Riptide jl-5

by Paul Levine

  Lila found a pair of windsurfing gloves in the pickup and they walked to the imu, where she started peeling away the leaves on top. Underneath was a mound of black dirt. “Jake, bring the shovels from the truck.”

  He did, checking on Lomio in the back. The man was conscious, but he wouldn’t be doing calculus today. Lila began digging and uncovered sweet potatoes, bananas, taro, and fish wrapped in ti leaves. She removed the food gingerly, feeling the heat through the gloves.

  “The leaves make steam,” Lila explained. “They gut the pig and put hot stones in the body cavity to cook from the inside out.”

  “The first microwave,” Lassiter said. “Didn’t know you were so domestic, a real Hawaiian homemaker.”

  She laughed. “A luau was not done every day, more of a celebration during makahiki, a period of peace.”

  “Not very appropriate today.”

  “No, this is war and Lomio is the enemy. Jake, I’ll need your help to get the information — smoke it out of him, you might say.”

  Lassiter’s look stopped her, but she recovered quickly. “Just to scare him, Jake, that’s all.”

  “He doesn’t look like he scares too easily.”

  She studied Lassiter a moment. “Lomio has to think we’ll kill him or it won’t work.”

  Lassiter paused, listening to the distant traffic. In the heavy foliage alongside the imu, they were hidden from the street and the hotel.

  “Okay, what do we do?” he asked.

  It took both of them to haul out the pig, the pungent smell of the steaming pork rising from the ground. Then they went after Lomio. He seemed even heavier now, trussed with the line, sagging his three hundred pounds onto the ground after they dragged him from the truck bed. They tried to pick him up but he struggled, so they rolled him like a beer keg to the edge of the imu. Then Lila removed the gag and pushed him in, Lomio landing on his back on top of the leaves.

  A cloud of steam rose from beneath Lomio and his face turned a scorching red, but still he was silent. Again Lila read the look on Lassiter’s face. “Don’t worry, Jake. It’s no worse than a sauna. Unless we keep him there all day, he’ll be okay, just lose a few pounds, which he ought to thank us for.”

  They waited several minutes. Lomio seemed to have mastered the pain.

  Lila squatted at the edge of the pit and leaned close to the big man. “Where are the bonds?” she demanded.

  Lomio spat in her face. She calmly picked up a large banana leaf and placed it on his chest. Then she dropped a hot lava stone on top of the leaf and stepped into the pit, her sneaker pushing stone and leaf against him, his massive chest caving inward to avoid the pain. The leaf was sizzling, leaving its shape as a tattoo on Lomio’s skin.

  Jake Lassiter had seen enough. “Lila, no… forget it!”

  “Only a second, Jake. This should do it. Lomio, where are the bonds? Or would you like me to remove the leaf and leave the stone there?”

  They both heard it at the same time, a rustling of bushes in the direction of the pavilion, someone walking toward them. Jake Lassiter reacted quickly, standing up, putting a finger to his lips, letting Lila know he would take care of it. She nodded and whispered to Lomio. “One sound, and you’re dead, fat man.”

  Lassiter walked in the direction of the noise, his mind flashing like a neon sign with the crimes he had committed — assault and battery, false imprisonment, kidnapping, extortion, and now maybe desecrating a luau in violation of some old Polynesian law.

  Coming through the oleander trees, walking straight toward him, was a man in his thirties wearing neatly pressed white slacks, moccasins, and a bright green aloha shirt. The man didn’t see him. He was preoccupied with the task of walking and unzipping his fly at the same time. A second later, the man had his precious cargo in hand. He was no more than twenty feet from the imu, hidden behind the trees.

  “Howdy,” Jake Lassiter called out in his good-neighbor voice.

  “Whoa, whoops.” The man took two steps backward and tucked himself in. “Didn’t expect to see anybody out here now.

  Just about to take my pre-luau piss. For good luck. Name’s Guy Ryder, master of ceremonies.”

  Lassiter decided not to shake hands. Guy Ryder had a booming voice and a smile filled with porcelain crowns. Lassiter smiled back. “Don’t let me stop you. When a man’s gotta go…”

  “Right you are. Now where’s that damn imu? I always piss on it for good luck.”

