Owen Minor was sick.
He tumbled out of bed and vomited on the floor. His skin was slick with sweat and there was a pain on his sternum hotter than fire. The bandage hid the spot where he had excised the tattoo of the little girl’s face.
It wasn’t the first time he’d been poisoned by a memory, but that hadn’t happened for years. Many years. What truly alarmed him was the fact that it was nine hours since he’d removed the image and the skin had not regrown. There was still a shallow and bloody patch. Four ragged square inches. The dressing kept the blood from running down his belly, but he could feel how raw the wound was. The pain was like a fresh burn.
“What the fuck?” he asked his reflection in the bathroom mirror.
Owen Minor was almost never frightened about anything.
He was terrified now.
The flap of skin was in the trash down in the cellar. Wrapped in wax paper and shoved down under the other debris. Later he planned to dispose of it far from his house.
Minor could feel it. He could almost hear it. The flies buzzed in long traffic patterns, around him, down the stairs, through the house to the basement stairs, down and around the trash can, and then back. Over and over again. They were frightened, too.
They were angry as well.
Minor was more than angry. He was furious.
That motherfucker Monk Addison. This was his fault.
“You’re going to goddamn well pay, you bastard,” he growled, then winced as a fresh wave of pain shot through him.
He thought about sending one of his flies to find Monk and make him do something awful. Maybe force him to go stick his hands into a wood chipper. That sounded fun. But he hesitated. Even the flies seemed reluctant. There was something about Monk.
Only once before had the flies refused to target someone Owen disliked. The big cop with the red hair. Owen had seen him flirting with Dianna outside the store where she worked. Owen wanted to do something bad to that big man. Partly because Owen lusted for Dianna, and partly because the cop scared him. Like that biker had scared him. But the flies absolutely would not go near him. And the one fly Owen sent to follow Monk to his house had never come back.
“You fucker,” he snarled, but the snarl turned into a sob.
He got dressed very carefully, filling his pockets with extra sterile pads and tape just in case the bandage leaked. Then he crept downstairs, moving like a man in a minefield until he reached the trash can by his workbench. The flies buzzed and swarmed and screamed in his mind.
He knew that he had to get the tattoo out of his house.
He had to do it now or go totally mad.