by Toby Neal
“So you buried him back there.”
“We buried him by the stream. He used to love the stream, playing in the water after we were done working.”
“Tony, we need to know about the farm.” Shepherd came around the table with his chair to sit beside the boy. “Uncle’s dead, so there’s no reason to protect him any longer. But we still need to know about how his operation worked and any people still out there who worked for him.”
Tony bobbed his head. “Yeah. I can tell you that.”
Lei and Pono stood. “We need Luke back,” Lei said. “We’ll take good care of him until your family can be located to bury him properly.”
The teen held the skull in both hands and tenderly kissed it on the forehead through the plastic. He handed the skull back to her. Lei took it and met the boy’s gaze with her own.
“Luke led me to you. He wanted you boys to be found. And freed.” She’d never been more certain of anything.
Tony’s eyes filled with tears. She felt his gaze on her back as she and Pono quietly exited. She slid the skull into her backpack. Pono reached out a hand. “I’ll take that by the morgue for safekeeping. You get home to that boy of yours.”
Lei smiled, handing over the backpack. “Pono Kaihale, touching a child’s bones. Never thought I’d see the day.”
Pono wrapped thick tattooed arms over the backpack in something a lot like a hug. “I think you’re right about Luke finding a way to get help for his brother and the other kids. It’s time I got over being chicken about kid cases. Solving them is how we can help.”
They parted ways at the entrance, Pono to return the skull to the morgue and the special drawer where Dr. Gregory stored such treasures, and Lei to get home to her boy.
As she got into her borrowed truck, one of the phones in her pocket rang.
Chapter Twenty-Five
This time when I woke, it was to a bright light, blinding, in one of my eyes. Somewhere off in the distance, muffled voices called my name.
I wanted to respond. I told my eyes to open, my hand to lift, my mouth to form words, but nothing happened. I was trapped inside my body. It felt like lying in a wooden coffin, confining and tight, and the coffin was lined with nails.
That eyelid was let go, and then the other one lifted. The bright light bored into my brain, rousing me. Still I couldn’t respond, though I heard them call my name again. The voices were close and immediate.
The light went away. My eye fell shut. I drifted and disappeared again.
The crocodile had stuffed MacDonald under a log at the bottom of the river. He was bloated and bobbed up and down with the gases of decay, finally just as the croc liked a body to be for eating.
“Let him go,” I begged. Water filled my mouth, but I could breathe fine. Some part of me was aware I was dreaming when MacDonald opened his milky eyes to look at me.
“We’re in hell, Stevens. Don’t you know that? None of this is real.”
“I’m not supposed to end up in hell. I prayed that sinner’s prayer. I thought I was going to heaven,” I told MacDonald.
“Obviously it didn’t work.” MacDonald shook his head.
I swam over and tried to pull the man from under the log, but the croc lashed its tail and knocked me away. The current caught me and carried me, and the croc sank its teeth into MacDonald’s swollen side.
The current carried me away from that horror show. The water was dark, thick, and gritty, but I was coming up, up, up from the bottom. My nose filled with a stinging scent that felt like a spear to my brain. I broke the surface and gave a gasp.
“I think he might be coming around.” My eyelid was pried open again. The light blasted. The other eye was tried. “No. Pupils aren’t responding.” An unfamiliar voice, American, was speaking. Was I home? Rescued?
I couldn’t open my eyes or respond. The container of my body held me tight and pinioned as an iron maiden.
“We need him awake by tomorrow when the ransom comes through.” This was a familiar male voice, crisp and authoritative. I knew this person, but not well. I’d recognize him if I saw him, but no name would come through the sludge at the bottom of the river and attach to his voice. I felt something land on me, heard the shuffling of paper. “Another proof-of-life photo for today. It would be better if he wasn’t lying there looking like a corpse.”
“Nothing I can do,” the first voice said. A flash of light. The paper object was removed from my bedclothes. “I’ll administer some more stimulant medication later. But maybe it’s just as well if he stays unconscious. He can’t tell what he doesn’t know.”
“True.”
