by Chris Bauer
Something was off.
Maybe it wasn’t Wally. Maybe there was a competitor. Someone a lot sloppier than him, the mess left behind on purpose to incriminate him. To expose Wally’s new business model. To expose him.
A turf war. Which meant maybe Vena’s grotesque murder wasn’t Kaipo’s fault.
But why Vena then?
“Miss, do you have another destination for me?”
More scrolling. “Yes. The Lihue landfill.”
Trash trucks idled near the gated entrance, seagulls hovered overhead, swooping and diving and peeling off to follow the scent to the mother lode itself, the two-hundred-acre landfill, a cornucopia beyond the fence. Adjacent to the landfill, a maintenance yard anchored by an orange brick building the size of a supermarket absorbed a steady diet of street sweepers and trash trucks on their way inside a separate steel cyclone fence. It was quitting time for the first shift, the sweepers parking side by side in straight lines, fanning away from the building. Kaipo took a chance, had the Uber driver leave her near the employee parking lot where she knew she’d see the workers as they exited the building. She stood just outside the fence, her back against a mustard-yellow Plymouth Duster in the first row, her arms crossed. Her face widened into a toothy grin the size of a harmonica when she picked someone out of a crowd of tired street sweeper jockeys on their approach to their cars.
“If it isn’t Birdy Tatoto,” Kaipo said before Birdy noticed her.
“My God. Kaipo, is that you?” Her friend quickly closed the distance. Long face, dark complexion, thin, looking thrift-store chic with a loose checkered top and distressed jeans. A beak-like nose. So appropriate a nickname.
“Sure is, Birdy. You look great, hon. And”—she made a production out of sniffing her face and neck while holding her shoulders in her hands—“you smell good, too. What is that, Dove soap?”
Birdy pulled Kaipo in, spoke into her shoulder as they hugged. “The county finally gave us showers and a locker room. No more stinking like an outhouse when we leave here. You look really wonderful, Kaipo. I mean—really—you look fantastic. Are you, um, you know—”
“Sober? Yes.” Her smile turned upside down, then it returned. “It’s a struggle every day, Birdy. Two years, four months, twenty-eight days. Every day a new trigger. But you know that.”
Trigger. Bad choice of words.
Birdy, unfazed, looked at her watch. “Three years, four months, four days, and… six hours.”
Birdy was Kaipo’s Narcotics Anonymous sponsor. Pinpointing her sobriety date was telling. It was etched in Kaipo’s persona as the day Birdy had lost her boyfriend to a self-inflicted gunshot. The boyfriend’s solution to his heroin addiction. Something she and Kaipo both shared, the loss of loved ones to drugged-out suicides, although Kaipo’s lover had the decency not to do it in front of her.
Happier memories were needed. “Tell me, Birdy, I forget. How old is this car again?” The car was the reason Kaipo had found her so easily.
“A ’72. I’m not doing the math. It was my boyfriend’s. He used to race it on the street, and I used to watch. Now the closest I get to drag racing is watching my sanitation buddies race their street sweepers every once in a while. Kaipo, I gotta tell you”—Birdy’s smile was genuine—“it’s so good to see you. I never thought you’d come back from the mainland. At least not alive. How long are you in town?”
“Few days. Too long a story for here. First part of it is, you need to call me Aiata. Where can we talk?”
“We were a mess, weren’t we?” Birdy said.
Birdy’s place, a large camper, was twenty minutes from the landfill in an RV park on a steppe carved out of an inactive volcano’s base. Their fold-down kitchen table talk had commenced over iced tea. A distant horizon that fell away from the volcano shimmered outside the kitchen window like a desert mirage on a hot day. Kaipo’s name change and the reason for it came and went as a topic. Kaipo was now back at the beginning of their friendship.
“We were fresh off the island,” Kaipo said, reminiscing. “Shitty jobs. No friends on Kauai yet. No money. But we always had enough money for drugs, didn’t we? Which put us on our way to moving from one addiction statistic to another.” Kaipo quit the romanticizing, lifted her backpack to her lap. “I need to give you something, Birdy, and you need to pay attention to me on this.” She unzipped a side pocket. Some second-guessing crept in, suddenly freezing her hand inside the backpack.
