Scar Tissue

by Samantha Simard

  Movement flickered in Wolfe’s side mirror, and his brain instinctively recognized the shape emerging from the window of one of the two remaining vehicles as the muzzle of an assault rifle. “Nice shooting, but I don’t think they liked that—duck!”

  He jerked the wheel as hard as he dared while going eighty miles an hour in a sports car, trying to avoid the incoming spray of bullets. Thankfully either the goon with the M16 wasn’t used to firing while moving or he was just a bad shot, because Wolfe didn’t hear the telltale thump of a bullet punching through the Mustang, nor did any of the windows shatter. The intersection with Mass Ave wasn’t clear as they approached, and Wolfe made a fishtailed right turn into the traffic, garnering a lot of angry honks but also losing another of the SUVs to a broadside crash with a pickup truck.

  The last SUV was swerving in and out of the flow of cars trying to get to them, and over the hammer of his own frantic pulse and Sebastian’s breathing, Wolfe could hear the distant wail of police sirens. He doubted BPD had many units to spare given what went down at Fenway, but at least it might dissuade whoever was in those crashed Cadillacs from following them on foot. The more immediate problem was approaching much faster than Wolfe liked: the Mass Ave intersection with Westland Avenue and Falmouth Street by Symphony Hall. The unmistakable molar-shaking hum of a semi truck’s engine to his left signaled incoming from Falmouth, and with it came opportunity.

  He had one chance to get this right. “Hang on!”

  The Mustang rocketed into the intersection at full speed, missing the nose of the giant truck by less than a foot and going temporarily deaf from the blare of the driver’s horn. Wolfe was close enough that he saw the whites of his own eyes in the reflection of the chrome grille, right before he cranked the wheel again and jammed on his brakes, rotating the Mustang a complete three-hundred and sixty degrees so they could face their pursuers head on.

  The semi-truck continued to Saint Stephen Street, and by the time the trailer was out of the way, the last SUV that chased them was gone.

  ~***~

  Chapter Seven

  Unforgiving Friday morning sunlight pierced through the thin skin of Jake Wolfe’s eyelids, and he groaned as his retinas attempted to char themselves into briquettes. It took his brain a moment to equate the sudden brightness with the whooshing sound of the curtains in the living room being thrown wide open, but when he did he squinted in his roommate’s direction. “Misha, what the fuck?”

  Mikhail “Misha” Aleksandrov stood by the front window, arms crossed over his chest. About the same height as Jake but a couple of years older, Misha had a mouse-brown tumbleweed on his head that he called hair, equally brown eyes, and a cleft in his chin that would’ve made Johnny Bravo jealous. He was dressed for work as an intern in a local law office, and somehow his plaid blazer only served to make him look more annoyed. “Pretty sure I should be asking you that question, Jakey, since I’m not the one who passed out on the couch for fourteen hours after a binge-drinking episode.”

  Jake was confused until he noticed the empty pinot noir bottle on the coffee table. The vial that had contained the Rapture was nowhere to be seen; at least he’d had enough forethought to throw away the evidence of his crime. To Misha, it must’ve seemed like Jake came home and guzzled down the entire bottle, when in fact that was the furthest thing from the truth. But with interning during the day and classes at Harvard at night, Misha wasn’t likely to notice much these days unless it was shoved right under his nose.

  When Jake didn’t respond, Misha sighed and rubbed a hand over his five o’clock shadow. “Please tell me you at least made it to the store and got some food.”

  “Uh,” Jake said intelligently. The high from the Rapture—more pleasant than the pain pills from the hospital and more euphoric than weed—had mostly worn off, but he still felt a pleasant buzz in his fingers and toes, blood thrumming underneath his numerous scars for what felt like the first time. “Not exactly?” Reluctantly, Jake told him what went down in the Caruso’s parking lot, emphasizing his near-breakdown and glossing over the details of his trip into Voici Spiritueux. He mentioned buying the wine, of course, but not the vial of Rapture that had been hidden inside of it.

  “So what you’re telling me,” Misha began, enunciating each syllable of every word at a glacial pace, “is that you blew our grocery money on one bottle of wine? You don’t even like wine!”

