Karen Olson - Ink Flamingos

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.

The needle slid along my lower back, but I didn’t have time to think about it. I swung my arms again and slammed my hands against either side of his face. He was so startled, the machine fell to the floor and his head snapped back.

Right at that moment, I heard a crash, glass shattering, footsteps running, and Jeff burst into the room. He barely looked at me as he grabbed Harry, swung him around and threw his fist into his face.

Harry’s good looks were history.

He fell to the floor, Jeff’s boot on his chest to hold him down, as Jeff turned to me.

“You okay?”

I nodded, although it was a lie. My shirt had fallen back down, but my jeans were still down below my hips. I reached down and started to pull them up when I remembered.

“He tattooed something,” I whispered, indicating my back.

“I got it,” Joel said from behind me, and I felt a soft cloth against my skin.

A security guard was behind Bitsy, who had her phone in her hand. “Tim’s on his way.”

Joel finished wiping the tattoo, and I pulled my jeans up, looking down at Harry. Jeff still had his foot on him, but Harry wasn’t going anywhere. He was out like a light.

Joel untied my ankles, and as the cord fell away, I felt myself start to collapse. Jeff caught me, his arms around me as he whispered, “It’s okay.”

I indicated Harry. “He killed Daisy. And Ainsley. He told me.”

Jeff lifted me up and carried me out of the room while Joel stood sentry, watching Harry. Bitsy waited at the front desk for Tim.

Jeff gently put me down in a chair in the staff room, but I stood right up.

“Stay put,” he said.

I shook my head. I had to see what that tattoo was. I went out to the back of the shop, where we had a long mirror, then lifted up my shirt and lowered my jeans.

It was half an outline of a flamingo, with a long black line from the beak to the wing. That had probably happened when I leaped up so fast.

I choked back a sob as I stormed up to my room and shoved the door open. Joel had used the cord that Harry had used on me to tie Harry to the chair. Harry’s eyes were open but unfocused, and he licked his lips.

“How does that feel?” I shouted at him. “What was the point of this? Didn’t you realize you’d get caught?”

His head lolled to one side as he stared up at me. “I thought they were gone for the night.”

He’d seen Bitsy and Joel leave but didn’t know they were just across the canal. He’d seen me lock the door.

“So you were going to tattoo me and then what? Were you going to kill me?”

He shook his head, then winced with pain. “I wanted to leave you something to remember me by.”

He’d certainly done that.

Before I could ask anything else, I heard glass crunching, and I turned to see Tim come in with three uniformed cops and Flanigan. I pointed at Harry. “He killed Daisy. And Ainsley Wainwright.”

Tim nodded. “We found Ann Wainwright tonight in a bar across the street from her sister’s apartment, having a drink after she cleared out her sister’s stuff. Ann was the one who saw Harry and Terri leaving the hotel room. After they were gone, she went in to find Daisy dead. She didn’t know what Daisy was doing there, but we can probably figure it had something to do with the Flamingos. She panicked and took off because she didn’t want to be implicated in Daisy’s death, especially since she was taking her place in the band. She left the door open a little, though, which was how the room service guy found the body. Ann didn’t know Harry and Terri knew her sister; she hadn’t seen her sister in a long time. When she saw Harry with you in Potter’s hotel room, she realized who he was. And then she found out her sister was dead, put it together that they must have mistaken her for her sister, so she decided to lie low, hoping they wouldn’t go after her.”