The Starr Sting Scale Read online

  Also by C.S. O’Cinneide

  Petra’s Ghost

  The Candace Starr Series

  The Starr Sting Scale

  Copyright © C.S. O’Cinneide, 2020

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purpose of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

  All characters in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Publisher: Scott Fraser | Acquiring editor: Scott Fraser | Editor: Dominic Farrell

  Cover designer: Laura Boyle

  Cover illustration: Sanya Anwar

  Printer: Webcom, a division of Marquis Book Printing Inc.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: The Starr sting scale / C.S. O’Cinneide.

  Names: O’Cinneide, C. S., 1965- author.

  Description: Series statement: The Candace Starr series.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190130741 | Canadiana (ebook) 2019013075X | ISBN 9781459744844 (softcover) | ISBN 9781459744851 (PDF) | ISBN 9781459744868 (EPUB)

  Classification: LCC PS8629.C56 S73 2019 | DDC C813/.6—dc23

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Ontario, through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and Ontario Creates, and the Government of Canada.

  Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites or their content unless they are owned by the publisher.

  Printed and bound in Canada.

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  For my daughters, strong female protagonists every one of them.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

  The Starr sting pain scale, developed by Christopher Starr, rates the overall pain of stings on a four-point scale. One is the lowest rating. Four is the highest. Everything in between still hurts.

  CHAPTER 1

  “I’M NOT SURE THAT I CAN HELP YOU.”

  “On the contrary. I’m quite certain that you can.”

  The well-kept blonde in her fifties bats her considerable lashes, quite a feat given the amount of Botox injected in her face. She sits opposite me, perched on a high bar stool at the back of the Algonquin, a dive we affectionately refer to as The Goon. Affection is perhaps too strong a word when talking about a dark, dank, seventies-wood-panelled hole that smells like stale beer and jism — the former odour compliments of the full-time barmaid, Lovely Linda, and the latter a result of the brisk part-time business she transacts in the men’s toilet on request. I’m Candace Starr, a woman who gets paid for a different kind of service. I still fit in here. But the blonde is definitely out of place.

  “A friend of mine sent me,” she says, flicking a strand of straightened hair off her polished forehead. “She told me you assist in these matters. That you helped her with a rather difficult husband.”

  Difficult husbands are a specialty of mine. Rarely in my line of work do you run into a husband who isn’t difficult in some way. They cheat, they lie, and occasionally they smack their women around. It’s like the metal in a wedding ring creates a strange magnetic force within a guy’s body that sets off his asshole switch. Maybe wives should insist on a wooden band.

  “I’m retired,” I tell her.

  “You look a bit young for that.”

  “I’m older than you’d think.” I’ve managed to keep my looks over the years despite my lifestyle. It’s the Italian blood from my mother’s side. That olive skin covers up a lot of hard living. The woman abandoned me on a median strip when I was three, but at least she left me with a good complexion and a figure that holds up. Everyone thinks I’m in my early twenties, but I’ve been on the wrong side of thirty for a few years now. I’ve got legs that go all the way up to my armpits — at an age when most women are starting to gather ass up from around their ankles.

  “I can make it worth your while,” she says, batting her eyes again. The Coach bag she’s clutching costs more than a month’s rent. I bet she can make it worth my while and then some. I’m impressed that she had the balls to come here. To track me down. Most society mavens like her would find a go-between to do this sort of dirty work. A gardener with connections, a boy toy with designs. This woman has made the effort herself to make sure the job gets done. I respect that.

  “Stand up.”

  “I beg your pardon?” She blinks repeatedly. The smooth paralysis of her face doesn’t allow for any other facial movement that denotes surprise. Or any other emotion.

  “I said stand up.”

  She tentatively gets to her feet. I drop down from my own bar stool and come up behind her. She’s tall in her Steve Madden boots, but I’m taller. At six foot three, there aren’t many people I don’t look down on. I pull back my curly mess of long, honey-brown hair and tie it up with a rubber band from my wrist. The blonde’s hair is cut short in the back, revealing a shapely neck. I could snap it if I wanted to. I’ve done it before. Instead I reach around and dart my right hand inside her cool silk blouse. She gasps, but I’m in and out in a flash. After all, this isn’t a cheap excuse to cop a feel. This is business.

  “You can sit down now,” I say, returning to my own seat. “Just had to make sure you weren’t wearing a wire.” I take a pull off the draft she bought me, my first drink of the day. “Now, tell me about the job. I’m not saying that I’ll do it. I’m just letting you tell me about it.”

  She looks like she’d like to raise one of her finely shaped eyebrows at me but manages only to achieve a slight twitch in the corner of her right temple. I wonder if she gets those brows waxed or threaded, making a mental note to ask her later, before I lift her wallet. I’m not much into the girlie stuff, but even a woman like me needs to landscape. When the blonde goes to sit on the bar stool again, her high-heeled boots peel away from the sticky linoleum floor, making a sound like someone pulling a band-aid off fast.

