Scar Tissue

by Samantha Simard

  “I cannot steal the formula now,” Sebastian told Sang, watching his face carefully for a negative reaction; the only thing Sang showed was that he was listening. “My father’s guard is too high, and he will suspect it was someone close to him if it happens now. I have a wedding to attend later this week, but after that… I think we could make a deal.”

  Sang grinned, sharp and full of teeth. “Excellent.”

  ~***~

  Chapter Sixteen

  Primary Day in Massachusetts dawned bright and beautiful, not a single cloud in the sky, and Wolfe and Scarlett waited outside Wolfe’s polling place on West Dedham Street so that he could vote. Scarlett had voted in her district before picking up coffee for both of them and meeting Wolfe in line; in front of them was an Indonesian couple arguing in their native language, and behind them was a woman who kept pushing her baby’s stroller back and forth to try and keep the little guy from exploding into sobs. There had to be two hundred people on the sidewalk and more inside. The high turnout was unusual for a primary election, but given how polarizing the race was, Wolfe wasn’t surprised that people wanted their voices heard.

  And speaking of voices Wolfe wanted to hear, he switched his Starbucks cup to his left hand so he could thumb open his phone with his right. No new messages from Sebastian, so Wolfe took a burning swallow of his coffee and watched Scarlett from the corner of his eye. “What’s up with you? You seem… twitchy.”

  “Kevin texted me last night and asked me to be his date to the wedding,” Scarlett said, tugging on the end of her ponytail as she watched the traffic on nearby Tremont Street. “And I figured it was fine, we get along okay and nobody wants to go stag to something like this. But I think he might be more invested in it than I am and I don’t want to hurt his feelings, you know?” She glanced at him curiously. “Do you have a date for the wedding?”

  “I do,” Wolfe told her, rolling his eyes when she gasped theatrically. “I asked Sebastian to go with me and he said yes. Now if he’d just text me back, I’d feel a lot better about—”

  His phone buzzed with an incoming message from Sebastian: I’m fine, but we need to talk in person ASAP. Meet me at the office.

  He and Scarlett both read the text, and when Wolfe met her gaze she raised her eyebrows and said, “Well, that’s ominous.”

  Wolfe glanced up at his polling place before leaving the line to head to the Mustang. The democratic process would have to wait.

  ~***~

  At the office on Boylston Street, Sebastian paced the length of the room and spun on his heel to face the door when Wolfe and Scarlett came through it. Before Sebastian could so much as muster the breath to apologize for not texting sooner he was crushed to Wolfe’s chest in a too-tight hug; after a split-second hesitation he hugged him back, burying his fingers in the soft cotton of Wolfe’s t-shirt. He smelled like laundry detergent and gun oil, and before now Sebastian had never known a person’s scent could be so comforting. He closed his eyes for a moment and breathed, pressing his face against the piecemeal muscle of Wolfe’s bad shoulder and feeling the knot of scars there under his cheek.

  “I’m glad you’re okay,” Wolfe murmured into his hair, one large hand stroking down Sebastian’s back. He leaned back to look at Sebastian’s face, no doubt checking for bruises or other injuries. “Where’s Constantin?”

  “He dropped me off. I think he went to try and talk to Lacey, make sure she didn’t get herself into more trouble after she left your mother’s house.”

  “Okay, so what did Sang want? Was it… what you thought it was?”

  “Not at all,” Sebastian said, staring up into Wolfe’s eyes. “He used that as cover so he could talk to me without my father getting suspicious.” He took a deep breath, glanced at Scarlett—who watched them from the doorway, a small smile on her face—and continued, “Sang wants to make a deal. If I get him the Rapture formula, he’ll… he’ll kill my father.”

  “Holy shit!” That was Scarlett, stepping into the office and shutting the door behind her. “Are you serious?”

  Sebastian chuckled. “That was what I asked him, and he most definitely was.” He glanced up at Wolfe again before looking down at the toes of their boots, too afraid of what he might see. He noted that while his feet were smaller than Wolfe’s by at least two sizes, they both preferred to wear lace-up boots with steel toes. He wondered if Wolfe liked to keep a knife strapped to his ankle too. “Jim, I know this probably doesn’t sit well with you, but—”

  “Do you believe him?” Wolfe interjected. One of his hands came up to touch Sebastian’s cheek lightly, getting him to make eye contact again. “Do you believe he’d hold up his end of the bargain?”

