So, yeah, a dickhead like Cajun Joe would probably carry a switchblade because those knives make a guy like him think he has a big dick, and it makes other people scared. Too many 1950’s gang flicks, too many movies since. People see a switchblade and they know they’re going to bleed. You don’t carry one to help you open packages or cut zip-ties. You carry one when you want to cut someone and you like seeing them get terrified as they realize what’s going to happen.
The tattoo artist stared at me, waiting for me to say something. I didn’t.
“How do I know this stuff is safe?” he asked.
I shrugged. “The fuck is it to you?”
Cajun Joe thought about that, gave a shrug of his own. “Okay,” he said.
“Okay.”
“What kind of art you want?”
I was wearing a black hoodie with the sleeves pulled down, the hood pulled up, the zipper halfway to my throat. That hid most of the art I already had.
“Need you to finish a piece,” I said. “Someone else started it but I need you to finish it.”
“Like doing my own stuff,” he said.
“You like getting paid?”
“Well…yeah.”
“That mean you’ll finish the tat?”
He considered me for a moment, nodded. “What’s the art?”
“A girl’s face,” I said and shoved up my left sleeve. My forearm is covered with faces. Girls and women, but also boys and men. So are my upper arms, chest, thighs, back. A lot of them. Nearly a hundred now, and plenty of room for more.
He grunted and gestured with the vial. “They’re all black and white. You thinking about adding color? If so, then I got to use something else than what you brought or they’re going to turn out like Indians.”
“It’s just the outline.”
I turned my arm to show him the face. It was three quarters done but there were bits missing. Part of the nose, some of the brow-shape, the corners of the mouth. Enough so that the face as it was looked generic. A woman. Not especially pretty, but female.
“It’s all in black,” he said. “It’ll wind up two-toned.”
I smiled. “That ink’ll dry dark.”
“It won’t,” he advised.
“It will.”
Cajun Joe frowned at the vial then cocked an eye at me. “You sure about that?”
“Dead certain.”
“Okay,” he said, giving me another and much more elaborate shrug. “It’s your skin, brother.”
I came real close to killing him right there and then. Some people can call me brother. Some can’t. He shouldn’t have.
-2-
When I took my hoodie off his eyes bugged at the faces already inked into my skin.
“That’s some collection,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“They all friends of yours?”
“Not really.”
“Movie stars…’cause some of them look familiar.”
“Do they?” I asked as I hung my hoodie over the back of an empty chair.
“A little familiar. Is that one that chick from the Mad Max film? Charlie Theory?”
“Charlize Theron?”
“Yeah.”
“No.”
“Oh,” he said. “She was hot in that flick, even if she had a robot arm.”
“It’s not Charlize Theron.”
“Looks like her.”
“Not really.” I touched the tattoo. The woman whose face was inked into the inside curve of my deltoid was named Molly Flanders. A great Irish name for a great Irish-American woman. Mother of two. R.N. at the E.R. over on the other side of Boundary Street. Dead now. Beaten to death by her husband because he wasn’t man enough to face losing his job and because Molly got between him and the kids every time he was drunk. Molly died and so did her husband. Two separate but related incidents. Both very violent. I was involved in one of them. I put the husband in the ground and made it hurt all the way. So, Molly was one of my people. One of the pale and quiet ones who come to see if they can hire me. I remember the first time I saw her, standing next to me at my corner booth at Dollar Bill’s Tavern. Standing there with her swollen face, smashed lips, broken teeth, and broken neck. I’d tried to talk her out of hiring me. Tried to explain how expensive it was. Not in dollars. In other ways. But…after he’d killed her, Molly’s rat-fuck husband had started in on the kids. One was in rehab now, learning to walk all over again. That was Kenny, ten years old and he’d never walk without leg braces. The little one, Lindsay, two, would have to figure out how to make the world work without being able to see it. Doesn’t take more than a drunk’s fist to do unfixable damage to a kid’s face.
Molly didn’t want to go into the dark without knowing her husband had paid, and paid hard. Going to jail wasn’t enough. Not after what he’d done to the kids.
You see, that’s how it usually works. The kind of clients who come looking for me don’t want revenge for themselves. The price is way too high for that. Way too fucking high. No, they want me to step in when their killer is hurting—or in Molly’s case has hurt—others. Sometimes they want me to stop the bad guy before he does something else to someone else. They want me to do what the cops, with all of their limited resources and rules, can’t. Or won’t.
When a client wants to hire me on those terms, it means that they are willing to pay the price. Not my day-rate, which is what I get paid to find bail-skips or take photos of philandering spouses. No, that kind of work is what I do for greasy lawyers and greasier bail-bondsmen. Like J. Heron Scarebaby and Iver Twitch—real names of a couple of lowlifes who hire me out for conventional gigs.
No, clients like Molly and a hundred others have to pay a higher price but it’s not to me. Not sure who they’re paying. Who we’re paying, because I owe something on that tab, too. Each time.
