Ink Read online

  That had been how Dianna met Patty a couple of months ago.

  Now she stood outside, rain hammering on her umbrella, staring in through the glass at an empty room.

  She wore a long gray trench coat over her clothes, a burgundy scarf wound around her throat, and gloves that matched the scarf. But she was cold, and only some of that was because of the rain and wind. She was angry and confused and scared. Her left arm hurt.

  She wanted to show the tattoo to Patty, to get some answers. Maybe to yell at the woman. Her heart wanted to break, too, because that beautiful tattoo had lost its luster. The vibrant colors were washed out, and that big, beautiful rose now looked like it was withering. What the hell? What the actual fuck?

  She pounded on the door.

  Nothing.

  She pulled her cell and called the store, got nothing. Texted Patty. Same result.

  “Damn, damn, damn,” she said. The tattoo throbbed very faintly. And not in a good way. After five furious minutes she turned away and walked through dirty puddles to her car.

  Dianna did not see the flies clustered around the light under the small awning above the parlor door.

  They, however, saw her.

  24

  A fly crawled on the glass outside of Patty’s bedroom. It was a fat blowfly speckled with green and purple, and not the prettier shades. There was a soiled quality to it. A garbage heap stain on the wings and too much red in the multifaceted eyes. It was the kind of fly that would look more at home crawling over the face of a dead animal on the side of the road.

  The insect scuttled between the lines of rain that ran crookedly down the pane.

  It had watched the woman inside open her first bottle of beer. Her second. Her eighth. It watched her throat bob as she swallowed, swallowed, swallowed. It watched as she stared at the dead face inked on her hand.

  It watched her punch the wall, punch her own thighs, punch her face.

  The fly watched her all through the storm.

  25

  Eileen Sandoval worked four days a week in the Pumpkin Patch, a quilting supply and fabric store on the corner of Main and Whippoorwill. She was eleven days shy of her fifty-third birthday, and all but three of those years had been spent in Pine Deep. She’d moved to Philadelphia for three years to attend the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, but eventually had to accept that her dream of being a high fashion designer was bigger than the talent she actually possessed. It was a hard thing to know about herself, but in time she made peace with it.

  Since then she worked at the Patch, as everyone called it, Wednesday through Saturday, and had three days off to look after her mother. During those days her sister, Maria, was able to have a bit of a break. Mother was a handful. Alzheimer’s was a monster of a disease, and things had progressed to stage-five severe decline. Because their mother was so physically fit, the math was skewed for how long she would live. The sisters never voiced their shared feeling that death would be a mercy, but it was always in the air between them. They’d been to the support groups, watched the videos, read the website information. There was no happy ending and death was the closest thing to mercy they could expect.

  The four days at the Patch were merciful in their way, too. The place was fairly busy, especially once the temperature began to drop. Rain also increased business because the knitting and quilting circle ladies came in nearly every day for the supplies they’d need on cold and wet autumn nights. And there was a back room for small groups and classes, some of which Eileen taught.

  Tonight was slow, though. The shoppers were all gone and the rain was just plain awful. Eileen stood looking out through the glass front door, her cardigan pulled tight around her and the heat turned up, but she couldn’t shake the chill. Everything outside looked like a bad impressionist painting—smears of car and traffic lights, indistinct shapes of things that moved in the darkness.

  A buzzing sound made her turn and when she did it was with sharp irritation. That damn fly was back.

  Eileen hustled over to the counter and snatched the flyswatter from the hook. Three times today she’d seen the little beast and gone hunting with the swatter, and three times the fly had found some place to hide. Waiting for her to forget about it before it snuck out and began buzzing its little wings.

  Eileen hated flies. Not as much as spiders, but flies were high on her list. She’d pick up a praying mantis or let a ladybug crawl onto her hand to take it outside. Lightning bugs, too. And grasshoppers or crickets could share the store or her home because they were good luck. Spiders…? No. They were dead as soon as she could whack them with a shoe, a rolled-up catalog, or the swatter. Flies, ditto.