  “The job, as you call it, is simple,” she says. “I want you to get rid of this young man.” She pulls out from her purse one of those strips of four photos you get from a booth. Shit, does anyone use those anymore in the era of selfies? A tousle-haired youth grins out from each rectangular square. He sits next to a pretty, plump teenage girl with doe eyes and big tits.

  “He’s kinda young for you,” I say. I’ve probably insulted her, but it’s the truth. I know these middle-
aged tantric-yoga girls can keep themselves up fairly well, but come on, she could be that kid’s mother. He didn’t even look old enough to be a difficult husband.

  “Age is deceiving,” she says. And I suppose it is after your third butt tuck. “But this person is not an associate of mine. Rather, he is an associate of my daughter.”

  I inspect the strip of photos again to get a better look at the teenage girl. The big hazel eyes, the slope of the neck. Definitely related.

  “You want me to off your daughter’s boyfriend?” I ask, incredulous. Taking out a target who doesn’t even shave on a daily basis is pretty heartless, even for me.

  “Boyfriend is not the right word for him,” she says, sipping on the Diet Coke that Lovely Linda delivered on her way to the men’s restroom with a friend. “He is a parasite. A barnacle affixed to the hull of society with no purpose or design. He smokes. He sells drugs. He sits in his basement and plays video games all day, and he fucks my daughter.” She adjusts her ass a bit in the chair, as if remembering her own days of being fucked in a boyfriend’s basement. “He’s got to go.”

  “Maybe it’s a phase,” I say. “These things blow over.”

  “It’s been two years,” she says. “Nothing is blowing over except my daughter’s chances of being accepted into a decent university.”

  “But c’mon, a kid?”

  “That kid gave her a disease,” she almost shouts, looking around the bar before she collects herself again. “He can’t keep it in his pants. He can’t keep down a job. He can’t even manage to graduate high school. He is so lazy that he has to set an alarm to get up and binge drink, and his conversational skills consist of grunting in response to any inquiry while he grabs at his genitals.” She takes a deep breath and continues. “He has no future and no prospects, and he clings to my daughter like a lemur on a high branch. I want him out of the picture.”

  I look hard at this flushed, badass woman, and then I look at the boy in the picture. He smiles back at me with his goofy photo-booth face. I can see a vape kit tucked into the front pocket of his jean jacket, a zit about to erupt on his chin. He has his whole life ahead of him. A string of doe-eyed girls in his future. Years of parties to crash, millions of brain cells to damage, along with half the people around him, as he lives out his days in a rented room over a run-down convenience store, falling into a sour-smelling bed drunk each night, only getting up to go to the bar, or to meet with disgruntled women of a certain age who need difficult men disposed of. Like my old man — or like me for that matter. I look back at the woman, who begs me with the same wide hazel eyes as her daughter.

  “Ten thousand,” I say, “delivered like I tell you.” So much for retirement. “And you have to do exactly what I say.” I finish off the beer in one go and motion Lovely Linda across the bar for another. She’s back from the men’s restroom.

  “I’ll arrange for it today.” The mother opposite me blinks one last time from her glacial face, and the deal is sealed.

  CHAPTER 2

  “MOVE IT ALONG, BOYS.”

  The two punks are hunched over the magazine section practically feeling up the skin mags. I know them from the neighbourhood, a couple of meth heads. I’m watching the store for Majd, the owner. He gives me a break on the rent for covering the cash from time to time. There are benefits in living above an E-Zee Market. Although this is probably the only one.

  “Free country,” one of the punks retorts. They stay their ground. The other kid grabs a Hustler and slips it under his jacket. Jesus, what’s the matter with these assholes? Haven’t they ever heard of the internet? They got stuff on the deep web that’d make a hard-core porn star pee her pants.

  “Make me,” the little shit with the Hustler says. Then I remember. It was his girlfriend I saw in here a week ago, with her sweet but strung-out face all blown up. He’d beaten the crap out of her for reasons she couldn’t remember but decided somehow she deserved. I’m going to enjoy this.

  “I said to move it along.” I get up from the stool I’ve been sitting on behind the counter, not happy to have been disturbed. I deliver my unhappiness to the kid by slamming him into the Slurpee machine while I twist his right arm behind his back in a way nature never intended.

  “Holy shit, Candace, I was only fucking around.” The punk whines my name with a nasal pitch. I think I may have broken his nose. If he got blood on the machine, I swear I’m going make him clean it up.

  “Yeah, well, I think you’ll realize that fucking around with me isn’t highly recommended.” I give the punk the bum’s rush out the front door, where his meth-head buddy has already disappeared in a hurry. When his body hits the pavement, it sounds like a wet slap.