  “I have no reason to think he wouldn’t,” Sebastian replied, an image of the scorpion riding on the frog’s back forming in his mind’s eye. He shrugged it off, saw the look that Wolfe and Scarlett traded—one of those silent exchanges where they seemed to read each other’s minds. “Wait, are you… you aren’t going to talk me out of it?”

  Scarlett put her hands on her hips and raised her eyebrows. “Why should we? Your old man has been making our lives hell for months—look what he had done to Jake, for Christ’s sake. It’s about time he got a taste of his own medicine.”

  “I agree,” Wolfe said, and for a second Sebastian saw not the private detective, brother, and friend, but the soldier he tried so hard to bury. The one who’d made hard choices when no one else would, who pulled the trigger and lived with the consequences. “Anton is never going to stop trying to corrupt this city. Sang is a bad fucking guy, but at least he’s predictable—he also makes mistakes, like he did in Chinatown a few years back. If he ran the Rapture operation, it would be much more likely that the BPD could take him down.” He sighed and scratched at his stubble-covered chin. “It has to be after Caitlin’s wedding.”

  Sebastian nodded, slightly stunned. “I already told Sang, he was amenable. You actually want to do this?”

  Wolfe chuckled, but it was a bitter sound. “Want to? No. But I’d like to think I’m capable of reading the writing on the wall, and it says that if we don’t take your father out of the picture soon he’s going to poison this whole city—figuratively and literally.” He folded his hand around Sebastian’s, squeezing lightly, mindful of his fingers. “And between the shit he did to my brother and to you… he needs to pay. We could have some big moral debate about whether it’s up to us to play judge, jury, and executioner… or we could just do it.”

  Scarlett held out her fist, and Wolfe bumped it. “Amen to that, babe.”

  At that moment Wolfe’s phone rang, the opening lines of The Clash’s “I Fought The Law” exploding into the office. “Ah shit, that’s Kamienski.” He answered after one ring, putting the call on speaker so Sebastian and Scarlett could listen. “Detective, to what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “Hey, Wolfe,” Kamienski said, his tone unusually flustered. “We don’t have time for our usual song and dance. Remember how that Aiden Parker kid said he didn’t know where his sister was when Silent Mark and I visited him yesterday? He came in to report her missing, and you need to get down here ASAP.”

  ~***~

  Across town, David and Diana walked out of the John F. Kennedy Federal Building after getting their asses reamed by their boss, Special Agent in Charge Dwight Whitney. He called the meeting to tell them the brass was ending the years-long mission to bring Anton up on charges in exactly one week if they couldn’t find a new lead. That would look bad not only for Diana, David, and the Boston CIA field office, but for Whitney in particular, since he was gunning for a promotion to the Pentagon.

  Whitney claimed he had nothing to do with the decision—the pointy-heads were looking at budget cuts and the fact that Diana had been in deep cover since she was a little girl. She knew a liar when she saw one, and Whitney had been doing his best not to sweat while she glared at his trembling mouth. He wanted to distance himself from any operations that weren’t performing or he wouldn’t g
et the position in D.C., and that meant cutting them off at the knees.

  They sat down on the wide brick stairs on Congress Street, the ones that faced the Public Market and the Holocaust Memorial. When David looked at Diana his expression was as hopeless as she’d ever seen it. “What the fuck do we do now?”

  “I don’t know,” she replied, staring at the traffic zipping by on either side of the divided road without seeing it. “This mission, David, it’s all I’ve ever known besides the orphanage.” She had her hands on her knees and squeezed them involuntarily, to the point where the joints creaked in warning. “I… I can’t go back to being what I was before.”

  David put one of his larger hands over both of hers. “And I won’t let that happen,” he assured softly, and Diana wondered if she was the only one who felt a spark every time their skin touched. “You’re a good person, D. You just… had to do some bad things to survive. It’s not any different from what I’ve done, or Jimmy, or anybody who’s life hasn’t been all picket fences and apple pie.”

