by Kay Hadashi
“Lucky her. She gets music with her beer.”
She still couldn’t get a good look at the girl’s face. She could’ve been a teenager, or a thirty year old. She drank her beer fast, though, as though a clock was ticking. Setting her can on the dashboard, she shook her head about something, her blond mane barely moving.
Hughes got active about something hidden by the dashboard. He was still in the front seat with his date, so they hadn’t progressed to back seat activities quite yet. Or maybe what happened in the back seat of a car in Cleveland happened in the front seat in Honolulu, Gina didn’t know. Maybe all he was doing was counting money to pay her ahead of whatever act that was being planned.
Then Gina saw what it was that he’d been doing. He had a crude pipe with a foil ball at one end. When he tried handing it to his date, she waved it off. With a second more insistent attempt to get her to take it, she pushed his hand away. He seemed to accept that, and holding a lighter to the foil ball, he took a puff.
“Smoking meth is illegal anywhere,” Gina muttered. She got out her phone to call the police. “Even in a parked car.”
That’s when the girl opened her door. White smoke came out. While stepping out, she shouted a profanity at him.
That didn’t accomplish much except to get him more excited. While he took another puff from the foil pipe, he grabbed a hold of her and pulled back. The girl fired off a few more curse words, which only seemed to piss Hughes off. He had both hands on her by then, one pulling her arm, the other pulling her hair.
Gina waited for the 9-1-1 operator to come on the line while anxiously watching the girl get abused by Hughes. She was impressed with the fight the girl was putting up to keep Hughes off her.
“Come on…come on…answer my call…”
Then the horrible thing happened. Gina saw a fist slam into the girl’s face. She fell back against the car door on her side and didn’t move. With no more resistance, Hughes grabbed the girl’s blouse and tore it open.
“Oh, no you don’t!”
Gina tossed her phone with the unanswered call aside and swung the Datsun’s door open. She was running before her feet touched the ground.
No longer a police officer, she had little she could shout. The words, ‘Stop! Police! Put your hands up!’ by law had to fail her.
She was across the street in seconds. With no real plan in mind other than getting him off his date, she pulled his car door open. When she saw his pants halfway to his knees, she hoped she wasn’t too late. Gina grabbed his ankles and pulled.
It was too much of a surprise for him, and he barely had time to grab the dashboard. With a second yank on his legs, she pulled him out of the car. When his chest landed on the ground, his face bounced off the pavement. He rolled onto his back. With one hand reaching for his nose, he tried kicking at Gina.
“Stop! The police are on their way!” was all Gina could think to shout. She looked past him into the car. The girl was out cold, her head leaning off to one side. Somehow, she needed to control a man high on meth, and call for an ambulance for the girl. Patting her pocket, she remembered leaving her phone behind. When Hughes began to push up from the ground, Gina pushed him back down again with a foot. Once he was down, she stood on one of his arms to keep him there. “Lay still! The police are almost here!”
It was a little white lie, one she hoped was believable. She prayed for the sound of a siren, any siren. She had no idea if her call had ever been answered by the 9-1-1 dispatcher, and if it had, if help was on its way. It could take some time locating her using the GPS chip in her phone, and she had a struggling maniac and an unconscious girl to contend with. At least she hoped the girl was only unconscious, and not…
In the next moment, it didn’t really matter. When she felt the hard edge of something club her in the back of the head, the moment went dark.
Chapter Nineteen
When Gina came to, she was on her back. She had no idea of where she was or why her head hurt so much. Holding her head with both hands, she felt a goose egg at the back, and a smudge of blood on her cheek.
“What happened?”
She put her hands on the ground to push herself up. She was on asphalt and didn’t know why. Getting to a sitting position, she felt dizzy. She held her head again, trying to figure out what happened and where she was. There were a few flashes in her mind, of sitting in the Datsun, and a fight of some sort. She reached for her hip, but her sidearm wasn’t there.
