Scar Tissue

By Jeffery Hess

A forty-year-old self-cutting workaholic abandons everything she knows for a stripper with a death wish. Both lives change, only one ends.

Scar Tissue is a psychological noir novel that stunningly brings to life a world others dare not dream of. This is a vivid and memorable portrayal of desire as seen through the eyes of two women with dark hearts and very different goals who cross paths at critical moments in their lives. The power of their hopes and despair, their weaknesses and strengths is a testament to the yearning that resides inside all of us.

Praise for Scar Tissue:

“This persuasive and dizzying novel grabs you and doesn’t let go. It is sexy, disturbing and relentless. What it says about human nature will keep you up at night. It’s also constantly entertaining and unnervingly passionate. Scar Tissue is amazing and weird in all the best ways.” —Fred Leebron, author of Six Figures, Out West, and Welcome to Christiania

“Scar Tissue has all that we’ve come to expect from Jeff Hess’s crime fiction—sweat-soaked Florida settings, uncompromising authenticity, and wild plots with hairpin turns—but adds yet another layer of ground-in grit. Hess’s new protagonists, Dylan and Abby, are damaged goods—selfish, yet sympathetic, slick cons, but also lost souls—and, most importantly, complicated women who are written and treated by Hess as such. In his latest, Hess spills just as much blood as in his previous novels, but it’s in the scars still healing where the real story lies.” —Steph Post, author of Miraculum, Lightwood, Walk in the Fire, and Holding Smoke

“This gritty novel is the redheaded stepchild of Martyrs mated with Thelma and Louise—layers of darkness, vengeance, and chaos wrapped tightly together into a ball of sinuous fury.” —Richard Thomas, author of Disintegration and Breaker (Thriller Award nominee)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Down & Out Books
• Release date: Jun 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9780463220665

Book preview

SCAR TISSUE

Jeffery Hess

PRAISE FOR SCAR TISSUE

"This persuasive and dizzying novel grabs you and doesn’t let go. It is sexy, disturbing and relentless. What it says about human nature will keep you up at night. It’s also constantly entertaining and unnervingly passionate. Scar Tissue is amazing and weird in all the best ways." —Fred Leebron, author of Six Figures, Out West, and Welcome to Christiania

"Scar Tissue has all that we’ve come to expect from Jeff Hess’s crime fiction—sweat-soaked Florida settings, uncompromising authenticity, and wild plots with hairpin turns—but adds yet another layer of ground-in grit. Hess’s new protagonists, Dylan and Abby, are damaged goods—selfish, yet sympathetic, slick cons, but also lost souls—and, most importantly, complicated women who are written and treated by Hess as such. In his latest, Hess spills just as much blood as in his previous novels, but it’s in the scars still healing where the real story lies." —Steph Post, author of Miraculum, Lightwood, Walk in the Fire, and Holding Smoke

Copyright © 2022 by Jeffery Hess

All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

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The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Scar Tissue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Books by the Author

Preview from Hell to Pay by Andy Rausch

Preview from The Damned Lovely by Adam Frost

Preview from The Neon Lights Are Veins by Nolan Knight

A voice said, Look me in the stars

And tell me truly, men of earth,

If all the soul-and-body scars

Were not too much to pay for birth.

—Robert Frost

My candle burns at both ends;

It will not last the night:

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends-

It gives a lovely light!

—Edna St. Vincent Millay

One

Every April 9th Dylan Rivers finds herself in bed with a woman she barely knows. This year, the bed is in a budget motel on the opposite side of Tampa Bay. The woman with her is a chew toy with no modesty and a body like a model. They’d met a few hours earlier at the Pinellas Pub, from which she followed Dylan back to this shit hole. The stench of mildew stabs in her nose, but it’s not the reason she’s holding her breath as the woman does her thing between Dylan’s legs. Breath holding is a habit she began as a child while hiding from beatings meted out by her father. Now though, with her hands wrapped in the woman’s hair, Dylan’s lungs are swollen in her ribcage and threaten to burst. With her head thrown back and her breath clamped off, her vision blurs, but she won’t let herself enjoy it too much. And she will not reciprocate. Pleasuring this woman is not remotely her goal. She’s neither Dylan’s lover nor her partner, not her wife or girlfriend. She means nothing more to Dylan than any other ingredient in her recipe for the ritual.

The throbbing in her chest becomes syncopated with the woman’s chin brushing across the sheets beneath them. The beat keeps her patient, helps her stay the course. To Dylan, life is not a car on a highway, but rather a train on tracks. Except for today. Today is her birthday. Her fortieth. Today, she allows herself one derailment…but not yet.

