by Chris Bauer
Follow the blue line toward the right wall.
Her flashlight soon outed her host in the far corner. His hands were clasped in front of him, and they also held a flashlight. It switched on and he turned it upward, so she could better see his face.
Olivier ʻŌpūnui. Bowl-cut black hair, long bangs, large, thin nose, long, clean-shaven face. Mid-length gray tweed coat, black fur collar, the ironed creases in his dark pants severe. Slender and delicate and always smartly dressed, he did not buck the stereotype: Olivier wasn’t overtly gay, but he did prefer, exclusively, the company of men. In Hawaiian, ʻŌpūnui meant large-bellied or corpulent. Maybe that was somewhere in his ancestry, but it was not the case with him.
“Thank you for coming, Kaipo,” he said. “Let me start by asking you about your sobriety. How are you doing?”
Small talk; Kaipo stayed wary. “I attend meetings when I can. But it’s not good when the meetings turn to talk about missing and presumed dead dope dealers, mine in particular. No one knew his connection to me, thank goodness, but you need to stop doing that.”
“Only you can know if Monte will be your last one,” Olivier said. “You are staying sober, Kaipo, and that has been a good thing. Something we want to foster. Let’s move to another topic. You are having doubts about Ka Hui’s recent business direction.”
A loaded comment. If she caved and said she was wrong to ask so many questions, he’d see that for what it was: patronization. She went with her real feelings. “Murdering innocent people for their organs is harsh, Olivier. Regardless—you made it clear it’s not my call, and unless Ka Hui will let me out of my contract with no repercussions, I’ve decided I can live with that. Hopefully,” her eyes drilled his, “you think I can live with it as well.”
“Let you out of your contract with no repercussions? That’s rich, Kaipo. Mr. Lanakai permitted one other associate to leave Ka Hui some time back. His business partner. That won’t happen again. The repercussions were the direst of dire for the partner and his family. Not Mr. Lanakai’s doing, mind you. Your employment with him is at will, Kaipo. At Wally’s—er, Mr. Lanakai’s—will, specifically.”
Wally Lanakai. Olivier. There was something there, between them. Blind employee obedience, yes, but something more. A deep reverence; adoration. Attraction.
She surmised it was one-sided.
“Kaipo? Hello? Pay attention! At. Will. Your employment can be terminated at Mr. Lanakai’s discretion only. Now, look behind you, please.”
There’d been no footfalls, and she tensed as someone or something bumped against her back. She turned, pushed away, and drew her piece from its shoulder holster, quick, smooth, unflustered. She steadied the nine-millimeter at a bulky box on a handcart, the words Commercial quality, with a stainless-steel tub and a 200-quart capacity on cardboard just beyond the barrel. The box still had the shipping straps around it. Behind the box stood Icky Ikaika. Icky dropped the cart handle, raised his hands. “Fuck, Kaipo, hold up, relax. It’s your new pressure cooker. Honest.”
She stood frozen, her gun still raised.
Olivier chuckled, inserted his hand into his overcoat pocket. Kaipo snapped her gun in Olivier’s direction. His hand reemerged with a miniature bronze-plated box. He settled it into his palm. “My, my, Kaipo, you are priceless when you get so serious.” He flicked open the box’s hinged lid. His snuff tobacco.
“We thought we’d surprise you with a brand new unit, not a hand-me-down. Such drama from you. Thank you, Mr. Ikaika, for delivering it yourself.”
And with that came a snort and a sniffle-sniffle. The pinch of powdery black snuff disappeared up his nostrils. He brushed the remaining dust from his fingers, brushed his nose with his hand, repeated the process, ambivalent to her drawn gun.
She lowered her weapon and reluctantly re-holstered it. She released a breath she hadn’t known she was holding.
Olivier’s slender footfalls echoed on his pronounced advance toward her. “I have one more thing to discuss with you, Kaipo. Mr. Ikaika, why don’t you load this new cooker into her van and let us chat alone, please? Thank you.”
After Icky left, Olivier’s officious demeanor returned. “About your message to the Blessids.”
“My what?”
