Mahu Vice

by Neil S. Plakcy

  “Nope. I’ll let you know how it goes.”

  Walking back into the federal building, Ray and I saw the debris from the demonstration everywhere—crumpled flyers, crushed leis, and a lot of empty plastic water bottles. The wind had picked up, stirring the trash along the street and adding to my nerves. I was worried about the evening; Sergei was a certified fuckup, and I didn’t trust Stan LoCicero.

  I was relieved to see that Sergei was there and ready to go. He’d had a serious conversation with his sister, and he recognized that he didn’t have any other options beyond cooperation. He was also pretty familiar with the process of getting wired up. I guess he’d been in trouble enough in Alaska to know the drill.

  He and Ray went over their story a few times, getting the details straight. “Remember, we need something on the wire that shows that LoCicero knows these guys are illegal,” Frank said. “You’ve got to pin him down.”

  “Leave that to me,” Ray said.

  Sergei rode with Ray in the Highlander, and I drove the Wrangler home, then walked over to the club to join Frank in a surveillance van. Darkness was falling, but Kuhio Avenue hummed with traffic, and a young guy in a straw hat strummed a ukulele for the tourists, who dropped tips in a cup. A group of Japanese sightseers, led by a middle-aged woman waving a small rising sun flag, passed us, eagerly pointing and snapping pictures of an old Hawaiian woman in a yellow muumuu.

  A few minutes before six, Ray and Sergei came into sight, walking down Kuhio Avenue toward the Rod and Reel Club. Frank had just made a note in his record when I heard the rumble of a motorcycle in the background.

  “That’s gotta be Stan,” I said.

  The motorcycle came out of the alley alongside the club and turned onto Kuhio Avenue. The driver was a husky guy in full leather and a black helmet, but I couldn’t see anything beyond that in the dark. I couldn’t tell if he was black, white, or some shade in between. If I hadn’t been watching closely, I might not have seen the flare from the gun the motorcyclist pointed at Sergei and Ray. The bike was loud, but I thought I heard at least three shots.

  Sergei fell to the ground, and tourists scattered. A woman screamed and a Cadillac SUV blasted its horn as the biker pulled in front of him on Kuhio. Ray pulled his gun but didn’t fire. I jumped out of the van. As I slammed the door behind me, I said, “Go after him!”

  Frank’s driver pulled out onto Kuhio, nearly sideswiping a tourist couple in an open convertible, and took off after the biker.

  I dialed 911 on my cell phone and gave our information to the dispatcher as I ran to Sergei, who was lying on the sidewalk clutching his side. Ray was already leaning over him. “Too many tourists and cars to get a clean shot,” he said to me.

  “Where were you shot?” I asked Sergei, leaning down next to Ray.

  “My side. It hurts.”

  “I called an ambulance, brah,” I said. “You’ll be okay.”

  “You said you’d look out for me, Kimo.” He winced from the pain.

  I grabbed his hand and squeezed. “I will.” I stood up and stepped away, dialing Haoa’s house, and when my niece Ashley answered I said, “I need to talk to your mom. Right away.”

  “I’m on a call, Uncle Kimo.”

  “Get off it, then. This is an emergency, and I need your Mom.”

  My ear reverberated as she slammed the phone down onto some hard surface, and then I heard her call for Tatiana. “What is it?” Tatiana said, when she answered. “Is everything okay?”

  Ray pulled off his shirt and tore it into strips, trying to staunch the bleeding from Sergei’s stomach.

  “Sergei’s been shot.” I handed him the phone.

  “I’m sorry, sis,” he panted. “I screwed up.”

  Squatting there on the sidewalk next to Sergei, I could hear Tatiana through the phone. “Don’t you dare die on me, Sergei. Don’t you dare.”

  People clustered around us, and I motioned to them to back away. “Police. Everything’s under control.”

  The ambulance siren grew. Ray was sweating as he leaned over Sergei, shirtless, applying pressure to the gunshot wound. “Don’t hate me, sis,” Sergei rasped. “I didn’t meant to hurt you or Howie.”

