by Don Winslow
“No.”
“That was going to be their home,” Tim says. “And you burned it down. The stupid thing is that you didn’t even have to do it. We were going to come tell you we were getting out of the business. You broke my son’s heart for nothing.”
Tim eases the pressure on the knife.
“Go tell that to the Company,” Tim says. “Tell them it’s over. Pau. We’re not going to look for revenge, we just want to get on with our lives.”
He takes the knife from Gabe’s throat.
“Too late,” Gabe says.
* * *
“The Company wants it all now,” Tim says when he comes back to the house. “They’re demanding we sell them the land for their own grow operation.”
“It’s like I’ve always maintained,” Chon says. “You take a step backward from someone, they push you two steps more. Because you let them think they can.”
We have to change their thinking, Chon thinks.
* * *
Kit wants to go with him.
Chon declines.
“Why?” Kit asks. “I’m bigger, stronger and faster than you. And I know the territory a lot better than you do.”
“All of that’s true,” Chon says. “You train to surf and swim. But this is what I do for a living. Every day I train to do exactly this thing.”
“Kill people?” Kit asks.
“Or wound them or capture them,” Chon says.
“So which?” Kit asks.
Chon shrugs. “Depends.”
Kit says, “I’m coming with you, or I go out and do it on my own.”
He’s got him there.
* * *
Israel Kalana would have been all right if he didn’t have to piss.
But he did have to piss, and he went outside to do it, because Palestine was hogging the one toilet, trying to end a bout of constipation.
Anyway, Israel is outside draining the weasel against a casuarina hedge when he gets thunked on the base of the skull. He wakes up in the back of Kit’s pickup truck with his hands plastic-tied behind his back, his feet bound with rope, and a rag stuffed in his mouth.
Palestine’s mistake is in going to look for what had happened to Israel. He walks out on the lawn to the edge of the pavement and sees the cigarette glowing up the street to the left. That’s the last thing he sees until he wakes up next to Israel, similarly bound and gagged, in the back of Kit’s truck.
* * *
Kai wonders where everyone went.
He pulls his Glock 9 and steps outside.
Chon’s gun is at his neck.
“I will literally blow your head off,” Chon says.
Kai drops his gun.
Chon says, “Take me to your leader.”
He’s been wanting to say that his whole life.
Well, he did say it several times in Iraq, but . . . you know, nobody got it.
* * *
Gabe sits in his house on the south end of the bay along Weke Road.
He’s enjoying a very good spliff and Miami Vice on the sixty-five-inch flat-screen when he gets a call from Israel. “I need to talk with you.”
“You found that guy Chon yet?”
“Yeah,” Israel says.
Which is true.
“Where are you?” Gabe asks.
“Outside your place.”
“Yeah, okay.”
Gabe clicks off.
Suspicious.
Israel sounded hinky to him, nervous. Stepping to the front window, Gabe stands to the side and eases the curtain open enough to look out.
Sees the Jeep in front and Kai squeezed behind the wheel. Kai needs to push away from the table a little more, Gabe thinks. Still suspicious—the line between suspicion and caution being razor thin—he takes his own Glock off the side table and goes out the back door. Sticking close to the wall, he edges his way around the house to the end of the lanai and sees Chon standing by the front door with a pistol held behind his back.
Gabe is a big man, but light on his feet.
He comes up behind Chon and sticks the pistol in his back. “Surprise, motherfucker. Time to die.”
Kit steps in and swings the ax handle like he’s going after a hanging curve.
Gabe goes down like he’s been . . . well, axed.
* * *
“Did you think you were playing with children?” Chon asks.
Gabe is duct-taped to a chair.
Miami Vice is still on.
“My guys will get you,” Gabe says.
“I don’t think so,” Chon says. “One of them is taped to a steering wheel, two others are in the back of a truck.”
“So what do we got to talk about?” Gabe asks.
Chon’s impressed.
He’s seen Taliban and AQ break down and cry by now.
(Usually it was Peter, Paul and Mary.
Or Kenny G that did it.)
“The point is,” Chon says, “do you realize how easy this was? I can do this anytime I want. It’s what I do. But if I have to do it again, the next time I’ll kill you.”
“So . . .”
“You didn’t take the peace offer the first time it was made,” Chon says. “I get it—you thought we were weak. Now you have better information to inform your decision. Take the offer. Don’t make me do this again.”
“Here’s the problem, bruddah,” Gabe says. “You think I can go back to the Company and tell them I got beat?”
Chon gets it.
“Do we need to send a message to your bosses?” he asks. “That’s unfortunate, but I think we can work that out.”
* * *
Gabe and his three guys lie in the back of Kit’s truck, all hog-tied and gagged.
Chon hefts a can of gasoline. “You boys like to play with matches, right?”
He pours gas over all of them.
Palestine finally takes a shit.
* * *
Red Eddie looks at the photo and shakes his head.
Four Palala mokes lying in the back of a truck, their mouths duct-taped shut. A big sign is draped over Gabe’s neck:
delicious. don’t send more.
ps: next time they come back as poke.
