He finished the eyebrow, paused, pursed his lips like a jeweler contemplating a cut, then thickened the line a little. He was good, he had moves, at least when it came to ink. He probably thought that he had all sorts of moves.
“What about her cheeks?” he asked. “They as high as they look or do you want me to flatten them down?”
“Cheekbones are fine. Work on the hair.”
He nodded. The hair was short and kinky. There was enough there for him to continue the shape and style. With every sting of the needle I felt a knife turn in my heart. There was a big bell ringing, deep and slow, in the back of my head. The echoes hurt like punches. I was sweating now and it took everything I had to keep it off my face and out of my voice.
“So this chick,” he said, “she your sweetheart or what?”
He was maybe trying to make conversation, maybe fishing for information.
“Never actually met her,” I said.
The needle paused, hovering like a hornet above my skin. “What?”
Instead of answering I said, “Do the lips.”
He studied me for a moment, his eyes coming in and out of focus. “Um…” he said, but left it there. Cajun Joe did a last touch on the hair, wiped the blood, and shifted to focus on the mouth. It was almost the last part of the image that would really matter. He started to work, stopped, bent to peer closer.
“Can’t tell how they’re supposed to be,” he said.
“Full.”
“What?”
“She had very full lips.”
Something about that troubled him, I could see it on his face. But he said nothing as he dipped into the cup for more ink and started to shape the lips.
I wondered if she would scream when they were done. I might.
But I decided, no. The nose was the last thing. After that…well, all bets were off after that.
The lips changed the whole picture, though.
“She looks…” he began, but didn’t finish it. His eyes were locked on the image. It was more than a picture. It was becoming the portrait it was meant to be. Dark eyes, short hair, good lines. Not beautiful by Hollywood standards. Beautiful by human being standards, but I doubted Cajun Joe was capable of grasping that.
Something was getting through to him, though.
I smiled through the pain. “Be careful, man, your hands are shaking.”
He stopped abruptly, loaded more ink, but was looking at me. Hard. “You fucking with me, man?”
“No,” I lied. “Just want to get this done and get on my way.”
So many expressions came and went on his face. Doubt, anger, fear, confusion. Mixtures and combinations of those and more. He absolutely knew something was hinky about all this. Knew it. And he knew that I knew he knew it. It was like that, but we hadn’t broken through the fourth wall, yet. We were still actors playing out the roles assigned us by our shared participation in the drama of daily, ordinary life.
That wall was crumbling, though. With every drop of ink he drilled into my skin it was crumbling. And with every drop I was getting closer to the truth. Soon I was going to know. Soon it was going to be certain. Either he was the guy or he wasn’t.
Right now, though, his doubt was holding that wall in place. He hadn’t flipped into an open and obvious knowing. There was no guilt in his eyes. Not yet.
That needed more ink.
So I waited while he thought about it, waited while he decided to go back to the job. Watched and waited while he finished the lips.
“The nose,” I said. “That’s the last part.”
There was very little to the nose. I’d left that part intentionally vague. Patty had understood when she did her part. The nose would clinch it, even in a black and white tat.
“What kind of nose does he have?” he asked. Was there a crack in his voice? Was it a little hoarse?
I couldn’t tell.
Almost, but not quite.
“Short nose,” I said, touching my arm to indicate where it should end. “Long philtrum. You know what a philtrum is? The gulley under the nose?”
“Yeah,” he said softly. “I know.”
“Long philtrum. Pretty deep, too.”
He cleared his throat. “And her nose?”
“Do the other part first.”
He did. It hurt. I bled. We both sweated. The room was cold but we both had lines running crookedly down our faces. He had a drop hanging from the point of his chin.
It seemed to take forever to finish the gulley above those full lips.
“Now the nose,” I said, and I traced it on my skin with the tip of my index finger. “This long. Wide. Kind of flat from where she got it broken when her first husband knocked her around. Never set right.”
Sweat ran like hot mercury down his face.
“The fuck is this?” he asked.
“It’s a tattoo,” I said. “Finish the nose and then I’m gone.”
