by AJ Llewellyn
He texted back, Why?
I responded with, Leilani’s missing. She was last seen there.
A long pause and he responded with Huge cock.
“That’s his password?” Francois laughed for the first time all day. “You know, babe, you should think about getting a better class of employer.”
“This is Hawaii. It’s not like we have a better class of criminal.”
“True. Doesn’t it ever depress you?” He drove so fast back to our house; depression was the last thing on my mind. Surviving his wild driving had me fully occupied right now.
“Sometimes,” I admitted, clutching the sides of the passenger seat, and screwing my eyes shut as he swerved around a curve on Kam Highway.
“Uh-oh.”
“What do you mean uh-oh? What’s wrong?” I opened my eyes. There was an accident up ahead and police cars lined both sides of the highway.
Francois let out one of his patented aggrieved sighs. “Ever think about moving to Switzerland?”
“No.” I relaxed a little as we loitered on the highway. “We’d miss all the culture, all the excitement.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“Yes, Francois, you would. Switzerland might be the place of brotherly love and all that, but what culture has it given to humanity?” Before he could respond I said, “In a couple of hundred years, their sole contribution has been the cuckoo clock.”
Francois narrowed his gaze and looked at me. “Kealoha,” he said.
I didn’t respond. The very name gave me hives. Louis Kealoha had been our last chief of police and a very corrupt one at that. He and his wife, Katherine, a former deputy prosecutor with the City and County of Honolulu, had local police officers steal their mailbox. The plan was to frame Katherine’s uncle for petty theft to discredit his attempts to expose their fraudulent activity. This included her stealing $150,000 from her uncle’s estate. That was just the start of it.
It had been a horrible, tawdry case, involving the couple, about twenty police officers, and mounting evidence of bank fraud—which was where I came in—identity theft and other bizarre charges. She received a thirteen-year prison sentence. Former chief Louis got seven years for conspiracy and obstruction of justice charges.
For me, the case had been a secret thrill since Benny and I had been hired by the state’s governor, David Ige, who hired us to work with the real, true-blue, genuine Hawaii Five-O unit. These men are nothing like the TV show. They are hard-working, diligent, law-enforcement officials who don’t run around the island with Uzis as they slurp down shrimp truck fare. They worked shoulder to shoulder with us to lay out a complex, fascinating, but ultimately grubby case that once again smeared the name of Hawaii’s Criminal Intelligence Unit.
Francois had been supportive during my long hours of secret work. I was not only legally not allowed to discuss the case but since it also involved corrupt cops at the highest level, I feared for my family’s safety.
Governor Ige had assured me, “Don’t worry, I won’t let anyone hurt you.” But as the horrifying extent of the Kealohas’ control over the people around them became evident, he moved us, my mom, and our cats into a condo in Waimanalo until it was all over.
“A mailbox, babe. Our great criminal island minds organized the theft of a damned mailbox, and I worried about what they might do to you every damned day.”
“I know.” I reached over and grabbed his hand. Somebody honked us from behind and we surged forward, Francois gripping my hand the whole way home.
Inside the house, I was surprised things were calm. Mele was asleep in Ferric’s bed. He, meanwhile, was polishing the bamboo-handled flatware for our wedding party. The place looked festive and smelled divinely of island flowers.
Francois sniffed. “Our flowers arrived?”
Ferric beamed. “Grandma just texted that she got the bread. She said she had to pull a flick knife on Vitoria, but she may have been joking about that.”
“Where’s the um, you know?”
Ferric gave me a quizzical look.
“The eagle,” I whispered.
“You don’t have to whisper. It’s dead. And it’s in your bedroom closet. It must have bad vibes. Mango was sleeping in there and came running out looking petrified, and that beast is all wrapped in bubble wrap and a box!”
Yowser. Mango was a hardy cat. She’d been my baby since before I met Francois. She’d been a stray around my rented digs in Turtle Bay. We’d fallen for each other hard and fast. No matter how many cats showed up at our place to lay claim to our hearts, she would always be number one.
