“That’s all right. That would be good. I need that.”
*
I was getting way more sex than I deserved. Amanda was wonderful, different from Cecilia, and that made me feel embarrassed about Cecilia. On the second go-round, I shut my brain off and just enjoyed.
“You were different,” she said.
“Hmm?”
I was halfway between sleep and nirvana.
“I said, you were different. What changed?”
“What changed when?”
“When you hugged me the second time?”
“Oh, I guess I turned my brain off.”
“I’ll remember that. Keep the man’s brain turned off.… Want to take a shower?”
“Sure. I’ll be right in.”
I dozed off, then Amanda was shaking me urgently.
“Sebastian. On TV—quick!”
Struggling out of my cocoon, I heard the news before I saw the pictures. An old black Ford pickup truck on U.S. 36, just south of Boulder, shot up by a passing vehicle. A middle-aged male driver and his female passenger killed.
I shot bolt upright, totally awake and adrenaline pumping. Amanda was sitting on the bed, one towel wrapped around her wet hair, a second coming loose over her breasts. On the TV, video showed a pickup truck that was a dead ringer for the F-150 parked outside our hotel door; it lay crushed on its top, broken furniture scattered around it. A camouflage tarp, like the new one covering my camping gear in the bed of my truck, lay in shreds with one corner still tied to the truck.
My pursuers had caught up with us and killed the wrong couple. The names of the victims were being withheld pending notification of their next of kin, but they were Boulder locals.
The killers would know by now they had made a mistake and resume their search. Amanda and I spoke in unison.
“We have to get out of here.”
Our weeks of living together had us finishing each other’s thoughts and sentences. We would have to talk more about her decision to force me from her life, but for now, it was clear I was back in it.
“Grab your stuff,” I said, pulling on my pants. “I’ll get the tarp off the truck.”
“Wait. That makeup on your cheek is hideous. Let me get it off. We can figure a better way to cover up the tattoo.”
“Just hurry.”
Chapter 40
Hide and Seek
Boulder, with its crowds of people, seemed the least bad of our options, and we angled northwest on side roads, alert to black SUVs with tinted windows.
At a Dollar Holler store on the north side of the college town, Amanda shopped while I stayed out of sight in the truck. She bought a blue tarp to replace the camouflage one we ditched at the hotel and filled a backpack with clothes and other essentials for herself.
I still had about half of my $5,000 bug-out stash, but with two of us using it—and Amanda was unlikely to live on canned SpaghettiOs and camp meals like I did—we’d be needing more, and soon. I added that to my list of worries.
We debated, in a friendly way, our next steps. I had to do something about hiding the tattoo. Amanda suggested finding someplace to buy theater-grade makeup as a short-term remedy. She pulled her smart phone from her purse to look for the cosmetics, and we stared at one another in amazement. That’s how they found us. Her phone was still on, beaming our location into the ether. I swerved to the side of the road, took the phone from her, ripped the battery from the back, and handed it back to her.
“We have to change direction right now,” I said.
“Sebastian, I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it. Shit happens. We need to get into a crowd.”
I floored the truck and aimed for the Pearl Street pedestrian mall, a four-block strip in Boulder that was pretty much always packed with humanity.
That should cover our movements for a little while.
We found a parking spot on a side street just two blocks off Pearl. It was perfect: No street light, and my truck, when parked, would be facing away from the pedestrian mall. I swung the pickup in a U-turn and backed into the slot. “You see if you can find some makeup. I’ll scout around for a tattoo parlor and someplace to grab a quick dinner,” I said.
She shook her head.
“Sebastian, I’m an encumbrance. You should leave me here. I can rent a car and go back to Denver. If they’re tracing my phone, I can get a new battery and they can follow me while you escape.”
“No,” I said. It was as simple as that.
I pulled one of my throwaway phones out of the glove box and put a battery in it. Then I programmed in the number of the cell phone I was carrying.
“If something happens, hit number five. If you get a call on this, it’ll be me.”