Women Dylan’s age have sons in high school, some entering college. Women her age celebrate this milestone birthday with tombstone replicas in their front yards and surprise parties where friends wear black and roast the woman of honor. Women her age have husbands in linen suits who order roses and break out hidden gifts like new cars and jewelry to thunderous applause from all in attendance. Dylan received no gifts or hugs today. Her gift to herself will be the pleasure of a blade when she has the proper conditions in which to utilize it. Until then, she goes about her business, getting to the brink, but no farther, with this woman.

Abby Stratton had danced into the Pinellas Pub earlier that night with her friends Brittney, Star, and Loretta. Girls’ night out. The band played a fusion of house and reggae music, amps cranked, making the sticky floor quake beneath Abby’s feet as they navigated a maze of pool tables. They all wore blue jeans and high heels and the world became their dance floor. Abby hadn’t been out with the girls in the weeks since she’d hooked up with Vince—an artsy, graduate-school kid who wore black almost exclusively, even in the brutal Florida heat. He had all the makings of a prospect, but had fallen apart before she got what she wanted from him. Now though, with only three weeks until her deadline, she carried eleven thousand dollars in traveler’s checks in her purse, more than enough to get her and that special someone to Burma. She just needed to find the right person.

While her friends had rent to make and drugs to buy and procedures to have, Abby’s freedom allowed her to disappear for a month or more at a time. All the girls thought she volunteered for the International Red Cross, and Abby never discouraged them from that assumption. No good could come from them learning what she planned.

The far side of the bar hung in shadows without the strobes and spotlights swirling around. In the dim light, she made her way through the crowd. Nobody caught her eye right away, so she kept walking to the far end of the place, where cold air spiked her nipples and made Abby hug herself for a moment as she approached the bar. Then she saw a candidate—a woman with her back to the action, alone, not scanning the room or dancing in her seat. That told Abby all she needed to know. She’d found a perfect prospect.

Abby wanted to slip into the restroom to check herself, but instead resorted to the mirror lining the wall behind the bar. Over the curves of tequila bottles, she smoothed her hair into place, and near the vodka bottles she checked her lipstick. With the woman in her periphery, hope cascaded over Abby in that instant. Even from that distance, Abby felt this alluring woman had what it took to be her accomplice.

As she approached, Abby noticed the woman wore dark pants, wide at the ankles, and a tucked-in shirt, as if she’d just come from work. A desk job, perhaps. Her shoulders and back looked athletic, as if she played sports. Maybe college gymnastics. As she got closer, the woman’s pants were jeans, not trousers. But instead of thick leather boots, she wore sensible lady loafers propped upon the stool’s footrail. Perhaps management somewhere, Abby thought. No matter. The woman’s naked ring finger suggested either she was single or she wanted everyone to think so. She wore her hair pulled back and her posture was erect, which made Abby guess off-duty cop or perhaps military from what they called CENTCOM at the air base. She appeared to be alone, which could mean friendless, unworthy of knowing, or unknowable.

Without turning, the woman said, Your drink’s on me.

The music blared, even on this side of the bar away from the dance floor, but Abby heard her clearly. Stoli and pineapple, Abby said without hesitation. She hadn’t bought her own drink in a bar since she was sixteen. You’re not married, are you? Or a cop?

The woman chewed ice from her drink, then hit her cigarette, deep, and looked at the glowing end. Abby hoped she’d stub it out on her extended tongue, all the while holding that intense eye contact with her. But she didn’t. Why? the woman asked. Should I be?

Abby couldn’t pin down her nationality. She had thick, dark hair with a medium-dark complexion, but there were no telltale signs around her eyes or nose. She assumed the woman’s ancestry involved some sort of hyphenated American thing, though Abby wouldn’t bet on it, nor did it matter. The dark tones of her hair and the sharpness of her blue eyes reminded Abby of a holiday in Estonia a number of years ago. Unbelievable, Abby said with her hand resting on the woman’s leg. They drank without speaking. The woman looked even better than she needed to, and Abby said, You don’t have to be suave with me. This isn’t a job interview; it’s an audition for a part.

The motel bed is against the wall, enveloped in an eerie canopy of shadows where the room feels ten degrees warmer than when they’d started. Despite friction and the fluids they’ve exchanged, the woman smells of perfume and liquor, highlighted by that funk of mold in the room. After three rounds of breath holding, Dylan gulps down a big wad of the dank motel room air. Her lungs are heavy and wet. Five minutes go by. She feels the pressure build again in her distended lungs until she can take it no longer and exhales the trapped fog as she collapses her legs onto the bed. The woman climbs up Dylan’s torso, huddles there, both gasping for new wind. It’s the best Dylan can do to simulate an orgasm in her effort to satisfy this woman’s sense of duty or ego. Acting is more pragmatic than trying to explain she only comes when she cuts.