The price is a total bitch.
It’s an absolute monster. I’m not sure I’d have the courage to pay it myself if I was in their shoes. And I didn’t know about my debt until I took my first client. A village girl in Tibet who’d been gang-raped by Chinese soldiers. The same soldiers who’d raped seventeen other girls and killed six of them. The same soldiers who were garrisoned outside of her village. The village where the murdered girl had four sisters.
You see how it works?
I took that gig and hers was the first face inked onto my flesh. She’s there, a few inches from my heart. Half an inch from a bullet wound I got in Iraq.
The girl and I both paid the price. And every single goddamn night we pay a little more of it.
Now I was here at Switchblade Charlie’s. I watched Cajun Joe’s eyes as he studied the faces on my skin. I usually keep covered up, but enough people have seen me without a shirt for me to have a good read on how they react. Cajun Joe was surprised at the number of tats, confused at the theme, and disapproving of the skill. Patty Cakes is a great tattoo artist but I can’t always provide a photo to work from. Sometimes Patty doesn’t need one, not when she’s totally in the zone. Sometimes she does. The tattoo artist in Tibet didn’t. That girl had been his niece. We both wept and we both screamed at different times as he sank the ink onto my chest.
Cajun Joe told me to sit and when I did he moved a light on a flexible arm so that it bathed my arm. He bent and studied the partial tattoo.
“All you want is the lines connected?”
“Pretty much,” I said.
“This is nothing. Anyone could have done this shit. Ten, fifteen minutes.”
“I know.”
Without raising his head he glanced up at me. “But you were in the waiting room for two hours until I was free.”
“Sure.”
“Why me?”
“I heard you were the man for the job.”
He sat back and studied me for a moment, suspicion flickering in his eyes. “Says who?”
I shrugged. “People. I asked around. Your name came up.”
“Which people?”
“Hey, I came here f
or some ink, not to marry you,” I said. “I’ll pay the rate for a full tat.”
The suspicion lingered and he shook his head. “You running a game on me or something?”
“No games,” I said, and that was true enough. I wasn’t there to play. “Word is that you’re good and I don’t use second string artists.”
He glanced at the simplicity of the faces and maybe that’s when he took a longer, better look. They looked simple, but they weren’t. Not if you really looked at them. Patty Cakes did a lot of them and she has the touch. So did that guy at the Tibetan village. And Mama Jewel in New Orleans. And each of the artists who have left their mark on me. Maybe not the best fine-artists in the world, but when you look into the eyes of each of those faces and you pay attention, you understand why people say the eyes are the window of the soul.
He made a sound. Not quite a word, not quite a grunt. More like an expression of wonder. Like when you stare at an optical illusion and you suddenly see the hidden message and realize that it was there all the time. Only now you can see it.
“So,” I said, “are we good?”
He began nodding while still staring into the eyes of the dead faces on my skin. “Yeah,” he said, then he looked up at me. “Yeah, we’re good.”
-3-
I unwrapped a piece of Juicy-Fruit gum as I watched him pour some of the red juice in the vial into a little pot. He asked if it was okay for him to add some of his own ink and I said sure. The color of the mixture remained dark red, though, even after he mixed it fifty-fifty with black. That surprised him and he commented on it, asking again what was in that vial.
“It’s special sauce,” I told him as I put the stick of gum into my mouth. “What’s it matter?”
It was clear he wanted to object, but in the end the matter was decided by the money he’d make doing half a quick job.
“You paying in cash?” he asked.
And I knew I had him.
“Yeah. Small unmarked bills.”
We both had a chuckle over that. But he didn’t reach for the tools until I pulled out my wallet and counted out a stack of twenties thick enough to look interesting.
Only then did he set to work.
Most tattoo artists ask to see your I.D. State laws about verifying age and all, but I have a face like an eroded wall and I’ve been street legal for a lot of years. I look it. Besides, we both knew he was going to pocket whatever I paid him. That’s why he didn’t have me sign a waiver or provide my address and phone number. He could read enough about me to know that he shouldn’t bother.
I settled into the tattoo chair. His workspace was shared but right now we were alone. The place used to be an old-fashioned barbershop and they still had four chairs. Someone had hung tracks for partition curtains, but they were all pulled back. The lights were low except around Cajun Joe’s station, and the walls were covered with hundreds of designs. Books with thousands more. Devils and unicorns, pirate chicks and panthers, skulls and snakes. The usual shit. The stuff pinned to the wall behind Cajun Joe tended to have a rougher edge. Zombies with storm trooper helmets—and I’m not talking Star Wars. Swastikas and confederate flags. And all kinds of crosses, some of them on fire.
He swabbed my arm with alcohol and then ran a disposable razor over it to remove any hair stubble. I didn’t have much left on my arms.
