Mahu m-1

by Neil S. Plakcy

  “This is hard, Harry.”

  “I noticed,” he said dryly. “Those pants don’t leave much to the imagination.”

  I couldn’t help laughing, and that made me feel a little better. “I mean talking to him. He keeps, you know, fooling with me.”

  “That’s what he thinks you’re here for. As long as he keeps it up, and I do mean that both ways, that means he doesn’t suspect anything.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.” I gave him a shaka. “Wish me luck.”

  He gave it back to me. “You don’t need luck. You know what you’re doing. Just do it.”

  By the time I got back to the table Wayne had a pair of fresh beers there for us. “You just want to get me drunk so you can have your way with me,” I said.

  “That thought did cross my mind,” he said, smiling.

  I wondered if I’d be doing this for real soon. Not with Wayne Gallagher, of course, but with somebody else. Would I be cruising these bars, looking for a little fun? Would I duplicate the same pattern I’d had with women, meeting and mating at random intervals, never able to settle down for a long-term relationship? Thinking of that turned out to be just the tonic I needed, relieving the aching hard-on in my pants and letting me steer the conversation back to safer subjects.

  We talked for a while, through another set of beers, and I found myself seeing good things in Wayne besides the dangerous sexuality he oozed. He was smart and witty, knew a lot about books and art and music. I almost found myself hoping he was innocent, that it had been two other guys who’d forced Evan Gonsalves to eat his gun. Then I got over it.

  By the third beer Wayne was a little boozy, and I assumed he’d had a few more earlier in the evening. It wasn’t that his speech was slurred, but he lost track of sentences, was easily distracted, and was all over me even more. I finally said, “Wayne, we’re in public here. Save a little for when we’re alone.”

  He leered at me. “We can be alone right here. They have rooms in the back.”

  “I didn’t know that. You mean like a hotel?”

  He laughed. “Not quite so fancy.” He stood up. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

  We weren’t getting anywhere-no matter how I tried to direct the conversation toward Tommy Pang and Evan Gonsalves, Wayne steered it right back to the meeting of our two bodies. Maybe in a more private place I could get him to boast more.

  I followed him through the bar, past the rest rooms to what I’d thought was a fire door to the outside. Instead, it swung open onto a narrow corridor. “Gee, I thought this was an exit,” I said. “I mean, being back here at the back of the bar, next to the bathrooms.”

  I hoped they heard that out in the truck. “It’s kind of like a back door,” Wayne said. He put his hand on my ass and said, “I like back doors.”

  “I’ve never done it like that. Is it fun?”

  “Oh, baby, it’s the best,” he said. “I’ll bet you have a tight little ass, too.”

  There were four small rooms on each side of the corridor. The doors to the first two on either side were closed, and in the third on the right a fat biker dude in leathers lay back on a narrow bed with his pants open and his dick out. The room across from his was open and empty and Wayne pulled me in there and closed the door.

  “Alone at last,” he murmured. He pulled me close and we kissed, and I was in big-time danger right then of dropping the whole plan, unhooking the wire and making love with Wayne Gallagher until we dropped from exhaustion. It was an effort to pull back.

  “You’re so sexy,” I whispered to him. “So big and powerful. I’ll bet you could do anything. You could make anybody do anything.”

  “You know I can.” He chewed on my ear and ground his hard dick into my leg.

  “You know how to take charge of a situation. Get things done,” I said. “I’ve seen you with Derek. You’re the real man in that relationship.”

  “Baby, I’m all man, and I’m gonna show you.”

  “You know what would make me really hot,” I said, tonguing his ear. “Tell me how you made the cop do it. How did you get him to kill himself?”

  I undid the buttons on his shirt and sucked first on one nipple, then the other. “Use your teeth, man,” he said. “Make it hurt.”

  “Go on,” I said, between tiny bites. “Tell me.”

  “Oh,” he sighed. “It was that picture you showed Derek. The asshole had been blackmailing us, but we didn’t know his name.”

  “Blackmailing you?”

  “He must have seen Derek whack his old man with the police lock. He threatened to tell the cops.”

