The Starr Sting Scale

by C. S. O'Cinneide

  “And what did she say to you, Jessica?” Malone presses.

  “Just to leave him alone. I told her I wasn’t seeing him anymore. But she didn’t believe me.”

  “Do you know Lachlan Reid?” asks Malone.

  “Yes,” Jessica says.

  “Did you know that Tyler and Lachlan had a fight at school the day before he died? It was about you,” she says.

  The girl looks up, surprised for a second. “Who said that?”

  “Lachlan did.”

  She nods then goes back to staring at the table. “I haven’t been to school much lately.”

  “Do you know anyone who might have wanted to hurt Tyler?”

  Jessica doesn’t answer. The mother stares down at the dishtowel then folds her hands on top of it. They are red and chapped, like she works in a laundry.

  “Lachlan was angry at Tyler, Jessica. Do you know anyone else who might have been angry at him?”

  “No,” she says. But her shifting eyes say yes.

  “Did you know he was involved with a gang? Maybe you saw them around, motorcycle guys? Maybe you even got to meet some of them. Took a ride on one of their bikes. That can be exciting for a young girl.”

  “Tyler was not a nice boy,” the mother blurts out. The dish towel flutters to the ground.

  “Don’t, Mom.”

  The mother goes quiet again.

  “I went with Tyler once to their clubhouse,” Jessica says meekly. And then the tears start to spill. Something finally breaks free in the mother and she gets up from the chair and goes to stand beside her daughter, holding her head to her apron. They cling to each other like a couple of Titanic steerage passengers.

  But Malone doesn’t seem to notice. She’s busy getting her iPad out to take notes and doesn’t look up when she asks, “Where was that, Jessica? Do you have an address? Do you think you’d recognize any of the people there if I were to show you a few pictures?”

  Shit, Malone, I think. You’re just not getting this. I don’t want to ask, but someone has to.

  “What happened at the clubhouse, Jessica?” For once, I try not to sound like the sarcastic bitch I am.

  “Tyler was not a nice boy,” the mother says again. And then she’s crying as well. The two of them hold each other at the kitchen table, sobbing. The yellow dishtowel on the floor is too frayed to dry up that many tears.

  “Is there anyone this kid didn’t screw over?” Malone says. “I didn’t even know him, and I’d like to break his neck myself.”

  “I wouldn’t say that too loud, Malone. Could prove intent.”

  “Yeah,” she says, “But I didn’t learn that he’d brought a sixteen-year-old girl to the Daybreak Boys to be gang-raped until after he was dead. It must have been some sort of initiation. But I can’t do anything if she refuses to go on the record.”

  “Uh-huh.” I’d heard about the initiation thing in some of the other gangs. But my father said it wasn’t done in the MCs.

  “We need to talk to Mr. Mendler. What happened to his daughter would make any father go ballistic,” Malone says. I could point out that judging by the bruises on Mrs. Mendler, going ballistic is probably something Mr. Mendler is already in the habit of doing.

  “Hmm,” I say instead, downing a drink that came with a cherry on a plastic sword and motioning the waitress for two more. Malone has decided to let me near a bar again after all. But it’s her kind of place, one of those low-tabled martini bars where young, motivated professionals hang out, hoping to meet more of their species. Malone’s paying, or I wouldn’t have set foot in a place that charges eight bucks a drink. Despite being from a different social gene pool than the usual patron, I still fit in. Hot women are the best kind of currency. They are accepted in more places than American Express.

  “You’ve been pretty quiet since we left the Mendlers’ house,” she says, sipping on her chocolatini. Honestly, there’s chocolate and there’s booze, and no one in their right mind should have them together.

  “You ever think maybe the father would be justified?” I say, looking around for the waitress. I catch her eye and she jumps, starts hurrying the guy mixing drinks at the bar. “Maybe the kid did deserve it, like the principal said.”

  “He didn’t actually say that. Besides, no one deserves to die at seventeen,” Malone says, but not with great conviction.

  “Even a no-account punk who takes his girlfriend along to be a gang’s plastic toy for the evening?”

