Broken

by Don Winslow

  “I said ‘sorry.’”

  “I boddah you?” the guy asks. “You like beef, boy?”

  Ben doesn’t know much Hawaiian slang, yet he’s pretty sure this guy isn’t talking about his groceries but is asking him if he wants to fight.

  “I don’t want any problem,” Ben says.

  “I been watching you,” the guy says. “You know what I can’t figure out?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Which one you’re fucking,” the guy says. “The blond spinner or the other mahu?”

  Fag.

  “Nice talking with you,” Ben says.

  “Get off my island,” the guy says. “You and your friends.”

  The shop owner comes out. “Is there a problem here?”

  “No problem, Uncle. Just talking story with this buggah.” He looks back at Ben. “You don’t want to see me again, haole.”

  He turns and walks away.

  “You know that guy?” Ben asks the owner.

  “Palala,” the owner says.

  * * *

  They come on to Chon with more caution.

  They already know what he can do.

  He’s out running on Kuhio Highway, which despite the name is a narrow two-lane road that curves along the coast, sometimes narrowing further to one lane on the bridges that span the creeks.

  It’s raining.

  Chon doesn’t care.

  He’s enjoying the run and the cool rain. He feels lucky to be able to take a run in this spectacularly beautiful place.

  Cars pass him slowly, trying to give him as much room as possible. Then he hears a motor approach and slow down. The Jeep doesn’t go around him but stays behind him, gets closer and closer.

  Chon keeps running.

  The Jeep comes right up on him, nipping at his heels.

  He hears laughter.

  Then, “Run, tough guy! Run!”

  Chon looks over his shoulder, sees four huge Palala guys in the Jeep.

  He runs faster.

  More laughter. “You faster than a Jeep?”

  There’s no place for him to get off the road. To his right, on the ocean side, is a steep cliff. He can’t risk trying to cross the road and let the Jeep hit him.

  Besides, he’s pissed.

  Chon is stubborn.

  He keeps running.

  The Jeep keeps coming.

  Pushing up on him, pulling back, pushing up again.

  A bridge is coming up.

  It’s one-way, the Jeep will have to stop if there are cars coming, and that’s what Chon is hoping for. Sure enough, he sees a white pickup truck drive onto the bridge from the other direction.

  He can sprint across and lose the pack.

  But the pickup truck turns sideways on the bridge, blocking it.

  Two other Palala get out.

  With baseball bats.

  The Jeep rushes up behind him and turns sideways, blocking any avenue of retreat. The Palala pile out, with bats, clubs, tire irons. “Hey, tough guy! How tough are you now?”

  Not that tough, Chon thinks as they walk up on him from both sides.

  I’m fucked.

  He looks down at the river below. If it’s too shallow he’ll break his legs or, worse, his neck or his back.

  But if the jump doesn’t, these guys will.

  He climbs onto the railing and jumps feetfirst.

  Hoping that the water will be—

  d

  e

  e

  p.

  * * *

  Chon sinks, grateful for the fact.

  He stretches into a diving position to stay under the water for as long as he can in case the mokes have guns.

  The current rushes him toward the sea.

  After a minute he lets himself come up for air, looks back up to see the mokes at the railing, pointing down and laughing.

  The river pushes him into the crashing surf.

  Maybe they figure I’ll drown, Chon thinks.

  Hell, maybe I will.

  He lets the current pull him out past the break.

  * * *

  Ben’s concerned.

  “Have you seen Chon?” Ben asks O. If these guys fronted Chon, he wouldn’t talk nice or try to defuse the situation. If the guys wanted to beef, Chon would go like prime rib. “I can’t find him, he doesn’t answer his phone.”

  “He’ll be okay,” O says. “I mean, he’s Chon.”

  * * *

  It’s a long swim, all the way across Wainiha Bay and around Kolokolo Point, but Chon enjoys it.

  Well, he enjoys it a lot more than having his legs broken with a tire iron.

  It’s not the distance that bothers him—he did a lot more in SEAL training on the cold water of Silver Strand—it’s the thought of sharks that worries him.

