Lana'i of the Tiger (The Islands of Aloha Mystery Series)

by JoAnn Bassett

  “But seriously,” Steve went on. “We’re all glad to have our Pali back safe and sound because we all love her, and we all need her, and we were all stunned when she got whisked away from us last month. Hopefully, she got paid a boat-load of dough for her work on that Las Vegas wedding. And hopefully, she didn’t gamble it all away.” He raised his glass. “Let’s hear it for Pali.” Everyone cheered and knocked back a gulp of champagne.

  It took me a couple of beats to catch up with the storyline. Oh yeah, these people didn’t know about Mexican drug cartels and hit men and the witness protection program. These people thought I’d been working my butt off on a ridiculously-expensive wedding in Nevada.

  “Speech, speech,” the crowd chanted.

  After everyone quieted down, I said, “It was a really hard job, but now that it’s over, I realize how blessed I am to live on this beautiful island with ohana like you. I’ll bet most of you had planned to spend this afternoon speed-walking through Queen Ka’ahumanu Mall buying last-minute stocking stuffers. But you came to welcome me home instead. Big mahalos for that. I love you all.” I blew a kiss.

  Everyone cheered and the serious drinking got underway.

  ***

  Everyone left soon after it started to get dark, but Farrah stayed behind. “Hatch and I wanted to talk to you together,” she said. “But he had to go back to work. Hatch got Moses to fill in so he could come to your party, but Moses had to be home by eight.”

  It galled me that she already knew the names of the guys who worked with Hatch. And it completely galled me that she and Hatch had planned to double-team me when they owned up to their betrayal. Farrah had been my best friend since grade school, but I felt like I was staring into the face of a stranger.

  “That’s fine. I’d rather talk to you alone anyway,” I said.

  “I know there have been rumors,” she said. “Island people got four necessities: food, sleep, sex and rumors.” She smiled as if she dared think I’d find it amusing that she’d managed to slip ‘sex and rumors’ into her little speech. And if she expected me to agree with her, forget it.

  “I’ve been away,” I said in the chilliest voice I’ve ever used with Farrah. “I haven’t heard a thing.”

  “Oh well, I guess that’s good. But you will—hear things, I mean. And here’s the truth: when you got tangled up in that drug mess, the police took you away somewhere safe. But I was left here. The bad guys figured I knew stuff because we were friends and I’d helped you out. At first, it was just scary phone calls. Then one night a guy came to my door. He said he had a message for me from you.”

  She blinked her eyes a couple of times and took a deep breath. I noticed she was unable to maintain eye contact with me—a true sign of lying or guilt, or maybe both. “Anyway, I let him in. I shouldn’t have. But I was worried about you.”

  I was starting to feel a tiny bit guilty, so I visualized her and Hatch going at it between the sheets and the feeling passed.

  “Anyhow, Lipton got really upset and he bit the guy. The guy pulled out a gun and shot at Lipton. One of the bullets actually nicked him.”

  I visualized Farrah’s little Jack Russell terrier coming to her defense. It was a touching scene, but it didn’t budge my opinion of her.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she said. “You look totally spaced-out. I’m telling you about how some guy almost killed Sir Lipton.”

  “Look Farrah, I’ll bet you’ve told your little sob story a million times. It may have worked on other people, but frankly, I’m not buying it. You and Hatch were making goo-goo eyes at each other long before I got shipped off.”

  She looked stunned.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s at least be honest with each other. You hooked up with my boyfriend while my back was turned and now you want me to tell you it’s okay because some low-life came to your apartment and scared you. Well, it’s not okay. It’ll never be okay. Even if Hatch and I had broken up—which we hadn’t—he’ll always be off-limits to you. That’s one of the rules of friendship. But moving in with him while I was gone? That was not only disrespectful, it was disgraceful. I guess I had way more faith in you than you deserve.”

  I turned and marched out the front door. I sat down in one of the ancient wicker chairs on the porch. It felt kind of awkward sitting outside where everyone on the street could see me, but being in the same room with Farrah made me want to smack her.

  She opened the screen and came outside. “Pali, would you please listen to me?”

