Ink Flamingos

Chapter 57

He laughed, an ugly sound. “It’s just you and me now,” he said, shoving me farther into my room.

I noticed the bruise on his cheek, happy that I’d inflicted it and wondering if I could do more damage. Because while I’d had doubts before, I had no doubts now.

Harry was behind all this. It was that picture on the blog. The one I’d just seen. And the iPhone he’d had when he appeared out of the blue. “They’re coming back,” I said.

He snorted. “Right. But even if you’re telling the truth, they didn’t bring their key, did they?”

No. And I flashed on a memory. Ace telling me he’d lost his key.

Harry had found it. Or, more likely, taken it.

“You set up that blog,” I said. “Why?”

He pushed me back onto my client chair, putting his foot on the pedal that made the back go flat. He was stronger than I’d thought, and as he roughly turned me over, I tried to think of how I could twist away. Before I could, however, he had my arms under the chair and was tying them with something he’d grabbed off my shelf. A tattoo machine clip cord.

I’d seen one of those used to kill someone before. My whole body started to shake as he pulled the cord tight around my wrists, then got up and stepped around and behind me.

“What are you doing?” I asked, turning my head so I could see him out of the corner of my eye. He took out some ink pots and began setting them on the low table next to the chair.

I kicked up, and he grabbed my feet as I frantically tried to move my hands, but they were bound too tight. I felt something wrapped around my ankles, then around the chair so I couldn’t lift my feet.

Banging from out front indicated that Bitsy and Joel were back-but locked out as I suspected.

“Bitsy and Joel will call the police,” I warned Harry, who still hadn’t said anything but was now slipping a needle into my tattoo machine. He was going to give me a tattoo.

He was a scratcher. Jeff had fired him because he botched tattoos.

Something dawned on me.

“You did that tattoo on Daisy, didn’t you? The one that killed her?”

Harry’s head snapped up, his eyes full of anger. “That wasn’t supposed to happen.”

“How did you come to tattoo her anyway?” I asked.

He snickered. “I met her coming here that day. She wanted another tattoo. I told her you weren’t here, that you were on vacation, but I could do it for her. I told her I worked for you, that I was new to the shop. She tried to back out, said she had to meet someone at the Golden Palace, but I told her I had my case. I said I could do it there. She finally said okay.”

Harry’s tone indicated that because she’d consented, everything he’d done was on the up and up.

“I knew you did all her tattoos, and I wanted a piece of that, too,” he said. “I wanted to prove to you that I was as good as you.”

But he hadn’t even told me he was a tattooist. Harry was totally delusional.

I thought about Daisy having to meet someone at the hotel. The room was in Ainsley Wainwright’s name. Was she going to talk to Ainsley-or, rather, Ann-about the band? Or was she meeting Ainsley, the blogger?

“Her friend wasn’t there when we got there,” Harry continued. “But I talked the girl at the desk into letting us in.” Like he’d talked the girl at the Venetian into giving him Sherman Potter’s room number. He was smooth.

“I didn’t know she’d have a reaction,” he said, still tinkering with my machine. It was as though he wasn’t quite sure how to get the needle in. Not good. “And then, when she did, and she stopped breathing, I panicked. I called my wife. Well, she’s my ex-wife. She sort of looks like you.”

She didn’t look at all like me.

“She agreed to help me.”

“To set me up so you wouldn’t be implicated,” I said.

“Everyone knew you were the only one who tattooed her,” he said matter-of-factly. “It would make sense it was you.”

And no one would suspect him at all.

He’d gotten the needle in now, and he settled into my chair, wheeling it around the side of the client chair. I felt my shirt being lifted up.

“Nice tat,” he said when he saw the Celtic cross on my upper back. “Needs something down below.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. His fingers slipped into the waist of my jeans and around the front. I tensed as he found the button, the zipper, and he tugged my jeans down around my hips. I struggled to catch my breath, my heart pounding.

“Then that blogger showed up,” Harry said, his voice devoid of emotion. “We couldn’t believe it. She was Terri’s neighbor. What are the odds of that?”

In a city that thrived on odds, Harry was right. If anyone had placed a wager on it, he’d be a rich man today.

Harry was still talking. “Terri was pretty sure the blogger recognized her. So we had to get rid of her.”

His fingers traced an imaginary outline on my skin. I forced myself not to flinch.

“You killed her,” I said flatly, trying to focus on his words and not what he was doing. The tattoo machine whirred to life as he stepped on the pedal. The needle pressed into the skin of my lower back. He hadn’t even done a stencil. What was he tattooing on me? I tried to follow the lines he was making, but I couldn’t figure it out, the usual pain nonexistent behind my fear.

“It was easy. We knew where to find her.” He snorted. “I had no idea there were two of them. Terri said she never said anything about a twin sister.”

“Did you think she had come back from the dead when you saw her with Sherman Potter?” I asked, forcing myself not to flinch. I was piecing it together now. Daisy went to meet the sister who was the singer, not the one who was the blogger. But Terri hadn’t known, so they’d killed the wrong girl. I remembered Harry’s initial reaction to the girl in Sherman Potter’s room, and then how he’d wanted to come with me to find her at the bar that night. Maybe he’d finally figured it out, too, and planned to cover his tracks. But thinking about that night reminded me…

“Your wife, excuse me, ex-wife, took the pictures of us,” I said. And then I remembered something else. How he’d taken me home in a cab. He knew where I lived. And I found a flamingo on my bed.

I shivered when I recalled the way Terri had given me the once-over when she came here to talk to Joel about the tattoo. She wasn’t here for anything except checking me out, seeing if she could impersonate me better, like I’d thought.

“So why do all that stuff?” I asked. “The blog posts, the impersonation, the flamingos?”

“Your brother, the police, needed a distraction,” he said. “You were the best way to do it.”

I’d suspected that, but hadn’t wanted it to be true.

I couldn’t hear banging anymore. Bitsy and Joel were going for help. I moved my hands under the chair and felt the cord give a little. I moved my hands a little more, and to my surprise, it gave even more. I started to work at it, hoping he wouldn’t notice my muscles flexing. If he did, then I’d just say my arms were falling asleep, a little white lie Sister Mary Eucharista would approve of, considering the circumstances. The needle was moving along my lower back, horizontally. It lifted a couple of times then settled back with little pinches of pain that had finally gotten my endorphins all worked up.

“So what are you going to do to me? Are you going to kill me, too?” I asked with a little more confidence now that the cord was giving way bit by bit.

“You screamed when we were at the Flamingo. In public,” he said angrily. “Now everyone’s after me.”

He hadn’t answered my question. Not that I really wanted an answer. Not that I needed one.

In what felt like hours but was probably only minutes, the cord fell away from my wrists. But what to do now? I couldn’t move my feet; he’d see me. And he had that machine. While he couldn’t go any deeper with the needle than he already was, he could use it as a weapon, hit me with it or something. But if I moved fast, maybe I could catch him off guard.

I had no choice.

In one swift move, I swung my arms up from under the table, twisted my body around to one side, and my fist connected with the side of his face as I pulled myself up to my knees.