  Wayne giggled and hiccupped some beer. “Good thing you aren’t a cop anymore.”

  “Oh, yeah.” I licked a trail down through the blond hairs on his chest. He had a little bit of a belly, but I thought it was sexy. “Derek killed Tommy? I would have thought it was you. You’re the big strong one.”

  He had his hands on my head, massaging it at the same time as he pushed me down towards his dick. “Tommy didn’t know Derek and I were lovers until he came back unexpectedly and found us making out on the desk,” he said. “He pulled out his gun.”

  I unzipped Wayne’s pants and started feeling up his dick through his white jockey shorts. He squirmed and murmured and breathed heavy. “Go on,” I said. “This is getting me so hot. What next?”

  “Tommy was standing in the open doorway, pointing his gun right at me. Derek was freaking out. He got around behind Tommy, looking around for something he could use to hit him. He grabbed the police lock and Tommy went down, half in the office and half in the alley.”

  He shifted around to release his hard-on. I remembered how Fred the bartender had compared it to a beer can. “The cop must have been hanging out in the alley and saw what happened.”

  I pulled his dick out of the slit in his jockeys. I didn’t have much experience, but it seemed huge to me, fat and fleshy and uncircumcised. I licked the side of it and Wayne squirmed again. I had to admit I liked having him in my power. It was as if I could make him do anything I wanted. “So the cop tried to blackmail you?”

  “We were supposed to give him $50,000. But once Derek saw that picture he realized he knew the guy’s name. We went right out to his house after that.”

  I took his dick in my mouth, sucked it a little, then licked it again. When I looked up at Wayne his eyes were glazed and he was breathing heavy. I pulled off him long enough to say, “But Derek was defending you, wasn’t he?”

  I took my mouth off his prick and started licking the insides of his thighs. He shivered and I knew he was sweating. “We’ve been doing some other stuff,” Wayne said. “We didn’t want to have the police messing around.”

  Wayne started moaning and squirming around. “The guy was a prick,” he said. “I got mad at him, and he mouthed off to me. He pulled a gun on us, you believe that?”

  “What a jerk,” I said.

  “So I wrestled him for the gun, and I shot him. Derek blew up at me, called me all kinds of names. I smacked him hard and he calmed down. Then he decided we had to make it look like suicide.”

  He leaned over me as I sucked him, running his hands over my head and down my shoulders. Then I felt him touch the wire. “Hey!” he said. “What the hell is this?” He pulled back from me. “You fucker! You’re wired up!”

  He pulled the microphone out of my collar and then tackled me. “You fucking asshole!” he said. “You think you can put one over on me!”

  We wrestled back and forth, knocking against the walls of the narrow room. He got me down on the bed with his hands around my throat. I was kicking him and trying to get out from under him, but he had a big advantage in weight on me. I felt my ability to struggle wane away. It seemed easier somehow to just give up. In the distance, I heard somebody banging on doors, heard the sound of wood splintering, but it was all far away.

  I think I was just about to black out when the door to the room burst open and suddenly I could breathe again. I looked up from the bed
and saw Haoa and Wayne wrestling with each other. At least they were better matched for size than Wayne and I were. And I knew from hard experience my brother’s self-defense skills. He got Wayne backed up against the wall.

  Then I saw Wayne reach for his pocket and I knew, instinctively, that he had a gun in it. I forced myself up off the bed just as he pulled the gun out and flipped the safety off. Haoa had him pinned against the wall and was taking deep breaths, not paying attention. I jumped at Wayne just as he raised the gun toward my brother.

  I went for his gun hand. Wayne kneed Haoa out of the way, catching him at a moment of confusion, and it was him and me again, wrestling for the gun, and then it went off.

  I swear that’s the way it happened. The report of the gun shocked us all, sounding twice as loud in that tiny room. And then Harry was in the doorway, and so was Lui, and Haoa and Wayne both slumped down to the floor, and all I wanted to do was go home for a nice long sleep.

