The Starr Sting Scale

by C. S. O'Cinneide

  “I think you’ll find a girl like me can’t be too careful, Malone.”

  “I think a girl like you left careful behind a long time ago.”

  Once we’re inside, Malone removes the cuffs, and I push my sunglasses up onto my head. We walk through the hall to the back where her cubicle is. I see Saunders through an office window as I pass by and lower my shades again. Luckily, he’s busy losing it on some chubby guy sitting at his desk. I can’t hear what Saunders is saying, but the look on his face says it all. It isn’t until he goes over to close the blinds that the guy in the chair turns around, and I see it’s Doug Wolfe, the cop whose wife my dad was banging. I hide my face with my hand and hurry up beside Malone. Her desk is on its own against a window; a high partition separates it from the rest of the floor. I sit down on the window ledge at first, but people walking by can still see my head. I take the extra chair instead. Malone throws Tyler’s leather jacket, still in the dry-cleaning bag, over the cubicle wall along with her own coat, and then she sits down at her locked-in laptop, booting it up.

  “Tell me, Malone, did you know my mom’s family was in the business?”

  “I may have heard something like that,” she says, still looking at the screen.

  “You think they were the ones who took out my dad?”

  “I doubt it,” she says, typing away. “We kept an eye out for the Scarpellos when you went on trial. To see if they might show up in town. But our intel told us that they never even crossed the state line.” So much for my loving extended family taking an interest.

  “What about Doug Wolfe?” I say, thinking of Saunders and him going at it just now.

  “What about him?” Malone says. Now she’s clicking on pictures in some sort of database. She must sense me looking over her shoulder because she angles the screen away.

  “My dad was doing his wife.”

  Malone turns around in her chair. “How did you hear about that?”

  “I have my own intel, Malone.”

  She shakes her head and turns back to the computer. “Doug Wolfe was on a training course at Quantico when your dad disappeared. All week.”

  “Quantico’s not that far away. He could have driven all night. Taken care of my dad and gotten back without anyone knowing.”

  “They checked it out, Candace. I’ve seen the file. No one found anything to suggest that.” She continues her clicking then types something else into the keyboard. “But the suspicion of it followed him around like a bad stink afterward. That’s why he got put on shit detail.”

  “So, you’re saying it could have been him.”

  “No, Candace, I’m not. And quit trying to figure this out yourself. I told you I’d give you the information when we crack this case and not before.”

  “But it sounds like the guy had a pretty good motive.”

  “You’re pissing in the wind, Candace.”

  “Nice language,” I say. Malone ignores me. I content myself with looking around her cubicle. A couple of photos of her and her friends in their hockey uniforms. Some sort of citation for conduct above and beyond. There’s a green button stuck into the fabric wall that says BECAUSE I’M IRISH with a cartoon of a frothy mug of beer. It impales one of those little red-and-gold envelopes you get money in at Chinese New Year.

  “I knew it!” Malone says, sitting back in her chair in triumph. She turns the laptop around to show me what she’s found. A photo of the wolf tattoo with the arms fills the screen. The one we’d seen on both Tyler and Lachlan.

  “It’s a gang tattoo,” she says, narrowing her eyes at me.

  “Is it?” I say, looking bored. “I don’t know what kind of gang would have those two kids in it. Sure they’re not just wannabes?”

  “Let’s go,” she says, turning off the laptop.

  “Where? I was just getting comfortable.”

  “To see Selena,” she says, grabbing her coat. “She’s in vice.” I don’t get up.

  “Well, come on, Candace.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” I hold out my wrists.

  “Oh, for God’s sake.” She puts the handcuffs back on again, and we’re off to find out more about the Daybreak Boys, the motorcycle gang that were my father’s best customers when he was alive.

  CHAPTER 10

  THE BUILDING WHERE SELENA works looks more like a place you’d go to meet your broker than a cop shop. Malone and I go in the back door with keypad access and walk up the stairs to the second floor. We enter a bright room full of desks, no cubicle walls, and floor-to-ceiling windows on all sides. A dozen or so plainclothes are typing away desperately on their laptops, as if they’re going to catch criminals through their computer screens instead of out on the streets where they live. A familiar tousled redhead looks up and recognizes us.

