There’s more than one kind of justice.
While the full force and might of the City and County of Honolulu, the state of Hawaii and the United States of America prepared to descend upon the hapless crew of Pele, I slipped from the warehouse. I knew I wouldn’t be missed. I also knew where I could go to get a lead on where Thompson might be found.
I made my way through the dying tropical summer day to a waiting taxi stand and climbed into the back seat of the first one I found. I gave the driver the address of the old Young Street police station. I had the keys Kate had given me and I would need my Jeep to find Thompson.
My wounds were healing and I was rested and ready. It was time to come out of hiding and try to salvage this thing if I could.
29
No one stopped me when I walked to the middle of the impound yard at the old police station, peeled the pink impound sign from the windshield of my Jeep and drove off. I didn’t even consider my next step. There wasn’t another choice.
I parked in the tow away zone in front of the restaurant. I didn’t think the Jeep would get towed again. Not in front of Chawlie’s place. It was early for his usual appearance but I knew he’d show up as soon as one of his people called him. The hit order on me would be no secret in Chinatown and I wondered just how fast the news of my invasion of his headquarters would carry back to him. There would be a reward attached and I didn’t think it would take long.
A waiter reluctantly took my order, probably worried I wouldn’t live long enough to tip him. The kitchen was unusually slow delivering the food and when it came Chawlie still hadn’t arrived. I sat with my back toward the restaurant’s entrance to demonstrate my disdain for the threat to my life. It was my way of gaining face while simultaneously insulting Chawlie. I wasn’t afraid of offending him. He’d already threatened to kill me. I ate my hot and sour soup, hoping it wasn’t poisoned.
When I finished the soup I asked for my bill. The waiter smiled, went to the front desk and came back with a plastic tray that was empty except for a single fortune cookie.
“Boss say no charge for you, Mr. Caine.”
The waiter bowed and backed away from my table. I took the fortune cookie and opened it and read the note. It said, A GREAT FORTUNE IS IN YOUR FUTURE. I had expected a cryptic message like, KISS YOUR ASS GOODBYE, ROUND EYE! but that was apparently beyond even Chawlie’s capabilities. Threats in a fortune cookie were a little too subtle even for him.
No one approached my table with verbal cryptic messages, either, the way they used to in the old movies where the mysterious Oriental delivers the warning out of the side of his mouth. My own waiter didn’t return. I finished the rest of the pot of tea and waited. I’d been there forty-five minutes, long enough for Chawlie to arrive, but he wasn’t showing and I wondered again if I’d made a mistake.
I got up and threw a couple of bills on the table. The waiter smiled at me the way you’d smile at a person who was dying of cancer—warm, meaningful, ghastly. I smiled back, hoping to scare him. I left the restaurant and nearly ran Chawlie over, stumbling before I walked into his chair in the foyer. There was another orange plastic chair across from him and he motioned for me to sit.
“You let Australian devil shoot you. I told you, too many people shoot you.”
“Good afternoon, Chawlie.”
“You stupid, or what?”
“I need your help.”
“Help? Help you? Not you. My son is dead because of you.”
“You set him up! For the honor of the family!”
He looked at me, blueberry eyes alive with emotion, but trying desperately not to expose the passion there. “I told you I’d kill you if you come here again, John Caine.”
“You said a lot of things, Chawlie. Most of which was total crap.”
“You did not believe me?”
“Of course not. You need me and I need you. My job is to destroy Thompson and his evidence. You just want him destroyed. He ruined your son even before he killed him. You used a little spy to infiltrate his company. She got tossed to the sharks. You used your son, you used me and you used her, too! Don’t deny it. Now Thompson knows everything your son knew and everything Jasmine knew, too. Thompson’s a torture freak. They would not have lied.”
Chawlie said nothing. He didn’t change expression during my speech. He just sat there and listened and aged twenty years.
“You can’t deny it. Thompson told me all about it just before he killed me. Or tried to.”
“It is difficult to kill you.”
“Don’t you ever forget that, Chawlie.”
Chawlie stared at me, betraying nothing. He had conquered the emotions boiling within him. I waited, knowing he was considering his options and trying to pick his best one. I already knew what it was but I wanted him to find it on his own.
“You are not afraid to die.”
He was beginning the negotiations with the hard sell. If that was his opener he had already lost.
“Not me. But anyone you send better be ready.”
Chawlie nodded. “What do you want?”
“The police have already raided his properties and offices and come up empty. Thompson must have another home here, somewhere the cops don’t know about. He’s someplace on this rock and he probably owns the property and it’s probably under the name of a cutout or a shell corporation he controls. You know it. You know where it is. You’ve known it since the day he bought the place. You know everything that goes on here that affects you. I need that address and I need it now.”
Chawlie shook his head. “It is very difficult—”
“Cut the crap, Chawlie! You know where it is! Don’t lie to me!”
“I’m not sure there is another—”
“Look. You owe me. If not for what you did to me, then for what I did for you. And if that’s not good enough, then for what Jasmine did for you! And for what you did to your son! You want to destroy Thompson? I’m your man. No charge. Just give me the address! Now!”
