by Chris Bauer
“Get me the transplant list, damn it. Pull it up and give your phone to me…”
“But promise me you won’t—”
“Give me your fucking phone!”
Wally scrolled down a list of potential recipients on Magpie’s iPhone, looking for their proximity to Wally’s chop house. He found one name, then a second. One full liver could accommodate two patients. “Her. Get Shirley M.’s people on the phone. She just finished a play and is in town. And she’s AB. Do it.”
“Type O donor, Type AB recipient,” Dr. Rakoso said, interjecting. “The donor’s liver can go anywhere, the recipient’s liver can come from anyone. You’re lucky she’s on your list.”
“Screw luck, I know my shit, Doctor.” Wally drilled a questioning look into his prospective freelancer, then addressed his unsolicited comments. “What the hell is it to you anyway, Doc, unless…?”
“If your secret admirer is telling the truth,” his guest said, “you’ve got maybe nine, ten hours to find homes for that liver.” Dr. Rakoso retrieved his own phone, scrolled through it, and checked his calendar.
“Breakthrough medicine appeals to me. If you find a patient, I’ll scrub in.”
10
Kaipo deplaned at Lihue Airport in sunglasses and a different baseball cap, this one University of Hawaii green. She exited baggage claim and found her way to a short line of airport limos waiting curbside, her destination a friend’s house in Pakala Village on the southwestern shore of Kauai. Thirty minutes later the limo stopped at the end of her friend’s driveway. “We’re here, miss.”
A newer-looking ranch home with vertical wood siding in pastel yellow, the small three-bedroom occupied no more than a quarter acre. A rental, her native Hawaiian friend Vena had told her. “A single career girl can afford only so much on these islands.” True that, Kaipo knew, even for someone like Vena, whose resume included current full-time employment as a contractor at the Navy’s Kauai missile outpost and dual degrees in maritime and military sciences from the University of Hawaii.
Kaipo handed the driver the fare plus a healthy tip. “Give me a moment,” she told him.
Her sunglasses off, she scanned the surroundings. The street was empty of traffic, a residential neighborhood of single-story homes on small lots under a cottony blue sky unobstructed in all directions. Kaipo powered down both windows, their tinted glass disappearing, the afternoon’s hazy heat creeping inside. Two neighbors in their front yards tended their lawns, their flowers, their porches, each with no more than a glance at her idling airport limo. A plane soared overhead, and a bubbly Vena waited for her inside her home, framed by the house’s front picture window, barely able to contain herself. Yet contain herself she did, told not to leave the house until Kaipo texted her an all-clear.
“Are we good, miss?” the driver said, a polite attempt to hustle her up. He popped open the trunk.
She reacted, her tone sharp. “No. Close the trunk.” She supplemented her bark with, “I need a moment, please. This will be a tough visit.” That sounded good as an excuse and it was true, but for reasons more consequential than it implied.
A car turned onto the street a few corners past Vena’s house. Black BMW. It slowed to a stop one house away, parked curbside across the street, facing the limo. Kaipo focused on it. Seconds passed, the car idling, no one exiting. One occupant only, looked to be male. He remained in the driver’s seat, no handheld devices in use as far as she could tell, no phone to his ear, no binoculars, no camera, his lips not moving. Just him staring ahead at Kaipo’s limo, interspersing this interest with side glances at her friend’s house. After a minute the black car pulled away from the curb at normal speed, closing their distance. Kaipo powered both windows up, put on her sunglasses again, and pulled her green ball cap down. The limo’s tinted windows and her dark sunglasses should serve as protection from prying eyes, but more extreme protection needed to come from her backpack on the seat. She felt inside for an aluminum case fresh from airport baggage claim, already unlocked. A one-button press snapped the case’s clips open. Her hand found the Glock, kept it out of sight inside the backpack.
The BMW drifted past, the driver holding up a phone, videoing the drive-by, the house and Kaipo both, her gun hand sweating. He was Asian, not Hawaiian, Kaipo giving him the side eye, the car continuing past. She craned her neck to follow it down the street, the car and its heat shimmer leaving her view multiple blocks away.
