by Toby Neal
“It is perfection. Kanpeki,” he said. “All I need.”
“Oh, good,” Lei sniffled. She hugged her grandfather. “I know you mean it when you speak Japanese about something. Let’s go inside, and you can see how we furnished it with what you sent over.”
Soga was settled in his new abode, resting. The party was a noisy backdrop filling the house as Lei and Kiet approached Wayne. “We have a surprise for you, too, Dad.”
“What? No need.” But Wayne cooperated with good grace as Kiet tied a blindfold on him and led his grandfather over to sit on the bench of the outdoor picnic table the family often used for meals, now groaning with the half-eaten food of the brunch buffet.
Wayne’s work-worn hands plucked at the knees of his jeans, and his craggy face was wreathed in a grin visible beneath the bandanna. Ellen came over and set a hand on his shoulder, and she was smiling, too.
“You said this is a Father’s Day surprise—but the longer this takes, the more worried I’m getting,” Wayne said.
“Just a little longer, Dad,” Lei called, wrestling a large, loosely wrapped bundle out of the shed where it had been hidden.
Stevens came over to give her a hand. “Hang on, Wayne. It’ll be worth the wait.”
“You’re going to love it, Grandpa!” Kiet yelled, holding onto Rosie, who was trying to lunge forward and grab the package as it approached.
“I know I haven’t always been the best dad. I hope you guys aren’t going to dump a bucket of toads on my head or something,” Wayne said.
“No! We’re so thankful for all the ways you two help out around here,” Stevens said as Lei set the bulky package at Wayne’s feet. Faint squeaks and rustles came from inside.
Lei untied the blindfold. “Open it, Dad.”
Ellen laughed. “Oh my. What’s in there, honey? I think you better just get your nerve up and see.”
Wayne glanced down, blinking. “I have a feeling that my life is about to change forever.”
“Open it, Grandpa!” Kiet jumped up and down with excitement. Beside him, the family’s big Rottweiler whined, snuffling at the package, his stump of tail wagging.
Wayne pulled the loose wrapping away from a plastic dog kennel with Kiet and Rosie’s help. Pressed up against the wire mesh, pink tongue reaching through the wire and tail lashing, a yellow lab pup strained to reach her new master.
“Oh hell. There goes my heart.” Wayne laid a hand on his left chest. He gazed at Lei, his brown eyes wet. “Sweets. This is too much.”
“I thought you deserved a chance for a parenting do-over, since you were gone for most of my childhood.” Lei’s eyes prickled too. “Shoots, this is a teary day.”
Kiet knelt in front of the kennel’s door, sticking his fingers in so that the puppy could lick them. “What are you going to name her, Grandpa?”
Wayne opened the wire mesh door. The plump golden puppy leaped into his arms, licking his face and lashing him with her tail. “I like the idea of a “do-over,” too. We’ll call her Dove, for short.”
They all crowded in to pet her until Dove wet herself with excitement.
“I think she’s had all she can handle.” Wayne stood up with the puppy tucked against his side. Dove settled, resting her muzzle on his forearm as if she’d always had a place there. Wayne pulled Lei close in a hug with his free arm. “I don’t deserve this, but I’ll take it—thank you, Sweets.”
“You’ve more than earned a thank-you from us.” Lei rested her head on Wayne’s shoulder, the golden pup sandwiched between them. “But love isn’t about deserving, Dad. It just is, and it covers a multitude of sins.”
“Thank God for that.” Wayne kissed Lei’s forehead, just like she remembered him doing when she was a little girl.
Turn the page for a sneak peek of book 1 in the Paradise Crime Thrillers, Wired In!
Sneak Peek
Wired In, Paradise Crime Mysteries book 1
The child had curled her body around an old stuffed rabbit as if protecting it. She lay on a bare mattress in a walk-in closet whose gloom was held back by a night-light, her thumb in her mouth. Blond hair gleamed silver in the grainy video feed.
Special Agent Sophie Ang swiveled the tiny video cam snaked through a hole bored in the drywall of the ceiling. She checked all four corners of the small space, and there was nothing to see but empty shelves. She brought the camera back to rest on the tiny figure in the daisy-sprigged nightgown she’d been wearing when they took her.
“Primary feed established,” Sophie whispered into the comm unit.
She took one more look at the child, visible in a window on the monitor, before crawling along the floor of the apartment above, pushing the floor schematic ahead of her.
Sophie drilled her second hole right near where the living room light fixture should be. She leaned all her body weight onto the silent, battery-operated pneumatic drill. The dust and wood of the subfloor and ceiling material of the unit below blew past her on a jet of warm air, making her nose tickle with an incipient sneeze. She turned her head hard, pressing her nose against her shoulder and holding her breath until the urge passed.