“What is it?” Birdy asked. “What’s wrong?”
Kaipo tucked away her doubt, exhaled, knew this was necessary. “I need you to take this. I need you to not argue.”
She liberated the handgun. Same gun she’d handed Vena twenty-four hours ago, but hopefully this time it would result in a different outcome. A mini-pang of PTSD wrenched her stomach while she handled the semi-automatic. She placed it on the table between them, a bullet clip next to it.
“What the hell, Kaipo?”
Vena’s words, too.
“Those recent killings,” Kaipo said, struggling, “those mutilated bodies you’ve been hearing about—”
“Yeah. What about them?”
“Add to them one more gruesome murder yesterday, not in the news yet. Vena Akina, from the island.”
“What? Vena? Oh, Kaipo—”
Kaipo took her friend’s hands in hers, Birdy in tears, Kaipo fighting them. “The murders might have something to do with me, Birdy, but then again, they might not. I’m not sure yet. But what they do have in common is the victims are all from Miakamii. Islanders who moved to Kauai. So promise me this, Birdy. Promise me you’ll keep this gun within reach for the foreseeable future, for protection, and—”
Kaipo’s eyes and mouth moistened in anticipation of a good cry, with her nearly losing it relaying this information, this… admonition. Vena, my poor Vena…
“—confirm something for me, that you’re not entertaining undergoing surgery to donate a part of your liver or any other organs for money.”
“Wait, what? How did you know…?”
“Word of mouth, Birdy. Son of a bitch, I knew it. Listen carefully to me…”
Things were worse than she’d thought. Social media: the bane, or the salvation of this generation? Blessing or curse? Regardless, different platforms had picked up on this little get-flush-quick scheme that Ka Hui had going. Kaipo launched into her plea, told horrific tales of mutilated corpses and crime scenes she’d remediated with multiple dead organ donors.
She ended with, “… and selling any of your organs will bring you up close and personal with the people I used to work for. Organized crime, Birdy. Good money, yes, but from bad people. Too risky. If there are problems with the surgery, honey, you don’t get patched up, you don’t get to walk away.”
Two more glasses of iced tea sealed it. Birdy accepted the gun, the bullet clip, and Kaipo’s quick tutorial on how to load it, fire, and release the clip. Plus Kaipo’s advice about not risking her life on the operating table for cash.
A worthwhile visit. It was now sometime after eight p.m. A good time for Kaipo to go.
“When can we expect Aiata to get back to Kauai from wherever she’s been hanging out?” Birdy said from her front door. “So we can maybe have a medication-free girls’ night out?”
“Not anytime soon, Birdy, sorry,” Kaipo said. “And the less you know about my whereabouts, the better, hon. My ride’s here. Always know that I love you, homie. Always.”
Kaipo climbed into the back seat with her belongings, gave her Uber driver a different address than she’d arranged for the ride. “You okay with the change?” she asked him. It was a hotel and spa in Lihue.
“Yes, ma’am. Nice place, if I recall,” the driver said.
“If I recall, too,” she said under her breath. She watched Birdy through the rear window of the SUV, Birdy waving as they pulled away.
The visit to Birdy: overkill? Arming her, telling her what could be in store for her, talking her out of doing something as stupid as mayb
e walking into the lion’s den for some short-term cash infusion… no, not overkill.
They arrived at the hotel, her Uber parking at the guest drop-off in front of the lobby entrance. The French provincial, with rooms in the main building and elsewhere on the property, housed a massive two-story lobby. Another sugar plantation conversion. She paid the driver in cash, climbed out, and was met by a hotel doorman.
“Take your bag and backpack inside, ma’am?”
“Bag yes, the backpack I’m keeping.” She handed him a tip. “I’ll be inside in a minute.”
Her Uber left. Kaipo wandered to the end of the sidewalk, made a turn at the corner of the building, stopped. She eyed a separate building at the deepest end of the parking lot, one story, a bunkhouse in a former life. Guest VIP digs. She narrowed her eyes in the twilight. A large man sat on a deck chair out front in a tight suit, his phone monopolizing his interest.
