“There’s no rush.”
“The men have to have a schedule. No stress, no fun. Two hours.”
27
My briefcase arrived one hour and fifty-three minutes later. I knew the exact time because the young man who delivered it handed me a buck slip along with my briefcase. He was seven minutes early.
“Senior Chief White wanted you to sign for it,” he told me, proud of his achievement and wanting to show off a little. “He wanted you to know that things haven’t gone entirely downhill since you left.”
I was beginning to like the kid.
“Everything there?”
“Cellular telephone, knife, your forty-five, ammunition and your watch and wallet. Everything on my list, sir. Anything else you wanted?”
“You have trouble finding anything?”
“No, sir. I like your Atlas of Asia.”
“You got an extra Phrobis handy?”
He reached under his blue Aloha shirt and pulled out the black SEAL knife, a twin of the one Thompson had taken from me. “Here,” he said. “You might need it.”
I took the little knife and felt the edge of the blade. It could draw blood.
“Thanks,” I said. “You have any trouble? Was anyone watching my boat?”
“She’s being watched, sir. Two men, maybe three, alternating locations. They’re now being watched. We’ll see where they go.”
“Did Chief White ask you to do that?”
The young man seemed surprised by my question. “No, sir. He didn’t. I’m running this as part of the exercise.”
I smiled at that. Max would have denied them permission to interfere with the investigation. This young fellow was acting on his own initiative. I understood that. It’s always easier to do something and later be told you shouldn’t have than to ask permission and be told you can’t. This man had a future if he didn’t shoot down his own career first.
“Mr. Caine?”
I knew what was coming. He wanted in. I didn’t blame him. In his place, at his age and with his training I’d do the same thing.
“I’d like to say, uh, if you need anything, anything at all, uh, here’s my pager number.” He handed me a slip of paper with a local telephone number scrawled across it.
“This authorized?”
“No, sir. I’d be on my own time.”
I looked at him carefully. He was eager and competent, and dangerous. A backup.
“What’s your name?”
“Jeff, sir.”
“Thank you, Jeff,” I said. “I’ll hang on to this.”
“Twenty-four hours, sir. Me and Doug, that’s my partner. We discussed it. Call us anytime. We’ll come.”
What do you say to that? The offer was genuine, and unlike most offers of assistance this one had weight behind it. “Thank you,” I said. “I appreciate that. You never know.”
He nodded. “I know.”
I understood that to mean exactly what he said. He knew.
“Good luck, sir.”
“Thanks again. I hope I won’t need it.” I closed the door. He would find his own way out. That wasn’t a problem, considering the fire codes. These buildings were designed to keep people from coming in. Getting out was easy. Unauthorized entry of a high-security building was a formidable task, but one that didn’t seem to have bothered young Jeff at all.
I took the briefcase to the kitchen table and opened it. My pocket cellular telephone and its charger rested on one side of the case, my Colt .45 was nestled in its pancake holster on the other. Eight magazines surrounded the pistol.
I picked up one of the Devel clips and checked it. It was loaded. Bright brass showed through the view ports at the sides of the magazine. Two additional boxes of cartridges were stored on the bottom of the briefcase where they would not tend to move during transit. My Buckmaster was there with the leather shoulder rig I’d had made for it in Hong Kong. My Rolex and my wallet were also in the case.
I found Kate’s gun cleaning kit, spread the morning newspaper over the top of her kitchen table, disassembled the Colt and cleaned and oiled it, piece by piece. I unloaded and disassembled each magazine and cleaned its component parts, too, making sure that each spring was in proper position and had the proper tension. I oiled and greased the slide of the Colt and assembled the big pistol again. Then I carefully loaded each of the magazines. When I was finished I loaded one of the eight-round magazines into the butt of the automatic.
Now I felt whole.
I don’t like guns. They are noisy and dangerous and they kill people. They bestow a deadly power on people who, upon reflection, might not have hurt anyone seriously if the means weren’t so handy, or on people who are too emotionally unstable to handle any kind of power in the first place. They are far too easy to use and require no training to be lethal.
Emotionally I tend to agree with the antigun lobby that people should not be allowed to possess them. I also don’t like the idea of governments having nuclear weapons. Any government. But both the guns and the bomb are realities, have been since before my birth. Once those genies were out of the bottle there is no way to put them back inside. Technology is a wonderful thing but it is also risky. Once a weapon is loosed upon society it stays out there until it is replaced by something even more fearsome. Reality, like truth, can’t be outlawed, can’t be called back, and can never be stamped out simply because it presents an unpleasantness. If the opposition was armed—and I had a throbbing reminder high up on the back of my leg that the opposition was not only armed, but armed with automatic weapons—I’d be crazy to consider going up against them with anything less than my own firepower. I trusted the Colt. Like me, it had history.
I had my personal arsenal spread out in front of me and was honing my Buckmaster when Kate came home. She looked from the Colt to the big knife, surprise showing on her face in spite of her attempt to hide it.
“You went out.” It was a statement that bordered on accusation. She’d been planning on kissing me, or hugging me, but there was no intimacy now. The fact of the weapons had created an invisible wall.
