I stared in horror at the scrap of human skin, stretched across the board like so much canvas. The braided wreath curved across the flesh, marred by a few small cuts that had been blacked out on the print copy. On most sides the skin curved over the board, but at the upper left, the skin was torn away, revealing both the bloodstained wood and a set of torn holes in the skin that indicated it had been stapled underneath, like a leather seat cushion.
Without another nod to Balducci, Rand took over, channeling Joe Friday.
"Do you know what this is?"
"It's a tattoo," I said, unable to take my eyes off it.
"Do you know what it means?"
"It's a… magical ward."
"To protect against evil spirits?"
"No, it's… like a capacitor. It collects, or deflects, magical power," I said. "Which depends on the intent of the wearer."
"Do you know who inked this?"
I'd have to look closer at the design to tell that. I really didn't want to do that. I looked up at Rand, eyes pleading. His face had gone cold, a bit stony; not unfriendly, but all cop. I leaned forward, looked through the clear plastic bag, at the wreath, the inking. The board exposed through the rip was smoothly polished and finely worked, despite the bloodstains. Suddenly I knew.
"Yes, I know the artist," I said. "Not, I mean, personally. It's Richard Sumner."
"Do you know where he is?"
"Buried in Cincinnati," I said. "Sumner was famous, but he died in
… 2005, I think?"
"Hell," Balducci said. "That rules out a suspect-" "Do you know who this was inked on?" Rand asked. "No," I said, closing my eyes at last. That piece of skin had come from a living human person. I'd really been trying not to think of that. My mind cast around for anything else. "Sumner did thousands of people. You could email the Lancing Dragon in Cincinnati, though. Sumner took extensive pictures. They're stored there."
Rand smiled. "We'll do that." His smile faded. "Do you know of anyone who had a grudge against Sumner, or against any of his subjects?"
"No," I said. "I mean, I don't know anyone who has a grudge against anyone-"
"Really?" Rand said. "What about against other tattoo artists? Especially magical ones?"
"According to our newsletter," I said sarcastically, " 'there are over two hundred licensed magical tattoo artists in the United States,' so it's a pretty big list-"
"Could we get a copy of that newsletter?" Rand asked. I thought about it for a moment. "Yes." "Is there anything you would like to add?" Rand said. "Yes," I said, nodding at the skin-covered board. "I would like to add a what the fuck is that thing? "
"Tell her about the box," Balducci said.
"What about the box?" I said, eyes drawn back to the thing on the table.
"We had a witness," cadaver man said. "He didn't live long enough to tell us much, but he mentioned… a box. A box covered in scraps of tattooed skin-"
"Don't tell me more about the box," I said, getting up. "Oh, God, it's a fucking lid-"
"Dakota," Rand said, motioning to cadaver man. "You don't need to stay any longer, Dakota, though our friend the Fed there may have more questions for you later-"
"Why did you bring me here?" I said, watching cadaver man slip.. . it… back into its opaque envelope. "Is this some kind of cruel joke, some kind of arrangement with my dad to get me to come home-"
"Dakota," Rand said. "I didn't lie. We did need to see you, and not just for your expertise-"
"Rand," Balducci warned. "She's just a civilian. And just a kid-"
"She's got to know," Rand said, staring up at me with the same sad eyes I remembered looking up to as a child. "Dakota, this just fell in our lap, but our 'friends' tell us they have had a dozen killings over the past five years where magical tattoos were taken, almost always on or near the full moon, moving from state to state each time. This last one was in Birmingham, and our 'friends' tell us all the signs point to an attack here in Georgia… soon."
"And the full moon is next weekend," I said. "Just after Halloween."
"So you see, Dakota, I needed to talk to you," Rand said. "We don't think you're a specific target but… Kotie, stay safe. Your Dad and I are very worried about you."
My childhood nickname rang in my ears as I watched cadaver man carry 'it' back through the door of white light.
"That makes three of us," I said.
