A Good and Useful Hurt (3 page)

“Lamar lives in a building a couple miles from here. I’m pretty sure they have some openings.”

“Lamar? Is he black?”

Mike sighed and said, “Yes.”

“This is quite the multicultural operation you have going here, Mike. Two chicks and a black guy! That’s a hell of a thing. All we need is a gay Hispanic and an Asian.”

Becky said, “I’m a quarter Korean.” She flipped at her hair. “Bottle-blonde.”

Deb laughed and high-fived the now-grinning counter girl while Mike stared, incredulous.

“Mike, we need that gay Mexican. Or Puerto Rican. Or really any variety so long as he’s queer.”

“I’ll work on it. But right now I have to do some drawing. Becky’ll give you the nickel tour.”

Debra, or Deb, as she insisted on being called, was a force to be reckoned with. In her first week at the shop she worked a torrid pace of ten hours a day, for seven days. Her clientele came in a flood. When Mike asked her why she’d left wherever she’d come from, she said simply, “Detroit got old.”

“So you’re not going to tell me the truth? That dude you worked on an hour ago flew in from Toronto. He’s flying out today.”

She grinned. “I’ll just have to see how good of friends we become.”

In addition to pulling in her vast clientele, Deb had Becky coming in to work early almost daily to reconfigure things with her. At first Mike had been troubled, but when Becky showed him how much money they were going to be saving, he just sat back and watched. Their autoclave, the steam- and heat-based sterilizer at the heart of any tattoo shop, was being tested monthly by a local hospital. The checks were not required by any state or city statute, but Mike had always felt better that they made sure the equipment was functioning properly. Becky put them on a mail-based system that would test biweekly for six hundred dollars a year less than he’d been paying. The Wavicide they sprayed their work surfaces down with was antiquated as well, and according to Deb, it was going to be the death of all of them. She switched them over to a newer product called Madacide, which in addition to being cheaper was benign to their lungs, had a higher kill ratio, and worked faster.

None of that compared to what she did in her second week.

Lamar shuffled sideways twice, back and forth in quick motions, then said, “I can’t deal with this shit, Mike, and you
know
I can deal with some shit.”

“Calm down.”

Deb said, “I was just trying to teach him to wash his hands. I wasn’t even trying to be a bitch.”

“That shit comes natural though, huh?”

Mike sighed. “Let’s be civil.”

“Mike, she ain’t even been here at all. You need to be rid of this chick.”

“Be civil. What’s the problem?”

“Lamar, who I consider a dear man, a talented artist, and a person I quite enjoy, does not know how to wash his hands. Sooner or later he’s going to get someone sick. Chances are he has already. I was trying, emphasis on
trying
, to show him a cleaner way of going about it. If this is how it’s going to be, I’ll leave, but I shouldn’t have to. I was trying to help.” Deb pushed a loose lock of crimson hair from her forehead and crossed her arms.

Mike said, “What happened, Lamar?”

“I was washing my hands, and after I shut off the sink, she said I should do it again. I’m not even trying to be a dick, so I do, and she says again. So I do, because I’m not a dick, and she says again. That’s when I started yelling at this chick.”

“What was he doing wrong, Deb?”

“It’s not even his fault, Mike, it’s yours.”

“Mike, you are not gonna put up with this shit.”

“What do you mean?”

“You turn on a faucet with dirty hands. You get soap. You wash your hands. You touch that same dirty-ass handle with your pristine hands, and they’re dirty all over again.”

She spun from them to the sink. “Faucet on. Soap. Scrub. Towels. Dry hands. Use towels to shut off dirty handle. Go work, not give staph infection.” She turned back to them. “Until we get pedal sinks or sensors, it’s the best way. Make sense?”

Lamar turned to Mike. “Seriously, dude, I cannot work with—”

“She’s right.”

Lamar sighed.

“She’s right, Lamar, and she’s right that it’s my fault.”

Deb smiled and said in a prissy tone, “Mike, it’s no one’s fault so long as we learn not to make the mistake again.”

Mike was already leaving the room, the grin on his face fighting a frown. He thought of Sidney, and her brains and skull coating the bathroom of their apartment. The piss and shit that had pooled in the low spot in the linoleum. The lack of a note. The grin died. It was a hollow victory.

Those first weeks with Deb were so similar to the first weeks Mike had spent with Sidney that it near to crushed him. Sidney had been eccentric; so was Deb. Sidney had been headstrong to a fault; Mike thought Deb might be more so. The two women looked nothing alike, but they shared an innate ability to make Mike want to simultaneously punch and embrace them. Both wore a rough, denticle-like veneer that could sometimes do more harm than good. For Sidney it had been a way to keep people from becoming close to her. With Deb it seemed more a case of the wrong words, even if they were correct, leaping constantly from her mouth. In any case, working with someone so similar to a former lover was odd, but also invigorating to Mike.

Doc was a psych teacher at Grand Valley State University.
He’d been coming to Mike since he’d rolled into town, initially to get a tattoo on his arm that he assured Mike would be both the first and last. The Red Wings had won their first cup in years that spring, and he wanted their spoked wheel and wing on his shoulder.

