Big Island Blues

by Terry Ambrose

  “If it’s a bad time . . .” Her voice trailed off. She sounded sick with worry.

  “This is fine . . . There’s never a bad time to talk to you.” I closed my eyes. What a dork. You’d think I was asking a girl to dance for the first time in my life. I cleared my throat as the realization of how I was starting to think about Benni clicked in my brain. Oh, shit. Talk about complicated. “We’re at a little bar where Andi was about an hour ago. It’s in Puako.”

  “Tiny’s place. Tiny’s good people. You can trust him.” She paused for a moment. When she continued, there was hope in her voice. “Is Haiku there?”

  My heart nearly stopped. Was Benni involved with Haiku? Please no, not the guy with the coke-bottle glasses. “He’s here. Did you want to talk to him?”

  She paused. “Um, no. Why would I? If Andi’s gone, he might be able to help. Those two are pretty tight. He’s got two girls of his own about the same age. Andi was in his wife’s English class in high school.”

  I glanced over at Haiku, mentally apologizing for insulting him while chastising myself for being jealous when I had no reason or right to that emotion.

  “McKenna? Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. Just feeling—I’ll tell you later. Right now, I should go talk to Haiku. He’s about ready to go on stage.”

  “I wanted you to know I’m going to have my cell off for a while.”

  It surprised me that a mother would do that while her daughter was missing, but she’d been pushing hard for days thanks to Cam. “Catching a few winks?” I tried to sound cheerful, but it came off as just plain lame.

  “I’m on the way to the hospital with Cam. It’s a long story, but—look, I’ll tell you all about it when this is over. Right now, you be careful, okay?”

  I rubbed the back of my neck, which burned hot with fear. For Andi. For Benni. And for the emotional train wreck headed my way. “Promise.” I disconnected the phone, wondering if whatever had happened to her client might put Benni’s job in danger. On the stage, Haiku was settling in. This was not the time to take on more problems. It was time for me to focus on the task at hand, questioning Haiku.

  I ignored the looks from Alexander, Shaw, and Tiny. The band was still tuning up, but Haiku peered at me with oversized eyes under a pair of bushy eyebrows as I introduced myself.

  His reaction was cordial, even friendly. “How can I help?”

  “Benni told me I should talk to you about Andi. She said you have a daughter about her age, and you’re pretty tight.”

  “Miki is a couple of years younger than Andi. Look, I’ve got to get going with these guys. I see you were about to talk to Deke. Andi only stopped by for a little while. I don’t know the whole story because she was mostly talking to him. Deke’s the man you want.”

  I glanced over my shoulder at the drunk-turned-snitch. Great, what were we in for? “Mahalo.” I excused myself and the band began to play something that could best be described as techno-Cole Porter. It was the damnedest thing I’d ever heard and, in an odd sort of way, the concept almost worked—just so long as you considered “almost” the operative word in that description. Tiny, well-rounded musician that he was, stood behind the bar, bouncing and bobbing to the mixture of retro and future while he chatted up someone on his cell phone. I doubted that it was a tourist asking for directions. More likely, it was the local cop ordering him to turn down the noise.

  “They ever perfect that sound, it’ll be sweet.” Deke’s eyes were glazed over. How long before he wouldn’t even know what he was saying?

  “I give them two years,” said Shaw. “They need a lot of practice and something to tie the genres together. There’s too much disconnect.”

  “Ever the critic.” Deke eyed the guys on stage and listened for a few seconds. “But, in this case, you could be right. Unlike the night you ran out on Benni.”

  Shaw lowered his gaze to the floor. “I’ve paid for my sins. Every damn day.”

  I glanced around the table. Alexander's face clearly displayed his growing impatience. To his right, the cowboy showed remorse for a mistake he’d made more than twenty years ago. And Deke? Well, if his eyes were any indicator, he was feeling nothing at all.

  Alexander pushed his chair back. “You two might wanna talk story about music or old times, but I gotta find my niece.”

  “Chill, man. We’re getting to it.” Deke stared straight at Shaw. “You told her about the guitar? Eh, Shaw?”

  “She needed to know. She saw it and told me how long she’d wanted one of those old Martins. I felt guilty for being gone all those years. I told her it was a present for her next birthday. It was stupid.”

