Zero Island (Blessid Trauma Crime Scene Cleaners Book 2)

by Chris Bauer

  Another path led to a new clearing. Volcanic ash underfoot gave way to a furrowed dirty rut that was fifty, sixty yards in length, at its end a memorial plaque in English on a concrete stand. The event the plaque commemorated: the crash of a WWII Japanese Zero in this very space after its Pearl Harbor sneak attack, its rusted hulk hauled away decades later for research and to validate the wartime historical event. The men gathered around the plaque, bowing in prayer, offering thanks to their pilot and other Samurai heroes in kami-no-michi, or Shintoism. Their prayers and the clearing left behind, they reached their destination: the settlement with the island’s only population, its defenseless houses and huts peppering this elevation and northward, up a gentle sway of a hill. They began their ascent.

  A front door exploded behind vicious leg kicks, two Yakuza men leading with guns and flashlights, the living room unlit, unoccupied. They kicked through brittle wooden chairs and tables, shoved a parlor sofa aside, stormed the dining room, the kitchen, the two bedrooms at the rear of the house, found no one inside. The hut across the path faced a similar assault, a residence furnished for occupation by simple, indigenous people, the other two men strafing the entire interior with semiautomatic fire when finding no one inside to execute.

  Two more small, simple, dust-laden, cobwebbed homes, two more residences obliterated with gunfire, neither with any people in them.

  The lead executioner found a phone signal and made a call, began speaking in Japanese. “There is no one here in these homes, Oyabun. No one to kill…”

  “You are wrong, you idiot!” Mr. Yabuki said. “Search every house in that bung-hole of a settlement. There are still many people on that island! The census says so. Find them. Exterminate them. Restore your country’s honor. Honor the Samurai…!”

  The Yakuza leader assembled his men outside, eyed the higher elevation in front of them. More homes at intervals, four, five plus, a little larger than the ones they’d checked already. The largest homestead in the settlement, a farm, sat atop the hill.

  “There,” he said, pointing. “The one at the top of this ridge. Our next target. If anyone is in this backward, scrub-fish shithole of a village, it will be there.”

  The path opened up. At the end of it was a barn, a two-story house, a grain silo, and multiple fenced yards. Squealing pigs, sheep, and two horses roamed a corral outside a stable, the horses breathing heavily. The six men each caught their breath while checking the magnificent moonlit view and sightlines at this altitude: the lagoon with their moored cruiser, the beach with the inflatable outboard, a starry-starry night, the moon aglow. Across the channel and seventeen nautical miles away sat Kauai, the island illuminated and sparkling with nightlife. Breathtaking.

  Barn first. Roaming, clucking chickens squawked at their arrival, each man tempted to blow them away in a flurry of bullets, but all were kept alive by the leader’s finger to his lips, demanding silence. Next, the house. On quiet feet they moved from room to room, the home basic but comfortable, with an old sofa and tufted but worn side chairs in the living room, a hand pump for well water in the kitchen, and a dining room with a china closet, the house’s entire contents about to be obliterated by indiscriminate gunfire. Two men cradled their long rifles near their hips, wrapping their fingers around their triggers.

  “No,” a Yakuza warrior said, “look! Shadows in the horse stables, a flickering light…”

  The six Yakuza marched across the dirt yard, guns by their sides, alert but giddy, about to participate in the slaughter of the innocent, God-fearing, and unarmed Miakamiian farmers that this property supported. The flickering candle threw shadows on the inside walls, shadows that were on the move.

  “This is the place,” their lead said. “Someone is in there. Time to restore Japan’s honor, and the honor… of the Samurai.”

  They entered the horse stable. Many stalls, no horses, a side-wall paddock door open to the starry evening, the horses wisely outside, in the corral. Hay on the floor, in the hayloft, and in all the nooks and crannies and corners. Baled hay in piles, singles and doubles. Hanging farm tools: sickles, scythes, steel leg traps for the occasional wild boars who wandered too far up the ridge. One man grabbed a pitchfork and started poking, speaking in English to the stable’s unseen, shadowy occupants.

  “You must show yourself, you American worms.”