I said my goodbyes to Rand and then got the hell out, escorted by the black-and white twin officers who'd picked me up. Tweedle- White and Tweedle-Black turned out to be Horscht and Gibbs, old buddies of Rand's, who were doing him a favor by scooping me.
Gibbs was a sexy beast, like a younger version of Rand himself, but after staying for the show with the lid, Horscht turned from stony Aryan Nazi to protective den mother. After some arguing, they agreed to take me back to Mary's to pick up my Vespa. But as we started to pull out of City Hall East's garage the colorful lights across the street gave me a better idea.
"Wait," I said. "Drop me at the Borders."
"Are you sure?" Horscht said. "It's a long way to East Atlanta."
"It's… nine fifty-five," I said. "I can take care of myself in a brightly lit commercial fortress, and call on a fare-slave to cab me back to Mary's for my Vespa. I never leave before midnight, anyway."
"But after seeing that-"
"The full moon is like, ten days away," I said, with false bravado. "I'm not worried."
"The lady can take care of herself," Gibbs said, smiling. "Anything else we can do?"
"Sure thing," I said. "Next time you give me a ride, I want to do it in cuffs."
Horscht was befuddled, but Gibbs whistled low. "Sure thing, girl."
"But if she hasn't done anything wrong-"
"Damn, Horscht, you never got a Sunday morning call?" Gibbs said, punching my raised fist gently. "I'll explain it to you later. You're all right, girl. Later."
I started sniffing around the bookstore for something on Richard Sumners. It was hopeless-I hate bookstores and this one was a brightly lit warren. I ferreted around their computer kiosk for a minute, browsing for any of the books I knew: The Craft of Ink-no. Flash, Ink, Flash-out of print. Anything by Richard Sumners-yes! One, titled Richard Sumners, three in store, shelved improbably in Art amp; Architecture | Photography | Photography Monographs, where I had absolutely no luck. Finally I collared a pimply-faced teen manning the Customer Service kiosk, whose end-of-day funk brightened considerably as soon as he saw my breasts.
"Oh, yes, that," he said, staring straight at the bulge in my top. In fairness, my breasts were about level with his head, and he seemed scared to make eye contact. "Right over here."
In Bargain Books: Richard Sumners by TASCHEN – $7.99. Right between Sicily in Pictures and More Amazing Kittens! I wanted to pop a blood vessel, but just stood there, seeing Sumners's life work end up in a bargain rack. Finally I picked it up, thick little brick, thumbing its thin but curiously heavy pages.
"At least it's selling," I said.
"Anything else?" he asked, eyeing my breasts again.
"You got an almanac for 2005?" I asked, but he shook his head.
As I turned to go, finally his eyes darted upward. "That," he said, "is one cool-ass shirt."
I looked down. Edgar Allen Poe stared upside-down at me between the lapels of my coat-vest. I'd sewn glitter and sequins onto the shirt to jazz it up, and his sparkling eyes had ridden up over the ridge of my breasts. "Thanks," I said, but by that point the kid had fled.
I grabbed a maple mocha and camped out in the cafe. There in the ghetto library, as we affectionately called it, I started flipping through this glossy tombstone to Richard Sumners's work, looking for clues to who might have worn the tattoo.
Richard's magical inking began before I was born, back in the 60's, but the wreathed snake had a modern flair to its design. I started to see some of the distinctive elements that made up the tattoo crop up in THE EARLY NINETIES section, but it wasn't until EVE OF THE MILLENNIUM that I hit paydirt.
At first I thought I had it: a man covering his eye with a tattooed hand bearing a mark nearly identical to the one on the lid. But it was too small, and I remembered Sumner didn't design his own flash: he had graphomancers do that for him, just like I did, which meant he ended up reusing the same design. Sure enough, there were three other people with similar tattoos, ending with a full-page shot of a young woman with the mark just above her breasts.
The tat was close-really close: the same size, on a flat piece of skin, sans belly button or the curve of a shoulder that would have shown up as a wrinkle on the lid. I stared at her – she had sharp, punkish hair like I did, and a sexy, come-hither smile. Automatically, I checked out the curves of her breasts, pressed beneath one delicate hand-they were full and luscious and looked quite lickable. Then my eyes drifted up to the tat, and I felt queasy. Had I just seen this woman in the flesh-flesh torn from her chest and stapled to a board like a seat cushion?
