by Kay Hadashi
“Knock it off, Kato!” their CO said over the radio. “Forget the damn dog!”
The Bad Karma was just setting down, ice crystals flying about madly in the rotor wash. They loaded the two crates of gear first, followed by the bodies. Melanie and Zito were the two last to climb in, the bird slowly lifting as they were being pulled in.
Melanie looked down, trying to see the hungry dog. She shone her flashlight in the wreckage and saw movement.
“Anybody got an MRE?”
The crew chief tossed her one from a compartment. “What’s that for? Dead bodies make you hungry?”
She tore into the package and found the foil pouch of wieners and beans. Tearing that open, she flashed her light at the dog again. “Hey! Dinnertime! Come and get it!”
She waved the flashlight at the pouch and tossed it out the door, aiming the beam to where it fell. As the Bad Karma banked away, she saw the dog trot away from the wreckage, sniffing the ground as it went.
“Poi Dog, you took a bad fall back there,” Swede said. “You okay?”
She buckled into her place on the narrow bench, keeping watch over her two dead bodies. They belonged to her, at least until they got back to base and signed them over to the hospital morgue. “I’m okay. A trip to the base chiropractor will get me right again.”
“Maybe you should go to the base hospital to get checked out?” Swede said over the noise of the churning rotors and drone of the engines turning them.
She looked at her crew one at a time. “No one says a word that I fell out of the helo, got it? Not a word, or I will personally make each of you miserable for a very long time. This story never gets told. Understand?”
Zito chuckled and patted her on the shoulder. “And she will, too!”
***
Melanie felt tapping on her chest, followed by a vigorous shake to her shoulder.
“Mel, time to wake up.”
Instinctively, Melanie reached up and grabbed what it was that disturbed her sleep. Such blissful sleep.
Trinh pried her hand from Melanie’s string grip. “Hey, it’s me, Trinh. It’s time to wake up. Your surgery is done, Mel. Time to wake up.”
Melanie opened her eyes to see her best friend looking down at her. “Surgery?”
“Your back, remember? It went great. Doctor Carlson got your disc squared away, which was worse than what the scans showed. But with physical therapy, you’ll be okay. Your legs are going to be fine, Mel. Did you hear me? You’re going to be fine.”
She tried focusing her eyes. “Where’s the baby?”
“Ha! First thing a mother would say,” Trinh said. “Are you having any pain?”
“I want my baby. I want Kenny.”
Chapter Fifteen
Melanie got so many calls in the hospital the next day from friends wanting to come by and see the baby, she had to make appointments for them all. By noon, she was exhausted and turned off the phone. Kenny was asleep in his bassinet next to her bed. When Trinh came by, she told her to close the door.
“Get my clothes,” she said. “I need to get out of here.”
“You’re not going anywhere until both Chapman and Carlson say you can. I just looked at your chart and they both recommend you staying until tomorrow.”
“Just get me my clothes.”
“I’m not helping you leave early.”
“Afraid you might get in trouble?” Melanie asked.
“Afraid I might lose my job.”
“If you do, I’ll hire you as my nanny.”
“Oh, now wouldn’t that be special. You could boss me around every day, telling me I’m not holding the bottle the right way, the diaper is too loose, the diaper is too tight, I use too much powder. Forget it, Mel. But why haven’t you guys hired a new nanny? You’ve had all summer.”
“Qualified nannies aren’t exactly standing in line to work for us. If we lived in LA, or even Honolulu, yes. But not here. They’re either looking for jobs to pay for their beach bum lifestyle, or are twenty-year-olds with no experience with kids.”
“What about that gal a few weeks ago? She even had a weekend sleepover.”
“She left when she discovered how small the house is. People think we all live in giant air-conditioned mansions on Maui. Surprise! More like humble little sweatboxes that have seen better days.”
“Well, you have three weeks before you’re bringing Kenny to work with you.”
“What if I retired and became a stay-at-home mom?” Melanie offered after a moment.
“Oh no, you don’t. You put in too much work to get to where you are today. I watched how much time you spent studying, how long your days were. I’m not letting you walk away from what you’ve built.”
“Mom retired early.”
“She retired from medicine when she was a decade older than you, mainly because she had a shake in one hand, and promptly opened that restaurant. That took as much of her time as working at the hospital. Anyway, you can’t survive on Josh’s salary from the college.”
“I have money in the bank. It’s just sitting there doing nothing.”
“Which is being saved for Thérèse and now Kenny. You never go near it because of them.”
“We could live off the interest it earns for us, easy.”
“Mel, I’m not letting you walk away from your career, so get over that idea. You have three weeks to find somebody and move her into your house. Focus on that. How’s your back?”
“I could use a pain pill, but not as long as I’m feeding Kenny.”
As though he recognized his name, the baby began to fuss.
“That’s his ‘I’m hungry’ whine. Bring him to me.”
Once Kenny was feeding, Trinh pulled up a chair next to the bed. “You didn’t wake up so good yesterday.”
