“Exactly,” Liam said, reaching into his bag to pull out another bottle of wine and three wrapped butcher packages.
“Good,” Sal said. “We’re going to need more wine.”
“That’s for the sauce,” Liam said, reaching into the bag again. He handed her a second bottle. “That’s for us.”
The last thing he pulled from the bag was a loaf of bread. “Freshly baked, but we’ll want to warm it up for dinner.” He reached for the oven handle, but Sal placed her hand over his and held it there.
“Oven’s broken,” she said absently. “I’m sure the bread is fine as-is.”
“Living without an oven is barbaric, Sal,” he said, winking at her.
Sal smiled, feeling the tension finally crack. “We all have our struggles. Now let’s get watching.”
Sal stirred the Bolognese, and Liam set the laptop on the kitchen table and plugged it in. “I downloaded the four episodes that aired before the show was canceled.”
Sal fought to unstick some meat from the bottom of the pot. “Do you think the demon’s the reason it was canceled?”
“Oh, definitely,” he said, and pulled up the first episode full-screen on his laptop. “Luckily, I found some more footage. Hollywood’s really clueless about network security. Keep stirring.” He uncorked the sauce wine and poured it into the pan, where it hissed and spat. He took over stirring, pausing to add more wine and then a small carton of milk. He turned the heat down, dumped in a zip-top bag of dried herbs, and put the lid on. “Now we wait,” he said.
Sal poured more wine and joined him at the kitchen table.
The show was called Ink Stainz: Vegas, with tacky hearts and thorns and dripping blood surrounding the show’s logo.
“Classy,” Sal said. Liam snorted.
The first episode introduced the artists, twelve heavily tattooed people of different races and genders, all looking as tough as they could for the camera. One of the men had a locust tattooed on his Adam’s apple, and Liam pointed to him. “That kind of tattoo will make you throw up. That guy, man. Watch him.”
Five of the people interested Sal. The man with the locust, who went by the very original name of Hannibal, was thin and small with full sleeve tattoos and bright red flames peeking out from the collar of his white T-shirt. A bald Latina who went by the name Sugar Skull had black lines tracing her skull bones, with brightly colored flowers sprinkled around. A very tall, large black man had full sleeves on his arms, normal enough, but his hands were inked entirely black, like a pair of gloves. Including his palms. His name was Charles.
By now, Sal was wincing. “These people have got to be addicted to pain,” she said.
“The endorphin rush is amazing,” Liam admitted. “But it takes a special kind of person to get that much ink.”
The last two were the most interesting. One was a white woman almost as large as Charles, about fifty years old, with horrible illustrations of children’s heads up and down her arms, complete with dates underneath them. She looked like a frequent canvas, not an artist herself. But she called herself Mama Tat.
“And if you call me Mama [bleep] we’re going to have a problem,” she said to the camera during her interview.
The camera then cut to Sugar Skull, who looked impressed. “That is a woman who has run out of [bleep]s to give,” she said. “Maybe she once cared what people thought of her, but not anymore.”
“I thought they were supposed to all hate each other on sight,” Sal said. “No one’s even said they’re not here to make friends yet.”
The final person introduced was a small man with light brown skin and large eyes. He wore a long-sleeved shirt and khakis, with no visible ink. His name was Gardener.
“This guy must have wandered in off the street, looking for a martini bar,” Sugar Skull said when they cut back to her. Seemed like Sugar Skull was the go-to for opinions about the others. “He just don’t fit in.”
The interview camera went to Charles then. “What’s that little [bleep] doing in here? He doesn’t have any [bleep]ing ink! You gotta pay your dues in an industry like this.” He held his ink-covered hands to the camera.
They cut to another contestant, a woman with a long blond braid and a leather vest over a white tee. Her tattoos were all cursive words written down her arms, over her hands, and one word going up her neck. Sal couldn’t read any of it. “A guy like that is the kind of [bleep] you get drunk and make him get some ink,” she said. She flexed her right arm, and the word on her biceps was censored, so Sal assumed it was a swear word. “This was my first tattoo. My rite of passage.”