Sophie felt a sudden give as the drill punched through and instantly let up on the pressure, holding the drill in place so it could suck the last bits of ceiling material out of the hole. She fed in the camera on its stiff, flexible cable, looking to see what was happening in the room below on the monitor.
Directly beneath the eye of the camera two men lounged on couches set at right angles facing a flat screen TV. Sophie rotated the cable slowly, watching in the monitor. The camera scanned the room, taking in guns set carelessly on the coffee table beside empty pizza boxes and a pyramid of beer cans.
“Secondary cam installed and operational. Two unsubs in exterior room, armed,” Sophie whispered.
“Roger that. Return to base when camera secure.”
Sophie opened the black tool backpack she’d carried in for the operation. Inside were a battery-operated cutting saw, pliers, and the camera equipment’s plastic case. She stowed the drill in the backpack and glanced at the two open windows of the video feed, now streaming wirelessly to the surveillance van parked outside the apartment building.
The little girl rolled over, looking at the ceiling, the rabbit clutched in her arms.
“Mama,” she whispered. “Mama.” Her eyes were black holes in the low-resolution image. Tears shone on her cheeks. Sophie felt something painful tug at her as she read the girl’s lips. She endured a flash of unwanted memory.
Something was happening in the other video feed.
Both men had picked up their phones and were reading what looked like a text message. Sophie saw them look up at each other, and through the floor beneath her, voices rumbled to accompany her lip reading.
“The FBI is onto us. You ratted us out!”
One of the men leapt to his feet.
“No, you did!” the other one yelled. “You even got the payoff!”
Sophie whirled and grabbed the saw out of the tool backpack. She ran back to the hole directly above the child even as her earbud crackled with orders for the rescue team. “Move, move, move!”
Sophie flipped on the saw, set at top speed, yanked off the vacuum piece that suctioned out the dust. She brought the chainsaw-like tool down, whining like a dentist’s drill. The saw bit into the wood, tearing through it like an electric bread knife through dinner rolls. She hauled the saw up out of the hole, threw it out at another angle, and drew it toward the end of the last cut.
The girl only had moments.
Sophie made the third cut of a triangle as the room below echoed with yelling, then the deafening bam-bam-bam of the kidnappers firing on each other.
Sophie leapt to her feet, threw aside the saw, and, hoping like hell the child had the sense to get out from under the hole appearing in her ceiling, she leapt with both feet and all her weight onto the rough triangle she’d made.
The fall was short and hard and she landed facing the clo
set door as she’d planned, knees bent to absorb the landing, the mattress taking some of the shock.
She hadn’t landed on the child. That was all she cared about as a tumult of wood, drywall and dust followed her down. She drew her weapon, and the closet door opened.
Sophie fired at the dark silhouette in the doorway. She fired until the shape fell backward out of sight, and then she spun to find the girl.
Anna Marie Addams had folded herself into the corner of the closet and her rabbit was tight against her chest. She lifted her head, eyes huge. Sophie squatted down, touched Anna’s hair and whispered softly, “Don’t look. You’re safe now. But don’t look. And put your fingers in your ears.”
Anna obeyed, putting her head down over the rabbit and her hands over her ears. Sophie turned and faced the door, blocking the girl with her body.
“Package is secure,” she said into the comm.
Her earbud crackled. “Roger that. Breaching the apartment.”
Sophie felt Anna shudder with terror, pressed against the back of her legs, as the door cannon boomed in the exterior of the apartment.
This time the doorway filled with nothing but a man’s arm, firing into the closet. Sophie fired back, but her breath was stolen by a blow to the chest that knocked her back against the child and the wall.
Sophie felt Anna squirming beneath her. She couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe, and an endless long moment passed as black spots filled her vision and her hands scrabbled for the Velcro closures of the vest. Then hands lifted her off of the child, dragged her over the bodies in the doorway, and ripped open her Kevlar vest.
Sophie’s diaphragm finally started working and she dragged in a breath. Her squad commander, Agent Gundersohn, leaned down into her face. “You’re okay, Agent Ang. The vest caught the round.”
“Demon spawn of a pox-ridden sailor,” she cursed in Thai, her voice a thin wheeze.
“What?” Gundersohn cupped his ear.
In the closet, Anna was screaming.
Sophie hauled herself to her feet. Her ears rang from the gunshots in the enclosed space. Her ankle buckled when she stood and it hurt like hell to breathe—but Anna was screaming. She stumbled back into the closet, pushed her way through the two team members trying to calm the girl, and dropped to her knees in front of the child.
