CHAPTER 53

“If they come after me, Corvelli, I come after you.”

John Tatupu spoke these words in my ear once he was finally released from the witness stand late in the afternoon.

Once the courtroom cleared out, Jake and I gathered our things, walked down the hallway, and stepped into the empty Lawyers Room.

“Tatupu was right,” Jake said immediately. “His testimony alone isn’t going to prove enough. At the end of the day the jury might want to pat Turi on the back for shooting Bristol, but they’re not going to acquit him of Bristol’s murder.”

I turned on my cell phone and punched in Audra’s number, but the call went straight to voicemail.

“I fucked up,” I said, running my hand through my hair, which was damp with sweat. “I should have went with a straight defense. Explained away the five grand in Turi’s pocket with Mindy Iokepa, hammered away on the fact that there was no gunshot residue on Turi’s hands or clothes, carved up the eyewitness, and brought in a dietitian to explain to the jury how many obese men live on Oahu.” I rested my elbows on the folding table and dropped my head in my hands. “I’m a terrible fucking lawyer.”

“You’re an excellent lawyer who employed a terrible fucking strategy by forgetting that trials aren’t about getting to the truth.”

Jake was right. Somehow in the months since Erin’s suicide I’d grown a conscience with respect to my moves in the courtroom, and it was going to kill my client. What the hell had I been thinking?

“All we have left,” I said, “is Max Guffman and our own ballistics expert, who can’t really say much of anything at this point unless it’s framed in a hypothetical.”

“What about putting Turi on the stand?”

“I can’t. If I put him on the stand, we have to talk about the gun, and that opens the door to the gun’s history and the bullets found in Alika Kapua.”

Jake was flipping through his yellow legal pad. “Let’s not forget who this trial is really about.” He tapped a page where he’d written one name in large letters across the center. “The man who either ordered Kanoa Bristol to execute Turi Ahina or at the very least was the reason behind Bristol’s murder attempt.”

M A S O N E T

Strangely enough, just seeing the name helped me retain focus. “You’re right, Jake. It’s all about Masonet. I have to start at the beginning. After the raid on the Tiki Room but before the shooting.”

“Where does that put you?”

I hesitated, a rotten feeling filling my gut. “Chinatown,” I muttered.

I stared at the page with the single name and thought about my next step: returning to the bar where the feds’ plan to capture Masonet went awry. I had to confront the giant, Lian, and Tam himself. Find out who Tam relayed Turi’s message to. I had to trace that message all the way up to Masonet himself.

And if Masonet hadn’t yet left the island …

Maybe he could be captured before Turi’s case was given to the jury.

I stared at Jake’s page, envisioning myself back in Chinatown with Scott and his Walther.

M A S O N E T.

The letters began to move on the page.

T E N O S A M

10

O

S A M

“Son of a bitch.”

Jake looked up from the folding table. “What is it?”

“A number, a letter, and a name.”

I jotted them down and slid the legal pad across the table back to Jake, cursing myself for not seeing it sooner.

“So?” he said.

“So that’s the code if you want to score a high-priced harlot in Honolulu.”

“You mean…”

“Yeah. Orlando Masonet is behind the Eastern European sex trade here in the islands.”

It made perfect sense. The night of the shooting in Pearl City, Audra told me the feds suspected that, in addition to the manufacture and sale of ice, Masonet controlled the four G’s in the islands: girls, gambling, guns, and ganja.

“What does that mean for Turi?” Jake said.

I thought about it. “Maybe nothing. But what it means for me is that I don’t have to go back to a deadly dive bar in Chinatown to try to track down Masonet. What I have to do is head on down to Waikiki and pay a long overdue visit to Gavin Dengler.”