CHAPTER 31
Odd questions ran through my head as I stared at the business end of Beni’s gun. Where had he been the last eighteen hours? How had a loser like him come up with such an impressive piece of weaponry? Did he know that in Hawaii a former felon like Beni could get tossed back into prison for even being in the same room as a gun like that? And, why was this fool pointing a gun at me—the person who’d fed and sheltered him when he had nowhere else to go? I don’t scare easily, but guns—especially a gun held by a loose cannon like Beni—scare me. I’d been trained to mask fear, though, so I went with my best bluff.
“Beni, what the hell are you doing? Put that thing away.”
“You don’t like it when the guy you screwed over screws with you, right?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Oh yeah, you don’t think I know you ratted me out to that cop? You play like you’re gonna help me, and then you go to the cops to rat me out?”
“Beni, I didn’t rat you out—to anybody.”
“Liar!” He screamed. I hoped Steve heard and was upstairs calling nine-one-one.
“Look, Beni, put down the gun so we can talk. I never mentioned your name to the cops. And, after what I found out today, I’m pretty sure you’re right—I think the cops were in on it.”
“In on what? You trying to mess with me? No more talking. Get your ass outta that bed ‘cuz we’re going for a little ride.”
“Okay, okay. Where do you want to go?” I slipped out of bed, holding a pillow to cover up as much as I could since I was only wearing an oversized tee-shirt.
“You’re taking me down to Lahaina. Then we’re gonna see about getting me the hell off this rock. If you make a call, or try anything stupid, I’m blowing your head off. I mean it. I done it before.”
His hands were trembling. He transferred the gun from his right hand to his left while he wiped his palm on his shorts. Then he switched it back.
“Beni, listen to me. I believe you about what happened up in ‘Iao Valley. I went up there today. And I know the Maui cops aren’t to be trusted. I’m on your side.”
“Shut up and get some clothes on.”
I pulled on the same pair of shorts I’d worn all day. My rubber slippas were by the door. I assessed the situation and determined I could still probably drop Beni in three moves, but he was brandishing a Desert Eagle—one of the most powerful handguns on the planet. One small slip-up and one of us would die. The Chuck Norris moves would have to wait.
We trudged out to my car and by then Beni was carrying the gun down by his side. No doubt he’d used up most of his paltry upper body strength by waving the five-pound gun in my face for the past few minutes.
As I was getting into the Geo I noticed Steve had left the garage door open—something he never did. Also, it was empty.
“Beni, how’d you get into my house?”
“Walked right in. You so dumb you don’t lock the door. You should be glad I got here first. The guys who’re after me woulda popped you right there in your bed.”
“Did you open the garage door?”
“Yeah, I woulda taken that little black car, but it was gone.”
“You don’t have a key.”
“Don’t need no key when you got skills.”
“Why didn’t you take my car?”
“This piece of kukae? No offense or nothin’ but this car’s garbage. ‘Sides, I don’t do no stick shift.” He paused for a beat. “Enough yak. Take me to the harbor.”
“Ma’alaea?”
“You deaf? I tol’ you Lahaina. We’re going to Lahaina Harbor.”
I drove the speed limit. Not fast, but not too slow either. I didn’t want to risk getting pulled over by Maui’s finest while chauffeuring Beni and his five-pound pistol. I had a million questions, but I held off. The gun was in his lap, his right hand tensing on the grip. Every few minutes, he’d lift the barrel a few inches to remind me who was really in the driver’s seat.
“Can we talk about that girl who got shot up in ‘Iao?” I said.
“What’s to talk about?”
“You haven’t told me all of it, have you?”
“What you wanna know? She turned out to be more trouble than she was worth.”
“Because the guy wouldn’t pay the ransom?”
“Yeah, and some other stuff.”
“Like…?”
“Like I don’t want to talk about it no more.”
We came out of the turns on the Pali Highway and dropped down to the flatlands heading toward Launiupoko Beach. Funny, only twelve hours earlier I’d seen this same beach from the air. It looked a lot prettier when I was sitting alongside Ono in the helicopter than it did in the dark of night with Beni poking a gun in my ribs.