  Deke licked his lips before knocking back the rest of his drink. “You got no idea what kind of stupid that was. You’ve unleashed the mother of all shit storms.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Haiku’s coke-bottle glasses flashed when the lenses caught the overhead stage lights. The clientele cheered as the screams from the strings reverberated off the walls to fill the air. It was as though Haiku had been transformed into a man possessed by his music.

  Shaw shouted over the din. “Deke, there hasn’t been a day in the past twenty years I haven’t regretted what I did. I’ve become a crusty, angry son-of-a-bitch.”

  Deke pulled off his dark glasses and placed them on the table. He sneered, “So now you’ll do anything to reconnect with your daughter before you die.”

  “I made yet another stupid decision regarding that kid by telling her who I was. I need help to fix it.”

  Haiku fell to his knees, the wailing from his instrument rising ever higher. It was the perfect complement to this confrontation in which one man was desperate for help, the other bore too much hostility to show compassion. How high would the tensions rise before one broke?

  Deke picked up his glasses and fingered them. He stared at Shaw. “You can rot with your regret for all I care.”

  I could see how close to the surface Shaw’s anger ran. I expected those feelings to erupt with uncontrolled fury if Deke continued to refuse to help. Why couldn’t Deke put aside his own anger for Andi’s sake? If I could get the cowboy’s temper on simmer for a few minutes, we might have a chance to find out. “We’ve been looking for Andi for a couple of days now, Deke. She needs help and what she told you might help me fit some of the pieces together. If you’ll tell us what you two talked about, we’ll get out of your hair.”

  “Well,” said Deke. “I think that sounds like a damn fine plan. With one exception.” Deke motioned for Tiny, who had finished his phone call. When Tiny stood next to Shaw, Deke said, “I ain’t telling this asshole a damn thing. Go to hell, Shaw.”

  Now Deke was deliberately baiting Tiny, too? Did the guy have a death wish? Tiny’s sumo-wrestler build made him someone you did not want to piss off. It wouldn’t surprise me if he took these two outside and beat their heads together like coconuts to see whether they were both hollow.

  Despite the test of wills, Tiny appeared calm as he rested a hand on Shaw’s shoulder. “Andi’s played here with the guys a few times, Shaw. Nice girl. I’ve got to tell you, she’s never been upset like tonight. Haiku said she started talking crazy talk about the Martin guitar she took from you. She said you told her it’s cursed. Let me tell you, brah, she’s taking it serious. None of it made sense to me, so after she left, I started calling around. One of my clients runs a high-tech security firm—hangs out with the likes of CIA spies.”

  “I thought that was something only old ex-military guys did,” I said.

  Tiny’s gaze was impassive. “Who said anything about her being ‘ex? Or old?’ Vanessa disappears every once in a while for a few days, then she’s back. I don’t ask and she don’t tell where she’s been.” He shrugged. “Anyway, she also has a big fascination with myths and legends. I told her what Andi told me.”

  On stage, the manic beat of the music had settled back into traditional Cole Porter. I had to admit, if nothing else, Haiku was versatile. Here, wi
th the exception of Deke, we all sat on the edges of our seats waiting for the rest of Tiny’s story. He might be a real estate broker by day, but the guy was all ham through and through.

  “Well?” I asked. “What did she say?”

  “Andi’s on her way to Ka Lae,” said Tiny. “South Point for you new guys. She’ll be meeting a guy at dawn who calls himself Ho'okano. He says he can break the curse. According to Vanessa, it’s all bogus.”

  Deke snorted. He reached for his only friend at the table, the vodka bottle, but Tiny grabbed it out of his hand. Deke slumped back in his chair and stared morosely at his empty fingers.

  “How long did it take your friend to figure out this is some sort of con?” I asked. This had been smelling like a scam since the beginning. With a second concurring opinion, I was now convinced.

  “About an hour,” said Tiny. “She contacted some high-powered hacker on the mainland and he did some super search on those messages Andi’s been getting. It turns out they were coming from an address in Kona.”

  The crowd erupted in applause as the band finished their first number. Haiku’s glasses were two gleaming mirrors; his broad smile dim in comparison.