“Okay, I’m good,” she told her driver. “Let’s get my stuff.” She texted her friend, told her she was on her way in.
An animated Vena emerged from her house and bounced up the driveway to meet Kaipo, her arms opening wide. “Girl, what have you been feeding yourself?” Vena said, leaning back from their hug. “A steady diet of steroids? You look like you’re at your college weight. And those cornrows. Très chic… ”
“Let’s get inside, Vena, and I’ll tell you all about it.”
At a round kitchen table behind tall lemonades, and after Vena’s additional kudos about her hair, Kaipo quickly filled in her friend about her businesses as a personal trainer and massage therapist, her lack of a love life, her chemical addictions, and what those addictions had done to her physically. How they had broken her down, nearly killed her. How she needed to build herself back up, doing it the old-fashioned way with martial arts, boxing, running, hard workouts, and her sobriety: in recovery two years, four months, and twenty-seven days. How she had help in her struggle with these bad habits from a questionable source.
“Ka Hui,” a knowing Vena said, frowning.
“Yes.”
“They’re back, Kaipo. Here in Kauai.”
“Yes. The reason I’m here. But where are they? And how’d you hear about them?”
“At work. You want something to eat?”
Tortilla chips and cheese appeared front and center on the kitchen table along with napkins, plates, and salsa. Vena settled back into her chair, sipped her lemonade, and watched a hungry Kaipo dig in.
“Chatter at the Howling Sands installation,” Vena said. “Navy outpost personnel talking about gambling, or lack thereof.”
Statewide, Kaipo knew, there was no legal gambling of any kind in Hawaii. No casinos, no state lottery, no scratch-offs. No horse or dog racing, no sports betting. It made Friday night social poker games attractive to those who craved the action.
“Card players from the mainland in social games get pulled aside by someone who knows someone and are asked if they want more action. Whispers about high-roller poker games. Strictly taboo, too risky, too potentially compromising, so no one at work does it. But they know about it.”
Ka Hui’s M.O. From the old days here in the islands, before the Feds eliminated them, and one of the businesses the resurrected family soon put in place on the East Coast, in Philly. And now they were back. But illegal gaming wasn’t the only business Ka Hui brought back with them.
“You know anything about organ trafficking?” Kaipo said.
“How’d you…? Never mind. Yes, I do know something about it. Something’s going on. Word has gotten around. Here. Look.”
Vena picked up her phone, pulled up an advertisement online. She offered the phone to Kaipo, then pulled it back. “Do not judge me, Kaipo. Got that?”
“No judging. Cross my heart.”
Vena was logged into a personals website, with extremely explicit profile photos of men and women, some of the men very big boys.
Kaipo’s eyebrows rose, but only slightly. “So they’re mainstreaming porn in personal ads. Tell me something I didn’t know.”
“Okay then. It’s just that, you know, I had kind of a chubby, choir-girl image going for me way back when,” she said. “Not saying I can vouch for any of these hookups, mind you. Hell, I guess I can vouch for some of it. Two or three of them…” She snickered. “Or ten maybe. No more than ten. But let’s stay on target. See this ad here?”
Vena zoomed in on the ad so it took up the whole screen.
“DONORS WANTED. Ages 18-40. Indigenous Hawaiians. Not heavy drinkers, not overweight. Non-smokers preferable. For a medical study control group focused on the human liver. Blood type O ideal. DM your contact info here…”
“So here’s the deal,” Vena said. “A girlfriend of mine looking for some extra money to make ends meet messaged these people. They’re looking for organ donations. Livers. Partial livers, actually, because giving up a full liver could be, you know, hazardous to your health.”
“Donations? As in not paying for them? Because, you know, selling organs is illegal, Vena. She knows that, right?”
“Yes. The donors get reimbursed for their, um, expenses.”
“Let me guess. Their expenses include pain, inconvenience, lost wages, other incidentals…” Kaipo trailed off, her shoulder shrug saying she of course wasn’t buying it. She finished with, “Which, she said, can all add up.”
“Hey,” Vena said, “this isn’t an ‘I’ve got this friend’ kind of scenario here. It’s not my gig, it’s hers.”