  “We’ll have to check out Mendler’s alibi,” she says, ignoring my question, as she tucks her iPad in her purse. “See if he was working. I’ll call Hawk Security in the morning. If the girl was too freaked out to report it to the police, her dad might have not been able to let it go.”

  The waitress brings over two more drinks. I down one and hand the empty glass back. I tell her to keep them coming.

  “My dad didn’t,” I say, surprising both Malone and myself.

  “Your dad?”

  “Yeah, when I was in university.”

  “You were in university?”

  “You’re beginning to sound like a goddamn parrot, Malone. Yes, I was at university,” I say. “For a while.”

  “What happened?” Malone asks.

  “It’s a long story,” I say, biting the cherry off the sword of my current drink. It feels sharp on my tongue. “But basically I woke up in the hospital with multiple contusions and ripped up downstairs. I also had a concussion so bad I couldn’t lay down new memories for three weeks.”

  “Oh my God, Candace. Did they ever find out who did it?”

  “I couldn’t remember anything. I was probably unconscious for the whole thing. That’s the only way they could have got to me. And it was ‘they’; the cops did a rape kit. For all the good that fucking did.” The waitress brings another drink and I give her another empty glass.

  “Didn’t they have any leads? Did nobody see anything?”

  “I was walking home from a party. I didn’t drink as much in those days and I needed the air. I was young, you know? Plus, the party was full of smokers. Which I hate. If you’re going to kill yourself, do it with something that doesn’t make your mouth taste like the inside of a Turkish prison.”

  “And they assaulted you,” she says. “On the way home.”

  “I guess so. My dad and my uncle Rod did their own research.” I pause to allow Malone to consider the kind of research two men for whom kneecap is a verb might have conducted. “But no one seemed to know anything. Could have been a gang, like the girl. Could have been frat boys. Whoever it was, no one was talking, despite my dad’s persuasion. I finally called him off before he broke the legs of half the freshman class.”

  “What happened after that?”

  “Uncle Rod’s girlfriend, Charlotte, took care of me after I got out of the hospital. But since it was three weeks before I could even remember what I had for breakfast that day, I wasn’t exactly able to keep up with my studies. I lost the year. Never went back.”

  “And the police never found them.” She says it as a statement rather than a question. Malone knows how hard it is for the police to find people sometimes.

  “I wasn’t exactly co-operative. I was just a kid.” I remember the questions, which bore into every detail of my life. They’d had a heyday when they realized whose daughter they were dealing with. More interested in that than the fact that some group of psychos had left bite marks on my nipples. “I’m not a big fan of cops,” I say.

  This has a bit of sting to it, and Malone takes a considerable sip of her own drink.

  “You should let me look into it,” she suggests quietly.

  “Leave it, Malone.”

  “There could have been something they missed. I could make a few calls. I could —”

  “Leave it,” I say more strongly before I down the last of my drink. “I don’t need saving, Malone. I’m happy with my life. I’m not some sad sack on a talk show. Shit like this doesn’t define me.”

  “What d
oes?” she asks.

  “I do.”

  I leave the bar, but remember the name of another. The night is still young, even if I’m not. I haven’t had the luxury of being young in a long, long time.

  CHAPTER 11

  “HI, MARCUS.”

  It’s late by the time I make it to The Goon. I had one other stop to make before here. A well-muscled familiar figure sits down next to me as Linda announces last call.

  “Hi, Candace,” Marcus says. He smells of Old Spice and pipe tobacco. A combination that I enjoy, despite how much I hate smokers. His dark skin seems to shine in the beige and grey drabness of The Goon.

  “Whatcha in town for?” I ask. More like who’s he in town for.

  “I’m looking for a young lady who came home from a Mexican all-inclusive with cocaine stuffed in the applicators of her tampons,” Marcus says. “She had four jumbo packs in her suitcase.” He motions to Lovely Linda for two whiskeys. She serves mine on ice and his neat. “Her bail bondsman got a little premenstrual himself when she skipped out on him.”

  “Do you think you’ll find her?”

