Scar Tissue: Seven Stories of Love and Wounds Read online

  Copyright © 2010 by Marcus Sakey

  This eBook is a work of fiction. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from Marcus Sakey.

  "The Days When You Were Anything Else" originally appeared in Sex, Thugs, and Rock & Roll, published by Kensington

  "The Desert Here and the Desert Far Away" originally appeared in Thriller 2: Stories You Just Can't Put Down, published by Mira

  "Gravity and Need" originally appeared in Killer Year: Stories to Die For, published by St. Martin's Minotaur

  "No One" originally appeared in Thirteen Magazine

  "As Breathing" originally appeared in These Guns For Hire, published by Bleak House Books

  "The Time Before the Last" originally appeared in Hint Fiction: Stories in 25 Words or Less, published by W.W. Norton

  Excerpt from THE BLADE ITSELF courtesy of St. Martin's Minotaur

  Excerpt from AT THE CITY'S EDGE courtesy of St. Martin's Minotaur

  Excerpt from GOOD PEOPLE courtesy of Dutton

  Excerpt from THE AMATEURS courtesy of Dutton

  Excerpt from THE TWO DEATHS OF DANIEL HAYES courtesy of Dutton

  Illustrations and graphic design copyright © 2010 by Jeroen ten Berge

  For more information about the author, please visit www.MarcusSakey.com

  For more information about Jeroen ten Berge, please visit www.jeroentenberge.com

  Foreword

  Scar Tissue will make your heart race and your heart ache, often in the same sentence. In Sakey's lean yet eloquent prose, pain is poetry, and loss has a startling beauty that hits like a sucker punch.

  This collection, filled with crime and murder and betrayal and loss and hope and love and redemption and pain and gorgeous irony, contains some of the best writing in crime fiction today.

  Hell, it contains some of the best writing in all fiction today.

  These stories don't just thrill. They linger. You'll be thinking about them long after you reach the end.

  Welcome to the dark, lovely world of Marcus Sakey. You don't read him. You feel him.

  I envy you readers who get to experience this for the first time. You're in for quite a ride.

  -J.A. Konrath

  Author's Note

  Short stories are tricky.

  When at their most effective, they’re tightly controlled glimpses of a larger world. The best shorts evoke the feeling and mood of a novel. They suggest a whole mythology.

  That’s not easy to do.

  It’s writing as a watchmaker’s art—every line, every word has to function as a gear driving the story forward.

  I’ve written dozens of short stories, some of which have been nominated for awards and been published alongside the best in the business. Lee Child has edited my work, and so has Clive Cussler.

  But for all that, there aren’t very many I’m happy with.

  Seven, to be precise. The ones you’re about to read.

  I hope you enjoy.

  Scar Tissue

  Seven Stories of Love and Wounds:

  The Days When You Were Anything Else

  As Breathing

  Gravity and Need

  The Time Before the Last

  No One

  Cobalt

  The Desert Here and the Desert Far Away

  Bonus Materials:

  Excerpt from The Blade Itself

  Excerpt from At The City's Edge

  Excerpt from Good People

  Excerpt from The Amateurs

  Exclusive Peek The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes

  I'm often asked where I get my ideas, and the truth is, I don't know. It's a mysterious process that blends inspiration from the real world with a lot of "What if?" questions and a healthy dose of subconscious thinking. One thing I can tell you is that ideas pretty much never just present themselves, all dressed up and ready to dance.

  This one did.

  I'd promised a story to an anthology called Sex, Thugs, and Rock & Roll, and didn't have any idea what that story would be. When I'd agreed, the deadline had been a far off thing, hazy and undaunting, but as it does, time kept passing, and all of a sudden that deadline had grown big and ugly.

  Then one perfectly average night I went to bed, and in the morning, I awoke to find I was turning a fully-formed story idea around in my head. A dirty little gem of a noir tale, and one I knew just how to tell.

  The result is probably my favorite of the stories I've written. I hope you'll enjoy it too.

  The Days When You Were Anything Else

  She calls sometimes. Late at night, drunk or worse. She calls to say she hates me.

  One time she said a guy offered her money to blow him in a bar bathroom. Then, defiant, told me she'd done it. Fifty dollars, she said. That's what she's worth.

  My Jessica. My baby girl.

  The last call, three months ago, all she did was cry. Not heaves and jags. Gentle sobs like rain that falls all day. She never even said who it was. I held the phone and whispered, over and over, that it would be okay. That she should come home. That I loved her and would take of her.

  When she finally spoke, just before she hung up, she said that it was all my fault.

  She's right.

  #

  After I got out of Dixon, I didn't want to be part of the game any more. It wasn't a moral decision. I wasn't trying to prove anything. It's just that hustling is like Vegas. Play long enough, you always lose. And I'd lost enough.

  So I talked to some people, and I landed a job working the stick at Liar's, a dive under the Blue Line. I'd hung around there often enough anyway. It was the kind of bar where workingmen go to find someone to kick them ten percent for leaving the back door to a warehouse open. I'm not talking criminals. I'm talking honest guys with more bills and children than a nine-to-five coupled with a six-to-midnight could cover.