Dylan rolls to her side. The sound of bells fills the room as a train crosses the intersection at the end of the parking lot. This is followed by two blasts of its horn as it continues, staying on schedule.

You are amazing, the woman says, snuggling up to Dylan, who lies there like sexual roadkill. Abby’s legs are crossed at the ankles, her arms out to the side, exposed, showing herself to this stranger in visual confession, like she does every year. One arm dangles off the bed and the other rests under the woman as she drapes Dylan’s left side. The sheets are crumpled and saturated with sweat. They’re sharing the wet spot—what otherwise might be fluids of contentment.

The woman traces her thumbnail along the jagged edges of the scar on Dylan’s chest and, as their breathing calms, her other fingers roam aimlessly and brush across her nipples. She resists the urge to stroke the woman back with the tips of her own fingers and instead concentrates on the sweat dripping from her face onto her chest. Her breasts push into Dylan’s ribs and their legs entwine. Dylan wants her to stay, but she needs her to go. She is nothing more than a delay, yet her head tingles with the notion of keeping the woman near a while longer.

How’d you get this scar?

No one’s ever asked before. The others had all pretended the scars weren’t there, which allowed her to expose them all the more—confession without conversation. This woman has no right to ask. No right to know.

A dim glow of passing headlights sweeps across the ceiling through the smoke-soaked curtains. Dylan cranes her head away when the car sounds close enough to come through the wall. A moment later, taillights cast the room in a red glow. Just another U-turn.

Lying there, Dylan repeats the woman’s question in her mind and recognizes her lack of emphasis on any single word. The question was breathed without the serrated edge of judgment, and that allows Dylan to relax a little, though she still doesn’t want to answer. Post-coital sharing will only add to the delay, and she really should be gone by now.

She had been a hair puller when Dylan went through the motions on top of her. Dylan had felt her sides being touched, the woman’s arms and legs randomly scissoring her. But she can’t be positive if the woman raked her hands up and down her torso during the deed, if she’d felt the remnants of all her previous rituals. Maybe she just imagined it, but it felt as if the woman kind of read her scars like Braille, tracing intently enough to draw blood with those sharp, fake nails.

Dylan’s in no mood to explain. She’d rather lie there, floating in the obscurity between sleep and consciousness for the brief period she’ll indulge it.

The woman is maybe half Dylan’s age. She can’t tell for sure and not that it matters. If it wasn’t her, it would be someone similar to her. Roughly the same age, the same build. Her appeal resides in her looks, yes, but not in the traditional sense of the word. There’s no glamour perpetuated by her hair or makeup, though her jeans and T-shirt looked tailor made. A pink rubber band held back her hair. The curves at her jaw, just beneath her ears, excited Dylan. The woman commanded attention, but she didn’t demand it. Perhaps her friends had put her up to approaching Dylan in the bar earlier. Her girlfriends seemed yoked to the act of artificial effort, while Abby roamed naturally. Clean. Unobstructed. That is what amazed Dylan the most.

Every year, Dylan hooked up with somebody. The feat carried no high-five, bragging rights bullshit. Just a means to an end. Blonde or brunette, top-heavy or straight as a wall, it never mattered. Each woman was only as memorable as a sandwich eaten when hungry—sustenance. Good, but not momentous. A mystic sense of duality had separated this one from the field of painted faces in the bar earlier—designer goods at a flea market. And she’d sent signals, steady bursts of invisible flares as she approached Dylan from the far reaches of her peripheral vision. Some sort of force drew them together from opposite sides of the bar. Magnetism. Charged particles in twisted meridian—coupling imminent, though temporary.

Now, Dylan’s legs twitch sporadically, which keeps her from drifting off. She’s not practiced in conversation, especially pillow talk. If she keeps quiet long enough, maybe the woman will drop it.

This must have been deep as hell, she says, tapping the scar with a blunt nail.

That nail. Even in the room’s darkness, the polish is as chipped and faded as the paint on all the shitty houses Dylan had grown up in. The woman slows her fingers and stops in the center of the scar, as if to concentrate. The old cicatrix is forever jagged from infection and neglect all those years ago, and she’d learned about moisturizer too late to do that one any good.

It’s a long story.

Seriously, the woman says, lifting her head from Dylan’s shoulder and pancaking it on the pillow to face her. Tell me how you got this one.

Her breath smells like it tastes.

Let’s just say it’s a remnant of a broken heart.

Oh, really? The woman’s voice perks up a scale.

Though freshly and thoroughly fucked, she has a full head of enthusiasm, which surprises Dylan.

