The Missing Ink (14 page)

“I’m going to get something to eat and head home,” I said, spotting one of my favorite Mexican spots in a strip mall. So much for my civilized dinner. No time for that when I didn’t have much time. I made a sharp turn, irritating the guy behind me, who laid on his horn like there was no tomorrow.

I just waved at him, a little finger waggle.

“Listen, Joel, I’ll see you in the morning, okay? Tell Bitsy she’s doing a great job.”

“And Ace and I are not?” He was teasing me.

“Sure, you know you are,” I said, hitting END on the phone and getting out of the car.

I still glanced around furtively, like Matthew was going to jump out of the shadows from behind a car, but besides a family of four and a young couple who were also heading into the restaurant, there was no one else.

The flaky white fish accented with cilantro and wrapped in soft tortillas were to die for. I scooped up a generous bit of the salsa in crunchy chips that were obviously not store-bought. Throwing caution to the wind, I drank a Corona. I justified it by telling myself I’d been through a lot. Even with the beer, my meal didn’t cost ten dollars. Gotta love it.

Jeff Coleman’s shop was closed when I walked over from the motel parking lot. The sign in the window advertised that it was open, but the door was locked. I hooked my hands around my eyes and peered inside, seeing nothing but shadows.

“He’s out of town.”

The voice made me jump, and an elderly woman, tiny, maybe five feet tall but no taller, with her white hair piled on top of her head in a loose bun, stood behind me. Her sleeveless dress showed off swirls of ink on her arms, tattoo sleeves extending to her wrists, an elaborate design across her chest, and even more tats on her legs. She wasn’t blind to my scrutiny.

“Taught him everything he knows,” she said, indicating the shop.

“Jeff Coleman, you mean?”

She nodded, holding out her hand. “Sylvia Coleman.”

Coleman?

A slow smile spread across her face. “Yes, dear,” she said, answering my unasked question. “He inherited the business from me when I retired.” She pulled a key out of her pocket and stuck it in the door. “Might as well come in. It’s hotter than hell.”

We stepped inside, the air-conditioning making the hairs on my skin stand tall, but not in a bad way. Sylvia indicated I should follow her to the back of the shop, where she pushed back a curtain so I could go through. It was Jeff Coleman’s office, cluttered with stencils, flash, piles of boxes of baby wipes, latex gloves, and disposable needles. My eyes lingered on the latter. Maybe I should swipe some of them, see if they matched the one sticking in Matt Powell’s neck. A closer look, however, told me that they were the same brand I used, the same ones the cops had in my case. Figured.

“Sit,” Sylvia said as she plopped into a swivel chair behind the desk.

I obeyed her, balancing on the edge of a metal folding chair.

“I’m Brett—” I started.

“Oh, I know who you are. I keep tabs on everyone in this business in this town.” She may have been petite, but her voice was big. Like Bitsy’s. Maybe all little women felt they had to compensate. “Jeff said you probably would be coming around, which is why I’ve been keeping an eye out.”

Jeff knew I’d try to find him? Did that implicate him in any way? I still had more questions than answers.

Sylvia was still talking. “I’d tell you where he is, but we don’t know if we can trust you.”

When a second passed and she hadn’t said anything more, I felt it was safe to respond. “I’m not sure I can trust
him
.”

She snorted. “Of course you can, dear. Why wouldn’t you?”

A mother’s love can go so far and be so blind.

“I just need to talk to him,” I tried.

“We’ve heard about what happened over there at that big new place,” Sylvia said. “Jeff’s trying to figure out who’s setting him up.”

Word traveled fast. Must be that “source” who told Jeff there was a warrant out for his arrest.

“It’s got to have something to do with Kelly,” I suggested.

Sylvia gave me a look that indicated she thought I might be a few clowns short of a circus. “Well, of course it has something to do with her.”

“I’ve been seeing her brother around.”

She waved her hand in the air dismissively. “Oh, him.”

“He’s been following me. Jeff said I should watch out for him. That he’s bad news.”

