Contents
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
DEDICATION
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Trouble in Tahiti: Blood on the Hibiscus
Copyright © 2000 by The Hayford Peirce Living Trust.
* * * *
Published by Wildside Press LLC.
www.wildsidepress.com
DEDICATION
For
DEBORA
Remembering the wonderful times in Arue
PROLOGUE
It was a cold, rainy election year in San Francisco, and by the end of a particularly foggy month of July the electorate’s nerves were frazzled raw, mine included. A maniac was hacking winos to death in the skid row south of Market Street and scattering the bloody bits and pieces about haphazardly. Nobody really cared very much, except maybe the other derelicts, waiting their turn, and the Sanitation Department, but the Chronicle was supporting the reform candidate in the Mayor’s race, and police incompetence made a fine issue to clout the incumbent with.
But what the Chronicle really wanted was a good case of police brutality.
Which I immediately gave them.
I’d been thrashing about in the wind and the rain for 27 hours now, and was no nearer the Market Street Monster than when I’d gone on duty. And had that been Sunday or Monday?
I couldn’t remember.
It was 3:45 of a bone-chilling Tuesday morning—or was it Wednesday?—and I was puffing badly by the time I’d hauled my carcass to the fourth floor landing of the railroad flat I was living in that year in the Potrero Hill district, down by the gas tanks on Army Street. I let myself in and automatically slipped out of my shoes in deference to the banshee howls and moans of the uncarpeted wooden flooring and the sleeping tenants below.
The brandy bottle, I remembered through thick mists of fatigue, was in the bedroom at the end of the corridor Just what I needed: a quick dose of oblivion. It’s still possible to sicken a case-hardened homicide cop of seventeen years’ experience, and pulling chopped-up fragments of female arms and legs from garbage cans in a floodlit alley off Folsom Street is as good a way as any.
I shuffled silently down the inky darkness in my stocking feet, too lonely and depressed and disgusted by the human race to feel anything except a dull self-pity and a weary rage at all of so-called humanity, in all its gruesome manifestations.
There was a thud outside, on the back-door landing.
I stopped abruptly.
Silence.
I pressed my ear against the door.
There was the rattle of metal against metal, and a squeak of rotten floorboards.
One hand reached for the pistol beneath my windbreaker, while the other groped around the wall for the switch to the outside light. I found it, and with my fingertips began to ease the doorknob around, awkward work if you’ve got a gun in your hand at the same time.
I switched on the light and slammed the door open.
The scrawny kid with the vacuum cleaner in his arms and one foot on the air-well stairs froze like a rabbit I’d seen paralyzed by headlights one night on the Wyoming plains. My bleary eyes focused on the gun barrel at the end of my outstretched arm a few inches from the open hole of his gaping mouth.
I motioned him back to the landing.
“That’s my vacuum cleaner,” I said blankly, my voice ringing bewildered in my ears. Whatever I’d expected, it wasn’t this. “My new vacuum cleaner,” I explained. “I just got it from Wards.” He licked his lips. “I haven’t even paid for it yet.”
His Adam’s apple bobbed. “It ain’t very bright leaving it out on the landing, pops.” His hands clutched it possessively, and his eyes gleamed. A junky, on the prowl, clouting what he could to support his habit. “It’s liable to get ripped off.” He giggled.
“Yeah, I guess you’re right. I just never figured anybody’d try to hoist a vacuum cleaner.” I let the gun fall to my side.
“It’s worth a couple bucks. You a cop?”
“Yeah.” Or so dim memories told me.
“So whattaya gonna do? I’m a minor, you know.”
“So I see. Well, I’m too pooped to take you in, and too lazy to shoot you, so I guess I’m gonna beat your ass, minor, and send you on your way. And the next time you’re in this part of town you’ll think of me and this big black gun and you’ll keep right on going.” I tucked the gun away. Who says that cops aren’t all heart? “Now gimme that cleaner.”
“I’ll give it to you, you mother!” He drew a deep breath, and lifting high my shiny new Montgomery Ward double-action vacuum cleaner threw it down the air well.
We stood there motionless for a long moment, until the crash below snapped us from the spell.
He darted for the stairs.
“Why you son of a bitch!” I cried, incredulous.
And grabbed him before he’d gone a pace.
He kneed me in the groin.
I was edgy and groggy, and angry and hurt. I just wanted to be left alone. So I picked him up and threw him down the air well.
He screamed all the way down.
Silence returned.
CHAPTER 1
There was a naked girl kneeling by the side of the road, imploring mutely with outstretched hands, but naked girls don’t grow on the sides of narrow mountain roads, even in Tahiti, so I kept on going. Yellow headlights and a moonless night, I mused vaguely; too much wine with dinner; twisty roads hemmed in on all sides by weirdly-shaped trees and bushes, like driving down a tunnel, with no room at all to pass an oncoming car; a strong smell of eucalyptus in the already heavily-scented tropical air; a fevered imagination.…
I slammed on the brakes, nearly putting the small rented Fiat into a skid and myself over the edge into the black void beyond. “Wake up, LaRoche,” I told myself, “if you see a naked girl, it’s because there’s a naked girl to be seen.”