The woman’s keeping Dylan from cold metal cutting into the hot meat of her lower abdomen, that tender real estate occupying the space between the waistband and left front pocket of her jeans. She’s horny for the slicing, the bleeding, and best of all, the release the ritual provides.

This scar is epic, the woman says. Tell me how you got it.

Heaving her legs over the side of the bed and finding the floor with her feet, Dylan sits for a second and lights a cigarette, then pitches it toward the plastic ashtray. Stop, alright!

No, I’m serious. I think there’s something to these scars. They’re a map of some sort.

Get the fuck out of here. A map? It’s just random shit that was in my head. I didn’t know what I was doing.

But don’t you see? This scar is like a sundial. She points toward Dylan’s thigh. And this one is like a compass, and this one here is so definitely an ax and yet… She leans back. When you see them from a certain distance, it forms like a big picture made of little pictures. Kind of like a Chuck Close painting.

Dylan imagines killing her. Greasing her. Icing her. Imagines being puffed up like a mad woman, all frothing outrage and insanity, clobbering her over the head and throwing her into her trunk. Or chopping her up in the bathtub and shoveling her into Glad bags, piece by piece. It’s time for you to go.

What?

Look, Dylan says, just because we fucked, we’re not a couple.

The woman doesn’t flinch. "Damn, girl, relax. I’m here for a good time, not a long time."

Dylan unscrews the cap on a water bottle and raises it toward the door. Just go.

I don’t think you understand—

No! You don’t understand. Dylan spins and points in her face. It’s not like you have a choice here.

Instead of getting pissed and leaving, the woman acts like she heard different words. She rolls onto her back and says, Maybe in the morning we can go get brunch.

Her bare legs are together now, a tiny swatch of hair just visible at the top; but Dylan’s done with her, and she feels she’ll burn up if this bitch doesn’t disappear.

Standing there naked, Dylan squares her shoulders. Don’t make me be an asshole.

"You are being an asshole. The woman spreads her arms, as if to display the bed as evidence. You really want me to leave?"

Next year, Dylan will try to find a mute. She nods. Seriously, she says, her firmness absolute. Go on, get out of here.

When the woman finally swallows the hint, or her pride, she surges in spastic motions. Reaching, bending to pick up her belongings from the soiled carpet. She sets the armload on top of the dark dresser. You know, a do-and-ditch doesn’t seem your style. You really should let me help you figure out what those scars are a map of. You might be surprised.

Wrap it up, Dylan says.

Abby slides on her jeans and T-shirt without putting on her bra or thong, straps on her high Lucite shoes before scooping her underwear and purse off the top of the dresser. She storms out, meaning to slam the door with all her strength and punctuate her departure, but the damn thing opens in and the knob is slippery. When the door shuts behind her, the effect is little more than someone in a hurry.

A numbing haze of fatigue washes over her. She can’t rush to her car with hostility because her limbs might as well be cardboard as she struggles, walking around the sensitivity between her thighs. Swallows back the sting of emotions from being dismissed. Of being wronged, and plain wrong.

Halfway to her car, she turns, praying Dylan isn’t watching from the window. She can’t see her, so she just assumes she’s there and the humiliation factor rises exponentially.

Abby holds her underwear and purse awkwardly in one arm and snatches open the Jetta’s door, squinting at the light filling the car. She never locks the doors because she always leaves the keys in the ignition.

She flops into the driver’s seat, hugging her belongings on her lap, and pulls the door shut awkwardly with her right hand. Her vision glows red from the flashing arrow on the motel sign. As the engine turns over, the stereo kicks on and Janice Joplin’s voice fills the car with Turtle Blues. CD cases lie strewn about the passenger seat and floorboard—The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Nirvana—but this one is her favorite because the torment in the song helps her think.

It’s too late to start from scratch again tonight. She thinks about the traveler’s checks in her purse. She should just go to the airport and begin her pilgrimage, continue her search for the right one along the way.

Anger causes saliva to boil into the back of her throat, juices rising in her esophagus as she balls her fists. She is usually an excellent judge of character. Dylan seemed such a perfect partner for her plan, all the elements and then some. Abby’s sure she can use Dylan’s scars against her. Not by blackmail, but by convincing her they are clues that will reveal answers to all of life’s questions. But she can’t force her. Can’t even be sure she’ll ever see her again—Dylan banished her. It was over. Fuck it. She decides right then to drive to the airport.

As she shifts from P to R, she thinks of Dylan again. Them in bed together, those scars, and the hard time she had with Abby’s zipper. The more she’d tugged, the more intense her face got. Abby smiles, shifting from R to D, and pulls out of the motel parking lot while recalling the expression on her face—concentration as if splitting an atom. That face couldn’t belong to