I’d made it to shore without finding any more sharks, or having any more sharks find me. I kept the bangstick in my hand all the way. I still held it, a talisman. Even empty, it gave me a sense of security.
I squatted in the bushes and used the tip of my buckle knife to cut the poison sacs of the Portuguese man-of-war from my stomach and chest, where I could reach. I’d blundered into a pod of jellyfish about a hundred yards from shore, just after crossing the reef. Hot burning pokers jabbing into my flesh cut through my exhaustion, hundreds of barbs lighting up all at once. My body was so close to total shutdown that all my circuits weren’t reporting in. I ignored the pain and swam through them. I wasn’t going back out there! Hundreds of long, piercing strings, tough as monofilament, wrapped my body. Only Portuguese man-of-war have those long, terrible tentacles. I jammed my mouth tight and screamed as quietly as I could. I screamed all the way to the beach.
I kept digging at my flesh until I saw the familiar lines of Kate’s blue Mustang stop at the rock wall. She blinked her lights and I stepped out of the darkness.
“Jesus!”
“Just John,” I said. I felt lightheaded, close to shock. I fought it, and kept fighting it. She opened the car door and I leaned in. “I’m going to mess up your upholstery.” Blood trickled down my chest. More wounds had been opened by my digging out the jellyfish sacs.
“Just a minute.” Kate spread a blue beach towel over the seat. It had the word HAWAII printed on it in black capital letters. I collapsed into the sports car.
She started asking questions but I smiled and held up my cuffed hands. “First things first,” I said.
“From what I know about you that kind of fits. They should be in back, though.”
“They were,” I said. “I found a way to get them to the front.”
She shook her head and unlocked the handcuffs. They fell to the carpet.
“Do you feel up to a little surgery?”
She shook her head. “You’ve got to see a doctor. You’ve been shot?”
“In the ass,” I confirmed. “Or close enough. I can feel the bullet just under the skin. If you can pull it out and pour hydrogen peroxide in the wound I’m sure it’ll be all right.”
“Jesus!”
“Come on, Kate. You’re supposed to be tough.”
“Nothing like this!”
“I’ll make you a deal. I’ll tell you all about it if you get the bullet out and let me stay at your place.”
She snorted. “That’s your approach to lonely women at three in the morning? ′Hey, baby! If you let me come home with you I’ll tell you a story and let you pull a bullet out of my ass!’ No thank you.”
“Do you have access to missing persons files?” I asked. “How about a plain blond girl, midteens, with a tattoo of a red heart on her right hip and keloid surgery scars on her right knee?”
“Carolyn Hammel. She’s a missing person case. She’s been on milk cartons. Where have you been?”
“I don’t drink milk. I know what happened to her.”
She eyed me intently, unblinking.
“You do.” It was affirmation of my truth.
“I saw a video of her death. Two men who appeared to be Japanese nationals raped and murdered her and got it all on videotape as a souvenir. I think they’re Japanese nationals—they spoke the language. I have reason to believe Thompson was the photographer. He claimed to be the producer. Said he had more of them, quote, nearly enough to retire, unquote. He showed me this film just before another little girl, the one you knew as Jasmine, was fed to the sharks off Makapu’u Point and I have reason to believe he filmed her death as a special order for a customer. I was tossed in after her but the sharks didn’t like me.”
“Close the door,” she said.
“I can’t go home.”
“Close the door.”
“I am not going to the hospital.”
“Close the door, put on your seat belt and shut up,” she ordered.
We spent the next ten minutes traveling through a dark and silent Honolulu. Even Waikiki is quiet at three in the morning. But nothing matched the silence inside Kate’s Mustang.
She pulled into the parking structure of her building and hustled me out of the car and into the elevator. I wore the bloody blue towel around my shoulders, my bare feet and sodden khaki trousers strikingly out of place in the Marco Polo, a high-rise condominium along the Ala Wai Canal. Kate’s apartment was a one-bedroom unit facing the mountains.