I couldn’t have been going more than 25 miles an hour twisting my way down the steep mountainside when I passed her, so I didn’t have far to return. I backed up until I passed her and came to a stop. For a moment, in the glare of the yellow headlights, I caught the gleam of shiny highlights on a slim tawny body with hard little breasts and long glossy hair in a disheveled mess around her shoulders. Her legs were hidden by the shadows, but I knew they were crumpled beneath her. She seemed to be in her twenties, with what was probably a cute little pug face distorted now by fear and pain.
She raised an arm reflexively to shield her eyes from the lights, and before I dimmed them I could see that her body was battered and torn and covered with blood.
Blood that was still flowing.
I sighed. Right up my line of work.
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Back in the days when I still had a line of work.
I got out and moved to her quickly, kneeling by her side. My arm went around her shoulders automatically, comforting, reassuring. “What’s the matter?” I asked in French, “what’s happened to you?”
She moaned, and clutched at me feebly. Her warm body pressed against mine and blood immediately stained my shirt. After a moment I could feel it begin to run down my arm. She nuzzled her face deep into my neck and whimpered softly, a child again, hurt and defenseless, snuggling up to papa for safety. I held her gingerly. “Can you talk?” I whispered. “How did you get here?”
“My husband,” she said suddenly in a flat, lifeless voice. She spoke French, overlaid with a Tahitian accent. “He’s in the car.”
“What car?”
“He…he drove it off the cliff. He’s in the car!” Her voice rose sharply.
“Where? Where did he drive off the cliff?”
“I don’t know. He hit me and he drove us over the side and we turned over and over and then I climbed up here and I don’t know where he is!”
If she’d climbed up the mountainside in the condition I’d just found her, the car couldn’t have gone over the side very far away.
“Just wait a moment,” I said, and disengaged myself as gently as I could. I checked anyway, but there was no flashlight in the glove compartment, and it was as dark a night as I’d ever seen. Enormous black clouds laden with water scudded by overhead so close I felt I could reach up and grab them. The air was heavy and cloying, and when the rain came it was going to be a torrent. Finding her husband on a night like this was going to be no easy task.
I trotted a quick hundred yards in each direction, stumbling and falling in the dark, but saw nothing in the mass of tangled growth to tell me where a car had plunged through. At least she won’t die of exposure, I said to myself. I guessed we were near 1,500 feet, and the occasional gust of wind that got through the shielding vegetation was slightly nippish all right—but only in relation to the damp 85-degree heat that was constant on the plain below. One less worry. Now to keep her from bleeding to death.
When I got back to the girl, she was crouched like a feral animal, her eyes rolling wildly at nothing. I eased her gently to her feet. One of her legs buckled under her, and she moaned loudly. Always wait for the ambulance, the rules said. That way you can’t get yourself and the Department sued. “Sure,” I muttered. “There’ll be an ambulance along in a couple of centuries or so.” I carried her to the car and got her into the front passenger seat. “So we’ll just take you in ourselves, won’t we, honey?”
I left my shirt hanging on a bush: it was a write-off.
I got her strapped in as well as I could, and began the drive down. Around the next corner the lights of Papeete suddenly glimmered far below, off to our left, and then were hidden again by clouds and mountain. I drove as quickly as I dared, hoping that the headlights of any car climbing the road would be visible in time for me to stop. It seemed that the restaurant at the far end of the road where I’d just been having dinner was the only inhabited place in the mountains, so it didn’t look as if there’d be much traffic coming up at this time of night.
So I hoped.
I nudged the accelerator a little closer to the floorboards and gripped the wheel grimly. “When did you drive off the cliff?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she answered haltingly, as if she were talking through cotton. “I don’t know. I…I was taking a shower and Patrick…came home from work, I think…it was before dinner…I was taking a shower and he had something funny in his hand and he came up to me and then I was sitting at the table in the kitchen and there was blood on my hand and it was dripping on the table and Patrick…Patrick said it was bleeding from my head and he was going to take me to the hospital. Patrick is my husband.”
“Yeah. But it looks like he took the wrong turn. He didn’t take you to the hospital?”
“No. No! He took me out to the car with no clothes on and I said, ‘Patrick, where are my clothes?’ and he said, ‘We’ve got to get to the hospital,’ and he drove us up here. I said, ‘Patrick, where are we going, we’re in the mountains, we’re going to the Belvédère, there’s no hospital up here,’ and he reached over and touched me and said, ‘Just a minute, chérie, just a minute, we’re almost there.’ And then, and then, and.…”
I liked that touch: “Chérie.” It made me want to gag.
I reached over to pat her bare knee. It was trembling. “Courage, my beautiful one, we’re almost there.” In French it doesn’t sound foolish at all: “Courage, ma belle, on est prèsque là.”
