“Miss Frost, take my advice,” Bonn said, taking my arm and speaking quietly, but firmly. “Talk to your lawyers, and take their advice. Because no cop cares how nice you are. We all just want to catch the bad guy and move the fuck on.”
It took an hour for the crime scene technicians to get back to the car, and then another hour to take all the pics and samples they wanted. While they worked, I took a walk down the pretty little suburban street, but then realized this was his neighborhood. We would have taken walks here. First, at night, then, maybe, someday, by day. I couldn’t take it; I trudged back, plopped down on the sidelines, and tried hard not to pick at, or think of, my itchy neck.
Or think of my daughter, trapped in foster care, unable to see me.
It was well after one when they re- released the blue bomb to me. Without even time to stop for a snack I spent the next three hours at Ellis and Lee, where my lawyers worked me over on everything from Valentine to Cinnamon to Calaphase. Finally I trudged back to the Rogue Unicorn and steeled myself for the fallout of my stunt on the steps of the jail.
But there was none; Kring/L was supportive as always, and none of the staff gave me grief. They all knew what I’d been through. In fact, Annesthesia pulled me aside and confided that we’d gotten a few customers who wanted graffiti-based tattoos, and that she’d been turning them away. I thanked her-and not just because I didn’t like the look of graffiti art on human flesh. Instead, at this point, I was raw enough about Calaphase that I was afraid that on the spot I’d do something I might regret.
Then, my day got even better. A cute, pigtailed college student came in looking for a ‘Frost bite.’ I smiled and told her she’d have to settle for a tattoo.
I love tattooing. I love talking to the clients, picking out the design, fitting it to the skin, feeling the smoothness of the canvas before I make the first mark. Even the prepwork-setting up the tattoo gun, the needles, the flash-has a pleasant rhythm to it, busy enough to make me forget things for a while. And when we get into the studio, just me, my tools and my client inside the protective barrier-well, they don’t call it a magic circle for nothing.
She chose a simple design, a butterfly atop a long-stemmed rose. Butterflower #4 was one of Jinx’s best designs, with simple, potent magical lines easily customizable for body shape and skin color. She wanted it in a “safe” place, someplace where it would look good in a bathing suit but hidden under normal clothes. I knew the type: I had been the type, long ago, before I got addicted to tattoos. So I gave her her first “bite” curling over her shoulder blade, so she could try out her rebellious streak before committing to changing her life.
The warm vibration of the gun rippled up through my hand, and I imagined the sharp, scratchy pleasure of the needle on the other end. I frequently wiped away the ink and blood so I had a clear view of my canvas, but as I drew the gun closer to the more sensitive skin near the ridges of her bone, I put the cloth down briefly and put my hand on her other shoulder to calm her, talking more loudly to keep her attention as I went over more sensitive skin.
Magical ink is trickier than mundane tattooing; you have less ability to recover from your mistakes, and have to learn how to really focus to get it right the first time. But Butterflower #4 was a small, simple mark, as magical marks go, taking little more than an hour, and after it was done I ran a little mana through it to make sure it worked.
The girl cried in delight when the butterfly stirred, then cooed as its wings lifted up into the air, throwing off little fairy sparkles of mana when, against my instruction, she touched it gingerly with her finger. No harm was done, though, so I coaxed it back into her skin so it could bond properly, bandaged it up to keep it safe from prying fingers, and sent her on her way with a stern but friendly warning-one more satisfied customer.
As I cleaned up, I felt good. At least there was this one thing I could do. Then I remembered Helen’s warning about the suitability of my profession, and I cursed. There was a good shot they were going to take this from me too, either because of the murder case or the custody case-that is, assuming there was anything I could do to get Cinnamon back at all.
“You have a call,” Annesthesia said, as I stepped out of the front inking room.
I checked the clock. “Almost nine,” I said. “A bit late for Rogue business.”
“She called twice while you were tattooing,” Annesthesia said, “but I didn’t want to interrupt you. It was only on the third call that she actually said it was urgent.”
“Oh, hell,” I said. My first thought was Helen calling with bad news about Cinnamon-but any kind of urgent call from Jinx or, worse, Saffron would be bad news right now. “I’ll take it in my office,” I said, stomping back to my desk and picking up the receiver. “What the hell’s happened now?”
The line was silent for a moment. “Dakota Frost?” the voice said uncertainly.
“Best magical tattooist in the Southeast,” I snapped, “but no-one ever needs an urgent tattoo-” At that last bit I stopped myself. First, I knew from experience that it wasn’t true, and second, it was no way to treat a customer. “Sorry, it’s been a bad day-”
“Well, given that your day started in jail,” the voice said, laughing, “I can believe it.”
“Ranger?” The Bettie Paige knockoff from the jail-who needed my help with graffiti.
“Still want to see some magic graffiti, Dakota Frost?”
My jaw hung open. “Oh, do I,” I said. “When and where?”
Speak of the Devils
The Candlestick Apartment Complex was in the West End, an inaptly named area of Downtown Atlanta even closer to the heart of the city than I was in Little Five Points. Even at ten at night, a fair number of the homeless milled around, which made me uncomfortable, which itself made me more uncomfortable. At a traffic light, I took a moment to make myself actually look around me, and saw the area was quite nice, with clean sidewalks, beautiful trees, and friendly people. Maybe I’d have to turn in my liberal do-gooder card.
The Prius told me to turn, and I turned, crossing train tracks and ducking under bridges, winding through smaller and smaller side streets whose broken pavement made Moreland seem as smooth as Georgia’s gas-tax highways. Graffiti began making more than its usual token appearance, and the tags got more and more elaborate-some of them looking suspiciously familiar, not the tagger’s exactly, but something I’d seen before.
I sighed. Some of the graffiti was beautiful, but a lot of it was just crap. There were clearly masters trying to do larger pieces here, some of them quite clever, especially a guy who kept drawing a kind of subversive Mickey Mouse smoking a joint. But for every masterpiece there were a dozen ‘toy’ taggers throwing up scrawls and gang signs, sometimes right on top of the masterworks, tsk tsk. Made both the masterpieces and the tags look like junk. No, not junk-unsafe. Like the people who lived there didn’t take care of what they had.
And then I was there, pulling up at the gate of a World War II ammo dump converted into apartments that, until only a few months ago, had housed hundreds of people. A lighted sign that had clearly once read “Candlestick Apartment Complex” in warm inviting letters now had an amateurishly-made banner draped over it, trying to legally rebut that claim by screaming “CANDLESTICK WAREHOUSES” in bold block letters.
I drove up to the iron gate and found the keypad had been broken open and hotwired. There was a notice from the city, a “POSTED: NO TRESPASSING” sign, and haphazardly duct-taped atop it was a piece of cardboard shouting: “WE STILL LIVE HERE, ASS!”
I stared at it, wondering if I should bail. This was not how I lived my life. I mean, I know I’m tall, tattooed, and edgy; but I keep my nose squeaky clean, and that includes staying in legal housing. If the city really was rolling the landlord to rack up fines, squatting wouldn’t fix it. It was more likely to get everyone arrested for trespassing. And I was in enough trouble already.