  One corner of Diana’s mouth turned upward. “Do Americans really eat that much apple pie? I only see it at Thanksgiving.”

  “I have no idea.” David thumb rubbed back and forth over her fingers in what she was sure was an unconscious gesture… right? “I’m more of a pumpkin guy myself.”

  Diana chuckled and shook her head, watching as a drag queen held the door for a couple of elderly Asian ladies before they all went into the Public Market. “I think the only option we have left is to infiltrate Blakely Manor. If I cut and dye my hair, I can use one of my aliases to get admitted—Diana Johnson has no history of psychosis, but Dajana Jagr does.”

  “I remember.” David pulled his hand back, and she missed it for a moment before snuffing the feeling out like a lit candle. “Wasn’t she the one who destroyed an entire liquor store with a baseball bat?”

  “The very same.” Diana heard the wry humor in her own voice. “I’m sure Tara can craft something convincing and have me get picked up in a van with no windows.”

  “After the wedding.” If she didn’t know him so well, Diana wouldn’t have seen the concern shimmering in David’s eyes. “I still need a date.”

  ~***~

  Aiden Parker had attempted to file a missing person’s report at the Boston Police station that served Back Bay, the South End, and Fenway. An arched-front brick building on the corner of Harrison Avenue and Plympton Street, it was across from public housing apartments, next door to a dialysis company, and within hollering distance of Boston Medical Center.

  Scarlett, Wolfe, and Sebastian stood on the observational side of a two-way mirror with Kamienski and Silent Mark, and Wolfe glanced into the interrogation room where Aiden was. He sat at a metal table that was bolted to the floor and appeared to study his hands, occasionally picking at a cuticle. He looked like he hadn’t showered in a couple of days, and his clothes were rumpled and dirty.

  “When he came in earlier he told the officers here that he would only speak to me,” Kamienski said, rubbing at his temple like he was fighting off a headache. “I drove like a bat out of hell across town, and when I got here he told me that yesterday he had an encounter with your father—” he nodded at Sebastian “—in an alley in Malden, of all fucking places. Like who goes to Malden? Anyway, he spun this batshit yarn about how Anton’s got Laine under some kind of mind control, and she didn’t recognize him at all… and then he asked me to call you. Said he had more to say, but he’d only talk to Wolfe.”

  “Me?” Wolfe wasn’t surprised, not exactly, but he hadn’t been sure that Aiden knew about his connection to Laine. “She must’ve told him what happened in Iraq.”

  “Evidently, yeah.” Kamienski walked with him into the hall and unlocked the door to the interrogation room. “Good luck.”

  Wolfe stepped inside and took a seat across the table from Aiden. He felt oddly naked without his gun—it was locked in the Mustang’s glovebox, since cops didn’t like it when people who weren’t officers carried weapons inside police stations—but he wasn’t afraid. Aiden was the size of a mature oak tree, but Wolfe was no slouch in that department and with his Ranger training he was confident in his ability to disable him if things got ugly. “I don’t suppose you want to apologize for almost running me over the other night.”

  Aiden looked at him with red-rimmed eyes, his cheeks puffy and splotched from crying. “I wanted to see you because you’re the only one that might be able to get through to my sister before she does something horrible.”

  Wolfe leaned back in his chair and folded his arms over his chest. “More horrible than attempting to assassinate a gubernatorial candidate with a long-range sniper rifle?”

  “Lainey already wanted to kill that asshole, and so did I,” Aiden told him, venom behind the words that Wolfe wasn’t expecting. “Do you know what he did to her? The video was all over the internet and Sullivan paid off all the media outlets before this election to make it go away.”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell. Why don’t you tell me?”

  “Sullivan was a state rep before he ran for governor, and he liked to pretend he was just like the rest of us. Every day when he went to work he’d take an MBTA bus from Somerville to the State House on Beacon Street. And every day, he walked by my sister. She was homeless back then, and liked to set up near the stairs into Boston Common—lots of foot traffic, plus she could be in the sun if it was cold. She had a sign saying she was a vet, and a coffee can that she used to collect money.”

