Moonlight Cocktail
Page 1
Moonlight Cocktail
A Jack Sullivan Novel
William Cassidy
Discus Books
Alexandria, Virginia
Copyright © 2019 by William Cassidy
Published in 2019 by Discus Books. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-1-7337346-2-2 (paperback)
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
EPILOGUE
PROLOGUE
Nervously skimming the old books, trying to avoid being noticed by others in the library, the Reader searched through descriptions of ancient Hawaiian rites. Enough noise was generated by the rattling pages that those at nearby tables looked up from their own books and scowled. The Reader immediately stopped and stared at the open pages, waited five minutes, then began to turn them again, slowly this time.
After four hours, the Reader found the object of the search, opened a notebook, and began writing with a hand that shook so violently the words were barely legible. Looking around, convinced that others were watching, the Reader got up and left the library.
All that remained now was to ask the right questions of the right person. It would be easy now. With a local telephone book, the search could begin. Thereafter, it would only be a matter of waiting for the right opportunity.
The Reader left the library, signing out more quickly than signing in, relieved to be away from the Bishop Museum’s reading room and the skeptical eyes of legitimate researchers. The Honolulu phone book listed several Herbal Medicine practitioners who might know where to find what the Reader was looking for.
The next day, concocting a phony medical problem as the reason for the calls, the Reader asked each practitioner whether the object of the search could be found on Oahu. After speaking to one who knew its location, the Reader purchased the necessary tools to remove it from the field where it grew wild — and toxic enough to kill a man.
CHAPTER ONE
The pitch of the airliner’s engines suddenly deepened as they slowed down over the Central Pacific Ocean, one hundred miles east of the Hawaiian Islands. As Jack Sullivan awakened, the pilot announced their descent into Honolulu International Airport; they would arrive in twenty minutes. Jack raised the window screen and gazed down at the Pacific, fifteen thousand feet below.
Whitecaps splashed the ocean’s deep blue surface like stars lighting up a night sky. Soon the color of the sea would lighten from the cobalt blue of the deep Pacific to royal blue when the islands came into view and then to aquamarine as the aircraft flew over the reefs surrounding Oahu. But these changes would not be gradual. There is no continental shelf extending far into the Pacific from the Hawaiian Islands. These volcanic islands rise abruptly out of the ocean, and the surrounding sea turns dark a mere two miles offshore.
Jack was returning from meetings in San Francisco with coffee brokers who were interested in buying the Kona coffee beans grown on his plantation on the Big Island of Hawaii. He was eager to get back to Honolulu, where he and Katherine lived most of the week. Ten minutes later, the Hawaiian Islands appeared on the left side of the aircraft; soon Jack could make out Pearl Harbor, the Waikiki Beach hotels, and Diamond Head crater on the southwest side of the island of Oahu. As the plane touched down, Jack bundled his newspapers and magazines, jammed them into his briefcase, and grabbed his cell phone. It was just after six in the morning, but he wanted to hear his wife’s voice.
“Hello”, Katherine’s sleepy voice responded after the second ring.
“I’m home, baby. Want to have breakfast with Hawaii’s newest coffee farmer?”
“I’d love to but it has to be quick. I have a very good customer coming into my shop at seven-thirty to pick up a dress before her plane leaves for Tokyo.”
“That’s all right. I’ll go down to the Club after breakfast and work out to make up for the two days I spent sitting on my ass in the City of Saint Francis. See you in twenty minutes.”
The airport wasn’t crowded, and Jack made good time getting to the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Waikiki. Katherine was waiting at the door of their suite wearing a floral sundress and high heels, her blond hair pulled back in a pony tail with a fresh gardenia set in the band.
“Welcome home, hubby,” Katherine exclaimed with a smile.
I missed you, baby,” Jack replied as he embraced her. “Very nice dress,” he said as his eyes took in his young wife.
“Well, thank you, Jack. We can only hope that my customers like it too. It’s my latest design, and they can have one too, for the right price,” Katherine said as she led Jack out to their lanai.
After another long embrace, they sat down to papaya juice and coffee. Jack regaled his wife with tales of his negotiations with the coffee brokers in San Francisco, and Katherine responded with stories of the various characters who had visited her dress shop while Jack was gone.
Suddenly she gasped. “Jack, it’s seven-fifteen, I’ve got to run. Let’s do something fun tonight,” she called as she dashed out the door.
“I promise. I’ll call you as soon as I make a plan.”
Jack walked to the kitchen phone, called the concierge, and asked for his car to be brought up to the front entrance of the hotel.
Ten minutes later, he was in his blue Jeep Wrangler, zigzagging from the hotel’s driveway to Kalakaua Avenue, the main street along Waikiki Beach. He drove east toward Diamond Head, past the Moana Surfrider Hotel and then the statue of Duke Kahanamoku, the father of modern surfing, in front of Kuhio Beach.
Jack always enjoyed the ten-minute ride from the Royal Hawaiian to Diamond Head. He had first driven this stretch of Kalakaua Avenue twenty years earlier when he was a Naval Officer serving on a Destroyer based at Pearl Harbor and he still got a kick out of it.
