The Starr Sting Scale

by C. S. O'Cinneide

  “Listen, Rory.” I sit on his bed, patting the mattress to indicate he should sit beside me. “There’s a job I need to do, and I need some special tools to do it.” Rory stays in the corner beside the aquarium. He’s not going to leave Bubba unattended.

  “What kind of job?” he says warily.

  “You know I can’t tell you that.” It’s easier if I tell him it’s for a job, instead of revenge against the Daybreak Boys. A professional hit is clean and untraceable if you know how to do it. Revenge is messy and has a habit of returning to its owner.

  “What kind of stuff do you need?”

  “Whatever you can get on short notice. I need it by tonight.” If Malone got out in time, she’ll be bringing the wrath of the entire police force down on the club. I won’t be able to touch those guys in jail. If she didn’t get out, they’ll be looking for me. I can’t give them the time to get organized.

  “That’s a tight timeline, Candace.”

  “Can you do it or not?”

  He doesn’t say anything.

  “Listen, I’m sorry about Bubba.” This is possibly the first time I’ve said sorry in my life. “But I need your help.” Another thing I don’t think I’ve ever said before.

  Rory lets his guard down a bit. Turns on the lamp on the table. I can see the suffering kid my dad locked in the basement behind his tired eyes.

  “Geez, Candace, you look like shit.”

  “I’ve had a rough night.” I gather up some of the bedsheet to staunch the blood flow from my nose.

  Rory comes over and sits down beside me. “Okay, Candace, I’ll see what I can do.”

  With that settled, I’ve got a call to make. “You got a phone I can use, Rory?” He reaches under his pillow where an old flip phone has been charging. You’d think with all his technological skills he’d have something better. I punch in Uncle Rod’s number. No answer. I try again, but the phone just rings and rings. Charlotte’s number and the E-Zee Market are the only other numbers I have memorized. I call the one most likely to produce my uncle.

  “Hello,” a half-asleep voice says on the other end.

  “Hi, Charlotte.”

  “Candace, is that you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is something wrong?” She’s coming more awake now. Must have looked at the time on her alarm clock and realized I’m usually horizontal at this hour and not making phone calls.

  “I’m trying to get a hold of Uncle Rod,” I say. “Did he sleep over there last night?”

  “No, Candace. He didn’t. I don’t know where he is.”

  “I really need to get a hold of him,” I say. I watch Rory go over to the aquarium. He reaches into a Styrofoam cup and drops in some fresh worms for Bubba. “I’ve run into some trouble. With the Daybreak Boys.”

  Charlotte doesn’t say anything, but I can hear her intake of breath through the phone line. “You found out,” she finally says.

  “Yes, I did.” Shit, did Charlotte know it was the Daybreak Boys who jumped me all those years ago? Did Uncle Rod?

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I expect her to start sputtering lame excuses, but she doesn’t.

  “Your father loved you so much, Candace.”

  “Of course he did.” What’s this got to do with my dad?

  “When you were on trial, he was absolutely destroyed. When the wife was going to testify, it looked like you’d be doing a life sentence. He would have done anything to stop that from happening. You’ve got to understand.”

  “Understand what?” None of this is making sense.

  “Understand why he was going to give himself up. Admit to everything he’d done. Well, most of it. He knew if he gave the police the right information they’d reduce the charges against you. Take it down to a lesser charge than murder, which they did anyway when the wife disappeared. But it was too late for Mike. The Daybreak Boys had him killed when they heard he was going to talk. He’d done so much work for them. It would have all come back.” I can hear her sniffle through the phone. “I’m so sorry we didn’t tell you, Candace. But Rod said not to. He said this would happen. He said you’d go after them. It’s suicide to take on that gang, Candace. We were only trying to protect you.”

  Your father could be unpredictable, I hear Pauly Strachan say again. It wasn’t about the rape. It was about my father. It had always been about him. Even what they did to me was just a sick act of bravado against Mike Starr, the infamous hitman. They wanted to prove they could brutalize his daughter and get away with it.

  “I’ve got to go,” I say, still stunned. “Tell Uncle Rod I’m looking for him.”