  He wandered farther into the stable, jabbing, poking, grunting while he thrust the prongs of the pitchfork into the scattered piles of hay.

  “You must pay for the murder of Oyabun’s grandfather eighty years ago. Come out, take your medicine. I will use my tantō, and I will make it quick, just like I did to your pilot before I rode the air to safety while his helicopter crashed into your despicable island. Hel-lo-o (jab, poke), where ar-r-re you…? My tantō is preferable to this pitchfork…”

  No movement, no giveaways anywhere. “Very well then, you give me no choice.” He raised the pitchfork overhead, was about to come down hard into a hay pile.

  Ben sprang from behind two nearby bales, his knife in his hand, an antique handgun in his waistband, startling the speaker, overcoming him. Ben’s short, sinewy body subdued the loudmouth Japanese Yakuza with a knife to his throat.

  The other five men lifted their long rifles, trained them on him and his hostage, in the ready. Ben sized up his enemies, dropped his knife, replaced it with a handgun to the man’s cheek and an arm around his neck for a chokehold. He wandered to one side with his hostage.

  “Leave my island now, without this man,” Ben warned. “Chester’s murderer! I get to keep him. Go. No questions will be asked. I implore you, man to man, be smart. You need to go. Now.”

  His captive tried to speak. Ben jammed the gun into his mouth and started shoving it down his throat while tightening his chokehold.

  “Roujin. ‘Old man!’” a different Yakuza said, stepping up, flexing his bravado for his peers. “The Bushido code of the Samurai reigns supreme! This warrior does not care what you do to him. He will die an honorable death, in battle, and will be honored by his family for generations. You, roujin, have no chance of survival. You call that rusty handgun a gun? It probably won’t even fire. And I thought guns on the island were against the Logan family rules—”

  The Yakuza chuckled, as did the other henchmen, all presenting mocking laughs and wide smiles, all of them still flashing their long guns. “These… what we are holding… now these are guns…”

  The speaker raised his weapon and his associates did likewise. The AR-15s erupted, began spraying the interior of the stable with chaotic automatic fire, aimed not at Ben or his hostage but rather at everything else: the roof, the stable walls, the floor, the windows, the stalls. The gunfire stopped, the laughing beginning again, with Ben still in command of his captive.

  “Now. Back to you, roujin—”

  From deep within the rear of the stable came a disembodied female voice. “Big fucking deal,” Ella said.

  The Yakuza speaker turned up his nose at this revelation, did a visual sweep of his charges, the men now snickering, chiding him for letting a woman speak to him that way. He played along.

  “Wow,” he said, aiming a flashlight deep into the shadows protecting the rear of the stable, where they’d heard the voice. “Guns on the island, and now their women are cursing at men! Mr. Logan wouldn’t like that a bit, you gutter gaishō…”

  In the tense silence that followed, Ella poked her head through the large pile of hay against the rear wall, the Yakuza’s flashlight glinting off her eyes. In one motion she swept a tarpaulin back, exposing the old buckboard kept in church storage. Visible in its payload was a black 7.7mm type 97 aerial machine gun cannon, the one removed from the Japanese Zero eighty years earlier, fully operational, and able to feed and fire nine hundred rounds per minute from a tripod mounted inside the buckboard’s bed.

  She spoke in a defiant tone. “You consider those things guns, asshole? This… is a gun.”

  With the forty-one-inch machine gun chest high, she
depressed the trigger, feeding the ammunition on a belt from a black box on the air cannon’s right, decapitating her targets, shredding limbs, severing torsos—“This is for Chester!”—the tinny noise of the ammunition belt the same as she heard while sleeping on the beach, her beloved Ben taking the heavy-duty artillery piece through its paces once every year or so, making sure the air cannon remained operational.

  Chicka-chicka-chicka-chicka-CHICKA-CHICKA—

  Ben held the last Yakuza in his arms, the man’s squirming plea for mercy so unbecoming a Samurai, Ben’s knife now against his throat just like the thug boasted that he’d done to Chester in the helicopter, and like Ella’s grandfather did to the Zero pilot in 1941. Ben told his hostage as much, told him what he was about to do to him, then slit his throat ear to ear.

