“How do you know?”
“I’ve got good investigation skills too,” he said. “I’ve also got some time. Why don’t I take the ferry to Lanai and we can hang out?”
“What about your family?” I asked.
“Oh, they’re in California for a few days,” he said casually. “Visiting Colleen’s parents.”
His plan was so transparent. His wife and children out of the picture for a while, he was ready to swoop in on me, just as he had tried to do the night before I left Maui. But he had been calling me at least twice a week since I got to Lanai. All those times couldn’t have been predatory. Some of them must have been in honor of the friendship we had started to build while we worked together.
“So what do you say?” he asked, trying to sound casual. Then, with more feeling, he said, “I’ve really missed you, Alli.”
“Don’t come to Lanai,” I said. “I’ve got to get off this island. I’ll come to Maui.”
“You will?”
I found myself smiling at how excited he sounded. “Yes,” I answered. “I’ll take the ten-thirty boat. I’ll call you when I get in.”
“No need to call,” he said. “I’ll meet the ferry.”
• • •
I had exactly forty-five minutes on the ferry to wonder why the fuck I was agreeing to see Keawe, but in typical fashion I avoided thinking at all. Instead, I watched a group of dolphins off to the right, one of them doing triple axial spins. Molokai passed off to the left. I nodded at one or two people I knew on the ferry, but most people on board were tourists. Three twenty-something girls with great bodies and bad sunburns. A honeymoon couple. A golfer who looked pretty dejected. It was late July, high tourist season.
The ticket taker came around, chatting to everybody. The golfer handed him money and the ticket taker shook his head. “You got to buy the tickets before you get on the boat,” he said.
“What do you do with stowaways?” the golfer asked.
“They get to go halfway for free.”
The golfer laughed.
The ticket taker said, “You can pay on the other end.”
The ferry was expensive for tourists, but they offered kama’aina rates for Hawaiian residents, and MPD always paid for my ferry trips. That was part of my compensation.
I liked listening to everyone’s conversations but couldn’t bring myself to start up a conversation on my own. No one talked to me, either. Maybe it was because of Mo. He loved riding the ferry back and forth, but people usually kept their distance from a 180-pound mastiff. My mom or sister would have made best friends by the time we got to the other side. They were so different from me.
When we docked in Lahaina, I spotted Keawe immediately. He was leaning against the fence, wearing a powder-blue T-shirt that cut just at the place on the biceps a girl loves to look at. He smiled and walked toward me for a hug.
“Hi, gorgeous,” he said. The hug felt tense, not because of me, but because of those around us. Maui was so small—someone was bound to know at least one of us. It had to be a friendship hug, in case someone saw. The hug was just long enough for me to feel the heat of his skin. I looked up at his face—his smooth brown skin, his close-cut black hair, his warm brown eyes. He was the gorgeous one.
“So where do you want to go?” he asked. He patted Mo on the head. “The beach? Should we dump the mutt and get some lunch?”
“Sure,” I said. It didn’t matter what I said at this point because we both knew where we were going.
My shakiness disappeared once I was with Keawe. Within moments, I felt strong again, no longer vulnerable to the tragic mistakes of teenage girls. He felt like my savior.
Unfortunately, my good sense was gone too.
In less than half an hour, we were in my apartment in Kihei, pulling each other’s clothes off.
• • •
We spent a day and a half holed up in my apartment. Keawe went out to L&L for chicken katsu once or twice, but mostly we stayed in bed.
And we talked. I told him about Pete Cordiello and how frustrating it was to not be able to bring him down. We talked about Lea. I cried a little over that, and at one point I told him, “I don’t think I’m tough enough to be a cop.”
“I don’t believe that for a second, Alli,” he said. “You’ve held your own. Look at you, coming into the department a haole girl and turning out to be president of your recruit class. You know what kind of bets we placed on you?”
“Yeah, I heard.” MPD cops were huge sexists, but they did respect female cops once they proved themselves. I knew I had earned respect within the department, but the outside community was a different story. Every time I arrested someone, it was “You haole bitch!” Trying to gain the trust of someone who hated me the second they saw me had given me some verbal judo skills, but it sure as hell wasn’t easy.
We didn’t talk about his wife. He never brought her up and neither did I. When she called, he politely took the phone onto the lanai. They were short conversations, exchanges of information. Married conversations. Keawe and Colleen had been married for seven years. He told me there wasn’t a whole lot left between them except their three beautiful little children.
This weekend with Keawe was just what I needed. He was attentive and sweet, and he had the most incredible way of making me feel loved with just a look. The sex was phenomenal. But I knew it had to stay a onetime thing; there was no way in hell I was getting deeply involved with a married man. The next day, I would go back to Lanai, he would pick his wife up from the airport, and that would be that.
“I’ll call you tonight,” he said when he dropped Mo and me off at the ferry. I tried not to roll my eyes.
“I’ll be waiting,” I said, laughing. I was sure he had gotten what he wanted, and maybe I had too. I didn’t want to dwell on any feelings I might be having about him.