  AFTERMATH

  “Jesus! Get this guy off me!” Haoa said. There was a gaping hole in Wayne Gallagher’s chest, and he was lying on top of my brother and bleeding over everything. From then on, things started happening very fast. Somebody called an ambulance and somebody else called the police, guys whipping out cell phones all over the place. I borrowed Lui’s and called Akoni at home.

  “I hate to drag you out like this, brah,” I said. “But I’m in a little trouble and I need your help.”

  I gave him the thirty-second version of what had happened and he said, “I’ll call Greenberg and be there as soon as I can. Don’t tell anybody anything.”

  I desperately wanted a beer, sedatives, something, but I knew I couldn’t have anything. I was so wired I couldn’t stand still, and I jumped in to help a drag queen in silvery spandex perform CPR on Wayne. We couldn’t do much for him, and by the time the ambulance arrived he was dead, too much blood leaking out of the hole in his heart.

  The TV crew from Lui’s station arrived right on the heels of the ambulance, and the correspondent taped a segment outside the bar. They got some footage of me and the drag queen, both soaked in Wayne Gallagher’s blood, and Harry let them make a duplicate of the audio tape, which they edited and played on the news the next day.

  The uniforms cleared the bar except for a couple of witnesses, the owner and the bartenders grumbling about the lost business, and the place turned into a standard crime scene. The cops kept me and my brothers and Harry separated, at different tables out in the bar, until Akoni came in and took over.

  “You wanted that shield, now you’re going to have to work for it,” I overheard Akoni say, as he forced Alvy Greenberg to look over Wayne Gallagher’s body with Doc Takayama. He looked sleepy and a little lost, and I got a perverse joy out of seeing his visible discomfort.

  By three a.m. Doc had released the body, and the crime scene techs had finished with the little room. “This place is a mess,” the bartender said, surveying the blood and fingerprint powder everywhere. “I’m not cleaning it up. I pour drinks. That’s what I do. I pour drinks and I listen to drunks complain. I don’t clean up nobody’s blood.”

  They let us go a little while later. “Hell, I know where to find you,” Akoni said.

  Harry, Lui and I got into the back of the van, with Haoa driving. “I’m wired,” he said. “No way I’m gonna get to sleep tonight. You guys want anything?”

  “I could use a cup of coffee,” Lui said.

  “Iced tea,” Harry said.

  I said, “The Denny’s on Kalakaua is open twenty-four hours.”

  We made a quick pit stop past my apartment so that Haoa and I could change out of our blood-soaked clothes, and then parked under the Norfolk Island pine trees near the band shell and walked up to the Denny’s, on the second floor overlooking the beach. There were a dozen other night owls scattered around the restaurant, one tired, middle-aged Chinese waitress in a pink uniform pouring coffee. We sat at a big round table out on the terrace, and Haoa ordered the Grand Slam breakfast. I got a big piece of pie, and Harry and Lui just had drinks.

  “It almost goes without saying that I appreciate what you guys did for me tonight,” I said after the waitress left. “But I still want to say it. Thanks. I know Terri and Danny Gonsalves will want to thank you too. You’re a bunch of heroes, every one of you, and I’m proud to be your brother and your friend.”

  They all looked down, not sure of what to say. The patio lights, which gave the terrace an other-worldly glow so late at night, made a low humming sound, punctuated by the occasional car passing on Kalakaua. “I never really knew what you did,” Haoa said finally. “I mean, I saw the cop shows on TV and I knew your job wasn’t really like that. I figured you sat around and ate donuts a lot, pushed paper, that kind of thing.” He shook his head. “Man, I’m glad all I do is work with plants.”

  He looked up at me. “Dad said you might be coming into the business with him. I think that’s cool. Maybe the two of us can work together sometime, building and landscaping.” He paused. “I’d like that.”

  I took a big drink of ice water to ease the swelling I felt in my throat. “If that doesn’t work out, I might be able to find something for you at the station,” Lui said. “You can keep your cool, work under pressure. That’s a good thing to have in my business.”

  I smiled, and looked at Harry. “What about you? You got any job offers up your sleeve?”

