2,000 Miles to Open Road (Barefield)

by Trey R. Barker

  I took the cane rocker and cranked it to face her. I said, "You're, what, Danny MacGillicuddy's... mother's... sister?"

  "Half sister. Same mother, different dad."

  "And Danny is missing?"

  "Yes. He's a soldier, stationed here."

  "He's AWOL?"

  "So it seems. Doesn't make sense. Danny was about to get out. He disappeared from some kind of exercise, went somewhere without authority ten days before he could have gone anywhere with no questions asked. When my sister got the notice, she called Packy, they talked, she said I'd be better... said she'd get hold of me, have me call him. I did."

  "Where's Packy?"

  "Nevada state prison. Place called Ely."

  "How'd you find me?"

  "Packy said he'd heard Hawaii." The con network. "You're not hiding."

  "And why... What's your sister's name? Melinda?"

  "Belinda."

  "Why did Belinda think you could handle this?"

  "I think she just thought I'd be better than her. You know Belinda?"

  "No. Just heard Packy talk about her. He gave her high marks."

  "She deserves them. I'm a lawyer. Been one long enough to know that doesn't mean much, but Belinda thinks it makes me Wonder Woman or something. I'm probably a little short of that but I wasn't about to turn her down."

  "What's Packy think happened?" I asked.

  "Doesn't know. Something bad, I think he thinks.

  "That's what you tend to think when you're inside."

  "I'm sure."

  "Has he stayed in touch with Danny? Know what's been going on with the kid?"

  "They write, Packy said. And talked now and then. He said Danny visited him not long ago and Packy gave him your name in case Danny needed... somebody like you."

  "Packy indicate why he'd need somebody like me?"

  "No."

  "How long's Danny been here?"

  "Nineteen months."

  "And Packy just got around to giving him my name? What kind of kid is he? You know him well?"

  "Yeah. I haven't had much contact the past few years, but I'm actually closer to his age than to Belinda's, so I had a kind of big sister thing going with Danny when he was a kid. I thought it was a good thing he joined the army, thought he needed that kind of discipline, because he had a little bit of a streak in him, wanted to be a tough guy. Sort of a loner, too, not real social. And probably not college material. But he was never in any kind of real trouble."

  "That would put Danny's apple a long way from Packy's tree. How about Belinda? What's her opinion of Danny?"

  "She's his mother. You remember what your mother thought of you?"

  "No, but I get your point. And since he's been a soldier?"

  "From what I know, what Belinda tells me, he's been a good soldier. Got his share of badges and little recognitions. Survival training. Marksmanship. Like that."

  "Where's Belinda now?"

  "Louisville. She's married to a college professor."

  "What's his name?"

  "Why?"

  "I'm nosy. It'll grow on you."

  "Roscoe Franklin."

  "What did Packy tell you I could do?"

  "He just hopes maybe you'll look into it. He said if you would, you'd find out. He said you don't have much backup in you. And you've got a great shit detector. And he said you're the toughest son of a bitch he's ever met."

  "Have you seen the paper work on this?"

  "Just the letter of notification."

  "Which says?"

  "Nothing, really. Just a pro forma notification of his absence."

  "Talked to them yet?"

  "Yes. Said I'd be coming over. Asked them to assemble the record for me. Made an appointment for tomorrow morning. I got in a couple of hours ago, rented the car, checked in, came looking for you."

  "And you want me to ask the Army what happened?"

  "Us. I'm in. I can pay you."

  "Yeah? You a woman of means?"

  "I have resources. What are your rates?"

  "I don't have rates."

  "I want to pay for your help. May I?"

  "We'll see. How long have you got for this? You took some time off from work?"

  "I quit my job a few months ago."

  I waited for her to say why. She didn't. I said, "Little young to be so independent."

  "Easier when you're young, I'd say."

  "Where're you from?"

  "Here and there. Most recently San Diego. Del Mar."

  "Beautiful part of the world."

  "This isn't bad either."

