by Toby Neal
Solomon’s full face reddened and his eyes seemed to swell with rage. Then he tipped his head back and laughed. “Bring it on,” he said. “I’m done talking.”
They tried a few more times, but Solomon simply turned his wheelchair away from the table. The interview was over.
“I agree with you,” Lei said to Tobita. “He’s protecting Anela Chang. But why?”
“You’ll have to catch her and see,” the Japanese man said, stroking his phone with a thumb. “This should be interesting.”
“Well, I most likely won’t be there to see it,” Lei said. “My case is the online gambling on Maui.”
“It was good to meet you, then,” Tobita said. “Good luck.”
Lei waited to go out of the observation room until Solomon and his lawyer had rolled down the hall ahead of her as he was taken back to the local jail. His hearing was going to be tomorrow, and she had no doubt the bail was going to be exorbitant.
Ohale and Lono Smith joined her. “How’s Stevens?” Ohale asked.
“He’s going to be fine,” Lei said. “They told me he’ll be discharged this afternoon. Hey, I’m wondering if you rounded up anyone in the raid that seems like the techies he was talking about.”
“They didn’t exactly have departmental badges on,” Ohale said. “But I’ll keep you in mind as we sort out the perps and their charges.”
They walked down the familiar worn hall into the beehive of cubicles in the main room.
“As long as you prosecute them and the gambling stops on Maui, I’ll consider this case closed,” Lei said. “We’ll be going home tomorrow. Got a baby who needs us, and a house that needs rebuilding. See you, Captain.”
He clapped her on the shoulder so that she staggered. “Good to work with you again, Hurricane Lei.”
“Haven’t heard that one,” Lono said. “Got to be a story there.”
“Oh, there’s a story, all right,” Lei said with a grin as she headed for the door. “But I’ll let the captain tell it.”
The bright bougainvillea and fern trees that decorated the parking lot gave it a tropical feel, but it was what it was: a tired, older area in a bad part of Hilo. She stopped, breathed in the moist, fresh air that smelled uniquely Hilo, and found herself scanning for her silver Tacoma in the lot out of habit. She’d gone through two of the vehicles since the one she bought here on the Big Island what felt like a dozen years ago.
Lei thought of Dr. Wilson, who lived and worked in Hilo, and wondered if she’d have time for a quick visit with her former therapist—but she didn’t want to get into telling that astute woman the situation that existed between her and Stevens. She needed to get back to him at the hospital, anyway.
Lei wished she thought he’d be happy to see her.
Stevens hated getting into the wheelchair and having Lei push him down the gleaming linoleum halls of the hospital for checkout late that evening. They’d eaten dinner in the cafeteria. He hoped it was his last hospital meal for a while.
Stevens somehow managed not to speak to her the whole time the doctor had met with them and explained the course of his recovery. He’d been prescribed rest, extra oxygen until the lungs healed enough to process air more effectively, and a course of antibiotics in case of a secondary infection. Follow-up visits to their doctor on Maui had been set up, and now they were heading back to Lei’s motel.
He sucked a careful breath through his nose, but it still hurt because the blow to his back from the round during the raid had bruised his already-inflamed lungs. The extreme exertion of running out of the compound had finished him off. SWAT had picked him up, collapsed on the side of the road, out of pity.
All of this was because of Lei.
Hearing her walking behind him, her hands on the wheelchair grips, he had to admit she’d been right. She’d pulled this off. Pushed the envelope all the way out there to find answers and eliminate their enemy while he stayed at home with the baby and barely got out of their burning house alive. Then he’d worked himself over physically and never accomplished a thing to help or protect his wife.
Stevens felt weak. Useless. He wanted to hate her for it. He couldn’t quite do that, but he could give her the cold shoulder for a while, even knowing his reaction was childish.
Lei completed the checkout process and sighed as she folded the hospital bill and put it in her pocket. “At least major medical kicked in on this. It was all covered.”
He didn’t answer.
