Only the youngest child wasn’t wearing handcuffs. A girl of about five. Chris understood it, then. The man had burst through the door and put the gun on the little girl’s head. After gathering the family in the living room, he’d made the little girl cuff them. Then he’d have told her how to wrap the belt twice around her father’s ankles and buckle it, before shoving her on the couch. He’d have shot her first. Probably the older boy next. Then he took his time with Mike’s wife, strangling her slowly while he asked the questions.
Why didn’t Mike just fucking talk?
On the television, Donald Duck was trying to catch fish on a mountain lake, but he was having trouble with an outboard motor and was throwing a fit. Mike’s youngest daughter succumbed to gravity and post-mortem contractions. She slumped over and fell off the couch, landing in a fetal position on the floor.
“Let’s get out of here,” Julissa said.
He looked at her and nodded. They retreated from the house the way they’d come, dashing across the backyard and into the trees. They left the back door unlocked and open. Chris paused just long enough to use his T-shirt to wipe the door knob, which was the only part of the house he’d touched.
“You touch anything inside?” Chris asked Julissa when they were back in the forest. She was pale and shaking. She’d put her gun back into her purse, though. Chris tucked his back into his waistband and pulled his shirt over it.
“I didn’t,” she said.
They came out of the forest and back onto the path. They didn’t speak again until they were in Chris’s car, winding down the switchbacks of Pupukea Road.
“What about Aaron?” Julissa said.
“I know.”
Chris handed her his cell phone and she tried calling. The call went straight to voicemail. Chris took a right at the traffic light and accelerated down Kamehameha. Julissa left another voicemail message for Westfield and then hung up. She tried to hand Chris his phone but her hand was shaking and she dropped it in the foot well.
“You gonna be okay?” Chris asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “Give me a minute.”
They drove in silence, racing past Sunset Beach, which was empty on this surfless summer day.
“I need a pay phone,” Chris said. “Mike’s got three other kids. I need to call 9-1-1. The cops gotta be there before the older kids get home.”
They pulled into a gas station in Kahuku. There was a pay phone next to the newspaper stand out front. He dialed 9-1-1 and waited for the operator to answer.
“9-1-1 emergency, how can I help you?” the woman said.
“You need to send some squad cars up Pupukea Road. My buddy and I were hiking back there and when we came through the gate next to the Boy Scout camp, we heard shots from the house across the street. 2611 Pupukea. There were screams too.”
“Sir, can you tell me your name?”
“It was about ten minutes ago. I found the first pay phone I could. I was too scared to go up to the house. It says Nakamura on the mail box. You gotta send someone right now. They were screaming. The kids were screaming.”
He hung up the phone and went back to the car. Mike had been his only friend for the last six years. But he’d always kept Mike at arm’s length and never let him in. Maybe he’d kept Mike at bay for years because he was jealous. Mike had a wife and a houseful of kids and family all over the island. Chris had his fine house by the bay and nothing but anger to fill it with. And now Mike and his family were just a mess for someone to clean up. A report to go in a file that might be erased later. He shut his door and started the engine.
“They’re coming?” Julissa asked.
“Yeah.”
He put the car in gear and they got back onto Kamehameha Highway.
“You find anything in his car when you drove it?”
“I forgot,” he said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the envelope with the rental contract. “He had this.”
He handed it to her and kept his eyes on the road. Julissa opened it and read it.
“He rented the car under the name Alex Fairfield. Fake, I guess. He only rented it for two days.” She flipped through the papers and a smaller strip sifted out and fell into her lap. She picked it up and studied it.
“Oh shit, Chris.”
“What?”
“This is a baggage claim receipt,” she said. She held it up and Chris glanced at it. There were three stubs stapled to what looked like the flap of an airline ticket envelope.
“Yeah?”
“There’re three names. Fairfield, Jackson and Caryl. Chris—he came with two friends, and they each checked a bag.”
“Shit.”
Julissa turned to look through the rear window. There were no cars following.
“Christ. Alex Fairfield came for you. Jackson or Caryl went to Mike. The other one’s probably waiting in my room at the Hyatt.”
“Seems likely.”
“What do we do?”
Chris drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and accelerated through a straightaway. He was doing eighty-five when they passed a roadside stand selling pineapples and Kahuku sweet corn.
“We need to get off Oahu. Now.”
“We’re going to the airport?”
“Too dangerous. Even if we got there as fast as we could, we couldn’t hope to get on a plane for at least three hours. After they figure out we killed their third man, they’ll assume we’re running. There’ve only got two security checks at the airport. One guy walking between the lines is all it’d take to spot us. If they don’t kill us in the airport, all they’d have to do is see what flight we board and make a phone call. Plus, there’s a body in my shed and the gardeners will find it in the next day or two if I don’t take care of it.”
“Where’s that leave us?”
“We’ll go back to my place and leave Oahu in the next half hour—on my boat.”
“Okay,” Julissa said. “But hurry. Because the other obvious thing they might do, when Alex Fairfield doesn’t check in, is come to your house.”
“I know.”
Chris pulled into the left lane to pass a VW van that was puttering along at thirty-five miles an hour.
