An Hour of Skin

Chapter One: The Wake

The Grand Palmer Hotel was going to be gone by Tuesday, and three hundred people had come to drink about it.

Lauren McKenna had a folding table set up under the mezzanine, in the shadow where the plaster had been stripped down to bare lath, and she had been working steadily for four hours. Forty dollars a piece. Cash in a cigar box, needles in a sharps container she'd brought from the shop, a strip of flash taped to a broken column: little wrecking balls, little chandeliers, the hotel's old script logo, a bottle of rye tipped over and pouring. Souvenirs of a death.

The demolition company had thrown the party as a joke that got out of hand. A DJ ran power off a generator in the alley. Somebody had strung work lights along the balcony rail, and the four surviving chandeliers hung above the crowd like the last unbroken teeth in a jaw. Wrecking crews in high-vis vests took selfies under them. Somebody's girlfriend had climbed onto the bar in heels and was dancing with her arms up, and the bar was ninety years old and would be landfill in five days, so nobody stopped her.

Lauren wiped a shoulder, taped down the last stencil in her stack, and looked at the line still waiting. Nine people. Maybe ten.

"You do this at parties a lot?" the kid in her chair asked. He was twenty-two, maybe, with the particular optimism of somebody who had never been billed for anything.

"When somebody pays me to."

"How long you been tattooing?"

"Thirteen years." She dipped, tapped, and drove the first line of a wrecking ball into the meat of his upper arm. Hand-poke, no machine — the generator was for the DJ and she wasn't going to fight over it. "Breathe out."

He breathed out. She worked.

Thirteen years, and here she was at a folding table under a mezzanine, taking forty dollars a body to keep a shop alive that might not last the summer. Copperline Tattoo was four months behind on rent. The building had sold in February to a limited liability company with a name like a dropped set of keys — Fenmark Holdings 12 — and the property manager had stopped returning calls, and the new rent, when it finally came, was going to be a number designed to make them leave without a fight. Della had done the math three times and then stopped doing the math.

So: forty dollars a body. Lauren had done worse for less.

She finished the kid, taped him, took his cash, and called the next one.

It was near midnight when the bartender sat down.

She was maybe fifty, forearms like rope, hair yanked back so hard it changed the shape of her face. She'd been running the makeshift bar all night and she smelled like limes and sweat and cigarettes. She put her arm on Lauren's table, palm up, and didn't say anything for a second.

The burn ran from her wrist halfway to the elbow. Old — years old — a splash scar, grease, the skin gone shiny and pulled, silvered in the low spots and knotted at the edges where it had healed badly. A long pale ridge cut through it where something had been stitched and hadn't been stitched well.

"I know you can't," the bartender said. "I've asked. Four shops. They all say the ink won't hold."

Lauren pulled the work light closer and turned the arm toward it. She pressed with two fingers, watching the tissue blanch and refill. Ran a thumb along the ridge. Some of it was slick and thin — that would spit ink back out like a kid spitting broccoli. But the field of it, the wide part along the outside of the forearm, that was thick and mature and would hold if you were patient and didn't try to bully it.

"What's your name?"

"Rosalie."

"Rosalie, some of this won't take. The shiny part, here, and here." Lauren traced it. "If I put a solid line across that, in six months it's going to look like a smudged phone number. But that doesn't mean nothing goes on you."

The woman's face didn't change. She'd been told no enough times to have built a wall against it.

"Hold still," Lauren said, and took a marker.

She drew for four minutes. She didn't draw over the scar. She drew with it — took the long ridge and made it the bank of something, then let a stand of ribbon grass come up out of the ruined tissue, blades bending the way grass bends near water, thin at the base and thickening where the skin was good, the whole design leaning east so that the pull of the scar became wind. Where the tissue was too slick to hold, she left it empty. Negative space. Air.

She turned the arm to the light.

"Oh," said Rosalie.

"It'll take two sittings. Tonight I do the bones of it. You come to Copperline in six weeks and I'll see how it healed and we'll finish." Lauren looked up. "It's going to be uglier than a normal tattoo, up close. Scar work always is. From four feet away it's going to be beautiful."

"Four feet away is where people are," Rosalie said.

Lauren snapped on fresh gloves. "Forty dollars."

"For that?"

"Forty dollars, and don't tell anybody in that line, because they're all getting chandeliers."

It took an hour and ten minutes. Scarred skin doesn't feel like skin; it drags, it bunches, it goes hard in one spot and soft an inch later, and the pain of it is unpredictable — dead in places and screaming in others. Rosalie made no noise at all. Lauren worked slow, laying line into ruined tissue with the shortest strokes she knew, going over the same eighth-inch four times where she had to, wiping and watching to see if the ink stayed.

When she taped it, the woman looked at her arm for a long moment and then put her other hand over her mouth and kept it there.

"Don't," Lauren said gently. "I'll cry, and I've got nine chandeliers left."

Rosalie went back to the bar. Lauren stripped her gloves, and that was when she noticed the man.

He was standing at the edge of her work light, in the dark under the mezzanine, and she had the immediate and unpleasant certainty that he had been standing there a long time. Tall. Dark suit, no tie, collar open. Somewhere around forty. His face was the kind of face that photographs well and reads badly — everything ordered, nothing offered. Silver coming in at the temples. He was holding a drink he plainly hadn't touched.

"You're in the way of the light," Lauren said.

"You didn't put anything on the thin skin."

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because it would fall out and she'd have to look at the failure every day for the rest of her life." Lauren started laying out fresh needles. "Are you in line?"

"How long have you been doing that? The scar work."