“Your message in that sauna. ‘Think Hawaiian, not Alaskan.’ That one.”
How did Ka Hui—Olivier…Just how was it he knew?
“You are out of your element here, Kaipo. What is—and is not—known by certain parties needs to stay that way, including your knowledge about him, and his knowledge about you. Through a grievous misjudgment of someone’s character on our part, the young man you were messaging now knows you exist. It is in your utmost interest to let that sleeping dog lie.”
“How did you—?”
“Your—utmost—interest, Kaipo! Back off. Or next time, your apprehension about meeting with me will be merited.”
22
Philo paid for breakfast, brought it to the Blessid Trauma garage: bagels, a pork roll sandwich for Hank, coffees, and juice for Patrick. He pulled apart the bag with the bagels and let them tumble onto the break table in the office. After he dropped into a chair, he studied Patrick, busy with his OJ carton. Patrick sipped his juice, looked over the straw at Philo. “Sir? Something wrong, sir?”
“What would you say…” Philo started then hesitated. He searched for the right words, sheepish about having been less than aware of—blind to—this dark young man whose thick, tan skin had deserved more than a cursory pronouncement regarding his perceived ethnicity from a sandwich guy at a restaurant.
“What I mean is, Patrick, you, ah, you’ve got a guardian angel out there who helped me figure something out about you.”
Philo locked eyes with Hank, grabbed a bagel, tore off a chunk. He began with an apology, his mouth full. “I tried calling the both of you last night but neither of you answered. So let me start by asking you, Hank, did you get Patrick’s DNA test results back yet?”
“Nope. A few more weeks,” Hank said, his look puzzled. “You’re killing us here, Philo. Let’s have it. What’s going on?”
“When the DNA results come back,” Philo said, unblinking, “they will show that Patrick’s not an Eskimo.”
“Aleut, sir, not Eskimo,” Patrick said.
“Fine, right, whatever, Patrick, but you’re neither. The results will show you’re Hawaiian.”
Patrick sat mesmerized. Hank showed his best what the fuck expression. “That’s not even an ethnicity, Philo. Hawaiians are Polynesians. You know these results how?”
“I haven’t seen them, I just know what they’re going to show. Apparently some Philly mob person noticed it. And according to the cops, this Philly mob in particular is loaded with, odd as it sounds, Hawaiians.”
Patrick choked on his bagel and orange juice. “Really?” He left his seat, wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “REALLY? I’m Hawaiian? I’m Hawaiian!”
Hank narrowed his eyes. “Philo, c’mon, how does some mobster know this? What mobster? How—?”
“Hank, I have no idea. What I do know is some criminal type took an interest in him. A mob cleaner-fixer type. Someone like us, but working for the other side.”
Hank now learned about the message left on the sauna floor, and Philo explained the Philly police’s concern that this new mob presence was from Hawaii. “The message was left for us, Hank, about Patrick. Who knows why the interest. Maybe it’s a bad guy with a conscience, trying to do some good. Regardless, it’s someone who knows something.”
Patrick bounded around the room keying at his phone, doing internet searches. “Oahu. Maui. Kauai. Look at that. Volcanoes…”
“Still not buying it,” Hank said. “Patrick, calm down, we really don’t know much more than we already did.”
“…luaus, leis…”
Philo had been skeptical, too, he said, but then he’d pieced it together. “Patrick—relax, dude. Sit please. I have a question for you; something I asked you before. Answer it for me agai
n.” He winked at Hank. “Your home state. When did it gain statehood?”
Patrick continued keying at his phone, didn’t have to think, blurted an unfeeling response, one indelible, rote memory his traumatized brain never had trouble finding: “We became a state in 1959.”
Hank nodded. “See, Philo, like I told you, Alaska.”
Philo nodded. “Right. Alaska earned its statehood in 1959. But so did Hawaii.” Philo, now on a roll: “Patrick, what was your dog’s name?”
“Poy. Poy, sir.”
Easier connection here, the Hawaiian food staple was poi, but then again—
“I did a search. Poi, Patrick, is—was—also a dog breed native to Hawaii. Could your dog have been a Hawaiian poi, not named Poy?”
