Riptide jl-5

by Paul Levine

  He bought a coconut macaroon and ate it in two bites. What was making him hungry — thoughts of Lila or death, or were they one and the same? Boy, the mind plays tricks after you’ve seen a friend killed. Jake Lassiter was fondling the passion fruit and munching a second macaroon when he turned around and there she was. Sun-streaked hair pulled straight back, her face tanned, full lips slightly parted, gold-and-emerald eyes still innocent and inviting.

  “Lo-li-laa,” he mumbled, mouth full of macaroon.

  “Jake, you have a milk shake mustache and crumbs on your chin. You really know how to knock a girl off her feet, don’t you?”

  “Bad timing,” Lassiter said, wiping his mouth with a bare arm.

  “Good choice, very filling and healthy, good to have in your stomach before a flight.”

  “We going somewhere?”

  “You, Jake. You’ve got to leave. Go home, get out of here before Mikala and Keaka find you. Mikala will kill you to get you out of the way. Keaka will do it for fun.”

  “Nice crowd you hang around with, or isn’t hang around the right description? Nice crowd you conspire with, carry their garbage, take a cut.”

  Lila took a step backward and turned toward the ocean. She stared at the horizon, keeping her thoughts and her expression hidden. “I’m not with them, not anymore. There isn’t time to explain everything to you. I know I’ve hurt you and now you’re striking out at me. Try to put yourself in my position. I met Keaka when I was a kid. He was different from the other boys.”

  “So was Ted Bundy.”

  “Listen, Jake. In the beginning, he wasn’t violent. He just wanted to return to an earlier time, to live off the land and the sea. Somewhere it went wrong. His disgust with the haoles led to disrespect for their laws. The drugs, the violence… it started slowly and got worse. Sure, I went along, I admit it. But I got out after Miami.”

  “What do you mean, got out? You were the mule, you carried Sam Kazdoy’s bond coupons to Bimini.”

  “I didn’t know whose they were, that you were involved in it.”

  Lassiter laughed a hollow, sad laugh. “It doesn’t matter whose bonds they were. It’s still a crime. But it so happens the bonds belong to my client.”

  “So you came for the bonds, not for me.”

  He could have told her the truth but the truth hurt too much. “That’s right. Does that disappoint you, Lila, that I’m not the romantic fool you took me for?”

  “I was sort of hoping that you were,” she said wistfully, her eyes moist. “Romantic, I mean. I thought you were, and it made me realize how little I was getting from Keaka.” She put both arms around his neck and drew herself up to him, the fullness of her breasts against his chest. He kissed her, wanting her more than ever, knowing the bonds had never been as important as this. But at the same time his mind was working overtime, the brain rattling off the charges against her — conspiracy to transport stolen property, grand larceny, buying, receiving, and concealing stolen property, and the biggie, maybe accessory to first-degree murder. Her rap sheet could be a miniseries. And Keaka — two first-degree murders, Berto and Tubby, three if he killed Marlin. The two of them were Bonnie and Clyde at the beach.

  “Jake, it’s wonderful to be in your arms again,” she whispered in his ear. “I’ve missed you so. That morning, leaving you on Bimini, it was awful. I cried all the way to Nassau.”

  “It’s a twenty-minute flight,” he said.

  “I mean it, Jake. It was the worst day of my life. I kept thinking about what I did, and I don’t mean carrying the bonds. That was no big deal, but leaving you that way…”

  “What’d you do with the coupons?” he asked, Sam Kazdoy’s lawyer again.

  “Keaka met me on Nassau. No hassles with the Bahamian government, no searches or anything. We flew Air Canada to Toronto. Same thing, they don’t bother Americans. I had them in a carryon, could have been my toiletries. Only things we declared were two bottles of duty-free rum. Then we went to Vancouver on the same plane. We spent the night and took a Continental flight to Kahului. No problem there, just a couple tourists coming home from Canada. But, Jake, the whole trip, I kept thinking of you.”

  He wanted to believe her, wanted to hear more about how she missed him, but part of him was on assignment. “Where are the coupons now?”

  “Keaka has them. I don’t know where, probably stowed away until Mikala figures out what to do with them.”

  “Where’s Keaka?”

