between the lapels of my coat-vest. I’d sewn glitter and sequins onto the shirt to jazz it up, and his sparkling eyes had ridden up over the ridge of my breasts. “Thanks,” I said, but by that point the kid had fled.
I grabbed a maple mocha and camped out in the cafe. There in the ghetto library, as we affectionately called it, I started flipping through this glossy tombstone to Richard Sumners’s work, looking for clues to who might have worn the tattoo.
Richard’s magical inking began before I was born, back in the 60’s, but the wreathed snake had a modern flair to its design. I started to see some of the distinctive elements that made up the tattoo crop up in THE EARLY NINETIES section, but it wasn’t until EVE OF THE MILLENNIUM that I hit paydirt.
At first I thought I had it: a man covering his eye with a tattooed hand bearing a mark nearly identical to the one on the lid. But it was too small, and I remembered Sumner didn’t design his own flash: he had graphomancers do that for him, just like I did, which meant he ended up reusing the same design. Sure enough, there were three other people with similar tattoos, ending with a full-page shot of a young woman with the mark just above her breasts.
The tat was close—really close: the same size, on a flat piece of skin, sans belly button or the curve of a shoulder that would have shown up as a wrinkle on the lid. I stared at her — she had sharp, punkish hair like I did, and a sexy, come-hither smile. Automatically, I checked out the curves of her breasts, pressed beneath one delicate hand—they were full and luscious and looked quite lickable. Then my eyes drifted up to the tat, and I felt queasy. Had I just seen this woman in the flesh—flesh torn from her chest and stapled to a board like a seat cushion?
There was no way to know. I’d give the book to Rand at the first opportunity and hope he could find out. But then I started thinking: Sumners was tattooed himself, and some of those tats had to be marks of great magical power.
I flipped to the bio, trying to find out a clue about how he died, but it was no help. It had been printed in 2003, and the most interesting piece of information was that Sumners had ‘recently had his hands insured with Lloyd’s of London for over a million dollars.’ Useless.
I’d originally gotten the book to try to find out who had worn that tattoo. But now here was a new question: did Sumners die near a full moon.
And then a creepy voice breathed in my ear: “Give me some skin, Dakota.”
3. ENTER THE RAT
“Jeez!” I cried, recoiling from the foul-smelling breath behind the voice, splattering my mocha across the table. “Spleen, don’t do that!”
Life had cursed Diego “Spleen” Spillane to look like a rat—long, pointed nose, thick, scattered, grey-brown hair, and one yellowed, fake eye. Generally he played above type. Today he was full of himself, and apparently couldn’t resist working it.
“Come on,” he said, curling his head around my shoulder, breath foul. “Be a sport.”
And then I saw his hand hovering over the table, held out for five. “Garlic,” I snapped, grabbing his hand and pulling him round to deposit him in the opposite seat, nearly losing the rest of my mocha when I brushed it again. “Don’t be such a fucking sneak—”
“Cops give you crap?” he said, grinning.
“No—how did you know—wait, how the fuck did you find me?”
“Mary’s,” he said. “I showed up just in time to see ya snatched. You weren’t in cuffs—”
“I tried,” I said, but Spleen didn’t take the bait.
“—so I figured you were all right, but I tailed them anyway, figuring—”
“What do you have for me that couldn’t wait?” I leaned back and looked at the ceiling. “I keep telling you, no one needs an emergency tattoo—”
“Ah,” Spleen said, suddenly knowing. “But this time you’re wrong.” He got up and held his hand out to me. “Let me take you on a little trip.”
I got up from the table. “This is a bad idea.” I started to leave the mocha and the book. Then I stopped, and looked down at the book, stained on one corner where I’d splattered it. The ghetto library had given me what I wanted; but I wasn’t a college dropout anymore. In a good