Anna’s head was down and her hands were still over her ears. A high-pitched cry ululated from her tiny body. Sophie put her hand on the child’s head and leaned close, into the screaming.
“Hush, you’re safe now. They’re gone.”
A second later the shrieking stopped. The rigid little body uncurled. The small white arms reached out. Sophie stood up with the child in her arms.
“Don’t look,” Sophie whispered.
Anna pressed her wet face into Sophie’s neck and shut her eyes, clinging like a baby monkey with her arms and legs. Sophie carried the child past the two sprawled bodies in the doorway, past the pizza containers and fallen beer cans and the man with his throat ripped open by bullets, leaving arterial spray across the couch. Past the black-clad Hostage Rescue Team members in their FBI-emblazoned Kevlar. Down the hall and a flight of stairs, through the push-handled exit, across the foyer of the building, out the glass front door, onto the sidewalk, and into the sunshine.
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Acknowledgments
Aloha, dear Readers!
Thanks so much for joining me, Lei, Stevens, and all of their wonderful ohana for Razor Rocks, #13 in the Paradise Crime Mysteries!
I thought I was done with the series with book 12, Bitter Feast, but after several years and ten thrillers with Sophie (the Paradise Crime Thrillers), I realized I craved the little glimpses I got of Lei and her family as Sophie’s adventures brushed up against Lei’s world . . . So, with the help of my Facebook reader group, Friends of Toby Neal Books, I came up with an idea for a new mystery—PIRATES!
Who doesn’t love a good pirate adventure?
Well, me, it turns out. Researching pirates, I was truly horrified to find out how brutal they can be, and no laughing matter. I’m even more grateful to the Coast Guard for all they do to keep our Islands safe! That said, I do not have an “expert” reader from the Coast Guard to keep my joint investigation honest, so if I made errors in how that went forward, I apologize.
I also want to thank my team for all their help, and most of all YOU, my faithful readers, who keep me excited to come to the page again and again, bringing these characters to life to teach us just a little about life, love, and solving murder.
I am working on several exciting projects. Look for Wired Ghost, #11 in the Paradise Crime Thrillers with Sophie, in the months to come. If you haven’t tried the Wired mystery/thrillers where Lei’s friend Sophie solves crime with her faithful dog Ginger, they might be just the thing to tide you over until I get to the next Lei book, tentatively titled Pistol Creek. I’m also working on a follow-up memoir to Freckled, tentatively titled Open Road: a Memoir of Love, Travel, and the National Parks.
And if you liked Razor Rocks, please leave a review. Even a few words help others discover the series, and they mean more than you know to this particular author. Some days, when the writing gets hard, reading reviews and knowing people want more is what keeps me going.
With much aloha and thanks,
Free Books
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Toby’s Bookshelf
PARADISE CRIME SERIES
Paradise Crime Mysteries
Blood Orchids
Torch Ginger
Black Jasmine
Broken Ferns
Twisted Vine
Shattered Palms
Dark Lava
Fire Beach
Rip Tides
Bone Hook
Red Rain
Bitter Feast
Razor Rocks
Paradise Crime Mystery
Special Agent Marcella Scott
Stolen in Paradise
Paradies Crime Suspense Mysteries
Unsound
Paradise Crime Thrillers
Wired In
Wired Rogue
Wired Hard
Wired Dark
Wired Dawn
Wired Justice
Wired Secret
Wired Fear
Wired Courage
Wired Truth
ROMANCES
The Somewhere Series
Somewhere on St. Thomas
Somewhere in the City
Somewhere in California
Standalone
Somewhere on Maui
Co-Authored Romance Thrillers
The Scorch Series
Scorch Road
Cinder Road
Smoke Road
Burnt Road
Flame Road
Smolder Road
YOUNG ADULT
Standalone
Island Fire
NONFICTION
Memoir
Freckled
About the Author
Kirkus Reviews calls Neal's writing, "persistently riveting. Masterly."
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Award-winning, USA Today bestselling social worker turned author Toby Neal grew up on the island of Kaua`i in Hawaii. Neal is a mental health therapist, a career that has informed the depth and complexity of the characters in her stories. Neal's mysteries and thrillers explore the crimes and issues of Hawaii from the bottom of the ocean to the top of volcanoes. Fans call her stories, "Immersive, addicting, and the next best thing to being there."
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Neal also pens romance, romantic thrillers, and writes memoir/nonfiction under TW Neal.
Visit tobyneal.net for more ways to stay in touch!
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