She pushed the wheelchair through the sliding front doors of the hospital. Out in the entrance, light, blowing rain kissed Stevens’s cheeks and tossed the decorative palms in the parking lot. The sun had gone down, and the sky was the black of Tahitian pearl. He smelled that lush, green smell that was Hilo, feeling a pang of nostalgia for his time living here.
“Wait here. I’ll bring the car,” Lei said.
Stevens didn’t obey. He stood slowly, picked up the oxygen canister, and walked down into the parking lot. Lei walked alongside him, glancing up at him with a frown.
“Stubborn. You don’t even know where I parked the car.” She caught his hand and tugged it. “Over here.”
Just getting to the car winded Stevens, and once in the car, he shut his eyes and focused on getting his breath back as she got in her side and started the car. “You’re not going to believe what a dive we’re in.”
He didn’t answer. It was all he could do.
She drove them to a cut-rate motel under the banyan trees where she’d been staying. He waited in the car while she went in and paid for another night. The doctor had said he wasn’t in shape to deal with going to the airport tonight, and even he knew it.
She came back. “Follow me.” She didn’t open the door for him or try to help, and he was fiercely glad of it. He didn’t want her help.
She unlocked the faded turquoise door of a room on the second floor. A queen-sized bed parked in the middle of the room was covered in a striped, dark spread. A rickety chest of drawers and a plastic-covered armchair with a lamp beside it completed the decor.
“Home sweet home,” she said.
“We need another room,” Stevens rasped out.
“Why?”
“Need two beds.”
“Since when do we need two beds?”
He stepped inside and ignored her, going to the phone. He picked up the handset and dialed for the front desk.
She snatched the handset out of his hand and plunked it down. “I know you’re pissed. Say what you’ve got to say. Let’s get this over with.”
He picked the phone up, dialed again. “We need a room with two beds,” he said to the front desk. Lei huffed out a breath, muttering, and stomped away to pick up and throw her few belongings into her duffel bag.
The front desk directed Stevens to a room a couple doors down. “Door’s unlocked. Come pick up the key,” the front desk man said. Stevens picked up his bag and the oxygen canister and walked down the hall to the other room.
He was settled on his own double bed, stripped down to a T-shirt and boxers, the TV on, when Lei returned with the key. She set her things down and went into the bathroom.
A minute later he heard the shower running.
He thought of her in there, her face turned up into the warm water. Streams of it flowing down her breasts, which were fuller every time he saw them. Water rippling down the river of her spine, over the dimpled curves of that fantastic ass. Water gushing down those long, strong legs, over her toned arms.
They so seldom got time alone together anymore, and she was in there soaping up all those secret, beautiful crevices without him.
Shit.
Staying mad, staying away from her, was going to be tough.
She didn’t make it easier when she came out, a towel wrapped turban-style around her head—but not around her body. He tried to keep his eyes on the TV as she paraded across his line of sight, those unfamiliarly full breasts swaying and begging to be explored, and damn if her flat belly wasn’t pooching out,
like there was a little round ball down there.
“Come here,” he said, muting the TV. “Something’s different.”
“Something’s always different these days,” Lei said. “It’s so weird. It’s like my body just knows what to do.” She unwound the towel from her hair, coming to sit beside him naked. “I wanted to show you something—the baby moving. It’s been doing it a lot lately.”
His legs were straight out on the bed in front of him, and she draped herself across his thighs, propping herself on her elbows across his lap. She must be able to feel how she was affecting him, because her back was over his crotch, but she gave no sign. Instead she took his hand and set it on her smooth, cool belly, on the hard roundness there. “Just keep your hand there for a minute. Baby usually wiggles when I lie on my back.”
They both sat there, looking at his hand on her belly.
Redness of his burned skin against the ivory satin of her waist. The sculptured lines of her, from peaked breasts to the round columns of her legs, the dark triangle between. His long fingers, large enough to span the width of her hipbones. The bulge of their child’s home beneath the palm of his hand.