“Do you want to shower?”
I nodded.
“Probably be best before. Get that salt off you. That way I can clean your wounds.” She was pawing through her medicine cabinet. “Shit! Rubbing alcohol. No peroxide. Can I use alcohol? It’ll burn like hell.”
“Might as well,” I said. “Everything else hurts.”
“I’ll look in the kitchen.” She left the door open.
I undressed, shucking the towel and my wet trousers. I got a look at myself in the mirror. The Phrobis knife sheath was still strapped to my calf, and a single strand of duct tape adorned my upper thigh. Blood caked the hair behind my ear; the seawater hadn’t completely dissolved the clot. My chest and arms were covered with long, wandering welts. My back still had tentacles and the purple poison sacs sticking to my skin. Blood ran freely down my leg and dripped on the tile floor. My eyes wore a haunted, exhausted look, the kind of expression you see on people who have raised the cover of hell and have taken a good, long look into one of the far corners. Most of the time they sleep in parks or on the street and ask you for money as you pass by. Most of them talk to themselves.
I leaned in and turned on the shower. I waited for the water to warm.
As I stood there on unsteady legs, Kate came in. She appraised my condition, ignoring my nakedness. Her appraisal was clinical. As tired as I was, I was still mildly disappointed.
“Jesus! Did they horsewhip you, too?”
“Jellyfish. You got any meat tenderizer?”
“I’ll look.”
She came back quickly with a small brown bottle. There was concern in her eyes I hadn’t seen before. “Turn around.” She had tweezers and a steak knife.
I turned around and leaned against the wall while she plucked the poison sacs from my back with the steak knife and picked them up with the tweezers, one by one. It was a slow, tedious process.
“Ouch! Shit! These things hurt!”
“I know,” I said. I was used to the pain. I was surprised how well the body could adjust.
“You look bad. You’re not going to go into shock or something? I don’t want you dying on me.”
I assured her I had no intention of either going into shock or dying. I wasn’t about to survive the previous twelve hours just to die in her bathroom.
“I found some peroxide in the kitchen and I’m going to sacrifice a clean white sheet. I don’t have many bandages here. I can get some in the morning, but these will have to do for now.”
I stepped into the shower and closed the sliding glass door. “Thank you, Kate. I mean it.” She offered no response. She stood there, staring at me through the frosted glass for a moment, then she turned and left the bathroom.
I removed the tape and the knife sheath and finished my shower, avoiding the places where there were holes in my hide. That covered a lot of territory. The soap stung the raw flesh. The water hurt the jellyfish stings. Kate came back with clean towels and helped me climb out, then dried me gently. The towels felt as if they’d been kept in the oven. Even after the warm shower I still felt chilled.
When she finished drying me the towels were streaked red with my blood.
“Jesus, you look bad,” she said, her voice low with concern. “Come here.” She led me to her bedroom where she had prepared her surgery. A bright tensor desk lamp was positioned over the sheet, the bedclothes turned back. Tweezers, towels and other implements were professionally laid out on a nearby table. “Lie down,” said Kate. It was a command.
I lay
facedown on the bed, staring out the window at the lights of Manoa and the University of Hawaii across the valley. The thought of being stretched out naked on Kate’s bed at four in the morning had never occurred to me. If it had, the present circumstances would not have been in that particular fantasy.
“Tell me everything,” she ordered as she began working on the bullet wound. “I’ll try not to hurt you, John, but I don’t see how that’s possible.”
While she worked I told her everything, even the things I’d planned on withholding. You can’t very well lie to a woman who is pulling a bullet out of your backside. You have to trust her. She finished and put a dressing on the wound. I heard the clink of heavy metal falling into a glass.
“Two-twenty-three Remington,” she said. “You’d probably call it a five point five—six millimeter. I’ve sent a few bullets to the lab before but this is the first one I’ve ever removed from the victim myself. No problem with the chain of evidence here. Right from your butt to the bag. If we can find the weapon we’ll get a match. No distortion, either. I thought you were tough.”
