by Rob Swigart
“You asked for a list of investors in Kapuna Shores. I took a little saunter into the Planning Department office. No one was around, so I had to look it up myself. Tough work. The files were a mess, but I did find them. That there is a pretty impressive list.”
“I also asked for a list of opponents of Kapuna Shores.”
Sammy nodded again.
Cobb lifted his eyebrows. “OK, don’t tell me. Everyone who opposes the development is a person of no consequence. Little people, ordinary citizens with an interest in the continued tranquility and beauty of our island. Those who did not want the new airport and all the new resort developments. People who work for the sugar companies. Do you think they hired a hit man of some sort?”
Sammy spread his lips away from the toothpick, showing teeth. It might have been a smile.
“No, I don’t think so either. Hit men do not use twenty-two-caliber long hollow points to kill someone. They do not leave their victim to slowly expire propped against a tree on the well manicured turf of the coconut grove in the early morning. Professionals do not do that kind of work. Not real professionals. I suppose they could have hired an amateur?”
Again Sammy spread his lips.
“No, I agree. No amateurs, either. That leaves Angela, I suppose. You didn’t meet Angela, though. If you had met Angela, you would have your doubts. She does not strike one as the shooting kind. More the drinking kind, you know. But I believe that the human heart contains much that is mysterious. She may have done it. I doubt it, but it is possible. Then there is the former Mrs. Linz. She lives in Palm Springs, which seems a long way to shoot from. Perhaps she hired an amateur. No, I agree. She did not have any real reason to hire one, since her alimony payments might stop if Mr. Linz’s estate were tied up in probate. I will scratch her off the list. That leaves— nobody. ‘More clues lead us into presence of immovable stone wall. We sway about, seeking still other path.’ I guess I will sway about some more. What do you think?”
Sammy removed his toothpick and carefully examined its end. Then he put it back into his mouth and shrugged his shoulders. “I think I’d better get back to work before the Mayor notices I’ve abandoned finances for the old habit of police work. It’s all I’ve done today, what with running around talking to Bea and Dr. Shih and the rest. Hard to justify all that under Finance.”
He opened the door by reaching for the handle without changing his posture. When the door was open, he looked out into the hall. Then he ran a blunt finger along the sign on the glass of the door: LT. C. L. TAKAMURA. INVESTIGATIVE SERVICES BUREAU. “And you better hope no one finds out you sent the irrepressible Scott Handel over to the Civil Defense offices to keep track of the fast-breaking if illusory health situation which is not, properly speaking, police business at all, as it does not involve any wrongdoing or criminal activity. They might tell you he’d be better occupied investigating the second homicide of this fiscal year under your expert supervision.”
Cobb rolled his eyes to the ceiling as Sammy left. “The Kukui Nut. He never changes.”
When Sammy had closed the door and his footsteps had faded down the corridor, Cobb took his service automatic out of his desk and placed it on his blotter. He clasped his hands together and rested his chin on them so he could watch the gun. The gun did not move. He tilted his head, changing the angle slightly. Still no movement. Finally he released the safety and the magazine interlock and dropped the magazine in his hand. He pushed out the rounds and weighed them for a moment. Then slowly, one by one, he put them back, lingering over each shell as it slid in and snapped in place. He shoved the magazine home and carefully wiped the barrel and stock with a cloth he took from the center drawer of his desk. He pulled his holster out of the big double drawer, strapped it onto his belt, seated the gun firmly, then stood and put on a light windbreaker.
He checked in the mirror on the wall, but the gun did not show. He pushed the holster further back along his side. Then he seated his porkpie hat firmly on his head and went out.
“When you gonna get a new hat?” Sergeant Hirogawa, on desk duty downstairs, asked. Sergeant Hirogawa always asked him that.
“This is a new hat,” Cobb said.
“You can’t fool me, Lieutenant. They haven’t made hats like that in thirty years,” Sergeant Hirogawa was just over thirty years old himself. “Not light blue hats with gigantic yellow pineapples printed in a pattern with white clouds mingled with something that looks like dog shit. Not porkpie hats. Not like that.”