But he did call that night. He called just after eleven, and we talked until three in the morning. Talked about anything. Every little stupid thing that popped into our heads. His pajamas had a hole in them. I needed to get a new toaster. He loved jelly doughnuts. Mo had bad breath. He hoped his softball team would win the next day. All these things were so inconsequential, but I hadn’t had anyone to talk to like that since Dalton and I had broken up. I had never been very good at having lots of girlfriends to giggle and share things with, but I had almost always had a boyfriend. I missed having one now.
We laughed a lot, quietly—his wife, still on California time, was sleeping, and he was speaking to me from the bathroom at the other end of the house.
The next day I felt energized, more like myself again, and I threw myself straight back into work.
6
“You seem better, Alli,” Walker said when I walked into the station on Monday.
“I am better,” I said, and the two of us went straight back to dealing with our buddy Cordiello.
It killed me that we hadn’t been able to pin anything on Cordiello yet. We had finally intercepted one of his packages, but he sent a runner to pick it up, making it impossible for us to connect the dope to him. Walker and I could never figure out what he did to scare people, but Cordiello was widely feared. It was hard to get anyone on Lanai to speak out against Pete Cordiello. He was smart enough to build a family and a lifestyle. He wasn’t a troublemaker, and he didn’t hang out with troublemakers. He was always respectful with police officers. Yet we knew by the numbers of Jet Skis and ATVs he was buying, by the elaborate parties he gave—flying strippers in from Oahu and paying for all the beer—that he was a major player.
Eventually we would catch him, I knew that. These guys weren’t smart enough to not get caught. We do catch them, and then they leave the women and children who love them with the house that gets seized and the vehicles that get seized, and that’s a whole other mess. But for now, his neighbors weren’t talking, and our surveillance hadn’t panned out yet.
Lieutenant Ruben, still dealing with the MPD chief over the Lea case, saw Walker and me
plotting, and specifically said, “Don’t stir up trouble, you two. We need to keep our profile low and exemplary for the next few weeks.”
We didn’t listen. Desperate to find out where Pete stored his dope, we talked Ruben into letting us do random boat checks. Technically MPD had no jurisdiction on boats, but Ruben okayed it as a proactive measure and told us not to get into trouble.
We decided to do a boat check that night. Boats were where fifty percent of our dope came from, and I was sure if we did enough of them we’d locate Pete’s.
At the docks, we saw some Matson shipping containers that were of interest to us.
“What do you think?” I asked Walker.
“Let’s go for it,” he said.
We chose one to inspect but struggled to get it open.
“Let’s try another one,” Walker said.
“Nah,” I said. “This one may be extra secure for a reason.” We used all the force we could produce between the two of us and got it open.
“Shit!” I yelled.
“Literally!” Walker said.
The container was full of manure, now pouring out onto us.
“Ruben is going to kill us,” I said. We had to go into the office tracking manure into the station. We left manure in the brand-new patrol car.
Keawe loved that story when I told him about it on the phone that night. We talked for two hours, and another two hours the next night.
What the hell was I doing?
I had never wanted to be messing around with anyone I worked with. Sure, I had gotten hit on left and right in the department. All the female recruits get hit on. But at the beginning of recruit school, Sergeant Kainoa sat me down and told me, “The best way to get through this is to do it without a guy.” He was basically telling me not to sleep around like so many of the girls did. I had consciously avoided being labeled a slut all this time, and now I had slept with Keawe.
I didn’t see him for another three weeks, but we talked almost every day, and I found myself thinking about him way too much. As my days on Lanai wound to a close, I started to get nervous. There would be no way to avoid Keawe once I was back on Maui full-time. MPD was such a small department, more like a family than an employer. It had its politics and bad apples, but the people that made up the department were like no other. Keawe and I were part of the same family—we were going to see each other all the time.
Shortly before I left Lanai for good, I was heading out the door to the station one day and called to Mo as usual. He didn’t come. I found him on the couch asleep and tried to awaken him.
“Mo,” I said. “Come on, boy.” It took me half an hour to coax him into my car. There was no way I could pick him up, so he had to get in on his own. He seemed to be in incredible pain, and I drove him immediately to the vet.
“He has cancer,” the vet told me after running some tests. “It’s late stage. Has he been sick for a while?”
“I’ve had him less than a year,” I said. “I don’t know. I was told he was in mourning for his previous owner, and that was why he wasn’t eating.”
She nodded. “I think he’s been sick all this time,” she said, and then repeated, “It’s very late stage.”
“How late?”
I didn’t need to hear the answer. We had to put Mo down that day.
Mo had become important to me in such a short time, and I was devastated. I called my mom in tears and she spent a long time consoling me. Then I called Keawe.
“I’m really sorry,” he said. “I wish I was there to hold you. But in a week, you’ll be here, and I’ll be able to help.”
I stayed home from work the day Mo died, and the next day Sergeant Ruben called me into his office.
“I want you to put the Lea case out of your mind,” he said. “Start with a clean slate back in Maui. These things happen and they aren’t pretty, but we have to do our jobs.”
Lea was the last thing I wanted to talk about with him. I changed the subject.
“I’m just pissed I’m leaving you with Cordiello,” I told him.
