“What things, for example?” I said.
“Dropping the bullet down the sink. That was bad enough.”
“Yes, it was,” I said, holding in my contempt for him.
“Which is one of the reasons I knew something really big must be on her mind when she sent me the page about meeting her at Buckhead’s last night,” he went on. “She said not to say a word to anyone and not answer her back unless there was a problem. Just to show up. Period.
“I was scared to death of her by then,” he said, and that part I certainly believed. “She had me, you know. I was dirty and she had me. I was so scared of what she might ask me to do next.”
“And what might that have been?”
He hesitated. A transfer truck swerved in front of me and I tapped my brakes. Bulldozers were moving dirt on the embankment, and dust was everywhere.
“Screw up the Container Man case. I knew that was coming. She was going to get me to tamper with something to get you into so much trouble that it was over for you. And what better case than one with Interpol and everything? With all the interest?”
“And have you done something to compromise that case, Chuck?” I said.
“No, ma’am.”
“Have you tampered with any case?”
“Other than the bullet, no, ma’am.”
“You realize of course you would be committing a felony if you altered or destroyed evidence? Do you realize Bray’s heading you toward prison and probably even setting you up for it so she can get you out of the way after she’s finished with me?”
“Deep down, I don’t think she’d do that to me,” he said.
He was nothing to her. He was a flunky who didn’t have sense enough to avoid a trap when he found one because his ego and ambition got in the way.
“You’re sure about that,” I said. “Sure Bray wouldn’t make you the fall guy?”
He wavered.
“Are you the one who’s been stealing things in the office?” I hit the matter head-on and asked.
“I have all of it. She wanted me to do . . . to do anything I could to make you look like you couldn’t run the office. It’s all at my house in a box. Eventually I was going to leave it in the building somewhere so someone would find it and return the stuff to everyone.”
“Why would you let her have this much power over you?” I asked. “So much that you would lie and steal and premeditate tampering with evidence?”
“Oh, please don’t let me get arrested, go to prison,” he said in a panicky voice that would win him no acting awards. “I have a wife. A baby on the way. I’ll commit suicide, I promise I will. I know lots of ways to do it.”
“Don’t even think such a thing,” I said. “Don’t ever say that again.”
“I will. I’m ruined, and it’s all my fault. Nobody else’s.”
“You’re not ruined unless you choose to be.”
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” he muttered, and I was beginning to fear he might be serious.
He was constantly licking his lips, and his words were sticky because his mouth was so dry.
“My wife wouldn’t care. And the baby doesn’t need to grow up with a father in prison.”
“Don’t you dare send your body to me,” I told him angrily. “Don’t you dare have me walk in and find you on one of my tables.”
He turned to me, shocked.
“Grow up,” I said. “You don’t just shoot your brains out when things turn to shit, do you hear me? Do you know what suicide is?”
He stared wide-eyed at me.
“It’s getting in the last pissed-off word. It’s a big so there,” I said.
22
The Pit Stop was just past Kate’s Beauty Salon and a small house with a sign out front advertising a psychic. I parked next to a beat-up black pickup truck tattooed with multiple bumper stickers that gave me broad hints about Mr. Pit.
The door to his business instantly opened and I was greeted by a man whose exposed skin, every inch of it, including his neck and head, was tattooed. His body piercing made me cringe.
He was older than I had expected, probably in his fifties, a wiry man with a long gray ponytail and a beard. He had a face that looked as if it had been beaten up a few times, and he dressed in a black leather vest over a T-shirt. His wallet was chained to his jeans.
“You must be Pit,” I said as I opened the trunk to get out the plastic bag.
“Come on in,” he replied in a relaxed way, as if nothing in the world was off kilter or worth worrying about.
He walked in ahead of Ruffin and me and called out, “Taxi, sit, girl.” Then he assured us, “Don’t worry about her. She’s gentler than baby shampoo.”
I knew I wasn’t going to like what was inside his shop.
“I didn’t know you were bringing anybody with you,” Pit commented, and I noticed his tongue sported a pointed silver post. “What’s your name?”
“Chuck.”
“He’s one of my assistants,” I explained. “If you have a place to sit, he’ll wait.”
Taxi was a pit bull, a brown and black square block of muscle on four legs.
“Oh, yeah,” Pit was pointing out a corner of the room where there was a TV and a sitting area. “We gotta have a place for the customers to wait for their appointments. Chuck, you just help yourself. Let me know if you need change for the Coke machine.”
“Thanks,” he said, subdued.
I didn’t like the way Taxi stared at me. I would never trust a pit bull no matter how gentle its owner said it was. To me, the mixture of bulldog and terrier had created the Frankenstein of breeding, and I had seen my share of torn-up people, especially children.
“Okay, Taxi, tummy rub,” Pit said in a cooing voice.
Taxi rolled over, legs in the air, and her master squatted and began rubbing her stomach.
“You know”—he looked up at Chuck and me—“these dogs aren’t bad unless the owners want ’em to be. They’re just big babies. Aren’t you, Taxi? I named her ‘Taxi’ because some taxi driver came in here a year back and wanted a tattoo. Said he’d trade me a pit bull puppy for a Grim Reaper with his ex-wife’s name under it. So that’s what I did, didn’t I, girl? Kind of a joke that she’s a Pit and I am, too. We ain’t related.”