“It was delivered,” I said, continuing to sharpen the blade.
“Somebody I know?”
“Probably not.”
She crossed her arms in front of her chest and looked at me as she digested that piece of news.
“Thompson’s boat is being repaired,” she said. “One of his thugs went down to the boat yard this morning and paid to have Pele hauled and repaired. Apparently there is some sort of a rush on the order. I’ve been told a premium was paid to get the work done quickly. You should be proud of yourself. From what I heard you cost him a small fortune.”
“Any sign of him?”
“He hasn’t been seen at his office and if he is in the house in Haleiwa he didn’t show himself all day. We’ve got close surveillance on both the boat and the house.” She shook her hair out of her eyes, wiping her forehead with one slender hand. She seemed unhappy and preoccupied.
“We got a positive ID on one of the men you fought with downtown at Honolulu Hale the other day. His name’s William Stone, aka Stony. Originally from New York where he collected seven misdemeanors, drifted out to California where he did the weight club circuit and worked as a bouncer and sometime enforcer. He got into trouble three years ago in San Francisco. Aggravated assault. Served six months of an eighteen-month sentence, then dropped out of sight. He was wanted for parole violation and for questioning about some felony strong-arm robberies in Los Angeles.
“You put him in the hospital with a broken spleen and damaged kidneys. He had an emergency operation at Queens the day after your fight.”
“He’s low budget and not very smart. And he’s in a tight spot,” I said. “He’ll talk to you.”
She pursed her lips, concentrating.
“He was willing to,” she said.
“Was? What changed his mind?”
“He knew about some of the things Thompson was into. We offered to ease up on hi
m a little after sentencing. You know, put in a good word with the judge to give him a little less stiff sentence?”
“Not a plea bargain?”
“We don’t do that when we’ve got them by the balls. He was a parole violator, not a defendant. The feds filed on him for interstate flight. He was going back inside. Anyway, he’d agreed to give us a short statement. Somebody got to him first.”
“Dead?”
“In the hospital. The night nurse found him last night, throat cut ear to ear.”
“You didn’t have a guard on him?”
She shook her head. “Guy got a phone call. Went down the hall for two minutes. The nurse found Stone before the guard got back. A quick in and out. Very professional.”
“Wow,” I said. From what I had seen of Thompson’s people, none of them were of that caliber. They were thugs, getting along by being bullies. They might shoot you in the back but they would not cut your throat. That took a special kind of toughness I hadn’t seen in them.
“I know. The captain’s hot. And you have an alibi. If I were not absolutely certain of your whereabouts last night I’d be suspicious.”
I laughed, but then realized she was serious. She was looking at the Phrobis knife on the table and the big one in my hand.
“Thompson plays rough, doesn’t he?”
“Yeah.”
“But you can’t prove it’s connected to him.”
Her beeper went off. She looked at the display and frowned. “The boss,” she said. She went to the kitchen phone and made the call. The conversation was short and I got the impression it was not friendly. But something had happened. I could almost see the hair on the back of her neck rise. She hung up and looked at me.
“Pele’s going back in the water this evening. The yard got the call from Thompson and they called us. We can make it if we hurry.”
“Thompson’s going to be there?”
“We don’t know, but we don’t think so. His crew is picking up the boat and taking it out. The captain thinks that Thompson is going to meet the boat somewhere.”
I started packing my weapons into the briefcase.
“What are you doing?”
“Getting my gear.”
“You’re not going anywhere with that stuff. You’re staying out of this.”
“Then why am I going?”
She shook her head. “Because I don’t trust you alone. Pack up your stuff and stow it here. Get dressed. You’re going with me. I don’t want to have to arrest you tonight.”
28
Kate drove and I was grateful. I also was grateful to be out of her apartment. People speak of rock fever, the fear of being trapped on a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific. I’d been trapped in a small apartment on a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific for two days and I was beginning to go stircrazy.
The boat yard was west of downtown in the industrial district of Kaka’ako and traffic was heavy all the way from Waikiki. It was rush hour. Distances are close in Honolulu, but there are many impediments to traveling in a car on an island where there are more vehicles than people. The crush of automobiles was compounded by street closures, barricades and traffic cones, proving the old saying that in Honolulu the shortest distance between two points is always under construction.
By the time we arrived on the western side of Kewalo Boat Harbor the sun was going down. Silhouettes of party boats glided across a mandarin orange horizon. Explosions of white light sparkled across the party craft like strobe lights as tourists memorialized the event.
Kate parked the Mustang and we walked together to the warehouse offices. There was a void in the previous intimacy that I understood as the rebuilding of her armor. My weapon preparation, which she had inadvertently witnessed, had affronted her sense of justice. It was an abrogation of some undefined pact we had made that we were out to get Thompson arrested. If there was some kind of pact I had not been aware of it. My mission was to get the evidence first, and then place Thompson in a position where MacGruder’s daughter would not be an issue. If he went to trial, she was certain to become an issue. I could not risk that in order to see him tried in a court of law.