  Tatiana was crying when I took the phone from Sergei. The ambulance pulled up and a couple of EMTs jumped out. A patrol car arrived, sirens blasting, and a uniform from the Waikiki station started cordoning off the area.

  “The ambulance is here, Tatiana,” I said. “I’ll go with Sergei to Queen’s.”

  “I’ll be there as soon as I can,” she said.

  The EMTs leaned down to where Sergei lay. One took his vital signs while the other took over from Ray, who leaned back, breathing heavily.

  My cell rang and I learned that Frank O’Connor’s driver had lost the motorcyclist in the crowded streets, unable to get a license plate number. Though I thought the assailant was Stan LoCicero, we couldn’t be certain of anything. It could have been either a man or a woman under all that leather, and the bike could have been anything from a Kawasaki to a Triumph.

  “Had to be LoCicero, though,” Frank said. “He’s the only one who knew about the meeting.”

  “Unless he told somebody else, or hired somebody,” I said.

  We promised to compare notes in the morning.

  Within a couple of minutes, the EMTs had Sergei bandaged up and loaded into the ambulance. “I’ll go with him,” I said to Ray. “You all right?”

  “Yeah. Just shook up.”

  “Go home and let Julie pamper you. I’ll call you from the hospital.”

  The ambulance ride was bumpy, and the driver had to swerve a couple of times to get around clueless drivers who didn’t get out of the way.

  “It hurts, Kimo,” Sergei moaned.

  I looked at the female EMT.

  She shook her head. “Can’t give him anything for the pain till we get him into a bed and stabilized.”

  “Hold on, Sergei.” I squeezed his hand. “It’s gonna get better. I promise.”

  When the ambulance pulled in at Queen’s, the crew loaded Sergei onto a gurney and wheeled him away. I went into the waiting room.

  Only a few minutes later, Mike burst in. “I was monitoring the police band. I heard somebody got shot and I was worried it was you.”

  “I’m okay.” We hugged in the waiting room and I explained about Sergei. As I was finishing, Haoa and Tatiana arrived and I had to through the whole thing again.

  “I shouldn’t have pressured him to go to that meeting,” Tatiana said. “He said he was scared.”

  “He’s a tough guy,” I said, wrapping my arm around her. “I’m sure he’s going to pull through.”

  They took Sergei up to the operating room and we all moved to the waiting room there. Eventually the doctor came out and told us that though Sergei had lost a lot of blood, they were able to stabilize him then remove the bullet and close up the entry wound.

  “I want to wait here for him,” Tatiana said. “I can’t believe it. I was supposed to look after him.”

  “He’s a grown man, Tatiana,” I said. “You can’t look after him forever.”

  “Of course I can. He’s my brother.”

  I knew how she felt. My brothers had looked after me plenty.

  Mike drove me over to the Rod and Reel Club, parking his truck in the alley behind the club. Ray was still there, standing under a streetlight with Julie. He was wearing a clean shirt and talking to Lieutenant Sampson. Tourists moved past us, and I could hear the back beat coming from the club. Life went on in Waikiki. It was hot and humid, and a mosquito kept buzzing around my head.

  “You okay, brah?” I asked him as Mike and I walked up.

  “Yeah. How’s Sergei?”

  “He’ll be all right.”

  I turned to Lieutenant Sampson. “You remember Mike Riccardi, from HFD? He’s been working the arson side of the investigation.”

  Sampson raised a single eyebrow but didn’t comment on Mike’s presence. “I don’t like it when anyon
e takes pot shots at my people,” he said. “Let’s meet tomorrow morning and recap where you are on this. Let’s get the ADA involved, too. We’ll see if we’ve got enough evidence to get a search warrant for the gun. If we can get a ballistics match we’ll have something to hold this guy on.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m going to make it my personal mission to arrest Stan LoCicero and make sure he goes to jail for a long, long time.”

  Sampson looked at his watch. “I’ve got to roll. Call me if you need anything.” He strode away down the street, and I turned to Ray and Julie.

  “You guys want to get a drink?” I asked, only too late realizing that was the wrong thing to say around Mike.

  Ray shook his head. “Julie and I are going to have dinner,” he said, holding her around the waist. “I’ll be okay.”