My eyelids opened a crack, at last obeying a neurological command. I registered a uniformed man with an upright bearing exiting the room. I shut my eyes again.
Something was wrong here. I wasn’t rescued. These were not the voices I should be hearing at a hospital somewhere in Nicaragua.
I heard the sound of footsteps retreating. Silence surrounded me, broken only by the beep of a monitor.
I tried to backtrack mentally and reconstruct what had happened. We’d been attacked. I’d woken up in the pit, sick, along with four others. I’d been so sick, probably from exposure and withdrawals, that they’d put me in the shed. Anchara had appeared, and forgiven me, and showed me the way out, and I’d escaped. Tied up one guard and killed another. Blown up three helicopters. Broken out three of the men who’d chosen to come. We’d gone miles through the jungle, and one by one my companions had been killed. I’d ended up in Nicaragua in a remote village, recaptured by the captain of the kidnappers.
And now I was here.
Was here the same place as where the captain had killed Falconer and taken me?
I dragged my eyes open again.
The room was different from the one I remembered in the Nicaraguan village—it was a tent. Large and heavy-duty, but still a tent. I could make out metal support poles in the corners, and above the rip-stop material of the roof, lacy tree patterns. The sounds of the jungle were present—a howler monkey, somewhere far off. The shriek of a bird, the shushing of a small wind in the tops of the trees.
Perhaps the captain had turned me over to these Americans? If so, why had they taken a proof-of-life photo and then said what they had? They’d talked about me as if I were a captive. They were Americans, but talked like kidnappers, propping a newspaper on me and taking that picture.
My hands wouldn’t move, but I could feel them now, feel the fabric under them, feel the small pain that was an IV going into the back of the left one. I wiggled my feet and they responded, lifting and moving the sheet, but when I tried to slide them back and forth, I couldn’t.
I hoisted myself a little higher in the bed, making my sore head swim, and looked down. My hands were tied to the metal bed frame with wide strips of fabric. The source of the pain in my side became apparent now: A short plastic catheter, inserted into my rib area, drained pus and blood into a plastic container that reeked of sweet, putrid infection.
The sight made me want to retch, but the clenching of my hollow belly was way too painful. I breathed carefully, with my mouth open, to keep from smelling it until the reflex passed. These small efforts exhausted me, and I shut my eyes, sinking back into a gray half-sleep.
Sometime later I woke again to hear someone moving around the bed. Remembering what he’d said about stimulant medication, I decided to let whoever it was know I was awake. Perhaps I’d misheard earlier, or been dreaming. I wanted to think so, and knew this for the weakness it was.
I opened my eyes. A brown-skinned man in scrubs and a mask was checking the drain at my side. “Water,” I croaked. “Agua, por favor.”
The man looked up, eyes crinkled and friendly over his green mask. “So you woke up at last. Welcome back, Lieutenant Stevens. I’m Dr. Aquinas. I’ll get you water in a moment. Let me finish changing this dressing. We’re almost ready to remove the drain.”
I turned my head slightly to see what he was doing, but that made
me dizzy. Pain descended, a vise around my temples. I groaned and shut my eyes.
“Head hurt? Don’t move it. You’ve been out a long time, and that was a serious head injury.”
Head injury? I didn’t remember having a head injury. Just the cut from the pig’s tusk and my ruined feet. I blinked, looking at my far-off feet. I wiggled them. They felt fine, but my eyes were gritty. Everything felt stiff, like I was fighting through an onset of rigor mortis. I tried speaking. “Where am I?” My voice sounded like a rusty hinge.
“You’ve been very ill. Almost died, in fact. But we did some surgery, and you’ve been on an antibiotic drip, and it looks like you’re going to make it.”
“Why am I tied?”
Dr. Aquinas prodded the flesh around the drain. Again, he didn’t answer my question. “This really seems to be better. I think I’ll take the drain out.” He pulled up the tape, and I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from moaning as the adhesive pulled my skin.
“Ready?” He pulled the drain quickly from the wound, a feeling like a saber flaying my flesh to the bone. I screamed, or would have if my voice were working—the sound that came out was the short, sharp squawk of a chicken being stomped on. “There. Got some nice fresh blood coming out now. I have to pack the wound. This is gonna hurt.”