  The criminals were the guys they talked to, guys like I used to be before I trusted the wrong person, before a job that should have set us up for six months instead sent me up for five years.

  Tending is no way to get rich, especially at a dump like Liar's, but my life is pretty simple. I have a studio in Little Puerto Rico and a phone number I make damn sure stays listed. At work, I keep a Louisville Slugger behind the bar, but rarely pull it out. I know these men, even the ones I've never met. After a year or two, I struck up a few friendships, guys that hang around after I flip off the neons. We talk and drink and smoke the place blue, and if Lester White is feeling magnanimous, do a couple of bumps. It isn't quite a family, but it's what I have, and it's okay.

  Sometimes, I even get to feeling good. Last week Lester was talking on his cell, chewing out the guy who runs a house he deals crank out of. He's nice enough, Lester, until he isn't. Then he's, well, not nice at all. I've heard stories about him and pit bulls, and I don't ever want to know if they're true.

  When Lester hung up, I asked if everything was okay.

  "Fucking kids," he said. "I don't know how many times I've told him to get a fucking security cage put on the back door. Kid thinks because they've got one on the front, they're safe, but these days." He shook his head.

  He didn't finish, and I didn't ask him to. I just topped off his Glenlivet. The rest of the guys I only spot Beam. Lester nodded at me, smiled, said, "Frank, when are you going to quit this bartending shit and come work for me? Kids these days, they aren't worth a goddamn."

  Like I said, sometimes I get to feeling good. Silly, maybe, but there it is. I have a job and friends and a daughter who calls every couple of mont
hs, even if only to say she hates me. And as long as she keeps calling, there's hope.

  Hope is a dangerous thing.

  #

  He came in around three, when the bar was all but empty. A thin kid in his twenties, sporting that cocaine skeeze: long, limp hair, a complicated goatee, a mean twitchiness to the eyes. A pack of Parliaments in his left pocket. A plastic-gripped pistol barely hidden by a half-buttoned work shirt. I know his type. I've been his type.

  The locket dangles from his closed fist, rocking like a hypnotist's crystal. "You know this, old man?"

  Do I know it?

  Till the day I die.

  A lot of the stuff I gave Lucy over the years was pinched, and she was generally understanding. From the beginning, my wife knew how I made our money. But I spotted the locket in a display window one day I happened to be flush. When she saw that it came in a box, with a ribbon and everything, she hit me with that smile of hers, the one that lit me up inside. I know just what to put in it, she'd said. I'd asked, What?, as I hung it on her. Us, she'd said, and shivered when I kissed the back of her neck.

  That was a long time ago. I haven't seen the locket since the last time she visited me at Dixon. "That's my wife's."

  "Not anymore." His lips curl into a shape nothing like a smile. "You know who was wearing it last?"

  And all of a sudden I know where this is going. "Yes."

  "Say it."

  I force the syllables. "Jessica."

  "Who?"

  "My daughter."

  "So, then, Frank," he curls his lips again, "I guess you better do exactly what I say. Right?"

  #

  I don't have many pictures. Three, to be precise.

  We used to have tons, albums full. I once joked Lucy that she must've been born with a Nikon attached to her head, all the pictures she took. And once Jessica came along, forget it. Our daughter was the most documented kid on the North Side.

  But you can't take that shit inside. They'll let you, but you don't want to. It kills you slowly to have proof of the way time passes, all those frozen instants that used to be yours. So you keep a couple of shots, two or three, and you stare at them until they don't mean anything any more, and at the same time, they mean everything.

  After I got out, I tried to find out what happened to the rest of our pictures. But after Lucy died, shit fell apart. What little we had that was worth anything was sold for bills, and the rest probably ended up in a dump. I like to think that maybe a collector got the photos, one of those guys who sell random snaps in boxes down at the Maxwell Street Market. I check it some Sundays, flipping through other people's lives, but I never find mine.

  Three.

  One of Lucy, dressed as a sort of slutty angel for Halloween a million years ago. It's faded and blurry, but she looks the way I remember when I close my eyes.

  One of the room in Cook County Hospital, Luce red-eyed but smiling, Jessica bundled like a burrito in her arms.

  One of Jess from Nag's Head, the summer before I went in. Eleven years old, just beginning to fill out the bikini Lucy and I fought about her having. I'm dragging her into the surf, and she's fighting me, legs scrabbling at the sand, face framed into the kind of mock fear you only have around someone you trust. You can almost hear her shrieking, almost hear her laughing.

  I can, anyway.

  #

  I reach out, and he lets the locket slip from his fist, the thin chain coiling in my palm. The filigree is worn, the hinges dark with age. I stare at it, and then I look up at the kid, and think about taking that pistol away from him and cracking his fucking skull with it. Then I say, "I don't have it."

  "You think I don't know who you are? What you do?"

  "I'm a bartender."

  "Bullshit. I know all about you. The jobs you've pulled. Lucky I'm not asking for twenty."