Sylvia leveled her gaze at me, studying my face for a few seconds before her eyes slid to the dragon’s head. “You need more ink,” she said flatly. “How can you run a shop if you don’t even have tats yourself?”

I glanced down at my arm, then at the dragon, knowing how it curved around my torso to my back, its tail touching the lilies on my side. I’d been thinking the same thing, but hadn’t figured out just what I wanted. It had to be perfect.

Sylvia was reaching under the desk. “I can do it now. Only two hundred.” Her words were muffled, but her tone came through loud and clear.

I stood up. “I’m not here for that. I just wanted to talk to Jeff.”

Sylvia put a tattoo machine on the desk and smiled serenely. “You’re a nice girl. But I can’t tell you where he is.”

“Can you tell me about Kelly, then?”

The change of subject startled her.

“What about her?”

“What was she like?”

Sylvia stared at a spot somewhere on the ceiling before answering. “She had some troubles.”

“Jeff told me she had a drug problem.”

“That wasn’t the only thing. She was a hooker. I told Jeff he should be careful. Sometimes you can’t change a leopard’s spots.”

“Is that what happened? Did she go back to hooking?”

Sylvia leveled her eyes at me, trying to figure out what to tell me. “You could say that.”

Could say what? On one hand, Sylvia seemed like she had all her balls in the air. On the other, her cryptic answers made me wonder if she had a touch of dementia. When I didn’t say anything, she continued.

“Jeff pulled her out of the gutter. She did clean up nice, have to give her that. Pretty girl. Maybe a little too pretty.” Sylvia snorted. “He trained her here, teaching her how to tattoo; she was pretty good. That’s how women got started, you know.”

I knew. I knew about the circus women who ended up marrying the men who’d tattooed them. How their husbands trained them as tattooists so they’d have help in their shops and they didn’t have to pay them. I wondered if Sylvia Coleman had learned the trade from her husband.

“So she worked here?” I asked instead, my curiosity stronger about Kelly right now.

“This”—Sylvia waved her arm around in the air, indicating the shop—“wasn’t in her plans. Even if it was in his. He wanted to spend his life with her. He wanted kids with her. They tried for two years. But she couldn’t. She had a condition.” I hoped she wasn’t going to start going into medical explanations. That was all the information I needed.

“Did they get divorced because of that?”

Sylvia smiled sadly. “She just left him one day.”

“So you didn’t hear from her again, either, after the divorce?”

She shook her head. “I wasn’t exactly close to her. But I wasn’t surprised when she left. Once she got straightened out, once Jeff gave her back her life, she was antsy. He thought a baby would change things, but she got tired of waiting for that. I couldn’t talk sense to my boy—had to just let it play out.”

Go figure, but I actually felt sorry for the guy.

A creaking sound made me catch my breath. The curtain began to move, and I saw a pair of black cowboy boots. Sylvia stood expectantly, and my heart hammered in my chest.

Chapter 24

“The sign says closed, but your door was unlocked.” He was about twenty, baby-faced, with tattoo sleeves running down both arms.

Sylvia stood, shaking her head. “I keep forgetting things,” she mumbled, indicating that I should follow her out into the shop.

I watched as she began preparing the young man’s calf for ink, shaving it carefully as she talked to him about what he wanted: a basic cross with a crown of thorns wrapped around its top. She found the flash hanging on the wall and noted its number, shuffling through a pile until she pulled it out, a ready-made stencil.

“I don’t know how much more I can help you,” she said to me as she transferred the stencil onto his calf, leaving its outline that she would trace with her machine’s needle.

I wanted to stay, to talk to her more. Not necessarily about Jeff—she wasn’t going to tell me where he was—but just to watch her, a previous generation of tattooist, a woman tattooist who’d had to suffer far more discrimination than I ever did. Those women who came before me were pioneers, breaking into a male-dominated profession and breaking all the rules. Women like Sylvia gave me an option after I held that somewhat useless art degree.

She was concentrating, her reading glasses perched on her nose so she could more clearly see the lines she had to follow. I needed to head home before Tim got there, so he wouldn’t have another reason to be upset with me.

I was also tired; it’d been a long day.