A lot of tattoo studios use a thermal-fax to make their stencils. This saves the artist the time he’d normally spend tracing a piece of art you bring in. Patty uses one for goofy shit like when people want a celebrity’s signature or one of their own drawings. She never used one for the art she did for me, and since Cajun Jack was only finishing a face he didn’t have to. That allowed us to skip the step of having the scanned art transferred onto my skin.
Instead he began prepping his tattoo machine. He took the mixed ink and poured it into one of those tiny cups they call an ink cap. He selected his needles and tubes from their sterile pouches and placed them into their slots in the machine. Then he added clean, distilled water into a cup for cleaning the needles during the tattoo process.
Some people pass out during a tattoo job. Not from the pain but from panic. The sight of the needles freaks them out. Not me, though. But I could feel my heartbeat quicken. Soon, I knew, it would begin to race. I could almost feel the sweat lurking inside my pores, ready to pop.
For me it’s the actual pain. Not of the needle. Hell, no, that’s just skin pain. What the fuck’s that to someone like me? Who gives a small, cold shit about that.
No, it was part of the price I had to pay when I took a job. As the face stopped being a collection of lines and became a person, something in that person woke up. And it woke inside of me. It started like a fever and then it turned into a scream.
Hard to explain.
Hard to sit through.
Patty Cakes usually insists I put a leather strap between my teeth. Helps to keep me from screaming. Makes it easier for her to work, though…she’s very sensitive, you dig? Sometimes we both end up screaming.
Maybe Cajun Joe would end up screaming, too. Maybe we both would.
“How you want me to do this?” he asked. “You don’t have a picture of this broad. How am I supposed to know what she’s supposed to look like?”
“Connect the lines.”
“Not as easy as that,” he protested.
I had to work at it to keep the smile off my face. Not a happy smile. Not a friendly one, either. “I’m sure you’ll make it right,” I told him.
Cajun Joe took in a deep breath and exhaled through his nose. I was being weird and elusive and it was trying his patience. I saw his eyes click over to the money on the side table and then back to the half-finished face.
He held up the needle and gave me an inquiring uptick of his chin. I gave him a nod.
He began to work.
-4-
The face looked like nobody for a while.
But I could feel her waiting to be seen.
Cajun Joe started with the jaw because that was the easiest to figure out. Most of the lines were done and it was simply a matter of connecting the chin to the jaw. It hurt, but it was still skin pain. I chewed my gum. Salt helps with nausea but for me sugar helps with pain. This kind of pain. I sometimes went through a whole bag of M&M’s or a big box of Dots when Patty was doing a face. That sanded maybe ten percent off the top of what I felt. Small mercies, but in this world you got to take what you can get.
“Who is she?” he asked as he connected the jaw to the cheek.
“A woman.”
“I know that, but can you tell me something about her? Help me see her?”
Christ I wanted to grab the needle out of his hand and stab him with it. The only reason I didn’t is that I was not one hundred percent sure it was Cajun Joe I was looking for. After looking for two weeks he was at the top of my short list. Switchblade Charlie was on the list, too. And Bugsy the Mummy, another skin-jockey over on Shade Street, near that big club, Unlovely’s. I had to be sure because otherwise I’m as bad as them. I’m really cool with righteous rage and harsh justice and all that movie vengeance shit, but collateral damage isn’t in the game plan. Nor is an unfortunate accident. Making sure, being certain, makes this harder. It increases the risks, it ups the pain, and—for me and my client—it edges us closer to having to pay the whole ticket. If there was any way I could be certain without having the tattoo completed, then it would be a better end to the day. Not for Cajun Joe, mind you. But for my client. And for me.
Life is always a complicated motherfucker. Always, always, always.
So, sure, I decided to tell him something about her. Some of what I knew. But here’s the thing…I didn’t actually know everything. I wouldn’t ever get a full picture until there was…well…a full picture, you dig? All I had to work with was bits of memory. Tastes of it.
“She worked over on the west side,” I said. “In one of the clubs.”
“Waitress? Some of those bitches over there are
hot. And I mean smokin’.”
He worked on her eyebrow, matching the missing one to the other.
“Bartender?” he speculated. “She looks a little like this Italian girl who works at Sparky’s—”
“She’s not Italian.”
“Oh.”
“Not a bartender.”
“Oh.”
“Prep cook. Worked in the kitchen,” I said.
He finished the eyebrow. It was starting to hurt. A lot. I waited for my comment to catch up with him. “Worked? She’s not there anymore?”
“She moved on.”
He cut me a quick look. “Ran out on you?”
“She’s still around.”
He laughed. “Yeah, I guess so. I mean, why else would you ink her onto your arm if she’s gone, right?”
I said nothing. All of those faces, female and male, seemed to be looking at him. No, let me change that, they were looking at him. I could feel it. Feel them. In a strange way they were all there with me. Like they always are. I’m never really alone except when I go into my special quiet place inside. Meditation is the only thing that works better than sugar. It doesn’t stop the pain but it lets me be alone with my own thoughts. Right now, though, we were all watching Cajun Joe work.