  36

  “We’re in position, boss,” Magpie said on the phone to Wally. Wally rubbed his brow, at a loss. A lot on his mind.

  He exited a different chicken slaughterhouse building on the farm property after having his men toss room after room in an exhaustive search, no Kaipo inside. He’d moved from anger to grief with each passing moment, but the hate and the need for revenge still drove him.

  Their casualties from the post-fight skirmish: the number of Ka Hui dead, zero; number wounded, three. All would live. Yabuki’s casualties, from what Wally could tell: many more wounded, two dead. Neither of the dead was Yabuki, which was all Wally cared about.

  “Tell me what you see, Magpie. Your surroundings. I want to feel this.”

  “One dead Japanese yacht guy, boss, draped over the con, a rifle shot to the head. My doing when we boarded from the Navy outboard.”

  More description from Magpie, wearing night goggles: a well-appointed bridge, even for a yacht, a nervous U.S. Navy commander standing next to Magpie, eager to get on with it, and the island’s calm lagoon, lit by the moon. Some monk seals were on the beach, sleeping, paying no attention to them.

  “Raising my binoculars, boss.”

  He mentioned the view of the channel separating Miakamii from Kauai, leading to the lagoon, with a soft chop and moonlit whitecaps. Mentioned the whine of an outboard engine, moving slowly across the channel, Magpie seeing two people aboard.

  “It’s Yabuki, boss, closing in. Fifty yards.”

  He again mentioned the Navy commander on his left, who now raised the rocket launcher to his shoulder. The launcher’s red laser dotted the chest of one of the outboard’s occupants.

  “Is Commander Malcolm ready, Magpie?”

  “I believe he is, boss.”

  “We owe this to him.”

  “I know, boss.”

  “Anything else, Magpie?”

  “Yabuki sees the laser on his chest, boss. Now he sees me in his binoculars, looking at him.”

  “Take him out.”

  Magpie’s final description was his tap of CO Evan Malcolm’s shoulder, the commander’s face drawn into a fist, his depression of the trigger, and the release of a screaming projectile traveling something short of Mach One that struck the bow of Yabuki’s approaching outboard and raised it ten feet out of the water while halving his body, showering the channel with sheet metal, nautical gear, a Samurai sword, and human body parts.

  A knock at Wally Lanakai’s hotel room door. Wally’s armed man looked through the peephole, called behind him to his boss.

  “Mr. Lanakai? Sir?”

  “What?” Wally sat slouched on a sofa in front of a TV, sipping a bottle of beer, anywhere from his sixth to his tenth.

  “It’s a hotel staff person with a package.”

  Wally stumbled to the door, swept it aside, and grabbed the small cardboard box out of the delivery man’s hands before slamming the door in his face. He turned the box over and over, looking through bloodshot eyes for the return address, then read return-address-sounding words somewhere on it that meant nothing to him. Fumbling while peeling off the paper, he found a white Styrofoam container inside, the size of a meatloaf, double-wrapped in mailing tape. He dropped the unopened container to the floor like it was contaminated and pulled back. Tears formed, further compromising his eyes, him unable to pick up the package.

  His unsteady voice demanded that his man open it.

  The lid aside, Wally peeked in, saw a reddish-brown internal organ the size of his hand, packed in dry ice.

  The human chemical factory. A miracle organ. The cure for Alzheimer’s.

  A full liver, not a partial. Wally had never taken a full liver from any living person who hadn’t deserved to die, had even walked away from a million and a half bucks from a cop who threatened to close him down.

  “Kaipo…”

  He didn’t want this one.

  Wally sobered up enough to call Douglas Logan, who answered immediately. In a few short words, Wally retracted his offer for the purchase of Miakamii Island or any of the island’s businesses. He’d lost Kaipo for good, and he wanted nothing to do with that fucking island ever again.

  37

  They settled into the chairs as Douglas Logan’s guests and would be fed a nice brunch when they were through talking to him in his ranch office.

  “Commander Malcolm—Evan. Mr. Trout, and Mr. Stakes. So glad you’re able to join me. So let me begin with a confession.”