  “I’m sorry,” Jake said, and he meant it. Whether he was sorry because he wasted the money or sorry because he got caught was up for grabs; a lot had changed since the Mass Art Murderer’s rampage, not the least of which was the stability of Jake’s moral compass. “Look, I know I fucked up, okay? I’ll go back to Caruso’s tomorrow and put the groceries on my credit card.”

  Misha stared out the window he’d uncovered a moment ago, no doubt watching the cars pass in front of their red Colonial-style house, which sat on the corner of Pearl and Granite Streets in Cambridgeport. Misha’s ultra-rich hippie-dippy parents had put a down payment on the house as a gift to their son for getting into Harvard; problem was, they’d stuck him with the mortgage before they left to hike the Andes for a year. Enter Jake, desperately in need of someplace to stay so he could from home as a call center jockey. It wasn’t a perfect relationship—there was the awkwardness that came with Misha having dated Jake’s best friend, who was a Mass Art Murder victim—but it was a symbiotic one, at least until today.

  “Promise me you’ll go to the store,” Misha said, tone resigned. He glanced at his watch. “And do it fast—I’m gonna be late.”

  Jake raised three fingers. “Scout’s honor.” No need for Misha to know he’d never been a Boy Scout—that was Jimmy, and he got kicked out for kissing another boy. “Now get out of here.”

  ~***~

  Otis and Martha Webber owned a brick-front Greek revival on Hutchings Street in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, a few blocks from the Franklin Park Zoo. Diana had never visited their house before today, but she presumed that before Martha got sick she had been a gardener, judging from the breadth and scale of the flowerbeds that stretched from the front door to the sidewalk. The gardens were overgrown with weeds and looked as if they hadn’t been tended in years, but Diana was less interested in plants and more invested in the battered blue Kia sedan sitting in the Webbers’ driveway.

  “Curtains are all shut,” David observed from the driver’s seat of the Camry, which they’d parked a few houses down from the Webbers’ abode, the front end partially concealed by an overgrown hydrangea. “That’s Otis’s car, right?”

  Diana glanced at the Kia and nodded. “Yes. Should we go knock?”

  David sighed and popped his door. “Don’t see any point in putting it off.” He waited for Diana to get out of the car before heading toward Otis’s house, the morning air slightly cooler than the day before but no less humid. “Oh, I forgot to tell you I saw Bobby yesterday.”

  Diana tilted her head to the side, considering. “Your son and the only sibling you’re on speaking terms with know you’re alive, but you still haven’t told your wife? There is a pun there somewhere, I think.”

  “Jimmy asked me when I was gonna tell Angela when I saw him yesterday, and I… didn’t have an answer for him,” David said, his halting tone telling Diana this was hard for him to discuss. “I don’t know what to do, but he’s right in that I have to do something before the wedding.”

  “What are you so afraid of?”

  “I don’t know,” David repeated. (Liar, Diana thought but didn’t say.) “Maybe it’s because she remarried?”

  Diana snorted. “Yeah, to a prick.” At David’s surprised glance, she raised her eyebrows. “Wolfe didn’t tell you about Keith?” She gave him the short version—which she’d heard through Wolfe during the ill-fated six-months when she’d pretended to date him—beginning with Keith’s drinking and verbal abuse and ending with Wolfe putting Keith’s head through a wall when he came home from basic training. “As far as I know, Jake’s fath
er is in prison and nowhere near his life, and that is most likely for the best.”

  David’s expression was a mixture of shock and horror, but in true spook fashion he covered it well as they approached Otis’s house. “Why the fuck didn’t Jimmy tell me about that?”

  “There is one thing your son values above all else: honesty.” Diana climbed the porch steps ahead of her partner and rang the doorbell, trying without success to get a glimpse of the interior through the sheer curtains blocking the window. “You were not honest with him for the majority of his life, so is it really surprising that he isn’t telling you shit?”

  David scrubbed at his dyed hair in frustration. “I guess not.” They waited a beat or two, and when nobody came to the door, he nudged Diana’s arm. “Go ahead and pick the lock, I’ll keep a lookout.”