  “I’ve done all the listening I care to do, Farrah. Please go now.”

  Farrah didn’t have a car. She didn’t even have a driver’s license. I knew that. After all, for years I’d been the one who’d driven her everywhere. Well, too bad. She’d have to be smokin’ some pretty strong pakalolo if she expected me to grab my keys and ferry her guy-stealing butt back to my former boyfriend’s house.

  She didn’t. Without another word, she clattered down the porch steps. She marched down the shadowy street, never looking back. After a few minutes, I pushed myself up from the wicker chair and went inside.

  CHAPTER 32

  Even with the Farrah and Hatch mess hanging over me, I still slept well in my own bed. I woke up on Christmas Eve at seven and showered and got ready for the day. I briefly considered going down to the Palace of Pain and reacquainting myself with Sifu Doug, but that would require a bunch of horsing around and silly banter I wasn’t prepared to handle.

  At around eight the phone rang. It thrilled me to once again hear my own phone ringing. I got up from the kitchen table and checked the caller ID. It said, Decker, H.

  I let it ring one more time.

  “Hello?” I said, sounding like I didn’t have a clue who was calling. I wasn’t sure why I was playing coy. Hatch knew perfectly well I had caller ID.

  “Hi Pali,” he said. Then he stopped. As if he’d forgotten why he’d called.

  “Are you going to give me some song and dance about how Farrah’s damsel in distress act was so charming you couldn’t help yourself? Because if you are, I’m hanging up.”

  “No, I’m sitting outside your house. I’m calling to ask if you’ll let me in.”

  Great. They didn’t get a chance to double-team me, so they went for the tag-team approach instead.

  “Sure. But I’ve got a lot to do today. Steve didn’t even get around to getting a Christmas tree.”

  I went to open the door. When I did, Hatch was sitting on my porch.

  “How long have you been out here?” I said.

  “About an hour or so.”

  I didn’t know what to make of that.

  “I feel terrible about what’s going on between you and Farrah,” he said. “I was trying to do something nice for you and it got all twisted up.”

  “You think shacking up with my best friend while my back was turned was something nice? Boy, have you got a pupule notion of ‘something nice’.”

  “Look, can I buy you a cup of coffee or something? Or maybe we could go down to Lahaina and grab some breakfast.”

  Okay, I was furious with both of them but the mere thought of the banana mac pancakes at Hargrove’s Restaurant in Lahaina softened my heart.

  “Could we go to Hargrove’s?” I said. “I’d like to see what’s happened to my shop while I’ve been away.”

  My wedding planning business, “Let’s Get Maui’d” had been temporarily relocated to Lahaina after my shop in Pa’ia suffered a fire. When I got whisked into witness protection, I was only a signature away from getting a new lease on my Pa’ia shop. But I’d had to leave everything in Lahaina when I’d been taken to Lana’i.

  “Sure,” he said. “Today’s my day off so I’m all yours.”

  “If only that were true,” I said under my breath.

  “Pali, give me a break here. Farrah and I are as freaked out about this as you are.”

  “Oh, I doubt that, Hatch. I really doubt that.”

  “Look, make me a promise, okay? No more
snide comments until you’ve heard me out. If after I’ve said my piece you want to hit the ‘delete’ key on me, then have at it. But first, give me a chance to tell my side.”

  We drove to Lahaina in silence. It was actually a pretty comfortable silence. It was the kind of silence I’d imagine two old married people might share as they traveled a stretch of road that’s not only scenic, but familiar. The road to Lahaina offers spectacular ocean views, as well as a short tunnel and hairpin turns around a steep, mountainous coastline. I’d missed it so much. I drank it in as if I were a dehydrated camel at an oasis.

  We got to Lahaina Town and Hatch parked his truck in a pay lot but he didn’t put any money in the slot. Most locals often don’t pay, but police and firefighters never pay. There’s not a judge in Hawaii who’d enforce a parking ticket on a cop or a firefighter.

  We walked over to Hargrove’s and I looked up at my shop above the restaurant. I still had the key on my ring, but I had no idea if my stuff had been left as is or if the landlord had dumped it all in a storage locker when I hadn’t paid the December rent.

