Mockingbird (20 page)

  She doesn't bother answering him.

  "Don't you at least want your mother's number? Or address?"

  She keeps walking.

  Because she has work to do.

 

She walks the rest of the way. Down Dark Hollow. Back to the main road. The rain soaks her to the bone and beyond. It's another half-hour into Ash Creek, which even now isn't much more than a quadrant of streets with a stoplight at each of the four intersections. Not much else going on here. Plenty of cars. All of them passing through, passing by, leaving this town in the rearview.

  As she did, years ago.

  Some things look the same. The sausage-and-onions joint is still there. The ice cream parlor next to it is boarded up, the pink plywood cone hanging loose from the sign, the paint scraped away by the tireless assault of time. On the corner is the five-and-dime, and it's still called that, too. Benner's Five-And-Dime. Not that you can buy jack shit for fifteen cents anymore. Even a crusty gumball from the machine outside costs a quarter.

  Other things have changed, though.

  Pappy's Gas is now an Exxon.

  The little park in the center of town is gone. Now it's a block of boxy little condos and townhomes.

  Luberto's Brick Oven is now a Rite-Aid.

  And where the Pepper Pot café once sat is now Ink Monkey Studios.

  Miriam has to smile. Her mother would have pissed her pantaloons over that. A tattoo parlor?
My word.
Might as well construct the Tower of Babel and dare God to knock it over like a big ole Jenga game. A bazaar of sin and depravity. Get your umbrellas and your dinghies and a pair of lions because surely the next Deluge is fresh on its way!

  She still can't believe her mother is in Florida.
Florida
. Land of the Mouse. Of the gator. Of Cubans and old people and cockroaches so big you could ride them to work.

  Whatever.

  She goes inside the tattoo joint. A charming little bell rings.

  
Ding-a-ling.

  She expects dingy, grungy, industrial – low-lit, the smell of cigarettes and incense, maybe the stink of spilled beer. Something growly on a CD player.

  But it's clean and bright. Polished Pergo floor. Shiny display case with T-shirts and bumper stickers and lighters all branded with the studio's logo.

  Ugh.

  Behind the counter, tat designs are on display: sugar skulls and dragons and American flags and faux-mystical Asian bullshit.

  In the corner, a little box TV hangs bolted to the wall. playing local news.

  A customer leans over the counter. A girl with Miriam's build. Powder-blue jeans pulling away from her pink blouse, showing off a whale tail that's the same pink as the streaks in Miriam's hair.

  She's chatting with the dude on the other side, a young guy. His spiky hair is meant to look like he doesn't care, but it probably took him two hours to sculpt it with some kind of putty product. His earlobes hang low, shot through with a pair of fat-ass lug-nuts.

  Between the two of them is an open book. Tattoo designs.

  "I just don't know," the girl says. "This is my first tattoo. I want it to
matter
. I want it to
mean
something."

  She flips the page as the guy nods knowingly.

  Miriam rolls her eyes.

  She scooches right up next to the girl, giving her a little hip-bump.

  Miriam faux-giggles, then says, "Gee, sorry.
Ex-cuseay moi!
Oh, hey. Did you ever think about getting a butterfly? Or a unicorn? Or,
oh-my-god
, an Asian symbol that means 'butterfly landing on a unicorn's horn'?"

  The girl blinks. She's not sure if this is a joke. Her gaze darts to the guy behind the counter, and she asks, "Do you do that?"

  "Eh," he says, stymied. "Maybe?"

  Miriam flicks the girl's nose–

  –and the girl recoils.

  "Ow! Hey!"

  "No, dummy, they don't have that. If you want your tattoo to mean something, you don't just come along and pick it out of a stupid book. You come in here knowing what you want. You slap down a design on the counter and you say, 'I want this fucking tiger sketched permanently on my ass-cheek because by golly, you know what? I am the eye of the tiger! I'm
ready
for the cream of the fight. And I'm rising up to the challenge of my rival'."

  "Maybe I'm not ready."

  The tattoo artist watches this unfold. Blasé and largely unaffected.

  "You're
not
ready, dingbat. A tattoo is an expression of your inner self inked on your outer self. It's some deeply spiritual shit."

  "Oh god, you're right. What tattoo did you get?"

  "A pair of handlebars right over my booty-crack. So when a guy is plowing me from behind, he has something to fake-grab onto. Am I right?"

  The girl looks horrified.

  Miriam snaps her fingers. "If you're not going to get inked today, why don't you go get a fro-yo across the street."

  "But they're all boarded up."

  "Maybe you didn't hear me. I said,
fuck off
."

  The girl pales and hurries out of the store.

  The dude behind the counter blinks. "That was interesting. You do realize she was a customer?"

  "She'll be back. She gets a butterfly. Trust me. Oh, and you don't seriously have an Asian symbol that combines both butterflies
and
unicorns, right?"

  "No. I don't think so."

  "Good. Then we can continue. You Bryan?"

  "I'm him. Why?"

  Miriam wants to shake his hand but – she holds back.
Contain yourself, girl.

  "I called. About the swallow tat."

  "Oh. Right. Here we go." He bends down, and with a grunt pulls out another book – this one a real mamma-jamma, stuffed to the gills with pages and pictures. "I take photos of all the ink I lay."

  He starts flipping pages. Skeletons on motorcycles, names of wives and girlfriends, ivy around a bicep, the Devil's face on the inside of some chick's thigh.

  He flips one page, and on it is a coil of barbed wire around some girl's wrist.

  Miriam ill-suppresses a shudder.

  Next several pages: swallow tattoos. Dozens of them. In pinks and blues, feathers like clouds, sweet eyes, many with banners in their beaks showing off names of loved ones. Bryan gets to the last page, taps a photo taped there. "Here."