He had to remember to breathe, and it was difficult. He told himself it was because his lungs were still bad.
He felt something then, a flutter of movement, a tiny pulse that felt like the tug of a fish on a line. He couldn’t stop the widening of his eyes, the grin that lifted his cheeks.
“You play dirty pool, Texeira. I’m still mad at you,” he growled, even as he palmed her belly gently, feeling the moth beat of their child’s movement. “God, this is amazing.”
“I know. She’s really in there,” Lei breathed. Her smile was luminous, even with her swollen black eye.
“He. He’s really in there, and he already wants out,” Stevens said. His hand stroked her stomach in gentle circles. The baby stopped moving. “Daddy’s tucking you in to sleep,” Stevens murmured, and then, because he couldn’t help it, he leaned over and kissed the place where the flutter of the child’s movement had been.
He looked up. Lei’s eyes had filled, gazing at him. “You’re such an incredible man.”
He shut his eyes, feeling his inadequacies. His failure to protect her. Her betrayal in going after their enemy and not even giving him a chance to go with her.
“Funny choice of words.” He wanted to stop touching her, dump her off his lap, but it felt too incredible to be almost touching his child in her womb. The coolness of her skin had warmed under the circles his hand drew on it. “You don’t think much of me if you came here alone to take on Chang.” His voice came out thready, weak. Which was how he felt.
“I thought you’d try to stop me.”
Now he did push her aside, but gently, moving his knee so she rolled off his lap onto the side of the bed. He crossed his arms over his chest and looked over at the wheezing air conditioner. He didn’t want to see her nakedness any longer—it made her seem vulnerable, when he knew she was far from it.
“Of course I would try to stop you. But did it ever occur to you I wanted to get this guy as much as you did?” His voice rose and broke. He began coughing, and now she jumped up and fetched a glass of water from the bathroom and a wad of toilet paper, which she handed him.
He finished coughing and wiped his mouth. Pink smears came away on the paper. He took the water from her, sipped. She went to her suitcase and dressed in sweats and a loose tank shirt. When she came back and sat on the bed beside him, he still noticed her breasts, filling out the shirt, the nipples tight pebbles lifting the fabric. Damn, his libido was a traitor.
“I’m so sorry.” Lei sighed, hung her head. Those wild wet curls hung over her face as she covered it with her hands. “I should have...I don’t know. Told you my plan. Given you a chance to come with me. But I remembered what you said that day on Haleakala...that you’d turn me in yourself if you needed to, to protect me.”
“We should have at least talked about it,” he whispered.
“I respect you too much. That’s why I couldn’t tell you,” she whispered back, still not looking at him. “I kept thinking of Anchara. Dying just when she should have been able to meet her son. Physically unable to protect herself. I’m selfish. I didn’t want that to happen to me, to you, to our children. I wanted to move on Chang before I was too big to do anything physical.”
He shook his head. “We could have figured something out together. And then after the fire? Don’t you know I would have moved heaven and earth to protect our family and catch this guy?” He coughed again, and she tried to hand him the water. He waved it away and instead tried to focus on breathing in oxygen through the cannula. “But it turns out I’m glad you were gone. I’m not at all sure we’d have gotten out if Jared hadn’t been there, and he was only there because you were away.”
“When I heard you on my voicemail telling me about the fire...I don’t even know how I ended up at Chang’s house. It was just the last straw.” Her voice quavered. “I was careful. All the time I was careful. More than I ever used to be.”
“You went up to Chang in his house and got him to roll on his family. How was that careful?”
Lei told him how it went down, and he snorted. “Careful? Right. And how about when you got out of your car and got Ray out of the SUV? SWAT wasn’t even going in there to get him!”