  “I’m not the kind of man to leave a lady behind.” His dark-brown eyes are heavy lidded, with long lashes like a girl. Fuck-me eyes, like young Elvis, before the drugs swelled up his face.

  “No,” I say, smiling. “You’re not.”

  The Goon is almost empty now. Linda has stayed open mostly for me. She works behind the bar, replacing glasses, going to each draft spigot and turning the key on the tap lock. When she thinks no one’s looking she adds a bit of water to the cheaper liquors to make them last longer. The usual end-of-night stuff. At four o’clock this morning, long after she’s gone, a cleaning service run by Dutch immigrants will clean the piss off the walls in the men’s restroom and empty those disgusting paper bags in the women’s cubicles. Then they’ll vacuum the dirt and greasy onion-ring crumbs off the carpet and bring in a steam cleaner if someone puked before making it to the can. They are dive-bar cleaning fairies, working in the dead of night to make The Goon presentable for the first customers who bang on the door at ten in the morning. No matter how many urinal pucks and air fresheners they use, the place will still smell like stale beer and the sweat of the disenfranchised.

  “What are you up to these days, Candace?”

  I take a sip of the whiskey, rolling it around in my mouth first, the amber bite of it reassuring my mouth, making it looser.

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  But I do tell him. Marcus Knight is not quite a civilian or a criminal, making him an excellent confidant. He also knows how to keep things to himself. I don’t think anyone knows that he’s my bro with benefits.

  I tell him about Tyler Brent and the blonde who wanted me to take him out. I tell him about Malone and her proposition and the Daybreak Boys. I tell him about the cuckolded cop, and my mother’s connections, and how one of them might have put my dad in the harbour five years ago. I even tell him about Uncle Rod and how he reacted when I told him Malone knew who was behind my father’s death.

  “Come on, Candace,” he says, his strong but amazingly gentle hand wrapped around the whiskey glass. “Rod’s a straight-up guy. He’s been around since you were born. He even went after those bastards after the trouble you had at college.” Yes, he knows about that, too. He and Malone are the only ones I ever told outside of my dysfunctional little non-family of Rod, Charlotte, and my dad. Like I said, he’s a guy I can talk to.

  “You never know,” I say.

  “You don’t trust him?” he asks, rubbing one of those remarkable hands along the back of his neck.

  “I don’t trust anyone,” I say, finishing off the whiskey.

  “Even me?” He puts his hand on the small of my back. I can feel the heat of it as he slips it up inside my leather jacket.

  “Even you, Marcus.”

  I pull away from the warmth of that hand and step off the bar stool, giving him a lingering kiss on the cheek before I walk away. Then I step into the cool night.

  There are times a woman needs to be with someone, and there are times when she needs to be alone.

  Trust me.

  The street is misty and deserted when the heavy oak door of The Goon closes behind me. A cold rain has started up. I’m not a fan of spring. It’s just a soggy, slightly warmer version of winter in the city, shivery and wet until one day it’s hot as hell and that’s summer. I zip up my leather jacket and pull my hoodie up over my hair. Even a few drops on my mop of hair makes the whole thing explode like an airbag.

  The E-Zee Market is closed. The neon sign is still on, making buzzing noises like a mosquito getting fried by one of those electric zappers. By this time on a weekday, Majd is sleeping in his small apartment attached to the back room. I’ve been in there, once. He showed me pictures of his family in happier times. His brothers smiling for the camera, along with his dad in front of some cartoonish backdrop that must have been the Syrian version of Disneyland. His mother was smiling, too, not knowing that three-quarters of her family would be gone in just a few short years. It made you want to walk into the photo and warn them. Tell them to turn in their all-day ride passes for a one-way ticket out of the country that would soon turn on them like a rabid dog.

  I cross the street, the hand in my pocket hiding the sharp ends of my keys, sticking out between the knuckles. When I get to the door beside the E-Zee Market that leads to the stairwell to my apartment, I pull them out and slip the door key in the lock.

  That’s when I hear the car. Not a completely outrageous occurrence at this time of night. But when I hear the door open behind me, I get ready. Put the cold metal of the keys back in my fist.