  “Forget about Keaka,” she said, kissing him again. Why did he get the impression she used her kisses as tools of distraction, the same way he fouled up witnesses with irrelevancies? Was that it, were her kisses irrelevant?

  A voice inside forced him back, took him somewhere other than where his body wanted to be. The voice told him there was unfinished business and a score to settle, told him to use his wits and maybe a weapon, too, told him things would never be the same. Finally it told him he could kill.

  “Where’s Keaka?” he repeated.

  “Jake, can’t you understand? You’re out of your element here. If Keaka pulls a gun, you can’t object like it’s a courtroom. Even if you found him, even if you had a gun, what would you do? I don’t see you shooting anyone. And Keaka won’t surrender. His greatest wish is to die a warrior, to join his ancestors and be reincarnated as a king.”

  “Maybe I can grant his wish. Look, he killed Berto, a friend of mine for a long time. Berto made some mistakes, screwed up his life, but he didn’t deserve to die. And Tubby Tubberville. Tubby was a big teddy bear. I blame myself for bringing him along. I was riding shotgun without a shotgun, and I was useless. Now, where is Keaka?”

  She looked at him through misty eyes. “Not on Maui.”

  “Where?”

  Lila shook her head sadly, as if already regretting what she would say. “In the jungle on Molokai. He has a campsite in a clearing.”

  “How do I get there?”

  “You don’t. He’s on high ground above the beach. He can see a boat approaching during the day or hear it at night. Besides, there’s nowhere to land a boat.”

  Keep asking questions, fast and simple, no time for a witness to take a breath or fabricate an answer. “How’d he get there?”

  “Windsurfs across the Pailolo Channel. He fishes and hunts and picks fruits. But he also has weapons — not native spears either — guns, and he’s good with them.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “Because I used to go there with him. That’s always what we did after a job, sort of a native celebration at beating the haoles. He would have sailed there early this morning, after killing your friend.”

  “His job isn’t finished if I’m still breathing, is it?”

  “No, but now that Mikala knows you’re alive, he’ll probably handle that himself. They’d consider it fairly easy — you’re just not in their league when it comes to this — and they’d want Keaka to lay low.”

  “Does Keaka have a telephone or a shortwave radio on Molokai?”

  “No, that would be too modern, too much haole influence.”

  “So he would have gone there believing I’m dead. Mikala couldn’t tell him I’m alive. I’d have the element of surprise.”

  “It would be your only advantage,” she said quietly. “Everything else favors him, including the fact that he’s a killer and you’re not.”

  Jake Lassiter was already planning. “Last night there were two men in the truck, a bigger man driving.”

  “That would be Lomio, part Samoan, part Hawaiian. He works for them. Lomio loves the truck and doesn’t mind hurting people. He’d still be on Maui, on the farm.”

  So three enemies out to kill him — Keaka, Mikala, and Lomio. And Jake Lassiter didn’t know whether he could trust Lila Summers. He went fishing. “Why aren’t you with Keaka?”

  She looked away. There was something about the pause Lassiter didn’t like, another evasive witness framing a reply, testing how it sounds in the mind instead of just l
etting the lips speak the quick truth. Finally she said, “After he killed the Cuban doper, I told him I was tired of the violence. I wanted it to stop. He promised it would. Then we got home, and he said he would kill the robber, sorry, the burglar who hired us to take the coupons to Bimini. I knew then it would never end. Keaka didn’t want it to end.”

  “So you left him?”

  “Keaka pretty much guessed what happened on Bimini, called me a haole slut, asked me to choose sides. We said some nasty things to each other, then I left. I’ve been staying with a girl friend in Kihei. Keaka didn’t tell me about the setup on Crater Road last night. He would have been afraid I’d warn you.”

  “Would you have?”

  “Of course.”

  “Why? Why betray your first lover, the man who taught you so much?”

  “I wouldn’t look at it that way. I just want you to live a good life and be happy and grow old and die in bed and not on a rocky mountainside.”

  It wasn’t quite what he wanted to hear. An All-American because I love you would have done nicely.

  “Lila, I’m going after Keaka, with or without your help. It would just be easier if you’re on my team.”

  She looked away again, turning toward the ocean. She was silent for a long moment, and Lassiter stood there, smelling the sweet fragrances of the tropical fruits, waiting. Finally, she told him where to put a board in the water, at Makaluapuna Point on the northwest coast of Maui by the lava rocks called Dragon’s Teeth. It was nearly deserted there, she said, only the nearby plantation village of Honokahua framed by a double line of Norfolk pine trees.

