Driven to Ink

Chapter 45

He caught me staring.

“It’s not what you think,” he said, a little panicky.

What? That he really was the guy who came to The Painted Lady after all, and not Ray Lucci? Because that was exactly what I was thinking right that second.

Every muscle in my body was taut. I was ready to run. But I did want some answers, especially now. His gaze had wandered over to the entrance to the bar. I could see him figuring how long it would take him to get over there.

I clamped my hand down on his knee.

“So you’ve never been in a tattoo shop before, Dan?” I asked, my voice low and possibly a bit threatening.

He started shaking his head so fast I thought it would spin right off his neck.

“No, no, no, I’d never been in your shop before,” he insisted, moving his leg to try to release my grip, but my hand was holding on pretty tight.

“I don’t think I believe you,” I said. “This is exactly what my tattooist tattooed on you. Isn’t it?”

“It wasn’t me.”

“What else are you lying about? Is that why you’ve been hiding? Because you’re guilty?”

“I didn’t kill him,” he hissed.

I took a shot in the dark. “So why did you give him ten thousand dollars?”

“I don’t need to answer any of your questions.” Dan Franklin pushed himself off the barstool. A piece of paper fluttered to the floor from his pocket as he ran toward the entrance. I started after him, but the bartender stood in my way.

“That’s twenty bucks for the drinks,” he said, then pointed to the ground. “And can you pick up your garbage?”

I totally did not have time for this right then. I tried to keep an eye on Franklin as I reached in my bag for my wallet, pulled out a twenty, and threw it on the bar before stooping down and picking up the hard piece of paper, which didn’t belong to me, thank you very much. The bartender obviously wanted a tip, but I didn’t have time. I almost slapped the paper in his hand but instead shoved it in my pocket as I sidled around him, stumbling out of the bar. I couldn’t see Franklin any longer. There were three walkways he could’ve gone down, and I skipped from one to the other, but I didn’t spot him.

“What are you doing, Brett? You were supposed to come right back to the shop.”

I whirled around to see Tim walking toward me. I said the only thing I knew he’d respond to. “I ran into Dan Franklin. He’s got a ‘That’s Amore’ tattoo, like Ray Lucci, and he said Ray Lucci killed his rat, Snowball, and he withdrew ten thousand dollars from his bank account, and I think that’s where Lucci got his money. And now he’s getting away.”

I could see the little wheels of Tim’s brain working, and he was coming to the same conclusions I did.

After a couple seconds that felt like hours, Tim pointed down one walkway. “You go down there, and I’ll go down this one. They do meet up eventually, right?”

They do, but this place was a maze of walkways and stairs and escalators and elevators. Dan Franklin could be across the street at the Mirage by now.

I jogged along my route and ended up at an ornate railing. As I was looking down at the rather spectacular crystal sculpture in the Palazzo hotel lobby, I saw Dan Franklin power walking past.

“Hey!” I shouted.

He glanced up and gave me a little finger waggle.

“How do we get down there?” Tim had come up next to me.

We had to go back to the escalators by the waterfall and then down to the first floor.

Dan Franklin disappeared.

Tim tugged my arm and said, “Come on.” We made our way back around the maze of shops until we got to the escalators. We took the escalator two stairs at a time-at one point I thought I’d somersault forward all the way down-and landed at the bottom with a thud, running straight ahead, through the Palazzo casino and then coming to the statue. We rounded it to the front entrance.

We pushed our way through heavy doors and stood outside, breathing heavily from our workout. Remarkably, I saw Dan Franklin in the distance, on the sidewalk, heading south. But I was tired. I leaned over, my hands on my knees, trying to catch my breath, and the little piece of paper that bartender made me pick up fell out of my pocket and onto the ground.

Something about it caught my eye. I reached down, picked it up, and uncrumpled it.

It was a Las Vegas Monorail ticket.

I shoved it at Tim. “This fell out of Franklin’s pocket. He might be going there,” I said.

Tim nodded as he studied it.

“Where on earth do we find this Monorail?” I asked. “I know it exists. I see it every now and then, but I’ve never actually been on it.”

“You and most of the city,” Tim said. “I think we can get to it at Harrah’s.”

“You think? You don’t know? You’re one of Las Vegas’ finest. You’re supposed to know where everything is.”