  Ugly, dirty, nasty little bastards.

  Buzz.

  Eileen whirled, raising her weapon, as ready to strike as any knight facing a dragon.

  But the fly was nowhere in sight.

  She froze there, poised, watching and alert.

  Nothing.

  Not even a buzz.

  Eileen did not even feel the fly land on the back of her neck. She didn’t feel it crawl under the collar of her blouse, or wriggle down along the line of her spine. None of that registered.

  Nothing, in fact, registered.

  She was not at all aware of standing in the store with the flyswatter for nearly an hour.

  She was only marginally aware of walking out, locking the door behind her, getting in her little Honda, and driving home. Those things were so routine her body did most of the work, requiring very little from her mind.

  Parking outside the house, unlocking the front door, and going inside were even easier.

  There were some flickers in her mind after that. Vagueness of movement. Of selecting the right knife. Of choosing the angle of thrust. Of wiping blood spatter from her eyes so she could see where to stab again. Marie’s screams did not register, though. Nor did the vacant murmurings of their mother as Eileen pulled back the blankets and raised the blade.

  None of that was in her mind. None of it was real.

  One item did manage to lodge in her awareness. As the blade fell over and over and over again, she saw the fly. Not a real fly, of course. An artistic one. Tattooed with great skill on the soft webbing between the index finger and the thumb. Eileen had no memory of actually getting that tattoo. She had no interest in such things. It was there now, though.

  Within seconds even that thought was gone because the fly tattoo was soon painted over with an even coating of rich, dark red.

  A car idled down the street from the Sandoval house. Windows smoked to a vague nothing, lights off. The passenger inside was completely invisible.

  The only sounds were his grunts and gasps as his hand worked and worked and worked. But the rain muffled all of that and no one alive knew he was there.

  26

  Staff Sergeant Gerald Addison and his Delta team walked through hell in Monk’s dream.

  In some firefights everything was so personal, so condensed to what was happening in a soldier’s immediate vicinity, that there wasn’t even the possibility of anything else. Bullets punching through the vain armor of clothes and deep into flesh, splashing life onto the walls. A grenade arcing through the air and the words Frag out! echoing through the halls of a shocked mind. The flex of a finger on a trigger, and that action defining all conscious control, except when the magazine ran dry and hands performed the swapping-out ritual without needing to be told. Shell casings, looking shiny and delicate, popping against doorframes and tinkling on the tiled floors. Faces yelling and then breaking apart as the gunfire dehumanized them into red nothing. Smoke and brick dust, red jewels floating through the air, and the screams.

  Monk—the man who was almost Monk—kicked a door in and went inside firing. That was the drill, those were the orders. No friendlies. A target-rich environment and everyone a bad guy. His team were practiced killers, and the men here in this little town were the definition of evil. The kind who put IEDs even on roads used by civilians. The kind who strapped
suicide vests to little kids. The kind who should have had bull’s-eyes tattooed on their foreheads like the mark of Cain. Unclean.

  The door tore free from its hinges and Monk followed the muzzle flashes of his own rifle as he stormed inside. With each trigger pull he saw his immediate world in freeze-frame images. The man with the black beard and head scarf kicking free of his blanket, reaching beneath his cot for his AK-47. Too late. A heartbeat too late as Monk’s bullets punched through his sternum. The dying man’s scream buried beneath the shouts and gunfire. Movement in another corner of the room. Monk turning, firing. Chasing any shape and defining that form in the flame of the next shots. Seeing bodies twist and fall, arms flung up as if in prayer or supplication, loose clothing billowing in that odd slow motion that only ever happened this deep inside the ballet of slaughter. Each face forever burned into Monk’s eyes as muzzle flame and bullet defined facial features, personality, expression, everything.

  Which is when things began to fall apart.