Cobb paused long enough to take the hat off and examine it carefully. “Not dog shit,” he said. “Mangos.” He went out.
He squinted into the sun a moment, then removed his dark glasses from his shirt pocket and put them on, slipping the black nylon cord attached to them over his head.
Traffic was light. He liked that. It was the middle of the afternoon, and any moment now the sun would flood through the window of his office and fade the masking tape on his IN and OUT baskets some more. He was happy not to be there to witness the further degeneration of his personal effects. He whistled a little as he crossed the street, a Japanese popular tune from the late nineteen-sixties.
He paused at the entrance to the County Building and looked around. Everyone seemed to be hitting the mid-afternoon peak, toiling diligently at their separate tasks, filing and typing, moving the papers from IN to OUT. He moved silently across the lobby and bounced down the stairs to the Civil Defense office.
The room was empty. Cobb tilted his head and lifted an eyebrow. He moved through the room to a door on the opposite side which revealed another door and another set of stairs, descending to the second subbasement. An ancient yellow and black fallout shelter sign was peeling away from the second door.
He could hear voices downstairs, so he went down.
A corridor with restrooms, a small kitchen, store rooms, and two small dormitory rooms filled with metal bunk beds piled with a motley collection of cardboard boxes filled with antique radio equipment, old pots and pans, cartons of survival crackers, and all the obsolete detritus of the past forty years of county government. The corridor ended at a large room, brightly lit with fluorescent ceiling fixtures.
Darrell stood on the other side of the room looking at an enormous topographic map of the island taped to the wall. Next to him was his boss, Sherm Coelho. They were pointing at an area of the map and speaking urgently.
Sergeant Handel was seated against the side wall, his ear pressed to the speaker on a radio. If the smaller room upstairs seemed to hold an impressive collection of radio gear, it was dwarfed by this collection, stacked in metal racks from counter to ceiling, and in places where there was no counter, from floor to ceiling.
“Very impressive,” Cobb said, nodding at the equipment.
Darrell looked up and gave a kind of embarrassed chuckle. “Oh, yeah. Well, we got a grant, see. From the federal government. We couldn’t afford all this on county money.”
“I see. And what is Sergeant Handel listening to? Not the top forty I would imagine.”
Handel looked up and waved for silence. The speaker crackled briefly, a few words lost in static. It stopped crackling. “It’s that government team up near the crater. They’re on their way back. We can’t tell for sure, but it sounds like they found something. Fortunately Darrell here is used to listening to this junk. These people don’t talk normal on the radio, Lieutenant. They use a lot of code words.”
“So do we, Sergeant.”
“Yes, sir, I know. But they use different ones. They don’t talk normal.”
“Keep listening. Any idea how soon they’ll get back?”
Handel shook his head.
Cobb went over to the map. He nodded at Sherm Coelho, a tall, gray-haired man with a neatly trimmed mustache and fussy hands. “Getting ready for something?” he asked.
Sherm shook his head. “Not really. Nothing to get ready for that we know of. Just thought I’d check up on preparedness for medical emergencies, you know. Perio
dic routine check.”
“Come on, Sherm. ‘Humbly begging pardon to mention it. All cards should repose on table when police are called upon’.”
Sherm lifted his eyebrows, a gesture which deeply furrowed his forehead. “Oh? Have the police been called upon, Lieutenant?”
Cobb snapped his fingers. “Doggone,” he said. “Wrong quote.”
Coelho relented. “All right, all right. Darrell got these calls you know about. Bea has informed Civil Defense, unofficially, of course, that there may soon be a medical emergency of some sort. Now you know we didn’t do too well last time, during the big storm. We got a lot of criticism for not being ready. This time I figured we ought to be ready, even if nothing happens.”
“Most sensible.” He looked around at the blank green chalkboards waiting for someone to enter information about shelter status and major emergencies. He read the column headings:
AREA / REPORT TIME / PROBLEM / NO. IN DANGER / DEADLINE / ACTION AGENCY / ACTION TIME
“Nothing to report up there yet, it would seem.”
