by Toby Neal
“Get on the floor,” she told Chang, freeing her weapon beside her. She hooked the radio off the dash. “Officer needs assistance! In pursuit of a black Escalade.” She named the highway. “Suspects armed and dangerous, escaped compound from SWAT raid.”
“Ten-four, Officer. Please identify yourself.”
Lei identified herself, driving as fast as she could on the weaving, narrow road.
The Escalade couldn’t have gotten that far ahead of her, and yet it seemed it had. She began to wonder if she’d somehow whizzed past it, if they’d ducked off the main road and found a way to hide. She passed a great chunk of cast-off tire, and then another, and finally there was the vehicle, pulled over on bare rims.
Lei came up behind the vehicle and stopped on the shoulder. The smell of hot metal and burned rubber penetrated the SUV, and a bullet burst a halo of cracks in the windshield as they fired on her.
Lei threw herself sideways. Thank God Ohale’s vehicle appeared bulletproof too. Lei dropped down below the dash, ramming another clip into her Glock. “Stay down!” she yelled at Chang again.
“No shit!” Chang exclaimed.
Hunched under the steering wheel, Lei considered her options. She didn’t want the suspects getting out and fleeing on foot, but sticking her own leg out and getting shot didn’t seem like a good idea either.
“We’re going to keep them covered and wait for backup,” Lei said.
“I’m okay with that,” Chang said.
She was starting to like him. She was pretty sure he didn’t feel the same.
The minutes seemed to pass like hours. Lei poked her head up periodically to see if anyone was trying to get out of the SUV, but so far, no movement.
Finally, the scream of sirens, and now they were coming from both directions—from Hilo and from the compound.
Some of the SWAT team must be back on the road to respond to her call. Sure enough, one of the SWAT vehicles overshot her spot and spun to face the Escalade. Pulling up behind it, arriving from the other direction, were two regular police cruisers.
The SWAT leader opened his door. Lei spotted Stevens in the passenger side. The leader used a megaphone. “Driver of the Escalade. Put your hands on your head. Get out slowly, and you won’t be harmed.”
A long moment passed. Then the shattered but unbroken window of the Escalade rolled down. A gun fell out and clattered into the road. “I’m unarmed,” a voice called. “But I can’t get out.”
Lei knew that voice.
She sat up and opened her door, shouting at the SWAT leader, “He’s disabled! You have to approach the vehicle and help him out.”
No one moved. The SWAT team appeared to be conferring. The police officers had taken defensive positions behind their doors.
This was taking too long, and she wanted to get an eyeball on Ray Solomon herself. Lei darted out from behind her vehicle door and over to the SUV. She couldn’t see anyone else through the heavy tinting on the windows, so she slid along the side below the windows’ edge as she approached the driver’s door, her weapon ready
Lei could see Ray Solomon’s face, tense and frowning, his hands on top of his head, reflected in the rearview mirror. She reached him and gave the front door a sudden yank to open it and surprise anyone waiting to take a shot. Ray must have been leaning on the door, because he fell out of the vehicle at her feet, landing on the pavement with a grunt. Folded beside the driver’s seat was a wheelchair.
“You,” Ray Solomon said, his distinctive golden-brown eyes narrowing on her face.
If it weren’t for those eyes, she wouldn’t have recognized Ray. The young man she remembered had been handsome and well built; he had taken pride in his body and his ripped muscles.
The man who landed at her feet must have been close to three hundred pounds, his lower body flopping and useless. But she recognized the hate in Ray’s eyes from the last time she’d pulled him out of a car. She couldn’t help the twist of guilt and regret in her guts, because it was her bullet that had paralyzed him.
The SWAT team surrounded the vehicle, opening the doors. “Clear,” the commander said.
“Where’s Anela?” Lei asked Ray.
Ray spat. It landed on her jeans-clad leg. “Long gone. Find her yourself.”
Lei felt a hand on her arm and knew it was Stevens’s. She backed away from Ray as the man was surrounded by the SWAT team, lifted and carried to one of the cruisers. She turned to her husband but didn’t have time to speak as Ohale rolled up in another of the SWAT vehicles. He got out and joined them.