  “What? No! That would be a health code violation. You know, I’m a wholesale butcher back in Des Moines. Those damn regulations can drive you crazy, temperature controls in the freezer, rodent hair counts. But pissing on the pork, I mean, that’s gotta be verboten everywhere.”

  “Just a little hosing on top of the leaves, that’s all.”

  Jake Lassiter scowled, an angry tourist now. “Well, I’m supposed to take the little woman to that looey-ow tonight and she’ll be damn sure unhappy if I tell her what you use for barbecue sauce.”

  Guy Ryder threw up his hands, revealing his still unzipped fly. “Okay, okay,” he said, looking for a nearby bush to finish the task.

  Lila Summers could hear every word of the baritone voice of Guy Ryder. She had replaced Lomio’s gag and at the same time removed the banana leaf from under the stone. Then she put two more stones on his chest and one on his stomach, and ripping open his pants, jammed one against his testicles. The heat singed Lila’s fingers through the gloves. Lomio writhed in silent agony. His skin sizzled and the acrid smell of burning flesh rose from the pit. Lomio’s face was crimson; then the color drained to a ghastly pallor. Sweat poured from his body and his jaws were clenched in pain.

  Lila listened as Guy Ryder’s voice grew faint, saying something now about how lazy the Hawaiians were, sometimes he had to help clear the tables, think of it, Guy Ryder, a former Top 40 deejay in a semimajor market, a busboy for Christ’s sake. Lassiter kept him company all the way back to the pavilion.

  Lila removed the gag. “The bonds, Lomio. Where’s Keaka’s favorite place?”

  Through parched lips caked with dried blood and spittle, Lomio said something. Lila Summers leaned close, her ear near the big man’s mouth.

  “Ooo-lay,” Lomio seemed to say, then fell into unconsciousness.

  Guy Ryder was counting place settings as Jake Lassiter walked back, just moseying along, another tourist with time on his hands. By the time he got to the trees, Lila was shoveling dirt into a mound on top of the imu.

  “Where is he?” Jake Lassiter asked, knowing the answer even as he said it.

  “Having high tea with Queen Kapiolani. Come on, Jake, I’ve put all the stones back in. Help me with the dirt and leaves, then let’s go. If you’re hungry, take a couple sweet potatoes.”

  Jake Lassiter didn’t want sweet potatoes. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  “Jake, lighten up. He killed your Mend, burned him to a crisp. As they say, what goes around comes around, a little symmetry in life… and death. I’ve given your friend some justice, something you wouldn’t do. If I had more time, I’d have cooked him medium-well, poached the bastard real slow.”

  “You buried him alive?”

  Lila shrugged. “What difference does it make if he was dead earlier or later? Dead is dead.”

  Lassiter stared at her blankly, his mind faying to work up a rationalization. Sure Lomio deserved to die. He tried to kill us, helped kill Tubby, Lassiter thought. But there are laws. We’re not in the jungle, he thought. Or is that exactly where we are, and not just here in the islands, but everywhere?

  He thought about Lila. She was right about one thing — dead is dead. No use dwelling on the huge Samoan; he was on his way across the river and Lassiter hoped there’d be a burning sulfur pit waiting. But later, Jake Lassiter knew, he would face his own trial, the moral questions of Lomio’s death, the determination of his own culpability.

  “Jake, snap out of it. He talked.”

  “He told you where the coupons are?”

&nb
sp; “I think so.”

  “What’d he say?”

  Lila laughed. “I’m glad you haven’t forgotten about the money. For a while, you seemed more interested in playing nursemaid to somebody who wanted you dead.”

  “I’m still Sam Kazdoy’s lawyer. I’m supposed to bring the coupons back.”

  “We can talk about that later. He told me Keaka’s favorite place was his ule. It means penis.”

  Lassiter shook his head. “Your boyfriend could’ve been a chapter in Freud’s Pleasure Principle.”

  “What he must have meant is the Iao Needle. It’s a pinnacle of volcanic rock in the West Maui Mountains. Keaka used to say it reminded him of his ule. What he said to you about his favorite place was a play on words, a joke, or as close to a joke as Keaka ever came.”

  “So where are the coupons?”

  “Putting two and two together, probably buried on top of the Iao Needle about twelve hundred feet above the floor of the valley.”

