Ink Flamingos Read Free Page B

Tim.
    “You’ve got a pretty good memory,” he noted.
    “She was a special client, and I did them all in the last couple years.”
    “So there weren’t any more?”
    I wasn’t quite sure what he was getting at. “No. Just the ten.” And then I had a thought. “When she got the color, did she get another tattoo?” I hoped he’d say no—my ego was already bruised by that color—but instead he asked something out of the blue.
    “So who do you think was impersonating you?”
    “Huh? Oh, right, the redhead. I’m not the only tall redhead in this city,” I said. “There are a lot of tall redheaded showgirls in Vegas.”
    “True, true. But who else travels with tattoo ink?”
    This conversation was getting old, and I had a client.
    “Listen, Tim, unless you need something official from me, I’ve got to get back to work. I need to pay my rent.” A not-so-subtle reference to the fact that I paid him rent for sharing his house in Henderson.
    “That’s just it, though, Brett, we might need to follow up officially. Everyone here knows about you. They know you’re a tattoo artist. They know you’re a tall redhead. We might need proof you weren’t anywhere near the Golden Palace earlier.”
    The Golden Palace?
    “That’s where she was found?” I asked. “I couldn’t tell from the TV; we came into the report late. What a scummy place to die.” I felt awful for the pretty girl who had more talent in her little finger than most people had all over. The Golden Palace was off the Strip. Not too far, but even a block away put you in dicey company. It was gorgeous from the outside, all reds and golds and Chinese dragon statues, but I’d wandered in there one day to see if the inside matched the outside. Absolutely not. The carpet was worn and frayed; even the slot machines were the old-fashioned kind you could still get a pot of coins out of. But no one in the Golden Palace was a winner. The gamblers were older people who came in with their Social Security checks every month and lost. They were the down-and-out who came to Vegas and stayed in the only place they could afford, and even that couldn’t support their dreams.
    “Daisy didn’t have to stay there,” I said, stating the obvious. “Did she really have a room there?”
    “I’ll send someone over to verify your alibi,” Tim said, ignoring me, which piqued my curiosity further.
    I quickly beat it down. I’d promised myself a couple of months ago that I wouldn’t get involved in police business anymore, that I would curb my curiosity about things that didn’t involve me.
    I reminded myself, though, that this did involve me, if the police had to check out my whereabouts when a girl died.
    There was one question, though, that was still nagging at me: “So if there were ink pots and tattoo needles, did she have a new tattoo or was it just the color in the flamingo that you think might be new?”
    “How could we tell if a tattoo is new?”
    She did have a new tattoo.
    “Whatever is new will have a pinkish hue to it, sort of like a bubblegum color. And it might be a little inflamed.” I couldn’t help myself. “Was she murdered, Tim?”
    “It’s just routine, the questions,” Tim said, ignoring me again. “Like I said, to make a hundred percent sure that it wasn’t you in that hotel room.”
    “Do the police think this redhead killed her?”
    “None of your business, Brett,” Tim said sternly. “Remember?”
    Okay, so it wasn’t enough I had to remind myself that I wasn’t going to get involved. Now my brother had jumped on that bandwagon.
    I didn’t have time for a snappy retort, though, before he threw me another question.
    “Have you seen this blog before, Brett?”
    I glanced down at the laptop screen, which had grown dark. I moved my finger on the pad, and the colors of Daisy’s flamingo flashed bright.
    “I found it through a link from another blog,” I admitted. “I don’t know why I didn’t know about it before, because