“All right. I’m sorry,” she said.
“Shh.”
She leaned over and kissed me, got out of the truck and walked down the sidewalk toward Pearl Street, looking classier than any woman has a right to. I followed a few moments later.
I strolled up one side of the pedestrian mall and down the other, passing galleries and chichi restaurants, but not one tattoo parlor. I figured we would have to cruise the area around the University of Colorado campus to find a tattoo parlor.
In just under a half-hour, I spotted Amanda coming out of Lilly’s in the Valley, the kind of store I have never been in. When I caught up with her, she kissed my good cheek. She led me back toward the pickup and into a cheap Chinese restaurant off Pearl Street for dinner. Amanda loved it, but as someone who’d lived in Asia for years, I missed the flavor in this so-called Chinese food. I made do.
Over dinner, I laid out my plan to get Amanda’s feedback: Buy a cowboy hat to shadow my tattoo. Visit a tattoo parlor and see what can be done. Beat it out of town in a direction to be determined. Call Mike Owens from the road.
She agreed. If for some reason the tattoo shop didn’t work out, she had several makeup options. I was appalled at the cost. Tiny bottles of skin-colored mud cost $100 and more.
“Sebastian, you are so innocent about some things,” she said.
“I would love to sit here all night long learning things from you, but we have to move.”
“Would you really like to spend time together?”
Her voice sounded uncertain.
“If we survive this little adventure…” I saw the hope in her lovely green eyes.
“If you can tolerate me as I am, I’ll never leave.”
She leaned over the table, grabbed my face in both hands, and planted an obscenely wonderful kiss on my lips.
“Let’s go find you a hat, cowboy. Then a hotel.”
We found a Western clothing store, and I tried on every extra-large hat they had before picking a round-topped one with a slouching brim. It made me look like Mongo in Blazing Saddles; it also cast a deep shadow over my face.
*
Around 8:30, we returned to the pickup and set out to find a tattoo parlor. Trying not to run over jaywalking college kids, I drove south on Broadway Street, which runs along the west side of the UC campus. Never having gotten a tattoo—before Borneo, that is—I wasn’t quite sure how to select a place. After passing several, I spotted one that had a parking space a few doors down.
“This look okay to you?” I asked Amanda.
“Whatever you say, cowboy.” She smiled.
The place was called “Boards, Bikes, Tattoos,” which I thought was an odd combination. As we approached it, however, I got it: A half-dozen teenagers with huge skateboards in their hands stood out front watching a kid balance a bike on its front wheel. He made it look safe as well as easy. It was neither.
We entered the store where three skateboarders were chatting up the guy behind the counter. Despite a lot of exposed skin, I could see no untattooed body part on any of them. This was the place for sure.
When we walked in, the three guys gave us the evil eye and left, telling “Bradley” they would see him around.
The kid—and he was just a kid, no
t yet voting age, I was sure—registered surprise.
“Hi. We’re about ready to close,” he said, “but I have time to answer any questions you might have.”
A polite high school kid named Bradley with tattoos from his knuckles to his neck. I figured he lived in the suburbs with his mom and dad and drove a soccer-mom minivan to his after-school job.
“Do you do tattoos?” I said, feeling ridiculous at the question.He looked at his arms and then at me.
“Um, yeah,” he said.
Amanda stepped in.
“I believe he means do you actually perform the tattooing?”
The kid addressed himself to Amanda.
“Oh, yeah. My parents own the shop, but I do the work,” he said.
“Did you do those skateboarders? The designs were incredibly complex,” Amanda said.
How did she notice? “I did some of them. Some of them are fixes. There are a lot of bad tats out there,” the kid said.
“Aren’t there?” she said.
What did she know about tattoos? Amanda was old enough to be the kid’s mother, and he was treating her like a pal. I realized I needed to get out with her more often. She had depths I had not yet plumbed.
