“Basically there’s four steps,” said Alex. “You got to do them in the exact order or it won’t work. First all the doors got to be closed. If you have that driver door open, it’s not going to work. So like if you get pulled over, that cop, he’s not going to search your car with all the doors closed. Meaning he ain’t going to find shit.”
“Doors closed,” said Timmy. “Got it.”
“Then you sit in the driver’s seat,” said Alex. “There’s a pressure sensor in the seat so it knows if someone is there.”
They got into the car, Alex behind the wheel, Timmy beside him in the passenger seat. “Next you turn on the rear defroster,” said Alex, switching it on. “But here’s the key thing: at the same time, you got to push these two.” He indicated the switches for the front and rear passenger-side windows.
Timmy pressed one switch, then the other.
“No, at the same t-time.” The kid was jazzed, nearly trembling with some weird manic excitement.
“Like this?” Timmy said, holding down both switches.
“Yeah, but you messed up the order, so you got start again from the beginning. Watch.”
Alex demonstrated again, flicking on the defroster while holding down the two window switches.
“That’s it?” said Timmy.
“No. Now you got to swipe the card.” He took a white plastic card from his chest pocket and swiped it across the center air-conditioning vent.
On the passenger side of the dashboard, a compartment opened soundlessly, in the spot where an airbag would go.
“Holy shit.” Timmy peered into the compartment. It wasn’t big, but big enough. “What’s that inside it? Wood?”
“Cork,” said Alex. “It soaks up the smell.”
“Goddamn. That is some James Bond shit.”
The kid fidgeted. Timmy saw in that moment how young he was, proud of what he’d built but mistrustful of praise.
“How much is all this going to set me back?”
“The base cost is eight grand. That’s for two compartments. If you need more than two, that’s extra.”
“Eight?” said Timmy. “Andy told me five.”
“It was five last year. Now it’s eight.”
There was no point in haggling. Timmy saw that he had no leverage in this negotiation. He said, “I only brought five.”
Alex frowned, deliberating.
“I could take half up front,” he said grudgingly—as though he were going out on a limb, as though he wouldn’t have an entire fucking car as collateral.
Timmy took the envelope from inside his jacket. “You do a lot of these?”
“I don’t know about a lot. I do some.”
Timmy did that math. If the kid did one installation a week, he’d clear thirty thousand in a single month. Probably he had a girlfriend spending it for him. Timmy had been the same way at his age, every dollar he earned spent—directly or indirectly—on getting laid.
“Enjoy,” he said, counting out the cash. For four thousand dollars, the kid should get plenty of tail.
“OLDER THAN CAVE PAINTING,” SAID CONNOR. “IT’S THE EARLIEST form of writing. I shit you not.”
Timmy was sitting in Connor’s chair, naked to the waist.
“Thirty-two hundred B.C. That’s the oldest known example.” Connor was famous for making asinine pronouncements about tattooing, its importance as an art form. He had personally done all Timmy’s ink but the first one, an eagle on his right biceps. He’d had the eagle since boot camp at Parris Island, which made it older than Connor.
“They found this dude in a bog in Denmark, the oldest known human. The skin was perfectly preserved. Sixty-one tats.”
Connor was not a critical thinker. His information came from old tattoo magazines he bought on eBay. There was so much ludicrousness packed into his stories that Timmy didn’t even bother.
A warm lick of blood trailed down his back.
“You need a break?” said Connor.
“Nah. I’m good,” Timmy said.
The current piece was an elaborate back tattoo, an ongoing project. Every few weeks Connor outlined a new section, or filled in what he’d outlined last time. It had begun with a massive Celtic cross centered over Timmy’s spine, its crossbar extending from shoulder to shoulder. Timmy had drawn the cross himself, on grid paper to get the scale right. He had a large back, and it took Connor three hours just to get the outline on his skin. Filling it in took longer. Timmy chose three colors: black, red, and green. He’d lost track of how much money he’d spent, the countless hours in Connor’s chair.
The cross, in the end, was not what he expected.
What’s the problem? said Connor. He had an artistic temperament, sensitive to criticism.
It looks kind of—Christian.
It’s a cross, Connor said.
The cross had been a problem from the beginning. First it looked too Christian. Then it looked too Celtic. Timmy feared turning into his father, whose flabby sentimentality about Ireland embarrassed him. If it was so fucking great over there, why did everyone leave?
After some discussion, he and Connor decided on a solution. The solution was more ink. Connor added a border around the cross, meant to resemble chain mail, then a leafy vine winding through the chain. Birds were added, thorny roses, a slithering snake. Timmy’s back looked better and better. Now Connor was filling in what was theoretically the final piece, a sliver of moon above the left shoulder blade.
The needle was very hot, digging into his flesh. His phone rang in his pocket.
Connor said, “You need to take that?”
With any other customer, he would have pitched a fit—more evidence, to Timmy, of his artistic temperament. Connor was so touchy about being interrupted that he’d hung a sign above the mirror: NO CELL PHONES PLEASE. He made an exception for Timmy, whose phone calls typically lasted less than a minute.
Timmy answered without looking, which was always a mistake.
“It’s February,” said his ex-wife. No hello, no how are you? They’d dispensed with the pleasantries long ago.
Connor gave him a quizzical look. Timmy held up a finger.
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “I can’t get down there right now.” Every few months he brought her a wad of cash, hand-delivered. Tess knew, had always known, what he did for a living. And yet she refused to understand that he couldn’t simply drop a check in the mail.
Connor reached for his vape and stepped out the back door for a smoke.
“Well, what am I supposed to do?” said Tess. “Put it on your tab?”
“Look, you know I’m good for it. I’ve got it right here.” It was nearly true; at least, it had been true a week ago—before he bought a Honda Civic from a stranger on Craigslist, before he handed a Russian teenager four thousand dollars in cash. “Don’t I always pay you eventually?”
“My car payment is due tomorrow. Not eventually.”
“Fuck your car payment,” he said, filled with righteous indignation. “This is child support. Food and clothes and whatever.”
“I already bought his food and clothes. That’s why I can’t make my car payment. Do you get that?” Tess spoke very slowly, as though he were hard of hearing. “We need a better system. Or any system. We could set up direct deposit like Paige and Bill.” Paige, her best friend, had ditched her husband last year. To Tess she was like a patron saint of divorce.