"Six years. On and off. It doesn't pay, if that's the question."

"It isn't." He set the drink down on the corner of her table, which she disliked, and put both hands in his pockets, which she disliked more, because it was the posture of a man about to make an offer. "How much did you take in tonight?"

Lauren looked at him properly. Watch worth more than her van. Shoes that had never met a Chicago winter. Somewhere behind him, a wrecking crew foreman laughed too loud, and she put it together — the hotel, the party, the man in the good suit standing in the dark watching people drink in his condemned building.

"You own this," she said.

"I own this."

"You're throwing a wake for a building you're killing."

"The building's been dead eleven years. Tonight's just the viewing." He didn't smile. "How much did you take in?"

"Twelve hundred and change."

"For seven hours."

"For seven hours."

"I'd like to buy your next eleven weeks," he said.

Lauren laughed. It came out short and unamused. "Get in line, then. There's nine people ahead of you and one of them wants his ex-wife's initials in the hotel's font."

"I'll pay for the nine."

"That's not how a line works."

He took his hands out of his pockets. "Jonathan Creed," he said.

The name did something to the air. She'd heard it. Everyone in the city had heard it, the way you hear the name of a weather system. Creed Group. The river. That vast strip of dead industrial ground on the south branch that had been chain-link and rust her whole adult life and was about to become something with a brand name and a promotional video.

"Lauren McKenna," she said. "You're standing on my extension cord."

He stepped off it.

"Three nights a week," he said. "Eleven weeks. Six-hour sessions. No other clients on those nights — I don't want you tired and I don't want you rushed. All the work happens at my house. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars."

Lauren's hands stopped.

It is a specific feeling, hearing a number that solves your life. It doesn't feel like joy. It feels like the floor tilting.

"What's the tattoo," she said.

"Left side. Armpit to hip."

"That's a big piece but it's not a quarter-million-dollar piece."

"It's grafted," he said.

She waited.

"Burn," he said. "Eight years old. Full thickness in places. Meshed graft over most of the flank, harvest sites on the thigh. I've been turned down by eleven artists in three cities. Two of them agreed and then stopped after one session." He said all of it evenly, the way you'd read out a parts list. "I've been watching you for an hour. You're the first person I've seen put a needle into scar tissue like it was skin and not a problem."

"It is a problem."

"You solved hers in four minutes with a marker."

Lauren looked past him at the ballroom. The DJ had switched to something slow and ironic. Two men in high-vis were trying to get a selfie with the nearest chandelier by standing on a table. Somewhere out in the dark the machines were parked and waiting for Tuesday.

"Two hundred and fifty thousand," she said.

"Half up front."

"Why so much?"

"Because I'm buying things that aren't work." He said it without apology. "Nobody photographs it. Not you, not me, not for a portfolio, not for a phone. Nobody knows it exists — not your friends, not your shop, not the man who does your taxes. And I decide which nights you're allowed to uncover that side at all."

Lauren tipped her head. "Say the last one again."

"Some nights I'll want you to work on the right side. The unburned side. Where I can watch your face and not have to watch you look at me." He met her eyes flatly. "That will seem irrational to you. I'm not asking you to think it's rational. I'm asking you to take the money."

And here was the thing.

Lauren McKenna had been financially cornered so long she could recognize the shape of a cage from a distance, in the dark, at speed. She'd been in the cage where you tattoo drunk bachelorette parties at two a.m. She'd been in the cage where you don't fix your tooth for eleven months. She'd been in the cage at nineteen, which was a different kind, which she did not think about at parties.

This was a cage. It was a beautiful one. It was lined in money and it had a door that only locked from his side.

She thought about Copperline. She thought about Della, who had two kids and a lease she'd co-signed. She thought about the number four in four months behind.

"Yes," she said. "With a term of my own."

Something flickered in his face. Interest, maybe. "Go on."

"You're paying me for silence and access and control of my calendar. Fine. But you're going to be lying half-naked in a room with me for two hundred hours, and I don't work on strangers." She peeled the backing off a stencil and didn't look at him. "An hour of your skin costs you one true thing."

"Define true thing."

"Something you haven't told anybody. Something that costs you to say. Not your favorite color, not where you went to school. If I ask and you lie, I stop working and you still pay."

"Do I get to ask you the same?"

"No," Lauren said. "You're not the one being drawn on."

Jonathan Creed looked at her for a long moment. Behind him the chandeliers swung very slightly, the way they did all night, from the vibration of three hundred people.

"Six hours a session," he said. "That's six truths a night."

"That's the price."

"That's more than I've said out loud in eight years."

"Then you'll be tired," Lauren said. "Same as me."

He picked his drink back up off her table. "Monday," he said. "Eight p.m." He set a card down where the glass had been — thick stock, no logo, just an address on the north branch of the river and a phone number. "Bring whatever you need. If you need equipment I don't have, buy it and send me the invoice."

"I'll need a chair."

"Then buy a chair."

He was three steps into the crowd when she said, "Creed."

He turned.

"Monday's the first hour," Lauren said. "You owe me tonight's, for booking me."

A muscle moved in his jaw. He came back and stood at the edge of the light, and the ballroom noise went on around them, and he said, quietly:

"When they take this building down on Tuesday, I'm going to be standing at the fence, and I'm going to feel better than I've felt in a year. And I don't know what that says about me, but I've stopped pretending it isn't true."

Then he went. Lauren watched him move through the crowd — people opening for him without seeming to notice they were doing it — and she looked down at the card, and then she called the next chandelier.

She made two hundred and eighty more dollars before the generator died at two.