  “Hi, Malone,” Danny says, smiling. Malone is suddenly rooted to a spot on the cheap office carpet. She smiles back, patting her hair.

  “Hi, Danny,” she says.

  “And you’ve brought your friend with you. Nice to see you again, Carrie.” He. leans back in his chair, legs stretched out. They’re almost as long as mine.

  “Hi,” I say, rubbing my wrists where the handcuffs had pinched before Malone had removed them in the stairwell.

  We stand there for a minute looking like a couple of idiots, Malone flipping her hair and me trying not to look like the criminal I am.

  “You looking for Selena?” Danny finally asks.

  “Yes,” Malone coughs out. “Is she around?”

  “I think she’s in the break room getting some java,” he says.

  Malone turns to me. “I’ll be right back. Don’t go anywhere.” She walks down a hallway toward the other end of the floor.

  “So, I hear you’re a PI,” Danny says, looking me up and down.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “Well, you must be good if Malone brought you in. She’s pretty independent. Where do you work?”

  “J&B Associates,” I say, using my dad’s favourite whisky as a cover.

  “Haven’t heard of them.”

  “We’re new in town.”

  He reaches over and grabs a travel mug but doesn’t take a sip. He’s wearing a white golf shirt that strains a little over the pecs. His forearms are smooth and taut, like a sailor’s. I used to run contraband with a guy on the west coast with arms like that. They feel good wrapped around a woman’s body, like a fleshy vice that pulls you in.

  “Well, if you’re new to the city, maybe I could show you around a bit,” he says. “We all go to The Sip Club for trivia nights on Thursdays. You should come tonight.” Trivia night. Next thing he’ll be asking me to go steady at the malt shop. What a Disneyesque world these people live in.

  “C’mon, Carrie,” Malone says tersely from behind me. I didn’t hear her creep up. That’s not like me.

  We’re in an interrogation room with Selena. The walls have more scuff marks than Principal Cutter’s desk. I look around for wet telephone books. The cops sometimes use the drenched, heavy pages to beat confessions out of people. It hurts like hell but leaves no bruises. I don’t think they even print those damn things anymore, though.

  “The Daybreak Boys, well, well,” Selena says. “They’re a nasty piece of work.”

  They are. I once saw one of them beat a guy senseless then douse him in motor oil and light a match.

  “What can you tell me about them?” Malone says.

  “Well, they’re a puppet gang for one of the larger syndicates. Half of those guys don’t even ride motorcycles anymore. They just keep up the club’s business side of things and let the smaller MCs do their work on the ground.”

  “MC stands for motorcycle club,” Malone says to me.

  “I know.” Does she think I just came up Lake Erie on a tricycle, for Christ’s sake?

  “It keeps the head honchos out of jail, farming the rough stuff out to puppets like the Daybreak Boys. Even they outsource a lot of their hits. No one wants to get their hands dirty these day
s, except with drugs and girls. And they still do their own enforcement. They like being violent, but they try to leave the killing to professionals.” Tell that to the guy doused in motor oil. But Malone still gives me a sideways glance.

  “Around here they run most of the massage parlours, moving the girls from place to place. Mostly Eastern Europeans. They also do a good business in illegal firearms and some extortion. But their main focus is drugs. We busted one of their meth labs last year. They’d gotten the recipe from a former Mob chemist. But he didn’t live long enough to get caught in the sting. Word is they’re into opioids now: fentanyl, carfentanil, and that new stuff, W-18, that’s a hundred times stronger than fentanyl.”

  “Isn’t fentanyl strong enough to kill a fucking gorilla?” I ask. Even I’m surprised. Who the fuck needs something a hundred times stronger? Next thing you know they’ll have something that makes a junkie explode as soon as he looks at it. Doesn’t make much sense, depleting your client demographic like that.