“Good work, Lei,” the captain said, holding up a neatly wrapped kilo of what looked like crystal methamphetamine. “We have a huge bust here. It was a good raid; no fatalities, thanks to non-lethal ammo.”
“Did you get Anela Chang?” Lei knew her voice was high-pitched with anxiety.
Stevens finally spoke. “Wasn’t among the prisoners. Thought she’d be in the SUV.” His face was grayish, his hair matted to his head with sweat, and Lei frowned at the sight of the red bubbles on his mouth. She reached up. Her fingers came away from his lips bloody.
“You’re injured!” she exclaimed. Stevens seemed to deflate all of a sudden, his knees buckling, and he sagged between Lei and Ohale. His breath sounded ragged and wet, and Lei felt panic jolt through her as Ohale caught Stevens and they lowered him to the road.
“First aid is on the way. Think he overdid it back there with his burn injuries, and he took a round to the back of the vest.”
“Got something to cover him up with in the back of the truck,” Ray yelled from the rolled-down window of the cruiser. “We won’t stop coming after you until you’re gone.”
Lei spun and stomped across the road toward Ray, but Ohale caught her arm. “Don’t let him bait you,” he said. “You’ve done enough. We’ll get them all. Don’t worry.”
“Come and hit me, Texeira,” Ray yelled. “Come and hit the man you crippled. You’re a dead woman walking, bitch!”
The officer driving the patrol car rolled up the window and pulled away. They heard Ray’s muffled shouts for longer than they should have.
Lei knelt next to Stevens. His face was white, his eyes closed, and she heard the fluid bubbling in his lungs as he struggled to breathe. “Where’s that ambulance?” she cried, and heard its wail finally approaching.
Several ambulances whizzed by, but only one stopped, as the others continued on to work with the injured at the compound. The emergency team wouldn’t let Lei get in as they worked quickly to get an IV into Stevens and put him on oxygen. Lei watched the vehicle pull away, tears blinding her.
“Guess you don’t want to see this right now, but at least it’s confirmation we’ve got the right guy.” Ohale held up a length of unbleached muslin shroud from a box in the back of the Escalade.
“Something to cover him up with,” Lei murmured, repeating Ray’s words. That murdering bastard.
Chapter Sixteen
Stevens never really passed out for any of the horrible hours after he’d collapsed in the road outside of Hilo. He desperately wished he could, just float away into the darkness now that he knew Lei and the baby were safe. But he was stuck in his broken corpse, struggling for every oxygen-enriched breath that he could drag into bruised, burned lungs.
He had ample time to reflect on how he should have stayed at the cottage with Wayne and Kiet and sucked on his oxygen bottle a whole lot longer instead of running off to the Big Island to participate in a raid that would probably have gone down fine without him. In the end, he hadn’t been able to do a thing to protect Lei, anyway. Getting out of her car and taking on Solomon in his blacked-out vehicle when none of the SWAT team would even approach?
It’s the final straw.
Stevens kept his eyes shut because there was nothing to see in the hospital room but the plastic oxygen tent around him, the usual equipment, and a tiled ceiling ringed with brown circles of damp. They’d shot him up with some sort of painkiller that dulled the panic out o
f the struggle to breathe, but he was far from any oblivion.
His mind kept circling back to Lei. Sitting beside the SWAT leader in that vehicle, he’d watched her get out of the car, helpless to do anything as she sidled along the Escalade with her weapon at the ready. He remembered how she peeled the door open and Solomon, who easily could have had a second weapon and plugged her in the head, landed on his back on the pavement and spat on her instead.
It was a feedback loop he couldn’t seem to pause. It’s the final straw.
He didn’t even know what that meant, but he felt the truth of it.
He must have fallen into a doze because he woke with a painful gasp to the feel of her hand in his. He knew without glancing down what it looked like: smooth, olive-tan skin; short, pale nails. It was so much smaller than his. A sturdy, capable hand that could handle a gun, a bomb, a dog, a truck, a baby.
Her hands didn’t need him for anything.