There was no way to know. I'd give the book to Rand at the first opportunity and hope he could find out. But then I started thinking: Sumners was tattooed himself, and some of those tats had to be marks of great magical power.
I flipped to the bio, trying to find out a clue about how he died, but it was no help. It had been printed in 2003, and the most interesting piece of information was that Sumners had 'recently had his hands insured with Lloyd's of London for over a million dollars.' Useless.
I'd originally gotten the book to try to find out who had worn that tattoo. But now here was a new question: did Sumners die near a full moon
And then a creepy voice breathed in my ear: "Give me some skin, Dakota."
"Jeez!" I cried, recoiling from the foul-smelling breath behind the voice, splattering my mocha across the table. "Spleen, don't do that!"
Life had cursed Diego "Spleen" Spillane to look like a rat-long, pointed nose, thick, scattered, grey-brown hair, and one yellowed, fake eye. Generally he played above type. Today he was full of himself, and apparently couldn't resist working it.
"Come on," he said, curling his head around my shoulder, breath foul. "Be a sport."
And then I saw his hand hovering over the table, held out for five. "Garlic," I snapped, grabbing his hand and pulling him round to deposit him in the opposite seat, nearly losing the rest of my mocha when I brushed it again. "Don't be such a fucking sneak-"
"Cops give you crap?" he said, grinning.
"No-how did you know-wait, how the fuck did you find me?"
"Mary's," he said. "I showed up just in time to see ya snatched. You weren't in cuffs-"
"I tried," I said, but Spleen didn't take the bait.
"-so I figured you were all right, but I tailed them anyway, figuring-"
"What do you have for me that couldn't wait?" I leaned back and looked at the ceiling. "I keep telling you, no one needs an emergency tattoo-"
"Ah," Spleen said, suddenly knowing. "But this time you're wrong." He got up and held his hand out to me. "Let me take you on a little trip."
I got up from the table. "This is a bad idea." I started to leave the mocha and the book. Then I stopped, and looked down at the book, stained on one corner where I'd splattered it. The ghetto library had given me what I wanted; but I wasn't a college dropout anymore. In a good year I made over fifty thousand dollars tattooing. And besides, it was a clearance book, probably about to go out of print; I'd be a butt if I pointed Rand or the Fed to it and it turned up gone.
"Just let me pay for this," I said.
"Need it for reee-search," Spleen said, "or just wanking?"
I glared at him. "What do I 'wank,' Spleen?"
"Anything that moves," he responded.
"You're moving," I pointed out.
"Touchy," he said, though it sounded like he meant touche. "Let's tango."
We tore south on Moreland at what felt like two hundred miles an hour in Spleen's battered old Festiva, though we couldn't really have been doing over forty. He'd bought the car off of me, well-used, five years ago and had not treated it well. The engine squealed like a worn-out carnival ride. At one point we hit a tiny bump and my hair scrunched against the roof.
"Spleen!" I said. "Thought of new shocks?"
"Shocks?" he said. "Just another mechanic's scam-"
We bumped on, getting a brief panorama of downtown Atlanta as we crested Freedom Parkway. I stared over at the glittering spires, glowing with fairybook promise denied to those of us who lived across the canyon of the Downtown Connector. Somewhere in there was the real Five Points, financial heart of Atlanta, but the view was quickly cut off by the King Center. We kept going, and I kept staring to the right, as if by keeping my eyes turned away, to the city, to the King Center, to John Hope Elementary, oh hey, look, there's Javaology-that I would not notice when we crossed Auburn Avenue.
"Thinking about her?" Spleen said, suddenly serious.
"No," I said. "We split two years ago, Spleen-"
"Never too late to catch up on old times," he responded, livening up a bit. "I could whip it back around, take a little detour down Auburn to Old Wheat-"
"You do, I get out and roll."