  Much like at Seams, Diana whipped out her lock picks and got them through the Kwikset deadbolt in under a minute. She was of the mind that Quick-Pick would be better branding, since the cheapest lock you could buy also happened to be the simplest, but that was a debate for another day. Walking inside revealed no immediate dead body stench, which was good, and they drew their Glocks and made quick work of clearing the house. Nobody home, and from the state of the dirty dishes and the trash, it looked like no one had been around since Martha passed away.

  “Place seems abandoned,” Diana noted, returning her gun to the holster at the small of her back, concealed by the length of her flower-print shell top. “Do you think we should—?”

  The back door to the house banged open and Otis Webber himself came barreling inside like his ass was on fire. A huge man at well over six-five and two-fifty, Otis was far more intimidating when he wasn’t partially concealed behind the counter at Seams. His t-shirt and jeans were ripped and dirty, eyes bulging in their sockets with mania and his entire body soaked in sweat. Without preamble, he let out an angered shout and ran at them, covering the distance from the kitchen to the living room in seconds.

  David and Diana dove to opposite corners like they were avoiding a charging bull, and Diana raised her hands in placation as Otis whirled on her. “Otis—it’s me, Diana! Please, what’s the matter?”

  He came for her with his arms outstretched and a snarl on his face. Diana turned quickly at the waist and brought her leg up, planting her foot on the coffee table and using it as leverage to spring upward. She grabbed Otis’s shoulders and spun around him, hooking her legs around his neck and using her momentum to throw him to the ground; she flew through the air and landed on all fours, skidding on the hardwood floor in David’s direction.

  “What the hell is his problem?” David wondered aloud, as Otis got his feet under him, seemingly unaffected by a headscissors takedown.

  Diana shook her hair out of her face. “I have no idea, but I do not see us reasoning with him in this state.”

  David was ready for it when Otis tried going after him, using the slick polish of the wooden floors to his advantage and sliding out of the way. He hopped up on the larger man’s back and got his arm around Otis’s neck, trying valiantly for a chokehold. Unfortunately, Otis was wise to this and turned around, slamming both his back and David into the nearest wall.

  “Uh, D?” he said, voice strained due to his ribs being crushed between a giant and unforgiving sheetrock. “A little help?”

  “Only since you asked so politely.” Straightening out of her half-crouch, Diana picked up the nearest solid object—in this case, a ceramic table lamp—and slammed it into the side of Otis’s skull. It shattered on impact, chunks of painted pottery and metal bits from the lamp’s innards hitting the floor at their feet.

  The big man went down like a sack of potatoes, falling to his knees and allowing David to stumble away from the wall and catch his breath. Otis didn’t lose consciousness, but he did curl up in the fetal position on the floor, moaning and grabbing at his head. David pulled a zip-tie from his pocket and handed it to Diana, who rolled Otis on his belly and secured his hands together behind his back. She noticed what looked like a small cut of some kind on the back of Otis’s neck near the base of his skull, but wrote it off as a result of the fight.

  “Dijana?” Otis groaned, peering at her from the corner of his eye. “How… why are you here?”

  “We’ve been looking for you, Otis,” Diana said. She didn’t bother correcting him on the usage of her true name, since David was the only witness; it didn’t matter that hearing Dijana brought back a slew of memories every time, not the least of which were a cold orphanage and the feeling of a gun in her small hands. “You have been missing for over a week.”

  Otis thunked his forehead against wood. “Has it been that long? That long since… Martha died?”

  “I’m afraid so,” David confirmed, a note of apology in his voice that made Diana’s heart do something funny in her chest. “Otis, where have you been?”

  Otis looked up at him, eyes going wide. “Mein Gott, you’re David Wolfe! Anton wants to kill you! What on Earth are you doing here?”

  “That’s not important,” Diana interjected, even though it really fucking was—just not to Otis. “Answer the question, please. We’ve been looking for you, but not for Anton. I was hoping you would be willing to testify against him.”

