Thrillers in Paradise

by Rob Swigart

  In the kitchen, Chazz smiled. One of the men was limping.

  The apartment was a shambles. Plaster filtered down from holes in the ceiling. Water was leaking from a ruptured pipe somewhere in the walls. No piece of furniture was undamaged.

  “Let them go.” Cobb turned on the light and picked up the phone. “Dead,” he said.

  “No.” The man on the kitchen floor groaned. “But you broke my arm, you bastard.” His accent was thick.

  “I doubt it,” Chazz growled. “Where’re my wife and child?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Bullshit. Get up.” He pointed the machine pistol at him. “I don’t really know how to use this thing, so you’d better be careful. You might really end up dead. You tried to kill me once before, and I’m not feeling kindly.”

  “I meant the telephone is dead,” Cobb said. “We’ll need a roadblock.” A car started up and screeched away. “Funny,” Cobb added. “You’d think they’d go back to the highway.”

  “I don’t care where they go,” Chazz said. “Family’s more important.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  THE HOUSE IN THE WOODS

  “It says his name’s Chausseur, Stéphane,” Cobb was reading the man’s identification. “The unconscious one must be the Algerian. Looks like you hit him the same place I did.”

  “Nasty. Very nasty. Too bad.”

  “Yeah, too bad.”

  The Algerian breathed loudly through his nose. Vincent Meissner was still in the straight-backed chair in Orli’s bedroom staring into space. Chausseur sat cross-legged on the floor, his back against the wall next to the television. Chazz had used the television cord to bind his hands behind him.

  “French Military Intelligence,” Lieutenant Takamura concluded.

  “I knew military intelligence was impossible. When you add French, you have a paradox. What’s that?” Chazz tilted his head, listening, then moved onto the lanai. “It’s Orli. Come on.”

  “Perhaps I’d better stay here,” Cobb suggested drily. “For the moment.”

  Chazz glanced at the Algerian. “Right.” He was gone.

  In a few minutes he was back with the child in his arms.

  Kimiko came in right behind him. She went to her husband and punched him on the arm. “What kept you?” she asked. Her voice was calm, but there were bright points of red on her cheeks. It was the only sign she was angry.

  “Ah, Mrs. Takamura.”

  “Don’t Mrs. Takamura me, Lieutenant. You were too late. They got Patria. They almost got me and the child.”

  “Then we must find her, Mrs. Takamura.” Cobb took her elbow. She shook off his hand. He looked helplessly at Chazz, who frowned at him. He was carrying the baby back and forth, patting her on the back.

  “Mrs. Takamura, I would like you to do something. I will remain here and guard these villains while you go up to the corner and use the pay phone to call the desk sergeant. Tell him I need traffic to look out for a tan Toyota sedan, Alamo rental, license 389LKJ.” He wrote it down on a slip of paper from his notebook. “Last seen in Kapaa, direction unknown. Then have the desk sergeant call Sergeant Handel at home. Have him come here immediately. Then I would appreciate it if you would also call Sammy Akeakamai. He might like to get a little exercise. And have them send an ambulance for Meissner here.” He looked at Chazz, sitting now in a chair with the baby.

  Chazz shook his head. “We have to find them. The other two have gone to warn Phoenix, and he has Patria.”

  “My thoughts exactly. Do you mind doing that for us, Mrs. Takamura?”

  “I think I would prefer to hold that gun while you go. I am not afraid of guns, and you might think of something else to ask for on the way to the telephone.”

  Cobb nodded. “Very well.” He handed his wife his Smith and Wesson and left the room.

  “Tell me what happened,” Chazz said. He ignored the two French soldiers, although the Algerian was beginning to moan and roll his head back and forth.

  Kimiko went through the events of the evening. When she was finished, she went to the kitchen and got a glass of water. She drank it, then drew another and gave it to Chazz. The bright spots on her cheeks were fading. She did not offer any water to Chausseur, and gave the moaning Algerian only a brief glance.

  “Thanks,” Chazz said.

  “Don’t mention it.”

  “Do you have a theory?” Chazz asked her after a moment. Orli had fallen asleep, and was drooling lightly on his shoulder. He touched her hair.

