Wounded (Wolfe & Vaughn Mysteries Book 3) Read online

  Wounded

  Samantha Simard

  Copyright © 2022 Samantha Simard

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission, except within the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be scanned, uploaded or distributed via the Internet or by any other means, electronic or print, without the author’s permission.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, and incidents described within are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-7326392-6-3

  Also by Samantha Simard:

  Wolfe & Vaughn Mysteries

  Stitches

  Scar Tissue

  Shorts Vol 1 (available on Kindle Vella)

  For Mom and Dad, always.

  And for everyone who keeps coming back for more bloody good fun.

  “Is it better to out-monster the monster, or to be quietly devoured?”

  - Friedrich Nietzsche

  “Who, what, where, when

  Just move along, nothing wrong til we meet again

  I’ll be the end

  I’ll be the war at your door, come and let me in”

  - Foo Fighters, “Shame Shame”

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  The Mass Art Murderer sat in the driver’s seat of a beat-up Pontiac Sunfire and contemplated what it meant to be a legend.

  Josh Wolfe wasn’t thinking strictly of fame, because there was a difference between being famous and legendary. People became famous for all manner of things, but the famous died every day. Maybe they made the five o’clock news for sixty seconds or a soundbite on social media, but in the end, what did they do? What made them so special? With rare exceptions like genius musicians or revolutionary scientists, they were… inconsequential.

  But legends—the stuff of scary stories that people told in the darkest part of night—those never died. They lived long after their originator was gone, because the fear that inspired them stuck in the memories of those who passed on their tales. Those words grew their own beating hearts, turned into visceral things that wouldn’t leave anyone in peace.

  Around Josh’s stationary vehicle (courtesy of Danh Sang’s junkyard), the world turned as it normally would’ve on Palace Road at nine o’clock sharp on a rainy October evening. He’d parked the Pontiac almost directly across the street from the western doors to the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and as groups of students walking around campus began to thin, Josh started looking for one co-ed in particular.

  Danielle Harrington was the only student from Professor Dean DeMarco’s spring class that returned to Mass Art for the fall semester, mostly because she was the only one left alive besides Josh’s pest of a half-brother, Jake. While Josh didn’t care one way or another what happened to the Harrington girl, his new employer had other ideas. After Sang took Anton Codreanu off the board a few days ago, he expressed his concern over Danielle and a few of the other loose ends the previous regime left behind.

  Josh waited until Danielle exited the building and crossed the street to her car before he started his engine. It was simple to follow her on to the Massachusetts Turnpike, zipping west through the city before exiting at Galen Street and crossing the Charles River into Watertown. She took Main Street past the library and Saltonstall Park, completely unaware he was on her tail—in fairness to her, he was very good at his work. She swung a wide right turn down Lexington Street and approached the home she had once shared with Alana Bach.

  Josh parked down the block, the nose of the Pontiac facing toward the blue colonial with an overgrown garden in the front. Judging from its appearance he wagered Alana had possessed the green thumb in the relationship. He slipped out from behind the wheel, shrouded in the cool shadows, the neighborhood quiet at ten o’clock in the evening. He crept up behind Danielle as she fumbled for her keys, just like he did with Stephen Carter outside his East Boston brownstone back in April.

  He hooked his arm around her throat in a rear naked choke, using a knee to press her struggling body against the door until she blacked out and went still. Then he lifted her in a fireman’s carry and headed back to the car, where he hogtied her and pasted duct tape over her mouth. He left her book bag behind on the stoop—it wasn’t like she’d need it where she was going. He had a new workspace in Maine that was nothing like the one in New Hampshire… and more importantly, he had a better plan.

  Danielle’s body would make an excellent exhibition, but only when the time was right.

  And it would be legendary.

  ~***~

  Chapter Two

  Army Ranger turned private investigator Jim Wolfe sat at an umbrella-covered table outside a café on Bulevardul Magheru in Bucharest’s city center. He sipped a cafea lunga and took in the sights and sounds of Romania’s capitol from behind his brown-lensed, gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses. His always-patient better half, Sebastian Codreanu, had explained that what Wolfe had ordered was simply an espresso made with more water than the Italian version. An affront to Sebastian’s love for sweet caffeinated drinks, no doubt, but it was cheap and contained caffeine. That was all Wolfe cared about at eight o’clock in the morning—he still sometimes woke earlier for reveille that never came, but that didn’t mean he enjoyed it.

  Even at the early hour Bucharest was bustling with activity, clusters of cars and the occasional bus zooming down narrow streets so they could loop through massive rotaries. Pedestrians walked past buildings of all shapes and sizes, staggering in their differences. Some had survived bombings from the Allies and the Luftwaffe alike, and others were nothing more than soulless brick tracts constructed by Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Communist regime. Two doors down from the café was a KFC, and in the distance Wolfe saw a billboard for Coca-Cola.

