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The client had entered Skin Art by Raoul six weeks ago. The tattoo artist was alone in the back room, sanitizing equipment and preparing to close for the evening when he’d walked into the reception area. Though the door rang when opened, the bell had not sounded. Yet a man stood in the center of the Oriental carpet, utterly still, eyes staring into Herrera’s eyes, as if knowing the precise space the tattooist would occupy.
Herrera’s heartbeats accelerated. There was nothing but night outside his window and the neighborhood was dangerous in the dark. He kept a .38 pistol in back and Herrera mentally measured his steps to the gun.
“I’m closed,” he said.
The man seemed not to hear. He looked in his mid-thirties, hard-traveled years, lines etched into his angular face, his eyes tight and crinkled, as though he’d spent a lifetime squinting into sunlight. He was small in stature, wearing battered Levis and a faded Western-style shirt with sleeves rolled up over iron-hard forearms. His face was small and flat and centered by a nose broken at least once, the hair a tight cap of coiled brown that fell low on his forehead and gave a simian cast to his features. His eyes were the color of spent briquettes of charcoal.
“I said I’m done for the day, man,” Herrera repeated. “Come back tomorrow.”
Again, the man seemed deaf to Herrera’s words. Work-hardened hands unfolded a sheet of paper and held up a richly detailed illustration of Jesus inked into a man’s bicep, a work by Herrera that had been featured in a tattoo artists’ publication.
“Did you do this?” the man said. “Do you claim it yours?”
“It’s my work. Why?”
“It ain’t quite real yet, is it?”
Despite his uneasiness, Herrera felt his ability challenged. “You won’t find better, mister. Not that I figure you could afford it.”
The man balled the page and tossed it to the floor. “It ain’t there yet. It looks like Him. But He ain’t in it.”
Meaning Jesus.
“Use the door, mister,” Herrera said. “I’m closed.”
Eyes locked on to Herrera, the man turned to the sign switch and flicked off the neon display. He pushed the door closed and set the lock. Herrera inched closer to his gun. The man lifted his hands.
“I mean you no harm. Look here …”
The man eased a hand into his pocket and produced a roll of paper money. He crossed to the artist, took Herrera’s hand and pressed the roll into his palm.
“Count it up.”
Herrera did. Over five thousand dollars in fresh, clean bills.
The new client pushed through the beaded curtain to the work area in back and the tattoo artist followed. The man withdrew his tails from his pants, unbuttoning the shirt and throwing it to the floor. He turned to display his back, wide at the shoulders, narrow at the waist. When he moved, the muscles twitched with sudden electricity, as if hidden power had been awakened. The man sat in the tattooing chair and stared over his shoulder at Herrera.
“Turn a mirror so I can see. This time you gonna get it right.”
Herrera shook his head. “That’s not how it works. I make drawings. Get your approval.”
The man closed his eyes and retreated inside his head. After several long moments he nodded. “That makes sense.”
“You want me to do Jesus, I take it?” Herrera asked.
“The back of His head from the bottom of my neck down. His exact size and as real as His tribulation.”
“How do I know if I’m representing the, uh, subject correctly?”
“He’ll guide your hand,” the man said, meaning Jesus.
Herrera had felt no hand but his own on the needles through a dozen sessions, but something seemed to have driven him to a greater height of art than ever before. The back of Christ’s head appeared dimensional, a tumble of brown and shadow starting at the base of the client’s neck and feathering out on his lower spine. The crown of thorns seemed so real that wearing a shirt would be impossible, the fabric tearing on the horrific spikes, stained by the bright blood dripping down curling locks of tangled hair. The project was beautiful and awesome and terrible in equal measure.
And now it was complete.
The man stood from the chair and reached for his shirt. When he turned toward Herrera the tattooist’s breath froze in his throat. A gulley had been cut into his customer’s chest, an inch-wide strip of flesh and tissue running from below one flat nipple to the other. It was a recent wound, the furrow red and puckered and weeping yellow fluid. Herrera swallowed hard, wondering if the visor-like cut went all the way to bone.
“Um, what happened there?” he asked.
The man pulled on his shirt and left the top half unbuttoned, the raw slit visible in the V. His dead-charcoal eyes bored into Herrera and he shook his head like the tattoo artist was the village idiot.
“He’s gotta be able to see out now, don’t He?”
Meaning Jesus.
2 (#ulink_334340ed-f59b-5bd1-af20-a35c4d80c5b1)
Mobile, Alabama. Mid May
“Carson. Yo, brother. Wake up.”
“Mmmf,” I said, trying to slap a big hand shaking my shoulder. I missed and slapped my own cheek.