We came around a final sharp turn, up a grade, over a cattle guard, down a hill, and suddenly we were out of the wilderness and back in civilization. The night was still dark, but now there were houses and street lights and TV antennas. It was another half-mile down the rest of the mountain to the stop sign on the main road. I came to a halt and said, “Which way?”
“Where?” Her voice was soft and sleepy: she was deep in shock. “Where are we going?”
“The hospital? Which way do we go?”
“Oh.” After a while she moved her head fractionally to the left. “There. It’s down there.”
Papeete isn’t much of a size by California standards, and we were on the main road that went right through the middle of town, so I figured we probably couldn’t go too far wrong by following her advice.
We didn’t. I turned left, and a mile down the road, just before the center of town, was a modern, five-story building, brightly lighted. Hôpital de Mamao, the sign in the parking lot said.
The building was set well back from the road, and there was a complicated watchman’s structure with enough barriers for Checkpoint Charlie blocking the way in, as if we were trying to blast our way into White Sands Proving Grounds rather than just getting some medical aid for the citizens. A couple of dozen Tahitians stood around it, gossiping peacefully to each other and with the watchman, a fat Tahitian in a khaki uniform. The barriers were down, and I gathered that visiting hours were over.
I nosed the car through the bystanders, jerked my head to the watchman in the direction of the naked, bleeding girl, shrugged a Gallic shrug with lips, hands, and shoulders which meant: “What now, pal?,” and was rewarded by seeing the barrier cranked up at full speed.
I left her in the car while I walked quickly into the emergency room. Two male orderlies, a Tahitian and a Frenchmen, were sitting behind a counter, smoking. They seemed faintly curious at the sight of my bare, blood-stained torso, but blood isn’t a commodity that’s in short supply in emergency rooms anywhere in the world, and they weren’t overwhelmed by it.
It was immediately obvious that they hadn’t received their medical training in California: they didn’t let the patient bleed to death in the car while I filled out forms and arranged for a mortgage on my house to guarantee payment of the eventual bill. Thirty seconds after I opened my mouth she was on a trolley, covered by a sheet, disappearing at breakneck speed around a corner. I went back to the desk and they reverted to form. “Name?” said one of them, picking up a clipboard.
A good question. I’d forgotten to ask.
“That can wait,” I said firmly. “Just dial the Gendarmerie and hand me the phone, if you please.”
“You want to call the Gendarmerie? On this phone?” The French orderly pursed his lips.
I leaned a little closer. “And do you want to be cited for obstructing police officers in the performance of their duties?” Old habits die hard. “Please,” I added. After all, I was a civilian now.
The pros were there in under ten minutes, two of them, one French, one Tahitian, natty in khaki uniforms with knee-length shorts and long woolly socks. They looked itchy. Well, it was their legs. I’d told them on the phone that they’d need climbing equipment but the deskman hadn’t passed the word along. They radioed back to the barracks, and then I climbed into the rear of the jeep. I could easily have driven my
own rent-car, with them following, but none of us thought of it—I’d spent all my adult life climbing into squad cars, and a khaki-colored jeep with a long whip-antenna and a radio set in the back seat was just one more. I watched an ambulance follow us down the driveway and through the gates.
I told my story to the gendarmes as we climbed slowly into the mountains. They were impressed by the depravity of it.
“Naked, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Young and good-looking, eh?”
“Yeah.”
“Wait’ll we get our hands on the bastard: he’ll need two ambulances.”
I snorted. “Wait’ll you see where she went over. If he’s really down at the bottom, you’ll be needing a shovel, not an ambulance.”
Distances at night are always deceptive, especially in unfamiliar territory. We crawled for what seemed like endless hours under the tree-lined canopy. As we climbed higher the sharp, pungent odor of eucalyptus assailed my nostrils. The air was thick enough to cut, but still the rain held off. Long after I was certain we must have missed it, I suddenly saw in the yellow beams of the jeep my blood-stained shirt hanging limply from the branch to which I’d attached it.
“Not stupid,” said one of the gendarmes.
I grunted.
The gendarmes jumped out like frisky dogs, made a few false casts up and down the road, their flashlights flicking beams back and forth, then returned to the jeep a little less full of themselves. The ambulance pulled up a moment later, followed eventually by two more jeeploads of gendarmes.
I perched on a fender of the ambulance and watched them unload searchlights and coils of rope and all the other grisly junk of my former trade. “Fare thee well,” I said sardonically, stifling a yawn. If it’d been in my jurisdiction, I’d have been in no hurry to clamber around in the dark of a moonless night on the sheer face of a mountain, looking for someone who’d just pounded his lovely young wife and then driven her off into space. If he’d managed to bail out by parachute, there still wasn’t anywhere he could escape to on a small island, and if he was lying down there bleeding to death, as far as I was concerned he could rot wherever he’d fallen.
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