  At the house in Kihei where Lila had been staying, she opened the garage and hauled out an old eleven-foot board, her harness, and a rig.

  “Don’t drift too far downwind,” she told him, “and sail port of the lighted weather buoy to get through the rocks on the Molokai side.”

  In the fading light, she handed him a stainless-steel Colt Python to carry in the pouch of a harness. He wanted to ask what she was doing with the gun, and what jobs with Keaka ended in their jungle celebrations. But he didn’t ask. He just put the gun in a sandwich bag and pressed it closed by its plastic zipper, sealing it like an office worker packing his lunch.

  “You don’t have to do this to prove anything to me,” Lila said. Then she kissed him, long and slow, as if it were the last time, and as she turned away, Lassiter thought he saw a tear in the corner of her eye. But then again, maybe it was the light.

  He could have said that he wasn’t trying to prove anything to her, but he didn’t say that. He could have told her what it felt like to lie facedown in the cold gravel as your friend is dying in a burst of flames — dying instead of you — but he didn’t say that either. He didn’t say anything. He just threw the board, the boom, the mast, and the sail into the bed of her old Mazda pickup. Then, as the sun set over Lanai and the coast of Maui was bathed in a peaceful orange glow, he drove to Makaluapuna Point, looking for the rocks called Dragon’s Teeth, wondering if anyone is ever ready to die.

  CHAPTER 28

  Hello and Good-bye

  It was from early Polynesians — Tahitians, Samoans, and Tongans — that the seeds of Keaka Kealia grew. Lean and strong, Keaka surfed Maui’s north shore, another island boy dark as a kukui nut. Surfing taught him balance and agility, and a thousand years of history imbued him with courage and a love of the wind and sea. When windsurfing came to the island from California, he learned that too, first on an old twelve-foot floater without foot straps, a Model A relic of the sport. With his natural strength, Keaka sailed for hours in thirty-knot winds over rough seas.

  In the beginning he did not own a harness, the vest that hooks into a boom line and relieves pressure on the arms, so he developed stamina beyond that of the others, though the tendons of his elbows swelled from the constant strain. He luxuriated in the drag of stretching muscles, a blend of pleasure and pain, a natural euphoria from the sheer physical act of conquering the sea. While still an amateur, he completed a 360, a complete flip, lifting the bow off a wave, mast upside down kissing the water, then bringing the board all the way around, landing smoothly, and trimming the sail to pick up speed in search of the next wave.

  By eighteen Keaka Kealia had grown into a rugged, handsome man, dark eyes set on a wide face, lithe and graceful in every movement. He worked part-time in a rental shop, giving lessons to the tourists, occasionally bedding down teenage girls from L.A. who were lured, yet frightened, by his hard brown body and brooding demeanor. Unlike the other beach boys, his mind was not socked in by a fog of Maui Wowie. He read books, studying the ways of his ancestors. The old Hawaiian folk songs spoke to Keaka, told him of the gods and of the spirits of the sea. He longed for that age, to gather fish from the ocean and ride above it on a board descended from the voyaging canoes of his ancestors.

  He watched with disgust as developers built condos hard by the beach. To find sanctuary from the tourists and the timeshare hucksters, he sailed nine miles across the Pailolo Channel to the island of Molokai and made a campsite in the jungle there. A century earlier, the island was deserted except for a leper colony, and Keaka, always aware of links to the past, appreciated the irony.

  He cleared an area on the slopes of the Molokai Forest Reserve and slowly built a hale, a thatched hut. He removed the bark from the timbers with a stone chisel and dried pili grass in the sun for the roof. He made water bottles and poi bowls from gourds, and he slept on a lauhala mat of woven leaves. He hunted pheasants and goats and cooked his prey over open fires. At night Keaka Kealia dreamed he was a warrior of King Kalaniopuu, and with weapons of stone, he attacked Captain Cook’s pale sailors, crushing their skulls and gutting them with sharpened sticks. Those he did not kill he drove into the sea, then watched with joy as they floundered in the surf, disappearing forever from view.