Coelho grunted. “I hope never. There’s one mysterious case over in the hospital. Some tourist up the Wai’ale’ale jeep trail in a rented Toyota. And we do have this thing down in the middle of the island, a thing which apparently is Russian. Since the Soviets have a tendency to test us all the time— sending jets in, firing missile tests overhead, that sort of thing— this could be just another provocation. But if it has some kind of disease on it, then we could have a big problem. That board will fill up.”
“Lieutenant?”
Cobb moved over to the radio console where Handel still listened intently. “Something?”
“You know they rented one of Gil Gates’s helicopters to fly up there?”
“Did they rent Gil too?”
“No. They had their own pilot. Can you imagine that? A pretty qualified group, huh? Anyway, the helicopter is back. Got in there a little after noon, spotted some wreckage, then set down somewhere up there near the slope of the volcano. They aren’t supposed to do that, but some hunter up there reported it. He thought they’d crashed. He saw it go down behind a ridge and not come out. The tower tried to raise it, but it was out of radio contact for over half an hour. Then they came back on the air, just as cool as cucumbers. Gil was hopping up and down for a while there, I bet.”
“You getting all this from listening to the radio?”
Handel nodded. “This thing is amazing. Darrell knows everything that goes on around this island. He can listen in on the tower talking to airplanes, to ham radios, to some frequency Gil uses to talk to his helicopters— that’s how I know about him. He took off in another chopper looking for the first one, but they came back on the air before he got to the Saddle out west of the airport. He turned the air blue, I’ll tell you, Lieutenant, yelling at them. They just said the radio must have gone out for a while, everything was fine. Then he muttered something about renting out all his choppers to careless types. He landed, then they landed, and that was the end of that. Now we’re listening to the jeep.”
Darrell was leaning on the counter making some adjustments. “Try that, Scott,” he said. “It should be clearer.”
The radio was silent for a few seconds, then a voice came through. “Base Blue, this is Jackrabbit.”
“Go ahead, Jackrabbit.”
“We have a confirm, Base. Repeat, we have a confirm.”
“Roger, Jackrabbit, understand you have a confirm. Do you have bacon?”
“Aye, Base, we are bringing bacon. Looks like Candide to us.”
“Understand Candide?”
“Affirmative, Base.”
There was a pause, then Base said, in a different voice: “This is the best of all possible worlds, then.”
“It looks that way, Base.”
“Understood. ETA?”
“Hour.”
“OK, Jackrabbit. Base out.”
“Sounds like the end of it,” Darrell said. “I’ll put it back on scan.” The frequency numbers flickered rapidly as the radio searched automatically for an active frequency.
“You see what I mean, Lieutenant?” Handel said. “They don’t talk normal. It sounds like a movie or something.”
“What was all that about the best of all possible worlds?” Darrell asked.
Sergeant Handel shrugged and looked at Takamura. “Don’t look at me,” he said. “Some kind of code. Does anybody know where they’re from? NASA? DOD?”
They all looked at each other.
“OK,” Cobb said. “Darrell, do you have any idea where that Base transmitter is?”
“No. We were just listening in. Sorry.”
“That’s all right. Keep listening. Did you make anything of his voice?”
“Base Blue? He sounded sort of excited to me.” Handel unconsciously matched Darrell’s posture, leaning against the radio console on one hand, shoulder high. His eyes widened. “Hey, Lieutenant. You’re carrying your gun. How come you’re wearing your gun? Is there going to be shooting?”
“Sergeant, you’re wearing a gun, aren’t you?”
“Well, sure, Lieutenant. But I don’t think I’ve seen you carry yours. Usually you leave it in your desk.”
“That’s true, Sergeant.” Cobb pushed his face into a thoughtful expression. “Very true. Now why is that?”
“Well, maybe you… wait a minute. Are you pulling my leg?”