"This is the vampire district," he reminded me. "Nasty to have a scrape-"
"I don't care. And I thought you said this was an emergency?"
"I'm not saying we should stop, just, it's not out of our way-"
"If you really cared about making time you'd have taken Glenn Iris-" and I suddenly drew a breath. Glenn Iris turned into Randolph "That would have taken you right past her front door, dipshit." Spleen said, scowling again. "Give me a little credit. I was just needling you."
True to his word, he kept driving, taking us onward, south of Auburn, south of Decatur and the tracks, growing perilously close to the foggy, haunted tombs of Oakland Cemetery-Margaret Mitchell, Bobby Jones, Reb and Union soldiers from the Battle of Atlanta- before finally hooking round the Mill Lofts back up north into Cabbagetown.
"I thought you said we were going to the Krog Street Tunnel-"
"Not Krog Street, babe," Spleen said. "Just Krog. The Krog Tunnel-"
"Oh, hell," I muttered. "The Underground."
To most locals, "the Underground" means "Underground Atlanta"-a subterranean tourist trap downtown near Five Points, reclaimed from turn-of-the-last-century storefronts that had been covered over by modern streets and buildings, rediscovered in the 60's. An ordinary historian might know that before then, "the Underground" referred to the Atlanta sewer system. But ask an Edgeworlder… and they'll tell you that the real Underground is a series of tunnels beneath Atlanta, covered over by the Confederates just prior to the burning of the city, and forgotten to the wider world since the Civil War.
Spleen parked on a side street off Wylie and led me through someone's back yard downstairs to an ancient, crumbled well, half hidden in the curve of the slope by a newer upper room held up by rusted pipes. Scattered around were magical tags-wards and wayfinders scribbled on walls with chalk or spray paint. The magical Edgeworld was alive, here.
Something fragile crunched under my boots when I stepped back to let Spleen lift the grating, and I scowled. I didn't want to look down to see whether they were crack bottles or blood vials. I'd thought this area was coming back-I often ate a block or two away at the Carroll Street Cafe-but it's amazing what even an Edgeworlder like me can miss.
We climbed down a rusted steel ladder about one floor before stepping off into a damp tunnel. The air was foul, and the floor was piled with garbage. I heard the rustle of something moving and, in the distance, the clink of a bottle falling to the stones. Spleen looked off sharply into the darker part of the tunnel, eyes narrow; I saw nothing, not even a rat, but after a brief moment Spleen saluted the darkness, then turned his back on it and marched on.
The garbage trailed off quickly as the tunnel brightened. This part looked new, with utilitarian lights that were part of the actual sewer system, but with tags hidden in corners and on sills that marked this as the border of the Underground. We went north for maybe a quarter mile until we could hear the squeal of a train overhead, and then Spleen pried open a dingy, metal door and gestured down a dirt-encrusted, well-warded stairwell.
"After you, my dear," he said.
"Fuck that," I said.
"I'm just messin with ya," he said, and led the way down.
Here, there was no light other than a dim, yellow, fluorescent wand he carried as he stumbled down worn steps. The stairwell switchbacked through a grim, cinderblock shaft-one flight, two flights, three flights, four: by my count, three stories beneath the streets, maybe more. The door doubled back the way we came, revealing a wider, vaulted tunnel, paralleling the one above us, filled with still, black water. A rowboat floated in the bile, waiting.
"You have to be kidding," I said, as Spleen got in the boat.
"The old Confederate runoff tunnel," he said, looking down into the water. "Or maybe a secret train tunnel that got flooded. Everyone who knows… is looong dead."
"Let's get this over with," I said, getting in behind him grumpily.
"Ready? Ready. Ready!" Spleen said, pushing off and clambering forward to grab the oars. "You sit yourself back and enjoy the ride."
"Whatever you say, Spleen," I sighed.
The bastard grinned, and then started singing.
"We're off to see the werewolf," he warbled terribly, and my blood grew cold. "The wonderful werewolf of Krog. He is the were the wonderful were-"
"The full moon is like, ten days away," I muttered. "No, I'm not at all worried."