“You can’t make it personal,” Ruben said. “There’s always another dirtbag following in his footsteps.”
Ruben was good at turning a blind eye to the ice that was coming and going on Lanai, but he was right about Cordiello. I was smart enough to know that catching one dealer wasn’t going to end the ice epidemic. After my year on Lanai, I was ready to move to a new town, a bigger town, and find out who the players were.
• • •
“Woo hoo, we’re getting the narcotics girl,” Officer Keanu said when I walked into the Lahaina station my first day back. He was grinning ear to ear, probably already planning to throw his work in my direction. Keanu was a bit lazy, never following up, never doing his paperwork. A broke, and everybody knew it. It was funny, but things at MPD operated outside of racial stereotypes. The islands were such a melting pot of Asians, Polynesians, haoles, that you almost never ran into issues of race at MPD. It all boiled down to work ethic. Ripper or broke.
“Officer Moore. Welcome back to civilization.”
Keawe’s voice. I froze. I hadn’t expected to see him so soon.
I forced myself to turn around. With Keanu’s eyes on me, I felt I was facing a test.
“Thank you,” I said, as casually as possible. “Surprised to see you here. I thought you worked Wailuku.”
“Do,” he said, “but something brought me to Lahaina this morning.”
“Damn you,” I said later, when he showed up at my apartment. “You could have given me some warning. No one can know anything happened between us, you understand? No one.”
“I know that,” he said, handing me a bouquet of flowers. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t resist. These are for you.”
I took the flowers and smelled them. He stepped into my apartment and closed the door.
“Is this how it’s going to be now?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he said, before he kissed me. “This is how it’s going to be.”
• • •
Keawe: my best friend, and now my lover.
At first, it was perfect. We spent a lot of time working together during the day, and he would always let me know if he was coming over that night. I put in four or five hours of overtime each day, so I normally didn’t get home until ten o’clock. If he was free, we had a couple of awesome hours together. In the morning, I would go to work again without worrying about someone at home whining because I didn’t pay enough attention to him. For a workaholic, the arrangement was ideal.
We were obsessed with each other. Whenever he left my apartment to go home, he would call me the minute he got into his car and talk to me all the way home, until the garage door went up at his house. I loved every single thing about him—the boyish dimples at the sides of his mouth, the way his smooth forehead creased when he wanted to say the right thing, his tendency to start singing “Moloka’i Slide” and other Hawaiiana at the oddest moments. He told me he loved me almost right from the start.
Keawe also taught me a lot about work in those early months—how to talk myself out of a situation instead of fighting my way out, how to listen to people first before reacting. He was so steady, so reassuring. Keawe embodied everything I loved about Hawaiian men. He was strong, intelligent, so compassionate, a family man, a good dad, close to his parents. Solid, and not a heavy drinker, which was rare for a Hawaiian cop.
I only dreaded the weekends, which for Keawe meant “family time,” and for me meant forty-eight hours without him. I started to work more and more on the weekends so that even the chief was telling me to go home. I either wanted to be at work or with Keawe. Those were the only two ways I wanted to spend my time.
Late one Saturday afternoon on an extra shift, I was working a UEMV (unauthorized entry of a motor vehicle) case on Hanakao’o Beach on the edge of Lahaina. A tourist’s car had been burgled and I was just wrapping up, checking the car for fingerprints, when an SUV pulled into the parking lot and parked next to us.
Keawe’s SUV.
He got out of the car with his family and walked over to me casually. “Hi, Alli,” he said. “What case you working?”
Behind him I could see his wife with their children. I was seeing Keawe’s kids for the first time. They were so tiny! They wore adorable swimsuits and carried their beach gear, laughing and giggling, excited to be coming to the beach.
Why are you talking to me? I wanted to say to Keawe. I hate you.
His wife, Colleen, came over to say hello too. She was tall, very thin and pretty, with long straight brown hair. She held the little girl in her arms as she reached out to shake my hand while Keawe introduced us.
“Sorry,” she said, “I’ve got to get Sacha into her swim diaper.” She carried the girl back to the car.
A diaper. This is a baby, I realized.
I watched Keawe’s family as they walked away from me and headed across the street to the beach. I wrapped up my case quickly and got back into my patrol car, where shame dropped like a curtain around me. I fought tears as I struggled to put the key in the ignition.
I wanted the affair to end. How could I do what I was doing to such a wonderful family? Three little children. One of them a baby. I was doing exactly what my dad had done.
When I got home, I wrote Keawe a long breakup letter and left it in his locker at work the next morning. He did not say anything to me about the letter, and I did my best to avoid him, but a couple of days later when I was driving home from work, he lit me up in his patrol car. Pulled me over.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I asked him. “Jesus!”
He handed me back the letter I had written. “I’m not ready to get this,” he said.
“Keawe, I can’t be that woman. I can’t do this to your family.”
He cut me off. “We’ll work it out,” he said. “We’ll work it out. We’ll be together, I promise.”
I didn’t really believe him. Something had changed for me that day on the beach. Before, I had thought of his family as separate from our relationship, as an extra in his life; I had fooled myself into thinking that I was his life. But he had a life—I was the extra.
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