by Toby Neal
He wasn’t going to forgive her. At least not right away. Well, she’d give him space while he was recovering, but after that she’d find a way to get them back into bed—because even if he could hold out, she couldn’t. She already missed being with him, hated the discord between them even if she knew she deserved it.
Still, it had all worked out. Surely he’d let it go in time.
Lei did some laps around the park, her eyes scanning the faces of pedestrians and commuters, realizing she was still looking for Anela Chang. Of course, there was no sign of the woman. She’d studied the woman’s driver’s license and memorized her appearance: medium height and weight with a brown, oval face framed in black hair.
She shook her head at herself—Anela was probably long gone. She was getting paranoid. She headed back to the motel, stopping to buy two cups of coffee and a bear claw from a nearby Gas ’N’ Go.
Stevens was agitated when she returned to the room, offering him a coffee. He was dressed in pants, but no shirt, and he wasn’t wearing the oxygen rig.
“I feel fine,” he said when she asked about it. He turned to put on a shirt, and she gasped at the huge purple bruise on the right side of his back.
“Looks bad, does it?” He craned a bit to see. She backed him up so that he could look at it in the mirror. “No wonder it hurts like a sonofabitch.”
“Makes me so glad for Kevlar,” Lei said. “I hate to even imagine what would have happened to you without it. I’m going to hop in for a quick shower. Want to join me?”
It was worth a try.
She could swear she saw him grit his teeth as he replied. “No.”
Lei showered and got dressed for the airport, squashing a little gel into her hair. When she got out he was already dressed, had eaten half the bear claw, and was seated in the cheap plastic armchair, working his phone, with the oxygen back on.
“Got a call from the insurance company. They’re going to cover the loss of the house. Unfortunately, not the cost to build a new one—just a flat rate of what the old one was insured for.”
“Well, thank God. That’s something, right?” Lei whisked a little mascara on her lashes, taking a bite of the pastry to get something in her stomach. “I don’t know about you, but I miss Kiet so much. Can’t wait to snuggle with him.”
“Me too.” He stood and picked up his bag. “Let’s get on the road.”
Lei looked around at the decrepit little room, happy to say goodbye to their first night in separate beds. Hopefully, that wouldn’t be an option in her dad’s cottage, though it was going to be tight with all of them crammed in there. Still, whatever the sleeping arrangements, she knew she’d rest easier with the shroud killer in custody.
Things had to get better from this point.
Stevens followed Lei onto the tiny aircraft, ducking his head to get in, and took a seat behind her. His long legs brushed the back of her seat, and he felt folded up into the small space, the tin can of a plane tight around him.
They’d gotten to the terminal on time and checked their weapons with the two pilots, who performed everything from stamping tickets to weighing luggage for Ohana Air, an operation that ran a few Cessnas out of the small-aircraft section of Hilo Airport. Neither of them had flown with the outfit before, but Ohana was the only airline with any openings on such short notice.
Stevens tightened his belt and stowed his duffel under his seat. He’d brought the O2 canister but he hadn’t wanted to use it unless he had to. Looking around the confined space and knowing how bumpy the wind over the channel between Maui and the Big Island could be, he decided to hook it back up.
A few other passengers bumped past him as he turned on the O2 canister and hooked the cannula over his ears. A plump Micronesian woman in a brightly printed, homemade skirt clutched an excited toddler; her husband followed, holding a carrier containing an indignant rooster. A businessman in a suit, wearing a white Panama hat, filled a seat near the front.
Stevens rested his head back against the seat, shutting his eyes and wondering when he was going to feel even halfway normal. Everything just took so much effort, and even though his breathing hurt less and he knew his lungs were healing, he was frustrated with looking and feeling injured.
He tuned out the conversation between the pilots as they went through their preflight check, their heads and equipment clearly visible in the open cockpit. Instead he looked at Lei in the seat in front of him.