  “Ah. About the Phoenix, you mean? He is a demon, of course.”

  “A demon?”

  “An evil spirit who does only harm: that is a demon. He does evil, but he wants others to know he does it. So he rubs our noses in his work. He kills women. I’m very frightened for Patria.”

  “You think he’s insane, not open to negotiation? How does he get these others to work for him?” Chazz gestured at the two men. The Algerian had stopped moaning and was looking at the ceiling with wide eyes.

  “He has a power over them, or he’s convinced them he’s doing something good. I think they believe they are working for him and he is working for the government. But he isn’t.”

  “No.”

  They lapsed into silence. Chazz looked at his child and thought of his wife. He tried not to think too much about her, about just what he would say when he saw her. And what he would do to the man who took her.

  He began to think about Shinawa, his teacher and his friend, an old man with a tranquility he could only envy.

  Shinawa had said the worst kind of people were those who, because they were cruel, caused others to suffer. There were those who caused suffering to themselves as well, but Chazz did not believe Phoenix was suffering. There was no doubt he was cruel.

  “What is your intent?” Shinawa had asked him.

  He answered that his goal was to live a life of wisdom and kindness.

  “That is the highest ethical goal of aikido. To protect yourself and your attacker. Do not forget, though, that the first goal is to protect yourself.” Shinawa had told him that, and Chazz was close to forgetting it, because he needed, above all else, to protect someone he loved. And he was afraid he was going to fail.

  That fear could destroy him. If it did, it would also destroy Patria.

  “There are those who are like letters written in running water. Anger and provocation pass by unnoticed. You are not there.” Shinawa had also said that, and Chazz admitted to himself that it was true: He was not there. He was angry and afraid.

  The anger could destroy them.

  He settled into himself. The room receded, grew dim, vanished. His awareness flowed out into the room and filled his own mind at the same time. He felt the Algerian breathing and dismissed it. He felt Kimiko, still wrapped around her own fading terror, seated and breathing softly. He felt Chausseur, twisting in his discomfort, looking for the moment when Chazz’s attention would lapse.

  He let his own breath settle, grow limpid and continuous, without breaks between inhalation and exhalation, a continuous circuit into his body and through his hara and out into the universe again. He felt the night outside, the small clouds floating across the bright face of the moon.

  He felt his anger, the hot point of it, shape itself into a weapon. And he felt himself set it aside. He did not throw it away, he did not get rid of his anger. He set it aside, within reach, for when he would need it. “The first goal is to protect yourself.” That included Patria, and Orli sleeping on the couch beside Kimiko Takamura.

  He must purge himself of all intention. Then he would be there, in the place he must be, when he needed to be. He would not plan to do one thing or another. He would just be there.

  He rose softly to his feet, almost languidly, and walked toward Chausseur, who had already pulled his own feet under him and was rising. Whatever he intended to do vanished, and he sat down again, his feet tucked under his thighs. He glared at Chazz, who did not seem to notice him as he passed by on his
way to the kitchen.

  Chazz opened the refrigerator and took out a formula bottle, set a pan of water on the stove, and set the bottle in it. He stood calmly as the metal ring on the stove grew hot and as the water developed small bubbles on the bottom and began to roil. After a few minutes, he took the formula out and tested it on his wrist.

  By the time he had returned to the couch, Orli was awake. He picked her up and gave her the bottle, and she drank greedily without giving a cry.

  Kimiko smiled. “That was amazing,” she said softly. “The timing.”

  Chazz nodded but said nothing. He was looking into his child’s face.

  Cobb Takamura entered. “Sammy’s on his way,” he said.

  “Why Sammy?” Kimiko asked. She watched Chazz shake the now-empty bottle before the baby’s eyes. Orli chuckled with delight, reaching for it.

  “Sammy has the maps.”

  “Oh. Thank you, Mr. Takamura, for illuminating me.”

  “Ah, Mrs. Takamura. Sarcasm? The car of the other two members of this gang of four thugs did not return to the highway when it left here. Rather, it went to the west. There is nothing to the west except a papaya plantation. Do you understand?”

  “I am not stupid, Mr. Takamura. There must be a building in the mountains somewhere. A hideout for the demon Phoenix.”