That was nowhere near the end of Doc, though. Next was a tat of the Lions logo on his left bicep. “Worked for the Wings,” he’d said.

Since then, he’d paid Mike with a smile to all but cover him. The only areas to avoid were those that a T-shirt would reveal. Doc wouldn’t be swimming with colleagues anytime soon, but he could show up to work and no one would know his obsession, save for a few close friends.

Mike, Lamar, Becky, and now Deb were all well versed on what to do if they were to encounter him anywhere normal, like a grocery store, mall, or movie theater: “Fucking ignore me.”

They were quite happy to oblige, for his sake.

Doc wore mostly Japanese-themed tattoos, and Mike had reserved some of his best work for him, though ironically almost no one had ever seen it. Both of them were all right with that, but neither would have denied a quiet excitement for the day Doc retired. He’d planned a whirlwind tour of some of the more prestigious tattoo conventions once his lower arms were completed, and though Mike did tend to avoid the limelight, he had no doubt that if Doc did as he intended, a torrent of new clients would be beating down his door. Not just the regular kind that kept them so busy now, but the special kind that came to them not for reputation, but for a certain kind of art.

Today they worked on a small piece of bare skin just under Doc’s left butt cheek. Deb watched Mike work; her last two appointments of the night had been forced to cancel when the weather made a drive from Lansing impossible. They sat together as the wind howled against the windows.

“How do you like Grand Rapids, Deb?” Doc asked.

“Seems OK. I keep bugging Mike and Lamar to take me out, but so far the only taker has been Becky. She brought me to this awful meat market that was playing really loud rap. I got hit on by a couple hundred drunk frat guys, pretty sweet. Becky had fun though.”

“You hear that, Mike? Pretty girl is new in town and wants to see the city. Give me one good reason you haven’t shown it to her yet.”

“Shop’s been too busy.”

Doc scowled. “I think I know where Becky took you, and that bar is terrible—almost as bad as this man’s excuse. Young lady, I will leave you with my card. If neither of these fine young gentlemen are able to accommodate your need to see the lights, no matter how dim, of our fine city, I shall find myself forced to act in their stead.”

Deb ginned and said, “You sure Mrs. Doc would approve?”

“It would be a Mr. Doc—and that’s of course what we would be in search of. I don’t think he would mind being found one bit.”

“You hear that, Mike? If you don’t take me out, Doc and I are going boy hunting.”

“I heard it just fine. You two have fun.”

“You’re a killjoy.”

“Please, Mike,” Doc said. “I don’t have any papers to grade this evening.”

Becky called from the lobby: “Tomorrow is your day off, Mike, and it
wasn’t
a meat market. And Debs, you got a phone call.”

Deb left the room, and when the door closed behind her, Doc said, “You’re going to foul this up for yourself.”

“I’m not trying to foul anything, or do anything else.”

“She’s cute.”

“She’s crazy. You should have heard what she said when she came in for the job.”

“Couldn’t have been too bad. You hired her.”

“She’s got talent, what can I say?”

“She likes you, at the very least in a friendly way.”

“Like I said, I’m just too busy for anything more than what happens here right now.”

“You’ll come to regret this; time is of the essence for these things.”

Mike set his tattoo machine down, removed his gloves, and said, “It’s just too soon, Doc.”

“No, it’s not. If anything it’s a fair bit too late. Sid is dead, Mike. She isn’t coming back, and if she is in some better place, as they like to say, I’m sure she’s pissed you’re not dating. It’s been almost four years. That’s a long time for anybody. And at some point, people get so they can’t crawl out of that hole.”

“Shit.”

“Shit is right, Mike. I say this as a friend: if not her, it needs to be somebody. I was a goddamn mess after Ben passed in 1982, but once all my tests came back clean, I was back out. Even if I wasn’t dating I was getting my head ready to know that I could. You didn’t get the chance to have Sid tell you what to do after she passed. I did. Those weeks when Ben was dying were some of the worst of my life, but we made it through them together, and he never once told me to keep my prick to myself. Quite the contrary, in fact. The last thing he wanted was for his death to ruin my life, and I know that Sidney would have felt the same for you.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Don’t think, do it. You’ve got a beautiful young lady practically begging to be entertained, and you’re sitting on your hands. At the very least, you’ll get some practice talking to women for when you are ready to date. Now can we get back to my fucking leg?”

Mike pulled a new pair of gloves on, picked up the machine, and tapped the foot pedal twice before dunking the needle at the end of the machine into the little cup of ink. He pulled the skin taut on Doc’s leg and started shading.

Mike said, “Thanks, Doc.”

Doc just smiled.

Phil drove the truck to work, cursing all of the dumb fucking sheep that didn’t seem to understand the rules of the road.
It wasn’t hard to drive a car, so why did some people make it so difficult? Phil downshifted the big Ford and crossed two lanes to the empty slow lane, then accelerated around the cars dragging ass in the other two lanes. As he passed them, Phil hung a thick, trunk-like arm out of the cab, middle finger on full display. The car closest to him, a Toyota Camry being driven by a little pencil-necked fucktard, responded in kind, but the hand disappeared back into the car when the driver looked over at Phil. The window rolled up and the hand disappeared, the driver staring straight ahead, uninterested now in a duel on the highway. Placated and smiling, Phil punched the accelerator.