As we climbed the exterior stairway of the warehouse I noticed Pele alongside the repair dock across the water. Workmen were finishing their tasks, hurrying before the sun completed its own daily travel. The repairs to Pele must have been inconsequential to have been completed in one day. I felt disappointed. Next time I got the chance I would hurt Thompson a little more.
Once inside we joined a small group of men and women who were intent on the big white yacht across the harbor. I recognized Captain Yoshida, and I thought I saw a couple of familiar HPD detectives, but most of the others were unknown to me. They had that confident look of law enforcement types who could not be fired regardless of how badly they screwed up. I assumed them to be feds.
Yoshida was standing in the middle of a group of people, all wearing identical expressions of self-importance. He glanced in our direction as we entered and frowned when he saw me. He waved Kate over, making a small production of ignoring my presence.
I strolled over to a window and watched the activity on Pele and the sudden realization of the scope of my failure hit me with the force of a tidal wave. My mission was to destroy any evidence that could implicate MacGruder’s daughter and I had led a federal task force to the source. With all this official interest my mission had foundered.
I had hoped to dart into the open jaws of the situation, recover and destroy whatever evidence there was, and then nimbly leap out before the jaws snapped shut. That was the plan, but I found I wasn’t nimble enough. There was too much heat now. The official minions of the law would take it from here, seizing Thompson, his thugs, his boat, his houses and all his tapes, rendering my cause hopeless.
I didn’t like failure. What was worse was the possibility of seeing a good man lose his career for something his daughter had done.
Across the water two men boarded Pele. Something was exchanged with one of the workmen, who left the boat, lugging tools and electrical cords. One of the two men went below while the other went to the flying bridge. A puff of blue smoke discharged from the exhaust and the water below the stern roiled from the spinning propellers.
Twenty hands brought twenty cellular phones and radio sets to twenty mouths at nearly the same instant. If stares really did have weight Pele would have sunk then and there. The big yacht moved away from the dock, making for the breakwater and the open ocean through a bright, tropical sunset.
It was over, I thought. Thompson was out there somewhere, expecting his men to pick him up and take him to the next port. With the craft properly provisioned, Thompson could make the mainland or he could make Tahiti.
But Pele was not properly provisioned. Kate’s contact at the boat yard had reported only minor repairs. She had not mentioned provisioning. And none of that mattered anyhow, because the feds would swoop down and pick them up before they entered international waters. And a thought hit me.
Thompson was merely evil. He wasn’t stupid and he wasn’t a fool. With someone like me nosing around, he must have known that something was going to happen, and that serious heat would soon follow. Pele was the bait, a queen’s gambit, the magnet that would draw all of the official attention. On this planet there is nothing more controlled, taxed, licensed, inspected and surveyed than an ocean-going vessel. A big yacht is slow, and on the ocean it presents a target profile similar to one of those stationary Iraqi tanks that were annihilated during the Gulf War. If Thompson expected any kind of official interest, Pele would be the last place he would be found.
I looked for Kate. She was in deep conversation with her boss, her face a study in beauty and passion in motion. It was not a good time to interrupt.
I watched and waited. Kate left her group and stood next to me by the window.
“They hit his house in Haleiwa this afternoon,” she told me. “No one was there but they found tire tracks that might matc
h those found at the MacGruder scene. It looked as though Thompson had packed and left the house in a hurry.”
“They expect him to be aboard Pele?”
“They expect he’ll meet the yacht once it’s left port.”
I nodded. They would expect that. But he wouldn’t be there.
“Thompson has no chance of getting off this island,” Kate continued. “The airport is blanketed. Are you all right?” Her dark eyes were shining, the passion there reminiscent of the night before. This woman was a warrior, in her own element, closing in for the kill.
“I’m fine,” I said. “I just thought it would turn out differently.”
“You’re still worried about those tapes.”
I nodded.
“This will ruin MacGruder.”
I nodded again.
“And you don’t want that to happen.”
“No, Kate, I don’t.”
“It has to be this way. You understand that, don’t you?”
I shook my head. “I understand that you think it has to be this way.”
This time Kate nodded, impatiently, biting her lower lip. She was looking at this from her own perspective. There wasn’t room for another. “I’ve got to get back to the others. I made a mistake bringing you here, I can see that now. I just didn’t want you to get in the way. There are some heavy people out there looking for Thompson and you could get caught in the crossfire.”
“I’ll get by,” I said.
“That wasn’t what I meant! You get in the way and there’s no way I can help you. You’ll be looking at serious felony charges if you obstruct this investigation in any way. They know why you’re here! I explained that to my boss, that I brought you here to keep you out of the way. He didn’t buy all of it, but you’ve got to help yourself now. I can’t help you anymore!”
She returned to the official group of Thompson-hunters without another word, her back held tense and absolutely straight by the depth of her feelings. I’d seen that before, recognized it from previous desertions. I had become excess baggage. She was angry with me for not accepting this as the proper and logical conclusion of the chase. If things turned out my way there would be a miscarriage of justice.
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