Jack was on his way to the Diamond Head Canoe Club where, for the last two months, he’d been working out every other day by paddling his one-man outrigger canoe along the several-mile length of Waikiki Beach. He smiled with satisfaction as he passed Queen Kapiolani Park on his left. It was two miles around the park, and he could run around it twice in 36 minutes. Not bad for a forty-five year old guy.
Jack could already feel the sun beginning to warm his face as he passed the World War I Memorial Natatorium on the beach to his right. The tradewinds out of the northeast were gentle, and the Pacific Ocean looked calm when he passed the New Otani Hotel, located on
the site where, local legend has it, Robert Louis Stevenson penned Treasure Island under a hau tree. Farther along, just past the entrance to the Surf Hotel on the eastern end of Waikiki, Jack turned into the driveway of the Diamond Head Canoe Club. A two-level building with gray coral stone walls outside and koa and mahogany inside, it was open to the elements on two sides and reminded Jack of houses designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. His favorite room was the Lanai, with its roof formed by the branches of hau trees that laced their way through an overhead trellis.
The Club sat on the beach at the foot of the Diamond Head crater, two miles west of the Diamond Head Lighthouse. Jack had taken up paddling shortly after he was admitted to the Diamond Head. It reminded him of the old days in yacht clubs on the east coast where he had grown up, clubs you joined primarily to race sailboats and drink and gossip at the bar. But here the drinks were usually Mai Tai’s rather than Martini’s. To correct this imbalance, Jack had introduced his friends at the Diamond Head to the special Martini he had concocted and named the “Wiki Wiki,” which means speedy in Hawaiian. It called for two shots of Tito’s Vodka to be shaken thoroughly in an ice-filled cocktail shaker and then poured into a chilled Martini glass. Instead of vermouth, one capful of Tanqueray Gin was then poured on top of the ice shavings that floated on the vodka, followed by a twist of lemon and olives on the side. Jack told his friends that this crystal clear libation instantly improved his personality, and they unanimously agreed. It rapidly improved theirs as well.
Jack waved to the Club Manager, Noa Watson, as he walked through the Club’s lobby to the Men’s Locker Room. Noa returned the wave and asked him to stop by after he finished paddling. Jack then heard a familiar voice booming from the direction of the scale at the far corner of the locker room. The greeting had been launched from the hawk-like face that topped a powerful six-foot frame and peered out at the world from beneath a bald pate, exultant in the confirmation that, even after forty years, his weight remained within five pounds of his college days at the University of Southern California. The voice was that of Gordon Grant - local real estate magnate, President of the Diamond Head Canoe Club, Navy veteran, and Jack’s good friend and paddling coach.
“Sullivan, you’re not here to practice paddling so you can compete with me, are you?” Grant barked, barely able to conceal the smile on his face. “That would be ludicrous and embarrassing if it got out to the Club. It could even affect your standing among members. No, I’m sure you’re here to take a steam or a sauna followed by a nice warm shower. Isn’t that what east coast lawyers do at athletic clubs? Take ‘executive workouts’?”
“Grant, you are completely full of shit. How does your wife put up with you?”
“Put up with me? She adores me! You haven’t yet learned the mystery of these islands, have you Sullivan? Well, as with everything else since you arrived in this paradise six months ago, I will have to teach you.”
“Thank you, Professor,” Jack said with a smile.
“You’re welcome,” Grant nodded in mock seriousness. “Now, how far are you paddling this morning?”
“I thought I’d go down to the Ala Wai Boat Harbor and back. You know, a relaxing two-hour cruise along Waikiki.”
“Excellent!” Grant pronounced. “I just did that myself. Of course, I got up earlier than you did and now I’m ready to start the capitalist phase of my day.”
“My turn comes later, Gordo. I just got in from the mainland,” Jack called as he left the locker room and walked toward the storage racks where he kept his canoe.
“Hey Jack,” Grant called, “the Diva and I want to have dinner with you and Katherine this week. Georgia reminded me that your wife keeps beating me at Dominoes, so now I’ve got to show her I’ve just been going easy on Katherine because you guys are new to Hawaii.”
“We’d love to, but, if my recollection serves me correctly, my wife has been routinely kicking your ass at Five Up fair and square,” Jack laughed as he headed toward the beach with his canoe.
The Pacific could not have been more inviting. There was barely a ripple on the surface, even at the reef thirty yards offshore. Jack slid his white carbon fiber canoe into the water, pushed it out a few yards beyond the wavelets that lapped at the shore, and jumped on board, straddling it until he gained his balance. Unlike a traditional outrigger canoe, you sat on this canoe rather than in it, almost like sitting on top of a surfboard. Typical of the one-man canoes raced at the Club, Jack’s canoe was twenty-three feet long, and there was an area two-thirds of the way back shaped like a scallop that served as the seat. He brought his long legs, one at a time, on board the main hull and extended them until his feet rested on the pedals that steered the canoe, dipped his black paddle into the Pacific and took long slow strokes on the left side of the main hull, through the azure water that passed under the canoe and the aluminum outriggers connecting that hull to a smaller hull called an ama. His left foot nudged the pedal to turn the canoe slightly left toward the opening in the reef that protected the beach shared by the Diamond Head Canoe Club and the Surf Hotel. As he reached forward with his shoulders and arms to extend the paddle, he felt the canoe begin to move through the water swiftly, more like a glider in flight than a boat.