He parked the truck at the first stop of the day, an oil change place on Thirty-sixth. Phil used to hate delivering here because the rugs he picked up were always incredibly filthy. He understood the environment—you work with grease, stuff is going to get dirty—but this was far from the only oil change on his route, and none of the rest were as filthy as this one.

Still, he wasn’t angry. These days, one of
his
girls worked inside.

Phil hopped out of the truck and walked to the back, heaved open the doors, and clambered on in. The order was written on the clipboard he’d left in the cab, but he didn’t need it. Not everything came easy to Phil, especially reading, but he had memorized the delivery list down to the last detail. He grabbed the pair of three-by-eight rugs and one three-by-four, then hopped off of the truck. He walked towards the door carrying a load of rugs under one arm that few men could have managed with both, whistling a few bars of “Freebird” as he strolled on in.

Phil saw that Hladini was working the counter as she most always was on rug day, and she was pretending not to notice him, just as she was prone to do. She was Indian—red dot, not feather. That was exactly the sort of shit that would have turned Phil off under normal circumstances, but this bitch had a seriously smoking body, and he could tell she’d be a good time.

“I’m going to set these down right here, alright Hlad?”

“That’s just fine. How’s your week been?”

“Busy, just like always.”

“Well, I won’t keep you.”

Phil gave her a smile and went to gather the dirty rugs. No one else seeing the smile would’ve thought anything of it—if anything, they’d remember her acting interested in
him
, and that would be it. The dumb deliveryman too stupid to notice the obviously interested pretty girl would fall through the cracks, and that was a good thing, because tonight Phil was going to kill Hladini.

If you had asked him, even Phil wouldn’t have known when it started. He’d had a decent enough family. His mom drank a bit too much and his dad wasn’t around all that often, but Phil had never wanted. His dad drove a truck and lived down in Florida now with his second wife—his parents had divorced the year after he’d flunked out of college. Big enough for football didn’t mean smart enough for college—Phil would have said that before college, and he sure as hell knew it afterwards. His mom worked as a secretary for the same company he delivered rugs for, and she’d gotten him the job after the mess at college, the mess where he’d fucked that chick and she said she was passed out but she wasn’t, not all the way, and he was going to leave anyways because of grades. Just a damn mess any way you spun it.

Things had been OK since then, but they’d gotten a lot better after he’d discovered hunting. It started out with just following women; they never noticed him, and he didn’t even know how he was doing it. It was a pretty good time, and even with the new hobby he still missed it. They were so stupid. If his father had imparted one bit of wisdom on him it was that women were just so dumb. Phil had known about his dad’s other women growing up—how could you not?—but his mom never got it. And if she knew and ignored it, wasn’t that worse?

It had been too long, that was just all there was to it. Phil was able to play other games in between the killings: follow a girl without her knowing about it, masturbate thinking of past conquests, plan the next event, and, best of all, the dreams.

Phil had been able to control his dreams ever since a nightmare he had when he was about eleven. He’d been scared, running from some knife-wielding thing, when he’d decided not to run anymore. He found there was no knife thing, or dinosaur, or anything at all unless he wanted it to be there with him. And he wanted the women with him. He wanted to relive the power and the suffering and make it better over and over again. It was always better in his sleep.

The dreams with the last girl were running thin, though. Usually they would stay strong for at least a few months, but lately they’d been fading faster and faster. After the first rape and killing, Phil had wonderful dreams for almost a year, recalling the event in exquisite detail. The longer it got from the crime, the more sure he was that there wouldn’t need to be any more, that his personal thirst had been well slaked. He had been wrong.

After the first girl wore off, Phil had gone through a week of nightmarishly empty sleep. It was as if she’d never been in his mind at all. “Never again,” he’d said at the time, so now the death of a new girl just meant stalking of the next soon after, so that the well of bloody memories never went all the way empty. That way he could kick the old one out of his head when the new one arrived. It was a good system, and it had worked great for the next two, but the one after that had been a bad death, plus she’d been a prostitute and the police had yet to find the body. Without pursuers, it seemed the dreams weren’t as powerful, either. He needed the chase, needed to see the family anguished on the television to really get a charge—the death on its own wasn’t good enough.

It was like beer, Phil figured. One day one can was enough, and the next you were due for two. It didn’t really much matter, though. If he needed to off a few people to keep that itch scratched, then so be it. He finished rolling the soiled rugs—no worse than usual today, and no better either—and walked them to the truck. He tossed the oil-stained mats into the bin in the truck and walked back inside.

Hladini gave him another smile when he walked back in, this one over a customer’s shoulder. Phil nodded politely and grabbed the fresh rugs from the floor by the counter, then walked back towards the pit to replace them in the filthy hallway that led out of it.

The men in the oil change ignored him, or at the very least gave him a wide berth as he quickly laid down the clean-not-for-long mats. That done, Phil went back up the pit stairs. He nodded at Hladini again—
See you in a few hours, cunt
—and walked back to the truck. He fired up the diesel engine and got moving to stop number two.