  I close the door and return to my stool, picking up today’s paper where Majd left it behind the counter. Another thing you can get off the internet, but I like the greasy feel of newsprint in my hands. Folding over the front page, I find a headline that gives me pause. I take a sip of the Jack Daniel’s I’ve been nursing behind the cash. I’m an alcoholic but not a sloppy one. I can hold my liquor even though it’s probably killing me. I’m still reading the article when the little bell jingles on the front door and a man I know but don’t want to see walks in and approaches the counter.

  “Long time no see, Candy.”

  The cop wears a rough overcoat on top of a cheap suit. He’s a detective, so he doesn’t have to dress in the usual getup. The sparse hair on his balding noggin has the consistency of dryer lint, and his face has that large-pored, flared-nostril look of a guy who spends more time smoking stogies and scarfing fried food than he does at the gym. Even sitting on the stool I tower over him, what with my height and being on the platform behind the cash. I know having to look up at me makes him uncomfortable, like most men. I barely glance over the top of my newspaper as I acknowledge the man. I hate it when people call me Candy.

  “Detective Saunders,” I say, returning to the article on the front page. He stands at the counter and waits for me to give him more of my attention. I fold the paper slowly and then look him in the eye. The two of us have history. “Can I help you?” If sarcasm were an Olympic event, I would have scored a ten out of ten from all the judges, even the Russians.

  “I see you’ve been reading the paper,” Saunders says, who always had a way of stating the obvious. Not the shiniest tool in the homicide division’s box.

  “I see you’re still buying off the rack.” Honestly, what do they pay these mugs? Even when my dad was on the skids, he wouldn’t have been caught dead in this Hugo Boss knock-off. Then again, Dad was a sucker for upscale brand names. He had a Cellini Rolex watch that showed the lunar phases. I remember as a kid being fascinated by the silver moon that flashed from a deep blue circle punched with stars on its face. He wore that watch every day of his life, right up until he disappeared. The tug that finally fished him out of the harbour a week later claimed to have never found it on his bloated wrist.

  The bell jingles again and a fairly tall Asian woman around my age walks in. She slides off a full-length smoky-grey raincoat and goes to stand beside Saunders.

  “I don’t think you’ve met Detective Malone,” he says. The woman lifts an eyebrow at me in lieu of introduction. They’re arched and well shaped, much like the rest of her.

  “Malone?” I ask.

  “Dad’s from Kerry. Mom’s from Canton,” she says.

  “Another Irish cop, imagine my surprise.”

  She smiles and pushes a strand of her angled, dark bob behind one ear. “Imagine how surprised you’ll be if I charge you with the assault of that gentleman out there on the sidewalk.”

  I take a closer look. This detective is smarter than Saunders and much classier, with her tailored black slacks and crisp white button-down shirt, the type where the loss of one more button would make people take notice. Her well-worn army boots kind of ruin the look, though. I can see the label on the coat she has draped over her arm. London Fog. At least this one knows where to shop.

 
“I got no idea what you’re talking about,” I say, staring her down from my perch on the stool. She locks me with her jade-green eyes, not flinching. She isn’t intimidated by my size, or possibly anything else. Where was a cop like her last week when that little meth head rearranged his girlfriend’s face? He deserved to have his nose broken.

  “Listen,” Saunders says, interrupting our little standoff. Too bad, I was kind of enjoying it. “We don’t care about that,” he says.

  “What is it that you care about then, Saunders?”

  He grabs the newspaper off the counter where I’d left it and points at the front page.

  “This kid. Tyler Brent. You know him?”

  I look at the picture. The boy has the same goofy grin on his face that he had in the photo-booth snaps the blonde showed me at The Goon. I look back at Saunders. “No, can’t say that I do.”

  “Well, that’s funny, because we found him down by the river yesterday with a broken neck,” Saunders says, putting the newspaper down.

  “I’m not sure why that’s funny but whatever gets your rocks off.” I look at Detective Malone and give her what I hope is an endearing smirk. She just keeps those green eyes of hers trained on me like an emerald-infused laser beam.

  “Looks a whole lot like your work,” Saunders says, leaning on the counter. “Or Mike Starr’s.”

  “That’s interesting. But since my old man’s been choking on cemetery dirt for five years now, you can probably take him off your most-wanted list.” I’m secretly flattered by the comparison. My dad taught me everything I know.

  “And you, Candy. You don’t seem to be choking on much these days, except that time I sent you upstate for.” Like I said, Saunders and I have history. He managed to nail me on conspiracy to commit murder a few years ago through dumb luck and a guilty wife who started singing like a scarlet tanager when the cops took her in for questioning. I served three years, mostly because the tanager flew off to South America and couldn’t testify; or at least that’s what everybody thinks and I’m not about to correct them.