by Toby Neal
I felt shitty. Throbbing headache, dry mouth, a twitchy sense of frayed nerves. Perhaps left over from the dream, but more likely that other thing. I dug in my olive-drab backpack, stuffed with all the personal possessions I’d have for the next six months. I took out my shave kit and went to the head.
It was a bare-bones closet with a metal toilet and sink and a steel mirror above it. I did my business and opened the shave kit.
I had a flask in there, a flask filled with booze disguised as a shave cream can. It had been a simple enough thing to buy online. This ration was all I going to get, and it was strictly for medicinal purposes, so I could stave off the DTs as I dried out.
Because that’s what this crazy-ass trip was all about. Kicking the booze, and the other shit, too. I swigged a gulp of the alcohol, looking at my hollow-eyed reflection in the steel mirror with contempt.
The foul stuff seared my throat and made my eyes water, burned my esophagus and went off like a bomb in my empty belly. It tasted horrible. I wanted to retch, but instead I felt immediately better, as flu-like symptoms of withdrawal receded.
Just one more hit.
It still tasted horrible, but now it felt good, and that second drink activated a fierce longing to finish the rest. But I was in trouble if I did. This had to last, and then I was done. I screwed the “shaving cream” top back on, and feeling steadier, actually shaved with a sliver of soap.
Working the razor around that stubborn square edge of my jaw, I caught sight of the hook pendant Lei had given me. The white bone seemed to glow in the dim silver of the mirror, filling the shadow at the base of my throat, almost hidden in the olive drabness of my uniform shirt.
I still remembered her small hands pressed together over the pendant and her curly brown head bent before me as she murmured a prayer of blessing over it. I remembered the way she’d risen up on her knees in the bed before me and fastened the slightly scratchy coconut-husk necklace with the simple bone-and-loop closure behind my neck.
My face had been so close to her breasts: small, round, and perfect in the tank top she wore. I’d looked my fill at them and breathed in the smell of her, shut my eyes, and felt the love in the gift wash over me. I’d soaked it in, reveled in it—as I had in her body.
I didn’t deserve it. I’d almost destroyed us. But I’d make up for it now, by dealing with my shit and making some money. The company I was working for, Security Solutions, paid very well. This six-month stint would be a good start for our son Kiet’s college fund, if nothing else.
I finished shaving. Splashed my face. Buttoned up that last button so that the bone hook I told her I’d wear until I returned was hidden. Zipped up my kit. Returned to my seat.
When I shut my eyes, for a moment I could still smell her. Close. So close.
I slept again.
I woke again, this time with a full-body spasm.
The plane had crashed in this dream, and I’d been on fire at the end. Crawling. Dragging my dog, burning and desperate.
Like that time the house was on fire.
But the plane hadn’t crashed, really. Must have been another dream. Or a memory. Maybe it had crashed. Who the hell knew?
I was never sure about anything, since we were captured.
I shook, the bone-jarring, full-body shudders of hypothermia. My jaw ached with tension from trying to keep my teeth from clattering together. I shivered so hard the water around me made tiny waves.
Tiny waves that splashed against the mud walls of the deep pit I was in.
“Lieutenant. Move back here.” Someone was pulling me up. A man hauled me under the armpits out of the puddle I’d fallen over into, propping me against the slimy mud wall. The rain from above continued to pelt down on us through a bamboo frame covered with palm fronds above us. I couldn’t stop shivering: My teeth chattered, and my body quaked. I couldn’t even form words, I was so racked with shudders.
“I think he’s sick,” the man who’d helped me said to someone else. I tried to remember his name. I knew this man, this fellow prisoner, filthy in his mud-crusted clothing. His eyes were dark and shiny as he looked into my face, briefly touching my head. “He’s got a fever.”
I realized he was talking to someone on the other side of me.
“You think they give a shit?” The other guy’s voice was scratchy and hard.
“But we should tell them. He’s no good to them if he dies,” my helper said. He sat down in the mud beside me and threw an arm over me. “Relax, L.T. We got you. Carrigan, get over here. Lean against him on that side. Let’s warm him up.”
I felt the reluctance in Carrigan, but he shuffled over and pressed against me. Sandwiched between the two men, I eventually began to thaw a little as our shared warmth loosened my locked muscles. “Thanks,” I whispered through cracked lips.
I rested my forehead on my knees.
A dim memory came to me. Carrigan was another of the civilian contractors. We’d all gotten to camp together—and the plane hadn’t crashed. Definitely hadn’t. I remembered his cold blue eyes. We hadn’t hit it off—I thought he was an entitled asshole. He wouldn’t change out of his polo shirt and bermudas into the uniforms they issued us.
“I’m in charge of tech. I don’t need to wear this hot, shitty uniform,” he’d said.
I didn’t tell Carrigan and the man who’d helped me—what was his name? Kerry? Kelly? Ken? —that I didn’t just have the shakes from sleeping in a puddle.
