As Nathan watched carefully, Billy finished assembling his American Eagle. He extracted several vials and set them on the ground. He tested the unit. It hummed.

‘One thing,’ the man said ominously, the razor rising slightly.

‘What’s that?’

‘Not a mole. Don’t tattoo me with a mole.’

‘I won’t do a mole, Nathan. I promise.’

Nathan folded the razor and put it away.

CHAPTER 34

‘We don’t call them guns.’

‘Yeah, yeah, I know. I forgot. I meant “machine”. Tattoo machine,’ Lon Sellitto was saying.

‘And we prefer “skin art” or “work”. “Tattoo” has a cultural connotation I’m not happy with.’ The petite woman, highly tattooed (skin arted?), gazed at Sellitto from over an immaculate glass counter, inside which were neatly arranged packets of needles, machine-not-gun parts, books, stacks of tattoo stencils, washable pens in all colors. Draw first, ink later, a sign warned.

The parlor was as clean as TT Gordon’s. Apparently legit skin artists took the disease stuff pretty seriously. You even got the impression that this woman would step out of the room to sneeze.

Her name was Anne Thomson and she was the owner of Femme Fatale Modification and Supplies. Mid-thirties, with short dark hair and only one tasteful nose piercing, she was really pretty. And part of that was the four-color tats, okay, artwork, on her chest and neck and arms. One – on the chest – was a combination of a snake and a bird. It vaguely reminded Sellitto of a picture he’d seen a few times on vacation in Mexico, some religious symbol. On her neck were some of the constellations, not only the stars but the animals they were inspired by. Crab, scorpion, bull. And when she turned once, he saw two sparkling red shoes on her shoulder. They looked real. Dorothy, my pretty …

Fuck art, Linc. That’s how I feel about art.

But not this. Sellitto liked the images. He really liked them. The pictures seemed to move, to expand and contract. Almost three-dimensional. How the hell did that work? It was as if he were looking at living paintings. Or at some entirely different creature, something not human but more than human. It took him back to some of the computer games his son had played a few years ago as a teenager. Sellitto remembered looking over the boy’s shoulder. ‘What’s that?’ Pointing at one of the creatures in the game. It looked like a snake with legs and sported a fish’s tail and human head.

‘You know, a nyrad.’ Like, obviously.

Oh. Sure. Nyrad.

Sellitto now looked up and realized he’d been caught staring at the woman’s chest.

‘I—’

‘It’s okay. They’re there to be looked at. Plural. Works, I mean. Not boobs.’

‘I—’

‘You just said that. I’m not thinking you’re a dirty old man. And you’re about to ask if they hurt.’

‘Naw, I figure they hurt.’