Kaipo went limp, felt her blood turning cold. How bold a move was this as an approach, should this be who she thought? “Tell me she didn’t go any further. Tell me you talked her out of it.”
“If she goes no further, I have no info,” Vena said, dripping with snark. “Of course she went through with it. And I never knew any of this until after the fact. Chances are it’s Ka Hui, Kaipo. She did the deal and walked away. With fifteen thousand dollars.”
“Let me guess. She’s a Miakamii native.”
“Yep.”
“How did they pay her?”
“The expense reimbursements were in cash. Other amounts came in donations to a crowdfund page she set up for herself. A rent party fund, or grocery funds for the indigent crowdfund, something like that. They suggested she create it. Total payments to her over a few days came to fifteen thousand bucks. Slick, in my opinion.”
Her remarks hung out there, Kaipo moving past what she already knew: Wally Lanakai was a smart operator when it came to collecting and handing out payoffs.
“You said she walked away, as in she’s doing fine after the surgery?”
“Back on her feet already, slinging drinks and food at Love Your Lava Beach Club in Kapaa.”
Vena elaborated, answered more questions about who, what, and when, finally getting to the where. “She said the surgery was in a shuttered healthcare facility, the donor and the recipient on site at the same time. It took about seven hours. Clean, professional, comfortable. She wasn’t able to eat or drink for a few days, and the staples came out a week later. She spent time in post-op care somewhere, a week I think it was, in a spa, received pain meds, has a little scarring, but no other aftereffects. Her words.”
Fucking Wally. Kaipo often wondered what he could have done with his life if he’d gone legit instead of all-mobster; gone corporate instead of criminal. But asking that about him meant she had to ask the same question about herself.
What she’d done for him, how she’d cleaned up crime scenes after him and his mob folks… how close she’d come to killing people herself…
She stopped her introspection.
“Vena. Listen carefully. Ka Hui—Wally Lanakai—is organized crime—”
“No shit.”
“Wally murders people when his survival instinct dictates it, also murders them when it doesn’t. Murders them when they don’t give him what he wants. Murders them when things go wrong, like with some of these surgeries.”
Kaipo lifted her backpack to the table, unzipped it, and took out a thick aluminum case. She flipped open the cover and removed a cushioned tray, in it a Glock 17. She laid the tray with the handgun in it flat on the table between them. Vena didn’t take her eyes off it.
“What the fuck, Kaipo.”
“I’ve seen the aftermath. I now carry this, even have a license for it. Tell your friend, and have her tell her friends, and you tell your other friends, to not get involved in what’s going down with those surgeries no matter how much money’s offered.”
Vena’s glances stuttered between the handgun on the table and Kaipo. The dead air remained unstirred until—
“Why are you here, then? You bolted him once and went into hiding. You’ve got a new identity…”
“All true.”
“So who are you again? Your new name? Aiata…?”
“Aiata Hauata. Nice to meet you, Vena Akina.”
“Whatever. Seriously, why do this? Why come back to Hawaii? Wait… the copter crash on Miakamii?”
“Not the reason. Something’s not right about that crash, but that’s not why.”
Vena absently tugged at a piece of jewelry on her wrist. Kaipo’s mind drifted, keyed on Vena’s bracelet as a sweet, shared remembrance of theirs. One similar to Vena’s was in Kaipo’s suitcase.
“You still have it,” Kaipo said, smiling.
“Sure do. I love my special momi snot.”
“I love my special momi snot, too,” Kaipo repeated, a tender response to a tender comment.
Momi, or Hawaiian for pearls. Snot, specifically snail snot, was the shell itself. Snot on a half shell, snot with a hat, snot that walks: Miakamii nicknames for the tiny colorful mussel shells strung together that graced Vena’s wrist. Stripes on some of the shells, starry dots on others. Tans and reds and iridescent blues. They’d made them for each other when they were in their teens. It was what BFF girls did on Miakamii.
“Someone murdered that pilot, Kaipo. The news says it was a tourist. Or someone posing as a tourist. Ka Hui comes back and bingo, the Logan family loses a helicopter and its Miakamiian pilot and some livestock, and the island church gets damaged, too.”
