Free Scar Tissue by William G. Tapply Page A

with me, you know.”
    â€œOkay, listen,” I said. “I want you to give him a message for me, okay? It’s very important. I want him to get it just as soon as he comes in. The message is this: Call Brady Coyne immediately.” I spelled my name and recited both my office and home phone numbers.
    â€œWait a minute,” mumbled the guy. “How you spell immediately ?”
    I told him and repeated the two phone numbers.
    â€œOkay,” he said.
    â€œIt’s very important,” I said.
    â€œGotcha, man. Police business, huh?”
    â€œExactly.”
    J ake didn’t call that afternoon, nor did he call me at home that evening or at the office on Thursday. It worried me. It was out of character for Jake to blow off an appointment, especially one he’d set up himself. He would’ve called if he couldn’t make it. And if he couldn’t call ahead of time, he’d call later.
    And why register under a phony name?

    This is going to blow your mind , he’d said.
    I called King’s Motel after Julie left for the day. A woman with no accent answered this time. I asked her to ring Jake’s room. Ten rings, no answer. I disconnected, then called her back. She told me Mr. Silver had not checked out. I asked her if she’d mind going to Unit Ten and knocking on his door. She said she couldn’t leave the desk. When I told her it was a police matter, she decided maybe she could do it after all.
    She came back on the line five minutes later. “Mr. Silver’s got his Do Not Disturb sign on the door,” she said. “I knocked, but he didn’t answer.”
    â€œCould you use your key, go in?”
    â€œSure,” she said. “And get fired.”
    â€œI left a note for him yesterday,” I said. “Would you mind checking his room slot, see if he picked it up? It’s from Brady Coyne. That’s me.”
    â€œOkay.” A minute later she said, “Nope. Your message is still here.”
    I thanked the woman and hung up.
    Where the hell was Jake?
    The question nagged me the whole time it took me to walk across the city to my apartment on the waterfront, and it nagged me while I changed out of my lawyer suit into my flannel shirt and jeans, and it nagged me while I sipped my glass of Rebel Yell and ice in my living room.
    The more I thought about it, the more it worried me.
    Jake had been through a lot. He’d lost Brian, he’d stopped working, he’d left his wife. Any one of those things was a certifiable reason for profound depression.
    He’d hardly sounded depressed when he called me on the phone to make the appointment he’d broken. When I talked to him, in fact, he’d sounded manic.
    It was an easy decision. I went down to the parking garage, got into my car, and headed for Route Nine in Framingham.
    It took nearly three-quarters of an hour to get there. Route Nine in Framingham is a divided highway lined with commerce:
restaurants and night clubs, carpet warehouses and computer stores, giant shopping malls with twenty-acre parking lots. Every hundred yards or so a light stops traffic to make it easy for shoppers to enter and leave the places where they want to spend their money, and to hell with anybody who just wants to keep going.
    Fluffy snowflakes the size of pennies whirled in my headlights, and a big neon sign with blinking bulbs heralding KING’S MOTEL appeared out of the blur. Under it, a smaller lighted sign read VACANCY. I got into the right-hand lane, thanked the green arrow on the traffic light, pulled into the parking area, and found a slot by the end of the building directly in front of Unit Ten.
    King’s Motel was a big oblong building with a white-brick facade, an overhanging roof, and an outside corridor running the length of the second floor. Ten units up, ten units down, front and back. Forty units in all. A tiny in-ground pool, now empty, sat directly beside the highway.
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