“They have more footage of people talking about Gardener than of him talking about himself,” Liam said.
Sal shushed him and leaned forward. “He’s back on,” she said.
Gardener had limp black hair that looked unwashed. It hung in his eyes. “I have a parlor on the Strip,” he said. “I specialize in anything with plants. Mostly flowers, but I can also do seeds, vines, insects. Leaves. I’ll do whatever the customer asks, of course,” he added. “But I love inking plants.”
Cut back to Sugar Skull. “Plants,” she said in a deadpan.
Back to Gardener. “I have no tattoos of my own,” he said, looking sad, as if he were talking about children.
“Yeah, that guy needs watching,” Sal said. “I know they edit these shows to make us like or dislike certain people, but a clean-skinned tattoo artist is like a tan hacker or a dental hygienist with bad teeth.”
Liam had returned to the sauce. He poured in a can of tomatoes and added a bay leaf. “I’ve never seen someone who works with ink not have their own,” he agreed.
The first challenge came up, to do a cover-up job on botched or crappy existing tattoos. Two customers wanted exes’ names eradicated, one embarrassed guy wanted a drunken tattoo on his butt removed, and an older man in a suit wanted a youthful indiscretion (a dog urinating on the German flag) removed from his arm. The artists each managed to cover their client’s tattoo, with talking-head interviews interrupting the tattooing scenes. Charles’s interview was so laden with profanity that it was more “bleep” than anything, but Sal got the distinct impression that he didn’t approve of his client, a small blond man who needed his ex-girlfriend’s name removed before his current girlfriend would agree to marry him. Charles had given him a detailed train covering the name, complete with it going into a tunnel at the top of his shoulder.
“You know, like when he [bleeps] his new wife.” He talked slowly, as if everyone around him was stupid. “The train is his [bleep] and the tunnel is her [bleep]. It’s metaphorical. I don’t know why he got so [bleeping] bent out of shape,” he said.
Cut to Sugar Skull, laughing too hard to say anything.
Mama Tat had a man who wanted to remove a small pink flower on his forearm. He mumbled something about a drunken night, not looking into the camera. Mama Tat had given him a bigger, pinker flower.
“The guy is closeted, and needs to [bleep]ing embrace his true nature,” she said simply.
Cut to Gardener, who looked coldly at the camera. “I should have gotten the flower.”
Sal was convinced the client would be super pissed. “Tat’s going home,” she guessed.
But no, Charles with his metaphorical sex tattoo went home, along with three others. The shocker was that Mama Tat had been absolutely right about the man, who had a tearful confession, coming out during his exit interview, cradling his forearm as if he had just won a trophy.
Cut to Mama Tat, looking pleased with herself. “I got an eye for little boys not knowing their true selves,” she said simply.
Gardener had the man in the suit as his customer. He turned the rude image into a full-sleeve giant redwood, with rich browns and reds and greens growing up the man’s arms, roots wrapping around his wrist, and leaves covering his shoulder. It was a huge tattoo to do in one sitting, the narrator claimed, and the client was sweating and shaking by the end of it.
“I thought he just want
ed a cover up so he could go golfing? That thing is huge!” Sal said.
That customer also cried during his exit interview, expressing extreme happiness at his ink and saying he would definitely be back for more from Gardener in the future.
Gardener won the challenge, making Mama Tat say some choice expletives during her talking-head interview.
“It’s fun to watch,” Sal said, shoveling pasta in her mouth. Liam definitely could cook. “But I don’t get the weird part. What’s the threat here?”
Liam pulled a tablet from his backpack and began searching online. “The threat is the reason they canceled the show,” he said, his eyes widening. “Every client we just saw is now dead.”
• • •
The other episodes were as entertaining as the first, only overshadowed by the fact that Sal knew everyone under the tattoo gun would die.
