by Rob Swigart
“Welter?”
“Yeah. Works for Kapuna Shores. He’s running out of patience. We’ve got the perimeter secured. I got my not-very-highly trained SWAT team here, four men. Hard to get a bead on the guy anyways. At one point he came forward in the plane a little, and one guy almost got a line on him, but he moved back again. You know, we don’t have a lot of need for a SWAT team. Now you helped out a lot a year or so back, so I let you in on these things. Truth is, we don’t have much training. You know what the manual tells us, though? It goes like this: Contain. Right, we did that. Isolate. Sure, easy for them to say, isn’t it? This man, this Welter, he’s on an Aloha seven-thirty-seven with a bunch of passengers, over a hundred, all eager to get away from our romantic vacation spot. He’d brought a rifle from home this afternoon. Some goddamn gun store up in Kapa’a got robbed today and the records are a mess, we thought maybe he stole the gun. Took us awhile to sort it out, but the gun was his. OK. We can isolate the plane, but not the felon, you see? Then, easy as pie, we apprehend. You got that? Apprehend. Cobb is on the plane now. He has a gun, and Welter has a gun. It’s been nearly two hours. Somebody’s going to get tired.”
He ran his big hand through his gray hair again and blew out through his thick lips. He moved over to the gate and looked out at the plane. Chazz stood beside him. From this angle they could see the edge of the galley door, but no people. The stairs, angled away from the side of the plane, loomed like a suspended metal platform in the pooled light, while the bottom was shrouded in darkness.
“If I didn’t know better,” Taxeira said softly, “I’d think this was an ordinary night. Looks so peaceful, the plane sitting out there, waiting for the final boarding call.”
They watched for a few moments. Chazz made out a figure crouching under the steps peering out, then withdrawing into the darkness again.
In the silence that seemed to grow like a living thing, Chazz could hear someone in the crowd behind the gate muttering. “Susan,” he said. Chazz could hear the anger, the undercurrent of panic. “My wife is on that plane.” It sounded as if he were speaking to someone else.
After a pause he spoke in a loud voice, very distinctly, “This has gone far enough.” Suddenly he broke through the gate and ran toward the plane. Someone else fell and the crowd swayed, first one way, then the other.
All hell broke loose. Taxeira shouted, “Stop him!” and Chazz bolted after him, his aches forgotten. On the aircraft a figure moved into view from the front, another shape blocked the light, there was a brief confusion and the first retreated back to the cockpit. Finally the second figure reappeared with its back to the door.
Chazz glimpsed all this as he chased the panicked man, a nightmare run, the stranger ahead moving toward the stairs, Chazz placing one leaden foot after another thudding onto the tarmac. For a moment it seemed nothing was going to happen.
Chazz reached out as the man in the doorway turned toward the terminal. He let his hand slide down the man’s arm to his wrist, leading the man in a circle toward him. The man shouted, “Susan!” and turned toward Chazz with a roundhouse punch, saying, “Get away from me.” Chazz pivoted with the punch, picking up its energy and deflecting it gently with his right arm, allowing the man’s wrist to slide into his right hand. Then with his thumb over the inside of the man’s wrist he torqued it away from his own center, stepped beneath the man’s arm, and reversed direction in a smooth shiho-nage, twisting the arm back and lowering the man to the ground, where he pinned his arm in a loop back onto the asphalt.
The whole motion had taken only a second or two. Behind him he dimly heard Cobb Takamura’s voice shouting, “Welter! No…!” and he turned slightly so he could watch what was happening on the aircraft.
Cobb’s warning had come too late. The man had taken a step, but of course there were no stairs there. It seemed to happen in slow motion, the step from the doorway, the sudden pedaling in the air as the man tilted forward. The sharp crack as his head hit the metal lip of the stairs and the reversal of his body as it turned backward again, no longer pedaling. It fell with a dull thump to the cement. Taxeira ran past Chazz to the body.
It was Welter. His body, a broken puppet of sticks and flesh, lay curled beneath the plane. Oddly there was very little blood.
“Get those stairs back,” Cobb called down. Someone began to roll the stairs back into place.