  “Any chance that could have been Treasure Chen on the bike?” I asked.

  Ray shook his head. “I was talking to Treasure last night at dinner. She told me she had a boyfriend who rode a bike when she was in high school and she hated it. Always afraid she was going to fall off. Could it have been Richard Hu?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I suppose.”

  Ray and Julie left, and Mike and I went to talk to Larry Solas, the crime scene tech, who was just finishing up. “I recovered two bullets from the tree over there. I’ll swing past the hospital on my way back to the lab and pick up the bullet they pulled out of your victim. I’m on duty till midnight. I’ll see if I can get you anything on ballistics.”

  “Thanks, brah.”

  As Larry packed up his big arc lights, the uniform on duty pulled up the plastic cones and let the traffic flow on Kuhio again.

  “You want some dinner?” I asked Mike.

  “Sure. But what do you say we pick up a pizza and take it to my place?”

  A dozen things flew through my head at once. Mike liked his pizza with ham and pineapple. He had a down comforter on his bed that was like resting on clouds. My Wrangler was safe in its parking space at my apartment, but if I stayed the night with Mike he’d have to drop me at home on his way to work. I didn’t have any condoms on me, but I hoped Mike had some.

  Had it been Stan LoCicero on the bike? Richard Hu? We didn’t have anything on Stan. There was no way a judge was going to give us a warrant on so little evidence.

  More than anything else, I wanted to lie in Mike’s arms.

  “Tomorrow’s going to be a hell of a day,” I said, linking my arm in his. “Let’s head for your truck, Romeo.”

  WHERE THERE’S SMOKE

  As I expected, Mike wanted a large pizza with ham and pineapple. “It was the first meal we ate after we moved here,” he said, while we were waiting at a little pizza place just down the hill from his house in Aiea. “My parents had been talking up Hawai’i to me for a long time, and when we saw there was a Hawaiian pizza on the menu we had to order it.”

  I lounged against the counter, under a faded poster of Mt. Vesuvius. Dean Martin was singing “That’s Amore,” and I was starting to relax. “You liked it?”

  He nodded. “I’d been worried that Hawai’i would be totally different from New York. I knew we were moving here so my mom would feel more comfortable, and I was worried that everybody would look like her, that they’d all speak Korean or something. And I wouldn’t fit in.”

  The counter clerk called our number, and Mike paid for the pie and a six-pack of garlic rolls. “So we went out for pizza after we unpacked our boxes,” he said, while he waited for his change. “And I liked the mix of ham and pineapple, of sweet and savory. The next day, I met this girl next door, and her mom was Japanese and her dad was white. She even kind of looked like me.”

  “I always felt like I fit in,” I said, as we walked back to his truck. “And then I went to college in California, and there I was exotic and different. It was weird. I’d look around, and everybody was white, or black, or Japanese, or Chinese. There were no in-betweens, like me. I’d use a Hawaiian word, or talk about eating Spam musubi or something, and people would look at me like I was from another planet.”

  “I felt the same way,” he said. “I used to go back to Long Island for summers and holidays, to stay with my dad’s parents, and when it was time for college I figured I’d go there. But it didn’t feel like home anymore. I’d go into this Korean neighborhood in Queens sometimes, just to hear people talking, but they’d look at me like they couldn’t quite figure out what I was.”

  It was like old times, hanging out with Mike, talking, eating pizza, and drinking this gourmet root beer he’d found somewhere, a local Hawaiian brand with a hula dancer on the bottle. We sat at his kitchen table eating slices and licking our fingers, and I thought of all the time we’d missed, days and months we could have spent in each other’s company.

  He still liked to rip all the soft dough out of the crust, then scoop bits of ham and pineapple into the hollows. And as I remembered, he’d get bits of pizza in his mustache and then snake his tongue out to grab them. It was gross, but endearing.

  While we were cleaning up, he bumped into me, and when I turned toward him he wrapped his arms around me. We started to kiss and rub our bodies against each other, and within a short time we were in his bedroom. The comforter on his bed felt just as good as I’d remembered, and so did his body against mine, his tongue in my mouth, and before long, his dick in my ass.

