-mile stare and I didn’t. Dmitri had been looking for me for a week, so it was time to play shrink. It was just what I needed for my fragile sense of well-being, which was on an upswing after the migas.
I drove downtown, checking the vital signs on the street life as I went. A potbellied old dude rocking a hockey mullet was holding up a cardboard sign that read “UFO broken, need money to get home.” Points for originality. The sky was still a mixed bag of Concord clouds and patches of gauze and blue, omen-free as far as I could tell. I parked in front of the Lucky and looked through the windows. Alex was tattooing the tiny foot of a big girl with big hair, and Dwight was sitting at the desk reading a comic book. It was Dwight’s day off so he was there supporting his buddy, the other new guy. It smacked of mutiny.