  “Please, Candace, please don’t do this,” Charlotte says.

  But I’ve flipped the phone shut, cutting her off in mid-sniffle.

  “I need to get out of here, Rory.”

  He turns his attention away from the turtle. Bubba doesn’t go for the worms, just starts smacking his head on an aquarium rock. “Okay, Candace,” Rory says. “Where are you going?”

  “You don’t need to know that,” I say, getting up from the bed. I toss the flip phone to him. He catches it with one hand, his reflexes undamaged despite years of being a junkie. “But I’ll be back tonight. Don’t let me down.” I walk through the busted open door and then take the stairs two at a time. I don’t have long. I need my uncle’s help if I’m going to do what I’m planning. Charlotte’s right. It would be suicide to go after the entire gang myself, even with their leader out of the way. I need a partner. But I’m not paying attention now. I don’t check out the perimeter before I exit. When I burst out of the front door of the building there are two cop cars parked sideways blocking the street in both directions.

  “Hi, Candy.” The muzzle of Saunder’s gun presses hard into the small of my back. A couple of uniforms get out of the cars and train their own guns on me. “Guess what, sweetheart? The tech boys came back with your E-Zee Market security tapes. You’re a lying bitch.”

  He frog marches me to the closest cop car, throws me over the hood to put on the cuffs. The one on my left wrist bites into the swelling and bruised skin of where I was chained for so many hours back in the clubhouse. Saunders yanks me up by my trussed hands and opens the door to the police cruiser.

  “I’m going to enjoy this, Candy,” he sneers. A bit of his spittle hits me on the cheek. Then he pushes me headfirst into the back seat and slams the door.

  As the cop car pulls away, I lie back on the torn-up vinyl upholstery and close my eyes. Too tired to put up a fight.

  CHAPTER 22

  IT’S NOT JUST THE TAPES. While I sit in the same interview room where Saunders badgered me last time, I hear the rest of the evidence against me. Danny Anderson can only account for my whereabouts until eleven thirty on Thursday, the night of Lachlan’s disappearance. I tell them I was at The Goon until last call, but that doesn’t fully cover the window of opportunity. No one spent the night with me in my apartment above the E-Zee Market. I had turned Marcus down at the bar. Not that he could vouch for me even if he had. Only the Scarpellos’ envoy had seen me by my apartment, and something tells me mentioning that guy won’t get me anywhere. No one says anything about Malone. I don’t know whether she made it out of the clubhouse alive or not.

  “You’re going down, Starr,” Saunders hisses at me. “Just like I said you would.” He doesn’t even have his tattered black notebook with him. His evidence is documented properly and ready to go to the prosecutor for arraignment. But there’s more.

  “We had an anonymous call, Candy. What do you think they told us?”

  “That you have the fashion sense of a colour-blind used-car salesman?”

  Saunders presses his lips together then goes on. Bonnie Berry, the cop who was supposed to take my statement before, is also in the room. She doesn’t say much, just makes sure the video camera in the corner is on. Although I did catch her smirking a bit when I insulted Saunders with the used-car-salesman joke.

  “That you were seen in a bar with Alice Cor
rigan’s mother, Kristina. Not long before her daughter’s boyfriend, Tyler Brent, was executed. Everybody knows the broad hated him.” He wets his lips. He’s loving this. Even his few wispy strands of hair are tensed with anticipation. “We’re looking for her right now. And this time, we’ll make sure none of your friends get to her before she testifies against you.”

  “I don’t have any friends,” I say to him. That fucking blonde. I wish I never saw her surgically enhanced face. Or gotten involved with her teenage daughter’s loser of a boyfriend. The video keeps rolling. But I say nothing. If Saunders thinks I’m going to confess, he’s as dumb as the Walmart loafers he’s wearing.

  There’s a knock at the door. Bonnie goes to answer. There’s some murmured exchange. Then she comes over to Saunders and whispers something annoying in his ear. He stands up from the table, the chair making an angry scrape across the floor.