“I saw his hands on his head. I knew he was disabled, which they didn’t, and that he wanted to surrender. I took a small chance there, but I knew things SWAT didn’t. About Ray and the kind of man he is.” She took a sip of the water in the glass she still held. “He’s a bitter coward. I don’t think he has the imagination, the brains to be the new Chang leader, no matter what he says.” She told him the content of the interview at the station. “We need to find Anela.”
“Well, I heard what he said to you, his threats. Whichever of them is running the Chang operation, I think he’s the shroud killer. And now he’s neutralized.”
“That we agree on.” She took his hand and lifted it to her lips. He felt the slick lining of her lips as she kissed the exquisitely sensitive, burned tips of his fingers. He tightened involuntarily. “Will you forgive me?”
“I don’t think so.” He stared at her steadily. “Like you said. That was the last straw.”
“Okay. I understand.” She went to the bathroom, and he heard the water running as she brushed her teeth, and he thought he might have heard her crying but couldn’t be sure. Then the light went out, and her shadow moved across the room. The covers rustled as she got into bed and rustled some more as she turned on her side, away from him.
He lay silently, watching the black shadowy shapes of the banyan tree leaves moving on the outside of the curtains, and he breathed as slowly and as deeply as he could, trying to get oxygen all the way into the bottom of his lungs. Because he had to heal and get stronger and find a way to keep living with this woman.
They had children who needed them.
Chapter Eighteen
Lei barely remembered falling asleep, and the sun was fully up when she woke with that restless feeling that told her she needed a run.
She swung her legs off the side of the bed and looked over at Stevens. He was still pale, but he was breathing better. She crept in close to lean her head down by his chest, and she didn’t hear liquid in his lungs anymore. Still, his color was off, and there were circles under his eyes. He didn’t look like he’d slept as well as she had.
He wouldn’t miss her if she went out for a quick run. They weren’t due at the airport until ten, when they were booked on a puddle jumper back to Maui.
Lei pulled on her shorts, sports bra, and shoes and left a note on the table beside him. She loaded a small can of pepper spray, phone, and her hotel key into her shorts pocket and went out, careful to shut the door quietly behind her.
On the familiar sidewalk buckled by the massive roots of the banyan trees, she breathed a sigh of relief to be moving again. Various aches and pains left over from y
esterday’s raid reminded her she’d been active the last few days, but it was good to be running at an even pace in her favorite old route, loosening tense muscles by using them.
Lei ran along the edge of the downtown park with its smooth grass and neatly trimmed coconut palms, looking up as a flock of noisy mynahs fluttered past to land on the grass, the flash of their black and white feathers contrasting with their bright yellow beaks, their voices gossipy and loud. The last of the night’s coqui frog orchestra gave a few shrill calls from the trees.
Fishermen lined the jetty with their bamboo poles, as they always had. Hilo Bay was smooth as glass, and there was an ever-present gauzy quality to the air from the volcanic emissions from Kilauea Volcano, a constant condition these past years nicknamed “vog.” Some people suffered asthma and other breathing problems when it got thick, and Lei was glad it had never bothered her.
She remembered her runs down through town to this park with Keiki, the way her big Rottweiler would lift her nose to sniff the bay and give a little snort as they ran, enjoying the briny smell.
Lei’s mind ticked over the argument with Stevens last night, and she felt heaviness bring down her good mood.
He wasn’t going to forgive her. At least not right away. Well, she’d give him space while he was recovering, but after that she’d find a way to get them back into bed—because even if he could hold out, she couldn’t. She already missed being with him, hated the discord between them even if she knew she deserved it.
Still, it had all worked out. Surely he’d let it go in time.
Lei did some laps around the park, her eyes scanning the faces of pedestrians and commuters, realizing she was still looking for Anela Chang. Of course, there was no sign of the woman. She’d studied the woman’s driver’s license and memorized her appearance: medium height and weight with a brown, oval face framed in black hair.
She shook her head at herself—Anela was probably long gone. She was getting paranoid. She headed back to the motel, stopping to buy two cups of coffee and a bear claw from a nearby Gas ’N’ Go.