“Yeah. No. Both, sir. That’s it! He was a poi, and that’s what I named him! Poy. With a Y, sir.”
Poi dogs. Not actually a breed, more like the product of natural selection, and supposedly extinct. Also a food source to Hawaiians at one time, along with feral hogs. Fattened up like hogs, then eaten like them too. They were virtually wiped out last century, but Hawaiian shelters still ran across strays and wild dog packs whose existence second-guessed their rumored extinction.
“Christ, Philo, you and Wikipedia are just a fountain of circumstantial information.”
“Fine, Hank, so you’re not convinced, but this is looking like the real thing. I’ve got one more. You wanna hear it or not?”
“Look, I don’t want Patrick’s hopes raised only to have him get disappointed. We’ve had leads before; nothing ever worked out.”
“I don’t want that either. Patrick, you want to hear more?”
“Yeah.”
“Then answer this. Who’s your favorite rapper?”
“Tassho Fearce, sir! Saw him at the Troc yesterday. He was awesome.”
“How long have you been following him?”
“Um, I don’t know for sure, sir. Maybe I saw him as a teenager. Yeah, that’s it, I saw him in person when I was a teenager.”
“That means you saw him perform before the attack that put you in the coma three years ago. In Hawaii. Tassho Fearce is Native Hawaiian, never been to the mainland. His first tour outside Hawaii was this year.”
Hank relented. The frontrunner for Patrick’s ethnicity was now Polynesian, and his birthplace, Hawaii.
There were multiple trails to the grain elevator leading from the city streets rimming its perimeter, the only structure on this land parcel. The route they were taking was the most direct. The vehicle caravan—a truck with pressure-washing equipment with more psi than a fire hose, another truck with a mounted generator, and the Blessid Trauma Services step van—followed a white pickup, its route winding through a half mile or more of illegal dumping, boulder rubble, and dismembered concrete pylons veined with twisted steel reinforcing rods, scattered within thirty yards of the grain elevator.
The white pickup braked hard then stopped, kicking up dust. It idled, the two large rigs passing it to park as close to the building as they could, not far from a fire hydrant. Philo U-turned and arrived alongside the pickup, driver facing driver. The pickup’s window powered down, cigar smoke billowing from its interior, the demolition site superintendent on the puffing side of it. The job boss was a bear of a guy with stained, chipmunk-like buckteeth. He pulled the cigar away from his mouth and dropped his cigar hand onto the pickup’s windowsill.
“My guys will leave the keys and head back with me, Trout. We’re late for happy hour. Do not, I repeat, do not do anything to the wood in the ceiling below the first floor. Don’t scrub it, don’t mist it, don’t put any enzyme materials on it. After you guys finish cleaning belowdecks, we have people coming in to salvage it.”
“Already in the contract,” Philo said. “But what’s the big deal? It’s fucking wood.”
“You’ll know when you see it. It’s like gold to carpenters. The wear patterns, grains pouring over it from the chutes, polishing it, some shit like that makes it valuable. It was in all the ceilings on each level, but scavengers ripped the upper floors of it out. They stayed away from the pit; too nasty down there. Don’t ruin the wood in the pit or it’ll cost you your whole fee.
“My last bit of advice to you, Trout. Watch your step on those upper floors. I don’t need any work stoppages, so don’t do anything stupid like kill yourselves. Good luck.”
Philo stood at the base of the crumbling building, Patrick and Hank alongside, Grace home with a private nurse. It took a lot for Hank to pull himself away, but she’d chased him out, made him go to work to take his mind off things. No Grace meant they needed an extra pair of hands. Joining them for the first time was Philo’s boxing sparring partner Miñoso.
Why not Miñoso, Philo had asked himself, maybe help out the guy a little, let him make a few extra bucks? “The thing is,” Philo had given Miñoso a speech, “you can’t mention the fight. You’re sworn to secrecy; es un secreto. There is no fight, understand?”
“Si. No fight.”
