The Starr Sting Scale

by C. S. O'Cinneide

  “I’ll be there,” says Malone, smiling. She watches the two vice cops walk away until they’re out of sight. Or perhaps she just watches Danny. That boy has an ass to be reckoned with.

  “Yes, Danny. No, Danny,” I mimic. “Honestly, Malone, you need to grow a pair.”

  Her eyes throw sparks again, but this time they don’t make me smile. “Why do people always say that? Like you have to be a man to be assertive.”

  “It’s just an expression, Malone.”

  “Well, it’s a stupid one.”

  “Not as stupid as you acted around Danny.”

  “Fuck off, Candace.”

  “Not many people tell me to fuck off and get away with it,” I remind her, stepping over and looking down to emphasize the difference in our heights. But as usual, she doesn’t back off.

  “Where were you on Thursday night, early Friday morning, Candace?” she asks tightly.

  “At a bar, where else?”

  “What bar?” she says.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Malone,” I say, standing down.

  “I’ll need the name of that bar, Candace. And the names of people who can vouch for you being there.” She’s dead serious. We are no longer under a blanket with our flashlights.

  I shake my head. “I don’t need this bullshit.”

  I go to the door to walk out, but you also need the code to exit.

  “Open the door, Malone,” I say. She just stands there.

  “You’ve got to understand, Candace. It’s my job.”

  “We’ve all got a job to do. Now open the goddamn door.”

  “I have to take you down to the station, get you to make a statement.”

  “You’re arresting me?”

  “No, of course not,” she says, looking sheepish, her earlier tough-cop persona dropped. “Listen, we just need to get a statement so I can clear you. You were one of the last ones to see Lachlan alive. And with your history, I just want to make sure nobody comes bothering you about this.” She thinks she’s protecting me.

  I bang my fist on the door then turn around and put out my wrists to her.

  “Oh, come on, Candace.”

  “If you are going to do a job, Malone, you might as well do it right.”

  Malone leaves me in an interrogation room for someone else to come and take my statement. She needs to go down to the beach where the foot washed up, and she doesn’t want me contaminating the scene. She brings me a coffee, and I pour some of my flask into the cup after she leaves.

  I wait about fifteen minutes, and then Saunders walks in. He sits down at the table with his stupid-ass tattered notebook and a bottle of water. Trying to improve his shitty health by drinking eight glasses a day, I suppose. Doesn’t he know that those bastards are ruining the environment with their plastic-encased tap water?

  “We meet again, Candy.” Oh man, if we weren’t in a cop shop, I’d deck him. “I understand you’ve been very co-operative with Detective Malone’s investigation,” he says with a smirk. “I hadn’t pegged you for an informant.”

  “I’m not a fucking informant,” I say. I haven’t informed on anyone. I’m starting to think I might deck him regardless.

  “Whatever you say.” He leans across the table. “You know, the tech crew have been going over those security tapes you gave us.”

  “Really,” I say, sitting back and yawning. But it does concern me a little.

  “How long do you think it’ll take them to figure out they’re a load of horseshit?” he says with a smile.

  “I don’t know, Saunders. How long did it take for your old lady to figure out you were?” The smile disappears. “Listen, you going to ask me where I was on Thursday night or what?”

  He sits back in his chair and starts flipping through the pages of the notebook.

  “You know I don’t buy this crap from Malone that you’re doing all this out of the kindness of your heart.”

  “You don’t think I have a heart, Saunders? Come on, I wear it on my sleeve.”

  “You’re wearing my patience, is what you’re wearing,” he says, looking up. “What’s in it for you, Candace? Has she got something on you? Promised she’d go easy if you help her out? Because if you are involved in Tyler Brent’s death, I don’t care what she says, I’m coming down on you. Hard.”

  “Hanging kids from zip lines isn’t my style.”

  “You’ll use any style if it gets the job done.” He puts his pen and notebook down. He must have been caught in the rain. The fine wisps of hair he has left are plastered to his head. They look like dark pinworms stuck to his scalp.