  "No. But no racetrack. What time tomorrow?"

  "Just morning was all I said."

  "Where're you staying?"

  "The Royal Hawaiian."

  "I'll meet you about 8:30. In the lobby."

  I walked her to her car. She turned at the steps and looked around. "What have you got here?"

  "It's five apartments, six counting mine," I said, pointing them out. "Five down there, each one with a front entrance to the lanai, which is what they call this long porch across the front, and each with a rear door to the back yard and the beach. Each apartment has a small kitchen, a room off that for whatever, plus a bedroom and bath. Lots of windows, couple of skylights. That's all. I rent four of them and keep one open for good friends or my partner when he comes over. And I put a second story on mine so I could see the sunset over the treetops, turned my bedroom into an office and library."

  "Got time to show me around?"

  "Sure."

  I walked to the front entrance and she followed.

  "This is the... I don't know what to call it... the main room."

  It is vast, maybe sixty feet from front to back and half that side to side, with a vaulted ceiling that rises to thirty feet. Up front, there are enough sofas and soft chairs to accommodate a dozen people comfortably, or more if they feel like rubbing up against each other, with a huge television against one wall and a Bose setup against the other, six speakers wired to the stereo and the TV, four inside and two out back. Behind the layabout space, a dining table that will handle twelve, and to the rear, just off the back lanai, there's a pool table, an Olhausen, which doubles as a buffet table for parties.

  "It's a great room," she said. "That's what you should call it. The Great Room."

  "Sounds a little pretentious, but okay. Over here is the kitchen. I'm on the other side of that. As you know. Fine kitchen, if I do say so myself. A Viking range, dual fuel, eight burners, two ovens. Granite counter tops. Built-in Sub Zero."

  She looked at me with a small smile, like she'd caught me at something.

  "I'm bragging, I know, but I love kitchens. And this is the first one I ever built from scratch, so I put a lot of thought into it. And a lot of money. The people who live here have access to all this, of course. It's kind of like a kibbutz."

  "Without the suicide bombers."

  "Yeah."

  We went through the main room, the Great Room, to the big back lanai where there's a jacuzzi big enough for eight, a Weber Summit grill, and a glass-topped table surrounded by six chairs beneath an umbrella.

  "I'm still working on the yard," I said, as we went down the four steps.

  "What's that? Tool shed?" she asked, pointing to a flat-roofed, free-standing structure with wide doors tucked off to the side.

  "Yeah. And a half-ass gym. I keep a set of weights and a bench in there. A heavy bag and a speed bag."

  We walked along the stone path I've laid and past the hole in the ground I'm trying to turn into a pond.

  "Someday this'll be a pond. Don't ask when," I said.

  "Full of those fat goldfish that look like they're coming out of a coma?"

  "Koi. No. No koi. They're pathetic looking. Something more exotic. That's why it's not finished. It'll have to be a lot deeper for the fish I want. Maybe I'll just forget it, fill it in. Or make it into a fountain."

  "Beautiful flowers," she said. "You're the gardener?"

 
"Yeah. But I get help from the others. Most of these are indigenous. The palms were already here." There are six of them along the back property line, forty-feet tall and leaning in from a lifetime of bending to the wind. "I put the fence sections up between them to keep people from cutting through that way and damaging the flowers." The fence is wrought iron, a Philip Simmons design I had seen years ago in Charleston and had made over here. With Simmons' permission and my payment for the privilege. I'd have liked it more if he'd made it but the freight stunned me out of that idea.

  The path led us to a wrought iron gate, the final section of the fence, that's perpendicular to a high hedge that separates me from the house next door. I unlatched it and it squeaked as it always does and we stepped on to the beach.

  The Pacific Ocean, Kailua Bay actually, was in front of us across fifty yards of beige sand. Leanne and Sally sprawled on a couple of big towels, halfway down. Dark, heavy clouds roiled in the distance. The bay was dotted with sails.