He began to work on it, but his hands were shaking pretty bad. It wasn’t going to be his best work and I’d have to wear it for the rest of my life. Life sucks in a lot of ways and that part wasn’t anything major. I could see the muscles at the corner of his jaw bunching and I knew he was getting mad, too.
Mad was okay. We could work with it.
He worked on the nose, following my directions and suggestions. The more it took form the slower he worked. The nose made the face, you see. It pulled all of the parts together. It made it a very specific kind of face. Even in black and white. Even without the dark brown skin and the darker brown eyes that she had when she was alive. That nose and those lips turned the face from generic woman to black woman.
That’s what he realized as he worked.
I watched him to see what that realization would do to him. That he was a racist dickhead was evident from the 88 and 14 tats. But being a racist dickhead isn’t enough. Free country, free speech and all that shit. I don’t go hunting for everyone whose philosophy pushes my ideological buttons. I’m not a fanatic and I’m not a sociopath.
I’m something else, and that something else needed this guy to be a very specific kind of racist dickhead.
I needed him to look at that face and do more than realize he was inking the features of an African-American woman on a customer’s arm. Again, that was nothing. Like me, he probably inked all sorts of shit he didn’t believe in. Nature of the game in a free country.
I’m not an artist but I’ve had enough tattoos to know something about it. There is a point when a collection of lines and curves stops being arranged ink and becomes an actual piece of art. I think it’s when the subject matter comes into true alignment with the artist’s technique. It’s a kind of magic. The image becomes real, and when you look at it you’re not seeing a painting or a drawing or a tattoo. You’re not even seeing the stylized version of it that has been filtered through the artist’s talent. You’re seeing the actual thing. Look at Van Gogh’s Café Terrace at Night and tell me you can’t hear the sounds of laughter and conversation, of coffee cups clinking on saucers, of cutlery tinking against plates or scraping on teeth, of the gurgle of wine as it’s poured into glasses. Tell me you can’t smell that wine, and the bread, the cheese, the meats. I can look at that painting, even a copy of it, and smell cigarette smoke, perfume, and fresh-cooked fish. Same goes for when I look at Gauguin’s Tahitian Women on the Beach. If you can’t smell coconut oil on warm skin and hear the soft crash and hiss of the surf then you have no soul.
When Cajun Joe finished the last part of the nose, joining the lines that formed the right nostril, the face on my arm became a person. A woman. Not the representation of a murdered woman, but her. Actually her. Alive. Not in the way she had been before she’d been beaten and raped and slashed to red ruin. And not a ghost version of her. When I looked down at her face I saw the essential woman. The truth of her. The reality of her.
It was so powerful because that acceptance of her kicked open a door in my head and my heart. Kicked it off the hinges and let all
of her life pour into me. From the moment she woke up in her mother’s womb until they zipped her into a body bag. I saw all of her life. It hit me in a rush and it feels like having forty-eight years of joy, pain, understanding, love, passion, ennui, compassion, dislike, hatred, giddiness, pity, and ten thousand other emotions shoved into me through that five-inch tattoo. I mainlined her entire life and the inrush nearly tore me apart.
All of the seventeen thousand five hundred and twenty days of her life.
How many emotions does a person experience in an average day? How many in each hour? If it was even possible for a person to feel only two different emotions in any given hour that meant that eight-hundred and forty-thousand individual needles of awareness stabbed into me.
In five or ten seconds.
I threw my head back and screamed.
What else could I do?
Cajun Joe staggered backward from his chair, his needles and the pots of ink falling and tumbling, clinking and splashing. I was aware of it but didn’t see it. Not really. All I could see was the woman’s life. Rushing, whirling, tumbling, kicking, slashing as it whirled around in my head.
And then the images suddenly slowed, crystalized as they do every time I go through this. First it’s the tsunami of their life’s emotions and then…then…
And then it’s the memories of what happened in those last few moments of her life. Those last terrible moments.
The hands grabbing her as she pulled the kitchen door closed and stepped into the darkened parking lot behind the club. Her ring of keys—the bar key, her car key, her house key—tinkled to the blacktop. Hands on her. An arm around her neck to choke off her screams. Another hand reached around, clamped on her stomach to pull her backward from the security light, into the shadows. Turning her, slapping her, a fist driving into her stomach, knocking the air and the hope from her. The hands grabbing cloth, ripping, exposing.