  “Just so.” Takamura smiled broadly. “The traffic people will be looking for the car, but I believe it went to the nest of the Phoenix and there we shall find Patria.” He did not add, if she is still alive.

  Chazz nodded and stood. “Kimiko, would you mind taking Orli to your house? She’ll be safe with you. She’ll sleep through the night, now, I think, and we are going to need the night.”

  “Of course.”

  Almost as soon as Kimiko had left, four officers arrived in a patrol car. Cobb sent two of them back with the prisoners. The others he sent out to check the surrounding streets, just in case. An ambulance took Meissner away, and Sergeant Handel arrived, looking tousled and grumpy.

  “You took me away from an intimate situation, Lieutenant. The lady is mad at me.”

  “Hazards of the job, Scottie. Believe it or not, there are even times Mrs. Takamura gets irritated with me.” He carefully avoided looking at Chazz.

  “Okay. What’s up?”

  As Cobb was briefing him, a heavy tread thudded up the wooden steps, and Sammy Akeakamai barged into the room. The ruins of a wooden toothpick jutted from the corner of his mouth, which was grinning wide enough to reveal about two-thirds of his widely spaced teeth. He carried a rolled bundle. A .38 revolver bulged the tails of a hideously colored Aloha shirt decorated with lovely topless wahinis with hibiscus in their hair. The girls displayed themselves provocatively on a sunny beach across his belly and back.

  “That’s as near an X-rated shirt as would be allowed in public, Kikui Nut,” Cobb said good-naturedly. Sammy spread the paper bundle on what was left of the coffee table.

  It was a large-scale topographic map of the Kapaa region. Sammy removed his toothpick and looked at it judiciously. He decided its destruction was complete and dropped it into the debris on the floor. “Dotted lines are unimproved roads. They’re a mess. It would be a rough ride for a passenger car, but they could make it. The roads crisscross one another all through the foothills of the Makaleha Mountains. If the Bad Guys went down through the papaya as you say, they’d end up here. Right turn brings them back to town. Left turn goes out here, southwest. There’s an old homestead up this ravine, a real shack, but an old woman still owns it, name of Somoza, Portuguese-Hawaiian, a widow. She’d be in her early sixties now, I guess. Lives there, far as I know, though it’s long dropped off the tax rolls. Certain things slide in county government, you know. She doesn’t have much, and the house was condemned back in the seventies, so in theory it doesn’t exist any more, but there’s no record it was actually destroyed. I don’t know how your man could have found out about it unless he’s a magician.”

  “Sammy knows everyone on this island,” Takamura told Handel. “And Phoenix is a magician.”

  “I’d be concerned about Mrs. Somoza,” Sammy frowned. “But it’s the only bet out there.”

  Sammy had a four-wheel drive. The small fluffy clouds that had drifted across the moon earlier had huddled together and hidden the sky, threatening rain over the entire island. The night air was close and still.

  Their headlights cut the dark, scything through papaya trees, sugar cane, then scrub lehua and the large spade-shaped leaves of hau. Chazz, Scott Handel, and the two patrolmen were in the back, Cobb in front. Sammy drove expertly over the rutted dirt roads. The darker form of the mountains loomed against the clouds.

  Rain began to smear the windshield.

  They stopped once and Sammy climbed out. “Before the rain wipes them away,” he said, stooping before the headlights to look at the ruts. “Civilian tires,” he grinned as he climbed back into the Bronco.

  “You have a plan?” Chazz asked over the engine whine.

  “Nope,” Takamura answered. “No plan. Just hurry. Phoenix is unpredictable and very dangerous. He’s got Patria.”

  Chazz settled back. Breathe in, breathe out. Glance at the shining spear of anger, waiting. Let the water flow over his name, wash it away. Not even carved in sand. Only water, flowing in, out.

  Sammy switched to parking lights, moved ahead more slowly a few hundred meters, stopped. The engine ticked under the strengthening fall of rain. “Gonna be wet,” he murmured.

  They got out. Sammy showed the twin ruts of a trail leading into a narrow valley. They walked, five men moving through falling water.

  The only car parked in front of the house was the rented Toyota.