“Are you awake?” she whispered.
He opened his eyes. His bed was propped at an angle to keep the fluids in his lungs from traveling upward, and she was on the outside of the plastic oxygen tent, a shifting image as if seen through water.
“How are you feeling?”
He shook his head. Speaking hurt too much, but mostly he didn’t have anything to say.
“I was so worried.” Tears gleamed in her tilted brown eyes, one of them purplish and swollen. Yeah, she was attached to him, all right. Michael Stevens, the man who’d take her shit and keep coming back for more, fool that he was. It didn’t mean he had a function in her life beyond sperm donor.
He shut his eyes. Shut her out.
She tightened her hand on his a moment, then withdrew it from beneath the plastic. He heard rustling and scraping and then silence.
A long moment passed.
He cracked his eyelids.
She’d dragged the padded plastic armchair that extended into a bed from the corner and pushed it as close to his bed as possible. Lei was lying on it facing him, hands flat against each other tucked under her cheek, knees drawn up. She had a nasty black eye and scrapes on her arms. Her hair was frizzing out of the ball she’d rubber-banded it into.
She looked dead asleep, her face pale. She’d been so tired since the baby, and today had been intense for everyone.
He wished he could tuck her against him in her special spot, that dip between his collarbone and shoulder. Her head fit perfectly when she lay along his side there, half of a heart he never knew he’d been missing until she filled the space.
Stevens shut his eyes, mad at himself because he knew he breathed easier now that she was beside him.
A cramp woke Lei, a knot in her arm that felt like she’d been punched in that spot. The hospital room was dark but for a fluorescent floor strip and the flashing of small red monitoring lights. Someone had covered her with a blanket, and a paper-covered pillow was tucked between her head and the chair’s frame.
Lei looked over at Stevens. He was shrouded in plastic that gleamed faintly in the reflected lights, his face a formless shadow against the white pillows, but she could hear his breathing.
It was steady, regular. Still ragged and a little wet, but more relaxed.
Lei rubbed the charley horse on her arm. It must not have liked all that climbing in and out of the tree. As she rubbed, she thought of the rest of the afternoon after they took Stevens away. Wrapping up at the compound, moving the defendants to holding at the jail. Giving her statement. A post-raid debrief at the station with SWAT. Saying goodbye to Terence Chang as he was held back for more interviews. Turning over her weapons for ballistics tests. Going straight to the hospital the minute Captain Ohale would let her go.
They still hadn’t found Anela Chang. Apparently, Ray had let her out of the SUV along the road, because investigators had found a hidden shed with evidence a quad vehicle had been parked there. Fresh tracks led back onto the road and then disappeared.
Anela could be anywhere, probably traveling under a fake ID and trying to get off the island. If she and Ray were as competent and organized as they seemed to be, she’d have assets stashed somewhere.
Lei tried not to let it worry her, but she’d had run-ins before with enemies who just wouldn’t give up, and the Changs were the most persistent she’d ever dealt with. She was glad Ohale had assigned a patrol officer, now sitting outside Stevens’s room.
Lei needed to touch him. She sneaked her hand up under the plastic tent, scooting to the edge of the chair bed so she could tangle her fingers in his, gently, so as not to wake him.
Her eyes were drifting shut again when she felt his fingers leave hers, and her hand was pushed out. It fell back into her lap.
She sat up, but in the darkness she still couldn’t see if his eyes were open. His breathing had changed, though.
“Are you awake?”
No answer.
She lay back down, troubled. He was still mad at her, and she hated that.
It was a long time before she fell back to sleep.
Morning had come, filling the room with moist, rainy Hilo dawn, when Lei next woke. A nurse was working on Stevens, hooking up a cannula for oxygen. Lei watched as she took his vitals, checking his eyes and down his throat, murmuring softly to tell him what she was doing as she worked. Finally, when the oxygen was turned on, the nurse disassembled the tent.
“Oh, you’re awake,” she said warmly to Lei. “Looks like you could use a shower. You’re welcome to use the one in the bathroom.”
