CHAPTER 2

“Would you be a sweetheart and get me a bottle of water?” she says, rubbing my chest as I’m about to drift off to sleep. “There’s a vending machine just down the hall.”

There’s also a sink in the bathroom and that’s just where I head, ripping the protective plastic from the flimsy plastic cup provided for our convenience by the eight-hundred-dollar-a-night resort. Groggy and naked, I hold the cup under the bathroom faucet and spin the knob, waiting for the tepid water to spout forth. But all I hear is a soft swooshing sound and the cup and the sink remain dry as a bone.

I briefly consider just falling back into bed, but I don’t feel like getting dressed and walking home. And I fear that’s just where this will lead if I don’t manage to snag the cougar some Dasani or Aquafina before the night’s end. So I suck it up, slip into my boxers, and snatch two singles off the cougar’s nightstand.

Then I head for the door. I’m only thirty-two but I don’t recover from drinking quite as rapidly as I used to, and I’m concerned I’m going to be too sick to make it to court in the morning. My partner Jake Harper might be able to cover for me, but it’s almost one A.M. and I have little doubt that he’s drunk, too, probably still banging back glasses of Jameson at Whiskey Bar in downtown Honolulu, swaying to live Irish drinking music with that girlfriend of his. I wonder briefly if I’ll still be hitting the bottle as hard as he is when I’m sixty-seven.

After unlatching three locks I step out into the hall, shielding my eyes from the lights. I pad down the Shining-esque corridor lumbering like a George A. Romero zombie, not dressed but still dripping with sweat. The usual trade winds have been absent from the leeward side these days, and the heat is really starting to get to me. After only eighteen months in the islands, I’m already starving for a nice ice cold day of New York City winter. Maybe even a nor’easter.

Eyes half shut, I glimpse a sign for the vending machines and turn right, dismayed to find a kid of four or five dangling a wrinkled dollar bill in front of the Coke machine, apparently trying to decide which beverage best suits his palate, or which best complements the package of Drake’s Devil Dogs he has waiting for him back at the room.

I sigh loudly enough for him to hear me, hoping he’ll catch the hint. He doesn’t. Doesn’t appear to be the sharpest crayon in the box either. It’s an awful thing to think, I know, but it’s nearing one A.M. and I have to brave heavy H-1 traffic and the big hard Hawaiian sun in just a few hours, and someway, somehow, I’ve got to sleep off the half gallon of light and dark rum that is presently engaged in a race war in the pit of my stomach. So sue me.

“Need a hand, kid?” I say, trying to speed things along.

The kid looks me up and down, and I’m suddenly conscious of the fact that I’m not wearing clothes, that I’m standing in front of a preschooler in a pair of pineapple-pattern boxer shorts, asking the kid if I can lend him a hand. As a criminal defense attorney, I realize this is how you end up at a criminal defense attorney’s door. Hell, this is how you end up on Dateline.

The kid shakes his head.

“Shouldn’t you be in bed?” I say, then hope like hell that Chris Hanson isn’t lurking around the corner with the “To Catch A Predator” microphones and cameras. I swear, NBC viewers, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.

“I’m thirsty,” the kid says.

“So’s the cougar,” I mumble, “so let’s get this show on the road.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing,” I say, motioning toward the vending machine. “Go ahead.”

The kid turns back to the machine, still swinging his wrinkled old dollar. “Grandma got some soda from room service,” he says, “but it tasted all oogie. I don’t think there was any sugar in it. Grandma’s a diet-betic. I just want a Dr Pepper, but look…” He points to his selection. “The red light is lit. That means it’s all out.”

“Maybe they have some Dr Pepper on another floor,” I suggest.

He stares up at me as though he’d forgotten I was standing here, his messy brown hair falling into his eyes. Looking at him, I almost feel sorry for the kid. Almost.

“Will you come with me?” he asks.

I shake my head. “No can do, kid.” I move toward the machine with my own two bills and notice the red light is lit over the Dasani bottled water, too. The luck just keeps on coming. “On the other hand,” I say with a sigh, “I’d be more than happy to.”