Lips on her flesh. Lips forming words. Hateful words. Calling her a bitch, a whore, a nigger slut as he ripped her clothes and forced her down and swarmed over her like a blanket of hate.
She’d fought him.
She was a woman who worked nights and worked in a club that wasn’t in the best part of town. She had pepper spray in her bag, but her bag was gone. She tried to punch, to claw, to bite. She fought to live. For her kids. For her sisters of color who had been consumed by monsters of this kind for hundreds of years. For women of every kind. For her own life.
And the man—if that word even fits—laughed at her and took her over and over again. Hitting her, breaking her. Destroying her.
What was left after the rape was unable to even move. Totally unable to fight.
The knife hadn’t been necessary.
Except it had.
In that last moment, while she lay already dying, she had seen the face of the man who had done this. His face. His clothes.
And his tattoos.
88.
The world spun and spun around me but I forced myself back into the moment. Even with her screaming in my head, I returned to who and what I was, and why I was there.
Cajun Joe stared at me and at her. I knew he could see her face on my arm, but more importantly he could see her soul in my eyes.
He was sweating and shaking. Equal parts terror and rage. And hate. Let’s not forget the hate. Lots of hate in that room.
“What the fuck are you?” he breathed.
I said, “My name is Denita King.”
It was my voice but it wasn’t me speaking.
Cajun Joe had a switchblade in his hand. I hadn’t even seen him pull it. Four-inch blade, glistening with oil. Sturdy, good for fighting.
I smiled at him as I got up out of the chair.
It may have been Mrs. King who’d spoken with my mouth, but that smile was all my own. My hands were my own. My fingers, my fists.
He screamed so loud and he screamed for a long time.
-5-
Back at my place. In my room with all the windows painted black. Lying in bed, praying for sleep, knowing it wouldn’t come. Not unless I drank all the lights out.
It’s hard to sleep in such a crowded room.
They’re always there. Always standing around my bed. Pale faces, gray faces. Most of them are silent. They stand there and stare at me, and sometimes at their own faces on my skin.
Mrs. King was there now. She wasn’t silent. She was one of the screamers. She’d loved being alive. She’d loved her kids. And she fought so damn hard.
She screamed.
And she’d scream like that every night for as long as I lived. That was the price and we’d both been willing to pay it.
God damn it.
My name is Gerald Addison. Most people call me Monk.
Tomorrow I’ll get up, get washed, and maybe I’ll spend the day chasing a bail skip. Or maybe a client will find me.
I lay there at night and listen to the screams.
As the night closes around me like a fist.
JONATHAN MABERRY is a NY Times bestselling novelist, five-time Bram Stoker Award winner, and comic book writer. He writes the Joe Ledger thrillers, the Rot & Ruin series, the Nightsiders series, the Dead of Night series, as well as standalone novels in multiple genres. His novels include KILL SWITCH, the 8th in his best-selling Joe Ledger thriller series; VAULT OF SHADOWS, a middle-grade sf/fantasy mash-up; and MARS ONE, a standalone teen space travel novel. He is the editor of many anthologies including THE X-FILES, SCARY OUT THERE, OUT OF TUNE, and V-WARS. His comic book works include, among others, CAPTAIN AMERICA, the Bram Stoker Award-winning BAD BLOOD, ROT & RUIN, V-WARS, the NY Times best-selling MARVEL ZOMBIES RETURN, and others. His books EXTINCTION MACHINE and V-WARS are in development for TV/film. A board game version of V-WARS was released in early 2016. He is the founder of the Writers Coffeehouse, and the co-founder of The Liars Club. Prior to becoming a full-time novelist, Jonathan spent twenty-five years as a magazine feature writer, martial arts instructor and playwright. He was a featured expert on the History Channel documentary, Zombies: A Living History and a regular expert on the TV series, True Monsters. He is one third of the very popular and mildly weird Three Guys With Beards pop-culture podcast. Jonathan lives in Del Mar, California with his wife, Sara Jo. www.jonathanmaberry.com
Jonathan Maberry, Whistling Past the Graveyard
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