  Wolfe knew his next question was a futile one, but as an investigator he had to ask it: “The VA couldn’t help her?”

  Aiden snorted. “The VA couldn’t find their way out of a paper bag with a flashlight and a fucking map.” Something envious and ugly crossed his face. “Did they help you?”

  Wolfe’s memory flashed back a decade ago, when he’d stumbled off a plane at Logan Airport with newly-healed scars over shifting shrapnel and a mind that wasn’t his own anymore, that had been twisted by war and pain and death. He’d tried going to the VA, but between the lack of staffing and the subpar care, it was easier to ask Caitlin for help. “No, they didn’t. Go on.”

  “Laine was homeless for a few months before the day she tripped Sullivan,” Aiden said, exhaling a gusty breath before chuckling mirthlessly. “You’d think there’d be some big punchline, right? That she did something so terrible to him that public ridicule was necessary retribution—but no, he didn’t see her fucking foot on the sidewalk and when he tripped he spilled his six dollar latte.” His cheeks reddened with agitation to match his hair. “Sullivan lost his mind, started screaming at my sister while tourists and commuters filmed him. He called her trash, told her she was a disgrace to the country she served, spewed all kinds of bullshit. She took a swing at him when he spat on her, and suddenly she was the bad guy.”

  “Was that how she wound up at Blakely Manor?”

  “Yeah, court-ordered rehabilitation, and Sullivan had the gall to be pissed she didn’t get jail time. Now Rapture’s the only thing that keeps her stable… or at least it was until Codreanu messed with her head this time around.”

  Wolfe sat forward, bracing his arms on the table too. “Rapture can be used for psychological manipulation?”

  “It’s worse than that,” Aiden said, his voice dropping to a whisper. Tears welled in his eyes, and while Wolfe thought Aiden Parker was just as guilty of manipulating Laine as Anton, there seemed to be some genuine love in him too, as warped as it was. “She didn’t know who I was, and she was… blank behind the eyes. Like a snake, or a puppet.” He met Wolfe’s gaze. “I don’t know what Codreanu’s planning, but you should watch your back.”

  ~***~

  Chapter Seventeen

  Jake got startled awake at eight in the damn morning—not by a nightmare for once, but by his phone chirping with alerts on the nightstand next to his head. The first thing he saw was a news blurb from WBZ that Christopher Sullivan won the Republican gubernatorial nominatio
n in a landslide and would face down incumbent Democrat Roy Halliday for the highest office in Massachusetts in November. Following that was a slew of text messages in the Sullivan/Wolfe-plus-Scarlett-and-Sebastian group chat, most of which were from Caitlin.

  He scrolled back to the top to read the saga. The band she’d hired for the wedding cancelled on her, citing the fact that their lead singer had apparently literally thrown up her vocal cords on the stage. This was a problem because not only was the wedding in two days, but today they were traveling up to Mount Washington, which meant Caitlin and Ryan didn’t have time to look for a new musical act.

  Jimmy had tried and failed to calm Caitlin down and Sebastian volunteered to play the piano but got shot down. He was already doing it for the ceremony and Caitlin didn’t think it was fair to ask him to play for the reception too. Kevin offered to bust out his drum kit—Jake hadn’t seen him play since middle school—and it was that suggestion that gave Jake an idea of his own.

  What about Lacey and her dad? he sent to the group, and text bubbles popped up immediately.

  That’s a great idea!! Kevin sent, then amended, If she’s not high as balls I mean.

  I’ll take high over no band. Caitlin was, as usual, very direct. Jimmy, do you have Samuel’s #?

  Regrettably, Wolfe sent after a moment’s delay. If this goes sideways, I blame my brother.

  Jake found himself smiling as he put his feet to the floor and got ready to leave town.

  ~***~

  Everyone coming up from Boston for the wedding carpooled the best that they could (Patrick and Maureen had the luxury of walking across the street) and ditched their cars in Angela’s driveway at two o’clock sharp. About five minutes later a luxury bus—complete with oversized leather seats, charging ports, and an actual bathroom in the back—came rolling down Putnam Street to pick them up. It had a capacity of fifty-six people and it was full by the time it chugged its way over to Interstate 93 and headed north.