  “How’d he get up there?”

  “The top of the Needle isn’t really sharp. It’s sort of a nob, just like…”

  “Yeah, I get it.”

  “Keaka would have climbed to the top.”

  Lila’s cheeks were flushed and strands of her hair were slick with sweat. She seemed animated, alive with excitement. Maybe the killing breathed life into her, Lassiter thought. The thought hung heavily on him. Two deaths by their hands. Okay, with Keaka, it was us or him. But Lomio? Lassiter told himself Lila did it to avenge Tubby. But she didn’t even know Tubby, so maybe she did it for good old Jake Lassiter. But she did it, he now believed, for the thrill. Maybe the money, too. And that was eating at him. The bonds belonged to Sam Kazdoy. Bring them back and half belong to Jake Lassiter. Lila Summers hadn’t said anything about bringing them back. They hadn’t talked about it. They hadn’t talked about much; they just did things, and every time they did something there seemed to be a body on the ground.

  Holding the microphone loosely as he’d seen Neil Diamond do in Vegas, Guy Ryder led fifty tourists from the pavilion to the imu under the pink Tecoma trees. This was a shitty job, worse than being a disc jockey in Quad City, Illinois, but after you skip town eight months behind on the alimony, you have to feel lucky to be the assistant entertainment director at a second-rate hotel on Maui.

  “This is Hawaii’s most authentic luau, an experience you won’t forget,” Guy Ryder was saying in his booming voice. “Get those cameras ready. But first let me say mahalo, a big Hawaiian ‘thank-you’ to these great guys who did the cooking. In ancient Hawaii, the men cooked and the women did the serving, and it’s the same here. Not like the mainland. Know what my ex-wife made for dinner? Reservations.”

  The tourists tittered and gathered around as three local teenagers wearing made-in-Taiwan loincloths pulled off the leaves.

  “When Captain Cook discovered Hawaii,” Guy Ryder intoned, “he didn’t call room service. No siree, the chiefs — and all the Indians — invited him to a feast. Of course, after feeding Captain Cook, the Hawaiians had him for dinner, but we won’t be too authentic, eh? Now have your luau coupons ready when Leilani comes to your table.”

  Guy Ryder didn’t get too close to the imu. The black dirt would have stained his white cotton slacks, and the smell of scorched pig always made him nauseous. He stepped away as the teenagers hauled the blackened carcass out of the ground. There was a rush of air, fifty tourists sucking in their breaths. Then a management consultant from Newport Beach who would have rather been playing golf said to his wife, “First time I ever saw a pig wearing Reeboks.”

  CHAPTER 34

  The Crooked Rainbow

  Before Haleakala existed, there rose from the sea the shield volcano that was to form the West Maui Mountains. For the next million years, molten rock erupted beneath the Pacific and exploded two thousand feet into the air, its boiling rain cascading down the mountain. Time and again the hot magma withdrew into the earth and a caldera, a depression, formed. Carrying the magma to the surface were dikes, channels in the rocks, and with time, they grew hard and the eruptions ceased. Then clouds pushed by trade winds were snared on the craggy peaks and the rains came, torrents streaming down the rocky landscape, and after twenty thousand lifetimes, the rains had carved an amphitheater into the ancient volcano.

  To the early Hawaiians, it became Iao, Cloud Supreme, a holy place considered the valley of kings, for it was there they buried the alii, their chiefs. Less than a dozen years after Captain Cook landed, the peacefulness of the valley was shattered when Kamehameha the Great launched his forces from the Big Island and pushed the army of Maui’s King Kalanikupule into the sacred valley. The pure waters of the stream ran red with warriors’ blood and skeletons remained visible for decades. A mile from the battlefield stands the Iao Needle, a spire of volcanic rock twelve hundred feet high.

  Two busloads of Japanese tourists were clicking away, their Nikons and Canons recording the lush valley scenes for folks back home. Jake Lassiter and Lila Summers crossed the walking bridge over the Iao Stream and headed toward the Needle. The steep slope looked impossible to scale, at least without ropes and pitons and Sir Edmund Hillary leading the way. But Lila said she had done it before, with Keaka, naturally, when they were younger, sneaking around to the far side, away from the tourists.