Pit’s shop was a world I didn’t know and couldn’t have imagined, and I’d visited some very strange places in my career. Walls were covered with flash, every example edge-to-edge. There were thousands of Indians, winged horses, dragons, fish, frogs and cultist symbols that meant nothing to me. Pit’s Trust No One and Been There, Fucked Thatopinions were everywhere. Plastic skulls grimaced from shelves and tables, and tattoo magazines were placed about for brave hearts to flip through while they waited for the needle.
Oddly, what I would have found so offensive just an hour ago suddenly took on the authority and truth of a creed. People like Pit and probably much of his clientele were outlaws who bucked anything that took away the right of people to be who and what they are. Out of place in all of this was the dead man whose flesh I was carrying in a jar. There was nothing countercultural or defiant about someone dressed in Armani clothes and crocodile shoes.
“How did you get into this?” I asked Pit.
Chuck began browsing sheet-flash as if he were wandering through an art museum. I set the bag on the countertop by the cash register.
“Graffiti,” Pit replied. “I bring a lot of that into my style, sort of like Grime at Primal Urge out in San Fran, not that I’m saying I’m anywhere near as good as him. But if you combine bright, more graffitilike images with the bolder lines of the old school, that’s me.”
He tapped his finger on a framed photograph of a nude woman smiling slyly, arms provocatively crossed over her breasts. She had a sunset behind a lighthouse on her belly.
“Now that lady there,” he said, “she comes in here with her boyfriend and says he’s giving her a tattoo for her birthday. She starts out with this little itty-bitty butterfly on her hip,
scared to death. After that she comes back every week for another one.”
“Why?” I asked.
“It’s addicting.”
“Most people get more than one?”
“Most who get just one want to tuck it somewhere, usually out of sight. Like a heart on a butt or a boob. In other words, that one tattoo has special meaning. Or maybe the person got it when they were drunk—that happens, too, but not in my shop. I won’t touch you if you smell like booze.”
“If someone had one tattoo on his back and nowhere else on his body, as best I can tell? Important? Maybe something more than bravado or being drunk?” I asked.
“I’d say so. The back’s a place people see, unless you never take your shirt off. So yeah, I’d say it probably meant something.”
He looked at the bag on the countertop.
“So the tattoo in there came from the guy’s back,” he said.
“Two round yellow dots, each one about the circumference of a nailhead.”
Pit stood still and pondered this, his face screwed up as if he were in pain.
“They got pupils, like eyes would?” he asked.
“No,” I said, glancing at Chuck to see if he was in range of our conversation.
He was sitting on a couch, flipping through a magazine.
“Gosh,” Pit said. “That’s a hard one. No pupils. Can’t think of anything without pupils if it’s an animal or bird of some kind. Sounds to me you aren’t talking flash. More likely it’s custom.”
He swept both hands over his shop, conducting his own orchestra of outrageous design.
“Now all that’s sheets of flash,” he said, “as opposed to a tattoo artist’s original work, like Grime. I’m saying, you can look at some tattoos and recognize a particular style. No different than Van Gogh or Picasso. For example, I could spot a Jack Rudy or Tin Tin anywhere, most beautiful gray work you’ll ever see.”
Pit led me across the shop into what looked like a typical examining room in a doctor’s office. It was equipped with an autoclave, ultrasonic cleaner, surgical soap, Biowrap, A and D ointment, tongue depressors and packs of sterile needles in big glass jars. The actual tattooing machine looked like something an electrologist would use, and there was a cart with squirt bottles of bright paints and caps for mixing. Central to all this was a gynecological chair. I supposed stirrups made it easier to work on legs and other parts of the body I didn’t want to think about.
Pit spread a towel on a countertop, and we pulled on surgical gloves. He switched on a surgical lamp, pulling it close as I unscrewed the lid from the jar, my nose instantly assaulted by formalin’s acrid bite. I dipped into the pink chemical and pulled out the block of skin. It was rubbery, the tissue permanently preserved, and Pit took it from me without pause and held it up in the light. He turned it this way and that and looked at it through a magnifying glass.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “I see those little suckers. Yup, there’s claws holding on a branch. If you kinda lift the image out of the background, you can see the tail feathers.”
“A bird?”
“It’s a bird all right,” he said. “Maybe an owl. You know, it’s the eyes that jump out at you, and I think they were bigger than this at one time. The shading gives it away. Right here.”
I leaned closer, his gloved finger moving over the skin in brushstrokes.
“See it?”
“No.”
“It’s very faint. Eyes have dark circles, like a bandit, sort of, kind of uneven, not very skillfully drawn. Someone tried to make them a whole lot smaller, and there’s stripes radiating out from the edges of the bird. You wouldn’t notice it unless you’ve worked with this sort of thing before, because all of it’s so dark, you know, in such bad shape.