“Why did they even air the show if people started dying?” Sal asked.
“They didn’t start dying until after the show aired,” Liam said, reading from Menchú’s email. “It began four months after people got their tattoos. This show aired faster than most, so they were two episodes in before the deaths began. After four episodes the producers put things together and canceled the show before anyone else figured it out.”
Sal thought for a moment. “Las Vegas is a tourist city. Most of these clients got their tattoos and went home, so they have only one connection. How many episodes did they film?”
“Twelve,” he said.
“And people kept dying after they pulled it.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yeah. This week would have been episode six.”
Sal ran her hand through her hair. “So people continue to die every week or so, everyone who got ink on the show. Not just under certain artists?”
“All of them. Menchú thinks it has something to do with the ink itself—ink is easy to bless or curse. But the curse had to come from somewhere. Find the spell, remove the curse, the remaining ink should go dormant.” Liam considered his own hands again. “But if whichever tattoo artist is doing this got sent home, it should stop, right? We just track who went home when and when people stop dying we can figure out who did it.”
“Sure, if you want to wait and see when people stop dying,” Sal said, exasperated. “What if whoever did it ended up winning?”
“That’s a good point,” Liam said, frowning at the bottle of wine—the second one was half drained. “I think it’s time to put this away and pay closer attention. Who do you suspect?”
“Mama Tat convinced a guy to come out on national television. He was wearing a wedding ring, Liam. That says magic to me.”
“Or she’s just very convincing,” Liam said. “What about Charles? He could have been out for revenge. He got voted off first, and the tattoo was quite good, if lewd.”
“Gardener is just creepy,” Sal said. “Another guy whose customer acted in a way we really didn’t expect.”
They added Sugar Skull to the list just because she didn’t act like a normal reality show contestant, being impressed, amused by, or otherwise friendly about her fellow contestants.
“Let’s keep watching,” Sal said, opening the bag of cannoli and offering one to Liam.
• • •
The third aired show cut Hannibal, who turned out not to be hard-core at all despite his locust, and two other artists who hadn’t really impressed Sal and Liam. Nothing strange happened, except that Gardener’s customers were always one hundred percent satisfied with their work, which was consistently plant-based. Sugar Skull showed her skill as an artist, and was also the only person to give the customers a lot of TLC regarding the pain.
Mama Tat showed loud, expletive-laden maternal love for her customers, not all of whom appreciated it, but it seemed to help her in the challenges.
After the last aired episode, Sal threw down her pen in frustration. “Nothing. No clues.”
Liam stretched. The wine had worn off, and they had both switched to water. “We’re narrowing it down, at least. Now we start on the raw footage.”
He sat down next to her and draped an arm over her shoulders.
She let him.
3.
Against everything Sal would have expected, Grace was the one most visibly excited about Las Vegas. She sat in her seat clutching The Remains of the Day, bookmarked nearly at the end, and stared out the window, drumming her fingers. Sal, in the seat beside her, was trying to use the plane’s Wi-Fi to look up all the tattoo shops in Vegas, while Liam sifted through records of how each of the victims died.
“Las Vegas has some great bookstores, I’ve heard,” Grace said. “I hope we’ll have time to visit Amber Unicorn Books.”
“Are you a collector?” Sal asked. “The ones I’ve seen you reading have been pretty new.”
“I’m looking for rare books,” Grace said. “Online shopping is fine, but nothing beats a good used bookstore. I’m looking for Mary Shelley’s lesser known books.”
Menchú and Liam were talking about the job. “What did you and Sal find last night?” Menchú asked.
“The unaired footage, the dailies—they showed some pretty weird stuff,” Liam said. “Dull as hell to wade through and find the weird stuff, though.”
“I wouldn’t want to have to edit those shows,” Sal said, leaning over their seats. “Tattooing is pretty damn boring. And they ask these horrible leading questions during the interviews. The producers have in their heads who they want to show as the slightly crazy one, who’s the darling, who’s the asshole. They ask questions to bring that out. They could make Grace sound like a party girl and Liam like a tweed-elbowed egghead if they tried. It’s a shame they canceled it; it would have made for some ratings gold.”