They gathered around Philo. The main tower was six levels of poured concrete. The top three levels had, at one time, windows on all the walls, but they’d been blown out by repeated hits from a wrecking ball. The bottom three stories were shaped like tandem missile silos, the entire structure poking vertically from the empty flatland like a Canaveral launch pad, jutting out from land onto two stationary marine legs that extended over the Delaware.
“Hope you know what you’re doing, Philo,” Hank said.
“Looks scarier than it is. The demolition company strung lights on all the floors and cleaned out the debris. We need to sweep it for explosive material and combustibles, and check the cracks in the foundation and walls and iron welds where grain might have collected. Floors, walls, ceilings, everywhere. They want the demolition to be controlled. An implosion, not an explosion, to keep the building from toppling into the river.
“Any grain left would be like what, twenty years old now?” Hank said. “How’s that still a problem?”
“All I know is, corn and other grains make grain dust, and grain dust is explosive. They can afford to be careful, so they’re not taking any chances.” He raised his voice. “Patrick. Put on your mask and help set up Miñoso with his. You’ll both need to carry a bundle of rope. Six floors of dust and decay await us, gentlemen. We’re gonna soak this bastard from the top down and scrub it clean.”
They crouched to fit through chain-link fencing behind a black tarp pulled aside to expose the entrance to the ground floor, one of two entrances on either side of the rectangular tower. Inside the building the floor was debris-free, but its metal fixtures were corroded with rust, and four-by-four holes in the first floor exposed a dark pit underneath that, according to the job boss, was rumored to be home to dog-size rats. Rats here, regardless of size, meant there had been, maybe still was, a food source, likely some leftover twenty-year-old grain. Someone would need to drop into the pit to handle whatever was down there. The demolition company had no intention of doing so. “Rats are biohazards, far as I’m concerned,” was how the demolition super put it to Philo. “And my opinion is the only one that counts. The pit’s your responsibility.”
The ground floor had no walls, only support columns reinforced with rusted iron rods, giving this level the appearance of an open-air parking garage. On the exterior, a multi-story black tarp flapped against the support columns, doing a poor job of protecting them from the elements. A one-person elevator anchored the floor with the crumpled vestiges of its manually operated, single-person cage sitting at ground level.
“Stairwell anywhere?” Hank asked.
Philo leaned inside a hollow cement tube that looked like one of the support columns. “Inside this column here. A spiral staircase. The steps aren’t sturdy, so we’ll go up one person at a time. Next level up is where the regular stairs begin.”
Inside the corkscrew staircase the steps had separated from their railings, were tilted and rusted out in spots, some steps missing altogether.
One by one they arrived on the second floor and crossed to the main set of metal stairs. Here the ironclad grain silos ended, the top of each section of the silo funneling out of sight into the floor above it. Parallel to the silo was a chain-driven vertical pulley that had once served as the guts of the grain elevating process, its chain now snapped, its buckets bashed and beaten, in some cases gone. Crosswinds whipped through large gashes in the walls, from wrecking balls handling some of the demolition chores in preparation for the implosion. They headed up the steps to the third floor, with time spent there and on each floor above it checking for electric outlets and junction boxes that hadn’t been ripped out. Hank put a meter on each one, confirming none of the electric sources left behind were hot.
From the fifth floor up, tall openings that once held wood-framed glass windows were empty, with rusted bars across them to keep past and present occupants on the inside of the building.
Philo poked through a door onto the open-air rooftop. Bolted to the roof were oversize ductwork, dented red-orange metal platforms, and other steampunk-inspiring architecture. Next to the roof edge, he admired the view. Wow. One by one, his team joined him.
Such a sweeping panorama of the city. The Girard Point Bridge, the huge span where I-95 crossed the Schuylkill River. A view of the Philly pro sports arenas and the Sunoco gas tanks, plus large, building-size murals, and the rail yards, and mothballed US Navy ships. And something short of three hundred sixty degrees of graffiti on walls at street level, artist canvasses for inner-city youth, trailing off as they closed in on the Delaware River, behind where they stood. Incredible.
“Miñoso. Watch your step,” Philo said.
Miñoso backpedaled from the edge and lifted his heel. He’d stepped in seagull poo. “¡Mierda!”