He studied the block of skin some more.
“You can never really cover up an old tattoo,” he resumed. “But if you know what you’re doing, you can work over and around it so the eye is taken away from it. That’s the trick. I guess you could almost call it an, optical illusion.”
“Is there any way we can figure out what the yellow eyes might originally have been part of?” I asked him.
Pit looked disappointed and sighed.
“It’s just a damn shame it’s in such bad shape,” he muttered, placing the skin on the towel and blinking several times. “Man, those fumes will get you. How do you work around that all the time?”
“Very, very carefully,” :I said. “Would you mind if I use your phone?”
“Help yourself.”
I stepped behind the counter, keeping an uneasy eye on Taxi as she sat up in her bed. She stared at me as if daring me to make one move she didn’t like.
“It’s okay,” I told her in a soothing voice. “Pit? Is it all right if I page someone and give him this, number?”
“It ain’t a secret. Help yourself.”
“You’re a good girl.” I encouraged Taxi to be one as I stepped around the counter to use .the phone.
Her small, dull eyes reminded me of a shark’s, her head hick and triangular like a snake’s. She looked like something primitive that had evolved no further since the beginning of time, and I thought of what was written on the box inside the container.
“Could it be a wolf?” I said to Pit. “Even a werewolf?”
Pit sighed again, the hard work of payday weekend shadowing his eyes.
“Well, wolves are real popular. You know, pack instinct, lone wolf,” he told me. “Hard to cover up one of those with a bird, an owl or whatever.”
“Yeah:’ Marino’s voice came over the line.
“Hell, it could be so many things.” Pit kept on talking loudly. “Coyote, dog, cat. Whatever’s got a furry coat and yellow eyes with no pupils. Had to be small to cover it up with an owl, though. Real small.”
“Who the hell is that talking about a furry coat?” Marino rudely asked.
I told him where I was and why, Pit rambling on all the while, pointing out all sorts of furry flash on a wall.
“Great.”- Marino got mad right away. “Why don’t you get one while you’re there.”
“Maybe another time.”
“I can’t believe you would go to a tattoo parlor alone. You got an idea the kind of people who go in a place like that? Drug dealers, assholes out on parole, motorcycle gangs.11’41t’s all right.”
“Oh, no, it ain’t all right!’ Marino erupted.
He was upset about something that went beyond my visiting a tattoo parlor.
“What’s wrong, Marino?”
“Not a damn thing unless you consider being suspended without pay something wrong.”
“There’s no justification for that,” I angrily said, although I’d been afraid it was inevitable.
“Bray thinks so. I guess I ruined her dinner last night.
She says if I do one more thing, I’m fired. The good news is I’m having fun thinking what the one more thing is I might decide to do.”
“Hey! Let me show you something,” Pit called out to me from across the room.
“We’ll do something about this,” I promised Marino.
‘Yeah.”
Taxi’s eyes followed me as I hung up and picked my way around her. I scanned the flash on the wall and only felt worse. I wanted the tattoo to be a wolf, a werewolf, a small one, when in fact it could be something else entirely and probably was. I couldn’t tolerate it when a question remained unanswered, when science and rational thinking went as far as they could go and quit.
1 couldn’t remember ever feeling this discouraged and unsettled. The walls seemed to move in on me and sheets of flash jumped out like demons. Daggers through hearts and skulls, gravestones, skeletons, evil animals and ghastly ghouls played “Ring Around the Rosie” with me.
“Why do people want to wear death?” I raised my voice and Taxi raised her head. “Isn’t living with it enough? Why would someone want to spend the rest of his life looking at death on his arm?”