“I feel kinda bad,” he said breaking the silence.
“Bad about what? About dragging me out of bed in the middle of the night, or threatening to blow my head off?”
“Nah, not that. I feel bad I had to shoot her.”
My hands gripped the wheel as if someone had zapped me with a couple hundred volts.
“What’re you talking about?”
“See this gun? It’s not mine. That’s why those guys are pissed. I took off with their fancy gun.”
“You killed somebody Beni?”
“I guess.”
“With that gun?” I glanced down at the glint of chrome.
“Looks that way.”
“You know, the police have me under surveillance,” I said. “They’re probably following us right now.”
Beni twisted in his seat. “I don’ see nobody back there.”
I took a glimpse at the rearview mirror. Black, nothing but black. No headlights and certainly no flashing blue lights.
“You think the cops been following you, eh? Did you ever think maybe it wasn’t cops? Way I heard it, people I know been following you too.”
I kept quiet.
“Spook you, eh? Now you know how I feel—everybody comin’ after me.”
“Can it, okay Beni? I need to concentrate on my driving.”
We zipped down the dark highway. I tried to think of some way to attract attention but I’d never seen the island roads so empty.
“Okay, we’re getting close to Lahaina.” I finally said. “Where do you want me to turn?”
“Man, you musta got that old timer’s disease or something. You can’t remember nothin’. I said, take me to the harbor.”
I turned left at Shaw, went a couple of blocks up Front Street, then turned and parked on Harbor Avenue. In the daytime, the area bustled with traffic and tourists. But in the dead of night it was just that—dead. I set the parking brake and waited for Beni to get out.
“Okay,” he said, bringing the gun up to my temple. “Get out—slow. You and me are gonna go visit a friend.”
“What friend? Who’s expecting you at this time of night?”
“Oh, not a friend of mine—a friend of yours. Some guys told me about that dude you been hanging with. You know, your boyfriend with the catamaran, eh? He’s gonna take me away from here. Otherwise, he’s gonna watch his brand new girlfriend end up like that red-haired girl. Now move.”
I got out of the car and assessed how I could turn the tables. In the dark, on the uneven footing of the dock, all I had to do was deliver one well-placed roundhouse kick. He’d go sprawling and more than likely the gun would skitter off into the drink. But then, if I missed…
“I know what you’re thinkin’ but I wouldn’t try nothin’ if I was you,” he said. “I got friends here too. And they’d love a reason to get their hands on your buddy’s boat. You mess with me, they mess with him.”
I stopped abruptly. “Beni, I can’t do this. You’re going to have to shoot me. I refuse to take you down to Ono’s boat.”
“Listen to you. Looks like that black belt stuff knocked your brain pupule. You get movin’ or I’ll start shootin’. I’m not kiddin’.”
I crossed my arms. He took a step bac
k and gripped the pistol with both hands. Even so, his arms sagged under the weight of the gun. I had only a couple of seconds to react, but that was enough time to reach out and grip his right forearm, pull him crashing to his knees, and deliver a quick blow to his solar plexus.
The gun went off. I’m not sure if he purposely pulled the trigger or if it fired as a result of his finger contracting when I knocked the wind out of him. The blast boomed and echoed across the sleeping harbor so long it sounded like he’d emptied the entire magazine. The single round went airborne—straight up. What goes up must come down, but after a couple of seconds I was reasonably certain it’d landed somewhere other than my skull.
Lights flicked on in boat cabins and heads popped up from below decks.
I yanked the gun from Beni’s limp hand and stood over him, waiting for possible retaliation from the drug dealers in the tricked-up yacht parked nearby. It was in the first slip—the one they’d stolen from Ono. But no one came up from the yacht. They didn’t even turn on a light.
A plain vanilla cop car with a flashing cherry on the roof showed up within minutes. Three guesses who was first on the scene.