Eddie considers this. A former special ops stud captures four of my guys. Pours gasoline over them but doesn’t toss the match. Has them at his mercy and executes only mercy.
Instead of sending me a photo of four charred corpses, he sends me a joke.
With a warning: “Don’t Send More.”
And a peace offering: Leave the Karsens alone and we’ll leave you alone. We’ll leave the islands.
I wish I could accept, Eddie thinks.
It would be the smart thing to do.
Would have been, Mr. Chon (and what the fuck kind of name is that anyway?), if you hadn’t exposed me to humiliation. An ali’i—a chief—can afford to lose men, can even afford to lose money, but what he can’t afford to lose is face.
First it’s my face, Eddie thinks, then it’s my neck.
And this admittedly comical stunt of yours has cost me face.
I have to get it back.
He calls the phone number attached to the message.
“Funny shit, man,” Eddie says.
“So what’s your answer?”
“You should have tossed the match,” Eddie says.
* * *
“We can’t fight the whole Company,” Tim says.
Chon says, “I can.”
* * *
He drives to the other side of the island—the “dry side”—to the small town of Waimea. Where an old teammate lives.
A former medic, Danny “Doc” McDonald chose the place because it’s in the middle of nowhere, he can afford a little bungalow not far from the beach, it’s sunny and warm, and no one is bleeding out.
He’s happy to see Chon. They haven’t seen each other since Helmand Province, and they were brothers.
“I need your help,” Chon says.
“Anything.”
; Chon leaves with Doc’s offer to come and fight (politely but gratefully declined), two HK 23 So Com pistols, a 12-gauge Remington shotgun, an M14 EBR assault rifle, two grenades, some flares, trip wires, M18 antipersonnel mines and a fully stocked first-aid kit (politely and gratefully accepted).
He needs it all.
He figures Eddie is sending an army.
* * *
Gabe meets the plane at the airport in Lihue.
The reinforcements that Eddie sent are a dozen serious hitters from Honolulu—skilled with guns, knives and jitz—more than capable of taking out this haole Chon.
He greets the Honolulu guests warmly but gets only condescending grunts in return. These Waianae boys look at Gabe like a hick who can’t handle his own business.
Gabe needs to set them straight. “Remember, I’m still the boss here.”
Yeah, okay.
“I don’t want Kit hurt.”
Yeah, okay.
* * *
Chon tells them all to get on a flight to California.
Except himself.
He’s going to stay and fight.
Tim says he’s staying with him.
“You’d get in my way,” Chon says.
“I was a marine.”
“Good for you, ma’am.”
“This is my home, my land,” Tim says. “I built a life here. I’m not running away and leaving someone else to defend it.”
Kit says, “Same.”
“No,” Tim says. “You’re not going to take a chance on leaving that baby without a father.”
“I’m not running away,” Kit says.
“Then walk,” says Elizabeth.
Kit looks at her.
“Seriously, what is this?” Elizabeth asks. “Some kind of bad western complete with philosophizing about the meaning of manhood? Let me tell you what manhood is, my son. It’s taking care of your family. If that means walking away or running away or crawling away. I raised you to be a man, and that’s what I expect you to do.”
“Let me suggest a compromise,” Ben says.
Because Ben is Ben.
“Not even the Company is going to risk a shoot-out in the middle of town,” he says. “You take Malia, your mom and O and go to the rental house. If you need to fly out tomorrow, you’ll be that much closer to the airport.”
“What are you going to do?” Kit asks.
“Learn how to use a gun, I guess.”
“I need you to go with them,” Chon says. “There might be some hard decisions to make, and that’s what you do best, Ben. You think. Go do what you do best, and let me do what I do.”
“What? Make some glorious last stand?”
“I won’t be standing, and it won’t be the last,” Chon says. He hands Ben one of the pistols. “It’s kind of like a computer mouse—point and click.”
When the others have left, Tim asks, “How are you planning to defend this place?”
Chon looks at him like he’s nuts.
“I’m not,” he says.
* * *
Too smart just to drive up into a spray of gunfire from the house, the seven Waianae hitters leave their two rented Ford Explorers a hundred yards from the Karsen cul-de-sac and walk in. Their AR-15s at or near their shoulders, they spread out and make a slow approach.
Twenty yards from the house, the leader signals them to stop and get down.
Two tours in Iraq, he’s cautious.
Looking over at the workshop, he listens.
Hears nothing.
Not wanting to walk into a crossfire, he signals a couple of his men to loop around the back of the workshop and check it out.
A minute later they signal from the workshop that it’s clear.
The leader advances his men ten more yards toward the house. If the Karsens were going to shoot, they’d have done it by now. Leaving them to cover him, he runs to the side of the door, waits a second and then kicks it in.
Nothing.
They search the house.
Nobody’s home.
The leader comes out.
Red Eddie isn’t going to be happy, he thinks, if I have to call him and tell him we were too late and the targets got away.
Then one of the men he sent to the workshop comes up and points something out. He shines a flashlight at the muddy ground, at fresh tire tracks heading up into the hills.
