Night Film(88)

And yet the longer I walked the streets, past Chinese restaurants, gift stores, unisex hair salons, orange and white koi drifting in pet store windows, I had the sense I was being watched. But every time I checked behind me—once, even popping into a Laundromat and looking out—I noticed nothing suspicious.

I wondered if the feeling came from the strength of Ashley’s stare, so alive and insistent, gazing out from the white page. All “missing” fliers were unsettling, the lost person smiling out from some candid photo taken at a birthday party or happy hour, so ignorant of their fate. Yet Ashley, alone on that picnic table at Briarwood, had a gravity, an understanding even, as if she knew what awaited her within weeks.

As I walked on, however, I realized I was absolutely right. I was being watched—by the entire neighborhood. Hopper’s idea to post these fliers wasn’t so simplistic, because if I stood out this much, attracted this many hostile looks and slow drive-bys—once I looked up at an old walk-up and saw an old woman had pulled aside her lace curtains to stare down at me—Ashley was noticed, too.

They all must have seen her, watched her, wondered about her as she wandered their sidewalks in her red coat.

Now all we needed was one of them having the courage to call.





60


“Tom-may?!” the guy at the front desk bellowed in a thick New York accent, turning toward the dozen tattoo artists at work behind him. “These guys got a question for ya!”

Rising Dragon was a fluorescent, spacious tattoo studio on the second floor of a walk-up on West Fourteenth Street. It was cheerful inside, without the aggressive Easy Rider feel of some of the other tattoo parlors in the city, where the handle-jawed thugs wielding the tattoo guns looked like ink was just a side job, their main work, contract killings.

The light was clean and clinical, walls decorated with tracing paper and framed stencils of full-body tattoos, skulls, Buddhas and warriors, Maori tribal patterns, shelves cluttered with bottles of colored ink and iodine. Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box” blared loudly from speakers.

“Ask ’em if they’re cops!” The answering male voice sliced through the wasp-buzz of the tattoo guns. Yet every artist remained bent over a client.

I had no clue who’d just spoken.

“Are ya cops?” the guy asked us, wincing at the awful thought.

He had peroxide white-blond hair and the permanently stunned face of a Malibu surfer facing an unexpectedly large wave. Wolf tattoos snarled all over his biceps.

“No,” I said.

The kid took this in a moment before turning around again.

“They’re not cops!”

“Tell ’em to come over!”

The kid, bobbing his head to the music, pointed to an alcove in the farthest corner.

“You can go talk to Tommy, the manager.”

Tommy appeared to be a large middle-aged man wearing black latex gloves. He was bent over, working intently, though at this distance it looked like he was doing an autopsy on a sperm whale. His client was facedown on a black massage table and was at least three hundred pounds, bald, naked, whiter than a slice of Sunbeam. As I stepped through the shop toward them, Nora right behind me, I saw the tattoo in progress was a massive lotus tree, a gnarled trunk growing out of the guy’s ass crack, up his spine, flourishing all over his back, twisted branches reaching around his chest, a couple of birds—not yet colored in—alighting on his forearms.

“What can I do you for?” asked Tommy, without looking up.

“Do you recognize her?” I asked, holding out the picture of Ashley. “She came into your shop a few weeks ago.”

He ignored me until he’d finished coloring in a pink lotus blossom.

Grown men with baby names—Bobby, Johnny, Freddy—there had to be some unspoken law that they looked meaner than the rest of us. He had a wide, thuggish face, salt-and-pepper hair. Unidentifiable tattoos peeked out of the neck and sleeves of his skintight silver polyester shirt. He had an easy confidence, as if he were used to people filing through the store to get to his station in the very back—tattoo parlor equivalent of the chairman’s corner office in the sky—asking for his take on things as we were now.

He dully looked us over, then the photo, and bent back over his client.

“Sure. She came in a few weeks back.”

“What color coat was she wearing?” Nora asked.

“Red coat. Black on the sleeves.”

Nora shot me an astonished look.

“Did she come in for a tattoo?” I asked him.

“Nah. She wanted her after picture.”

“Her after picture? What’s that?”

Tommy stopped working to stare up at me. “After we finish your tat, we take your f*cking picture.” He gestured toward a far wall, covered with photographs of smiling people showing off with their completed tattoos.

“She had a tight twofold of a kirin on her ankle,” he went on, resuming his work. “She wanted to know if we still had the after.”

“A twofold?”

“One tat on two people. When they’re apart it don’t look like much. But together, when their arms are around each other, hand in hand, lovesick and shit, it turns into somethin’. A very Jerry Maguire ‘you complete me’ kinda thing.”

Of course—Ashley’s tattoo on her ankle featured only half of the animal, the head and front legs.