“Come on, Cars … time to get hoppin’ and boppin’.”
The only reason I opened my eyes was because I smelled bacon. Say what you will about alarm clocks, bacon is better. I looked up and saw blue sky filtered through tree branches. I tried to sit up, made it on the second try. I was in a lounge chair on Harry Nautilus’s back patio. The picnic table beside me looked like a launching pad for beer bottles. A pedestal fan on the patio was blowing air across me. Harry switched the fan off.
“Good morning, merry sunshine.”
I studied the chair beneath me, gave Harry a look.
“You fell asleep there, Carson. I kept the fan on you to keep the skeeters off.”
“A polite host would have carried me to a real bed and tucked me in.”
“A smart host would have coffee. And these.” His right hand held out a steaming mug and his left opened to display a half-dozen aspirin. I grabbed both, chewing the pills and washing the paste down with New Orleans-style coffee, brewed black with chicory and cut with scalded milk.
“Want a bacon-egg sandwich?” Harry said.
I shot a thumb up as Harry retreated into the kitchen and the previous night returned to me, the major scenes at least. Flanagan’s bar decked out for a party: blue balloons, two long tables weighted down with cookpots of chili and sandwich fixings – ham, turkey, barbecue, cheeses – plus bowls of chips and nuts and pretzels. A twelve-foot banner over the bar said simply, 436 is 10-7.
It meant badge number 436 was out of service. Harry was badge number 436.
It was his retirement party. A surprise, Harry lured there by me and Lieutenant Tom Mason, our long-time leader and apologist. I don’t often get misty-eyed, but when we’d walked into Flanagan’s and I saw the sign, it got a little blurry.
Harry was my best friend and had been my detective partner for years. It was Harry who’d convinced me to join the force when I was a twenty-seven-year-old slacker wondering what to do with a Masters Degree in Psychology gained by traveling to every max-security prison in the South and interviewing homicidal maniacs.
Harry was ten years older than me, a year and some shy of fifty. He’d started on the force young, and when adding in unused sick and vacation days, plus time credits when he’d been injured in the line of duty, it added up to thirty years in service, all but five of them in Homicide.
The bash at Flanagan’s had been an alcohol-fueled semi-riot. Harry was a legend in the MPD, and his friends had come to see him off, his enemies to make sure he was leaving. We’d stayed two hours, neither big on shoulder-to-shoulder crowds, slipping away to Harry’s place on the near-north side of Mobile, a trim bungalow in a quiet neighborhood overslung with slash and longleaf pines and the snaking branches of live oaks. His back yard was slender and long and landscaped with dogwoods and banks of azaleas. It was centered by a looming sycamore, from which Harry had strung a half-dozen bright birdhouses.
He’d fetched bottles of homebrew from his closet, channeled mix-tapes of Miles and Bird and Gillespie through the speakers, and we’d sat beneath a fat white moon and had our kind of party, long beer-sipping silences broken by stories from the streets, good and bad and blends of both.
Harry stepped out and handed me six inches of warmed French bread filled with scrambled eggs, bacon, melted cheddar and heavy lashings of Crystal Hot Sauce, and I went to work supplanting beer with food, something I probably should have done more of last night.
Harry’s eyes went to the bottle collection on the patio table.
“Happy to see you liked my homebrew.”
When I’d accepted the position in Florida, Harry’d started brewing beer, saying he needed something temperamental to work with now that I was gone. I’m pretty sure it was a joke.
“Great stuff,” I said. It truly was, but Harry mastered anything he did. “How much kick is in that freakin’ stout?”
“It’s about eight per cent alcohol.”
I shook my head. My brain didn’t rattle, the aspirin kicking in, along with snatches of last-night’s conversation.
“You’re really thinking about the job?” I asked, recalling one of our conversations. “You retire one week, take a new job the next?”
Harry slid a chair near and sat. He was wearing an electric orange shirt and sky-blue cargo shorts. His sockless feet crowded the size-thirteen running shoes, yellow. The colors were strident to begin with, and seemed neon against skin the hue of coffee with a teaspoon of cream.
“It’s hardly a job, Carson. I’ll be driving a lady around when she wants to go out. Sometimes her daughter comes along. It’s maybe ten hours a week. Did I mention the gig pays twenty clams an hour?”
“For turning a wheel? Now it’s making more sense.”
“Mostly it’s taking the lady shopping. Or to church, the hair stylist, doctor, stuff like that. The lady lives in Spring Hill, just a couple miles away. She calls, I’m there in minutes.”
“You didn’t say who the lady was.”