  “The problem was not you, Dijana,” Otis said, hands clenching and relaxing involuntarily. “Anton has done so much for Martha and I over the years. He brought her to all the best doctors, funded experimental treatments, even paid for her hospice care… but once she died, I think he realized he could no longer buy my loyalty because he had no more leverage against me. Perhaps he was fearful of exactly what you wanted to ask me.” The big man took in a shaky breath. “They came for me in the night. Injected me with some kind of drug and wrapped me in a—oh, verdammen, what is it called—?” He made a motion with his arms like he was hugging himself too tightly.

  David’s eyebrows shot up. “A straightjacket?”

  “That’s it! They put me in one of those awful things and took me away in some kind of ambulance.” Otis squinted at them, his head tilting slightly to one side. “I do not remember much else, but they brought me to a place, a terrible place called Blakely Manor.”

  Diana opened her mouth to ask what was so bad about Blakely Manor, but in that same instant Otis collapsed back to the floor and began convulsing violently. David bent down to try and help him, but Diana yanked him backwards, away from the sparks skipping across Otis’s skin from the back of his neck, as if he were hooked up to a car battery.

  Otis convulsed for a moment more, made one final haunting sound, and died.

  “Don’t! You’ll get… shocked…” Diana trailed off, exhaling harshly when she caught sight of the smoke coming from the same area as the sparks. “What the hell is that?”

  David was leaning against her chest, both of them sprawled on the hardwood, and when he noticed this he jerked away. He cleared his throat loudly and said, “No idea. Think he’s safe to touch now?”

  “Probably, but do it quickly,” Diana advised, pushing herself up to peek out the front windows. Her throat tightened with emotion but it never made it to the surface, and she studiously ignored the burning behind her eyes. “This place is either bugged or someone’s watching it. There is no other explanation for why Otis was fine one minute and dead the next.”

  David rolled Otis’s corpse over with a grunt, and after some squishy-sounding searching he tapped Diana’s shoulder. She stood and examined the small, bloody device David held in his palm. “What is that? Some kind of microchip?”

  “Not exactly,” David replied. “See this part on the back? That’s a transmitter, but it’s been modified to receive a bigger electrical signal than your typical tracking device. Someone killed Otis, and you were right—they did it because he talked to us.”

  ~***~

  If there were something Scarlett Vaughn despised more than strapless tops and Junior Mints, it was shopping malls. And in her opinion, the Burlington Mall was one of the wor
st. There was nothing wrong with it—in fact it was full of bustling stores and extremely clean—but it was also kitty-corner to I-95 and Lahey Hospital, making it primo real estate for lost tourists and a breeding ground for all kinds of crazy germs. Between that and the design of the parking lots, driving by the place was enough to set Scarlett’s teeth on edge; being in it was a completely different animal.

  Yet she sat in the too-white bridal section at Nordstrom on an overstuffed bench upholstered to look like a shaggy dog. She held her phone in one hand and a flute of champagne in the other, the latter which she hadn’t touched since she was technically on the clock with Melissa seated two chairs away. They were waiting for Caitlin to emerge in her newly-tailored wedding gown before Scarlett and Frogger—expert hacker, certified genius and a good friend of Wolfe’s—tried on their bridesmaids’ dresses.

  Across from Scarlett sat Angela Wolfe and Maureen Sullivan, best friends for twenty-something years and the mothers of Scarlett’s partner and the bride-to-be. They were both in their fifties and at the low end of five feet tall, but that was where the similarities ended. Where Maureen was heavy Angela was light, and Angela’s flaming-red hair hung straight as a pin to her shoulders, while Maureen kept her dark curly hair—which all four of her children had inherited—in a stylish bob. Angela liked to wear ripped jeans and t-shirts, while Maureen was usually sporting some kind of New England Patriots merchandise and a colorful bag designed by Vera Bradley.

  Scarlett opened her conversation thread with Wolfe (he was currently in her contacts as “Big Tuna” for no particular reason) and shot him a text: Pretty sure your mom and Mrs. S are taking bets on how long we’ll be here.

  Wolfe’s response came almost instantly: Can’t see how waiting for Caitlin to try on her dress for the 8th time could be worse than following Christopher around while he knocks on doors.