I thanked Sylvia for her time, and as I turned to leave, I heard her call my name, so I looked back.

“Come back and I’ll find something nice for your other arm,” she said. “A garden should be balanced.”

I promised her I’d call.

The tinkle of a small bell rang in the distance as I pulled the door open and stepped outside into the heat. The sun was starting to go down, but the air still wrapped itself around me, suffocating me. The car took just a few minutes to cool off, and I eased the Mustang out of the lot and into the street, heading for home.

The white Dodge Dakota stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb behind me. Every time I looked in the rearview or side mirrors, there it was, looming large behind me. If I stopped short, he’d run right into me.

After about five miles, I knew for sure I was being followed. And he wanted me to know that, staying close, not hanging back behind any other cars. I tried to make out the driver, but couldn’t. Only a shadow.

My cell phone was still hooked into the hands-free device, and I stuck it on my head, dialing Joel.

“Talk to me,” I said.

“Where are you?”

“Have you ever met Jeff Coleman’s mother, Sylvia?”

“Did you meet her? Isn’t she fabulous?”

“So you do know her.”

“Everyone in the business in Vegas knows Sylvia.” He paused. “Hey, how did you meet her? I heard she retired.”

“She was at Jeff’s shop.”

“You went there?”

I quickly told him about the visit, keeping an eye on the Dakota behind me.

“Interesting about Jeff and Kelly,” he said. “I knew he’d been married, but didn’t know more than that.”

I told him that I was suspicious Jeff had set me up at Versailles.

He pointed out the other side of that coin: that whoever had killed Matt might have been setting Jeff up.

Neither of us could decide which was right.

“I’m being followed,” I finally conceded.

“What?”

I’d turned off the highway and the Dakota was close enough so I could smell its exhaust. “A Dodge Dakota. Followed me all the way from Jeff’s shop. But not exactly trying to keep it from me.”

“Do you think it’s that guy who was following you before?”

“It crossed my mind.”

“Why don’t you just stop and find out what he wants?”

It was a simple question, and one I’d been considering. It wasn’t like I was alone on the road; there were plenty of other cars.

“Okay,” I said, tired of the game. “But stay on the line, okay?”

“I’ve got my hand on the landline. I’ll call the cops if I hear something.”

I pulled over, easing the Mustang off to the side of the road, but as I opened the door and started to step out, the Dakota sped past me, so close I thought he’d take my door off, so fast I couldn’t read the license plate.

I watched the taillights as the truck slowed for a light and made an executive decision. I closed the door and put my foot on the accelerator—the mouse now following the cat.

“What’s going on?” Joel asked in my ear, and I told him. “Don’t lose him!” he said.

I was trying not to, but I’d gotten stuck behind a couple of elderly drivers who decided the speed limit was way overrated. The Dakota turned a corner, but by the time I got there, it was gone.

I sighed. “Lost him,” I said to Joel.

“Want to come back to the shop and we’ll get a drink?” he asked.

The idea was tempting, but my heart was racing. “I just want to go home and lock the doors and put on my sweats,” I said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“If you need to talk again, just call,” Joel said before hanging up.

The Dakota didn’t reappear, and I managed to make it home without any more drama. Tim’s car was absent from the garage, so I let myself into the empty house, savoring its familiarity.

Cheese and crackers beckoned from the fridge, and the bottle of Malbec was still half-full. I poured a glass before settling down in front of the TV. The clock reminded me that it was just about time for
20/20
and the exposé about Elise Lyon.

Alison Cho was giving the introduction just as I hit the remote.

“Elise Lyon had it all: youth, beauty, money, and she was going to marry the son of one of the richest men in the country. But she threw it all away, running from her fiancé to Las Vegas a week before her wedding, where she was last seen in a tattoo shop asking for a tattoo with the name of a man no one had ever heard of.”

The screen filled with a close-up of the devotion ink I’d drawn, “Matthew” prominent, larger than life.

“Who is Matthew?” Alison’s voice-over emphasized. “Is she with him now? No one knows, because after visiting The Painted Lady, Elise Lyon was never seen again.”