“Property under the name of a Nevada corporation, officers all foreign nationals. Devil Thompson thinks no one can find out. I know before he put the check in the bank. Broker my nephew, bank president my cousin.” Chawlie gave me the location of the only other piece of property Thompson owned on the island. It was on a ridge above Haleiwa, surrounded by cane fields.
“Anyone else know this?”
“Only me. Now you.” Chawlie would not look me in the eye. This had cost him a lot of face. “What are you going to do?”
“Take him out. Any way I can.”
Chawlie looked at me. The passion was coming back. “You got cause.”
“Yeah,” I reminded him. “And so do you.”
I got up to leave, keys in my hand.
“John Caine!”
I stopped and turned back toward Chawlie. He had not moved from his chair but his head was turned toward me, his mouth open as if he were struggling with himself. I don’t know which side won. “My nephew, a contractor, built a basement under this house. Be careful. He has secret entrance to basement from house. You would not find it if you didn’t know it was there.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes. Sure. He make his movies there. People scream and no one hear them.”
“Where is it?”
“Don’t know. You could ask nephew, but he’s on vacation. You look. You’ll find it. Small house.”
“Thank you, Chawlie. It helps.”
“You don’t have to worry about having to die anymore, John Caine. I no kill you now. Thompson do it, I think.”
In the reflection of the neon lights in the windows of the shops along River Street I watched the old man watching me as I got into my Jeep and drove away.
30
The ocean′s surface retained a clear delineation with the sky six hours after the sun had slipped below the horizon. Light from a full moon reflected off the waves, painting their tops with silver all the way to the edge of the world.
I lay
on my stomach in a stand of mature sugar cane trying to impose myself into the terrain, ignoring the possibility of centipedes and scorpions that inhabited these fields like commuters on the L.A. freeways. The cane was dry and ready for harvest and it made a hissing sound when the breezes blew in from off the sea.
From Chawlie’s restaurant I had driven directly to my berth in Pearl Harbor, not bothering to scout the area before boarding Duchess, wondering, but not caring, if Thompson’s people were watching me, and if SEALs were watching them.
My briefcase was still in Kate’s apartment, so I retrieved more weapons and changed to black fatigues and jump boots. I drove directly to Haleiwa, through the rolling pineapple and sugar cane that covered the central plains of Oahu. Nobody followed me. The freeway ran all the way from Waipahu to Wahiawa, terminating at Schofield Barracks. From there it branched into a couple of two-lane country roads. Only one of the narrow little cane roads led from Wahiawa to Haleiwa. No one could follow me without exposing their presence. It was too flat and too narrow, especially in the dark.
The map book of Oahu showed the property’s address on a dead-end street. I drove by the house anticipating a quiet rural neighborhood, the kind of setting you’d expect in an affluent environment. I was surprised. The house was the only one on the street, its concrete driveway the only one that did not lead to a grass plot. Two police cruisers flanked the house and two more were parked in the street. Chawlie wasn’t the only one with connections.
Seven people conferred in a group in the front yard. Huddled together, they had a collective end-of-shift attitude, as if nothing of importance had occurred. Their postures were those of hunters who had missed the game, fishermen without a bite. Their faces, hidden behind sunglasses, tracked me in the Jeep as I drove past. I stared back, an errant tourist.
It was disappointing, but not surprising that the cops beat me to the house. Government agencies can, when they put their collective minds to it, shift monumental piles of paper to find connections so seemingly trivial as to defy logic. That’s their strength. But they couldn’t know what wasn’t written, filed, entered and collated. They didn’t know Chawlie. That’s their weakness.
The sun was gone and I drove all the way to the end of the road before turning back. This time I ignored them, concentrating on how to get to the cane field behind the house. I noted the position of the house. It was an intruder upon the field, surrounded on three sides by the cane. I wanted to get into position before it became too dark and too quiet.
If Chawlie’s information was correct I wanted to get inside the house and look around. When I made the slow reconnaissance I noted large windows all the way around the house, a standard Hawaiian architectural device for maximum ventilation. From the exterior of the structure, nothing seemed to match the layout of the room where I suspected the tapes were made. The secret basement that Chawlie had mentioned must certainly be there. The house looked to be slab on grade, but that didn’t mean anything. The basement didn’t have to be directly ventilated to the outside. Bomb shelters don’t have windows.
Thompson could be hiding there until the search for him cooled off. Even the feds don’t have the funds or the energy to continue a high-profile manhunt for long. After a few days they would conclude he had left the island and would depend upon other means to catch him.
Thompson would have had a back door in place long ago. A man in his position would have known it wouldn’t last, no matter how self-delusionary he was in other respects. It was a gamble, but the police and the feds had covered all the other exists. They’d pierced the tangled corporate vines Thompson used to conceal his ownership of the property, and it followed they would know everything else about him, too.
He had to be somewhere and I had nowhere else to go. If Thompson was on the island, he would be hiding in that basement.
The cops were gone by the time I got into place at the edge of the cane. They had left a solitary vehicle parked in the driveway with a lone occupant. He appeared to be listening to the radio and drinking a cup of coffee, waiting out the time until his replacement arrived. He clearly expected no trouble.