Harry’s turn to frown. “Can’t, Carson. It’s confidential, part of the agreement.”
“She’s in the Mafia?”
“It was her husband who hired me, actually. And no, he’s sort of on the side of the angels.”
“Who you think I’ll tell?”
“Sorry, Carson. I gave my word I’d be mum.”
That was that. Harry’s word was a titanium-clad guarantee of silence. I switched lanes. “The wife unfamiliar with the operation of automobiles?”
“I guess she can drive, but doesn’t like to.”
“Damn,” I said, “Harry Nautilus, chauffeur.”
“Driver,” he corrected.
3 (#ulink_42520312-2617-5a34-96f0-658202544a79)
I bought a Miami Herald for the flight and returned to Miami. The headlines hadn’t changed much since Friday: “No Progress in Menendez Murder”blared the main story, with another headline, inches below, saying “Miami Mourns Loss of Favored Daughter”.
Last Thursday had been a horror for local law enforcement. Roberta Menendez was an MDPD administrator who’d started as a beat cop, putting in eight years before a fleeing felon’s gunshot shattered her hip. Undaunted, she worked a desk at the department while pursuing a degree in accounting – delighted to find an unrealized ability with numbers – and becoming a supervisor in MDPD’s finances department. Balancing books was work enough, but Menendez gave her remaining time and talent to a host of social and charitable organizations throughout the region, helping volunteer organizations manage their finances on a professional level.
I’d met Roberta Menendez a couple of times, a stout and handsome woman with an unfailing smile and sparkling eyes. She had a gift for public speaking and was a flawless representative of the department.
Then, in the early hours of last Thursday, someone had broken into her home in the upper east side and put a knife in her upper abdomen. Robbery was ruled out because nothing seemed missing. The perp simply entered, killed, retreated.
It was a tragedy and I read for two minutes and set the paper aside, knowing the frustration taking place in local law enforcement, news outlets screaming for meat, leads going nowhere as live-wire electricity sizzled down the chain of command: Get this killer; get him now.
I hit Miami in mid afternoon, stopping at the downtown Clark Center before heading home to Upper Matecumbe Key. My boss, Roy McDermott, was at his desk rubber-stamping paperwork.
“Hey, Roy. Anything happening on the Menendez case?”
My boss frowned, a rare look; Roy normally resembled a magician who’d just finger-snapped a bouquet from thin air.
“Nada, Carson. MDPD’s working double shifts. They’re angry.”
“No doubt. We in?”
Roy tossed the stamp aside. “I’ve got Degan and Gershwin working with the MDPD, but everyone figures it’s MDPD’s baby, one of their own gone down. Even if our people figure it out, we’ll dish the cred to the locals. They need the boost.”
“You want me on Menendez?” I asked.
“You’re on something else,” he sighed. “Call Vince Delmara.”
Vince was a detective with MDPD, an old-school guy in his early fifties who believed in hunches and shoe leather. My call found him working the streets on the Menendez case and he asked could I meet him briefly at five, which meant Vince needed a Scotch.
We met at a hotel bar in Brickell, Miami’s financial district. Vince was dressed as always: dark suit, white shirt, bright tie and a wide-brimmed black felt Dick Tracy-style fedora, which he wore even when the temperature was a hundred in the shade. It kept the Miami sun from his face, Vince regarding sunlight as a cruel trick by the Universe. The bartender saw Vince and began pouring a Glenfiddich. I studied the taps and ordered a Bell’s Brown Ale. I started to pull my wallet but Vince waved it off.
“I’ve run a tab here since the Carter administration. You’re covered.”
I followed Vince to a booth in a far corner. There was a middling crowd, men and women in professional garb, dark suits prominent, few bodies overweight. The women tended to pretty, the men to smilingly confident. It reminded me of the book American Psycho and I wondered who kept an axe at home.
We sat and Vince set the fedora beside him on his briefcase. His hair was black and brushed straight back, which, with his dark eyes and prominent proboscis, gave him the look of a buzzard in a wind tunnel.
“You read the paper day before yesterday?” he asked.
“Out of town.”
Vince popped the clasps on his briefcase and handed me a folded Miami Herald.
“Page two, metro section.”
The table had a candle in a frame of yellow glass. I pulled it close to read five lines about a twenty-three-year-old prostitute named Kylie Sandoval found dead along a lonely stretch of beach south of the city.
“Sad, but not unusual, Vince.”
Vince rummaged in his briefcase and passed me a file. “Story’s missing a few details, Carson.” The file contained photos centering on a tubular black shape on sand studded with beach grass.