  “It wasn’t always like this, you know,” Constantin Ionesco said from across the table, gesturing vaguely at their surroundings. A stocky man somewhere in his fifties, he wore his black hair cut short and slicked back, and instead of his usual finely-tailored pinstriped suit he had on a leather jacket over a red polo shirt and some jeans. Nobody would’ve mistook him for a businessman even in a suit, so this new casual look was the best choice to blend in. “During Communism, there was no McDonald’s, no… macrobiotic burrito places.” He pulled a face, then scowled, making his square jaw more pronounced. “What even is that?”

  Scarlett Vaughn lowered her own aviators so she could peer over the rims at Constantin. “You mean what’s a macrobiotic burrito?” When
he nodded she scowled, hiding her blue-green eyes behind the sunglasses she and Wolfe had gotten 2-for-1 at a store closing sale. Her wavy blonde hair was pulled back in a ponytail, exposing her heart-shaped face and light skin to the October sun. She barely reached Wolfe’s shoulder when they were standing, but there was no one else he trusted more to watch his back. “If you don’t know, you don’t want me to tell you. Shit like that can’t be unheard.”

  “Isn’t macrobiotics something to do with whole grains?” Wolfe asked, taking a beignet off the plate of pastries on the table. “How bad can that be?”

  Sebastian Codreanu knocked his knee into Wolfe’s, swiping the beignet before Wolfe could get it to his mouth. “If you are saying that, you have never endured the hell that is a macrobiotic burrito. It’s worse than tofu, and that is saying something.” He was Romanian by birth but upper-crust Boston by rearing and his accent twisted oddly around consonants, drawing out his rs and vs every once in a while. He looked at Wolfe sideways and grinned, a roguish, dimpled thing that never failed to make Wolfe’s heart beat double-time. “Sorry, were you going to eat that?”

  “I guess not,” Wolfe said dryly, returning the smile when Sebastian handed him half the beignet. He took a bite, sweetness bursting on his tongue—too sweet for his tastes, but perfect for Sebastian. “This isn’t exactly breakfast food, you know.”

  “What would you have us eat, porridge?” Scarlett wondered, taking a massive chomp out of an equally massive croissant. “I’ve never seen a French café on the same block as an Italian bistro and a Japanese tea house, and I’m from New York. If this can’t be an actual vacation, I at least want to eat as much food as possible.”

  Always goal-oriented, Constantin checked his watch and made an annoyed sound. “Your friends are late. If we do not get to the Palatul Parlamentului before the next tour—”

  “Calm down, we’ll make it,” Wolfe interjected, inspecting the attractions guide he’d snagged at the airport. The Palace of the Parliament was formerly known as the “House of the Republic”, ironic given Ceaușescu’s penchant for making decisions for his citizens. It was described as the second-largest building in the world (the first being the Pentagon) and contained twenty-three different sections, including two houses of government and three museums. “Walker’s never let me down before.” He noticed Sebastian checking his phone for the tenth time since they arrived at the café. “Any news on your old man?”

  Anton Codreanu—a wealthy restaurateur, the master manipulator behind Boston’s criminal underground, and the architect of most of Sebastian’s suffering—had been missing for about a week. This wasn’t surprising to any of them, since Wolfe, Scarlett, and Sebastian made a deal with Boston’s second-biggest crime boss, Danh Sang, to have Anton killed. What was surprising, however, was the lack of a body. Without concrete evidence that Anton was dead, Sebastian was acting like a spooked horse, shifty and nervous save for little moments like the one with the beignet.

  “No,” Sebastian replied after a slight delay, slipping his phone back into the pocket of his plum-colored leather jacket. “Kamienski says they have no leads… but then again, they probably aren’t looking very hard.”

  “Gotta give it to Sang, he’s good at disappearing people,” Scarlett commented, taking a bite from her oeufs cocotte, which as far as Wolfe could tell was an egg in a ramekin with some bacon and cheese. She brightened when she spotted something over his shoulder and waved. “Hey, we thought you guys got lost!”

  Flynn Walker greeted them first, flashing Scarlett a smile that was boyish for a man in his late forties. “Nah, I can count the number of times that’s happened on one hand,” he said, the faintest Texas twang in his words. He took off his sunglasses—also aviators, but tinted an obnoxious shade of blue—to reveal brown eyes flecked with gold. A former Delta Force operator, Flynn’s once-dark hair had gone salt-and-pepper at the temples, visible even when it was buzzed down. “And whenever it’s happened, it’s because somebody can’t read a damn GPS.”

  Dragging over a chair for himself and his partner, Adam “Dev” Devereux snorted so hard it sounded like he hurt himself. “I’m sorry, but who insists on programing the GPS? Every single time? Because it’s not me.” Pushing thirty but with a face like a college freshman’s, Dev was the definition of the word genius with the added bonus of being genuinely nice. Shaggy blond hair and big blue eyes rounded out the look of the best explosive ordnance disposal technician in the Army’s history. “I navigate by the sun. Or you know, by reading a map.”