Groping at her clothes, she looked down. Not even her holster was there. No belt, no uniform, no Kevlar vest, nothing but a skirt and blouse.
Still trying to figure out this new world she was in, she heard a woman crying. She looked to a few feet away and saw a girl on her side. Her clothes were torn. She seemed familiar.
“Are you okay?” Gina asked, still groping the goose egg at the back of her head.
The girl cursed Gina.
“Same to you. Any idea what happened?”
“Don’t you know?” the girl nearly screamed.
“I’m kinda woozy over here, so you might want to lay off the attitude, okay?”
“I’m hurt,” the girl said, before starting to cry again.
Gina got up and after getting her legs working right, went to sit with the crying girl. There were no cars in the parking lot they were in, not even her squad car. Or did she have a crappy pickup truck? Things still weren’t making much sense. “Where are you hurt?”
“My face,” she whimpered. “He tore my clothes.”
Gina tried covering the girl’s chest with pieces of torn blouse. “Who did?”
“That bartender. He said we were going for a drive and stop at the beach.”
Another flash of information hit Gina’s mind, something about a bartender. “Did he touch you anywhere else?”
“I think I was out cold for a while.” The girl felt her clothes. “I don’t think he did anything else. Are the police coming?”
“I don’t know,” Gina said. “I’m not even sure why we’re here or how I got hurt. Or even who you are.”
“Holly,” the girl said quietly. She was beginning to settle now that Gina had her arm around her shoulders. “I knew better than to go back to that bar.”
With the mention of a bar, fragmented memories were beginning to fit together. Gina remembered going to the bar but not going in, instead following Hughes and a girl around in his car for a while. The girl she was comforting must’ve been that same girl. She still couldn’t figure out why they were battered and sitting in a parking lot, or even why she followed them.
“Holly, do you have a phone?”
“It was in my bag.”
“Where’s that?”
“In that guy’s car.”
More clarity. Gina recalled sitting in her Datsun watching the ‘date’ unfold in Hughes’s car, drugs being inhaled, and a punch being thrown. When the last piece of memory came back, albeit hazy, it was of her standing over Hughes, while looking at the unconscious girl in the front seat of his car. Now here they were, sitting alone in the parking lot with no cars anywhere nearby.
“Okay, we can’t stay here,” Gina said. She stood and tried pulling the girl up by the arm.
“Where’d we going?”
“For starters, the hospital would be a good idea.”
“No! I can’t go there!”
“I saw you get punched pretty hard, Holly. It knocked you out. You should get checked out by a doctor. They should check for other injuries, too.”
“I can’t go back there,” Holly said.
Gina wanted to go to some place to get her head checked as much as she wanted the girl to get examined. But in the girl’s present state of mind, that apparently wasn’t happening. When she looked across the street, she saw the Datsun still parked there.
“We’re not staying here,” she said, forcing the girl to stand. “It’s not safe.”
“Where are we going?”
“My house. You can stay there tonigh
t. It’ll be safe.”
“Where do you live?”
“Near the university. You’ll be safe.”
Gina found her phone on the front seat where she’d left it. A call was live, but no one was there for a moment when she spoke. Just as she was about to end the call, she heard a voice on the phone.
“Hello?”
“This is 9-1-1 dispatch. Are you in need of assistance? Are you safe?”
Gina looked at her companion. Holly nodded back.
“I’m fine. I guess I mis-dialed.”
“I’ve sent a squad car to your location. You’re across from Kapalama Park, right?”
“I’m not sure where I am right now, but I don’t need the police.”
Getting off the call with dispatch was harder than she expected, suffering the third degree on why she called and if she was safe. After the call, Gina gave Holly her blouse to wear since she was wearing a tank top beneath hers. Once Gina got the Datsun started, she drove to the end of the alley. Just then, a squad car drove by, its lights flashing but no siren. Acting as nonchalant as she could, she pulled out into the quiet street and drove in the opposite direction.