  "We keep this outrigger canoe," I said, pointing to the right, "and the nets,"--they were strung up along a rig of poles--"for fishing for our dinner. And this Boston Whaler." It's a seventeen-footer with a center console and a 90-horsepower Mercury. It's on a trailer that we wrestle to the water with a cable and winch rigged to one of the palms. "We fish from it, too. And daytrip to some of the smaller islands."

  "Do you own the beach, too?"

  "No. Nobody owns the beaches in Hawaii. They belong to all the people. The tree line is where my property ends."

  "I'm impressed. Are you a man of means?"

  "Men of means don't have a mortgage like I've got."

  "Owning this," she said, "doesn't quite fit with what I expected."

  "From an ex-con? Yeah. Especially one squared up."

  "What's the history of this place?"

  "The military built it sixty years ago as a retreat for the brass. It was pretty beat up when we bought it two years ago. The government was in one of those phases they go through where they want to sell obsolete assets. My partner used to live in Hawaii and knew of it and we were bucks up and flew over for the auction. We won."

  "Bucks up?" she asked with a little tilt of her head.

  "Yeah. It works as a business. Pays for itself with a little cushion for the landlord and gardener. I get real good rates and, even at the prices, I can be pretty picky about the people I rent to. Which is important, living like this."

  "Apartments, not condos?"

  "Yeah. They want to buy and if I could be sure the people here now would stay forever, I'd go for it. But things change, and it'd be hard for me to reserve the right to approve the people they might want to someday sell to. That scares me some."

  "Yes. One bad apple..."

  "Been lucky so far."

  I walked her back through the gate and along the hedge past the herb and vegetable garden to the front and her car in the wide gravel turnaround flanked by a six-carport.

  She reached for the door handle but I got there first and opened it for her.

  "Thank you," she said, and smiled right at me. "Chivalry. A lost art."

  "I'm old fashioned."

  "You build the front wall?"

  "With help." It's ivy-covered brick, seven feet tall, open only at the gate. Did it to remind me of Wrigley.

  "Nice touch," she said. "Reminds me of Wrigley."

  "Thanks. See you in the morning." I closed the door and she drove off with one hand in the air in a wave.

  Hmm.

  ***

  I met Packy MacGillicuddy a while back when I came up from the hole for the third and last time and found him sitting on a bunk in my cell. He was playing four hands of twenty-one against himself as the house, all the cards face-up. He put a big, full-faced smile on me and I stood there stonily as the hack slammed the self-locking door behind me and trundled down the walkway.

  "Patrick Aloysius MacGillicuddy at your service. Federal Bureau of Prisons number 748, dash, 340, dash, 9922. Call me Packy. Pleased to meetcha."

  "You haven't met me."

  "Prob'ly will, though, sharing a cell with you. Harry Pines, right? Relax, brother. You got no worries with me. Much trouble as you go to to keep from getting butt-fucked, I sure ain't gonna bring any more down. I do easy time. It all plays with me. I'm just getting by."

  In the six months we celled together, my last six, I came to like Packy more than anybody I met inside, not that there was much competition. He was right about doing easy time. He never had a bad day or even a bad mood. He was decent, funny, and interesting, had a lot of stories to tell and he never seemed to be hiding anything as he told them. But he was. They all are.

  He had grown up tough, fought professionally, as a welterweight, and when he got tired of taking punches he went to Las Vegas and got hooked on the bright lights and non-stop action. He dealt for a while, then played the tables, then cheated the tables and the slots, and then took to supplementing his income by doing favors for people, one of whom set him up with a guy who wanted to buy a silencer. The guy was an ATF undercover agent. Packy's pal gave them Packy to reduce his own pending sentence and when Packy handed over the silencer he was on his way to spend five years of his life at the Federal Correctional Institution at Terminal Island in the Los Angeles Harbor. That's where I met him.

  "Silencer! Sonofabitch wasn't nothing more'n a piece a pipe, loud as shit, sounded like a atom bomb when they shot it off in court, hundred and fifty dollars I got for it." It made him laugh.