“Thanks,” Lei said. One glance at Stevens’s face showed her that his icy blue eyes hadn’t thawed. She felt too tired to deal with it at the moment. She went to the bathroom and got into the tiny shower stall. The flow of warmish water felt heavenly, but it was awful to dry off with the tiny, thin towel afterward and have to get back into her filthy clothes. She’d go change at the motel. She wanted to go into the station to listen to Ray Solomon’s interview, which she heard was going to be held this morning with his lawyer present.
Dressed, rubbing her dripping hair with the towel, Lei faced Stevens. “I’m going back to the motel and then into the station for a while. I’ll be back to see you at lunch.”
She waited a long minute. He’d closed his eyes, pretending to be asleep, and didn’t answer. She left, her injured eye leaking tears she didn’t notice until they wetted her shirt.
Chapter Seventeen
Lei sat in the observation room at an old Formica counter riddled with cigarette burns from the old days when smoking was allowed. The local DA sat beside her, playing with his phone as he watched the participants gathering. A tinny audio feed piped in the arrival of Ray Solomon, in a wheelchair pushed by his lawyer, a Mainland transplant called Munson. Captain Ohale and one of his detectives, Lono Smith, were conducting the interview. Lei remembered Lono from when she used to work in Hilo. He was still lean and tall but sported a bushy mustache now. He started in.
Lono: “We have your crew in custody. They’re eager to make deals, so why don’t you be the first and tell us about your operation?”
Solomon: “I don’t hear a deal there.”
Ohale: “Well, we hear Anela Chang was the brains of your operation. Where is she?”
Solomon: “We’re family. I’m not throwing Anela under the bus.”
Lono: “We have a witness who will testify Anela was the real boss.”
Solomon: “Who’s that? They don’t know shit.”
Munson: “Don’t say anything more. We still don’t hear a deal here.”
Ohale: “We don’t have to make a deal, actually. You don’t have anything we want but Anela Chang’s location. We have all we need to bury you and your operation already.”
A long pause. Lei glanced over at the DA. He was a small, dapper Japanese man she’d been briefly introduced to as Tobita. “Going to offer him a deal?” Lei asked.
“We’ll see.” Tobita shrugged. His eyes still flicked back and forth between the tableau in the interview room and his phone.
Solomon: “I was in charge. Anela is a glorified secretary, though she’d be pissed to hear me say it.”
Munson: “Don’t say anything more, sir!”
Solomon: “I want to tell them like it is. What the hell, right? So yeah. I took over my dad’s operation. My dad, Terry Chang. The real, original Terry Chang, not that lame-ass computer kid living up at the family house.”
Lei winced inwardly, thinking how much Terence Chang would hate hearing this. She hoped he never did—it was that kind of comment that might provoke him into criminal action, feeling like he had to prove something. She still remembered the first time she’d met Terence, as an angry teen tagging buildings, then later in a red do-rag, brandishing a .357 Magnum. He’d “gone straight,” but she sensed it wouldn’t take much to have him resume the family business, and Ray Solomon’s taunts could be a trigger.
The interview continued, with Solomon talking in detail on how he ran the business—the meth manufacturing in particular. She perked up and paid attention when Solomon described the gambling operation. This was the case that had originally brought her to the Big Island, and now he was handing it to her on a platter.
“We get protection money from businesses, and my tech department works up profiles on the business owners, figures out what we can tap them for. Then we set up profile-driven gambling to rope them in. It’s a low-overhead operation. We have a couple of guys providing muscle and a couple of techies running the games and PayPal accounts. It’s a nice, passive income stream.”
Lei narrowed her eyes even as she took notes. Plainly, there were going to be some suspects she needed to interview from the people they’d rounded up at the compound—unless that “department” was housed elsewhere.
It was at the disclosure of specifics that Solomon clammed up. “Given you enough for today,” he said. “But you can see Anela’s role is small.”
Lei wondered if he was trying to get the attention off Anela. What could his motivation be? She frowned, concentrating on the physical wreck that was Ray Solomon. He appeared confident and self-contained, even in a prison-orange coverall that barely contained his mass.