“You really do need to get checked over by a doctor, Holly.” Gina touched her cheekbone, which was beginning to throb. “I wouldn’t mind having someone look at me, too.”
“Okay, but can we get something to eat first?”
“Yeah. We’ll find a place.” The last thing Gina wanted was a meal. She wanted information instead. She knew Hughes was dirty for at least trying to have his way with Holly, who looked a little too young to be served alcohol. “Maybe we should call your parents so they can come pick you up?”
“They’re back home on Kauai.”
“Who do you live with here?”
Holly waited a moment before answering. “I got a roommate. I’m a student at the university and live in a dorm.”
“It might be better if you stay with me tonight so we can keep an eye on each other.” Gina pulled into the lot of a family restaurant. When the waitress tried showing them to a booth at a window, Gina asked for something in a corner away from the street. Even though she’d skipped dinner, Gina wasn’t hungry and ordered only coffee. Holly ordered a breakfast omelet.
Holly was pretty, in a pick-up bar sort of way. Her face had delicate Asian features, but large occidental eyes. She had too many facial piercings for Gina’s taste, and one had a spot of blood around it left over from when she’d been hit by Hughes. What had been a large blonde mane glued together with hair spray was a topsy-turvy wreck.
“Tell me what happened in the car with Hughes,” Gina said to her companion. She held her glass of ice water to her cheek to cool what surely going to be a bruise in the morning. “That was his name, right? The dayshift bartender at Bunzo’s?”
“I knew you were going to ask a bunch of questions. You’re a cop, aren’t you?”
“You’re not in trouble, Holly. I’m just trying to figure out what happened, more for my sake than anything else.”
“Can I go to the bathroom first? I want to clean up a little.”
“Sounds like a good idea.”
While she waited for Holly to return, Gina made a few notes on a napkin with a pen she borrowed from the waitress. She had a rudimentary timeline of what happened, and a description of Hughes’s car. When the omelet was brought to the table, Holly still hadn’t come back.
“Have you seen the girl I came in with?” Gina asked.
“Not since she ordered,” the waitress said. She looked a lot like many of the people Gina had been meeting, with dark skin, Asian eyes, prominent cheekbones, and black hair ironed straight. Most noticeable was the overdone makeup and false eyelashes that looked more like window awnings. If she’d been wearing a miniskirt while standing on a street corner in Little Italy, Gina would’ve rousted her out of the neighborhood. “Why’d you come in here with her?”
“What do you mean?”
“You look like a decent gal. Not like her type, anyway,” the waitress said as she walked away.
Wondering if she was being played for a fool, Gina went to the restroom in search of Holly. When she found it empty, she had a couple of choice curse words of her own. Back at her table, the omelet was waiting, along with a refill of her coffee.
She pulled the plate to her side of the table. “I’m finally getting that omelet I’ve been wanting all week.”
***
When the waitress brought the check, Gina was pressing the glass of ice water to her cheek again. “Can I get some more ice, please?”
The waitress came right back with some. “Every time that girl comes in here, she’s a mess.”
“Who? Holly?”
“Is that her name this week? Last time it was Ivy. One other time it was Rose.”
“I sense a trend. What do you mean by being a mess?” Gina asked. She finally looked at the waitress’s nametag: Angela.
“Crying all over the place, clothes torn, hair in tangles. Real mess, I tell ya.”
“She’s here a lot?”
“Every Saturday evening. Anything else? You want some dessert? We have plenty of pie.”
“Pie after an omelet?”
“People like our pie,” Angela said, walking away again, taking her pen and sense of style with her.
Gina left money on the table to pay the bill and left. She went through the complicated routine of starting the Datsun’s engine. While letting it idle for a moment, she rubbed the goose egg on the back of her head. “So, this is what people do for fun in Honolulu on a Saturday evening. Not much different from home.”
