Scar Tissue

By Mark Gummere

Scar Tissue is the first novel in a projected series of detective/mysteries in the spirit of
Raymond Chandler and Robert B. Parker. Robert “Lucky” Lucas, a fifty year old retired police
Detective and widow from Southern California, has relocated in San Francisco to be near his
son’s family. As a favor to his daughter-in-law Kathleen, Lucas reluctantly agrees to speak with
Ray Rhodes, a childhood friend with prison record who has been arrested on weapons and drug
charges, but adamantly proclaims his innocence. During his investigation, Lucas becomes
convinced Rhodes is the victim of jealousy and crooked cops, and is trapped in the middle of a
disturbing and dangerous family history, a history that will lead to murder and attempt on Lucas’ life.

Mark Gummere lives in San Francisco, teaches classes in Cinema Studies, and is a former San Francisco Private Investigator. The second Lucky Lucas novel, The Damage, has just been released, and is also available on Smashwords as a downloadable ebook. The third Lucky Lucas Novel is underway.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mark Gummere
• Release date: May 11, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458100818

Mark Gummere

Writer and college instructor in Film Studies. Former former private investigator in San Francisco.

Book preview

SCAR

TISSUE

By

Mark Gummere

Published by Mark Gummere at Smashwords

Copyright Mark Gummere 2011

ISBN 978-1-4581-0081-8

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

CHAPTER ONE

Marty Milner was already a little high when he parked his car in the drive-way of the furniture warehouse a little after ten p.m. He took a small vial of coke from his jacket pocket, took a fresh pop, and left the car. It’d been a week since Marty had any sex and he was hoping he’d find Lucinda. He went into The Blue Light on Golden Gate and moved through the crowd.

You seen Lucinda tonight? Marty asked the bartender.

Earlier. Not in a while. The bartender poured Marty a shot of Old Grand Dad.

Tell her I’m looking, should she come back. Marty threw down the whiskey and left the bar.

There were three hookers working the corners a half a block down the street, but Marty wanted Lucinda. He approached the Asian propped up on 4 inch heels wearing a red mini skirt on the southeast corner, and smiled. Hey China, Lucinda anywhere around?

Black girl, not the right girl for you, she said.

She’s right for tonight. She around?

Don’t know, she said, and moved away.

Marty walked another block, turned and circled back, and then he saw her. She was getting out of a silver sedan alongside the curb. The car pulled away and Marty hollered, Lucinda! She turned toward him.

The motel on Polk was one Marty had used before. He’d done a favor for the owner once when he brought him a twenty-year-old punk who had tried to rob him with a baseball bat and alcohol induced bravado. Marty looked the other way while the owner beat the hell out of the kid. Marty had been given free rooms ever since.

Marty and Lucinda did a few lines of coke and Marty set up a little portable Ipod and docking station and they danced to some slow rhythm and blues. They swayed about the room, and slowly undressed one another. It was a set they’d played before.

Lucinda once said she was twenty-four, same age as Marty, but he wasn’t sure. Some nights she looked eighteen and other nights thirty. One night, while she was taking a shower, he went through her purse and found three sets of i.d. She was twenty-four year old Lucinda, twenty year-old Trudy, and twenty year old Helen, with addresses in San Francisco, Portland, and Las Vegas. He didn’t really care if one of them was the real girl or not. What he did care about was the sex. They went at each other, slept for an hour, did some more coke and rolled again. It was three thirty in the morning when Marty dropped her off. When he got home he drank a beer and was smiling when he climbed into bed. He loved being a cop.

CHAPTER TWO

It was a Sunday morning in October, and I’d have preferred a quiet lazy day to stretch out on the couch with the newspaper and junk food and football on television. But you don’t always get want you want, and I’d promised my daughter-in-law I’d come over to meet and talk with her childhood friend Ray Rhodes. Rhodes had been arrested and was out awaiting trial. He was charged with possession of cocaine and an unregistered handgun.

Ray has a record, Kathleen said, when she first called. And so the gun thing is also a parole violation.

He sounds like a good friend to lose, I’d said.

He says he is innocent, and I believe him. I want to believe him. He said he’d never seen the drugs or the gun and the police set him up.

Why would they do that?

He doesn’t know. Just talk to him, okay? As a favor?

I wasn’t looking for any type of work, and I hoped I wouldn’t find any, but at least the trip from San Francisco to Berkeley would result in some time with my grandkids, Kit and Katy. I pulled on an extra-large black golf shirt over my blue jeans, ran a comb through my salt and pepper hair, and poured the last from a pot of coffee into a to-go cup, and walked to the back of the house. Lou, my four-year old Dalmatian, scampered up to see me from behind the bushes where he liked to hide in waiting for the neighborhood cat. He barked a hello, followed me into the garage and climbed into the backseat of my Buick.

I backed the car out into the street, turned on a country and western radio station, and waved to my overly industrious Korean neighbor, who was on his hands and knees trimming the edges of the small patch of lawn that passes for a front yard in many of the houses in San Francisco’s Sunset District. The Sunset is quiet and comfortable. It’s also often shrouded in fog as it sits up close to the scenic Northern California coastline. This morning, however, the fog was minimal, the sun was breaking though, and life wasn’t too bad. And, if I could extricate myself from whatever involvement Kathleen had planned for me with her friend, the day might turn out just fine.

The traffic was light and I was across the Bay Bridge and onto University Avenue in about thirty minutes. I made a right hand turn at the corner of California Street, where there still stood one of the oldest House of Pancake restaurants in the state. It was also one with a colorful history.

The waitresses used to sell LSD, mescaline, and peyote, right at the table, my son Keith said one morning when we were there for breakfast.

This was the 60’s? I said.

Yeah, I heard the story too many times for it not to be true. Customers could actually be seen sprinkling some hallucinogenic like so much powdered sugar right across the tops of their waffles or pancakes. Yes, I would like the blueberry pancakes, orange juice and Window Pane, please! Amazing, huh? Keith said, laughing.

Forty years before you arrived.

Keith had come to Berkeley for school, and met Kathleen while they were students. Married for eight years, Keith was still at the university, but now as a teacher. He’d followed my father’s lead, who was a history teacher, into the academic world. Better that he follow my dad, than his own, I always felt. After twenty four years with the Pasadena Police Department in Southern California, and after my wife’s death from cancer, I’d started drinking too much and caring too little. The Chief of Police and I came to a mutual agreement that it was time for me to leave. Teaching history hopefully will not leave Keith with the sort of damaged psyche his old man was still trying to repair.

At California and Channing I pulled over in front of the brown shingled two story house Keith, Kathleen, Kit, and Katy called home. It was a nice looking place, weathered but not beaten, used but not worn, a house with character. I let Lou out of the car and we walked up the brick path that separated the well-manicured lawn on the left and a large oak tree on the right. Kit’s bicycle was on its side on the wooden steps that lead up to the front porch and front door. I was about to knock when the door swung open and five-year old Katy jumped up against my legs. Lou did circles and barked.

Grandpa! Katy shouted. I picked her up and kissed her. She’s a wisp of a girl, with short cut brown hair and freckles splashed across the bridge of her nose. Her green eyes sparkled. She jumped down and went for the dog. Louie, Louie! She ran into the yard and the dog obediently followed.

I went into the house, closing the door behind me as Kathleen got up from an overstuffed couch in the living room off to my right. Also rising from the couch was someone I assumed to be Ray Rhodes. Kathleen was