  The Kauai Police Department had been overwhelmed physically with the carnage and multiple investigations in progress. Exploded cars with the bodies of local Yakuza redistributed along coastal Highway 50, near the U.S. Naval base’s Howling Sands Airport. A stolen sanitation department vehicle on the same highway, ready for the scrap heap after its decimation at the hands of mobsters. The street sweeper operator’s revised statement that said no, he didn’t know nothing about no body parts in no cooler, he’d been mistaken, it was his ruined lunch-bucket he was complaining about on his 9-1-1 call. An abandoned chicken farm that had more blood, all human, no fowl, in its slaughterhouses than the place had experienced in decades, but no bodies to attach to it. An abandoned yacht registered to a Japanese corporation left floating in the channel, no one on board. A midnight report of a fire in the channel, but no vessel to attribute it to. The NTSB and Terry Koo’s hounding of Douglas Logan because someone had monkeyed with the evidence of the helicopter crash on Miakamii, with Logan unable to provide an explanation.

  And a woman named Aiata Hauata, former Yakuza hostage, her location unknown, who had checked herself out of Kauai’s Veterans Memorial Hospital in Waimea a day after she’d been ambulanced there, treated for an abdominal laceration.

  “Miakamii is a relic,” was how Logan began his admission. “A beautiful gift to us. We’re able to see the majesty, and listen to the language, of a Hawaii of hundreds and hundreds of years past. It has struggled to remain a way of life for its people, and for my family as its curators. But it is in incredible decline, and the island’s natives…”

  Ella carried pieces of a broken dining room table out of the thatched cottage at the foot of the ridge, tossed them into a fire, and headed back inside. Ben was nearby in a different home, using a crowbar to knock out a window frame shredded by bullets. He tossed a Victorian stationery desk through the empty frame, two legs of the desk gone, severed by the gunfire. Ella put her back into a vintage armoire carved with Hawaiian royalty figures in plumed headgear, the doors of the chest splintered. She shoved the antique piece out the front door of the cottage toward the roaring flames, the fire calling to all the empty homes, its flames waiting to taste the hundreds of years of island history being fed to it piece by piece, defaced heirloom by defaced heirloom, artifact by artifact, home by empty home.

  They were determined not to be sad, determined to embrace the good of it. A new beginning for the island, and for them as a couple, and as individuals, one female, one male, from a long line of native people who rarely got sick, preparing themselves for whatever the other islands, and the mainland, had in store, for whatever miracles that could be found in the volcanic ash, the gentle waters, and in their own flesh, and blood, an
d organs.

  “—its population, gentlemen, numbers only two now. Ella and Ben Waumami. The charade needs to be over. Twelve hundred residents per the 2010 census, eleven hundred ninety-eight fewer people ten years later, some gone for good, to heaven, but the rest living modern lives elsewhere, enjoying visits back there to rekindle their inner Miakamii.

  “So Evan. I understand now, because of your fiancée Miya’s research, the island’s importance to medicine. Starting in a few days I’ll have other research doctors brought in to pore over Miya’s work. To move the island into the twenty-first century. And to recolonize it. My family has agreed, but more importantly, Ella and Ben have agreed. It’s time, Evan.”

  “Copy that, Mr. Logan.”

  “‘Douglas,’ son. Please call me Douglas.”

  “Copy that, Douglas.”

  “Mr. Logan, sir?” Patrick said.

  All eyes went to Patrick, someone who usually spoke only when spoken to.

  “What is it, Patrick?” Mr. Logan said.

  “I want to stay here on Kauai, Mr. Logan sir. My identity, my home, it’s here. Philo sir, you and Mr. Logan helped me find it. I want to learn more. I can’t leave yet. Can you give me a job, Mr. Logan?”

  This could only be an incomplete discussion at this point, but Philo understood, had no choice otherwise when considering the mindset of the former Patrick Stakes—the current and former Patrick ʻŌpūnui—painful as it might be to Philo and his business. Patrick, and his dented noggin, needed to explore more of his roots, to discover more about himself. Mixed feelings swelled Philo’s heart to see his employee near the end of his quest, but in the process losing one of his closest friends.