“Poor Mango,” I said.
“She’s okay. I gave her some chicken.” Ferric loved our fur-girl, too.
Francois opened the large Rubbermaid container that held our flowers. The smell of maile lei swamped our senses. All three of us moaned. The heady scent of warm vanilla filled our kitchen.
“I was so worried they’d be skimpy,” Francois murmured as he lifted one of the open-ended, long, green-leafed leis and placed it over his shoulders. It was thick, lush, and lustrous. Our lei-maker, Millie, had done herself proud. I had no idea where she got all those leaves, but she’d done an amazing job. Francois, Ferric, and I would wear these leis, which in a traditional Hawaiian wedding were worn by men.
We were also going to have a traditional handfasting ceremony. I couldn’t wait. For a moment, I forgot about the missing Leilani. Francois unwrapped her triple pikake lei. The scent was intoxicating. He gently placed it back in its soft folds of tissue, then held the fragrant leaves of the maile lei to his nose.
“Delicious,” he said. “Time to find our friend.” He strode out of the kitchen, and Ferric wrapped the lei again.
“It’s starting to feel real,” he said, giving me a disarming grin. “We’re gonna have a wedding, Dad!”
“I know.”
He closed the container. “I’ll take it to the fridge out back.”
I let him go, inhaling the lingering fragrance in the air. Maile is probably one of the oldest materials used for leis in all the islands. They were initially used to commemorate the goddess of the hula, Laka. The kahuna who was going to marry us had said the secret outdoor heiau, or temples, that were dedicated to Laka, still carried the fragrance of the maile. They were also used to help bring peace between warring chiefs in times gone by.
Unfortunately, maile plants are not as plentiful as they used to be because of drought. Several years ago, some lei makers imported them from the Cook Islands. More enterprising lei makers started growing the plant themselves and also hiking through our rainforests to find them in bulk.
I’d have to ask Millie when she came to the wedding, where she’d found ours. The beauty of maile lei is that you can keep them forever. They dry very well and locals like us drape them over mirrors and photos of loved ones as a sign of respect.
Just as I was contemplating my to-do list, Francois ran back to the kitchen.
“Babe! Leilani did go inside the bakery but had some kind of argument with Vitoria and a guy. He followed her out. He—babe, I don’t know how to tell you this, but he was carrying a bag of weapons. And look. Look who it is!”
He showed me the footage on his iPad, and I took a deep breath. I would have recognized that big fat lip anywhere. It was Lippy. The man on the run from his destiny.
Chapter Four
“Those aren’t weapons. It looks like a chef’s knife bag.” Oh, boy. Knives are weapons. What am I saying?
“Yeah.” Francois didn’t have footage of Lippy driving Leilani away in Benny’s car, but he did have footage of her abduction, thanks to one of the cameras at the rear of the bakery. We viewed it and I got a lump in my throat as we watched Leilani fighting Lippy. She even punched him in the mouth.
“I hope she gave him another fat lip.” Francois echoed my thoughts.
Debbie was in the car jumping up and down and appeared to be barking. There was no sound, but the picture was clear. Lippy held a large butcher’s knife
to Leilani’s throat. She was crying as he dragged her away and out of camera range.
“Any other cameras?” I asked, frightened by my own fertile mind. I tried not to think of her being tortured in some homemade dungeon.
Leilani!
Francois looked more disturbed than I’d ever seen him. “I think we can safely say he’s the one who took her. I doubt somebody else came along and snatched her from him. Now, where the hell are they?” He fiddled with a small tracking device. “Damn it. Benny’s car tracker’s offline. I wonder how the hell that happened.”
He kept working on it, then his cell phone rang. He checked the screen. “I don’t know this number. Can you take it, babe? I gotta get this thing working.”
“Aloha!” a male voice asked as I took the call saying, “North Shore Security.”
“Aloha to you, too.”
“How much da reward for fine one wahine?”
Francois and I hadn’t discussed a reward. But I was willing to pay it.
“What you know about one wahine?” I asked, adopting pidgin to match the caller.