  “I’m on to you, Candy. You may have that little Asian girl snowed, but you can’t fool me. You wriggled out of twenty-five to life last time. You won’t do it again. I’m taking you down. Just like I would have taken your lowlife father down if he hadn’t done us all a favour by getting himself killed.”

  I stand up from my seat and reach across the table. Saunders jumps back in his chair, almost falling over. But I’m only reaching for the filthy notebook. I write down the name of a bar and the name of a man and throw it across the table at him.

  “Here’s all you need to know, you bloated prick. Now do me a favour and stay the hell out of my way.” I throw open the door to the interview room, and a dozen cop heads turn around when it bangs against the wall.

  CHAPTER 18

  WHEN RORY GETS HOME TO HIS SQUAT, I’m holding Bubba the turtle upside down above his tank.

  “What the hell, Candace?” he says, dropping the dolly he uses to cart around his huge battery for recharging. That must be a bugger to lug up the stairs.

  “What did you find out about those kids, Rory?” Bubba squirms in my hand. I’ll need a bucket of hand sanitizer after this.

  “Come on, Candace, he’s still traumatized from that thing with the filter. Put him down.”

  I pinch one of the wet leathery legs. Bubba squirms more insistently. The messed-up turtle doesn’t even have the sense to retreat to his shell. “No, we’re going to talk about it now. You’ve had days to find out something. Were they prospects for the Daybreak Boys or what?”

  “Not prospects,” he says, still too nervous about his turtle to sit down. “Just ran some chemical on the street for them.”

  “And?” I say, knowing by his shifty eyes there’s more.

  “They might have gotten into some trouble at one of the safe houses.” Now we’re getting somewhere.

  “Where’s the safe house?” I ask, knowing I have leverage with the turtle dangling.

  “They move them around. They have a few hotel rooms around the city. They rotate them with their bill-counting machines and the naked girls that measure and bag the product.”

  “What sort of trouble?”

  “You know, stupid shit, like taking selfies with the girls and playing the elevator game in the hotel.”

  “What the hell is the elevator game?”

  “You push a bunch of buttons in a special sequence but don’t get off when you come to them. Supposed to send you into another dimension.”

  “That is the stupidest fucking thing I have ever heard.”

  “There was a girl who did it and no one heard from her again,” says Rory.

  “You better tell me what else they did, or no one’s going to be hearing from Bubba again.”

  “That’s it, Candace.”

  “They’d have to do more than that to get themselves killed, Rory, and you know it.”

  “I don’t know, Candace,” he says, running his hand through his greasy hair. “If anyone finds out I told someone about it …”

  I reach out with the other hand and grab Bubba by the tail. “How fast you think this turtle’s tail will snap off if I hold him upside down by it? I hear they can’t swim without those things; it’s like a rudder.”

  “No, don’t!” he shouts. His voice echoes off the peeling walls of the squat. He really is attached to his turtle. “Okay, okay, word is they lifted some stuff. Some smack and
some cash.”

  “How much cash?” I roll the little tail back and forth in my fingers and the turtle’s eyes start to bug out on each side of his head. I’d never really hurt Bubba, but I got to make this look good.

  “Fifty K, all right. Now please put my turtle down, Candace.”

  “That’s chicken feed to the Daybreak Boys.” I hear they sometimes count a million a week on those machines. The money isn’t just from the drugs, of course, but from all the pies the gang has their dirty fingers in. The Daybreak Boys might have put Tyler and Lachlan in the hospital for stealing that amount from them then recovered the cash and the drugs. But the monetary expense and the attention brought on by taking a hit out on two high-school kids shouldn’t have been worth it to the club, just like Selena had said. The Daybreak Boys would know Tyler and Lachlan would never rat to the cops if they roughed them up. The kids would only end up implicating themselves.

  “Maybe they were trying to send a message,” he says, wiping a bead of sweat from his forehead. “Now please, Candace, that’s all I know.”

  I drop the turtle into the tank. He makes a loud plop as he hits the water.