“The water cut the velocity. I haven’t got to that part of the story yet.”
“Go ahead. I’m going to work on your scalp now. Is there a bullet in there, too? If you shake your head will it rattle?”
“No. Somebody hit me from behind. I haven’t got to that part, either.”
“Should I be recording this?”
“No. Listen to the whole story. Then we’ll decide what to do.”
“We? I don’t think so. This is out of your hands now. I’ll decide what to do.”
“Once you’ve heard the story. Hear me out.”
She moved to the other side of the bed and began working on my head wound. “Let me see your eyes,” she said. Painfully I raised my head while she checked the pupils. “Doesn’t look like a concussion, but you’ve got about an inch of scalp gone back there.” She cleaned the wound and made concerned sounds deep in her throat.
When she finished, she handed me a robe and I followed her to the living room. We sat on the couch while I finished my story. There was a feeling of intimacy I hadn’t noticed before. Kate made coffee and microwaved croissants from her freezer. They tasted good, but food did not appeal. I ate them covered with strawberry preserves. I know I had burned a huge amount of calories and they needed replenishment. She made me drink a lot of water. I was thirsty and obeyed.
Kate was an excellent listener. She paid attention to more than just words. She watched my face and listened with her whole being. She did not take notes but I knew she would remember the salient facts, and I understood that she was comparing and processing what she heard with what she already knew. Kate was a homicide detective, a good one, and she was working.
By the time my story was finished the coffeepot was empty, the croissants were gone and the sun was warming the Ko’olau Mountains above Manoa. I’d been awake for twenty-six hours. My eyes felt gritty.
“I’ve got to get to work,” said Kate. “I want to talk to my boss about this and I want to pull the files on the girl you saw. I want a positive ID. I’ll also bring home some other missing persons files and Jane Does that turned up last year.
“If it’s any consolation, this was what I had heard rumored about Thompson. The snuff films. You’ve corroborated the story I got earlier this year. Only I knew about it from a confidential informant.”
“Whom do I corroborate?”
“It doesn’t matter now. The witness is dead.”
Choy. It had to be. The boy had been doing all kinds of back-channel work, getting money anywhere he could. I admired his energy, if not his judgment.
“I’ll lock up and you can use my bed. Can you sleep?”
“I don’t think I can do anything else,” I admitted.
22
I huddled in the middle of Kate’s bed surrounded by pink cotton ruffles. I pretended sleep, hopeful she would mistake my deep, regular breathing for the real thing. She didn’t. I listened as a dresser drawer opened and closed, and then I heard her bathroom door close and lock. Her liberal attitude about nudity apparently wasn’t mutual. I closed my eyes.
The next time I looked at her bedroom clock it was nearly noon. Kate hadn’t turned on the air conditioning and I was suffocating beneath the pink ruffles. I turned down the covers and carefully rolled over.
“I’d like to say I’m impressed but I don’t think that’s for me.”
I opened my eyes.
The bedclothes were on the floor. I was flat on my back, uncovered and sporting a rock-hard erection. Kate stood at the foot of the bed, smiling a tired smile.
I rolled onto my stomach.
“The man’s shy.”
“The man hurts,” I moaned. It was true. Every part of my body was stiff, sore or on fire. My muscles were sore. My thigh throbbed from the gunshot wound. The back of my head pounded like the all-time world record hangover. I smelled like meat loaf. The meat tenderizer had taken some of the fire away, but not all of it. That pain wouldn’t go away for days.
“I don’t know who you were dreaming about, but it was an impossible dream,” she said. “You look like you might die if somebody touched you.”
She was right. Air hurt.
She covered my body with a sheet. “I forgot to turn on the air conditioning when I left. I’m sorry.” Her voice was tender and solicitous. I nearly didn’t recognize it.
“I don’t remember dreaming.”