“First, want one reward.”
I recognized the man’s voice now. For a second I’d thought it was Benny, but this guy had a slight lisp and he’d been at the bakery this morning. He was one of the customers who’d offered to tweet about Leilani.
“A thousand dollars,” I said as I realized we now had three hours until our wedding.
Francois stopped tapping buttons on his little scanner. “Who you givin’ a thousand dollars to?”
“Guy from the bakery this morning. Says he has a lead on Leilani.”
“Gimme that!” Francois reached for his cell phone, but I pulled it out of his grasp.
“What you know?” I asked the guy.
“She’s in the house next door.” Suddenly the pidgin-speak was gone and the lisp more pronounced.
“Where you live?”
“You gonna PayPal me a thousand dollars by five o’clock?”
“Sure.” I put him on loudspeaker so Francois could hear him.
The guy went on. “Okays. She in da kitchen. Guy with a big fat lip. He eating. Smells plenny good. Saimin, I tink.”
I didn’t care what Lippy was eating, though, I did miss a bowl of good saimin. “You don’t say?”
“I do say. I can see them from my kitchen. My window’s open. So is his. Only it’s not his kitchen.”
“It’s not?”
“Not his house, either.”
Francois rolled his eyes.
“Whose house is it?” I asked.
“Mrs. Plinky’s.”
“Plinky?” Is that a real name?
“Yeah. Mrs. Plinky.”
“And where is she?”
“Tied up somewhere else in the house.” A pause. “I tink. That’s what caught my eye. He was tying her up. Made your friend help him. He keeps trying to make your friend eat. She’s shaking her head. I no know why. That saimin smells gooooood.”
What was wrong with Leilani? Nothing beat stellar saimin! I mentally shook myself. She’d been abducted. And this whack job had knives.
The caller’s voice became muffled. “Aw, shoots. He just saw me. I tink he comin’ here now.”
He let out a scream and ended the call.
I still didn’t know the guy’s name or address.
“Plinky. Pearl Plinky. Age seventy-eight. Poor lady. 62-87 Kamehameha Highway. That’s Haleiwa. Right next to us. Wonder what brought that fool up here.” Francois frowned. “That’s in those estates. You know, where everything goes for about a million. Lippy’s got expensive tastes. We know where he is. We can go get him and turn him in.”
“We should let Benny know.”
Francois looked at me. “We’ll call him when we’re there. The last thing we need is Benny rushing over and alerting Lippy to his presence. We gotta protect old lady Plinky and Leilani.” His eyes widened. “Holy Moly.”
“What?” I was afraid to ask.
He gestured to his iPad. “There’s been a rash of break-ins on the North Shore and the windward side of the island since yesterday. The perpetrator breaks in and uses their kitchens to cook himself meals.”
“That’s nervy. And damned weird.”
Francois grinned. “Very. I gotta hand it to him, though. He takes his own food and cleans up afterward.”
“Why did he abduct Leilani?”
Francois shrugged. “Beats me, but let’s hope his culinary tastes haven’t started veering toward cannibalism.”
I wished he hadn’t said that. With traffic on the highway, it took us fifteen minutes to get to Haleiwa. I spotted a family walking past Matsumoto’s shave ice shop. They were all eating shave ice in the waffle boats that have become my passion. Next to malasadas. And donuts. And parts of Francois. I adore those waffle boats. You can eat them after you’ve finished consuming the shave ice. Sort of a consolation prize for running out of shave ice.
“Mingo, why do you have your arm stretched out of the window?” Francois peered around me. “If I didn’t know better, I’d swear you were trying to steal that little girl’s cone.”
“No, no.” I pulled my arm back in. “And it’s not a cone. She had a boat.”
Francois laughed. “I know about you and your waffle boats, Ming-Ming.” He picked up speed. “And if you’re a good boy and you marry your man like you’re supposed to today, I’ll bring you down here for one.”
“You will?” Oh, boy! I deserved it. I’d agreed to skip a honeymoon because we had so many repairs to do to the house. Our hardwood floors had started lifting and it would cost thousands to replace. That was just the start of our house’s woes.