  Sebastian stared at the pair for a moment, amusement in the quirk of his lips. “I feel like the roles in this conversation are… not what I expected them to be.”

  Constantin seemed unimpressed. “Explain to me again why we need these two?”

  “Because international heists are sort of their thing,” Wolfe replied. If he was being honest, he was still a little weirded out by the idea that his father was not only a high-ranking CIA agent, but had put together a team that operated in the grayest areas of the intelligence community. They worked under the moniker of Project Renegade, and on the books they were a think-tank—but off the record, they did everything from rescue the children of foreign dignitaries to bust up drug cartels. “Getting the records we’re looking for won’t be easy, Constantin.”

  “I don’t know if heists are on our resumes, but we’re pretty damn good at getting into places where we don’t belong.” Flynn sat down and pulled a rolled piece of paper from inside his jacket. He spread it out on the table, using their mugs to hold down the corners so it didn’t blow away. “Thanks to Tara—” meaning Tara Byrne, the second-best hacker and tech whiz that Wolfe knew “—you’re looking at the complete schematic of the Palace of the Parliament, translated to English for your convenience.”

  “Okay, so what is the plan?” Constantin asked. He barely blinked, clearly not convinced of Dev and Flynn’s usefulness. He was also, Wolfe knew from experience, extremely distrustful of strangers. While he knew Flynn from an event that’d gone tits up while Wolfe and Scarlett were protecting Christopher Sullivan, Constantin had never met Dev before and therefore would naturally regard him with suspicion until he proved himself.

  Flynn grinned and hooked a thumb at Dev. “He’s the brains of this operation. I’m just here to look pretty.”

  Dev rolled his eyes in a way that suggested he heard that line a lot. “The records room is in a semi-secure part of the building.” He tapped the area with his index finger, which was off a main corridor on the third floor. “If you get caught in there without the proper clearance you’ll get arrested. The best idea I came up with was to go in with the tour group and create a distraction—that will allow Sebastian and Scarlett time to sneak in and find what we’re looking for.”

  “I’m not complaining,” Scarlett said, studying the schematics, “but why me and him?”

  “Constantin could be recognized if there’s any members of the old guard around,” Dev replied, stealing the bodyguard’s coffee and ignoring his indignant squawk of protest. “Sebastian is the only other one of us who speaks the language and he can’t go alone, but Wolfe and Flynn are both too memorable.” A little smile. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but most people aren’t over six feet tall here.”

  Wolfe raised his hand like they were in a classroom, and all that got him was the waitress with the check. Not what he was looking for, but he couldn’t fault the speedy service. He paid with some newly-converted leu and waited for her to leave before he spoke. “Stupid question—why can’t we just look up what we need online?”

  “Because Communism, that’s why,” Sebastian said as they stood and gathered their things, pitching his voice lower so they wouldn’t be overheard while they walked to the nearest street corner. “The records on Dumitria are from before the revolution, so they would not have been converted to an electronic format in the government’s databases.”

  “Or in any private ones,” Flynn added. “Tara checked.”

/>   “Awesome,” Scarlett said dryly, leaning against Wolfe’s shoulder as they waited for the signal to change. “So what’s the distraction gonna be?”

  Dev grinned, bright and sunny. “I’m gonna blow something up.”

  ~***~

  Jake Wolfe stood on a tarp in the living room of his red Colonial on the corner of Pearl and Granite Streets in Cambridgeport and looked down at the gigantic canvas spread out on most of the floor. Beside it on a tarp was an array of paint cans and thinner, along with buckets of brushes and sponges. He wore black sweatpants, a dark-blue t-shirt, and a gray hooded sweatshirt over his scarred skin even though he was alone in the house.

  His roommate, Mikhail “Misha” Aleksandrov—whose wealthy out-of-touch parents had gifted him a mortgage before leaving the country for an undetermined amount of time—was an intern for a local law firm. He frequently pulled all-nighters at the office, so Jake was used to being by himself at night. In this case, though, Misha was on his third date with a guy he’d met at the coffee shop down the street from his work, and he’d told Jake not to wait up. Insomnia was a close personal friend, however, and after his fifth screaming nightmare Jake had decided that sleep wasn’t happening.

  It was around one o’clock in the morning and Jake was aware he looked crazy, opening a can of discounted canary yellow latex paint he’d gotten at Home Depot and dipping one foot in it. He hadn’t painted a single thing since his mutilation at the hands of the Mass Art Murderer back in April, and every time he picked up a brush his crooked fingers shook… so he’d decided to try a different approach. They always said there was no wrong way to make art, right? Besides, he couldn’t be too hard on himself—he’d come face-to-face with the Mass Art Murderer at Caitlin and Ryan’s wedding and didn’t even have a breakdown.