  “Candace Starr?” a voice calls out.

  I turn around. A large man, even by my standards, is holding the door of a Lincoln Continental open for a grey-haired gentleman who now stands on the sidewalk. He is dressed impeccably but has one wonky eye that makes it hard to know where he’s looking. I’m not sure if he’s addressing me or the Popsicle Pete in the E-Zee Market window to my left. I decide it’s me.

  “Who wants to know?” I ask, keeping my fist with the keys hidden behind my back.

  “Please,” says the gentleman. He’s not totally grey. Closer up I can see he’s actually what they call salt and pepper, a hair colour that looks good on men of any age. He’s wearing a three-quarter-length camel coat that stands out in the dark street like a beige-wool beacon. The rain is making dark splotches on his shoulders. “We only wish to talk,” he says, the one eye still roving wildly.

  The big man at the car door places a hand inside his own coat, a less expensive version of his employer’s in a much darker colour. He doesn’t pull anything out, though. Just wants me to know he has more than his considerable bulk backing him up.

  “I’m not much of a talker,” I say.

  The old man smiles. “Then perhaps you would like to listen.” He steps away from the car door and gestures with an open arm, like he’s a footman guiding me into a pumpkin coach on its way to the ball. I realize I don’t have much choice. It’s either get inside or deal with the ugly stepsister holding the door. I walk over, get into the black sedan, and slide along the leather seat in the back to the far side. The gentleman in the camel coat gets in beside me, and the big guy closes the door. Then he plants his burly carcass next to the driver. The car pulls away from the curb. As we drive off, I can see Marcus through the window of The Goon, still seated at the bar.

  The old guy leans forward and whispers something to the driver, who nods and makes a left onto one of the streets that lead to the highway out of town.

  “So, Candace Starr,” he says, turning to face me in the back seat, though his eye is turned elsewhere. “We have heard a great deal about you.”

  “All of it’s true,” I say, fingering the keys in my pocket. I haven’t got my gun. I’ve been hiding it under the extra lotto tickets in a drawer behind the cash at the E-Zee Market ever since Malone caught me with
it. I’ve tried to get Majd to keep a gun behind the cash anyway. He’s been robbed before. But he said he had enough of lethal weapons back in Syria.

  The old man smiles. “I don’t doubt that it is.” I’m sure he doesn’t; that’s why he brought Magilla Gorilla with him.

  “So,” I say. “You know my name. What’s yours?”

  “My name is not important, Miss Starr,” he says. “Not for this conversation.” I’m concerned about what he means by conversation. Will this just be a short convo with a large lead pipe or a deeper version of pillow talk that ends with me sleeping with the fishes?

  “I’m listening,” I say, staring out the rain-streaked window. It blurs the streetlights of the highway as we pull onto the ramp.

  “I understand you have been asking questions about a certain family,” he says. “And that family does not take kindly to being discussed.”

  The Scarpellos. Shit. I decide to see if my lineage will buy me any sway.

  “My mother was a Scarpello,” I say.

  “Yes, you take after her,” he says. “Although not quite as …”

  “Batshit crazy?” I suggest.

  His roaming eye goes still for a moment. “I was going to say ‘dark,’ Miss Starr,” he says. My mother’s hair was jet black compared to my honey brown. “But since you mention it, Angela was a concern. A somewhat erratic woman. Una pazza.” A crazy woman. I’d learned that word from the Italian guys who used to hang out at the pool hall. Dad and Uncle Rod liked to shoot a few games together back in the day. They’d let me sit on a stool as a kid and move the marker along the scoreboard as they sunk the coloured balls. I used to love twisting the end of a pool cue into those little square, indented pieces of chalk. It made a squeaky sound, like a toy. Maybe the old guy’s wandering eyeball is the result of having a pool cue stuck in it. I saw my fair share of fights in the pool hall. When one broke out, my father would move me from the stool and put me up on the counter of the waitresses’ station. I was given a hot pot of coffee to hold at the ready, with instructions to pour it on any brawler who got too close.