Her curly head was wedged in between the seat back and the window, propped on a sweatshirt. She looked like she might already be trying to get a nap. The memory of her belly fluttering beneath his hand tried to melt his resolve. Thinking about it reminded him of Kiet and the ever-present regret that he’d never even known his ex-wife was pregnant. He’d missed everything of his son’s early existence, and he regretted it. But how would it have complicated his relationship with Lei to have known Anchara was pregnant?
No telling. They might not even have married. He probably would have kept trying to make it work with Anchara for the baby’s sake, and the mere thought of that made his stomach knot, reminding him how much it had cost to be with Lei—only to have her cut him off at the knees.
His resolve not to forget or forgive hardened even as one of her errant curls escaped, bouncing over the seat and seeming to reach toward him. He shut his eyes not to see it.
The plane putt-putted down the runway and seemed to heave itself into the sky with a lurch. Stevens looked out his window, down at the familiar airport. Hilo’s lush countryside and the khaki-green waters of Hilo Bay spun away below as they climbed. They had to fly the length of the island before they hit the ocean channel that separated the Big Island from Maui, and Stevens enjoyed the play of the clouds and the soaring peak of Mauna Loa, capped with snow, off to the right as they passed the belching caldera of Kilauea below and to the left. The two volcanoes were separated by vast stretches of hardened black lava interrupted by the green mounds of kipuka, spots of elevated virgin forest that the lava hadn’t covered.
Flying low had its benefits—the island was ruggedly glorious, as savage and primitive as the world might have been in the Jurassic age. He half expected to see dinosaurs feeding on the tree ferns below.
Stevens was pretty sure Lei had fallen asleep, because her head never moved even as the little plane bounced and yawed in the updrafts, causing the rooster to squawk and the child to fuss. He shut his eyes and willed himself to relax. He’d never been a comfortable flier, and the bounciness and the claustrophobia of these little planes were the worst. He’d succeeded in dozing off as they were circling around Haleakala to land on Maui when everything changed.
Chapter 19
Stevens was first aware something was different as the plane, which had been descending toward the airport, rose again with a high-pitched revving of the engine, banking away from its descent through Maui’s narrow sugarcane-covered midsection.
Stevens looked out the window at the patchwork of fields. From this vantage point he could see clearly the stages of growth. Fields newly seeded: dark red soil, studded with cane start cuttings in corrugated rows. Then young fields, bright green with new growth. Older fields with fifteen-to-twenty-foot-tall waving grasses, so much like hula skirts. Finally, fields near harvest, gone to tassel and yellowing as they died without water, stalks rich with trapped sugar.
Stevens frowned as they banked away, curving out over Kahului Harbor and bending around the rugged cliffs and narrow road that curved toward Lahaina. Lei still hadn’t moved, but he lifted in his seat to see into the cockpit. The businessman in the Panama hat had moved closer to the cockpit, apparently to find out what the problem was, so he waited to hear an announcement.
The Micronesian man began to expostulate to his wife, waving his hands, their language, a flow of rapid liquid syllables, mostly drowned by the roar of the aircraft’s straini
ng engine. The toddler cried.
Finally, the announcement Stevens had been waiting for. “Sorry, folks. We’ve had orders from Kahului Airport not to land. Some sort of emergency. We’ve been redirected to land at another airport. It’s just an additional half hour or so, and we’ll put down and sort this situation out.”
Stevens frowned. He didn’t like the tone, though the words were rational enough. There was an undercurrent of fear in the man’s voice that set off his internal cop alarm.
Lei finally lifted her head. “What’s going on?” she asked over her seat to him. “I must have dozed off.”
“You missed the whole flight, actually. There’s some problem at Kahului Airport, so we’re being redirected.”
“Dammit.” She rested her head back in the corner, apparently going back to sleep. He didn’t see the point in alarming her with his own suspicions, so he put his head back and shut his eyes as if dozing, but he kept them slightly open.
