Karen Olson - The Missing Ink

Joel brought me a Johnny Rockets burger-not as good as In-N-Out-but I think it was less an act of kindness than a desire for one himself. It wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate it, but he’d already had the pretzel and the ice cream, gone out for lunch and then some sort of snack after that-no one knew what-and now the burgers.

Weight Watchers would make a load off him.

He knew what I was thinking and batted his eyes at me, his mouth curled in a Cheshire-cat grin.

“I don’t start counting points until next week.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You didn’t have to.”

Joel and I had a weird sort of connection that usually only people who’d known each other for a lifetime had.

“Sorry,” I said into my burger.

Joel clicked on the TV.

We were coming into the news late, halfway in, so we found out what the weather was going to be like for the next week-sunny and hot, more of the same-and that the Dodgers were preparing for their next game with the Diamondbacks.

The pet of the week was a dog named Sasha.

Just as I was about to shut it off, Leigh Holmes’s face filled the screen. The lights from the police cars behind her flashed red and white, and an airplane took off behind her. The “Breaking News” logo flashed at the bottom of the screen.

“Police are investigating the body of a woman found in a car here at McCarran airport,” she said. “Sources tell us it could be Elise Lyon, the missing woman from Philadelphia.”

“They couldn’t come up with some sort of ‘runaway bride’ name for her?” Joel asked as he wadded up the empty burger wrapper and tossed it in the trash can. “They’re so lame.”

I shushed him.

“The car was rented by a Kelly Masters, our sources tell us, which is the name Elise Lyon used when she went to a local tattoo parlor two days ago.”

What had happened to Elise Lyon after she left the shop the other night? But I barely had time to think about that because the picture changed, and now, instead of Leigh Holmes’s, it was my face that flashed on the screen. I recognized it from when I walked out of the staff room this morning into their assault on me.

“You look fabulous on TV!” Joel said. “The light picked up all the highlights you just got. And your red hair against the silver in your ears, well, it looks great.”

I studied my face, trying to see what Joel did, but all I saw was what I imagined everyone else would: the short, chopped haircut, hoops that ran the length of my earlobes, the dragon on my chest, the water lilies on my arm.

“Brett Kavanaugh, owner of The Painted Lady at the Venetian Grand Canal Shoppes, may have been one of the last people to have seen Elise Lyon alive.”

Joel slapped my arm playfully. “That’s the best free advertising we could get!”

I wasn’t sure it was a good thing. Between this and 20/20 , we would undoubtedly attract some new clients, but for all the wrong reasons. They’d see what they would expect: the tattooed lady, the dwarf, and the fat man. Ace, with his movie-star good looks, would be the only “normal”-looking one among us. Wasn’t that a joke.

“Brett Kavanaugh is the sister of Detective Tim Kavanaugh, who is in charge of the investigation.”

They showed Tim come in the shop and make them turn off the camera.

“Detective Kavanaugh was questioning his sister and her employees earlier today, but he had no comment for the record.”

“Oh, don’t look so sad,” Joel said, his arm snaking over my shoulder. “You really do look great on TV. And we’ll get some business out of this.”

I shrugged off his arm and, as I was about to turn off the TV, I saw something that made me stop short.

I pointed. “There, do you see him?”

Joel was too late; the picture had already changed back to Leigh Holmes at the airport.

“What did you see?” he asked.

“It was that guy, the bald, tattooed guy who was watching me this morning in the mall. He was outside the shop. I saw him in the window behind Tim.” My heart was pounding. Who was that guy?

I turned off the TV.

“Hey, she might have had more.”

“She doesn’t have anything. Otherwise she would’ve said it right away. Anyway, I can’t concentrate on that now.”

“Do you really think the guy is stalking you or something?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. It’s really creeping me out.”

Joel took his cell phone out of his breast pocket. “I’m going to call around, see if I can find out who he is, okay?”

I nodded.

He stood up and pecked my cheek. “I’ll take a walk outside.”

While he tried to track down that ink, I punched Tim’s number into my cell phone.

“Listen, I’m tied up right now,” he said without even saying “hello.”

“Are you at the airport?”

Heavy sigh. “You saw it on TV.”

“Just now. Was the car really rented by Kelly Masters? Is it Kelly-I mean Elise Lyon-in the car?”

“I can’t say anything right now. I’ll see you when I see you.” And he hung up.

I hated it when he did that.

And I hated it that I couldn’t just drive over to the airport and see what was going on.

I had to ink four shoulders-four women who each wanted the same image of a book to commemorate their friendship and the fact that they’d met in a book club. They were in Vegas for a long weekend to celebrate twenty years together and didn’t want everything that happened in Vegas to stay here. I’d sketched a small red book with golden tassels and four blue stars, and they loved it.

They brought a bottle of champagne, and while we didn’t exactly condone that, Bitsy conceded it was a special occasion, and between the four of them, they probably wouldn’t get drunk on one bottle.

They cheered one another on as I worked, and I found myself thinking about Mickey and the rest of the gang at the Ink Spot, back home. I missed that camaraderie, and even though I was forming bonds here in Vegas, it wasn’t the same yet.

When I was done, they insisted I share a glass with them.

After they left, I went into the staff room. The light table was a mess of tracing papers and stencils. Bitsy would file everything at the end of the day, but I started to help by making piles. As I shuffled the bits around, I spotted the crude drawing Kelly Masters-or, rather, Elise Lyon-had handed me just a couple of nights ago.

I ignored the rest and picked it up, studying it as if it would give me some sort of clue as to what her story really was.

She couldn’t draw, that was for sure.

I traced the outline with my finger, but the light from the table illuminated the paper, and I could see something was written on the back. I flipped it over to see an address written in pencil.

It was a familiar address, a lot farther up on Las Vegas Boulevard. Near Fremont Street.

It was Murder Ink.

A tattoo shop. Our competition.

Elise might have just gotten the names of other tattoo shops in Vegas and then picked one. The hole in that story, however, was that there was only one address written on the slip of paper. Unless she’d been there and decided not to stay.

Not out of the realm of possibility. I knew Jeff Coleman, the shop owner. He specialized in flash, the stock designs that lined the walls of his shop. No originality to his work; his street shop located next to Goodfellas Bail Bonds catered to walk-ins, and he stayed open until four a.m. so anyone out partying who wanted a tattoo on the spur of the moment would wake up the next morning with one. He didn’t have a conscience about who or what he tattooed, as long as he put money in the till.

He was everything I didn’t want our shop to become. So far, we’d succeeded.