  “Kona?” I asked. This island might have a lot of residents, but it could be an incredibly small place. That’s where this whole thing started and now we were right back there.

  Tiny gave me a thumbs up. “But you got a big problem. The girl is already on the road and her phone is dead. Kid told Haiku she’s been using it pretty heavy and she forgot to grab her charger before she ran out of your place, Shaw.”

  “She wasn’t answering our calls, anyway.” I glanced at Deke, who sat, now detached from the whole conversation. It was as though we bored him.

  Alexander rubbed the back of his neck in frustration. “So my niece is goin’ to meet this guy and we got no way to stop her?”

  Tiny looked Alexander in the eye. “Sounds about right.”

  “We gotta go,” said Alexander.

  Shaw stood. “Thanks, Tiny.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Is there anything else? Where exactly are they meeting?”

  “Andi told me sunrise at Ka Lae,” Tiny said.

  I blinked at Tiny, trying to comprehend why anyone would want to make that drive. “Why there?”

  “When Andi told me, I thought they were meeting at the old sacred grounds. Then, she said they weren’t meeting at the heiau, but in the parking lot at South Point. He gave her some bullshit about channeling the spirits of travelers from a thousand years ago. That’s what got me to being really suspicious. I wondered why he’d pass up heiaus in Kona and Ka Lae for a cliff diver’s playground.”

  I raised an expectant eyebrow at Tiny. “Unless you wanted to get rid of a body?”

  Tiny gave me a firm nod. “Exactly.”

  I’ve been lied to a bunch of times in my life. In the old days, I could spot a liar from across the room, and while I’m not as sharp today as I once was, Deke’s disconnection from the conversation told me Andi was not a subject he wanted to discuss. The band’s retro-Cole Porter sound wasn’t good enough to warrant being disinterested in Andi’s safety—nor was he quite that drunk. That meant there had to be more. “You’ve been pretty quiet the past couple of minutes, Deke.”

  “Ain’t got much to say.” He glared at Shaw. “He’s not on my friendly list.”

  Alexander moved slightly toward the door. “McKenna, I’m leaving.”

  He might be ready to get out of here, but I wasn’t. Deke wanted us gone and that was good enough reason for me to want to stay. Leaving now would be a mistake.

  I held up a hand, but Shaw ignored me. He stood next to Alexander. “You coming or not? That’s at least a two-hour drive from here.”

  “I’d rather know why Deke wants to be rid of us so much.” I leaned forward, placing my hands on the table so I could lean over Deke. “You’ve been antsy since we walked in here. Now you’re anxious for us to leave. Why is that?”

  Tiny’s expression was one of sadness, his tone, consoling. “You’ve been sober for a lot of years, brah, what gives?” He raised the bottle he held in his hand. “Now you’re back to this?”

  All eyes were now on Deke. The ruddiness in his cheeks from the alcohol was draining fast. Even Shaw, the oblivious cowboy who could only communicate with his girlfriend and his horse, recognized Deke’s fear. “I didn’t know you’d stopped, Deke. How long were you dry?”

  Silence was the only answer he received.

  Tiny placed the bottle on the table in front of Deke, his hand still clamped around the neck. “I’ve only seen you drink soft drinks and water for fifteen years. You must want this pretty bad.”

  Deke turned away from Tiny, then drew in a ragged breath. His lower lip trembled as his gaze was pulled back to the bottle. Despite his hunger for a drink, Deke was afraid, pure and simple. Polite asking wasn’t going to do the trick. We needed to squeeze him. Hard.

  “I’ve seen a lot of people with that same expression. Most of them weren’t drunk, but I still recognize panic.” I fixed Deke with a stare that would have made my fourth-grade teacher proud. It was time to jerk the rug out from under this drunk’s feet.

  Deke started to rise from his chair, but Shaw shoved him back down. Tiny released the bottle. He backed away to let Shaw tower over Deke. “Answer the man.”

  Before Deke could say a word, I threw more questions at him. “How come you didn’t say anything about this Ho'okano, anyway? Why did Tiny have to tell us?”

  “You think he sold her out for booze?” The anger in Shaw’s voice hinted that, among other things, selling out a friend ranked in the Top 10 of cowboy-code violations.

