“Dakota,” she said, smiling, drawing her fingers over one last line of Braille before closing the book. “It’s been too long. You’re normally not so shocked.”
“Actually, I always am, spooky-eyes,” I replied. She scowled, and I said, “You’d prefer ‘Little Miss Anderson’?”
“NO!” she said, throwing her hands to her cheeks in mock horror. “Shame on you for dredging up high school memories, Miss Frost!”
“Don’t you start,” I said. “I’ve heard that far too much over the past few days—”
“So,” she said primly, leaning her elbows on the table, folding one hand over the other, and propping her chin atop them, “Let’s see this tattoo you’ve got for me.”
“Actually,” I said, pulling out the envelope, “I have two today, and maybe one later—”
“Oh, goody,” she said, clapping her hands together.
“Don’t get too excited, I may be taking one of them on spec.”
“Anything for you, Dakota.” She leaned her head against her hands. “What are they?”
“The one I called you about is a werewolf control charm. Spleen—”
“Feh,” Jinx said. “He smells.”
“Spleen hooked me up with a were who wants more control over his beast.” I grew uncomfortable, but Jinx kept ‘staring’ at me from behind her black glasses. “I think it may be a Nazi design, or something they collected. Frankly it scares me. I’m not comfortable inking it without knowing what it does.”
“As you should be,” she said. “And the rest?”
“A magical wristwatch.”
“Oh, my,” Jinx said, making gimme, gimme motions with her fingers.
“This one is a… stunt,” I said, holding off. “I don’t know if I’ll get paid, but I’ll cut you in for ten percent if I win the contest.”
“Dakota,” she said reprovingly. “Anything for you. But really! A contest. That’s so unlike you. What’s my cut going to be?”
“One hundred thousand dollars,” I said.
“Mmm.hmm,” she said. I couldn’t tell whether she believed me. Or maybe she missed the ‘thousand’ part? “Well, anything for you, Dakota. Let’s see what you’ve got.”
I slid the flash out of the envelope and arrayed it on the table. She stared down at it for a moment, then let her fingers run over it, looking off into the distance, murmuring. Then she pushed her glasses down and picked the flash up, holding it close to her spooky geode eyes, staring first at the detailed joins of the clock, then at the edge of the wolfsbane charm.
I felt so sad. Growing up, Jinx had always had the best vision of any of my childhood friends; now she could see little more than a murky blur. It was painful watching her rock her head back and forth, trying to eke some sense of the figures through the ruin of her eyes. Finally she put the flash down on the table, drummed her fingers, and nodded.
“It will take me a day or so to ‘look’ them over,” she said.
“I figured,” I said, pulling out a USB key. “I have some files if you want the originals—TIFF, JPEG, PNG, and for the clock, even something called SVG—”
“Scalable Vector Graphics,” she said, suddenly breathless, upraising a gloved hand into which I dropped the key. “Excellent. That will save me a step.”
“I don’t have the other one. We’re trying to get a picture now—”
“Do you know the general kind of inking it’s going to be?”
“It’s…” I stopped, deciding how much to tell her. This was police business, nasty stuff, and I knew how she felt about the police—heck, I felt the same way. But this was Jinx, after all. What could I hide from her? “I’m not inking it. Someone ripped a tattoo off one of Richard Sumner’s clients.”
“A copyright infringement case?” she said, shocked. “Dakota—”
“No,” I said, very flatly.
Jinx’s face drained. “Oh, Dakota,” she said, horrified. “You mean literally. Oh, Dakota! What have you gotten yourself into? How did you ever come across such a thing—”
“Andre Rand,” I said. “He wanted to warn me. Somebody’s targeting people with magical tattoos.” Her hands went to her mouth. “I’m, uh, trying to help them—”
“Well, duh,” she said. “Quit dancing around it, I can smell your reluctance from here.”
I didn’t say anything. I was a bit embarrassed. Jinx hated the police, for reasons she never disclosed. In fact she’d nearly cut me out when she found out my dad was a cop, and even now she barely tolerated him—though on that score I knew how she felt.
“Well,” I said, “It’s just, I didn’t think you’d like me working with them—”
“‘Them,’” she said. “Say it. ‘The police’—and ‘the Feds,’ I’ll bet.