A bodyguard.
The car in the space in front of the bunkhouse—an SUV limo, in gold—closed the deal for her. Wally Lanakai liked gold limos. In Wally Lanakai’s past life, he also loved this hotel.
Tomorrow, if she still had the balls to do this, she’d march in to see him. Would have him call off whatever the hell he was doing related to these grotesque murders; possibly related to him looking for her.
One overkill aspect. If she was right about this, about approaching Wally, then Birdy and the other Miakamiians out there, wherever they were, would be safe, the Glock she gave Birdy not necessary. If she was wrong, and something else was going on, well, better safe than sorry. Either way she’d need to have a heart-to-heart with Wally regarding their future together, or lack thereof, and let whatever was going to happen between them happen.
Time to check into the hotel. Head down, she about-faced and thumbed her phone as she walked, caught herself in mid-stride just before plowing into a man in her path.
Japanese. Broad shoulders beneath a small smile. “Oh. Sorry, sir, I wasn’t paying attention—”
The last thing she remembered after the pinprick to her shoulder was hearing someone speaking on a phone saying he got her bag from the lobby.
Kaipo felt the leather against her cheek, her head against the seat, her nose against the car door. Her mind was a wandering, unsettled mess.
What’d he give me, damn it…
“A derivative of the Michael Jackson drug.”
Someone sitting next to her, a man… she’d asked the question aloud. Her fuzzy head processed the answer, translating it.
Propofol? The anesthetic?
Again what she thought was a mental response, wasn’t.
“Propofol-lite. The real stuff could kill you. We’ll be there in a minute. What a beautiful, starry night you will be missing.”
Her mind latched onto something else. Getting injected with a propofol derivative meant she hadn’t relapsed. A small comfort. The thought stayed a thought only, no comment from her kidnapper.
She struggled to sit up, her wrists and ankles wrapped in duct tape, her head burdened by a massive headache.
“We’re here,” he said. “Don’t try to stand, I’ll carry you.”
Inside a motel room, he laid her on a twin bed. Three men, her guess Japanese, surrounded her, one at the foot of the bed, the others on each side. The one who carried her in pulled up a side chair, began speaking.
“Stay calm, do not scream, or we will tape your mouth shut. Not that anyone would hear you; we booked all the rooms in this wing of the motel. Oyabun will be here to see you momentarily.”
They waited. Kaipo faded in and out, then was out for the count.
Her eyes opened, her body aching. The same man sat in the chair next to the bed, but behind him a slender man occupied a wing chair, his legs crossed, his hands folded in his lap. Her face and body were softly lit by sunlight through a window. The man in the wing chair spoke, his voice calm and even. “Good morning, miss.”
“What time is it?” Kaipo said through cotton-mouthed lips.
“Seven a.m. You slept through the night.” He handed off what he was looking at. “Show her the photo.”
The bedside associate thrust a photograph in her face. In it a woman sat ringside at what appeared to be a boxing ring at a casino. The man sitting next to her in the photo had his arm on the back of her chair, was smiling, but the woman had an I-can’t-be-bothered look.
“You are this woman,” the man in the wing chair said. “You are a part of Ka Hui. You are with Wally Lanakai. You are Kaipo Mawpaw, correct?”
“No. I’m… my name is Aiata Hauata. I’m visiting friends… I’m… please, let me go…”
“That is bullshit. You are Kaipo Mawpaw, and Wally Lanakai is desperately combing the islands for you. You mean something to him—a lot, I suspect. Except, I also suspect, he does not mean the same to you.”
She got it now. They were watching Wally. Watching him, interested in him, probably not liking him. He’d spent a long time away from the islands—more than a decade. Time for other players, other organized crime factions, to materialize in Hawaii, to get a footing.
Like from Japan.
“I… Wally Lanakai and I were business associates,” she said, “but not any longer. That’s all. I needed to disappear. Be away from him. Not something that’s easy to do. Why are you doing this? Why kidnap me?”
