“I can do that,” Ray said. He showed a fine, glib pride as he started to explain. “This tattooing thing, it’s always been an interest of mine. I’d been doing it for years in an amateurish way, you know, just a leisure-time activity, cheap thrills, if I could find a more or less willing girl who’d let me work on her. I’m not saying I was any good. I knew I wasn’t. And I always had trouble knowing what design to use, but it was no big deal. I had no ambitions.
“And of course I knew Wrobleski — we go back a long way — and I knew what he did, and once in a while he did it for me. When you’re in real estate, there’s always somebody who needs killing. And in the beginning I thought I was better off not knowing the details, but then along comes Akim, who’s got one or two grievances against Wrobleski, and he wants to share, to give me all the chapter and verse about what his boss does. He gets quite a kick out of describing it. You know, I’m not the only sick puppy in this story.
“And then, right, I have my brilliant idea. I like tattoos, I like maps, I especially like coded maps: I’ve found my subject. Akim describes events and I illustrate them, by putting a lousy tattooed map on the back of some random girl I pull in off the street, though okay, not so random in your case, Marilyn darling. Akim helped sometimes. Akim likes to watch. And that’s all it was, no big deal, no different from a couple of guys going out, having a beer, shooting some pool.
“And then I start having problems with Wrobleski. I ask him to do a simple job. And he won’t. I don’t like it when people say no to me. It’s the principle of the thing. I want to fuck with him. And I suppose I could have threatened to give an ‘anonymous tip-off’ to the cops, but I didn’t need to do that, did I? All I had to do was make sure Wrobleski knew the tattoos existed. And as fate would have it, my little sick friend Akim had been keeping an eye on the women. He knew where they were, knew where to find them again.”
Ray McKinley was not entirely surprised when Billy Moore kicked him a couple of times, once in each kidney.
“How did Wrobleski even find out?” Zak asked.
“Our Mr. Wrobleski had an occasional taste for prostitutes. Akim made the arrangements. Akim and I made sure he got a girl with a map of one of the murders on her back; I think her name was Laurel. He looked: he saw the map. Okay, it was a shitty map, and it was coded. But Wrobleski could decode it better than anybody else on earth. He could read the signs because he already knew what they meant. He realized that somebody knew his business, but he didn’t know who or how or why. And that bothered him. I liked it that way.”
“And how was this supposed to end?” said Zak.
“Wrobleski was supposed to kill the fucking mayor. If he’d done that in the beginning, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
Billy Moore kicked Ray again, in the stomach, just to keep up his own morale. Ray McKinley seemed to be coughing up blood.
“So now you know,” said Ray thickly. “You can all sleep easier now. And where do we go from here? You want to call a cop? No. Why would you? Wrobleski’s gone. Akim’s gone. Old man Driscoll ain’t coming back. You don’t want a court case with a missing murderer and no bodies, do you? The real question is, and this is always the real question: what exactly do you want?”
It was not a question any of them had expected Ray to ask. They had expected denials, threats, perhaps pleading, but not this.
“I’m not unreasonable,” Ray said. “You know that, Zak. You want me to set you up in your own little shop, ‘Zak Webster: Map Seller to the Gentry’? Tell me what the price is. Tell me what these other two clowns want.” He turned to Billy: “Property, cars, drugs?”; and then to Marilyn: “Tattoo removal?”
“We want you to take a little trip,” said Marilyn. “Downstairs into the basement. We’ve got some women who are dying to meet you face-to-face.”
Ray McKinley started to say something, but Billy Moore grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, pulled him to his feet, and dragged him across to the other side of the room, tearing open the pale lime-green linen of his jacket in the process. Zak had opened the door that led to the basement, to another, different kind of underworld. Ray looked down the flight of steps, but could see only darkness at the bottom. Then he heard women’s voices, though he couldn’t make out any words. He could also hear a mechanical noise, an intermittent drone, a buzzing, the sound of a tattoo machine being brought to life.
“So much can go wrong when amateurs start tattooing,” said Marilyn. “They get carried away, scrawl obscenities all over your body, or your face, or your dick. And you know, a lot of beginners don’t care much about hygiene. There’s a lot of risk: blood poisoning, tetanus, hepatitis, toxic shock. You can imagine. But you won’t have to imagine.”
Billy Moore picked Ray up for the last time, one hand on his collar, one on his waistband, the weight evenly distributed, then tossed him forward, hard and fast, through the doorway, so he would have no chance of gaining a foothold as gravity pulled him down the steep decline of stairs. His legs and arms flailed, he grunted some indecipherable words, and then there was the sound of him hitting the bottom like a sack of root vegetables. A low, pale light flicked on, revealing female silhouettes, circling, homing in.
Zak closed the door to the basement. Then he closed and locked the store. He and Marilyn and Billy walked away. He felt no guilt. It was already well past closing time.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Geoff Nicholson is the author of sixteen novels. His debut, Street Sleeper, was short-listed for the Yorkshire Post First Work Award; Bleeding London (1997) was short-listed for the Whitbread Prize; and Bedlam Burning (2003) was a New York Times Book Review notable book of the year. His nonfiction titles include Sex Collectors and The Lost Art of Walking, and his journalism has appeared in The New York Times, Bookforum, Gastronomica, Art Review, The Believer, McSweeney’s, and Custom Car, among other publications. He is a contributing editor to the Los Angeles Review of Books and Black Clock. He was born in Sheffield, England, and lives in Los Angeles.