  The Champagne cork does not so much much
pop
off the bottle so much as it
thuds
dully against the floor.

  "That's not it," she says. Shit.

  This one's on some guy's bicep, for one. And while the forked tail and swooped wings are there, it's got way more going on: lots of detail in the feathers, in the eye. "This isn't right. The one I'm looking for is on a dude's chest. It's got roughly the same shape as this one, but less detail. Dude, it's like I said on the phone. Just a shape. The only detail's the eye, and even then, it's just a little round hole where the artist didn't ink."

  "Nah. Sorry. This is the only one in the–"

  The last word he says is "book," but the sound goes all distorted and wobbly, like someone's playing with knobs and levers in the sound booth that is Miriam's own head. She feels hot, and her vision tries to fold in on itself.

  She takes a step backward, and it's then that she sees.

  On the television in the upper corner of the room.

  A girl's face. On the news.

  A skull hovers over it. Mouth open. Streaks of blood from the sockets.

  Everything snaps back to normal.

  Bryan asks, "Is everything o–"

  But she silences him with an index finger.

  She listens. And watches.

  "The girl, eighteen-year-old Annie Valentine, was seen being dragged into the back of a Type A school bus by a man in a hooded sweatshirt. The witness reported seeing blood on the girl's head."

  "A school bus," she mumbles.

  They show the picture again. It looks like a snapshot pulled off Facebook. Long, straight dark hair. Unex ceptional face. The kind of girl you marry, not the kind of girl a guy dreams about. She looks drunk in the picture. She's holding up a plastic cup of something piss-colored. Bud or Coors or some other watery light beer.

  The skull hovers, fading in and out.

  Just like what she saw over Tavena White's face.

  A sign. Like a road sign, pointing her toward her destination. But here her destination is bad mojo, a bridge out, a storm-swept river that's oh-so-hungry.

  "No, no, no," Miriam says. It's happening. It's happening
now
. Not in two years. Now. Maybe it's been happening all along.

  "What? You know that girl?"

  "I… don't." But how can she say what she's thinking? The truth won't help her. (She hears Wren's voice in her mind:
Psy
-cho.) All she knows is, now she's on the clock. Maybe she was
always
on the clock, but two years is a pretty good stretch of time. But now a girl's been taken. She might already be dead.

  Miriam can hear the ticking in her ear. And the rustle of wings.

  "You seem awfully shaken over some girl you don't know."

  Her skin itches. It feels like her teeth are vibrating inside her mouth. All the stresses of the day – her mother in Florida, Uncle Jack's bullshit, whatever-thehell-happened with Beck, and now this – feel like a stiletto at the base of her neck, pressing harder and harder.

  "You got like a… a computer around here?"

  "What? Yeah."

  "I need to use it."

  "I'm sorry, it's private use only."

  "I'll say it again, I need to use it."

  "This isn't a library."

  She reaches in her pocket, pulls out a crumpled twenty-dollar bill. Drops the little money boulder onto the counter. "That's my first offer. My second offer is going to be a lot less lucrative and a lot more of me flipping the fuck out. My advice is, twenty dollars in pocket is better than whatever you'll spend on me going apeshit here in your very nice, well-kept, well-lit store. What's a broken display case cost, anyway?"

  He studies her. She wears her crazy, and he must be able to see it glowing there like a giant electric bug zapper. Snapping and crackling.

  "Come on back," he says, warily scooping the twenty into his hand.

 

The computer is a laptop, and it sits on a little side-table next to a reclining hydraulic chair the color of oxblood. It has all the accoutrements next to it: the ink gun, swabs and swaddles, bottle of alcohol.

  Bryan kicks over a small wheeled office chair and Miriam stares.

  "Go ahead," he says.

  "You sit. I want to pace."

  "Seriously?"

  "Serious as a pulmonary embolism. Which is, by the way, very serious. Now make the Google happen."

  She stands, lets him sit. He clicks an icon, a browserwindow pops up.

  Google across it in colorful letters.

  "What am I searching for?"

  "School bus."

  He shrugs, starts to type it in.

  "No, wait. A…
type-A
school bus. I wanna know what that means."

  He pulls up images of school buses. Then she gets it.

  "It's a short bus," she says. "A tardcart."

  "That's offensive."

  "Oh,
sorry
, buttercup, I didn't mean to tap-dance on your sensitive demeanor. You want a balm or perhaps an unguent for your rashy vagina?"

  "I'm trying to help you here. You're being very rude."

  "
You're
being very rude," she retorts.

  He turns toward her and stares. "My niece is mentally handicapped. She didn't ask to be. And she didn't ask to have bullies like you call her names she doesn't deserve. You could stand to be nicer."

  "Oh. Fine. Yes. Sorry." She sees he doesn't believe her. "
Sorry
. I know. I'm abrasive. I'm a jerk. I am genuinely sorry. Can we just get back to the Googling, please?"

  "What next?"

  She thinks. The school bus in the vision – the vision in which Tavena is killed – could have been a Type-A. But that bus was burned out. "Look up 'bird mask'."

  He does. Again, he pulls up a page of images.

  Tweety Bird, Angry Birds, Mardi Gras masks–

  "There!" She taps the screen.

  Her finger pokes an image – a drawing – of a man in a long leather robe and a bird mask like the one in her visions.

  
Click.

  "Plague doctor," Bryan reads. "Also called… let's see. Beak doctors."

  "Because of that scary fucking mask."

  "Looks like. The eyes of the mask were generally glass. The beak has holes in it and was meant to serve as a kind of… medieval respirator."

  She doesn't have to see the screen to know. "They put aromatics in there, didn't they? Dry flowers and whatever."

  "Camphor. Bergamot oil. And yeah, roses and carnations."