“There a faster way to your house?”
“No.”
They were driving past shrimp farms; a little later they passed the Mormon enclave at Laie. Then they were racing next to the ocean, passing through villages at seventy miles an hour. Hauula, Punaluu. Chris slowed when they passed bridges over streams because there were children lined on the rails fishing for tilapia in the mangrove roots. They rounded the steep bends at Kahana Bay and Chris slowed to the speed limit when he saw a police cruiser pulling out of the Crouching Lion Inn. It passed him going the other direction and did not turn around to give chase. He hoped it was heading to Mike’s house.
“Not much farther. Twenty minutes.” He took his eyes off the road long enough to look at her. She was focused again, not scared. He liked the way she measured every situation. When the time came, he could count on her. She was holding her cell phone.
“That thing get internet?”
“This?” She held up the phone. “Yeah.”
“Try logging in to a travel site, see what kind of flights we can get from the other islands.”
“Which island?”
“We got overseas and mainland flights from Kona on the Big Island, from Maui and from Kauai. We could sail to any of those islands in under twenty-four hours.”
“What’s the fastest island to sail to?”
“Fastest is Molokai. Thirty-seven miles that way.” He pointed towards the ocean. “No overseas flights, but we could maybe catch a single engine plane to Maui or the Big Island from there. It might take five hours to get to Molokai. We could cut that to three and a half or four if the wind is good and we run the engine full bore.”
She looked at her watch, then back at her phone.
“If we get to your house in twenty minutes and we don’t take longer than thirty
minutes getting ready, could we make Molokai by seven?”
Chris thought about it. It’d be a race, but Sailfish was a fast boat.
“Yeah. We could make it to the harbor by seven. Tack on another thirty minutes to the airport.”
“There’s a flight from Molokai to Kona at eight thirty. Should I book it?”
“Wait’ll we get to my house. See which way the wind’s blowing.”
“Okay.”
She bent back to her phone and thirty seconds later gave out a cry that made Chris swerve to the side of the road and hit the brakes.
“What is it?”
“Aaron—he’s alive. He emailed us and he’s okay.” She explained the email to him.
He pulled back into his lane and sped up again. Even the good news about Westfield didn’t dull his urgency to get off the island. Or take away the image of Mike and his family, the youngest daughter slumping off the chair.
“He said they’re tracking our credit cards?”
“Yeah,” Julissa said.
“How much can you find out doing that?”
“Depends on their level of access. If they traced him to the hotel, they must know at least where he’s making purchases. He must’ve bought a meal in the restaurant, since the room was on your card.”
“Would they know what he’s buying, or just where he’s buying it?”
“Both.”
“Hold off buying the plane tickets. If they trace our ticket purchases, they’ll have someone waiting by the time we get off the plane, wherever we end up.”
Julissa put down her phone and looked out the window.
“Shit. I didn’t even think of that. You got a way around that?”
“Yeah. I’ll show you when we get on the boat.”
“I’ll email Aaron, let him know what’s up,” she said. “But I’ll keep it vague. Jesus. For all we know, they’ve got our emails hacked too.”
“Okay.”
Chris concentrated on driving. He had never liked speeding, but he was doing a decent job of it today. He passed a pickup truck stuffed full of local teenagers and gunned the engine until they reached the macadamia nut farm opposite Chinaman’s Hat on Kaneohe Bay. Then he slowed to thirty-five.
“Let’s keep a lookout for rental cars.”
Julissa dropped her phone in her purse and started watching. They reached his driveway without seeing any cars at all.
“I’ll pass my drive and go a quarter mile in the other direction, in case they parked that way.”
“Good idea.”
They made the check down the road south of Chris’s house, and when they didn’t see anything, Chris did a quick U-turn. As they rolled down the driveway, Chris saw Julissa’s hand go into her purse. Holding her Sig Sauer, likely.
“I’ll park in front of the door and we’ll go straight inside. Anyone’s been monkeying with the house I’ll know right away from the security panel.”
“Okay.”
“If everything’s okay, I’ll grab my ID, a couple other things. We’ll take the body out of the gardening shed, get on the dingy and go to the boat.”
“How can I help?”
“Get on the phone and tell your mom and your dad to go away for a while. Camping in Wyoming, something like that—whatever, as long as it’s far from Texas and no one knows about it. Tell them to take a shitload of cash and not use their credit cards. If we get away, if Westfield gets away, your family is the only leverage he’ll have. I don’t have anyone left. Neither does Westfield.”
He didn’t say the last part: Mike’s gone. That wasn’t real quite yet.
He watched Julissa nod.
He could tell from the flick of her eyes and the turn of her mouth she hadn’t thought of that problem.
“Jesus, this gets worse and worse,” she said.
“I know. We’re all in, now. He’s not going to give us any choice.”
He killed the engine. They both got out of the car and dashed for the front door. As he worked the security code, he felt Julissa press her back against his. He knew she’d taken her gun from her purse and was holding it ready, waiting for whomever or whatever was out there.
Inside, Chris went to the security panel in the hallway. He hit the Report button and the electronic voice calmly said, “No incidents since last command to arm.”