  “It better be,” I say, making my way out the open door. “Or next time, you’ll be cleaning Bubba up with a pool skimmer.”

  I run through the E-Zee Market on the way to my apartment. Majd observes me but says nothing. I guess Charlotte did okay running the store. I go upstairs and grab the douche bag from the bathroom and cut open the seam I glued shut. My ID is all there, along with a chunk of cash for a rainy day. I have a feeling the weather may change.

  “You okay, Miss Candace?” Majd asks when I come down the stairs in a hurry.

  “You didn’t see me,” I say, then I jingle out the door.

  When I arrive at Uncle Rod’s place, he’s just getting out of the shower. A faded tan towel is wrapped around his waist. He’s wearing an old-style shower cap that makes him look like a cooked bag of Jiffy Pop popcorn.

  “I need you to stash a few things for a while.”

  He shakes his head. “I knew no good would come of this.”

  I drop the bag of ID and cash on the coffee table. “Come on, Rod. Just for a few days. If you can hold on to a gun for a pumpkin terrorist, you can hide some of my shit.”

  “My concern is not with what I’m hiding, but what I’m hiding it for, girlie.”

  “There’ve been some developments,” I say. Now I even sound like Malone.

  “And what might those be?”

  “That Lachlan kid has taken a permanent swim in the harbour. And it looks like these boys were on the wrong side of the Daybreak Boys.”

  “Jesus, Candace. You should have been an old dog for the hard road there, known what could happen. Didn’t you see this coming?”

  “Maybe.”

  “For God’s sake, girl. Let me get my kit on and we can talk about this.”

  “Will you hide the stuff for me or not?”

  “Of course I’ll hide it for you. What’s got your knickers in such a twist? Besides these boys playing with your dad’s old customers.”

  “I’ve got to go to a hockey game,” I say as I fly through the door and down the street. Like I said before, I’m good at remembering things.

  Rod stands on the stoop in his towel and shower cap.

  “The door’s not an arsehole, Candace. It doesn’t shut itself,” he shouts after me.

  Now that one I don’t think he made up.

  The Lakeshore Arena is colder than the other night at the zip line shack. I sit down on a splintered bench in the viewing area and try not to think about the icy chill seeping through my jeans to my ass. Two women next to me are cheering and raising a big red foam fist with the pointer finger in the air, even though it’s just a practice. If this were a men’s hockey game, Uncle Rod would have called them puck bunnies, hockey’s version of groupies. They have the same enthusiasm for the players on and off the ice as girls do for musicians, but wear fewer tube tops, on account of the cold.

  About a dozen women fly back and forth on the ice, practising passes, trying their slap shots on the goalie. The team name is written on their jerseys in neon pink: Chicks with Sticks. Malone is number twelve. It takes me a minute to pick her out under the helmet and bulky equipment. She looks so much taller on the skates. Selena is playing net, which is ridiculous given her size. She’s like a dwarf star trying to guard a netted black hole. I could do better, I think. You don’t need to be able to skate, I figure, and I can cripple anyone who gets too near with my goalie stick. But if I remember correctly, that might be against the rules.

  “Would you like some hot cocoa?” the girl beside me asks, holding out a steaming thermos. I pull out my own flask and tip it to my lips, indicating to her that I brought my own beverage. A stray hockey puck flies up from the ice and hits the seat next to me, splintering it some more. I throw it back on the ice and it hits the goal post, knocking it off its moorings. The puck bunnies get up and move to another seat after that. This is also when Malone notices me. She skates up to the boards and takes off one of her hockey gloves to unfasten the clasp on her helmet. I walk down from the bench and meet her there.

  “What are you doing here?” she says.

  “Looking for you.”

  “Why?” She pulls off the helmet and shakes her hair out.

  “You left me with that bastard Saunders,” I say.

  “Shit, Candace. I hadn’t meant for that to happen. I asked Bonnie Berry to take your statement.”

  “Bonnie Berry? Is that her real name?”

  “According to her, it is.”