The businessman, sitting directly behind the cockpit, turned to look back at the passengers. Stevens saw the matte-black gleam of a weapon in the man’s hand, his sleeve covering it. The gun was pointed at one of the pilots through the open door.
We are being hijacked.
“What are the chances?” he muttered to himself. This had to be part of the Chang operation. Keeping his eyes cracked, he slid his phone out and thumbed it on. No signal. The hijacker must have a signal blocker; it only made sense. He wondered what story the pilots had had to tell the tower in Kahului, or if anyone had been alerted there.
How had the man smuggled a gun on board? Thinking back on the lax security getting on, he realized how simple it would have been to have a weapon taped by another person under the seat ahead of time, or even sneak one past the pilots, given the simple security at the small-aircraft terminal.
The system counted on it not being worth anyone’s time or effort to hijack a tiny commuter plane. Where was there to go out here, with so much ocean and so little land? Whatever happened, he was sure this wasn’t just a random hijacker. This had to be connected with their case.
He considered waking up Lei, but the honest-to-God truth was that he was afraid of what she’d do. She was one seat ahead of him, closer to the hijacker, and he wouldn’t put it past her to try to take him down. Unarmed and pregnant.
No. He’d think of another solution.
He’d cleaned out his pockets and didn’t have anything on him but his phone and the O2 container. The key was going to be how to get closer to the hijacker without tipping him off. Long minutes went by. Stevens breathed deep and slow, filling and resting his lungs, controlling his heart rate as he waited for the right moment to make a move.
The Micronesian family had accepted the change in route, and the dad had taken out some sort of wooden puppet and was making the baby laugh. Lei’s head hadn’t moved, and the Panama hat of the hijacker was turned toward the pilots.
They flew past Moloka`i without slowing down. Stevens saw the hijacker glance back to see if anyone had noticed and was glad for his pretend slumber as the hat turned back toward the pilots. He’d tried to see the man’s face, but it was screened in sunglasses, and all he could make out was that his skin was a color consistent with Hawaiian ancestry.
Stevens mentally calibrated his physical description of the suspect as the plane hummed on and his tension increased. Sweat prickled under his arms as he scanned out the windows, looking for a clue to their destination. Oahu, a rising purplish sea turtle of a shape, rose into visibility off to his right.
Still, they kept going.
Kaua`i, then. It had to be. Kaua`i had a regular airport and a small commuter terminal on the north shore. There was nothing past Kaua`i and her tiny sister island, Ni`ihau, but the great open ocean and the uninhabitable Northern Hawaiian archipelago. Ni`ihau was unlikely—it didn’t even have an airport, was privately owned, and closed to anyone but a small native Hawaiian population who lived there.
He mentally rehearsed his moves. Timing was going to be the biggest factor.
The plane finally began to descend. Up ahead, through the windscreen beyond the pilots, he could see a landmass. It didn’t matter what landmass, really. All that mattered was that the pilots had somewhere, potentially, to bring the plane down. They had to be running low on fuel.
He gathered himself and, moving gracefully and quietly, lifted himself out into the aisle. The cannula was still in place in his nose, but the eighteen-inch-steel vessel of oxygen, roughly the diameter of a Louisville Slugger, was concealed behind his body as he moved toward the hijacker.
“Excuse me, gentlemen. I can’t help noticing we aren’t heading toward Moloka`i, which is closest to Maui,” Stevens said, keeping all his attention seemingly on the pilots. He’d snuck up on the hijacker, whose attention was on the pilots and the landmass ahead, and he felt rather than saw the gun lifting toward him.
He swung the oxygen tank up in a vicious arc, hitting the hijacker in the head and knocking the Panama hat off.
The weapon discharged, a boom like a cannon in the enclosed space, and the screams of passengers and crew filled his ears as the plane veered abruptly downward.
Stevens saw a hole, already whistling air, in the bulkhead beside him as he hit the hijacker again, this time on the arm that still held the weapon. The arm broke, the man screamed, and the gun dropped to the plane’s inclined floor, sliding away. Stevens whaled the guy another one upside the head, and this time the hijacker slumped out of the seat into the aisle. Stevens dropped the canister.