Julissa was looking at him.
“No one tried to get in. I can’t say for sure no one’s watching.”
She looked out the kitchen windows.
“I’ll hurry,” he said. “Just call your folks.”
Julissa nodded and sat on a stool by the kitchen counter. She put her Sig Sauer on the countertop and got out her phone. Chris left her there and ran up the stairs to his study. The safe was built into the floor under the desk. He fell to his knees, lifted the floor panel, and dialed the combination. There were a lot of documents in the safe, but the two things he wanted were both in padded mailing envelopes at the top. The first was a collection of papers and documents that had belonged to Cheryl. The second was a package he’d put together in contemplation of a day like today. It had a passport, ten thousand dollars in cash, two credit cards, and an Iridium satellite phone.
When he came downstairs, Julissa was hanging up.
“They’ll go?”
“I didn’t let them say no. They’ll drive to San Antonio tonight, then Santa Fe tomorrow. They’ve got a friend they can stay with until I call to explain more.”
“You ready?”
She tossed her purse over her shoulder and grabbed her gun.
They went out the front door and Chris locked his house. Then they went to the garden shed. Crossing the lawn, Chris felt how exposed they were. One of the other two men could be in the trees, hiding in the undergrowth or in one of the deep stands of ginger. They moved quickly and Chris kept himself between Julissa and the trees.
The fish bag was where he’d left it. They loaded it into the gardener’s wheelbarrow, one of them on each end of the bag. It hung off the front of the wheelbarrow but didn’t tip out. Chris pushed it from the shed, and led them across the lawn to the dock. Then they dropped the body into the dinghy. The little boat listed enough to take on a few gallons of water, but Chris jumped in quickly to right it. Julissa climbed in after him and sat on the gunwale, looking at the water.
“At least we don’t have far to row,” she said.
“You get seasick?”
“Don’t know. I’ve never sailed.”
He rowed until they reached the transom of the sailboat where he tied the dinghy’s painter line to a cleat at the swim platform. He stepped aboard and held his hand out to help Julissa.
“Why aren’t they here already? That’s what I don’t understand,” she said.
“Westfield said they were tracking us with credit cards. I just used my card for the beers at the Hyatt. My card, your hotel. Maybe they put two and two together, think we’re both in Waikiki.”
Julissa took his hand and stepped to the boat’s swim platform. They pulled the dinghy alongside and, lifting together, brought the fish bag aboard. Chris used a length of rope and a bowline knot to secure the bag’s nylon handles to the boat. Then he hoisted the dinghy to its davits.
In less than ten minutes, they were underway. Chris had not unfurled the sails yet; Julissa was steering the boat between the channel buoys under engine power.
He slid back the companionway hatch and went down the stairs into the salon. The things he’d brought from his house safe were in his pockets; he pulled them out and put them in a drawer in the galley, except for the new satellite phone, which he took out of the envelope and put back into his pocket. He opened the envelope with Cheryl’s old documents and looked at the contents. He never thought he was keeping them for any useful purpose. Just something to take from the safe at night after he’d had a couple glasses of whiskey, so he could turn her old documents over in his hands, feeling their edges, the places she touched. He put the envelope into the drawer and slid it sh
ut, then climbed the steps back into the cockpit.
“You okay?” Chris asked.
“Yeah.”
Chris came behind her and looked at the row of instruments behind the wheel. The wind was blowing steady at twenty knots and they’d already had a gust up to thirty. Looking ahead of the bow, out in the channel between Oahu and Molokai, he could see white caps on the waves.
“It’ll be a wet ride once we get out there and get the sails up.”
Julissa nodded. For now, they were still in the ship channel leading out of Kaneohe Bay. The water around them was calm and clear.
Julissa pointed at one of the flat-screen displays behind the wheel.
“What’s that?”
“AIS—an automatic identification system for shipping. The transceiver shares with the VHF antenna. It broadcasts the ship’s name, course and speed and picks up the same from any ship with the same system. It’s a good way to avoid collisions.”
“That’s what I thought,” she said. “Can we turn it off?”
“Why?”
“Maybe we shouldn’t be broadcasting our name and position for the whole world on this trip.”
“Shit, you’re right. Turn that off.”
“The transceiver won’t keep broadcasting if I just kill it with this switch?”
“No.”
They were just one stupid mistake from getting themselves killed. How many others would he make? Everyone on Chevalier’s email was being hunted down and murdered, and who had given Chevalier the list of names and email addresses in the first place? Now that Mike and his family were gone. Mike, who hadn’t even blinked when Chris asked him to retire from HPD and help him track Cheryl’s killer. Who’d sat on this boat with him and helped him map a path to revenge. Whose kids called him Mr. Chris and whose wife sometimes left home-cooked dinners on his doorstep.
He blinked out of it. Now wasn’t the time for this.
“When we get to the mouth of the channel, hold this course, dead to windward. I’ll raise the sails and then we’ll fall off the wind to the southeast. That’ll give us a heading straight to Molokai and we won’t have to tack.”
Julissa nodded.
“Weather’s okay for this?”
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