  Faint yellow light illuminated the two dusty front windows. They spread out and surrounded the house. Rain fell straight down; mud sucked at their shoes. Beyond the dim windows the darkness was complete.

  Chazz found a door in back next to a shed rotting over a pile of ancient wooden boards and an abandoned old-fashioned washing machine. Vegetation grew right against the house in some places.

  He listened at the door but heard nothing. The grimy window beside it revealed nothing. He tried the latch and almost fell when the door opened. He could see nothing inside.

  To his left one of the patrolmen grunted, a small sound lost in the hiss of falling rain.

  He slipped inside. He was in a small anteroom that smelled of damp and dust. He felt the handle of a tool, the wood rotted and splintery: a shovel. The damp smell of newly turned earth rose from it.

  There was a faint light showing under the inner door. He crept to it and listened. He could hear nothing.

  He made a decision. He opened the door and stepped in.

  When the patrolman grunted, Cobb Takamura, right behind him, touched his shoulder “What is it?” he whispered.

  “I stepped on something.”

  They crouched down, feeling with their hands. It was something soft that felt like flesh. Cobb did not dare risk a light, but when he felt the outlines of an arm he stopped for a moment.

  “What is it?” the patrolman hissed. Cobb heard the tension in his voice.

  “I don’t know, but she’s dead.” He stood up. “First we find out what’s inside. The Toyota is here; maybe they are, too.”

  They made their way to the front.

  Sammy and the second patrolman were on the other side of the house, blocked by dense brush. A high window threw an indefinite yellow oblong into the leaves. Sammy strained to look inside, but all he could see were vague shapes that seemed to dangle from the ceiling. The light was bad, the angle wrong.

  He backed slowly, bumping into the patrolman. “We can’t get through here,” he murmured. “Either we go around the other way, or we go in through the front.”

  They crept back the way they had come.

  Cobb stood by the front door, his gun in his hand. He waved Sammy to the other side. The two patrolmen were backup, guns drawn, waiting below the steps to ei
ther side of the door.

  Cobb nodded and started for the door when it opened. Chazz was standing there. “Somebody get me something, a blanket, a coat, anything. Patria’s here. She needs help.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  VENOM

  She huddled under the blanket Sammy had pulled from the back of his Bronco. The bruises on her neck and face were dark smudges in the dim candlelight. Her teeth wouldn’t stop chattering. Chazz squatted beside her, his big arms around her shoulders, as if by their strength he could hold her together. For a long time she couldn’t talk.

  Under the blanket she was naked.

  “He raped her,” Chazz told Cobb. He showed his teeth. It was not a smile.

  Cobb Takamura had gestured to the others to leave. They waited outside by the car. Now he looked down at his friends, his face expressionless.

  Patria spoke. “He… he thinks he’s a bokor, a sorcerer. Black magic. B-but I know who he is…” She shook uncontrollably. Chazz stroked her hair.

  “He’s Phoenix,” Cobb said.

  “N-no. Not… Phoenix. His mother…” She started shaking again.

  The photographs of skulls hung from loops of string overhead, hundreds of them. The walls were crudely painted. Spider webs filled the corners.

  There was a light knock on the door.

  Takamura opened it and looked out. Sammy Akeakamai stood there. Cobb nodded.

  “Dead,” Sammy said. “Mrs. Somoza. Two or three days, strangled.”

  Cobb nodded. Nothing surprised him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Call in. You know what to do.” Sammy nodded and turned away. Cobb closed the door.

  “What happened?” he asked Patria.

  She tried to answer, shook, tried again. “He was making up his powder, zombie powder. The bokor needs special ingredients. Not all of them are active. But he was missing one. This was after he…”

  “Never mind.”

  “What was he missing, Patria?” Chazz asked her softly. So softly Cobb barely heard. So softly only menace came through.

  “It sounded like ‘cone.’ He was going to make me his ‘beast.’ He said that. He started making the stuff— all the right rituals. Ceremony and resurrection. Cotton in his nostrils so he wouldn’t inhale the powder himself. Wrapped in burlap. N-not funny at all. The others came, in a hurry. I caught some of it. There was a fight, I guess. Something. He went into a rage. Screamed he had to get the cone. S-same word in French.”