Sergeant Handel crouched next to the body. “This is him?” he asked. “He looks different like this.” A line of dried blood ran down his cheek. It looked black in the shadows.
Gobb clattered down the stairs. “That’s him. Is he dead?”
“I don’t thinks so,” Handel answered. He had his finger pressed against Welter’s neck. “He’s sure as hell unconscious, though. I’d be surprised if something wasn’t broken.”
“You’re cut,” Cobb said.
“Yeah. I guess I forgot about it.”
Cobb Takamura looked up as Taxeira approached and shook his head. He had laid his Smith and Wesson and Welter’s rifle on the cement beside him.
“He doesn’t look good,” Cobb said softly.
“What happened in there?” Taxeira snapped. The tone of command in his voice offset some of the banality of the question.
Chazz helped the man to his feet. “Are you all right?”
“I think so. I’m… sorry. I guess I panicked. Is it over?”
Chazz looked toward the group at the foot of the stairs. “It’s over,” he said. “You better wait over there.” The man walked away reluctantly, and Chazz moved over to Cobb and the others by Welter’s crumpled form.
Cobb stood up. “The pilot stuck his head out. He got tired of trying to get information about what was happening on his own plane over the radio from the tower, so he just walked out. Welter ran forward waving the gun. As he went by me, the pilot retreated to the cockpit and I grabbed Welter’s rifle. He tried to make a run for it out the door. He didn’t know the stairs had been moved back. Must be fifteen feet up there,” He looked up at the doorway overhead. Then he picked up his gun and holstered it. “What’re you doing here?” he asked Chazz.
Chazz lifted his shoulders. “Kimiko and the kids are fine. I couldn’t get through to the station and got worried about you.”
“Thanks.”
Handel, behind Chazz and Inspector Taxeira, said, a little too loudly, “I heard the whole thing. You were great, Lieutenant.”
Taxeira started away. “Somebody get the medics over here. This man’s badly hurt.” He paused to ask Chazz about the other man.
“He’s OK. He panicked. I think his wife’s on the plane.”
“Thanks for handling it. That was neat work.” He walked away, vanished into a pool of shadow, only to reappear in the lights at the gate, where he stopped to talk to the now-relaxing SWAT team.
Chazz reached down and picked up the pair of glasses lying on the ground. They were unbroken. Silently he held them out to Cobb.
Cobb smiled grimly and put them in his jacket pocket. Then he pulled out the magazine for his Smith and Wesson from the same pocket. “This was in here the whole time.”
Chazz did look up then. “What?”
“Magazine was in my jacket pocket. My gun wasn’t loaded.”
“You were bluffing?” Handel was shaking his head. “I don’t believe it. Amazing, Lieutenant.”
Cobb smiled brilliantly. “It was nothing, Sergeant,” he said. “I don’t care for guns.”
APPREHEND
CHAPTER 21
“THERE’S SOMEONE OUT here to see you, Lieutenant.” Sergeant Hirogawa’s voice was tired, but Chazz could hear the undercurrent of appreciation, even over the antique intercom. It would have to be a woman, young and pretty.
Without thinking, Cobb said, “Send her up.”
Chazz was reading Dr. Shih’s report. Without looking up, he said, “I don’t have to ask how you knew it was a she.”
Cobb did not answer. He was brooding over his gun, which lay, disassembled, on h
is desk. He reached out and pushed the magazine a fraction of an inch. He refolded his hands and gazed some more. Then he reached out and moved the magazine back.
“Do you have to do that?” Chazz asked. He was frowning at the window, the report held loosely in his hand.
The morning outside was very fine. Because it was morning, sunlight did not fall through the windows. It fell, instead, on distant forested mountains. Cupped in a three-quarter circle of those mountains was the east slope of Wai ‘ale ‘ale, widely reported to be the wettest place on earth. Somewhere up there, too, was the crash site of a satellite of dubious origin and even more dubious content. Dr. Shih’s report, half-read in Chazz’s hand, took note of vital signs in poisoned patients; of tests run and tests proposed; of blood chemistry and enterotoxic shock.
Elliot Propter, she reported, was showing signs of improvement. There was some possibility he might recover consciousness.