“I was having the craziest dream.”
“Mel, nobody ever wants to hear about someone else’s dream. And your internal life is too weird to hear about.”
“This one seemed to have a meaning, almost like I was having a premonition.”
“Okay, what was it?”
“Well, at first, I could hear you guys talking about me, like I wasn’t completely asleep yet. Then all of a sudden, I was back in Korea on a mission. Something went wrong with the landing, and I flew out the door.”
“You have those dreams all the time,” Trinh said. “You take bits and pieces of things that really happened and then paste them together into a bizarre dream. They don’t mean anything, except that you’re just trying to work through all that stuff. Seriously, you need to see a therapist if you want to quit having those dreams.”
Melanie moved Kenny to the other breast. “That wasn’t all, though. That dream turned into something even weirder. It was like I went back in time to old Hawaii. There was some big battle raging here on Maui, just up the slope from our house. Then I, or someone took an arrow in her back, but she kept fighting until she died. Then she was buried in a cave up on the pali, a spear and the arrows that killed her put there with her.”
“How do you know it was near us?” Trinh asked.
“I recognized so much of it. But it was so odd.”
“What was odd? All you did was change the place from Korea to Maui, and you became a Hawaiian warrior. You said in the dream you got shot in the back with an arrow, right? Well, that was probably right when Carlson was working on your spine. And you turned the bullet you were really shot with once into an arrow.”
“But in the dream, I died. Or at least the Hawaiian warrior did. Then all of a sudden, I was back in Korea again, Collins yelling at me on comms about not wasting time.”
“I don’t know, Mel. It’s your nutty dream, not mine.”
“Hand me my phone,” Melanie asked.
“Who are you calling? You’re supposed to be getting rest.”
“No one. I just want to look at pictures.”
Trinh handed it over. Once it was turned on, Melanie went to saved images that she found at the online auction site.
“These are them!”
“They’re what?” Trinh asked, trying to see the screen.
“The artifacts that were put up for auction bids were the same things as in my dream. The spear, the arrows, the red kahili. It’s all the same.”
“Of course they’re the same. You simply put those things into your dream.”
“I never told you the end of the dream. I was back in the Bad Karma, heading back to base, with two bodies recovered from the wreckage.”
“Only two? We have three dead bodies in the morgue. And where does the helicopter come into play?”
“I don’t know. But in the dream, the two bodies were Hawaiian warriors. In real life, they were white CIA operatives.” Melanie rubbed her face for a moment. “Then I was feeding a dog, or something stupid like that. It was really odd.”
“I’m not a therapist or a dream interpreter, Mel. I have no idea what that might mean.”
“All I know is that in some weird way, it makes sense.”
“Anything weird makes sense to you, Melanie Kato,” Trinh said, standing. “Lunch break is over. Back to work.”
“Hey, before you go, did you see yesterday’s headlines?” Melanie asked.
Trinh rolled her eyes. “Something about the mayor being too hard on island crime. The reporter said you beat up some guy at a surf shop in Lahaina. Nobody’s going to believe that, Mel. Just forget about it.”
“Maybe there’s a little bit of truth to it.”
“What happened?”
Melanie told the story of the salesman at Gonzo’s thumping her in the chest, and her putting him on his knees.
Trinh laughed. “Just what Maui needs, a cranky mayor who was in Special Forces!”
After Trinh was gone, Melanie called Detective Nakatani.
“Hey! Congratulations to Maui’s newest mother! I heard there was a surprise?”
“Boy instead of a girl. So much for the accuracy of ultrasounds.”
“No, I mean you needed surgery?”
“How’d you know that?” she asked.
“It’s in the newspaper. They said you needed to be rushed into emergency surgery to save your life. Something about bleeding to death, or whatever.”
“I wasn’t dying. How’d they find out?” she asked.
“There were three reporters waiting with all the rest of us to hear about you and the baby. Once you went to emergency surgery, someone came out to talk with us.”
“Which doctor?” she asked.
“Well, it wasn’t a doctor.”
Melanie had a sinking feeling. “Don’t tell me…”
“Your mother-in-law held something of a press conference about your condition and the planned surgery. I have to admit, she did a decent job of it.”
The tic came back to Melanie’s eye. “I’ll deal with her later. I have a question. On those latest artifacts, the dirty ones that look as though they’ve just been collected, is there any indication at all of where they came from? Did the other detective figure out anything like that?”
“That Honolulu detective went home. We couldn’t afford him for another week, so you have me to figure that out, along with the perps behind the deaths of those three men. We’ve sat each of Gonzo’s surf instructors in an interrogation room, and one or two might give up something if we press them a little harder a second time.”
“Not officially classified as murders yet?”
“It would probably be wrongful death or manslaughter when the time comes. Why are you asking?”
She gave him a short version of her dream. “There are so many trails up into the hills and over the pali that someone could’ve discovered something up there, and has been bringing it down with them, selling it off at auction.”
“And I suppose you have a troop of experienced trackers and climbers to go check out every inch of two hundred square miles?”