  The shapes rising up around him were not more men with rifles. They should have been. That’s all there were supposed to be. Here and everywhere else in this town. Just an ISIS team. Seventeen men, ages seventeen through fifty-four. They had the names, the histories, the lists of soldiers and civilians murdered by these men.

  Just men.

  Only men.

  Except in that little room.

  The photo strobe of each gunshot captured the faces of the three women. One of them old. One younger middle-age. One barely an adult.

  Torn by bullets.

  And the other faces. The smaller ones.

  Running backward like hell’s clock—teenager, tween, young kid, toddler. Infant.

  The bullets found them all.

  Gerald Addison’s bullets found them all.

  It took no time at all to burn through a thirty-round magazine with a rate of fire of 950 rounds per minute. Each round traveling 2,900 feet per second. There was no time for errors and no take-backs.

  There was a voice in his head, one of the other shooters, yelling the same thing over and over again. “The intel was wrong. The intel was wrong.”

  No shit.

  That was when Gerry Addison died from his own gunfire. Not from any bullet. His flesh was unscratched the entire time. No. He died anyway.

  Monk was still waiting to be born, but that could wait. The small room in the little town was not a place for birth. It was not a place for living. The angels of death had come and they held dominion.

  In the now, in his dreams, shivering inside his leather jacket, Monk Addison sweated and writhed and wept and remembered. Joy was such a fleeting thing. Guilt endured.

  27

  “That was great, babe,” Scott said as he rolled off her. He was a little out of breath. Gayle wasn’t. “You’re the best that’s ever been.”

  Scott was asleep in under two minutes. The sex had lasted only twice that long. From the time he pulled off her panties and pushed up her T-shirt to when he came inside of her … four minutes.

  Gayle Kosinski lay there in the dark and tried to analyze things. Scott wasn’t rough, but he’d definitely forgotten how to be gentle. There was no tenderness anymore because that was part of love and Gayle knew, without doubt, she had moved into the category of “habit.”

  She lay unmoving, listening to his breathing deepen. She hadn’t moved much the whole time. Scott didn’t seem to require it. Or even notice. Not anymore, and not since Randy was born. Even after they were able to have sex again, for him it was a thing to do. Not because of any feelings of duty or obligation. He needed to come twice a week, and she was there in the same bed. That was the equation, the habit, the process.

  In a bedroom in a comfortably middle-class part of Pine Deep, with all the lights off and the rain coming down so hard it felt like the house was under attack. Her husband’s semen seeped sluggishly from her to soak the sheet. She was naked and cold, but did not pull the T-shirt down over her breasts. The underwear she wore to bed was somewhere on the floor. Where he’d simply tossed them. His boxers were, too, but that wasn’t the point. Things went where they were thrown because he was in the moment. Once upon a time he would have either set any clothes he removed from her on the chair beside the bed. Or, if he was really in the moment, he would pick them up afterward and present them with a gallant flourish, and some kind of joke. Your unmentionables, m’lady.

  Back then he’d been playful, generous, inventive, passionate, and, she thought, empathetic. That ship had sailed, hit an iceberg, caught fire, and sunk.

  Gayle tried not to think about the four minutes of sex, but couldn’t help it. Scott had kissed her, but it was perfunctory, his tongue like a dagger. His hands always went straight to her breasts. She had very large breasts with very sensitive nipples. He liked that. He made a lot of private jokes about how she had the best tits in Pine Deep. Nipples so hard they could cut glass. And a pussy that was tight even after two kids. That was flattery from Scott. He used to be better at it but all of that was a long time ago. Now it was those kinds of comments and him pawing at her. He’d be hard as soon as he had her shirt up, turned on by her breasts far more than her face. Or by any crucial part of her. And when he removed her panties he was inside of her in seconds. No foreplay worth mentioning. No oral sex. No gentle touches. No pause to see if she was wet enough. Just a need to rut.

  Her vagina felt bruised and there would be finger marks on her left breast where he’d clutched as he’d come. No one else would ever see that, though, and the marks always faded quickly enough. Gayle wondered if this qualified as abuse. He never forced her. Never, ever hit her. But he also didn’t exactly ask. He even told her he loved her, but it sounded rote. Perfunctory.