  (Shouldn’t—it’s the sharks who should be worried about Chon.)

  He catches a wave off Lumahai Beach and body-surfs it to shore.

  * * *

  Tim and Elizabeth are sitting on their lanai having a sundowner drink when Gabe rolls up in his truck.

  Gabe gets out. “Uncle Tim. Auntie Liz.”

  “Gabe,” Tim says. “Kit’s not here. He’s out surfing.”

  Gabe already knows this. He wouldn’t have come if Kit were here.

  Tim knows this, too.

  “I came to talk to you,” Gabe says.

  “What can I do for you?”

  Gabe walks up to the lanai but not up on the porch. Leaning on the railing, he asks, “How long have you lived here, Uncle?”

  “About twelve years,” Tim says.

  Gabe says, “My family has been here since before the haoles came.”

  “Haoles like us?” Elizabeth asks.

  “I didn’t used to think so,” Gabe says. “Now . . .”

  He lets it hang.

  Elizabeth says, “You used to sit in the yard eating peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches with our son.”

  “This is our home,” Tim says.

  “Then why are you selling out to strangers?” Gabe asks. “You could be in business with your own people.”

  “You mean the Company?” Tim says. “No thanks.”

  “I’m not asking, Uncle.” He juts his chin back toward the trucks full of his guys.

  “That’s how it is?” Tim asks.

  “It don’t have to be,” Gabe says.

  “I’m afraid it does,” Tim says.

  “You need to leave,” Gabe says. “I don’t want to see you get hurt.”

  “Who’s going to hurt us, Gabriel?” Elizabeth asks. “Are you?”

  Gabe turns and gets back in the truck.

  * * *

  Kit strides down the main street of Hanalei.

  Chon sees him from the lanai of Bubba’s Burgers. He jumps down and walks beside him.

  “You need some help?” Chon asks.

  “No.” Kit doesn’t even look at him. Kit walks through the front door of the Blue Dolphin bar and sees Gabe sitting at a table drinking beer with the Palala. Edging through the crowd, he grabs Gabe, hefts him over his head like he weighs nothing, walks out and tosses him off the lanai. Then Kit vaults the railing, grabs Gabe by the front of the shirt, drags him to the river and pushes his head under the water.

  Leaning down, Kit says, “You threatened my parents, Gabe?! You threatened my mom and dad?”

  He lifts Gabe’s head out of the water.

  Gabe gasps for air.

  Kit shoves his head back down.

  Israel Kalana tries to pull Kit off. Kit straight-arms him, and Kalana staggers backward.

  “Stay out of this!” Kit yells.

  Kalana and the rest of the Palala back off.

  Kit holds Gabe down until his legs start quaking, then pulls him back up, turns him around and lifts him till they’re face-to-face. “You go near my parents again, I’ll kill you. I’ll break you to pieces with my hands.”

  He drops Gabe and looks at the pack.

  “That goes for all of you,”
Kit says.

  * * *

  “We should pull out of this deal,” Ben says back at the rental house. “People are going to get hurt. I’m not sure this market is worth it.”

  “That’s not the point,” Chon says. “If we let ourselves get chased from here, people will take runs at us everywhere we sell. We’ll be out of business. We fight.”

  “That’s always your solution.”

  “Like yours is always to run.”

  Ben asks O, “What do you think?”

  “I think it’s not up to us,” O says. “It’s up to Tim, Kit and Elizabeth. It’s their home, we’re just tourists.”

  “She’s right,” Ben says.

  “She is right,” says Chon.

  I’m right? O thinks.

  Huh.

  * * *

  They meet at the Dolphin.

  Which is in itself an announcement. Within minutes everyone in town will know that not only are the Karsens not going to separate from their mainland friends, they’re going to rub it in Gabe’s nose—they’re dining together in the same place where Kit turned the Palala leader into a pool toy.

  “I should have told you about Gabe’s possible connection to the Company,” Tim says to start things off. “My bad.”

  “So what do you want to do?” Ben asks. “We understand if you want out of our deal. No hard feelings, no one will think any the less of you.”

