a nice jolt as if getting those last pistons firing in my brain. I had been starting to drag.
“You’re an angel,” I murmured while Charise sauntered across the tattooing room to pick up the tiny skirt she had folded and placed on another tattooing chair. The woman had to be freezing when she walked out the door, but it wasn’t my problem.
“The guy at the coffee shop said you usually ordered that,” Serah said, keeping her eyes locked on me while the other woman got dressed.
“Bill,” I grunted. Bill was one of the baristas down at the local coffee shop, though if you called him a barista you risked getting a face-full of steaming-hot coffee. He was usually making my order by the time I walked in the place since I almost never deviated from my usual. There were perks to being a regular customer.
With half the coffee gone, I walked Charise to the front lobby, where we briefly set up her next appointment so that she could get the matching dragonfly done on her other hip. I had offered to do both today but she just smiled and said that she liked to have a reason to come back to see me. I accepted the compliment and the impersonal hug before she strode out of the shop, her high-heeled shoes clomping across the hardwood floor like a draft horse pulling a heavy load.
I hesitated at the glass case, some part of me not wanting to return to the tattooing room. Charise represented everything that was normal about my life, everything that it was supposed to be. I’d wanted a life of bullshitting with people about everyday things that didn’t really matter. Life was supposed to be creating art and helping people. I was supposed to be worried about bills and whether I needed to get a new set of tires for my SUV so I could get through the winter snow.
But all that was slipping away in the face of darkness that was crowding my life. Reaching down to pick up my MP3 player, I switched the music over to a playlist of movie scores. It matched my darkening mood and was easy to talk over.
“I think I’d like this tattoo,” Serah said, finally pulling me into the tattooing room.
Stepping over the threshold, I leaned forward a little to see that she was pointing to a picture of a Japanese koi. I smiled, impressed by her selection.
“Nice choice. Do you know what it means?” When she shook her head, I picked up my coffee cup and sat down in the tattooing chair that Charise had vacated just moments ago. “The koi is popular among young men, but some women have started getting it. It’s the symbol of a person’s journey. A sign of growth, courage, and strength. There’s an old fairy tale that I don’t remember, but apparently the final evolution of the koi is a dragon, the most important of all the Japanese symbols.”
“You make it sound like you have to be worthy of attaining a tattoo of a koi,” she said softly as she closed the book and set in on the chair next to her.
“Only the person getting the tattoo can decide if she is worthy.” I paused, waiting for her to meet my eyes again. “Are you?”
She lifted her head, her shoulders straightening a little, and met my gaze without flinching. “I am.”
“Good answer.”
A little laugh escaped her and she shook her head at me as we both brushed aside the momentary soul-searching. There was a lot I didn’t know about the TAPSS investigator but I respected her. She worked hard and believed in what she was doing. There were a lot of people in this world who weren’t doing half as much as she was.
“Thanks for the coffee,” I said, holding the empty cup up to her before I placed it on the counter.
“I thought you could use it. You said that you were functioning on only two hours of sleep. The parlor forcing you to keep such long hours?”
I shook my head. “I’ve got some other problems that I’m dealing with at the moment.”
“Earlier, when you told me that your girlfriend was pregnant,” Serah started and then paused, licking her lips. “You weren’t serious, were you?”
“Trixie is pregnant.”
“Oh,” she whispered.
“Which explains her reaction to your announcement the other night at Kyle’s shop,” I added, watching as my companion visibly paled. Yeah, telling a pregnant woman that other pregnant women had been killed by