Chazz looked down at the paper. “You know, Cobb, this guy is pretty lucky.”
“How’s that?”
“He didn’t die.”
“Neither did Grant Welter. Not yet, anyway. We have had a number of people not die, haven’t we? I find that confusing under the circumstances.”
Chazz expressed surprise. He lifted his eyebrows. Somewhere in the vicinity of his mouth his beard twitched.
Cobb went on. “ ‘From the first I knew my work on this case was like bowing in the dark.’ You know, I never have liked these things.” With a brisk change of mood he reassembled the gun and dropped it in a drawer as the door to his office opened. The Filipino girl from the hotel peered around the jamb. “Lieutenant Takamura?”
He stood. “Ah, yes. Do come in. As the great Charlie Chan once said, ‘Condescend to sit on this atrocious chair. Is it possible you bring news?’ This is Dr. Charles Koenig of the Douglass Research Center, a friend and sometime colleague. And this, Chazz, is Miss Mendoza. You may have seen her very pretty face behind the desk at the hotel.”
Chazz shook her hand. It was small and finely boned. She sat down, facing Cobb. “I don’t know if it’s important or not, but I was in town anyway. Errands.”
Cobb steepled his fingertips. “Miss Mendoza, I have had one murder, one attempted hijacking and subsequent injury, four cases of some kind of poisoning, mass hysteria, panic, and an intrusive satellite of some kind falling in the wilderness similar to one in which I, alas, seem to be lost. Anything you have to say would be welcome.”
“Well, you asked me to kind of keep a watch on those two people, Linz and Franklin.”
“Yes.”
“I thought you might want to know Mr. Linz didn’t come back last night. His room wasn’t slept in or anything. Fanny, the morning maid, told me. I asked her to check.”
“Interesting.”
“That’s not all.”
“OK.”
“The Franklin woman, Angela, she had breakfast with a man this morning. I think his name is Kano, a Japanese man. They ate at the hotel. Lee, the morning chef, told me that. But not in the dining room. In her suite. Room service. Waffles and smoked salmon and champagne.”
“Waffles and champagne?”
She nodded. “Sixty-seven dollars and ninety-five cents. They gave a ten-dollar tip, in cash.”
“An expensive breakfast for two,” Cobb observed. “Even for people with no shortage of funds. It sounds almost like a celebration, doesn’t it?”
She smiled. The room brightened noticeably. “That’s what I thought.”
After Cobb had showed her out he threw a quizzical look at Chazz, who shrugged, waving the sheets of typescript. “The murder case is yours, I believe. I’m just trying to help out a little on the medical emergency, if it is a medical emergency. There is still no official word, is there? No, I thought not. The radio station alternates between alarming rumors and reassuring elevator music. The newspaper prints platitudes from the State Health Department. Four people are in the hospital unconscious and very sick. It is very puzzling. Dr. Shih now suggests that Elliot Propter is improving. If he recovers, perhaps he will have something interesting to say.”
Cobb sighed. “I’m glad we all got a good night’s rest,” he said. “I have a feeling this is going to be another long day, whether there is a connection or not.”
“Are you getting some kind of psychic premonition?”
“ ‘Psychic powers somewhat drowsy just now. Need prodding into wakefulness’.”
“Oh.”
Sergeant Handel threw the door open and fairly leaped into the room. “Lieutenant! Listen, you aren’t going to believe this. I just plain forgot last night. I mean, it slipped right out of my mind.”
“It did?”
“Yeah. When I was checking the passenger manifests, I thought maybe I should check on Peter Linz too.”
“Yes?”
“He’s been here for four days already. He came in on Saturday, the day before the murder. But he didn’t check into the hotel until the day after the murder, on Monday night.”
Cobb frowned. The frown deepened. He sat down heavily in his chair and gripped the edge of his desk lightly in both hands. He glowered. Handel lost his enthusiasm. “Is something wrong, Lieutenant?”