Las Vegas’ finest had started toward the Strip. Harrah’s was a little ways down from here. In the direction Dan Franklin had been headed. Sounded like a plan.

“So tell me about this ten grand,” Tim said.

Uh-oh. I knew that was coming, but I hadn’t quite figured out yet how to skip around it. It did, however, get Tim to help me chase Dan Franklin, so I had to think fast.

“Jeff found out about it.” That wasn’t a lie. Exactly.

“Coleman?”

I nodded.

“How did he find out?”

“How does Jeff find out about anything?” I asked.

Tim mulled that a second, then asked, “So Jeff found out Dan Franklin withdrew ten grand from his bank account?”

“That’s right.” And because I needed to get off the subject, as we passed the façade of the Venetian, I added that I thought Dan Franklin might have actually been in my shop, that it might not have been Ray Lucci after all.

“We have Dan Franklin’s information, not Ray Lucci’s. Why would Lucci pose as Franklin? That never made sense,” I said. There was something about the tattoo that tickled my memory, something that was a little off, but I couldn’t remember what it was.

We circled around a gaggle of Japanese tourists holding cameras up to get a shot of the Eiffel Tower in the distance. There was a lot of pedestrian congestion here: heavyset guys holding beer bottles-open container laws don’t exist in Vegas-as they jostled each other, laughing; twentysomething women showing off bellies and tattoos; middle-aged couples wearing fanny packs and trying to sidestep all of the above. Three Hispanic men were slapping small cardboard cards against the palms of their hands before holding them out to passersby. Rejected cards sporting pictures of women with large bare breasts and phone numbers where they could be contacted lay scattered on the sidewalk.

I ignored them and craned my neck to see Franklin up ahead. He hadn’t moved as quickly as I’d feared. Maybe he’d stopped for one of those cards.

“So Lucci had the same tattoo Franklin has,” Tim mused. He was trying to figure out if that meant anything.

“So does Sylvia,” I said, although the instant I said it, I regretted it because of the way Tim looked at me.

“What do you mean, so does Sylvia?”

“She’s got a ‘That’s Amore,’ too,” I said. “She told me she got it in Sedona to commemorate her wedding. It looked new, so I’m sure she wasn’t lying.”

“What about Dan Franklin’s?”

“What about it?”

“Did that look new, too?”

I saw where he was going with this. If Franklin was the one who got the tattoo at my shop last week, then it would still be healing with that bubblegum pink hue. I thought about the tattoo, but I wasn’t sure.

“It was so quick,” I said. “He took off his jacket, I saw the tattoo, and then, when I pointed it out, he swung around so I didn’t have a chance to really look at it.”

“But this is your job,” Tim protested as we went through the doors at Harrah’s.

“Okay, so I had an off day,” I said bitterly.

The lights were flashing like a strobe; bells were ringing; music was playing. People were crowded around the slot machines, methodically hitting those little PLAY AGAIN buttons and hoping for the best. I refrained from shouting, “You’ll never win,” and stuck close to Tim as we maneuvered our way across the casino floor toward the back, where Dan Franklin’s head bobbed up and down in the crowd. He didn’t seem to know we were behind him, and he didn’t look back. Maybe he figured he’d lost us back at the Palazzo.

It felt as if we were walking forever. Around slot machines, gaming tables, people, cocktail waitresses balancing trays of glasses. Like those rats in a maze.

Finally we left the casino and stepped into a small area with a couple of kiosks. A sign pointed us in the direction of the Monorail. We went outside along a concrete path between Harrah’s and the Imperial Palace.

It dawned on me right about then that Tim was helping me track down Dan Franklin. Exactly the kind of thing he was supposed to prevent. But I certainly wasn’t going to say anything. He was on autopilot; being a cop and chasing the bad guys was ingrained in his DNA. Although it could be argued we didn’t quite know which side of the law Dan Franklin was on. The tattoo made him suspect, as did the facts that he’d been hiding out for days now, eluding any sort of questioning, and had withdrawn ten thousand dollars from his bank account.

As we approached the Monorail station, after walking what felt like miles, I realized there was one more thing that cast doubt on the man’s innocence.

He had a blue Ford Taurus. So what would cause him to get around town on the Monorail instead of driving? An accident, perhaps?