Page 22 of Puck
I squeezed his hand. “My heavy personal shit isn’t much nicer, and I’m still holding your hand, so you tell me.” I touched the tattoo of the 1939 Ford. “That’s a lot of story for one tattoo.”
He nodded. “The rest are the same.”
I examined his shoulder and arm—the M16 with the helmet on it seemed pretty straightforward, and something I guessed he wouldn’t want to talk about just yet, so I traced the outlines of the cards and dice, the revolvers, and the pinup girl.
“What about these?” I asked.
Puck grinned. “You’ve got a nose for the interesting stuff, don’t you?” He lifted his arm to look at the tats. “So, the interesting thing is, those three tats are connected.”
“How so?”
“I did a tour in Iraq as a grunt, followed by a few months’ worth of guard duty in Germany to finish out my enlistment period, and then I shipped back to the States. Of course, when I enlisted, I was a seventeen-year-old kid with no family who was also on the run from a quadruple homicide. Didn’t exactly have a home to go to, you know? I knew the cabin was still mine, but it was in the middle of nowhere, literally, no electricity, no plumbing, nothing. So I hit stateside with no clue what to do or where to go. I’d spent four years as a grunt, most of that boots on the ground in Iraq doing CP—combat patrol. No real education beyond high school, no real skills other than shooting, marching, and pumping iron. The only other thing I knew how to do with any real skill was play cards. I learned how to gamble sitting on my old man’s lap. He’d bring me to card games, and I’d watch him play. I knew the card suits and poker hands before I could walk. So I found a card game. Made enough money gambling to set myself up with a life, for a bit.”
I frowned. “So that explains the cards and dice, but how does that connect to the pinup girl and the revolvers?”
He laughed. “Well, I ended up in what you might call an underground version of the world series of poker. All totally illegal, of course, but hey, it was good money. The whole thing was flashy and as blinged out as you might expect from high-dollar, cash-only, underground poker players. Fancy cars, velvet-covered tables, bottles of Cristal and Hennessy, all that shit. And real live pinup girls. Instead of strippers or topless chicks or something tacky like that, they hired these girls as waitresses and had them get hair and makeup done to look like old school pinup girls, complete with vintage bathing suits.” Puck hesitated a moment or two. “I got involved with one of them. Raquel, her name was. At first it was . . . you know, just physical. But I kept going back for more, and she seemed interested in more, so we never really talked about it, but we . . . got together, I guess. I dunno what you want to call it. I ended up living with her. She was . . . Raquel was . . .” He hesitated again, this time hunting for the right words. “Not what you’d call a classy sort of lady, but she was the sweetest damn thing. She modeled some, mostly scantily clad or not at all, did some exotic dancing, some escort work—strictly nonsexual, she insisted. And she had the pinup girl thing going—she had a whole website for her work as a pinup girl. It was good business, I guess.”
“You keep using past tense,” I pointed out.
He nodded. “Because she’s dead. First and only serious girlfriend, remember?” Puck tugged on his beard again. “She was always bugging me about doing something with my life besides playing poker. She’d yammer on until she was blue in the face about how I was so smart and had potential and if she were as smart as I was she’d be doing something besides modeling and dancing. I tuned her out, figured she was full of shit. I’d barely graduated high school, and I only did that much because Pops fuckin’ made me. School was bullshit, and all I knew was gambling and guns.” He touched the crossed revolvers. “I got this to piss off Raquel, along with the other two, the cards and dice, and the pinup girl. The pinup was for her, but it was also like, guns, gambling, and girls is all I’m good for.”
“What happened to Raquel?”
Puck sighed and tugged on his beard hard enough that it looked painful. “She got hit by a taxi. Shouldn’t have been a big deal, just a broken leg and some contusions or whatever. But she—she picked up an infection. The hospital bungled it all to hell, and she died. Fucking freak thing, you know? Staph infection or one of those flesh-eating things, can’t remember what it’s called. You generally only get them in hospitals. She got it, and they didn’t handle it right, and she fucking died. She was twenty-three. Prime of her life, gorgeous, had her whole life ahead of her.”
“Did the hospital get in trouble?”
Puck shook his head. “Nah. We weren’t married, and she’d run away from home when she was just a kid. Nobody to sue them. They told me she’d died, that there wasn’t anything to do, and I should just . . . fuckin’—go home. So I went home. Got her buried. I was the only one at her funeral.”
“Jesus, Puck.”
He laughed. “Running theme, I’m noticing, you saying ‘Jesus, Puck.’” He squeezed my hand. “Twelve years ago, now. Old pain. It’s fine.”
“Does it hurt less, now?”
He shrugged. “Not really.” He touched the tattoos in question. “So that’s those three. The guns were just to piss her off, and because I thought they looked cool. The cards and the pinup were about how I made my living and about Raquel, the only good thing I’d ever really had in my life up to that point.”
“What about your dad?”
“That’s complicated.” He waved a hand. “Short story is he was a drunk, and he wasn’t always nice. I knew he loved me, but when he was at the bottom of a bottle, he turned into . . . someone else. He was angry. Life had dealt him a shitty hand. Ma died when I was a baby, he got laid off, all sorts of shit. But he was all I had, and he was . . . he was Pops. Like I said, it’s complicated.”
I examined his tattoos. “I’m scared to ask about any others.”
He touched the M16 and helmet. “You can probably guess about this one . . . a buddy killed in action. Dirty Harry is there because that movie is the shit, and I love Clint Eastwood. The handcuffs . . .” he laughed, “that one’s got a funny story attached to it.”
“Tell me.”
He lifted an eyebrow. “It ain’t exactly a PG story, babe.”
I lifted an eyebrow back at him. “Does it seem like that’s bugged me so far?”
He conceded with a shrug. “Guess not. So after Raquel died, I figured the best way I could honor her memory was to do what she always wanted me to do, make something of myself. I enrolled in Santa Monica College—which I paid for gambling, by the way—because a counselor told me I could transfer to UCLA as long as I put two years in and kept a C-plus average. So I did two years at Santa Monica, and then transferred to UCLA. I enrolled in a criminal justice class at Santa Monica, but only because it filled my requirements. Turned out I enjoyed it, and that sort of piqued my interest in forensics, so I ended up studying that at UCLA. But then right as I got my bachelors, a recruiter from the FBI talked me into a career in law enforcement. I thought that was funny as shit, all things considered. I mean, I paid for my degrees with illegal gambling, and there were four bodies at the bottom of quarry because of me.”
“Seems pretty PG to me, so far,” I said.
He chuckled. “That’s all just background. So I ended up in the FBI, did my time at Quantico, made agent, got put into the forensics department. I spent a good year and a half, almost two, not really dating or seeing anyone during my time at Santa Monica, not even hooking up. I was focused on school, and losing Raquel was still kind of raw, you know? Once I got into UCLA, I started hooking up again, and at that point, I kept it basic, you know? Well, I had to work my way up, in the Bureau. Just because I had a bachelors in forensics didn’t mean I was going to get the good cases right away, or be a forensics lab tech or whatever. I had to put in my time. Lots of legwork, boring cases, all that bullshit.
“One case was investigating this woman suspected of being a madam. Nobody could pin anything on her, but there was lots of circumstantial evidence that she was running a multi-state ring of hookers.”