“Did you find out who won?” Menchú asked.
Liam shook his head.
The footage was raw, and lacked selective editing and talking heads to narrate the action, but the challenges continued, with Mama Tat and Gardener taking top place most often. They grew to hate each other, and dormitory footage showed that their mid-challenge arguments often continued when they returned to their rooms. Sal and Liam reviewed as many hours as they could, but there was more footage than they could watch in one night. They skipped around to find the winners, and learned that Mama Tat and Gardener reached the finals together, but not who had won.
They did find out that the final challenge had been to tattoo each other.
“So I thought we could just find out who was doing all of this by waiting to see which one,” Liam said. “But Sal was against that idea.”
“It would be efficient,” said Grace. “If time-consuming.”
“But we’re not Team One. We want to stop these deaths,” Sal said.
“Sal,” Menchú said, disapproving. “Team One doesn’t kill indiscriminately.”
Sal nodded. “And the government and the Church have our best interests at heart, I know, Father.”
He sighed, and turned back to Liam. “Any word on causes of death?”
“It’s not the tattoos themselves, at least not obviously. We had one heart attack, one car accident, one fall from a ladder, one from a fast-growing cancer. The man from the first episode had a stroke on a golf course.”
“The redwood guy? I liked him,” Sal said. “What about the guy who came out on the show?”
“Tripped over his dog and hit his head. Died instantly,” Liam read from his computer.
“One interesting thing,” he continued, “was that each victim was pale and emaciated at the time of their death, even those who didn’t die of sickness. As if they had been drained.” He looked at Menchú. “Does that sound familiar?”
Menchú nodded, and pulled a heavy book from under his seat. “Tattoos come from all over the world,” he said, settling into his lecture mode. “They can indicate anything from the places a traveler has been to whether a woman has reached marriageable age. Some use them to channel spirit animals, some for protection against magic. Some tattoos ev
en indicate the specific skills of the wearer. Did anyone you saw last night look like their tattoos had any rituals associated with them?”
Liam nodded. “A couple of guys with prison or gang tattoos. One Asian businessman had some interesting tattoos on his back.”
Grace leaned forward with interest. “Was he from Cambodia?”
Liam shrugged. “I can look him up.”
“I’ve got it,” Sal said, looking at her notebook. “Kang Keo, yeah, Cambodian. He was heavily inked on his back. A lot of circles with spikes, and animals. Two tigers.”
“When was he on the show?” Grace asked.
“Sixth episode. He was part of the history of tattoo challenge, where the tattoo artists had to give ink from a culture they weren’t familiar with,” Liam said, pulling up the footage and passing his laptop back to Grace.
“I remember him. He had a bunch of tattoos, and talked like he would throw a fit if they disrespected his culture,” Sal said. “It made me wonder why he was taking a chance on a reality tattoo show.”
Mama Tat won the round by giving Kang Keo a tattoo of nine spikes on the back of his neck. The client seemed happy. Sugar Skull left the show for going to her tattoo design book for a Japanese kanji that was supposed to mean “peace” but actually meant “rat.”
Menchú flipped through his book, leaning close to the fine print. “If he was tattooed in the sixth episode, he shouldn’t be dead yet, right?”
Sal turned to the page in her notebook with the list she and Liam had made of the remaining clients and their projected death dates. “The clients from the fifth episode would have died six days ago. They took a week off before the sixth episode, and so we have one day to stop the next batch from dying.”
“It sounds like Mama Tat and Gardener are our two main suspects. So when we touch down, I want Grace and Sal to go to the tattoo shops. Liam will search to see if any clients from the sixth show are still in Vegas,” Menchú said.
“How many of the clients were tourists?” asked Sal. “Those would all be back home by now, wouldn’t they?”
Bookburners: Season One Volume One Page 30