“No.”
“That’s what it would take.”
“Unless we find someone who knows something. I just wish Josh had been able to follow those guys the other day. I bet you anything they have something to do with the stolen artifacts. Or more,” she said.
“We do have a lead on the decapitation injury.”
“Somebody saw something and came forward?”
“No. Somebody found the head.”
“Where?”
“A scuba diver found it stuck in coral in the reef near Lahaina. Apparently, it had been stuck there for a while, from the way the reef fish had been nibbling at it.”
Melanie’s stomach turned. “Thanks for sharing that.”
“At least he’s altogether again.”
“To change the subject to something a little less gruesome, has the coroner come up with anything about the propeller marks on the guy’s body? He said that first day he might be able to figure out what type of propeller did the damage.”
“Yeah. I got a couple of uniforms checking out the marinas again, looking for a specific size and style of outboard propeller. It’s been pretty slow going, though. Not everyone likes the cops sniffing around their boats. On the other hand, we’ve made two arrests of drug mules using boats to move the stuff.”
“That’s something, anyway.”
Now that Kenny was done feeding and sound asleep, Melanie felt like napping also. Setting her phone aside, she snuggled in for a snooze.
***
When she woke again, Melanie wasn’t alone. But it wasn’t Josh or Dottie there, or even Trinh on another visit, but Addie.
“Addie, I’m so sorry I’ve been so difficult lately. It’s just that…”
“It’s just that you’ve been waiting to have your baby, and your back was hurting you so much, you needed surgery. After the week you’d just had, I can understand completely why you were so upset. When your mother-in-law got here, that seemed to push you over an edge.”
“Please don’t say anything to Josh or Dottie, but she really has a way of getting under my skin.”
Addie chuckled. “I get the idea she has that effect on quite a few people.”
“Did you just come from home? Are the others okay?”
“They’re fine. Thérèse sure is a little trooper. She’s making some decorations for the nursery.”
“I can’t wait to see. The two of you sure get along well. Tay doesn’t always take to people right away.”
“She’s a special little girl. I’ll miss her when I go.”
“Have you decided to leave soon? You really are welcome to stay. I’d almost prefer you over, well, you-know-who.”
“I made a flight for tomorrow,” Addie said. “The police still don’t know how long it will be before they release my son. I guess I’ll have to trust a mortician to ship him for me when the time comes.”
“I’d be glad to manage that for you, Addie. I doubt it’ll be much longer.”
Kenny woke and began to fuss.
“That’s his ‘diaper needs changing’ whine,” Addie said.
“I’ll call the nurse.”
“No, I can change him.”
Melanie watched from her bed as the woman gently cleaned and changed Kenny’s diaper.
“Funny how we never forget how to do something like this,” she said, giving the infant a tickle. “I guess we do it so many times, it becomes ingrained in the memory of our hands.”
She picked the baby up and held him close to her chest, patting his back to burp him.
“Addie, when you go home, what will you do?”
“Oh, go back to my clubs and charity things, I suppose. My friends will look at me with pity on their faces, and it won’t be long before I feel lonely again.”
“Why don’t you stay here? You could be our nanny. You and Thérèse get along so well, and you certainly know what to do with a baby.”
“Me? A nanny? I think those years have passed me by.”
“We’d pay you well, and you’d have a place to live. I know that room isn’t very big, but with the other room turning into Ken
ny’s nursery in a few months, it seems like it would be a good arrangement.”
“You honestly want me to be your nanny?”
“It would only be five days a week, when Josh and I are at work. You could even take half days off on Wednesdays when he gets home from work early. You wouldn’t have to start for two weeks. That would give you enough time to go home and settle whatever affairs you have there. We’d even buy you a car to take the kids around in. What do you say?”
“Can I think about it?”
“Of course. But you know I’m going to have Thérèse work on you.”
Chapter Sixteen
It wasn’t hard at all for Melanie to stay in bed when the others went to church on Sunday morning. After all, Kenny was there with her, beginning his first full day at home.
“So, what’s the deal? Are you going to be a mind reader? Because we already have someone in the family who sees ghosts and another that knows magic. What’s your shtick going to be?”
Like it always did, her phone rang. Once again, it was from Detective Nakatani.
“Please tell me another body hasn’t washed ashore.”
“Not that I’m aware of. Were you expecting one?” he asked.
“One on someone else’s island would’ve been interesting to read about in the newspaper. Two is definitely too many. But three is just absurd. And they all happen to be on my island. The families must be looking for them. Have they been contacted?” she asked.
“We’re still looking for the family of the second. It might turn out that he has no one interested in knowing he’s dead. The third is still unidentified. We are making progress on the investigation, though.”
“How?”
“First, the bad news. We haven’t been able to identify the seller yet. They’re proving to be a lot trickier than what we first expected. But we have been able to identify many of the bidders, and there have been a lot of them.”
“Can’t really do anything about them until they buy the stuff, right? Is bidding breaking the law of black market trafficking?”