  “It’s what sells these days,” she says. “And while the Daybreak Boys take their orders from higher up, they keep enough pathetic underlings to run their stuff on the streets. I’m thinking this is where your two young men might fit in.”

  “More outsourcing,” Malone says.

  “It’s not just for conglomerates anymore,” Selena says. “Being affiliated with the larger MC gives this local gang access to powerful friends and family members in the top echelon. They mix in legitimate circles. Political. Judicial. You name it. That’s how the Daybreak Boys get away with it. They let the stooges do their street-level work and then ride down the street on their hogs with teddy bears raising money for the Children’s Hospital, trying to convince the public they’re just a harmless bunch of goons in leathers. But make no mistake, these guys are a vicious lot. They’ve got their tentacles in everywhere.”

  “I didn’t know they had such reach,” Malone says.

  “They don’t call it connected for nothing. Organized crime is its own LinkedIn,” Selena says.

  “Are these kids on your radar?” Malone asks.

  “I don’t think so. They’re too young to be members. It takes years of grovelling at the feet of these animals before they invite you to become one of the pack. I saw the photos you sent me, and their tats aren’t even official, just cheap imitations. The wolf’s snout isn’t symmetrical, and there are four arms surrounding it, not the usual five. But we might have been monitoring them as known associates. I can ask Danny if you want.”

  Malone colours a bit.

  “Or you could do the asking, if you prefer.”

  “No, that’s okay,” she says. “Anything else we should know?”

  “They’ve got a clubhouse down on Regent Street, with fortifications better than a state prison. Except it’s for keeping people out, not in. You’d need a tank to get in there.”

  Malone types the address into her iPad then flips it back in its case. “Thanks, Selena. I really appreciate all this.”

  “Honestly, Chien-Shiung, these Daybreak Boys are a scary bunch. I’d steer clear of them if you can. It’s hard to believe they’d even bother with this Tyler Brent kid. They might give him the beating of his life if he was dealing for them and made the wrong move, but taking the time to order a hit would be a bit over the top.”

  “Maybe if he pissed them off enough,” Malone says. Tyler was good at pissing people off.

  “Maybe,” Selena says. “But it would have to be pretty bad for them to risk taking the heat for killing a minor who wasn’t even a member. Those guys are usually too busy killing each other to involve the greater public. Plus, hanging a kid from a zip line seems a little too creative and personal for a professional hit.” I shoot Malone a look.

  “Could have been trying to make it look like an amateur,” she says, ignoring me and my look.

  A guy pops his head in the door of the interrogation room. He needs it to interview a perp who tried to rob a bank with a banana and a pointed stick. They’re bringing in a psych consult.

  We walk out the door and past the would-be bandit. He’s been disarmed of the pointed stick but is currently taking a healthy bite of the other weapon. The arresting officer must have peeled it. He wouldn’t have been able to with his wrists cuffed like that. I’m surprised they’re letting him eat it. I would have thought it was evidence.

  “Just watch yourself, Chien-Shiung,” Selena says, taking Malone’s hands in hers before we exit into the stairwell. Danny is no longer at his desk. Maybe he’s gone to interrogate a suicide bomber who tried to blow up a post office with an apple.

  “I will,” Malone says.

  But she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Her friend is right. The Daybreak Boys have their fingers in a lot of dirty little pies. And one of the dirtiest is the police force.

  We’re back in the unmarked. Malone hasn’t got the subpoena yet to question Alice Corrigan. The family’s lawyer, Lopez, had called to say he was getting a psych eval of Alice. It would state she’s not emotionally fit enough to withstand questioning yet. You can get a psychiatrist to say anything for the right price. My defense attorney brought in a doctor who claimed I was “emotionally and psychologically scarred” from the abandonment of my mother and a childhood exposed to criminals. All I ever said in that stupid shrink’s office was “Where the fuck is the couch?” In any case, we can’t talk to Alice, so we’re off to see girlfriend number two, Jessica Mendler.

  “So how long have you known Danny?”

  “A couple of years,” Malone says. “Ever since Selena was assigned to vice. He’s a good guy.”