  “I think McKenna might be onto something,” Alexander said.

  “I’ll second that.” Tiny’s disappointment in Deke showed on his face.

  “Screw you.” Deke crossed his arms over his chest.

  His defiance had exactly the effect I wanted. Shaw shoved Deke’s chest. The chair fell backwards. Deke cried out in pain as he landed. Shaw jumped on him, clamping his hands around Deke’s neck. “No. Screw you! You son-of-a-bitch. You did do something, didn’t you?”

  The crash and tumbling bodies killed the music instantly. Everyone stared. Shaw on top, Deke underneath. Shaw trying to kill the man now coated in sawdust.

  Deke glanced wildly around the bar, but no one volunteered to save him. He threw a glancing blow at Shaw, but that only intensified Shaw’s anger. “What did you do, goddammit? You tell me now or I swear I’ll kill you!”

  Tiny pulled on Shaw’s arm, but Shaw’s grip was so tight he dragged Deke with him. Deke bit his lip as he stumbled to his feet, still in Shaw’s grip. Blood trickled down his chin. Tiny yelled, “Let go of him!”

  “Not until he tells me the truth!”

  Unless I wanted a conga line of guys pulling guys off Deke, we were headed nowhere fast. Shit. Deke would walk out free as a bird, unless—I glanced at the bar. The Louisville Slugger. That’s what I needed.

  I hurried back to where I’d seen Tiny store the bat. The rush of being once-again young flowed through me as I hefted it in my hand. I returned and tapped Tiny on the shoulder with the end, motioning for him to release his grip on Shaw. When he pulled away, I did the same thing to Shaw.

  He glowered at me, the angry fire burning bright in his eyes. “Go ahead, take a swing.”

  “You’ve been talking to your horse for too many years.” I rolled my eyes and shook my head. What did Carla see in this cowboy, anyway? “Give me one minute, then he’s all yours.”

  Shaw released his grip, leaving me alone with Deke—and a crowd who wanted to tear him apart.

  I smacked the Slugger in the palm of my hand a couple of times. Damn, that felt good. “I had one just like this when I was eight. It’s a great bat. I nailed Johnny Bakerton in the balls with a line drive that summer. He was four years older and weighed a good fifty pounds more than me. The poor kid’s fastball was never the same after that. You don’t want to
know what I can do with this.”

  Choking up on the bat with a double-fisted grip, I watched Deke’s eyes. His pupils looked as though they might explode.

  “Do we understand each other? You talk or I’ll bust your head in and then let Shaw have you. What do you want to do? You’ve got five seconds.”

  Shaw grinned. “Give me that.” He reached for the bat. “I’ll show you how it’s done.”

  Deke wasn’t waiting for a designated hitter. He started spilling his guts faster than I run for the bathroom after eating bad pork. “I got in trouble a while back and lost a grand in a poker game one night. It was a stupid bet I never should’a made. The next thing I know this guy is telling me how I can clear myself with him just by helping him get some guy’s Martin guitar. He said it was stolen from his old man.”

  I pressed the bat against Deke’s throat. “Well, well. That’s a nice little story, but all you’ve done so far is make everybody here think what an asshole you are. I wouldn’t be surprised if they all want to take turns playing ‘Turn Deke’s Head to Pulp.’ If you want to get out of here alive, I’d suggest you spill the rest.” I smacked the bat hard against my palm and barked, “Now!” What I really wanted to yell was, “Son-of-a-bitch that hurt!”

  “Honest to God,” Deke cried. “I didn’t know this was gonna have anything to do with Andi. The guy just told me he wanted to get back what was his.”

  Talk about stupid rationale. Was this guy an idiot? I raised my voice so the crowd could hear. “Oh, okay, so you were willing to steal a guitar from an innocent stranger to clear your gambling debt. Is that right?”

  Grumbles about thieves and liars rippled through the crowd. It was exactly the reaction I’d hoped for.

  “No, no,” Deke stammered. “He said it was Shaw’s. That’s why I went along with it. I’m not—I’m not a thief.”

  “Sounds like a thief to me,” I said. “And worse, you put Andi in danger with your stupid vengeance.”

  It took both Tiny and Alexander, but they were able to hold Shaw back despite his protests.