CHAPTER 32
Detective Glen Wong, with his partner in tow, skittered down the dock with service weapons drawn. If he’d been behind the whole operation from the get-go, it couldn’t have played out any better for him. There I was, holding a take-no-prisoners Desert Eagle chrome handgun, standing over a skinny dude I’d walloped into a near coma.
“Ms. Moon,” said Wong as he approached. “Why does this feel like déjà vu all over again?”
“Before you get the wrong idea, Detective, I really need you to hear me out.”
“You know, there’s not much you could say that would change my mind,” he said. “I told you no more than eight hours ago that if you didn’t back off I’d throw you in jail. But here you are.”
Ono came running down the dock from the other direction and Wong’s partner stepped over and held out an arm to prevent him from coming any closer.
“She’s a friend of mine,” Ono said, as if our acquaintance would make any difference.
“We’re taking her in,” the partner said. “You can talk to her after she gets processed.”
The paramedics arrived and bundled Beni up for the long ride back across the island to the hospital in Wailuku. The crowd on the wharf had grown to a couple dozen people. I flinched when somebody took my picture with a flash.
Wong nodded at his partner and Bert Konomanu went over and talked to the picture taker.
“Too bad you won’t get to be on the news,” said Wong as he ordered me to put my hands behind my back so he could snap on the handcuffs. “We don’t reward vigilante behavior.”
He escorted me back to the Fairlane and even put his hand on my head to make me duck down to slip into the back seat. I thought that was just something cops did on TV.
“You okay back there?”
“Never better,” I mumbled.
We rode to the police station in silence. During the forty-minute ride I had plenty of time to mentally flip through a bunch of questions I knew would never get answered. How had Wong shown up at the harbor so quickly—especially since I hadn’t seen him following me? Why was I being arrested before I’d been read my Miranda rights? And why hadn’t I kicked Beni’s ass when he was in my bedroom? I could’ve claimed self-defense and saved myself and the taxpayers of Hawaii a helluva lot of trouble and money.
When we got to Wailuku, Wong didn’t take me in through the jail entrance but instead used a back door into a hallway I hadn’t been in before. Great. I’d seen enough crooked cop movies to know this is how it goes: they throw you in an unmarked back room and say you resisted arrest or something. Then they hammer you down until you confess to some bogus charge.
“Do you want anything to drink? Coffee? Soda?” he said. We walked the full length of the hall before he ushered me into the last room and flicked on the light switch.
“No, mahalo.” If I was polite maybe he’d feel at least a little remorse over what he was about to do.
“You know why you’re here?” he said. He gestured for me to turn around so he could take the cuffs off before I sat down.
“Obstruction of justice, harboring a known fugitive, and probably a bunch of other stuff you’re gonna make up.”
He shook his head. “I’m not going to be taping this interview, Ms. Moon. In fact, this interview never happened. I know you have a tough time with authority, and you’re just bad-ass lousy at obeying orders, but I’m going to try again anyway. It’s my job.”
It pained me to hear him refer to his job as if he were Tom Selleck in Blue Bloods. Wong was a crooked cop, a guy on the take. He and his kind were a blight on the Maui Police Department and every other police department where cops step over the line and decide the rules don’t apply to them. I wasn’t going to give him any excuse to inflict physical pain, but I wasn’t going to blithely go along with his self-serving BS, either.
“Yeah, whatever, Wong.”
“The reason this interview never happened is because you’re in a world of hurt. I’d hoped to spare you the really nasty fallout, but you insisted on bulling ahead. Now, I gotta figure out what to do with you. If I release you, you’re a dead girl walking.”
I didn’t follow what he was saying.
“Are you threatening to kill me?”
He shook his head. “We’re not the threat. You’re now well-known by a group of thugs who have murdered at least five people—four of them women—here in the islands. They’re associated with a drug cartel operating out of Southern California and Northern Mexico. The couple you were doing the wedding for...,” he looked at me as if he was waiting for me to fill in the names.
“You mean Keith Lewis and Nicole Johnson?”