“Everyone okay up there?” he yelled to the pilots. “I’m a police officer.”
“Yeah, we’re okay. Correcting our vector,” one of the pilots said. “We have to land up here, though. We’re losing air pressure.”
As if on cue, yellow masks dropped out of the ceiling, dangling and bouncing on their clear plastic tubing. Someone gave a cry of alarm, and Stevens glanced back quickly and saw Lei was out of her seat, comforting the Micronesian woman and helping the family with their masks.
Stevens looked ahead at what the pilots were seeing—a small island, green as an emerald, with forbidding red cliffs. “Is that Kaua`i?”
“Ni`ihau,” the pilot responded.
“Can we make it to Kaua`i? If the hijacker wanted you to land there, no telling what’s waiting on the ground,” Stevens said.
“No. We’re losing air, and we don’t have enough fuel to circle around to the airport on Kaua`i,” the pilot said, his voice sounding tense. “We were only supposed to be going to Maui. This is two hundred and fifty miles past our original destination.”
The hijacker had begun to move on the floor, moaning. Stevens bent down and rifled his pockets, but there weren’t any other weapons. He pulled the cannula and plastic tubing off his head and detached it from the O2 canister. He hauled the man back upright into his chair, using the plastic tubing to bind the man’s arms across his chest, avoiding the broken forearm—and as he did so, he touched something he was pretty sure was a breast.
Frowning, Stevens tweaked off the sunglasses. The man’s face was the medium brown of Hawaiian ancestry and his hair was buzzed short, but the contours of the face were suspiciously feminine. Lei had come up beside him as he secured the hijacker in the seat. She grasped the chair back as the plane bounced and rocked.
“Nice job, Michael,” Lei said. Stevens felt his battered ego swell a bit as his wife lifted the flopping head of the hijacker and took a look at the face. “This is Anela Chang. What the hell?”
“What the hell is right!” Stevens frowned.
“Probably had a plan to take us out down on the island and get away,” Lei said. “It can’t have been an accident that we’re on the same flight together.”
“Don’t mean to interrupt, but we’re going to have a bumpy landing,” the pilot yelled. �
�Get back in your seats and put those oxygen masks on!”
Chapter 20
Bent over, Lei preceded Stevens back to their seats. She sat and buckled on her seat belt, slipping the dangling yellow oxygen mask over her nose and mouth, glancing over at the Micronesian family’s frightened faces and giving them a thumbs-up.
The bullet hole whistled like air being blown across the top of a Coke bottle, and the sound seemed as loud as the straining engines as they approached the forbidding cliffs of Ni`ihau way too rapidly. The air pressure was definitely gone as Lei drew in a ragged breath, her ears popping uncomfortably. She felt Stevens’s hand on her shoulder. She reached back, her fingers grasping, and he took her hand, squeezing it hard.
The plane bounced in a gust of wind off the cliffs, and the family all shrieked. The pilot turned on the speaker. “We don’t have radio contact with anyone down there, and there’s no real airstrip, so we’re going in hot and radio dead and landing on the road. Just gonna have to roll the dice that there are no other vehicles. Please assume the safety position illustrated on the card on the back of the seat in front of you.”
The plane cleared the cliffs, bouncing in updrafts, and Lei could see the landscape ahead: a scrim of trees, open sun-scoured fields, a tiny cluster of houses they whizzed by, and a long, narrow ribbon of road.
Her ears popped again, and she squeezed Stevens’s hand harder as they swooped down toward the road. The engine chose that moment to cut out.
Lei leaned her head on her arm against the seat back in front of her, biting her lips to keep from screaming as the plane bounced, deadly silent, descending toward the road. The Micronesian family yelled as they hit the road, and again as they skipped like a stone back into the air, landing again, skipping up again, trees on the right a dangerous blur so close Lei felt like she could touch them.