  "Those jobs were a long time ago." I gesture down the bar. "You think I had any kind of money, I'd be working here?"

  He looks it over, taking in the two geezers staring at their beer, the Cubs sign in the dingy window, the bowls of pretzels the regulars know better than to eat. For a second, his confidence seems to slip. But then he shakes his head, fingers his shirt to make extra-sure I get a view of the cheap Chinese pistol. "Ten grand," he says. "By Friday. Or she fucking dies."

  My fingers go to fists. "Don't," I say.

  "Don't what?" His mask is back in place, all insolence and swagger.

  "Don't threaten my daughter."

  He curls his lips again. "Friday," he says. Then he turns and struts out.

  I open my hand to look at the locket. I know it's warm from being in his pocket, but it's hard not to pretend that it's because she had it around her neck.

  #

  Ten years ago—Jesus, a decade—one of the neighborhood kids came to get me.

  It was eleven in the morning, and I had been up all night doing a thing, so when I heard the doorbell, I wanted more than anything to bury my head under my pillow. But Lucy was at work, so I staggered out of bed.

  The kid was named Jimmy-something, a scraggly little brat that had lately been sniffing around Jessica. She was nine and he was maybe eleven, but things happen earlier these days. I didn't open the screen door, just glowered down at him. "Yeah?"

  And Jimmy-something, he said the scariest words a father can hear. "It's Jess. She's hurt."

  I didn't even change out of my pajama bottoms.

  Growing up in the city, it's a blessing and a curse. Kids are wired to run around shrieking like carefree morons, and that's exactly the way the should be. But between drug dealers and speeding buses and evil fuckers in raincoats, it's tough to just let them go. So Lucy and I had set up boundaries; Jess could go to the school playground but not to the city park, she could walk on Augusta but not on Division.

  So of course this Jimmy idiot leads me straight down Division to the city park.

  The first thing I saw was a ring of ten or so kids clustered around someone on the ground, and my heart kicked up to a hundred beats a minute, sweat running down my sides like it never did on a job, ever—not even the time Leo-fucking-Banks shot the security guard because he thought he was reaching for a piece—and I tore ass across the street, shoved through the kids, and there's my Jess on the ground, clutching at her ankle, which is bent way too far to one side, and her face is squinched up in pain, tears cutting tracks down her cheeks, and then she spots me.

  Ever seen your baby girl look at you with relief and terror at the same time? It'll rip your fucking heart out.

  I dropped to my knees beside her. She looked at me and then at one of the other kids, and said, "I fell." I glanced up at the kid she'd eyeballed. A boy, maybe twelve and already got that scraggly not-quite-moustache, pale and shaking and looking like he was about to take off running. It was obvious there was more to the story, but I didn't really give a damn. I just wanted to take care of her. So I scooped her up and walked out of the park.

  And warm and trembling, scrawny little arm clinging to my neck, smelling of dirt and sunshine, she looked at me, and she said, "I'm sorry, Daddy," and my heart broke all over again.

  Everyone talks about how a kid changes you. How there's this whole sense of wonder, like, I don't know, like you woke up and could see colors that hadn't been there yesterday. Everything is still the way it was, but it all looks different.

  So you change, too. Become a different person. Self-preservation goes out the window. All of a sudden you'd do anything, anything for this helpless little creature. That's what everyone says, and they're right.

  Especially if it's a girl.

  #

  I drive an '86 LeBaron. My furniture comes from the Brown Elephant resale shop. Towards the middle of every second week, I have to downgrade from Marlboros to Basics.

  Ten grand. May as well ask for a ticket to the moon.

  After my shift, I go home to pace my shitbox apartment and smoke and think.

  I think about going to the police. Telling them there's a cok
ehead who says he's kidnapped the daughter I haven't seen in seven years, and how I have two days to get him what I make in four months. I think how they will listen to me very intently at first, making notes with silver pens while they wait for my file. I think how when it comes, they will see arrests for assault, bad checks, unlawful entry, plus the conviction, five long years.

  The note-taking will stop. The pens will vanish.

  Truth is, I don't blame them. I really don't. First rule is that everybody lies. Why would they bust their ass running around to check out a story like mine?

  After all, they don't know Jess.

  I think of the last time she called, when all she did was cry. How each sob was like a spike through me, because I knew every single one was a wound done her. Done to my baby girl, who had once loved and trusted me, and then found me gone when she needed me most. Whose mother had died while I was inside, and who never knew what that did to me, how it emptied me out to lose my wife. My baby girl, who ran away before I was released.

  Who had to do the things a sixteen-year-old runaway has to do.

  #

  I figure that if I sell my car and my records and empty my joke of a bank account, I can probably scrape up two, three grand.

  So I put on a clean shirt and I go to work. I spend the longest afternoon of my life pulling Buds for losers. I greet the dusk rush eagerly, glad for the distraction. I pour shots and light cigarettes and forget orders and knock things over, and a couple of the regulars make jokes about it until they see my eyes, and then they wander away from the bar to the siderail on the back wall.