Chapter Twenty
When Gina woke on Sunday morning, it was to a bulldozer rolling over her head. Without lifting her head, she felt the goose egg at the back. It was still large, and that wasn’t making her head feel any better. Touching her cheekbone brought her the same results, of being puffy and tender.
She didn’t want to see how big of a shiner she had, so she avoided the mirror in the bathroom on the way to the kitchen. The omelet she’d had the evening before at Jack’s Restaurant had sat heavily, and she was hungry only for coffee that morning. Sitting at the kitchen table with the first mug, she let the steam rise to her face.
She was just deciding to go back to bed when there was a knock at her front door.
“This is Sunday morning. No reason to bother people so early on a day off.” She went to the door but didn’t open it. “Who is it?”
“Me.” It was a low voice that she recognized. It was the roofer, or electrician, whatever he was this week.
“Not doing any plumbing today. Thanks, though.”
“Not here for water. Here for walls.”
There was as much banging going on inside her head as she figured there would be with nails and his hammer on wall paneling.
“So early?”
“Sooner started, sooner done.”
Gina muttered the same answer to herself, only with a sense of sarcasm. “It’s Sunday. You can’t give it a rest? I mean, take a day off from working on the house?”
“You want walls or not?” he said through the gap in the door.
“Let me put something on.” Giving up on having a quiet morning to herself, Gina swapped her pajamas for a T-shirt and shorts before letting him in. “I have coffee, if you’d like some.”
In the kitchen, he pointed to his own face in the same spots as her injured cheek. “What happened?”
Gina had to think fast because she hadn’t thought of any explanations. As far as she knew, she’d taken a whack from behind, leaving her with the goose egg, and got the bruised face when she fell forward and hit the asphalt. “I had some trouble with the ladder yesterday.”
“Not boyfriend?”
“I don’t have one.”
“Looks like fight with boyfriend.”
“Fight with the ladder.”
“You want me to do something?”
“I can take myself to the doctor, but I think I�
�m okay.”
He shook his head. “No need for doctor. I can open it.”
“Open? What do you mean?”
“Bad shiner, like a boxer gets. I can open.”
Gina went to the bathroom to look in the mirror. That’s when she saw how big the bruise was, so big that her eyelid was sagging with the weight of extra blood in it. It really did look like something her boxer cousin would have after a bout. She’d even seen it get opened once. The way it looked on her, it would take a week, maybe two, before it ever went away.
“You know how?” she asked, tapping her fingertip on the lump of bruised eyelid.
“All of us in the family are boxers. Do this all the time. Maybe hurt a little, but better faster later.”
“Faster later?”
“You want it better or not?”
Kenzo looked the part of roofer, electrician, and plumber, but not that of a plastic surgeon. For as rough and tumble as her life had been growing up, Gina still didn’t have any scars on her face, and wanted to keep it that way. Having the roofer cut her eyelid the way a ringside doctor would with a boxer gave her a strong sense of alarm. But tapping a fingertip on her eyelid again, she didn’t want to spend the week looking like a boxer who got knocked out in the tenth round. “You go wait in the kitchen. I need to think about this.”
While she sat in the bathroom, Gina tapped her finger on her eyelid again. That wasn’t going to accomplish much at making her eyelid go down. After washing her face, she wiped alcohol on her eyelid and cheek, doing the same thing she’d seen her uncle do to her cousin the one time. That stung her eyes while it dried. Taking apart a safety razor, she took that into the kitchen with more rubbing alcohol. He already had paper towels out and a chair arranged for her.
“You have a lighter?” she asked.
She watched carefully as he waved the razor blade through the flame on his lighter.
“You really know what you’re doing?”
“It’s okay. I’ve done this lotsa times.”
“I’ve heard that before.” Gina settled into the kitchen chair. “Okay, look. Just a tiny pinprick, right? Just big enough to let the blood out. I don’t want a scar.”