  “We’re not done here, Starr.” He and Bonnie leave the room. I hear someone step in behind me. Probably Saunders’s boss or that fucker Wolfe come to gloat. I’m a spectacle here in the squad room now that everyone knows who I am. My Princess Leia cover has been blown.

  A cop walks over to the corner and turns the camera off. When she turns to me I can see her swollen cheek is taped up. I think the bastard might have broken her cheekbone. My nose is taped, too, but I don’t think it’s broken. She sits down at the table.

  “How you doing, Malone?”

  “I’ve felt better,” she says with a sigh.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Things don’t look good for you, Candace.”

  “I didn’t do it.” She cocks one eyebrow but lets my denial stand.

  “I didn’t tell them about the bikers,” she says.

  “What bikers?” I say, leaning back in my chair. Even if the recorder is off, she could be hiding a wire in her lacy red bra. Or maybe she’s wearing a blue one now. She probably does her own laundry.

  “The one whose dick you bit off before you broke his neck,” she says. “And the one you shot to save me. They assume Marcus did it. Well, not the biting off part, but the rest. And I didn’t correct them.”

  I’m not surprised by the police’s conclusions. After all, that’s why I’d left the gun in Marcus’s hand. A move I know he forgives me for, wherever he is now. Not his corpse. That’s in the morgue. But the rest of him. The part of him with the strong and gentle hands. The part that called me his girl. Whenever the police are looking for someone to blame, they always look for the darkest skin in the room.

  “How did you explain the state of Chuck’s dick?” I say.

  “I told them I did it.”

  “No shit?” I actually laugh, despite the circumstances. How does Malone do it? She can make me laugh even when I’m cuffed to a table waiting to be arraigned.

  “It’s given me a certain amount of street cred,” she says, smiling. “I’ll have to put up with a few nicknames for a while, I guess, but it’ll eventually die down.” I doubt it. There was a kid in my class who shit his pants once in circle time when the teacher wouldn’t let him go to the restroom. He’s still called Crapper to this day.

  “Once they find Kristina Corrigan, they’re going to arraign you, Candace. There’s nothing I can do about that. Right now, they don’t have much, just their suspicions about the tapes and the anonymous tip.”

  “If there’s nothing you can do, why the hell are you here?”

  “Because, like I said, I care about what happens to you, Candace.” She reaches into her tailored black pants. She must have a closet of them. I can visualize them all hung up in a row like a battalion of half Malones. When does she get the time to iron? She unlocks the cuff from the table and puts it around my other wrist.

  “I’ll take you out by the back door,” she says, standing up. “You’ve got twenty-four hours to clear yourself, Candace. I don’t care what you do, but be back here the same time tomorrow with something I can use to get you out of this.” She walks over to the door. You could knock me over with a wisp of Saunders’s hair, but I don’t need to be told twice. I get up and join her at the door.

  When she walks me through the squad room, a few people look up. But they turn their heads back to their screens just as quickly. They figure Malone is taking me to a holding cell or somewhere else. She takes me down the stairwell and unlocks the cuffs when we get to the fire exit.

  “Twenty-four hours, Candace,” she says, as I rub at my wrists.

  “Twenty-four hours, Malone,” I tell her. And then I saunter down the alleyway and climb the fence at the end. When I drop down the other side of it, Malone is still in the doorway.

  As I walk away, I wonder if she really believes I’ll come back.

  I only stop once to make a call from a pay phone to a burner. Guess there’s one more number I remember. I leave a message after the tone with an address where to meet me. It’s a risk, but I need to take it.

  When I get to Rod’s, the door’s locked. But I’ve got the key. I open it quickly, step inside, then shut the door behind me just as fast.

  “Uncle Rod!” My voice echoes through the empty house. No response. Where the hell is he? The blank TV screen reflects my image. I’m a mess, just like Rory said. My hair looks like a rat’s nest. And although I can’t make out the colour of my swollen nose, I can guess it’s purple. I call out again for my uncle then check the basement to see if he’s working at his tool bench down there. I come back up into the living room and realize I can’t wait for him. I’ve got to get out of the city and find someplace to lay low. The Daybreak Boys will have to wait. I can’t get at them from a cell anyway. But I will get them. That you can bet on as surely as the roulette wheel in their clubhouse basement.