  “He fucking worked me over in the interview room.” I make it sound worse than it was. I want her to feel guilty.

  “Shit,” she says again, casting her green eyes down at the helmet in her hand. I don’t need to look at the dot matrix scoreboard in the rafters to know I’ve gained a point in the blame game.

  Selena skates over, leaving the goal unattended. The huge pads on her legs practically come up to her chest.

  “Is there a problem here?”

  “No,” Malone and I say together.

  The buzzer sounds and the rest of the players start to skate off the ice. Selena eyes me suspiciously. Like I might reach across the board divider and do some damage. As if I could when they’re wearing all that goddamn equipment. It would be like trying to put a dent in the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.

  “You coming for a beer, Chien-Shiung?” Selena asks tightly.

  Malone looks up at me. Even with her skates on, I’m still taller than her.

  “Not tonight. I’ll catch up with you next time.”

  We all stand there awkwardly for a while. Then Selena leans in to her friend and says, “I hope you know what you’re doing,” and skates away.

  “Want to go for a drink?”

  “I’m still pissed at you, Malone.”

  “Want to come for a drink anyway?” she says, brushing a strand of sweaty hair out of her eyes.

  I let her sweat some more before I answer.

  “Okay, but this time I pick the place.”

  We’re in a back booth at the Albion, a joint halfway between the Vodka Bar and the dives where I usually hang out. That way both Malone and I won’t feel out of place. Or perhaps we both will, but at least that makes us even. That’s the beauty of compromise; you each get to have the pleasure of the other person not getting what they want. It’s Sunday, so the real action happened here last night when the college kids came for the “buck-a-draft” beer. The floorboards reek of all the dollars they spilled, and there’s a hole in the wall that the busboy is trying to repair with Polyfilla in between clearing tables.

  “What are these?” Malone says. “They taste like mocha smoothies.” She sucks hard on the straw to vacuum up the last of the frothy caramel-coloured liquid in the bottom. It’s her second. She had wanted to order a vodka cooler, the same kind Shannon the body shot girl had left at my place, but I had convinced her to try something dif
ferent.

  “They’re called Paralyzers,” I tell her, sipping on my Jack Daniel’s with ice. “Made with milk and cola.” Truthfully, the milk and cola make up only half of the drink. The other half is pure liquor. But I don’t tell Malone that. She’s having too much fun.

  We’re playing the drunk girls’ version of Would You Rather.

  “Okay,” she says. “That guy over there with the bike shorts that leave nothing to the imagination or the bartender with the harelip?”

  I look over at the two men. The bartender’s harelip is a bit of a turn on, but the guy in the bike shorts seems to be packing a considerable unit. “The biker boy,” I say.

  “Eww,” says Malone and motions the waiter for another drink.

  “Okay, my turn,” I say. “The college boy who looks like he’d wet his pants if you talked to him or the three-piece suit with the hula-girl tie and cocaine on his upper lip?”

  “Hmm,” Malone says. “Is there a third choice?”

  “No, Malone. There isn’t.”

  She squints her eyes, like she’s concentrating real hard and it’s not easy.

  “The hula-girl tie.”

  “Are you kidding me? Isn’t he a felon in your eyes?”

  “I don’t know,” she says, burping with no apparent shame. “He’s cute in a rumpled bed sort of way.” Her third Paralyzer hasn’t come yet, so she reaches over, grabs my drink, and takes a long sip. I motion the waiter to bring me another as well. Malone is paying again.

  “So, tell me, Candace, how did you get into, you know, your line of business?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Malone.”

  “Oh c’mon, Candace, we’re off the record here.”

  “How do I know you’re not wearing a wire?”

  She reaches down and undoes a few buttons on her shirt, not without difficulty. Then she pulls the lapels out and exposes a red lacy bra. “See,” she says, smiling. “No wire.” The waiter places her Paralyzer in front of her and hands me my Jack. He looks down at the lacy bra and smirks.

  “Happens to them every time,” he says, then walks away. Malone does up the buttons again.