  Lassiter stretched, spit in his hands, and dropped into a deep-knee bend. He started gingerly up the overgrown trail, hand over hand. Lila scampered past him with feline grace, balancing on a rock, grabbing the roots of a small tree, steadily making progress until the angle of the Needle shielded her from view.

  “Don’t worry about me,” Lassiter called after her. “I’ll catch you at the top.”

  But now he was thinking.

  Strange thoughts.

  So many questions about Lila. How could she dispose of Keaka and never blink an eye? And how did she get the big Samoan to talk? What goes on in that brain of hers, and what code of conduct does she live by? And what would I have with her? What have we had so far? Just kissing and killing. And shtupping, Sam Kazdoy would say.

  How is the old man doing? Is Violet Belfrey still hanging on? Have to get back to Miami, the coupons under one arm, Lila Summers on the other. Then what? Talk, plan our lives. She’d learn to be — to be what? — more civilized, less homicidal?

  He was tired and his mind was running away again, a dinner party in Miami, Lila talking to him. Jake, the new attorney general doesn’t like the onion soup. Should I jam his hand down the garbage disposal?

  Lila, we don’t do that here, we just wait for him to leave and then suggest to the other guests that he’s gay.

  Welcome to polite society, Lila Summers.

  A rock clattered down the slope, startling him. He let go of a tree branch and it snapped back and smacked him across the nose. The trail was no more than a drainage gulley now, thick trees blocking out the sun. Lila was far out of sight, clambering up the slope like a mountain goat. Lassiter tried to pick up the pace, but he was distracted, plagued by bizarre thoughts.

  What if she found the buried treasure but said it wasn’t there? She could send him on his way, then get it later. Crazy. Estas loco, Berto would’ve said.

  Poor Berto. Dead in a swamp, his woman runs off with the guy who snuffed him. Maybe women, like the rich, are different from you and me, Berto, old buddy. Tougher, I guess. The evidence was mounting in support of that case. Maybe not evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, but look at the facts. Lee Hu, there’s some fidelity for you. And Violet the Vulture, cozying up to the old man, then wham, her boyfriend swipes the bonds. And Lila Summers. There’s more to her than kisses and a suntan.

  The slope was even steeper near the knob of the Needle. Lassiter’s right knee — ligaments patched, cartilage removed — ached with every step. He was climbing through a fine mist that turned to a light rain. Finally, the trees gave way, and on all fours, he scurried into a clearing at the summit. He rested for a moment, hands on his knees, sucking in air.
Time out.

  Lila sat cross-legged near a sheer cliff on the far side. Sweat and dirt streaked her face, and her hair was matted with brambles. Beside her was a small hole, the dirt the color of cocoa. In her lap was a yellow waterproof backpack caked with mud.

  Ignoring Lassiter, she peeled open the Velcro latches and dug in with both hands. She closed her eyes and let her hands drift unseen inside the pack.

  “Feels so good,” she purred. “Come try it.”

  “Nah, don’t think I could get off on it.” But he joined her anyway, four hands rummaging through small slips of paper, the prize of eagles. And she was right. It felt damn good, a fortune trickling through their fingers…

  East Chicago, Indiana Environmental Improvement Revenue Bond, Youngstown Sheet and Tube Project; Jackson County, Mississippi Pollution Control Bond, International Paper Company Project.

  … hundreds spilling out in glorious colors. They played with their treasure, reading aloud the tuneless names of municipal sewage projects.

  A bright sun had broken through the clouds and mist. A dewy line of sweat beaded on Lila’s upper lip. She said, “We’ve got to get off the island as soon as possible, and we can’t use the airport. Mikala will have cops everywhere.”

  “Just don’t ask me to ride a sailboard to San Francisco.”

  “I’m thinking of a larger boat. My girlfriend’s father has an old Hatteras docked at Maalaea, the Crooked Rainbow.” As she said it, they both looked up, because above them was a rainbow, its colors brightly etched against the sky. They laughed and kissed, and rolled on top of each other on the wet ground, and for a moment, he forget about the questions without answers.

  When they untangled and stood up, Lila said, “I’ll call my girlfriend and make sure the boat’s gassed up and the keys on board. We’ll leave at sunrise for Oahu, and we can fly out of Honolulu for wherever you want.”