  I’ve got to find where Rod’s hidden my stash. I pick up the land line on the hall table, checking with Charlotte again to see if he showed up there. But there’s no answer. It goes to her voicemail. I slam the phone down. I’m going to have to find where he put my IDs and cash myself.

  “Hide contraband in plain sight, Candace,” I remember my dad saying again. He and Rod were cut from the same cloth, just like Charlotte said, so I start with the fridge. Not tucked into the package behind the bologna. Not in the carton of eggs that’s a few months old. There’s nothing in the freezer but mojito mix Charlotte brought over and some more bologna, furry with frost.

  I start to tear the rest of the kitchen apart. If Mrs. Boddis is home next door, she’ll be calling the cops about the noise instead of a peeper this time. I try to place the pots and pans and cutlery down more gently, but it slows me down. Looking for an obvious place where no one would look is harder than I thought it would be.

  I start in on Rod’s bedroom after that, giving up on the obvious places. Getting a screwdriver from the basement, I remove the light switch and electrical outlet covers. Nothing is hidden inside. I pull all the clothes out of his closet and rip open the soles of his shoes with the screwdriver. Nothing. I even dig to the bottom of his clothes hamper but only find the pilled green cardigan he’s owned for over twenty years. Agnes knit it for him.

  The bathroom is a similar story. I unscrew the outlets. I look in the toilet tank. Check under the sink and in the medicine cabinet. There’s nothing big enough to house my stuff. Then I run down to the basement and get a wrench to go at the pipes. It’s a long shot, but I’m running out of ideas. The elbow pipe comes away with nothing inside but a spidery clump of my uncle Rod’s hair.

  I sit on the floor of the tiny bachelor bathroom, my legs sticking out the door. There is no way I’m ever going to find my stash without Rod’s help. I’ll just have to cool my jets until he gets back. Malone said I had twenty-four hours. And the Daybreak Boys are all on the run now from the cops since the thing with Malone. I’m safe for now.

  I go to the fridge and grab a beer left over from the hockey game then sit down on the couch and crack it open. The cold, hoppy liquid races down my throat, soothing it. I haven’t had a drink since my flask ran out in th
e Daybreak Boys’ furnace room. The cops wouldn’t even let me have water after I was arrested. Oh, they kept saying they’d bring me something to drink, but they never did. A tactic designed to break me. I slam the beer bottle down on the coffee table. It causes a thick head to form that I have to down quickly so it doesn’t spill over the lip. The force of my frustration has knocked the cupboard door in the coffee table open and a couple of the Stanley Cup playoff tapes spill out. I stare at them on the carpet for a few moments before it dawns on me: This is where Rod hid the gun, the one he was holding for the pumpkin bomber. I can’t believe I forgot. I write off my stupidity to alcohol withdrawal and not having slept in the last thirty-six hours.

  Pushing the coffee table away from the couch, I start yanking the tapes out while I kneel on the carpet. I pull each cover off, the tape and box both labelled with Rod’s careful handwriting, then I throw it on the floor beside me and fetch another. When I’ve gone through them all, I search around in the back of the cupboard with my hand, even stick my head in there looking for a panel or something. Then I cross the room and pry apart the dinosaur of a VCR. No stash, no gun. And now Rod is going to kill me when he gets home. You can’t buy those ancient pieces of crap anymore.

  I sit back on the couch, put my face in my hands. Then pull away quickly when I realize how much it hurts my nose. I grab the beer and almost finish it off. I’m going to have to go out for supplies if I have to wait much longer for Rod. He doesn’t keep liquor in the house.

  In the discarded pile of tapes and their covers beside me, one label catches my eye: Stanley Cup Playoffs 2015. He’d written the title as well as the year on each tape and box. Like the year wouldn’t be enough. He only ever tapes the playoffs. But there’s something odd about this particular label. Something that’s making my spidey senses tingle when I look at it. Then it comes to me, what makes this one tape different from the rest.