  Tim Kearney was a lifelong loser.

  He knows it.

  Three B&Es, three convictions, three stretches in the joint. Killed a biker in his last stint (rather than join the Aryan Brotherhood) and would have been serving life without parole if he didn’t happen to look like Bobby Z.

  Yeah, Tim was losing at everything until life brought him Kit and Elizabeth, and it was taking care of them that made him something. Washed ashore here in Hanalei, worked as a laborer, a cook, a carpenter, dealt a little pakalolo and built a home.

  A life.

  A family.

  Kit—his son—is a freaking legend.

  Malia—his daughter-in-law-to-be is a wonder.

  Life is good.

  So why risk it, he thinks, by taking on the Company?

  But here’s the thing about Tim.

  He doesn’t respond well to threats.

  Just ask the biker in the joint who told him to join the Aryan Brotherhood or else.

  Tim chose else.

  And you can’t ask the biker, because he’s dead.

  So when Ben offers him an out on their deal, Tim is tempted to say . . .

  No.

  Hell no.

  He’s not going to let a punk like Gabe tell him how to live. And he sure as shit ain’t going to let the Company tell him how to live. But he looks to the rest of his family. “What do you guys think?”

  Kit defers to Malia.

  Gabe is her cousin, and she’s the only native-born Hawaiian at the table.

  “I think,” she says, “that you shouldn’t be in the drug business at all. Certainly not with the Company and—no offense, Ben, Chon, O—with you either. We don’t need to be rich, we need to be a family. And . . . we were going to wait to tell you, but . . . well, we’re going to have a baby.”

  Oh.

  * * *

  “You’re seventeen years old,” Elizabeth says.

  Babies having babies, she thinks.

  “Yeah, we didn’t plan this,” Kit says. “I was careless. But I think we can handle it. I know we can handle it.”

  I don’t know, Elizabeth thinks. Kit is physically a man, seventeen going on twenty-five, but he’s still a kid, a boy. On the other hand, they tend to start families young in the islands, and . . . well, it’s a done deal, isn’t it?

  So Elizabeth throws her arms around Malia. “Sweetheart.”

  Tim says to Ben, “There’s your answer.”

  “I’m sorry if we’ve wasted your time,” Kit says.

  “No, we’ve had a great vacation,” Ben says.

  * * *

  “Can you imagine,” O asks as they walk home, “what that kid is going to look like?”

  No answer.

  “I mean, gorgeous,” O says.

  “You okay with this?” Ben asks Chon.

  “Sure.”

  “You’re worried about our reputation,” Ben says.

  Chon shrugs. “I guess we can take a hit.”

  “What about payback?” Ben asks.

  “Not everything needs to be paid back,” Chon says.

  “I want to see your driver’s license,” Ben says. “Who are you and what did you do with Chon?”

  “Maybe I’ve evolved.”

  “It’s the Spam,” O says.

  * * *

  Gabe takes a gas can from the back of the truck.

  The other Wolfpack take more cans and they walk to the tree house.

  Gabe didn’t want to do this, but then he heard that Kit was rubbing his nose in the shit, going out to eat with the haoles at the Dolphin.

  You forced me into this, he thinks as he climbs up the ladder.

  You didn’t give me a choice.

  He unscrews the cap and pours the gas around the house.

  * * *

  Kit sees the flames.

  A fire in the sky.

  At first he doesn’t know what he’s seeing—it doesn’t make any sense, as if someone lit a huge torch in a watchtower.

  Then he gets it.

  “NO!”

  He guns the engine and races up the road. Jumps out of the truck while it’s still rolling into the cul-de-sac, grabs a hose from the workhouse wall, turns on the spigot and runs toward the burning tree.

  The top two levels of the treehouse are consumed in flames.

  “Kit, there’s nothing you can do!” Tim yells.

  Kit doesn’t listen. He pulls the hose toward the tree and sprays water.

  It does nothing.

  He drops the hose and starts to climb the ladder.

  Tim pulls him back. “No, son! It’s too late!”