“You’re Bradley?” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Hi, I’m Mandy. And this is Tom.” She turned to me, making things up as she went along. “Is there anything you can do with him? I don’t think I can date a man with that on his cheek.”
“You date?” he asked.
The kid tried to recover from his ageist gaffe.
“Um. Let’s see. Wow. Where did you get that?”
He removed my new hat and placed it on the counter. He turned my right cheek into the light and stroked the skin in a totally professional way. I wondered what the demon thought about this. I felt like blushing.
“That is—wow! I have never seen anything this good. But it’s deep. It looks deep. Did it hurt?”
“More than you can imagine,” I said.
“I’ll bet it did,” he said. “Where did you get it?”
“It’s a long story, and I obviously wasn’t in complete control, so let that be a lesson to you, young man,” I said, playing the old guy card. “Is there some way to cover it up, make it look like a skin deformity or something? Anything but what it is.”
The kid looked at me funny.
“You want to cover it up?”
“Let’s just say it wasn’t my idea,” I said. “It attracts a lot of attention that I’m not comfortable with, and I’d much rather look like a leper than keep this thing.”
“Wow. Too bad, ’cause it’s a real nice piece of work.”
“It’s a little too special for my tastes. Can you do anything?”
“Tom,” Amanda said, addressing me. “Don’t push Bradley. Artists don’t like that.”
The kid beamed.
“Yeah. I can do something,” he said. “Let me think about it. It’s too late to work on it now. I’m going to need a chunk of time. Can you come back tomorrow night? Oh, no. I’m not working tomorrow night. How about the night after? That will give me time to come up with a real good design for you. I’ll have to do some research on the colors. That’s so deep. How did they do that?”
“As I said, it’s a long, painful story. Listen, can we do it sooner? She won’t, you know, uh… we’re just passing through on our way to Vegas and she won’t, you know…”
The kid imagined more than I was suggesting and blushed in embarrassment. I was more than a little grossed out myself.
“Tom, you can be so crude,” Amanda said.
She meant it to be a putdown, but her eyes were laughing at the two embarrassed males in front of her.
“I didn’t mean that,” I said. “I just want to have Bradley here work his magic so we can get to Vegas and…”
“Tom, stop it.”
“So, Bradley, how about if I offer you $100 above your normal price to do it first thing tomorrow? Maybe before the other shops along here open up?”
The kid was clearly glad to be discussing something other than old-people intimacy.
“Yeah, I can skip my morning classes,” he said. “I just have history and English and crap like that. I don’t have art and design until the afternoon. Let’s meet here at, say, 7:30. Maybe you could bring coffee and donuts.”
“That sounds like a wonderful idea,” Amanda said. “I’d love to watch an artist at work.”
The kid blushed again.
“What kind of coffee do you like?” she asked.
“Starbucks. Grande. Mocha cappuccino, half-latte, half-soy with chocolate sprinkles.”
“How about donuts?”
“Anything but cake. I’m all about the sugar,” he said.
“Great. We’ll find a LaMar’s Donuts, too.”
“That would be cool. Tomorrow is going to take a while. Plan on being here till noon or so. And I’m thinking it’s going to cost about $350, $400, uh, plus the bonus.”
I practically swallowed my tongue.
“Three hundred and…”
“Oh, you must be giving us a discount,” Amanda said.
“Well, I like a challenge, and this is going to be a challenge,” he said.
“Bradley, will cash be all right?”
“Cash? Sure. I can offer you a 10 percent discount for cash.”
The kid was a businessman as well as an artist. What was I doing when I was his age?
“Wonderful,” Amanda said. “We’ll meet you at 7:30 tomorrow morning with a Starbucks grande mocha cappuccino, half-latte, half-soy with chocolate sprinkles, and lots of sugary donuts,” Amanda said.
“Cool. I’ll be here. Oh, uh, sir. This could be painful, you know, since it’s your face and all. You might want to take some aspirin or Tylenol before you come in.”
“Okay, whatever you say, doc.”