“If I did that, Sergeant, you would fall down.” He shook his head. “I tell you, it makes me sad. This has always been a nice quiet island. We don’t have a Honolulu here. Peaceful, serene, even dull. That’s the way I like it. Always have. The fact is, Sergeant, that I don’t carry a gun most of the time because most of the time there is no need. I can’t say I care for the things. They’re noisy, for one thing. Not to mention dangerous. Usually I go qualify a couple of times a year and put it away the rest of the time. A gun, Sergeant, is not a subtle tool.” He pulled his gun out and waved it around. “If it falls into untrained hands, for instance, someone could get hurt. Not to mention the embarrassment to the officer who so carelessly or foolishly loses control of it. Why take a chance?”
Handel held out his hand. “OK, Lieutenant, I get the picture. Please put it away. It might go off.”
“Don’t be silly, Sergeant. This weapon cannot discharge. The safety is on. Look, I’ll pull the trigger and show you…”
“It ain’t. Lieutenant, the safety ain’t on. Don’t pull the trigger.”
“It ain’t. Why, so it isn’t. How careless of me.” Cobb thumbed the safety, ejected the magazine into his hand, put it in his pocket, and holstered the gun. “I just don’t like these things, Sergeant. If I carry it, I might be tempted to use it instead of my head.”
Handel looked puzzled. As he was about to speak Darrell held up his hand. “I think they’re coming back on the air.”
The frequencies had stopped scanning. The same voice came back. “Base Blue, this is Jackrabbit.”
“Go ahead, Jackrabbit.”
Darrell began operating another radio device as the conversation continued.
“We have a priority change here, Base. This is not just bacon. We seem to have the whole breakfast.”
“Understand priority change, Jackrabbit. What is your recommendation?”
“We feel it might be wise to get the indigenes involved at this time, Base. We have Candide confirmed. Repeat, Candide confirmed.”
“Understand Candide, Jackrabbit.”
“That’s affirmative. Call the State Health Department ASAP. Tell them there’s a toxin on that satellite. Tell them it’s a bad one, but we don’t know at this point how much has escaped to the atmosphere.”
CHAPTER 10
CHAZZ WATCHED THE TRUCK drive away. It tossed up a rooster tail of red dust which quickly collapsed and disappeared down the narrow dirt road. He smiled and shrugged his heavy shoulders.
Patria slid her hand up the back of his shirt. “She was a surprise,” she whispered softly.<
br />
Chazz wriggled his back muscles against her palm. “That feels good,” he said, watching the last of the dust vanish into the brilliance of late afternoon. At their backs the house nudged up against the flanks of the hillside, and before them, in the far distance, they could see a thread of sea beyond the green. She dug her fingers into the flesh under his shoulder blade, first one side, then the other. Then she pushed her nails in.
“Ouch,” he said. But he continued to arch against her hand.
“Sure,” she laughed. “Easy for you to say.”
He laughed without looking back at her. “Yeah. She was a surprise.” She had been the person to install the electricity and turn it on. She had also been an elderly, very large Hawaiian woman whose vast hips supported a tool belt bulging with wire cutters, pliers, connectors, and insulators; she was hauling an enormous roll of electrical wire.
Yet she had moved into the house with speed and amazing delicacy. It had taken her less than an hour to string the wire from the road to the house and connect it. Now she was gone, but behind them, in the bare living room, the ceiling lamp burned brightly, though ineffectually, against the sunlight streaming in. In the brief, monosyllabic conversation she granted Chazz and Patria she admitted that she was Sammy Akeakamai’s aunt.
“So,” he said finally, stepping back to put his arm around Patria’s shoulders. “What was your day like?”
“Come,” she said, pulling him back into the house.
The entry opened directly onto the living room, a rectangle as blank and empty as the moon. Only the small chandelier at one end, near the kitchen, broke the even white symmetry of the room. With one arm still around Chazz, Patria flipped the switch beside the archway, and the light went out. “Amazing,” she said.
“I think it must be magic,” Chazz answered. “Black magic. ‘Ana’ana. The dark secrets of the ancient kahuna come back to haunt us, to throw over our simple lives the terror of darkness and despair.”
Patria was laughing. “Really, Chazz. You ought to be ashamed. This is white magic. Bringer of light to benighted man.”