On Jack’s right, a black rock jetty extended twenty-five yards from the beach. As he reached the end of the jetty, he looked to his left and spotted the orange windsock on top of the black stake thirty feet away. The windsock and the seaward tip of the jetty marked either side of a break in the reef that allowed canoes to slip through to the open sea. Jack always took notice of these marks as he left the security of the beach area, because it was not easy to see them when returning. And if the wind increased and the swells and waves grew higher, it would be even more important to find the channel opening so the waves didn’t pound the canoe, and its occupant, on the coral reef.
As Jack cruised through the opening in the reef, he felt the Pacific beneath him rise. No matter how calm the ocean seemed from the beach and no matter how small the waves appeared from that vantage point, there was almost always a significant swell at the reef. And it looked and felt mountainous when sitting on a small canoe three inches above the surface of the water. Jack jabbed his paddle deeper into the blue water, increased the rate of his strokes, and propelled the canoe clear of the reef. Then the Pacific was flat again, almost like an inland lake, but deeper now, a darker blue and mysterious.
Shortly after he began paddling at the Club, Jack learned that the locals don’t like to tell tourists too much about the water beyond the reef. They think it’s bad for business and they’re probably right, because beyond the reef lies the unconstrained expanse of the Pacific Ocean and all the creatures that call it home. In the middle of this vast ocean, the Hawaiian Islands are sometimes called the most remote spot in the world because they are farther from any continent than any other place on earth. Jack thought this assessment was a bit extreme but he conceded that, technically speaking, the Hawaiian Islands were indeed remote, and the presence of creatures like Tiger Sharks and Reef Sharks a short distance offshore was evidence of the sometimes hostile environment that surrounded these otherwise peaceful islands.
As Jack paddled west toward the curving line of Waikiki hotels, he saw a U.S. Navy Destroyer heading toward him from Pearl Harbor, probably bound for the Navy’s operating area ten miles off Diamond Head, where it would conduct antisubmarine warfare training exercises. The sight of the sleek gray hull with its high bow, sweeping sheerline, and raked mast reminded Jack of his own years on an earlier version of this warship. In a flash, it was all there before him - the acrid smell of burning fuel oil mixing with the pungent salt air of the open sea; the sound of the ocean hissing past the hull; sharp voices articulating the age-old commands that navigate ships out of harbors; visiting exotic places, making friends that lasted a lifetime, and the loneliness of long periods away from home.
Jack cracked a sweat off the Waikiki Natatorium and, by the time he reached the waters off the Hawai
ian Village Hotel a half hour later, the salt that was steadily dripping from his hair stung his eyes. Tired and not excited about the return voyage, he gulped the bottle of water he had brought along and surveyed Honolulu’s skyscrapers. From his vantage point two miles out, he imagined the lawyers inside those office buildings who were, at that moment, reviewing documents, preparing for depositions, talking with clients about bills, arguing with each other, and daydreaming about all the other places they would rather be. He was glad he was in one of those other places.
As he turned his canoe around to begin the voyage home, he heard the roar of silver airliners emerging from the bright blue sky to begin their final approach to Honolulu International Airport. There was no way he could know that one of those airliners carried a passenger whose fate would soon alter the idyllic life he and Katherine had enjoyed since moving to Oahu.
Forty minutes later, Jack looked up at the left side of the Surf Hotel and then sighted down it to the jetty below, barely visible now because the wind had increased and larger swells washed over the end of the jetty. From his perch on the canoe, Jack looked to his right but did not see the windsock. He sat there for a moment, seaward of the reef, and scanned the surface of the water. He caught a glimpse of the orange windsock as his canoe rose on top of a swell, but it quickly disappeared when the canoe slid down the wave. These quick bearings were sufficient to let Jack position his canoe for the run through the break in the reef. He waited and watched the pattern of the waves behind him, ascertaining when they would reach their peaks and where they would break. His strategy was to pass through the reef behind one breaking wave and in front of another so that he cleared the reef’s channel before the wave behind him broke, always mindful that his one-man canoe would not stand up to a pounding on the reef.
As one building wave passed under him and surged toward the reef, he began to paddle slowly. He waited until that wave reached the reef and was about to break, then jabbed his paddle into the water rapidly and repeatedly. He looked behind and saw the next wave building thirty feet astern of his canoe. Jack dug his paddle deeper and turned the boat to the right to keep it headed straight through the channel. After ten hard strokes, he put some distance between himself and the wave behind him, cleared the reef, and surged onto the beach. He had once again completed a successful voyage.