The kid holds out his grubby paw and I grudgingly accept it, escorting him to the stairwell to avoid the elevators. In the stairwell the echoes of our footfalls ricochet off the cement walls like stray bullets, his Sunday shoes clopping like a pony’s, my bare feet slapping against the stairs like a wet seal’s flippers. On the next landing I catch our reflection in the glass case that houses the fire extinguisher. A tiny kid and a tall nearly nude stranger holding hands in an empty hotel stairwell at one A.M. This doesn’t look good for anybody. If someone spots us, I’m off to jail. Me with my pineapple boxers, reeking of rum and cougar sex, promising a preschooler a refreshing Dr Pepper from a vending machine on a lower floor of a tropical beach resort.

“Sorry about the way I’m dressed, kid,” I say as we approach the door to the fifteenth floor of the Liholiho Tower.

“Oh, that’s okay,” he says. “I heard some girls saying you looked really warm in your suit before.”

I pause, my hand on the door handle. “What’s that?”

“Downstairs in the lobby,” he says. “I saw you before, talking to some old lady.”

“Hey, kid, she isn’t that old.”

He shrugs. “Anyway, while you were talking to the old lady, some young lady was talking about how you looked really hot in your suit,” he says, “and her friend said she’d like to help get you out of it.”

“Is that so?” I say, smiling. I open the door to the fifteenth floor. “Hey, how old are you, kid?”

He holds six fingers in the air. Then he says, “Four.”

Smart kid.

As we move down the hall toward the vending machines I warn the kid not to make any noise, then realize that if Chris Hanson’s around, I’m only getting myself in deeper and deeper. This transcript’s apt to buy me four to six years at the Halawa Correctional Facility, at least.

“Here we are,” I say, thrilled to see not a single red light on the machine, not by the Dr Pepper, not by the Dasani. “And it looks like we’re good to go.”

The kid rushes up to the Coke machine and tries to push his wrinkled old dollar bill into the slot. The machine spits it back out.

“Let me try,” I say, plucking the bill from the kid’s tiny hands and smoothing it out against the wall. I slide it in. This time the machine swallows it down.

The kid’s eyes light up.

“Okay,” I say, holding out my hand. “Now one more.”

The kid shrugs, looks up at me as though I just spoke to him in Mandarin Chinese.

“You don’t have another single?” I say. “No change?”

The kid pulls out his pockets like an elegant hobo. An old gum wrapper flutters to the floor but nothing else. “Grandma don’t have no more change,” he says. “I threw it all in the fountain downstairs with the fish. I had to make a bunch of wishes.”

I sigh. “Ya know, a bottle of Dr Pepper is two bucks,” I tell him. “A bottle of Dr Pepper from a vending machine is two bucks in every hotel in the English-speaking world.”

He shrugs his shoulders again, then eyes my left hand and the two bills I’m squeezing into my fist.

“All right,” I say, moving toward the machine. I slide in one of the cougar’s dollar bills and allow him to select the Dr Pepper.

The bottle tumbles downward and lands with a thunk. The kid reaches his hand in and shouts, “Thanks!”

“Sure, kid,” I say, glancing from the single I have left to the two-dollar price tag below the Dasani. “Let’s go.”

We head back upstairs. There are eight rooms down our end of the hall, four on each side, each with an adjoining suite. The kid’s room is just next door to the cougar’s, but the kid’s room is adjoined to the last room on the left, not to ours. The last room on the left has a baby blue garter hanging from the door handle. Looks like I’m not the only one getting lucky tonight. Though, of the two of us, I am the only one who gets to sneak out the door come morning.

I bid the kid good night and tell him to keep our little soda mission a secret. Or at least not to mention the pineapple boxers.

He nods his head and walks toward his room. I turn and hustle down the hall to pay a visit to the ice machine.

When I return to the cougar’s room I pull her key card from the pocket in my boxers meant for condoms. I quietly open the door and step inside.

The cougar’s sitting up in bed, her arms wrapped around her toned, tanned legs. “Well, that sure took you long enough,” she says.

I nod and douse the lamp she’d turned on above the desk.

“Where’s my water?” she asks, holding out her hand with indignation.

“Here, baby,” I say, placing a thick melting cube of ice in her palm. “Suck on this.”