This is the fourteenth installment of the short story "Ink" by Steve Metcalf as it first appeared in the second Event collection "Iron Bay."
INK
Steve Metcalf
Chapter Thirteen
Poof
Big Mo knocked on Jones’s door but there was no answer. He then called Jones’s phone but there was no answer. Finally, he walked around the building as best he could and peeked in all the windows. There was no one home. Still holding his phone, he dialed up a friend of his, a detective with the Colma PD.
“I think there’s a problem,” Mo said.
* *
The apartment was nearly empty and all that was left was a laptop on a stack of boxes, small piles of clutter in the various rooms and a tiny television in the corner. The TV was on, and she was listening while creating a mixture of chemicals in a small, red, plastic bowl.
“It’s a steel-hulled cargo ship with the words Khan Hao stenciled along both sides,” the well-dressed lady on the television screen said. “We’re getting the footage from the local CBS affiliate, KTVT. The ship has been powering toward the small fishing town of Iron Bay for hours – coming over the horizon at first-light this morning.”
Bren Kira Duk finished creating her mixture and grabbed a small sponge and dunked it into the bowl. The sponge started to expand as it began soaking in the liquid mixture.
“Several helicopter fly-overs didn’t pick up any activity on the ship,” the newscaster continued. “In fact, many experts believe that the ship is running on a sort of cruise control – unmanned – and is heading directly for Iron Bay.”
Bren smiled, muted the television via remote control and clicked her mouse. The laptop woke up and had finished buffering a news report out of Sacramento.
“Chad DiNapoli was found beaten to death in his backyard yesterday,” the older man said on the recorded newscast. “The police have no leads as yet aside from the home’s security system.”
The image on the screen changed from the gray-haired anchor to a still-image of the backyard. Bren was familiar with it. Swing set. Toys. Four-foot high fence. The image was, by definition, a frozen moment in time, but no one really knew what it meant. Bren was cowering by the fence. Jones was standing further down the fence from her, crouched, fists clenched, in a clearly aggressive stance. Viewers could just make out the chain wrapped around Jones’s hand. DiNapoli was walking toward the two with his arms outstretched. It might have been a violent posture – it very well might have been an act of recognition.
Suddenly, and seemingly without provocation, Jones struck.
“This might be difficult to watch,” the newscaster said as the video froze. “So, if you have a delicate constitution, you might want to look away.”
The video started up again with Jones repeatedly punching Chad even as he fell to the ground. The video seemed to be running in slow motion as Bren stood to step away from the carnage. The screen froze once again and zoomed in on her tattooed arm.
“The young lady’s right arm,” the newscaster said in voice-over narration. “It is covered in tattoos. The image here is not high quality enough to pull much detail out, but you can see some. Possibly a dragon, here, or a snake. Some Asian characters here.”
The video began rolling again and the camera seemed to zoom in on Jones’s face as he turned away from the slumped figure. The video froze yet again with a fairly clear image of his face.
“Police are working with the San Bernardino force,” the image flipped and stretched to now show the Chad DiNapoli murder side-by-side with the Martin Gustavson murder. Jones’s face was in both images. The images then flipped to Bren. There was not much detail on her hood-covered face, but you could see the ink because of the sleeveless shirt.
“In an investigation independent of law enforcement, Channel 4 has learned that these two men attended the same Southern California high school. We’ll continue digging and keep you updated with any new information.”
She reached up with the remote and finally shut the television off. Likewise, she powered down the laptop and closed it. She was smiling and could feel all of the lights in her brain turning back on. That dark, red, frightening corridor was being flooded with genuine light and warmth for the first time in a decade and a half.
Bren, in her apartment, checked the bowl of liquid. The sponge had stopped expanding and it had soaked up about a quarter of the liquid in the small container. She pulled a slip of paper out of her pocket. It was four names and four addresses. Two of them were crossed off with red Xs. She grabbed a pen off the laptop box and crossed off Nolan Bise and Hiawatha Jones.
“Got you,” she said. Smiling, she lit a match and touched it to a corner of the paper. She held the burning sheet of paper as long as she could and then dropped it onto the floor. It burned and curled into a black husk. Continuing to smile, she looked from the black remains of her checklist over to the sponge, grabbed it, squeezed it and started scrubbing her right arm.
After several seconds, the ink began to turn back to liquid and ran off her arm into a dark pool on the apartment’s linoleum floor.
The End
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