The hitters get back into their vehicles and follow the tracks.
* * *
Driving toward the rental house on Weke Road, Kit spots a vehicle full of Hawaiians he doesn’t know.
Problem is, Kit knows every Hawaiian in Hanalei.
Who does and doesn’t belong.
These guys don’t.
All mokes, all with that hard look, that Waianae look, and their rented Toyota Highlander is driving slow, cruising, as if the guys inside are looking for something.
Us maybe, Kit thinks.
But the Highlander slides past the house without even slowing down.
Kit drives past the house, too.
Elizabeth says, “Kit—”
“I know.”
He keeps a distance but follows them down the road, then stops and sees their car take a hard right to avoid going into the Black Pot beach parking lot and then continue on Weke until it takes a left down the short dirt road to a boatyard that sits along the river.
“Stay here,” he says.
He gets out of the car and watches the Highlander park at the boatyard. Four men get out and walk to a twenty-foot rigid-hull inflatable boat—the kind they use to take tourists out on snorkeling trips—pulled up in shallow water beside the small beach.
What are they going to do with that? Kit asks himself.
He sees Gabe get out of the car.
It’s a shame, Kit thinks. He walks back to the car. Says to Ben, “Take them back to the house and wait.”
“What are you doing?” Ben asks.
Taking care of my family, Kit thinks. “Just do it, please.”
Malia says, “Kit, what—”
“I’m not doing anything stupid or rash,” Kit says. “I’m going out in the ocean, where nobody in the world can touch me.”
I’m going to take the guys out, Kit thinks, but I’m not going to kill them.
The ocean will do that.
Kit walks upstream from the boatyard to a little cove where he knows that Ty Menehe’s Jet Ski will be sitting in the water. He feels a little bad about taking Ty’s ski, but Ty had told him “anytime,” and this is anytime.
Straddling the ski, a Sea-Doo RXP-X, Kit starts it up and heads downriver toward the boatyard. He doesn’t try to be inconspicuous but drives right into the moonlight on the river.
Looks over and sees that Gabe spots him from the shore.
Kit guns the engine like he’s surprised and alarmed, and he races toward the mouth of the river.
Praying they’ll follow him.
* * *
Lying in the trees at the edge of the clearing, Chon watches the vehicles’ headlights come up slowly, the cars navigating the narrow, curving, bumpy trail that’s slick with mud.
It’s what he hopes will be the first mistake of many. They should have walked, humped it in.
Laziness, he thinks, is always punished.
He hopes Tim, on the other side of the clearing, sees the headlights, too. Hopes he’s ready when this goes off. Tim was a marine—all jokes aside that’s a big deal—but his skills are two wars old, and that’s no joke either. He has to trust that Tim will have the patience to wait and not fire before the targets are in the kill sack.
Kit looks back, sees the inflatable speeding toward him.
With all four mokes and Gabe on board.
Good, Kit thinks as he hits the incoming surf on the bay and busts through the inside break. He doesn’t turn to cross the bay toward home but keeps the ski pointed straight out of the bay.
Toward the break known as Kings and Queens.
* * *
Tim watches the hea
dlights.
It’s been a long time since he’s set up a night ambush.
Kind of like riding a bicycle.
* * *
Kit hears the whiz of bullets past his head before he hears the crackling of the automatic rifle.
It’s scary, but not that scary.
Unused to guns as he is, Kit thinks it’s probably pretty hard to hit someone from a moving boat bobbing in the increasing swell.
He revs the engine, though.
He has to reach Kings and Queens before the mokes reach him.
And they’re gaining fast.
* * *
Ten feet from the clearing, the lead car’s bumper hits the trip line.
The mine goes off.
Chon sees the flash of light before he hears the sharp crack of the explosion and the shouts.
The Explorer jumps sideways.
The driver opens the door and dives out.
The front-seat passenger isn’t going anywhere. His left hand holds his right arm, trying to keep it attached to the shoulder. Two men in the back, both hit with shrapnel and blinded by the flash, spill out of the car.
Chon finds one of them.
Green in his night scope.
The old expression is “shoot to kill,” but Chon shoots to wound. Not out of some humanitarian concern—fuck that—but when you’re outnumbered, wounding the enemy can be more effective than killing him, because at least one of his buddies has to tend to him, taking two men out of action instead of one.
Chon hits him in the hip. The force of the bullet spins the guy before he goes down. Sure enough, his buddy bends over, grabs him and drags him back out of the open.
Or tries to.
Chon’s next shot hits him in the back of the leg.
Now there are three wounded.
Chon stops firing.
Hopes that Tim won’t shoot yet.
* * *
Gabe knows what Kit is doing.
Taking them into the face of the enormous waves at Kings and Queens. Luring them out into the death zone, where only the best watermen can survive.
I’m one of the best, Gabe thinks.
These Waianae mokes aren’t.
And even I would have a tough time making it out here without a board, just me in the water without a life jacket or a bruddah on a ski coming to pull me out.
He yells, “We need to go back!”
The Waianae boss turns and points a gun at him. “Keep going!”