“It’s okay, cowboy. You don’t have to tell me.”
“I have no secrets from you, Kate.”
“Yeah. Ain’t that the truth.” She sat on the bed, close to me but not touching, as if I were a patient with an exotic, contagious disease. “Do you feel up to thinking? I’ve been working on this all day and I think I’ve got enough to go on.”
“Go where?”
“My boss thinks we have enough for a warrant. We’ll hit the boat and his house. With your sworn statement we can get—”
“I’m not giving anybody a sworn statement.”
“But you said—”
“Kate. Remember what I’m in this for?”
“Yes, but—”
“I need to clear MacGruder’s daughter.”
“But she’s dirty!”
“She’s dead! And she was killed because she objected to killing little girls! Getting her involved now will only destroy an innocent man and it won’t hurt Thompson at all. We’ll get Thompson. And you’ll put him out of business. But we’ll have to do it my way.”
“Too late,” she said. She glanced at her watch. It was a bit of action for me to follow. Because I had been injured I was supposed to be slow and stupid, too. “There’s a team on its way to Pele right now.”
I smiled. “There won’t be any tapes, any incriminating evidence of any kind on that boat. Except a hole in the hull.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Thompson wouldn’t leave anything to chance. He would not leave anything like that on a boat that is going to have service people aboard. I put a hell of a hole in the bottom of Pele. She won’t be going anywhere until that’s repaired. He’s reckless in some ways but he won’t leave those tapes lying around. They’ll either be at his home or in another location we don’t know about, a safe house.”
“What is this thing?” She held up the UM-1. I’d forgotten about it, and must have left it in her Mustang. For the first time I told her about the sharks. She shook her head. “You’ve got more lives than a cat! Jesus!”
“Wish I were Jesus,” I said. “I could have walked on water.”
“But you know what happened to him, don’t you?”
“Couldn’t hurt worse than I do now.”
“Get some rest. I’m waiting for the call. You hungry?”
“Starved.” That surprised me. I thought I was too tired to eat.
“I brought some hot and sour soup from Wo Fat’s. That sound good?”
Chinese penicillin. I admitted that it so
unded good and it made me think of an old man in Chinatown with a dead son and a dead concubine and a contract on John Caine. He had sacrificed his son for reasons too obscure for me to follow. He had played strange games with more people than I would have thought possible and for the most unfathomable of reasons.
This whole case was full of people taking the lives of others for questionable reasons and I was getting a little sick of it.
I knew the raiding team would come up empty. Thompson would like to believe he had killed me, but he wouldn’t be sure and he couldn’t leave it to chance. He was so certain he would kill me that he ran off at the mouth and told me too much. If I were Thompson I’d have somebody watch Duchess to see if I turned up. And I’d make preparations for early retirement. I didn’t see him making any more videos until he was certain I’d become shark bait. That made some unknown young girls safe for a while. At least from that predator.
He must have some nagging doubts about me. I couldn’t imagine what had gone through his mind when the 44 slug rocketed up from the bilge.
I smiled at the thought.
Kate returned with the soup. I sat up, covering myself as well as I could.
“Don’t bother,” she said. “I’ve seen it all.”
“Can you call off the boat search? I mean, is it really too late?”
“What do you mean?”
“I just thought if Thompson thinks I’m dead it could be useful to both of us. Raiding that boat is a tipoff that I survived. He’d know.”
She thought about it. She’d had a long day and night and it showed. I could see dark circles under her eyes. Even exhausted she was still beautiful, easy on my eyes. After all the horror of the day before, being with her was like finding a peaceful island with a safe harbor.
“It could be useful,” she said carefully, as if she were realizing the fact of the words as she uttered them.
“Can you turn it off?”
“I can try,” she said, making up her mind. Her eyes flashed twin smiles at me, mischievous dimples appearing on her face. Twenty years dropped and I could see her as she had been as a little girl. “I’m going to use you, John Caine. You might not like it, but I’m going to use you.”
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