My demons were still my own, even in this particular ring of hell.
“Shut the door, Texeira,” Captain Omura said. She looked away from her monitor, the bell of her immaculate bob swinging as Lei shut the door. “You said you wanted a private meeting.”
“Yes, sir.” Lei sat down in one of the hard plastic supplicant chairs in front of the desk. “While I was on Oahu this weekend, I had a visit from an army representative of the company Michael went to work for overseas. Security Solutions.” Lei pushed her hair behind her ears, groping for words, forcing them past the lump in her throat. “He informed me that Michael was captured.”
“Captured? What does that mean?” Omura’s carefully groomed brows snapped together and she leaned forward. “What the hell kind of lame-ass operation was this?”
“A training camp for military police somewhere in South America. They wouldn’t tell me where. But supposedly he went there to train armed forces personnel on investigation techniques, and he and several others were taken captive. The army officer who informed me said that they expected a ransom demand anytime now and that they’d handle it. The men were insured.”
“So they expect that kind of thing?” Omura’s tilted dark eyes widened. “This is our tax dollars at work?”
“I don’t know about that. I don’t know much of anything.” Lei threw up her hands, stood. Paced back and forth in front of her captain’s desk. “I’d like permission to take some personal leave.”
“Denied,” Omura said immediately. “I can’t spare you.”
“Come on, Captain! He’s your man, too!” Lieutenant Michael Stevens was one of Omura’s steadiest officers, in charge of training new detectives and always working a full roster of lieutenant duties. “Don’t you want to know what happened to him?”
“So this leave is for you to hop on a plane to God-knows-where, trying to find your husband ‘somewhere in South America?’” Omura made air quotes with her fingers. “First of all, I don’t like hearing this news any more than you do. But seriously, Lei—I can’t spare you! I’m shorthanded, as you know, and Michael taking that military leave really put me in a jam, as I wasn’t shy to tell him. So any personal feelings aside, I couldn’t let you go even if I wanted to—which I don’t. You’re a mother. Or have you forgotten you have a son who needs you, more than ever now that his father’s missing?”
Lei rubbed her hands up and down on her black jeans, wicking away nervous sweat. “I haven’t forgotten. But I have family who’ve been helping with Kiet already…”
“No. Just no. And if this officer told you to wait, you need to do that.” Omura stood, came around her desk, and did an unprecedented thing—she held open her arms. “Hug.”
“Captain?” Lei cocked her head. But she smiled as she leaned carefully into the other woman’s space and shut her eyes for just a moment. The Steel Butterfly was hugging her. It was an awkward and stilted embrace, like two triangles leaning against each other—but the emotion clouding the captain’s eyes was genuine as Omura pulled away.
“I’ll do all I can to support you during this time. Flex time for your pickups with the kid, short days, swapping shifts, whatever. But I can’t grant any leave, especially if I think it might end up like that other trip.”
That other trip.
Lei’s belly tightened at the memory. She’d taken off for the Big Island to deal with an enemy, a move that had worked in some ways and cost way too much in others.
“Shit,” Lei said. Her shoulders sagged. “Okay.”
“Good.” Omura tip-tapped on her pointy-toed heels back around her desk and sat down. “I have a new case for you. Something a little different, in addition to your regular cases with Pono. I’d like you to handle it as a side project.”
She reached down into the secure cabinet beside her desk and took out a plastic bag, stapled shut and neatly labeled. Inside was a skull, and by the size of it, it belonged to a child. A cobwebbed hole where the forehead would have been testified to possible cause of death.
“Where’d this come from?” Lei picked up the bag tentatively. The bone of the skull was stained by soil, but it was clean.
“It was brought in this morning. Apparently it washed up on the beach near one of the Hana rivers. This woman found it in some driftwood. She put it in the bag and brought it in. Didn’t realize she should have left it there and called us.”
“Oh, great,” Lei murmured. “Have you had anyone look at it? To date it, or anything?”
“No. That’s for you to figure out, and if there’s anything that can be found out about this poor kid.” Omura pinned Lei with her dark gaze. “I plan to keep you so busy you don’t have time to worry about getting that man back. Now go find me a cold-case child killer.”
Continue Red Rain Now!
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About the Author
Kirkus Reviews calls Neal's writing, "persistently riveting. Masterly."
Award-winning, USA Today bestselling social worker turned author Toby Neal grew up on the island of Kaua`i in Hawaii. Neal is a mental health therapist, a career that has informed the depth and complexity of the characters in her stories. Neal's police procedurals, starring multicultural detective Lei Texeira, explore the crimes and issues of Hawaii from the bottom of the ocean to the top of volcanoes, and are so popular that they've spawned a licensed fan fiction world on Amazon. Fans call her stories, "Immersive, addicting, and the next best thing to being there."
More Titles From Toby Neal
Lei Crime Series
Paradise Crime Series
Romances
Romance Thrillers
Young Adult
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