It sure as hell did. I writhed against my bonds and bit my lips as he stuffed the wound with sterile gauze tape, leaving a wick protruding.
“Still got some drainage here. Perhaps we can take this packing out in the next day or so.” Dr. Aquinas stripped off his gloves and straightened up. “I’ll give you a little something so you can rest now. You just came out of a coma, so the priority is to take it easy.”
“A coma? How long have I been here? I have questions…”
“And I don’t have the answers for you. I’m just here for your medical care.” Dr. Aquinas avoided my eyes. He injected something into my IV. “Sweet dreams.”
“No, man. I just woke up!” I tugged at the restraints, hating that I was bound, knowing that I was still a prisoner. Darkness dragged me under, and it felt like the crocodile pulling MacDonald down to the bottom of the river.
Lei reached the truck she was borrowing from a relative of Pono’s, and pulled her vibrating cell phone out of her pocket. “Dr. Wilson! I was wondering when we could talk.”
“Yes, Captain Omura told me about recent events. I’m on Oahu, but I thought we could perhaps do your post-shoot debrief over the phone.”
“That could work.” Lei got into the vehicle and turned it on, cranking up the AC. The blast of warm air from the vents smelled of the mustiness of the truck’s interior, something sweet and melted in the backseat, and a note of wet dog. She frowned. Her sense of smell was not usually this good. There was only one other time when it had been this sharp—that time she’d been pregnant.
Could that one night with Stevens before his departure have…? But no. She’d been through the roller coaster of hope and disappointment way too often to wish now. “I’m hoping to get a call from the army anytime now, that they’ve negotiated the prisoners’ release.”
“Yes, Omura briefed me on the situation.” Dr. Wilson’s tone was concerned. “I heard Michael was captured.”
“Yeah. They haven’t told me much. I haven’t been able to do anything to help him, and it’s so frustrating.” Lei blew out a breath. “I had Sophie look into the situation over there a little bit, and it’s not reassuring. The army and Security Solutions seem to be having some disagreement on how to handle the kidnapping. I’m worried.” She clenched and unclenched a hand on the warm plastic of the steering wheel. “First of all, that the army might do some crazy thing like a raid on the prisoners’ location. And then, even when we get him back, that he’s worse from this. Not better.”
A long pause. “I didn’t agree with his idea of curing himself by going overseas,” Dr. Wilson said softly. “But as you know, he didn’t ask me.”
“I know.” Lei pushed a hand into her disordered curls. “He didn’t ask me either.”
“So how are you handling the stress?”
“Staying busy with work.”
Dr. Wilson snorted. “That’s not exactly a news flash, my girl.”
Lei laughed ruefully. “I have to keep moving. Because as soon as I stop, I think of all that could go wrong.” She sighed. “But I got a really hot case that started out as a cold one, and that’s how I got into a couple of shooting situations.” She described what had happened with the child’s skull that Mrs. Yamaguchi had found and how it had led to the discovery in Hana and the raid in Kaupo.
“I walked away when I saw that Noah the child-slaving dog killer was dying,” Lei finished. “I feel a little guilty for leaving Pono to hold his hand until it was over, but I just didn’t have it in me to witness that man’s passing.”
“How responsible for his death were you?”
“I don’t know. I shot his tire, but it was the quad hitting a rock at high speed that caused it to flip. So I don’t think I had anything to do with it, really. I was proud of myself for not plugging him in the back after what he did to those boys.” Lei described the man’s psychological manipulation of the boys and the damage it had done. “I’d love it if you could take a look at Dexter. I’m going to be involved with these boys into the future.”
Dr. Wilson sighed. “Of course I will. But isn’t someone working with him?”
“Yes. But I trust you.”
“And I receive that as the compliment it is. I’ll coordinate with your friend Elizabeth Black and make sure everything that can be done is being done. Speaking of boys, how’s Kiet doing?”