  Here's a sample from Lono Waiwaiole's Dark Paradise which is available from Down and Out Books.

  Chapter One

  Pre-game Warm-ups

  1

  The first time Happy Dixon died, Geronimo Souza breathed life back into him at Isaac Hale Park on the Puna side of the island. Everyone blamed Junior Silva for the accident because it was Junior's board that ran upside Happy's hard head, but the truth was Happy had a habit of sticking his head where it didn't belong.

  Geronimo had been at the beach that day only because his yearlong pursuit of Lahapa Wong had yet to bear fruit. His plan had been to take the SAT that morning, but he jumped to Plan B as soon as Lahapa called in search of a ride to the beach. He felt like he was making solid progress, too; Lahapa's sweet tongue was halfway down his throat when all hell broke loose. By the time he'd saved Happy's sorry life and got back to the blanket, Lahapa had chilled down by several degrees and was ready to head for home.

  Funny how much can turn on the tiniest twist of fate, Geronimo thought as his memories of that day more than two decades ago flooded through his mind. He never did get with Lahapa, who eventually married a hook and lived in Pasadena now, and he ended up in the Navy instead of the university. Which Geronimo had no complaints about, because the Navy had led directly to where he was standing right now--at the scene of a fatal accident on Highway 11 about halfway between Mountain View and Volcano, Geronimo the one who had arrived at the scene in a Ford Explorer, which now had a blinking blue light on the roof, and Happy Dixon the one with his hard head stuck through the windshield of an overturned Toyota Corolla.

  Geronimo called the accident in and went about the job of laying out flares in each direction. "Jeezus Christ, Happy," he said aloud, even though he knew Happy wouldn't have listened to him even if he were still alive. It was a single-car accident, thank god, the Corolla off the road in the thick ginger simply because Happy could drink a helluva lot better than he could drive.

  Louie Yamamoto arrived just as Geronimo finished with the flares, the ambulance Happy didn't really need right behind him. Louie's blue light was flashing on top of a new Land Rover. The new rig made Geronimo think briefly about replacing his Explorer, but he knew the way his finances were going the numbers would never add up--even with the departmental allowance all the Big Island cops earned for using their personal cars on the job.

  "Oh, fock," Louie said as soon as he took a close look at the wreck. "Ain't that Happy Dixon?"

  "Yeah," Geronimo said.
"And I think he's really dead this time."

  "Whaddaya mean?" Louie said, because Louie had been in elementary school the first time Happy Dixon died and was as ignorant about Geronimo's generation as Geronimo was about Louie's.

  "It's a long story" Geronimo said. "Can you take this the rest of the way?"

  "Too good now for traffic action, yeah?" Louie said through a grin, a reference to Geronimo's transfer to the drug task force the previous year and to Criminal Investigations five years before that. "We get a helluva lot more traffic deaths than anything, you know."

  "That's why we need a real cop on this, Louie," Geronimo said, a grin of his own flirting around the edges of his broad brown face. "Plus you're the one on duty here."

  "That, too," Louie said, his grin jumping suddenly to a high chuckle. "I got it, brah, no problem."

  Five minutes later, Geronimo was headed into the wet night again, the irony of the situation rolling around in his mind unimpeded while he drove through a light rain.

  Just like the last time Happy Dixon died, Geronimo was only at the scene because of a woman. This time, though, the scenario was a little more complicated--the woman he had just left in Volcano was not the same one he was headed home to when he happened on the accident.

  "I'm late, I'm late, for a very important date," he recited under his breath, followed by immediately wondering where the fuck that had come from. It was only half true, anyway. He was late, but he had no important date with Denise in front of him and hadn't had one behind him for as far back as he could remember.

  You lucked this up good, he said to himself, thinking back to the way things had been when the two of them had started together, him chiseled koa fresh out of the SEALS and her by far the hottest wahine in Hilo High's graduating class that year.

  Fifteen years disappearing down the fucking drain, Geronimo thought. You satisfied yet?

  2