“Yeah, well those were the aliases they were using here in Hawaii. Turns out they’re major players in a money laundering scheme for the Gato Negro drug cartel in Northern Mexico. Drugs are sold in the U.S. for American dollars. Then those dollars are used by our buddy ‘Keith Lewis’ to buy expensive real estate in Southern California. He turns around and resells the properties at a discount to get a quick sale and then deposits the proceeds in a bank account held by the cartel.” Wong stopped, giving me a few moments to put the puzzle pieces together for myself.
“Anyway,” he went on, “it’s a great way to move large amounts of cash without throwing up red flags. Problem was, your guy got greedy. Wanted more than his fat real estate commissions. Our inside guy learned ‘Lewis’ pocketed over a half-million bucks that should have gone to his boss, one Juan Carlos Cardoza-Jimenez—head of the cartel. The middleman who’d recommended ‘Lewis’ to Señor C-J couldn’t ‘fess up that the guy he’d stood up for had bilked the boss. So, he came up with a way to force Lewis to give back the dough. He dreamed up a kidnapping, setting the ransom at the same amount Lewis had stolen. That way, he’d tip off ‘Lewis’ that he was on to him, and he could replace the boss’ money and make things square before heads rolled.”
“How do you know all this?” I said.
“Like I said, we got someone on the inside.” He scratched the side of his head in a where was I? gesture. “But it didn’t exactly go as planned. Seems when Lewis got wind of the ransom demand he thought it had come from the big guy himself—Cardoza-Jimenez. Which meant his life expectancy was down to days, maybe hours. So he throws the little bridesmaid under the bus and hightails it outta here.”
“But that doesn’t explain why you didn’t investigate Crystal Wilson’s disappearance. Why’d you stonewall me? Maybe we could’ve found her before they killed her.”
“You have no idea how hard we all worked on this. I spent a fortune the department doesn’t have on snitches and surveillance. We came up short.”
“But why not tell the public? Don’t you remember the Elizabeth Smart case in Utah? She was spotted by an everyday citizen on a downtown street. Why didn’t you use the media—get the w
ord out?”
Wong pinched his lips into a tight line. “I wish I could’ve. Unfortunately, I wasn’t calling the shots here. It was the feds.”
“Okay, now I’m even more confused.”
“That bridesmaid—what was her name?”
“Crystal Wilson.”
“Yeah, well, that wasn’t her real name. She was an undercover agent for the Secret Service, planted at your bride’s health club to befriend her. The feds had figured out the money laundering scheme and were ready to pounce, but they needed evidence. They sent your girl in to get something that would hold up in a U.S. court. We weren’t getting much cooperation from the other side of the border.”
“When she was grabbed, do you think the kidnappers realized she was a federal agent?”
“We’re not certain, but from what we hear, we think they didn’t know.”
“Well, I know who pulled the trigger. He confessed to me. I can—”
“Mahalo, but we’ll take it from here, Ms. Moon. This thing’s already gotten ugly enough.”
“I’m stunned. The U.S. government was willing to sacrifice a highly-trained Secret Service agent just to get evidence on a money laundering scheme?”
“This is big, Ms. Moon. It’s the war on drugs.”
“For the Secret Service agent it wasn’t a war—it was an ambush.”
***
I left the police station in a cop car. Wong told me I had two hours to ‘get my affairs in order’ and then I’d be relocated to a safe place until I could be called to testify before a federal grand jury. No telling how long that might take.
Two hours wasn’t nearly long enough to say the good-byes I needed to say, or explain why I wasn’t going to keep the commitments I’d made—like showing up at Sifu Doug’s kung fu promotion ceremony later that day. But then, Crystal Wilson—or whatever her name really was—didn’t even get two minutes.
We pulled up in front of my house and I went inside to pack.
CHAPTER 33
I pulled out a dresser drawer and dumped a tangle of underwear onto my bed. How could I just up and leave? I had two weddings next month. I couldn’t just disappear. My friends would alert the media, put up a reward and generally make Wong’s life miserable if he stonewalled them.
Livin' Lahaina Loca Page 22