“Not well. I almost called you earlier this week.” Lei described Kiet’s insecurity. “Is it okay that we’re sleeping in the big bed together? He’s really regressed. Sucking his thumb, won’t let me out of his sight. It’s really worrying me.”
“Kiet’s a sensitive kid and he senses something is wrong. I would spend as much time as you can with him. Keep him with familiar family members and maintain the same routine each day. You have to put some extra energy into reassuring him that, though his father’s absent, his world continues and his needs will be met.”
“I’ve been doing all that. I just feel guilty I’m away so much. Especially when I was thinking I’d like to take those foster boys home.” Lei explained her impulse. “But Elizabeth nixed it, and she was right.”
“There was a time you wouldn’t have agreed,” Dr. Wilson said. “But you’ve learned to trust a few others. And your instincts with Kiet are solid.”
“Speaking of, I better head home.” Lei switched her phone to Bluetooth and put the truck in gear. “I’ll call you as soon as I know anything about Michael. They’re probably going to bring him to Oahu, so maybe we can all meet there.”
“I’ll count on that, and pray it’s soon,” Dr. Wilson said, and Lei ended the call. She got on the road, her mind drifting to the possibility of reuniting with Stevens on Oahu as her eyes took in the coconut palms swaying in Maui’s usual wind along Hana Highway.
As if conjured by Lei’s wishing, the Security Solutions satellite phone rang on the seat beside her.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The next time I woke up might have been hours or days later. I had no sense of time anymore—it was elastic and illusory—but what I did know was that I was being moved. Overhead, I saw the lacy patterns of trees, then sky—that milky blue that heralded a hot day. I heard the roar of engines, smelled the harsh burn of diesel ahead.
I was still tied, I discovered when I tried to move my arms. I tipped my head back a little, and by rolling my eyes back, I looked up the body of one of the men carrying my stretcher. There was a triangle of beard stubble beneath his chin. He was one of the Hondurans by his skin tone and height.
“He’s awake,” the man said in Spanish, looking down at me.
“That’s okay. We’re almost there.” I recognized Aquinas’s voice, panting with exertion as he carried the other e
nd of the stretcher. We’d reached a helicopter. I recognized its American designation as they stowed the stretcher on a detachable medical transport rack.
“You’re going home, Lieutenant.” Aquinas and the other man still wore their medical masks, and I wondered why.
“How long was I out?” I asked. Aquinas shook his head, tightening down a strap over my stretcher. He locked the IV pole into place.
From the front of the helicopter two pilots looked back at me, their pale faces and crew cuts identifying them as American. Aquinas slammed the door and sat down in a jump seat beside me as the other bearer jogged away.
“We’ve got you now, Lieutenant. Sit back and enjoy the ride,” one of the pilots said, and the roar of the rotors drowned out any question or thought I might have had.
Just to be awake felt good. The bird rose in the air. Tremors from the engine jostled me, but it felt soothing in a weird way. I hadn’t felt mechanical motion in a long time—something that was a part of my everyday life at home. Sharp smells, of fuel and straining metal, filled my nostrils, along with the roar of the engine.
I still wasn’t sure what to think about Aquinas. Was he one of the kidnappers? He’d sounded American, though his coloring was consistent with Latino ancestry. But why was he traveling with me now? And who had that American in the uniform been?
All this thinking was making my head ache. I could feel that I was stronger and that I wasn’t feverish anymore. There was a lot to be grateful for. I didn’t have to have all the answers now.
Eventually the thrum of the engines translated to soporific, enough for me to drowse off, but I woke when we touched down on the ground. The door of the helicopter flew back, and a couple of uniformed medics jumped in. Aquinas hopped out and walked away.
“Good to see you awake, Lieutenant,” one of them said, checking the IV. “We’re moving you into a medical tent until we fly you out tomorrow.”
“Okay.” My voice still sounded scratchy and unused. I lifted my head to see where they were taking me and spotted a cluster of hangars, planes, and heavy-duty tents, all in camouflage. Wherever we had arrived was a military facility. My heart thudded heavily with anxiety as the medics lifted me down and stowed my stretcher on a rolling gurney.