  “The only job description I’ve got to offer is friend,” he said. “And you’ve been doing that for about twenty years just fine.”

  The waitress brought our food. Across from us, a single guy walked slowly along the beach, stopping to look up at the stars and listen to the waves. I thought about going surfing in a couple of hours. I said, “I appreciate what you want to do, guys, but I think now, more than ever, I just want to be a cop. Maybe it sounds goofy, but there are things wrong with the world, and somebody has to try and fix them. I’m not going to let anybody take that chance away from me, at least not without a fight.”

  “Think the force will take you back?” Harry asked.

  “I don’t know. But I’m not just going to walk away.”

  It’s funny, I hadn’t really decided that until just that moment. I’d been so caught up in the task of seducing Wayne Gallagher, of putting him and Derek away, that I hadn’t thought past that night. Once I did, the answer seemed clear. I was still a cop, just like I was still a surfer and I was still a gay man. It was up to me to make a human being out of all those identities.

  Haoa and Lui made plans to return the equipment to the station the next day, and Harry and I said our goodbyes and walked out together into the warm, fragrant night. “You feel good?” he asked.

  “I do,” I said. “First time in a long time.”

  “Good.” We walked along in silence for a couple of minutes. Somewhere a dog barked, and a cloud passed quickly over the moon. “Your brothers were definitely squirming in the van,” he said after a while. “It was kind of funny, or it would have been if we all hadn’t been so damned scared. And then when Gallagher found your wire, it was like somebody shocked them with an electric poker. Haoa jumped up, knocked back his chair, and lit out for the bar. Lui and me, it took us a little longer to react.” He shook his head. “I was going down that hallway and I heard the shot, and man, it just chilled my bones. I was never so glad to see anybody as I was to see you alive in there.”

  We stopped at Ohua so he could head mauka toward his apartment. “I’m gonna walk for a while,” I said. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  He gave me a shaka. “Take care.”

  I gave it right back to him. “I will. Maybe we’ll get together sometime this weekend. You have any plans yet?”

  “Tomorrow night, I’m having dinner with Arleen. We were going to talk about her taking some courses at UH, sharpen up her skills, maybe she could jump up to a programming job next time. Now maybe we’ll talk about job hunting. Who knows what’s going to happen with the Rod and Reel Club.”

>   I shook my head. Once again, Harry surprised me. “Not tomorrow, then,” I said with a smile. I crossed over Kalakaua and walked along the beach, listening to the gentle lap of the waves. Waikiki almost never sleeps, but this is about as close as it comes, just before dawn, before the surfers and the early shift workers and the second watch cops come on duty and the city starts to wake up. I hadn’t been out this late in a long time, and I liked it. It was like Waikiki belonged to me, my private slice of paradise. You don’t get many chances to slow down, pay attention to everything around you, and I wanted to take this one. I picked up a piece of crumbled newspaper and put it in the trash, listened to the night birds calling and the sound of a siren somewhere in the distance. It meant that somebody’s life was falling apart out there, a fire or a rush to the hospital, an accident or a theft or maybe even a murder. That was bad. But I knew that there were people, like that little seven-year-old who watched her mother and her brothers and sisters murdered, who could find their way back. And now I knew that I was one of them.

  We told our stories over and over again during the next couple of days, as my brother orchestrated the reports on his TV station, and those that followed on other stations and in the newspapers, to make me into the hero of the hour.

  Derek was arrested in the early morning hours on Thursday, and not surprisingly, Uncle Chin stepped forward to organize his defense. It had made things a little touchy between him and my father, but they both believed in making the necessary sacrifices for your family’s sake, so I thought they’d come out of it okay.

  It was interesting to see how the media treated Tommy Pang and Evan Gonsalves. From “a prominent Honolulu businessman” Tommy became “a local underworld kingpin,” a description I’m sure he would have relished.

  Evan was officially cleared of Tommy’s death, though the department stopped short of calling him a martyr. Even though there was suspicion that he had been both a snitch and a blackmailer, a plaque bearing his name was ordered for the front wall at headquarters, where people often left memorial leis for officers killed in the line of duty.