“The Logans ever lose a copter before?” Kaipo said.
“Not that I’m aware of.”
“That’s the part that doesn’t work.” Kaipo tapped the side of her nearly empty lemonade glass with her nails, thinking. “The Hawaiian mob and the Logans coexisted on Kauai for a long time, didn’t interfere with each other. And they’re in the organ harvesting business now. The shells, the mollusks—the disease immunities—Wally wouldn’t lose good, transplantable Miakamiian organs to the ocean. If he wanted the pilot dead he’d have had him killed on land, then he would have taken his liver.” She poured herself more lemonade, sipped. “He won’t kill the goose that laid the golden egg. Plus I don’t think he’d do anything to hurt that island.”
“Well someone did. You see the news coverage?”
Vena pulled up news reports on her phone. Photos taken from the air by Kauai news stations reporting on the crash, their own helicopters and planes hovering over the site before the Navy scrambled their helo gunships to chase them off. “The livestock pens took most of the hit. There was no damage to the school, but see there, the church… something took out a window.”
In Kaipo’s mind that was a shame, but no big deal. She worshipped in that church, as did all natives born and raised there. But the church and school weren’t getting heavy usage nowadays, or so the drumbeats were saying, a declining population and all that. A disappearing way of life.
“Back to why you came back, Kaipo. What do you plan to do?”
“What I’m doing now, with you. Have you give me some leads. Spread the word. In person and below the radar, naming names where necessary. Hoping you do the same. A whisper campaign that says stay away from them. Plus, if it comes to it…” She dropped a hand onto her aluminum gun case. “Protection of the innocent by whatever means necessary. I have something for you.”
Kaipo made space on the table, lifted out a second tray from the case. “Here. Keep it in the house.”
Vena shook her head. “I… no, I don’t think I can…”
“Yes, you can. It’s light, it’s easy to operate. A quick lesson and you’ll be good to go.”
Looks passed between them, Vena finally getting it. She picked up the gun from its tray, got wide-eyed while she held it.
Kaipo would drive the seriousness home. “Look,
Wally might think he’s doing good here, putting money in the pockets of people who need it, but it’s too risky. He’s ruthless, and that makes him dangerous. I’ll spend a few nights here with you to get a feel for things myself, then I’ll head back, guns and all. I promise not to eat much.”
She held up the empty chip bowl, gave it a playful shake. “But you need to keep the chips and salsa flowing.”
The gun back in its tray, Vena’s expression lightened. Her phone rang. A FaceTime request. No new tortilla chips on the horizon for Kaipo.
“Let me take this call. It’s from my Love Your Lava Beach Club girlfriend who’s suddenly fifteen grand richer. Hold on… Hey, sweetie,” she said into the screen. “What’s up?”
Vena suddenly pulled back, shocked by an image. Then came the recognition. “Oh no. No, no, no…”
Kaipo moved behind her, leaned in for a look. Flashing red lights from police vehicles lit up the screen’s background, their sirens gaining strength. Her friend was streaming footage from the front of the restaurant. She began speaking in a panic. “You seeing this, Vena? I’m on my break… oh my God… do you see this?”
The streaming image zoomed fifty or so feet closer to focus on the restaurant’s circular driveway. A body lay on the blacktop, an adult male in remnants of a clown outfit, thrown from a moving vehicle. The blanket covering him had unraveled when it hit the asphalt and rolled. The body was now face up. The video footage zoomed farther in. The chest and abdomen were eviscerated, the holes packed in gauze tinted scarlet that hadn’t stayed in place. Restaurant customers were starting to gather, the police were arriving, and Vena’s friend stopped talking, started gagging…
Vena shouted at the screen. “That’s Ichigoo! He’s a street performer who works that restaurant. Oh mymymy…”
“A friend of yours?” Kaipo said. She helped herself to the phone, taking it from a distressed Vena. The footage was sickeningly gruesome, but a little less so for Kaipo, considering her avocation. The man’s entrails were exposed on the blacktop.