  Kit shrugs him off and climbs into the burning tree. To the first level. He throws down pieces of furniture, rips appliances from the walls, planks from the flooring, anything he can reach through the flames, anything he can free with his hands.

  Tim climbs up after him.

  Helps him tear out a sink, throw it to the ground.

  A mirror from the wall.

  The flames are getting worse, but Kit rushes up to the next level.

  “We have to go!” Tim yells.

  “NO!” Kit is trying to pry Malia’s stained-glass window from the wall.

  “Now!” Tim yells.

  “I have to get this!”

  Tim grabs the other side of the window, and together they rip it from the wall.

  “Take this down!” Kit yells. “I’m going up!”

  “Okay!” Tim puts the window under one arm and then kicks Kit from behind.

  Kit falls off the platform, lands on his hands and feet, looks up to see Tim coming down the ladder and tries to go up again.

  Tim grabs him and holds him. “You have a kid to think about now. You can rebuild.”

  Kit grabs the hose again and starts to spray.

  It does nothing against the gas-fueled fire.

  He finally gives up, drops the hose and watches his beloved home burn, crumble and topple to the ground.

  Malia holds him. “It’s all right, it’s all right.”

  She’s never seen him cry before.

  * * *

  The rain falls on ashes.

  From which nothing will grow.

  The stench alone sickens, the gas fumes linger, the acrid char stings the nose.

  Standing in the rain with Ben and Chon, looking at the devastation, O can’t help but feel that they brought this on these people.

  Destruction to paradise.

  * * *

  The insurance guy arrives later that morning.

  He gets out of his Jeep and walks up to Tim. “Jack Wade, Hawa
ii Fire and Life.”

  The Jeep has a longboard strapped on the top.

  “I’m sorry about your loss,” Wade says. As they walk over to the scene, he asks, “How did the fire start?”

  Tim looks at Kit.

  Kit shrugs. “We don’t know.”

  Wade steps up to the charred tree trunk and says, “I’ll run tests, but I can tell you right now it was deliberately set.”

  “Not by us,” Tim says.

  “I can smell the gasoline from here,” Wade says.

  “We didn’t set it,” Kit says.

  “Do you know who did?” Wade asks.

  No answer.

  Wade does his inspection, taking several samples of the ash at different levels of the tree.

  When he comes down, he goes up to Tim and says, “Look, you seem like nice people, and I don’t want to jam you up, but this is the clearest case of arson I’ve ever seen. I have to do an investigation to determine if you set the fire. If you did, the loss isn’t covered.”

  “So, bottom line, you’re not paying,” Elizabeth says.

  “I’d like to,” Wade says. “I want to. But I can’t until the investigation is complete and I can determine that you didn’t set the fire to collect insurance benefits.”

  “We’re guilty until proven innocent,” Tim says.

  “Not at all,” Wade says. “Unless I can show that you had motive, means and opportunity, we’ll pay the claim. I hope that’s the way this ends, I really do. If you can tell me whether there was anyone else who had a motive . . .”

  Kit quickly says, “Not that I know of.”

  Wade leaves, telling them that he’ll be in touch to schedule an EUO, an Examination Under Oath, and suggests they might want to retain a lawyer.

  Tim looks at Kit.

  “I’m not ratting Gabe out,” Kit says. “He’s still my brother.”

  “Your brother burned down your home,” Tim says.

  Ben says, “We’ll pay the cost to rebuild.”

  “There’s nothing to rebuild,” Kit says. “The tree is too damaged to support anything. It’ll probably die.”

  “I’m so sorry,” O says.

  “It’s not your fault,” Kit says.

  O isn’t sure he means it.

  Tim says he has something to do.

  * * *

  Tim presses the blade to Gabe’s throat.

  Gabe never saw Tim, never heard him. Just got into his truck to go surf, and there’s a knife against his windpipe.

  He hears Tim Karsen say, “Give me one reason I shouldn’t, Gabe.”

  “This isn’t you, Uncle.”

  “You think I haven’t killed anyone before?” Tim asks. “Think again. The only reason I don’t cut your fucking throat is that I want my family to have a life. Kit and Malia are going to have a kid. Did you know that?”