“Yes,” Cobb said heavily. “You have just moved a suspect up on my list. I do not need more suspects. I need fewer suspects. We have Japanese businessmen from Tokyo. We have American businessman Welter, who may have lied to us about the man from Tokyo, but who is now in no condition to tell us anything. Until I get a ballistics report to the contrary, I would include him as a primary suspect. We have Ms. Franklin, now celebrating at breakfast with an official of the Kapuna Shores Development Corporation, an activity which elevates them both to the status of suspect. I did not need you to add the victim’s son to the list, Sergeant. But you’ve done very good work.”
“Thanks.”
“Think nothing of it. Now answer this. Peter Linz did not stay at his hotel last night. He did not stay there Saturday night or Sunday night either. So where did he stay?”
“The house in Kalaheo?”
“Good. While you’re over there, would you please check in Hanapepe for Lianne Billings? She’s had some encounters with Peter Linz, and now that you have moved him up the list, I’d like to have you talk to her again. She may be over at the hospital, but try her home, would you?”
“Sure,” Handel said. He left so fast papers lifted from the desk.
“He’ll make a good detective,” Cobb said. “He’s still got the enthusiasm.”
There was a silence. Cobb seemed to sink back into himself, a brooding air coming over him. He stared out the window for a while. Chazz looked at the report, no longer reading it. “Now what?” he said at last.
“Now?” Cobb’s brows lifted. “I’m mulling over one or two things. What about you?”
“Well.” Chazz looked at the ceiling. “Try this: L-M-L-four-three-two.”
“What’s L-M-L-four-three-two?”
“The license of a white panel truck with a large, powerful motorized antenna on the roof. Parked, and definitely lurking, in dense shrubbery on the grounds of the DRC. Operated by speakers of American English. Had a long fresh dent in the right side, just about bumper height.”
Cobb laughed. “ ‘Most warm congratulations’,” he quoted. “ ‘You are number one detective yourself.’ Let us stroll down to traffic and have them contact the Department of Finance in Honolulu to check it out. Then perhaps we should stop at the hospital and the hotel. I have a few questions beginning to form in my tired brain.”
A black plastic plate on the counter in the traffic office proclaimed that Betty was on duty and available to accept fines in cash or personal check. She told Cobb it would take a little time. The computer that connected them with the state offices wasn’t working properly. “We got these new IBM machines,” she said. “No one has quite figured out how to use them yet. Shirley will be back in an hour or so, and I think she knows how to find the answer for you.”
“Technology,” Cobb said, watching a Hawaiian Air flight come in from the south. Signs of the current state of emergency were few, but included the almost continuous extra flights arriving and departing from the airport.”
“What about it?” Chazz asked.
Cobb gestured at the plane. “Emptying the island,” he said. “Bad for the economy. Bad for the sleep of merchants. The Mayor will be very unhappy. Kapuna Shores may have trouble selling condominiums. But I was referring to the computers. This is a nice, quiet, backward kind of place. People here are sometimes baffled by new technology. Yet we have NASA radar installations in Koke’e, the most modern new airport, missile tracking at the Pacific Missile Range Facility, not to mention the most up-to-date biotechnology center in Hawaii. It reminds me of the ethnic mix of the islands: rich, humid, fecund, and strange.”
“Very poetic for an ordinary policeman,” Chazz grinned.
“Hmph. Shall we go?”
They were about to climb in Cobb’s sedan as Darrell crossed the street from the County Building and walked up the drive alongside the police station. “Hey, Lieutenant.”
“Good morning, Darrell. How’s the emergency going?”
“Sounds like you don’t believe in it too much.” Darrell’s broad face was somber.
“Not too much. I seem to be in a minority, though.”
Darrell scuffed his shoes on the pavement. They were black leather, highly polished, and seemed out of place in a tropical paradise. He saw Chazz looking at them and grinned shyly. “Formal work shoes,” he said. “It’s true, though. Thousands of visitors have already left the island. A number of locals are visiting relatives on other islands. The planes are still booked solid, but the worst of the traffic jams seem to be over. Since last night, you know, people are taking another look at things. The attempted hijacking sort of snapped folks back to reality. The traffic people have cleared up most of the mess, and reservations, though very brisk for all the extra flights, have settled to manageable levels. Civil Defense is back to standby, and the emergency is under control as long as no more people get sick or anything. Anyways, I wanted to tell you my cousin Sammy came in this morning. He had that look, you know.”