“But if you really scrutinize, you can see it’s darker and heavier around the eyes, for lack of anything to call them. Yup. The more I look at it, I think it’s an owl, and the yellow dots are a messy attempt to cover them up by turning them into owl eyes. Or something like owl eyes.”
I was beginning to see the stripes, the feathers in the dark shading he was describing, and the way the bright yellow eyes were lined with dark ink as if someone had wanted to make them smaller.
“Someone gets something with yellow dots, doesn’t want it anymore and has something else put on top of it,” Pit said. “Since the top layer of skin’s gone, most of the new tattoo—the owl—came off. I guess the needles didn’t go in as deep on that one. But they went in real deep with the yellow dots. A lot deeper than necessary, which tells me two different artists are involved.”
He studied the block of skin some more.
“You can never really cover up an old tattoo,” he resumed. “But if you know what you’re doing, you can work over and around it so the eye is taken away from it. That’s the trick. I guess you could almost call it an optical illusion.”
“Is there any way we can figure out what the yellow eyes might originally have been part of?” I asked him.
Pit looked disappointed and sighed.
“It’s just a damn shame it’s in such bad shape,” he muttered, placing the skin on the towel and blinking several times. “Man, those fumes will get you. How do you work around that all the time?”
“Very, very carefully,” I said. “Would you mind if I use your phone?”
“Help yourself.”
I stepped behind the counter, keeping an uneasy eye on Taxi as she sat up in her bed. She stared at me as if daring me to make one move she didn’t like.
“It’s okay,” I told her in a soothing voice. “Pit? Is it all right if I page someone and give him this number?”
“It ain’t a secret. Help yourself.”
“You’re a good girl.” I encouraged Taxi to be one as I stepped around the counter to use the phone.
Her small, dull eyes reminded me of a shark’s, her head thick and triangular like a snake’s. She looked like something primitive that had evolved no further since the beginning of time, and I thought of what was written on the box inside the container.
“Could it be a wolf?” I said to Pit. “Even a werewolf?”
Pit sighed again, the hard work of payday weekend shadowing his eyes.
“Well, wolves are real popular. You know, pack instinct, lone wolf,” he told me. “Hard to cover up one of those with a bird, an owl or whatever.”
“Yeah.” Marino’s voice came over the line.
“Hell, it could be so many things.” Pit kept on talking loudly. “Coyote, dog, cat. Whatever’s got a furry coat and yellow eyes with no pupils. Had to be small to cover it up with an owl, though. Real small.”
“Who the hell is that talking about a furry coat?” Marino rudely asked.
I told him where I was and why, Pit rambling on all the while, pointing out all sorts of furry flash on a wall.
“Great.” Marino got mad right away. “Why don’t you get one while you’re there.”
“Maybe another time.”
“I can’t believe you would go to a tattoo parlor alone. You got an idea the kind of people who go in a place like that? Drug dealers, assholes out on parole, motorcycle gangs.”
“It’s all right.”
“Oh, no, it ain’t all right!” Marino erupted.
He was upset about something that went beyond my visiting a tattoo parlor.
“What’s wrong, Marino?”
“Not a damn thing unless you consider being suspended without pay something wrong.”
“There’s no justification for that,” I angrily said, although I’d been afraid it was inevitable.
“Bray thinks so. I guess I ruined her dinner last night. She says if I do one more thing, I’m fired. The good news is I’m having fun thinking what the one more thing is I might decide to do.”
“Hey! Let me show you something,” Pit called out to me from across the room.
“We’ll do something about this,” I promised Marino.
“Yeah.”
Taxi’s eyes followe
d me as I hung up and picked my way around her. I scanned the flash on the wall and only felt worse. I wanted the tattoo to be a wolf, a werewolf, a small one, when in fact it could be something else entirely and probably was. I couldn’t tolerate it when a question remained unanswered, when science and rational thinking went as far as they could go and quit.
I couldn’t remember ever feeling this discouraged and unsettled. The walls seemed to move in on me and sheets of flash jumped out like demons. Daggers through hearts and skulls, gravestones, skeletons, evil animals and ghastly ghouls played “Ring Around the Rosie” with me.
“Why do people want to wear death?” I raised my voice and Taxi raised her head. “Isn’t living with it enough? Why would someone want to spend the rest of his life looking at death on his arm?”
Pit shrugged and didn’t seem bothered in the least that I was questioning his art.
“See,” he said, “when you think about it, Doc, there’s nothing to fear but fear. So people want death tattoos so they won’t be afraid of death. It’s kind of like people who are terrified by snakes and then touch one in the zoo. In a way, you wear death every day, too,” he said to me. “Don’t you think you might fear it more if you didn’t look at it every day?”
I didn’t know how to answer that.
“See, you got a piece of a dead person’s skin in that jar and you’re not afraid of it,” he went on. “But someone else walking in here and seeing that would probably scream or puke. Now, I’m no psychologist”—he vigorously chewed gum—“but there’s something real important behind what someone chooses to have permanently drawn on his body. So you take this dead guy? That owl says something about him. What went on inside him. Most of all, what he was scared of, which may have more to do with whatever’s under that owl.”
“It would seem that quite a lot of your clients are afraid of voluptuous naked women,” I commented.
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