I stood, gave Stephan an air kiss, and started out.
“Brett?”
I turned to see Stephan looking at me through the mirror.
“Yeah?”
“When you find her, tell Charlotte Trevor thought the world of her.”
I nodded and smiled. “Yeah, I will.”
Kyle was pirouetting across the stage. He flipped his hand up at me.
“We’ll talk.”
“I’m sure we will,” I said.
The tow truck beat me to the parking lot. The tow guy already had the car up on the flatbed, ready to take it away. He frowned at me, a clipboard in his hand.
“You Kavanaugh?”
Great. Jeff Coleman was going to get everyone to call me by my last name.
“I am.”
“I’m dropping you off.” He indicated that I should climb up into the cab, so I did.
“So how do you know Jeff?” I asked, trying to make small talk and ignoring his stare.
“Did Jeff do your ink?” he asked.
“No. Had it done in Jersey.” Except for Napoleon on my calf, but he couldn’t see that because of my jeans, and I wasn’t going to volunteer information if I didn’t have to.
“Nice,” he said, turning back to the road.
We rode in silence through the city streets until he pulled up in front of Murder Ink.
“Here you go.”
I’d hoped Jeff would have him drop me at the Venetian, but no such luck. I thanked the guy and got out of the truck. He took off before I could get to the door, the gold car glimmering as the sun hit it.
Jeff Coleman was nowhere to be seen. His mother, Sylvia, was inking a girl’s hand. I got closer and saw it was a skull. Peering into the girl’s face, I figured she was eighteen at most. She might regret that skull in a couple of years. Or maybe even next week. I might have tried to talk her out of it. If I knew Sylvia, she’d talked her into it.
“Hello, dear,” Sylvia said without looking up, her machine whirring seamlessly as she drew.
I didn’t know exactly how old Sylvia Coleman was, but I guessed she was in her seventies, maybe even early eighties. She’d run the shop for years and then turned it over to Jeff when she “retired,” although it seemed her retirement just meant she came to the shop for half a day instead of a full day. Sylvia wasn’t the golfing type. Or even the traveling type. She was an old-school tattooist, having learned the trade from her husband, who had died of pancreatic cancer about ten years ago. Sylvia had tattoos all over her body, except for her face, and I knew this because the day I showed up for my Napoleon ink, she stripped to her birthday suit and gave me the grand tour.
Most people might have been a little freaked-out by that, but each tattoo has a story, and she told those stories so well that I forgot she was naked underneath that ink.
“While you’re here, you might as well pick something out,” Sylvia said, waving the machine toward the flash on the wall. “Jeff says you might be here a while.”
He did, did he?
I pulled up a chair. “Thanks anyway, Sylvia, but I don’t know how long I’ll be here.” I watched her outline the skull, then looked back at the girl’s face. One tear was crawling down her cheek; her mouth was set in a grim line.
It hurt. It hurt like a thousand bee stings. But for most, the hurt evaporated when the endorphins kicked in. Not for this girl.
She was regretting this already, but she wasn’t going to admit it.
And it was too late now. If she told Sylvia to stop, she’d have half a skull on her hand. Might as well go for the whole shebang.
A voice from behind me made me jump.
“It’s about time you showed up.”
Chapter 34
Jeff Coleman came out from the back of the shop. For “liking” me, he didn’t look too friendly at the moment. He jingled a set of keys.
“Come on.”
“Where are we going?”
“You’re going to see your brother, dear,” Sylvia said without looking up from her work. “You need to come clean.”
Easy for her to say.
“Do you have another car here?” I asked as I got up.
Jeff had already started out the back again, and I sped up a bit to keep up. He didn’t say anything, just led the way through the office and out the back door.
If I’d thought the gold Pontiac was outdated, then the purple Gremlin that sat against the curb was a dinosaur. I might not have even recognized it if it weren’t for a silly book Tim had brought home about the worst cars ever. I couldn’t remember where the Gremlin was in the lineup, but I did think it got a better rating than the Pinto, which apparently tended to catch fire spontaneously.
Those cars were in and out again before I was even born.
Jeff Coleman, however, was about ten years older than me, if I could hazard a guess, and he probably had some sort of nostalgic warm feeling about this funny-looking car with a long snout and a back end that looked like it had its tail chopped off.
“Whose car is this?” I asked as Jeff opened the passenger door for me. Chivalrous. Who knew?
I had to wait until he got into the driver’s seat before he said, “It’s my mother’s.”
This made sense. Somehow I could see how this car’s quirkiness would appeal to someone like Sylvia. A vintage car for a vintage woman.
“Are you really taking me to Tim?” I asked.
“I’m taking you home. If he happens to be there, then I guess, yeah, I’m taking you to Tim.”
Home. Immediately I thought about my queen-sized bed with the fluffy white cotton sheets. Now I wanted nothing more than to crawl under the covers and sleep for about three days. I felt like I’d been up for a month. And that vodka I’d had at Chez Tango had made me sleepy without my even realizing it.
“Sorry about your tires,” I said.
“What did you do?”
“Hey, I didn’t do it,” I argued.
“No, I know that,” he said, taking a cigarette out of his breast pocket and sticking it in his mouth.
“Can you not smoke in here?” I asked.
He gave me a quick glance before looking back at the road again. He kept the cigarette in his mouth but didn’t light it. Security blanket, I guess.
“I mean,” he said, the cigarette wobbling between his lips, “what did you get into that someone had to slash my tires?”
I sighed. There had been so much all day that it could’ve been any number of things. And for some reason, my brain settled on Frank DeBurra. Maybe he’d found me after all and was mad I’d ducked out on him at the