  “You want to go up and check it out?” said Hatch.

  “Half of me wants to go up there and the other half doesn’t. I suppose I’d like to keep pretending all of this has just been a really bad dream.” I think he knew I wasn’t just talking about my shop.

  “Tell you what. You go in the restaurant and get us a table, and I’ll go upstairs and check out your place. It might be easier for you to handle if you know what to expect.”

  “Mahalo.” I handed him my keys. When I’d taken my key ring out of the drawer that morning I’d clutched it in my fist. I held the keys to my house, my car, and my shop. Tangible proof I was really home. “It’s that big one there. The one marked ‘Schlage.’

  I went to Hargrove’s. There was a sign on the door reminding people the restaurant would be closing at two o’clock so the staff could be home for Christmas Eve. I was seated at a table by the open windows. It’s usually hard to get a window seat, but I was one of only five customers. I ordered coffee and by the time it arrived, Hatch was walking toward the table.

  “Looks pretty good up there,” he said. “You’ve got some way-dead plants and a couple of mega-size cockroach carcasses, but other than that, it’s the same as I remember it.”

  “How about the phone machine?” I said. “Did you check to see if there were any messages?”

  “Oh, I didn’t realize I was supposed to get your business back up and running,” he said. “Get me a to-go coffee and I’ll get crackin’.”

  “No, no, I didn’t mean that,” I said. “I was just wondering…”

  The waitress came and took our order. When she turned to go, I looked closely at Hatch for the first time that morning. He was wearing a white polo shirt with a local golf course logo on the pocket. The shirt was neatly tucked into a pair of tan shorts. Around his waist was a braided brown leather belt. For Hatch, a collared shirt and belted shorts were his usual off-duty attire. Even if he was just hanging around his house, he always wore neatly pressed clothes. I flashed on Ono’s more casual approach to life—the rumpled khaki shorts, his live-aboard lifestyle, and his checkered past. Some women go for the ‘bad boy’ thing, but I realized my own world view more closely lined up with buttoned-down Hatch Decker than endearing, but chaotic, Ono Kingston.

  Which led me to my next point. How did it figure that my tarot-card-reading, Ouija-board-consulting, latter-day-hippie best friend Farrah Milton had hooked up with my knife-pleat and spit-shine firefighter boyfriend? Talk about your odd couple.

  “Okay,” said Hatch, breaking the silence. “Do you want to go first or do you want me to?”

  “Have at it,” I said. “You’re the guy who’s got some ‘splainin’ to do.”

  “Well, this is kind of hard for me to talk about, but I gotta tell ya I was pretty cheesed when you didn’t respond to my Christmas card.”

  “How could I respond?” I said. “Wong gave me the card and left. And anyway, it wasn’t like I had a phone or a computer or anything. I was on lock-down. And I’d have gotten in major kukae if I’d try to send you something in the mail.”

  “Wong told me you didn’t even open it. Did you ever read it?”

  “Of course I read it.”

  “So?” he said.

  “So, what?” I said. I was beginning to get a little ‘cheesed’ myself. How dare he try to avoid the conversation about what was going on with Farrah and him? “I don’t think a stupid Christmas card is the eight-hundred pound gorilla at this table, do you?”

  “Stupid Christmas card? I write and tell you I love you and I miss you, and you call it ‘stupid’?”

  I tried to remember the message in Hatch’s card. Had he written, I love you? I couldn’t believe I’d missed that part. Well, even if he had written it, wouldn’t that make them shacking up just that much worse?

  “Who cares what you wrote in the card?” I said. “From what I hear, you and Farrah were already sleeping together by that point.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says Ono and Steve and most of Pa’ia Town. You think I’m deaf or something? People talk, Hatch. And it gets back, whether I’m over there or over here.”

  “Well, ‘people’ don’t know everything they think they know. Sometimes things aren’t what they look like.”

  How strange that notion kept cropping up.

  “Well then, why don’t you clue me in on how things really are? ‘Cause, you know, I’d really love to know where I stand.”