He smiled a nice kid smile. I would have to revise my thinking about young people who have tattoos.
“How do you do it?” I said, as we walked away.
“What? Intrigue boys?”
“No. I know how you do that. How do you remember a coffee order like that? That’s not coffee. That’s a milk shake,” I said.
“Sebastian, we need to get you out more.”
“Coffee, black. That’s what coffee is. Not mocha chocha latte soy.”
“You’re showing your age, grandpa.”
“I’m feeling it. And five hundred bucks for some ink and a bunch of needle stings. We already spent four hundred on the hat. We’ll be broke by the weekend at this rate.”
“Do you want to cover up that tattoo?”
Whump. Just like that. Back to reality.
I scanned the college crowd around us.
“Yeah. Let’s get out of here. I don’t think the cowboy hat works.”
Of course, I thought as I steered Amanda to the truck. Stupid again. Two older people, obviously not parents and not professors. We stuck out in the teenaged crowd. Would I learn to avoid trouble before I got myself—and Amanda—killed?
Chapter 41
Empaya Iba
We pulled up to the front door of Boards, Bikes, Tattoos promptly at 7:30 after cruising the neighborhood. Bradley stood waiting beside a white minivan. We saw no one else. The boarders, bikers and tattooed college kids were apparently sleeping in.
The kid unlocked the shop door and held it open.
As he and Amanda talked designs, I took a seat on one of the black padded tables in the back, my mind miles away, trying to figure out an escape route, how to ditch the truck, how to get more money. The walls were closing in. We were out of good options. Hell, we were out of bad options.
Bradley came over, tattoo gun in hand, and I lay back on the table. He touched the tattoo gently, and I felt a stinging electrical charge that brought it all back, the excruciating pain of my initial experience.
“Wow, you’re tense,” he said. “Don’t be nervous.”
He touched my face aga
in, and we both cried out in shock.“Must be static electricity,” he said and reached into a supply closet and pulled out a rubber floor pad. “That should do the trick.”
I had my doubts, but the third time he touched me, nothing happened. I let out the breath I’d been holding.
“This might hurt,” he said, considering my face, “but nothing like the original tat. A lot of this is really close to the bone. It’s too bad your cheeks aren’t fatter.”
He was totally absorbed, like a doctor talking out loud as much for his benefit as for mine.
“I’m going to try a little patch along your hair line, see how it goes, and how well it will cover the old tat.”
“Okay,” I said.
His machine buzzed, and I felt the first tiny pin pricks, trying hard to hold my head still and keep my breath steady. Then everything exploded. I saw stars, and Bradley flew back. He dropped the tattoo gun and slid to the floor.
Amanda screamed.
“Sebastian, do something!” She looked at me, her eyes wide with fear. “The spider web. It’s on fire.”
My skin burned worse than anything I’d experienced in Borneo, but I had to do something about the kid.
Bradley lay against the bottom shelves of his workbench, his legs splayed and his head lolling on his chest. I patted his cheek until his eyes fluttered open.
“What—what happened?” he said.
“Your gun, it must have shorted out.”
“I’m sorry,” he said groggily, climbing to his feet. “That’s never happened before.”
He shook his head, and his eyes tried to focus on mine.
“I’ve got another gun,” he said. “I’ll try that.”
“Don’t worry about it, kid,” I said. “I’m done with tattoos. How about if I give you the hundred and we call it even?”
“No, you don’t have to do that,” he said. “I didn’t do anything…”
Dazed as he was, I knew he thought something was off about this. I pressed the money into his hands.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Yeah, sure.”
Amanda and I slipped out the door. I scanned the street, but it was still early, still dead quiet.
“What happened, Sebastian?” Amanda said, her hand on the truck door. I shook my head. “It was the spider, wasn’t it?”“Yeah, I’m pretty sure it was Empaya Iba making an appearance,” I said.
The Mark of the Spider: A Black Orchid Chronicle Page 21