  We were slumped next to each other in the afterglow of the kind of sex that makes your eyes roll back in your head when Mike started sniffing. “You smell that?” he asked.

  “What? I showered this morning, but it was a long time ago.”

  “Not you. Smells like gasoline.”

  He jumped off the bed, pulled on a pair of shorts, and ran from the room. I followed, and as I went toward the living room I smelled what he had—gasoline, and above it, smoke.

  He grabbed a fire extinguisher from the kitchen and pushed through the screen door to the yard. Over his shoulder, I could see flames licking at the back wall of the garage. “Call 911,” he yelled.

  I did, for the second time that night. I gave the dispatcher the address and said it was the residence of a firefighter, then I went outside to help.

  If you’re going to have a fire at your house, it’s best to have a trained fireman there with you. Mike knew just what to do, spraying the flames with the extinguisher, and directing me to get the hose and wet down the yard.

  There was little in the back that was flammable; all the landscaping was away from the house and there wasn’t any of the usual junk lying around, as you’d find in my parents’ yard. No broken-down furniture, wooden trellis, or anything else that might catch fire.

  “Get my parents out,” Mike yelled, as he sprayed the extinguisher.

  The flames were moving along the back wall in the direction of his parents’ half, so I ran around to the front, barefoot, wearing only my shorts, and banged on their door. It was just after midnight, and from the lack of light I was sure his parents were asleep. How long would it take me to rouse them? I looked around for a window I could break, and finding none, pounded on the door again.

  His father answered, wearing a nightshirt imprinted with Japanese characters, and I had a feeling the look of distaste on his face had to do with both my presence, and my attire. “Get out,” I said. “Mike’s side of the house is on fire.”

  He turned into the house and began yelling for his wife, disappearing inside. I wasn’t sure if I should wait to see if they needed help evacuating, or return to Mike. The arrival of the first fire engine told me I didn’t have to do either, and I stepped back to let the professionals do their job.

  Clouds covered the moon, but the truck’s headlights and the flames lit up the area like daytime. The firemen hustled Mike out of the way and I met up with him alongside the house, where we had a view of the back but were out of the way.

  “What the fuck?” he said. “Somebody tried to burn my house down.”

  He was agitated, yelling
and jumping up and down. I tried to grab his arm, but he shook me off. We were both drenched in sweat, but the adrenaline was running out, and I just gave up and leaned back against a tree.

  “Had to be Stan LoCicero,” I said, when he’d calmed down. “Unless you’ve got some other case going?”

  “Not one where they’d try to burn me out. Damn, we’ve got to catch this bastard.”

  I wondered if Stan was still around, if he’d found some vantage point to watch the fire and make sure he’d been successful. “He must have come back to the Rod and Reel Club after the shooting and heard me and Lieutenant Sampson talk about nailing him. I bet he thought he could get me out of the picture.”

  Mike’s parents came around the corner then. His father had pulled on a long raincoat, and his bare calves made him look like a flasher. I couldn’t laugh, though. He wore plastic rubber slippas, and his gray-and-black hair was tousled.

  His wife, whom I’d only seen previously in her nurse’s uniform, was wrapped in an elaborate embroidered dressing gown. She wore fuzzy pink slippers and her short dark hair hung sleekly around her face.

  “It’s okay,” Mike said, going over to hug them. “We caught the fire before it got to your side.” By then, the firefighters had extinguished the flames, but were hosing everything down just to be sure. Mike led his parents down to the street where they could talk privately, and I followed just behind.

  “What happened, Michael?” his father asked.

  With an utterly straight face, Mike said, “I’ll have to investigate the source and conditions of the fire before I can make any conclusions.”

  His father looked from him to me. I walked over to them. “I’m afraid this might be my fault.”

  “Kimo,” Mike said.

  “I’m not surprised,” Dr. Riccardi said. “Since you came into my son’s life, detective, we’ve seen nothing but trouble. You break his heart, turn him into an alcoholic, now you burn down our house?”

  “Dominic,” Mike’s mother said. She put her hand on his arm.

  “No, Soon-O, these things need to be said. I’m tired of watching Michael throw his life away.”