  “I noticed.”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  “The hell you didn’t. You just look at that piece of candied ginger and your head starts spinning.”

  She doesn’t say anything, but I can feel the heat of her blush from the back seat.

  “And what about Selena? Seems you’ve known her awhile.”

  “We met up at the academy, in training,” she says. “Two visible minorities banding together, I guess.” She’s more comfortable discussing her friend than the candied ginger. “With that and being women, we had two strikes against us from the old boys’ network.” She glances at me in the back. “I suppose you don’t meet many women in your line of work either, Candace.”

  “I told you, I’m retired.”

  “Sure,” she says. “Still, it must have been hard.”

  “I’ve never been into that feminist bullshit,” I say. “If that’s what you mean.”

  “I hate it when strong women say that. Feminism just means that women should be considered equal to men. Are you telling me you don’t believe that?”

  “No.”

  “Really?” she says, pulling into the driveway of a better house than Lachlan Reid’s, but quite a bit lower on the status scale than Alice Corrigan’s.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I think we’re better.”

  Jessica Mendler looks nothing like “the other woman” as we sit at the kitchen table with her and her mother, an older and even more fade-into-the-wallpaper version of her daughter.

  “I don’t know anything about what happened to Tyler,” she says. Her eyes are red from crying. Honestly, what kind of hold did this jerk have on young girls?

  “Where were you on Saturday night, Jessica?” Malone asks.

  “I was here,” she says, nodding to her mother, who looks like she’d like to hide under the table until we’ve left. That’s when I notice that her eyes are red, too, and one’s a little green around the edge, the last bit of healing left from a bruise.

  “She was,” she says, like an afterthought.

  “Was anyone else here?” Malone asks. Jessica looks at her mother for an answer.

  “My husband,” she says. “He was here, I think.”

  “You don’t sound too sure.”

  “He’s been working some nights. Doing shifts for Hawk Security. He’s had trouble getting steady work since he came back from
Afghanistan.” She picks at the end of a yellow dishtowel she has in her hands, pulling on the threads.

  “So he’s in the military,” Malone says.

  “Not anymore.” Then the mother shuts down again. Malone turns her attention back to Jessica.

  “Lachlan told us you were involved with Tyler,” Malone says.

  “Yeah,” she says. “Sort of.”

  “Can you define ‘sort of’ for us, Jessica?”

  “We went out a few times.”

  “Where?”

  “Mostly the park,” Jessica says. Then she realizes she’s made a slip. She’s been told that Tyler’s body was found in Riverside Park. But there are a lot of parks, a result of forward-thinking urban planners who didn’t take into account their current use as a place for junkies to get together and dispose of needles.

  “What park?” Malone asks.

  “I don’t remember.” Well, at least she said the right thing there.

  “Did you go anywhere else with him, like to a movie, or maybe out for pizza?” Malone is trying to get a handle on Tyler’s usual haunts. Unfortunately, her idea of teenage dating behaviour has come out of an Archie comic.

  “Did you go to any parties with him?” I ask. The mother picks more furiously at the dishtowel.

  “No,” she says, looking into her lap. “He usually went to those with someone else.”

  “Alice Corrigan,” says Malone.

  “Yes,” Jessica says. “He said he was going to break up with her. That she was way too possessive.” I’d expected her to say this with a little more gusto. Usually the piece on the side loves their day in court to justify their actions. But she just says the words like she’s playing a broken telephone game between her true feelings and what comes out of her mouth.

  “Did Alice ever threaten you?” Malone asks.

  “She said something to me once,” Jessica says. “But that was after.”

  “After what, Jessica?”

  She gives her mother a worried look. The mother worries back. The dishtowel may not make it.

  “After we stopped seeing each other,” Jessica says. But I know that’s not it. When you encounter a girl like Jessica, you know there is a Before and an After, and the lightning strike in between them has a far more lasting impact than losing the attention of a two-timing loser like Tyler Brent. But if Malone realizes this, she decides to leave it for now.