  Jake Lassiter wished he had a wet suit. There was a chill in the night air, and the black water even sounded cold slapping the rocky shore. His feet felt it first, then his chest, as spray from the shore break hit him.

  He beach-started in the shallow water that broke across the volcanic shelf and, looking down, thought he saw a human skull wedged between two rocks, reflecting the moonlight. A wave pounded the rocks, and the skull, if that’s what it was, disappeared.

  The crossing shouldn’t be that difficult, he told himself. He had made longer trips, though not at night and not in unfamiliar waters. And not with murder on his mind.

  Is that what it would be if he crept into Keaka’s camp and pounced on him under a sky lit with stars? Sure it would, he decided. First-degree, too. Premeditated and cold-blooded. No, that’s wrong. His feet were cold; his blood was hot. Hot with thoughts of Berto strung up in a swamp and Tubby pushed over a cliff. And Lila — what had Keaka done to Lila Summers, what had he made her? A thief? Yes, surely that. They were in it together in Miami, and who knows what before then. A murderer? No, he couldn’t bring himself to acknowledge that Lila had anything to do with the killings. That was all Keaka’s doing, he told himself. Then told himself again, just to make sure.

  The wind let up at sundown, just a puff by Maui standards, twelve to fifteen knots from the northeast. He could sail on a starboard tack all the way across the Pailolo Channel. From the beach at Honokahua he could see Molokai, silhouetted in the darkness, rising like a black monolith, its southern coastline a jungle devoid of lights. The night was clear and a three-quarter moon cast a milky glow on the peaking waves. Lassiter fell once getting beyond the surf line, but once was enough. Freezing now, a shivering, bone-deep cold.

  The water was choppy and the board pitched beneath him, but in a few minutes his legs were making the adjustments, knees bending, weight shifting without any message from his brain, just doing it on autopilot. At the same time, his arms were letting out the sail and raking it in, allowing the rhythms of the wind and water dictate the movements. It was peaceful here on the black sea and he wanted to enjoy it before the quiet was shattered on a d
esolate island.

  The dark monolith grew larger and Lassiter was aware of how small he was, bucking the waves on a fiberglass board, an infinitesimal speck on a vast sea. It made him think of the insignificance of what he would do, at least in the universal scheme of things. If Keaka would die, or if he would die, the moon would still pass through its phases, and the tide would still rise and fall. We are born, puny and weak, and set afloat on the waters of a small planet in a runty solar system, and if we capsize, as we surely will, there will be others, just as puny, to take our place. Everything we have created, good and bad, will fade and crumple and be lost to the winds of time. Those who mourn our departure will pass, too, so that all memories of us will die in the flicker of a cosmic eyelash. Rather than depress him, these thoughts calmed Lassiter with the knowledge that life was so fleeting, it was useless to waste precious moments in a state of fear.

  He was thinking these thoughts, wondering if he would be alive to share them with Doc Riggs, when he felt something. Felt it before he heard it.

  The water beneath him moving.

  Suddenly, an explosion.

  A deafening concussion and a wall of water that engulfed him.

  The sea rose from beneath Lassiter and hurled him into the blackness. He belly-flopped into the channel, graceful as a rhinoceros. He kicked twice and surfaced, eyes stinging, a gash on the forehead where the boom had sideswiped him. His first thought was that his board had hit some unexploded Japanese mine from World War II. But treading water, Jake Lassiter saw it, or at least part of it: the mammoth tail of a humpback whale visible forty feet above the water, the rest of the animal hidden below. Then a prehistoric shove, the tail whipped once, and the beast slipped under the sea. Another wave swamped Lassiter, and he tasted salt water, raw in his throat.

  Save the whales! My ass.

  It was the migrating season for humpback whales, and one had breached alongside of him. Lassiter was still treading water when he realized that his board wasn’t next to him. He had lost precious seconds watching the whale, and the board had drifted away. If Lassiter were ten feet above the water, he could have seen the moon glowing off the fiberglass or illuminating the sail. But he was mostly under the water, kicking his legs to keep his nose high enough to breathe. Lila’s harness was too small for his chest and pressed hard against his rib cage. It had no flotation material and the weight of the metal simply made him heavier. He was growing tired. He could swim in the direction he thought the board had drifted, but make a mistake, chase the wrong receiver, the coach would scream, and the board would be halfway to Tahiti.