Besides, we were worried about our son. Ferric might have been fifteen but his hormones hadn’t told him that. They thought he was in his twenties. He’d fallen hard for a local girl, Alika Clayton, who’d lost an arm to a shark attack.
Alika and Ferric were smart, sweet kids, and were wonderful together, but Alika was having nightmares thanks to the loss of her arm. Those and phantom pains had her parents up at night worrying about her. She’d taken a break from Ferric after watching an episode of Friends. Who takes their cues from a TV show? Besides, the “break” for Rachel and Ross had been a disaster. So far it was for Ferric, and us as well. He still had to see Alika at school every day and she wanted to be friends with him. Friends! No teenage boy wants to hear that. Ever.
Not only that but her parents, Adam and Dani, had become close friends. Adam referred a lot of business Francois’s way. And Dani and I spent a lot of time together. She’d been hurt that I asked Leilani to be my Best Person and not her, but I’d known Leilani for years. I sighed. We hadn’t wanted to go anywhere without Ferric. He acted stoic but the way he cried over Shark Week on the Discovery Channel made me realize he needed us at home with him. Even if the floors were falling apart, the ceilings had cracks, and the bathtubs needed recaulking. All three Claytons were coming to the wedding, and I hoped there wouldn’t be tension.
On the other hand, I wondered about their wedding gift. They were the ones who’d given us the used coffee maker.
“You’re worried about Dani,” Francois said, reading me correctly as usual.
“Yeah.”
“Listen, it’s going to be fine. Worry about one of our friends at a time.” He’d pulled into the massive parking lot that serviced the pricy housing complex where Leilani was being held captive. “There it is.” Francois’s intense gaze fell on the house where we believed Lippy had run amok.
“Things are quiet,” I said. “I wonder why he chose this place? I mean, it’s not really visible from the street.”
“Yeah. It’s strange.” Francois used his binoculars to study the house. “We still don’t know which neighbor called us. I’m going in for a closer look.”
“I’m coming with you.”
“Good idea. Who do you think we are?”
“Starsky and Hutch.”
He looked at me. “We’re more like Lau
rel and Hardy.”
“That’s not nice.”
He rolled his eyes.
“There’s Benny’s car.” I pointed to the bright orange Prius. Lippy sure had picked an easily identifiable getaway vehicle.
“I smell saimin.” Francois’s nose twitched. “Stay here.”
“And miss all the action?”
“You can watch from my camera.” He jabbed at his iPad screen. ”Here. Look.”
“Wow,” I said as I got a crystal-clear view of his crotch. “Where have you got the camera hidden?”
He smiled. “One of your favorite places.” He got out of the SUV and gently clicked the door shut. He put a finger to his lips and sneaked away like a thief in the day. I sat, fuming, but fascinated as he darted between cars. It was hard to see sometimes, but I did get frequent glimpses of his running shoes.
My cell phone rang. It was my mom. I took the call.
“Mingo, where are you? We’re all set to go. You’re getting married in just under two hours.”
“We’re rescuing Leilani.”
“Oh, cool.” She was munching something.
I panicked. “What are you eating?”
“Don’t worry. I made toast and peanut butter. It’s not wedding bread. Say, you got another wedding present.”
“Oh, okay.” I kept my gaze on the iPad. Francois was against the wall of the house. He was inching toward the kitchen window. I could see Lippy washing dishes. Dawn! He was using Dawn! It had all kinds of chemicals in it that were harmful to Hawaii marine life. That was a criminal offense, right there. He had a big, gleaming knife beside him. Leilani was drying dishes. She had masking tape wrapped around her mouth. I could tell she’d been crying. It was the most deranged scene of domesticity I’d ever seen.
I wanted to beat the shit out of Lippy the Loon.
I was worried about the knife, but Francois had it in his camera view now.
I had to go help him. “Mom. I gotta go.”
“Somebody sent you a sex toy,” she said. “Why would anyone think you need a marital aid?”