“Remove the tape,” he barked to the bedside thug. Moments later, Kaipo’s wrists and ankles were free. “Sit over here.” He gestured at a wing chair on the other side of the floor lamp.
She sat as requested, rubbing her wrists, wary of her inquisitor.
“I will give you more information than you are entitled to, Ms. Mawpaw. Listen carefully and understand. I am Mr. Yabuki. I am oyabun of the Yamazuki clan. You might know us as the Yakuza. Your association with Ka Hui has put you in a bad position, and me in a rather good one. I want Ka Hui out of the islands, and you will help me accomplish this.”
And suddenly she saw a way out of this. Yes. A very simple way out. “I’m more than a simple bargaining chip, Mr. Yabuki,” she said. “I’m your solution.”
“And the solution as you see it is what? Why you were there, at his hotel? To see him? To sacrifice yourself? That is your solution?”
Her confidence waned with his assessment, but she had to bite. “Yes. To plead with him to stop what he’s doing. To stop exploiting people. To leave the islands again. With me, if that’s what he wanted.” The last statement she hadn’t quite come to grips with, but there it was.
Mr. Yabuki sipped some bottled water, analyzing her. “Get her something to drink.”
A bottle of water appeared. She sipped.
“I find this interesting,” Mr. Yabuki said. “You are willing to sacrifice yourself. A very honorable gesture. Honor is a trademark of the Yakuza, as I’m sure you know. The days of the Samurai.” Another sip of his water, then he put his bottle aside. He folded his hands between his knees and leaned forward, into her space.
“But your solution is not how this is going to go. You are naïve, Ms. Mawpaw. He won’t leave the islands after he finds you. He’s a businessman, like I am. He’s just starting his operation again. Mr. Lanakai needs bigger incentives to leave. Much bigger incentives. Like threats of exposure about what he’s doing, or what it looks like he’s doing—”
She shuddered as an image hit her. The man taking pictures of Vena’s place. Of Kaipo, arriving there. He was Japanese, not Hawaiian. Was Yakuza, was there framing Wally.
“—and the permanent loss of something he covets. You. He wants to find you, Ms. Mawpaw, and he will. In pieces, all over Kauai. Unless he agrees to leave the islands permanently.”
She lost her composure, her temper boiling over. Her fingers tightened into a fist that delivered a short, sudden punch to Mr. Yabuki’s pointy jaw, then she got up in his face. “You killed Vena… you gutted her…!”
The two thugs pounced, ripped a screaming Kaipo away from their boss, subdued her and duct-taped her again, this
time her mouth included.
Mr. Yabuki wiped blood from his mouth with a handkerchief, stood over her on the floor while she mumbled and kicked and squirmed.
“That was a mistake, Kaipo Mawpaw-san.”
19
An afternoon of sun and sand, beachside. Multiple bottles of beer were working their way out of Philo’s system courtesy of a sunbathing sweat, a hard swim along the coastline, and trips to the head to relieve himself. Philo and Patrick had their lobster dinners delivered to their cabana, the Hawaiian sunset overwhelming while they noshed. Patrick, quite the lobster-eating machine much like he was quite the Philly cheesesteak-eating machine, pulled chunk after chunk of meat from monster lobster claws and dipped them into the butter. Philo, on the home stretch with his meal, began pontificating.
“We need a lot more of this, Patrick, and a lot less time doing…” Better to keep the gore of recent experiences out of the dinner conversation. “You know, the other stuff.”
“Yes, Philo sir. More lobster, more sun, more beach and ocean, less dead bodies, sir.”
“Not the way I would have put it, Patrick, but yes, that’s what I meant.”
And not the time for this incoming phone call from Evan. Good hearing from him, bad hearing what he had to say.
“Another one,” Evan said.
The beach and the sun and the sea fell away, blanked out by horrific visions of more blood, more gore, and the despair he heard in Evan’s voice. Beyond grief, beyond shock, Evan was experiencing an accumulation of tragic events, including news Philo had already had a hand in delivering, the first to tell him about the second home invasion, where one of Evan’s female contractors at the Navy base had also been eviscerated.