As I lay in the cane watching the cop my thoughts returned to Kate’s frustration at my actions. She must have felt betrayed. I hadn’t promised her I wouldn’t pursue my own mission. Somehow she had assumed that just because we’d become lovers we were allies, that her goals and desires were now mine. I owed a debt to MacGruder, and as long as it was still possible to repay it my goals wouldn’t change.
Headlights appeared from the direction of the highway. A car stopped in the driveway, beside the cop’s car. I strained to hear the conversation but there was a steady breeze whispering through the cane and I could hear nothing else. From their relaxed postures it appeared they were two men who knew each other well. A third person occupied the shotgun seat, and for an instant I caught the profile of a woman. The driver lit a cigarette and the lighter briefly illuminated Kate’s face. Had the interception of Pele gone so wrong that now Kate was out beating the bushes again?
Another vehicle came down the road, a dark cargo van with no windows in the rear compartment. Kate and the other two cops swiveled their heads toward the van. Beyond the two police cars, just in the periphery of my vision, I saw a door open and a shadow detach itself from the house.
The van stopped at the end of the drive, blocking the two police cars, and sat idling its engine, getting the full attention of the occupants of the police cars.
I tried to get my gun out of its holster below my fatigue blouse, but the breeze suddenly waned and every movement I made caused the dry cane around me to rattle. I rolled to one side and put my hand under my left arm and tried to draw the big revolver. I saw the interior lights of one car flash on as the uniformed cop got out of his car to investigate.
Two muffled shots came from the house and the cop dropped to the ground. Two more shots were fired into the driver’s side of the windshield of the other police car. Then two more.
I lay frozen in place, on my right side, right arm under my fatigue blouse, hand on my Ruger Redhawk .44 magnum. Another breeze wandered through the cane field. I took advantage of the noise and drew the revolver.
The shadow emerged from the darkness and stood over the body of the policeman lying between the two cars. The man was a big Asian I had not seen before, big as a sumo wrestler. He fired again, aiming toward the body at his feet. He kicked at the body, grunted, and opened the driver’s door of the nearest car, his pistol extended.
A small figure darted from the passenger door and raced for the street. I recognized her at once. Head down, arms pumping, feet flying over the driveway, Kate looked like she had a chance to escape until the back door of the van opened and two men jumped out and tackled her to the concrete. One of the men hit her with his fist after she went down.
The big man pulled the other body from the car. It was Captain Yoshida, Kate’s boss. The big Asian dragged Yoshida and the other dead policeman into the house. At the van the two men turned Kate over and searched her roughly, and after a short conference, hauled her into the van and closed the cargo doors.
There was an opening in the hurricane fence surrounding the property that looked wide enough to drive through. If there had been a road at one time it was long gone, reclaimed by the vegetation. The sumo wrestler came out of the house and drove each police car into the cane until they were no longer visible. He piled cut cane around the last car until he was satisfied they were covered and returned to the house.
The van’s occupants remained hidden. I didn’t know Kate’s condition, but her captivity changed the equation. I couldn’t rush them now. Waiting was all I could do.
Thompson came out of the house preceded by the big Asian and followed by Tweedledee. Each man carried two satchels.
I tracked the big Asian with my Ruger, judging him to be the most dangerous. When I had a shot I fired a double-hammer, two shots into the man’s chest. As he went down I moved my sights and shot Tweedled
ee twice. I emptied the gun toward where I thought Thompson had been. By then everybody was down and I was moving, retreating into the cane field, rolling, crabbing sideways, back and away from the light, ejecting the empty shells and searching for a speedloader as I moved.
I’d counted Thompson plus four men, including the two in the van. I’d taken out two with my assault. That left two plus Thompson. I didn’t really count him. He wasn’t the type to run around a dark cane field searching for an armed man. I could see him ordering someone else to do it but I couldn’t see him going himself.
I crawled to a rough row of old tire tracks gouged into the soil and covered by cane. I’d scouted the field on the way in, choosing this as my first fallback position. I waited, knowing they’d come.
They did. Four of them, flanking me in two lines.
Four?
I lay motionless, allowing them to pass me in the dense cane. When the last man passed I eased myself onto my elbows and shot him in the back. He bellowed in pain and pitched forward, throwing what looked like an automatic weapon into the darkness in front of him. I fired on where I thought the drag man would be on the other line. Then I ran.
Automatic weapons fire opened up behind me. I dropped to the ground and rolled to my right. An invisible harvester cut the tops of the sugar cane above my head. I lay on the ground, hugging the tire tracks, and reloaded.
The only advantage I had was invisibility. They didn’t know my location unless I fired on them or moved. That went both ways but they had to move and time was running out. They outnumbered me, but someone somewhere would have heard the shots and called the police. I’d hit three, so there should only be two left, but I was hearing four, one moaning complaints but still upright.
It wasn’t possible. A .44 magnum will put a man down and keep him there. Hit a man with one and he wouldn’t be able to get up and complain about his injuries unless he was wearing a bulletproof vest.
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