  But Gayle still felt like a victim.

  Maybe not entirely of her husband’s indifferent lust, but of her own choices.

  There had been a phase of pretending she liked the spontaneity of it, the immediacy. But that had never really been true. Gayle could not remember the last time she’d had an orgasm with him. Three years ago? Four? Her pink plastic pal in the bedside table was a more dutiful and attentive lover.

  Veni vidi vici. That was Scott’s way.

  I came. I saw. I conquered. More or less. I groped, I fucked, I came, I went to sleep. That was closer.

  Gayle listened to the storm. It was as cold and angry as she felt. As alien as she felt. As lonely as she felt.

  The conversation from three hours earlier played over and over in her head.

  “You’re really serious about wanting to go on a date with another woman?” Scott had asked for maybe the tenth time since she’d brought it up.

  “Yes. If that’s okay.”

  Scott smiled and shook his head. “I never pegged you as a lezzie.”

  “Honey,” Gayle said patiently, “I keep trying to explain this … I’m not a lesbian. I think I might be bi.”

  “But you want to fuck a woman.”

  “I never said I wanted to have sex with anyone. I want to have a date. If that’s okay.”

  “It’s weird.”

  “Why is that weird? You’re the one who started bringing up the threesome thing.”

  “Oh, come on.” He snorted. “That’s hardly the same thing.”

  “I know. This would be a date and not you fucking two women.”

  “Hey, keep your voice down,” he hissed. “The kids…”

  “The kids are asleep and I wasn’t yelling.”

  Scott poured himself some wine. Did not offer to refill her glass. “I was just joking about a threesome.”

  “Joking? Oh, come on … you know you weren’t joking, Scott. Every time Carolyn was around you kept staring at her.”

  There’d been some back-and-forth with him claiming that he wasn’t interested in her. Not per se. He was simply turned on at the thought of being with two women.

  The remark was telling. He wanted to be with two women. Not with her and, say, Carolyn. Or not us and someone else. With
two women. She’d been so tempted to ask how Captain Four Minutes could ever hope to satisfy two women. Gayle wasn’t 100 percent sure he understood what a clitoris actually did.

  The conversation about another woman had been after the big July Fourth party they’d thrown. They were party people. It was something they both loved and were good at. It was his friends from the brokerage and her friends from school; Gayle was an administrator there. That night, while they cleaned up, and because Scott seemed to be in a mellow, happy mood, she mentioned that she’d like to see another woman.

  Naturally Scott thought they were talking about threesomes again.

  Gayle said, “No, honey, weren’t you listening? I said I wanted to be alone.”

  “With some woman?”

  “Yes. Maybe.”

  “With Carolyn?” asked Scott.

  “No.”

  “With who, then? That blonde soccer ref? She’s a dyke and—”

  “Please don’t use that word,” said Gayle, realizing that the conversation was already sliding downhill. “And, no, not her. Not anyone in particular. It’s just something I … it’s…”

  “You’re asking permission to go fuck someone and want me to feel good about it?” he demanded, and the moment was lost right there. “That’s what you’re asking? Permission to fuck some woman?”

  “Scott,” she said, trying to keep things in neutral, “I keep telling you that this isn’t about me wanting sex with some random woman. I don’t really know if I want to have sex with any woman. But I need to be true to who I am.”

  “True to what? That you’re a lesbian?”

  “That I’m bisexual.”

  “Which is the same thing.”

  “No,” said Gayle, “it’s really not.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “Okay, then how would it be any different if I did what you wanted and had a threesome with Carolyn? Don’t tell me you’d expect us to just be all over you. I’ve seen your Pornhub history, Scott. You know I have. You watch a lot of threesome videos and a lot of girl-on-girl. You can’t stand there and tell me the thought of me with another woman doesn’t turn you on.”