  He leaned in and lowered his voice. “I’m only telling you this because I know sooner or later Farrah will tell you herself, if you’ll listen. People think Farrah and I are lovers and I let it stand because I’m protecting her. And I’m only protecting her because you weren’t around to do it. And she’s in danger because of you. So if you want to get all high and mighty, you go right ahead. But it’s only going to make it that much harder to swallow the giant helping of crow you’re gonna be eating when you get your facts straight.”

  “I’m not following you. A scummy guy came up to Farrah’s and Lipton ran him off. Isn’t that it?”

  “Yeah. But that was after the guy had beaten Farrah so bad you could hardly recognize her. And after Lipton bit him, he ran. But before he left, he told Farrah if she called the cops he’d come back and finish the job, for good.”

  The waitress put a plate down in front of me and I smelled the yummy pancakes but I had no desire to take a bite. My eyes stayed on Hatch.

  “Here’s where it really gets ugly,” he went on. “He beat her to make her tell him where you were. Farrah knew you were on Lana’i, we all knew it. But she refused to talk, so he kept choking and beating her until the dog managed to trip the latch on the bedroom door and go after him. No one knows about it. I only found out because a guy at work said it was weird the Pa’ia store had been closed for two days and nobody knew where the owner was. I had a bad feeling so I went up to her place. When I found her, she was a mess.”

  At this point my I’d scrunched my forehead so tight I was getting a headache.

  “She refused to let me take her to the hospital because so was so scared. I stabilized her jaw and treated her black eyes. One was completely swollen shut. She had a couple broken ribs. In fact, she’s still taped up. She was terrified if anyone saw her they’d call the police, so she had Beatrice work the store for more than two weeks. She moved into my place and I’ve kept an eye on her ever since. You can’t tell anyone about this, Pali. She’s sworn me to secrecy.”

  I laid my fork down and bowed my head. I have a rule about crying in public. I don’t allow myself to do it. Unless, of course, it’s unavoidable. And right then, it was unavoidable.

  CHAPTER 33

  It’s not the good times that define your character, it’s the rotten times. My character was definitely on the line when I learned Farrah had been brutally beaten by a skuzzy druggie who’d come looking for me. And it was even further on the li
ne since my boyfriend had offered her refuge but the whole town was talking about how they’d cheated on me behind my back. Throw in that I couldn’t straighten it out because I was sworn to secrecy and you have a major character-building opportunity.

  The thing about being attacked in your own home is that it bruises your soul. It’s not like having your purse snatched, where somebody grabs your handbag and takes off and it’s a hassle to replace your credit cards and your ID but within a couple of weeks things get back to normal. When someone invades your home and physically harms you, you no longer feel safe anywhere. Every stranger becomes a potential assailant, and every dark corner becomes a place where evil lurks.

  After Hatch told me about Farrah’s assault, I wasn’t able to eat a bite. I asked Hatch to ask the waitress for the check and just take me home. I didn’t even want to go up to my shop and check it out.

  I sat in stunned silence on the drive back to Hali’imaile. I thought about how I’d sent Farrah out into the dark the night before. She must’ve found a ride home, because it’s miles and miles from Haili’imaile to Sprecklesville, but even walking a couple of blocks must have been terrifying.

  When we pulled up at my house, Hatch leaned over and lightly kissed me. “I’ve been waiting to do that for six weeks now,” he said. “I love you, Pali. Welcome home.”

  “I love you too, Hatch.” I wanted to say more, but my guilty lips wouldn’t work right.

  “Hey, so now we’re even, right? I mean, you took me in when I got busted up, and I took in your friend when she got busted up. I know people around town have been talking, but screw them. I had to do what I had to do.”

  “Mahalo for taking care of her. Not everyone would’ve done that.”

  “Hey, not everyone’s a proud member of Maui County Fire and Rescue. It’s how we roll.”

  I kissed him again and got out of the car.

  Steve was in the kitchen. I went in and he started chattering but I couldn’t make out what he was saying. I looked at him and I started crying again. He’d known me long enough to know I wasn’t crying about coming home, and I wasn’t crying because I was scared some drug-addled moron was going to blow me away for a kilo of weed.