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When I finished with the yearbooks, I went down to the guidance counselor’s office. She was a haole woman in her late fifties, with frizzy black hair and red-rimmed glasses.
“Mrs. Matluck?” I asked, through the open doorway of her office.
“It’s Ms. Matluck, but you can call me Eileen. You are?”
“Kimo Kanapa’aka. I’m hoping to become Dakota Gianelli’s foster father.”
“Oh, Dakota. Yes, I met him yesterday. Come in and sit down.” She spoke with the flat accent of the Midwest. “I understand right now he’s living with Mrs. Gonsalves?”
I nodded. “Until my partner and I get the paperwork complete to be foster parents.”
“How can I help you?”
“I wanted to talk to you about Dakota. He’s a good kid but he’s been through a lot lately.” I sketched out his background to her, and she made a few notes.
“Punahou will be a good environment for him,” she said, when I was finished. “I hope he’ll thrive here.”
“So do I. I graduated from here, as did my brothers, so we have a strong connection to Punahou. Terri Gonsalves is one of my best friends, and has been since we were at school here.”
“I’ll keep an eye on Dakota for a while, to make sure he’s settling in well. If I have questions who should I call?”
I gave her my card, and thanked her for her time, then walked back outside. Classes had let out and there were swarms of kids everywhere. Most of them were wearing green, and it took me a minute to remember it was St. Patrick’s Day.
I didn’t even notice Dakota until he was right next to me. “Are you here to pick me up? Can I come back to you and Mike yet?”
“Dakota, it’s only been a day,” I said. “You know what Mrs. Chow said. It could take a couple of months.”
“As long as you’re here, can I come to your house for dinner? I want to see Roby.”
“Let me call Terri.”
Terri had some work she wanted to finish, so she was glad I could pick up Dakota. “I’ll bring him back to your house after dinner,” I said.
That brought up the question of what we were all going to eat. There wasn’t much food in the house, so I called Mike and he agreed to pick up a bucket of fried chicken on his way home.
“Terri says you and Mike are going to have a baby,” Dakota said as I drove through the downtown streets toward the highway.
“Not exactly,” I said, looking at him out of the corner of my eye. He was facing away from me, out the window. “Our friends Sandra and Cathy want to have a baby, and we’re donating sperm.”
He turned toward me. “So the baby won’t live with you?”
“God, no,” I said. “Oops, I shouldn’t have been so eager about that.”
Dakota laughed.
“I’m hoping that the baby will live with them, and come over to us for a visit now and then. At least until he or she gets out of diapers.”
“Babies are a pain,” Dakota said. “My cousin back home had a baby. He cried all the time, and it drove her crazy.”
“Babies can do that.”
“No, I mean, really crazy. She drowned him in the bathtub.”
“Jeez, Dakota. That’s terrible. What happened to her?”
“She went to jail. Everybody in the town where we lived knew about it and my mom got mad at some lady at a bar when she was talking trash, and punched her. My uncle paid off the lady and said my mom should take me and get out of town for a while. That’s why we came to Hawai’i.”
No wonder Dakota was screwed up, coming from the family he did. I hoped that being around Terri and Levi, and me and Mike, would help him see that there could be better things in his future.
We got home and let Roby out for a quick pee in the yard. He was so excited to see Dakota that he had a hard time concentrating on his business. I had to send Dakota inside to clean up before dinner in order to get Roby to pee.
We ate around the kitchen table, Roby sprawled on the floor next to Dakota, hoping for cleanup patrol. I had a vision of the next couple of years—me, Mike, Roby and Dakota together. Expanding our table to add Sandra and Cathy and a baby. It was going to be like our family events when I was growing up, adults and kids and dogs, everybody laughing and talking story, even a tipsy aunt or uncle doing the hula.
“Can I take Roby for his walk?” Dakota asked when we were finished eating. “Please?”
“Don’t go too far from the house,” I said. “And be sure to pick up his poop. I don’t want any neighbors yelling.”
He grabbed Roby’s leash from the counter, and the dog went through his usual jumping and twirling as Dakota tried to hook him up. I cleared the table as Mike began washing the dishes. I brushed past him on my way to the refrigerator, bumping my butt against his, and he turned around and smiled.
I leaned up and kissed his cheek, grizzled with five o’clock shadow. “How long do you think he’ll be?” Mike asked.
“Not long enough for what I want to do to you.” I wrapped my arms around him and nuzzled his neck, our bodies pressed against each other.
Then I heard the gunshot.
Immediately we disengaged and I ran for the front door. I hadn’t taken my gun out of my hip holster when we came in, so it was right there when I needed it. I burst through the front door as another shot rang out in the still evening, followed by Roby’s frantic barking.
A dark car accelerated and sped off down the street, too fast for me to get a glimpse of the license plate, or even to tell a make. Dakota was lying on the side of the road half a block from our house, holding his thigh and crying. Blood pooled around his leg. He’d let go of Roby’s leash and the dog was chasing the car down the street.
“Roby! Get back here!” I called as I ran toward Dakota.
In the background I heard Mike banging something. Where was he when I needed him? Did I run after Roby or stop to check Dakota?
Fortunately the dog turned back toward us when I called him. I leaned down next to Dakota. “What happened?”
“We were walking and somebody from that car shot at me,” he said, between gulps.
“What do we have here?”
I looked up to see Dominic Riccardi. He was a doctor at the VA hospital, where his wife, Soon-O, was a nurse. He got down to the ground and looked at Dakota’s leg. I realized Mike must have been banging on his father’s door.
A moment later Soon-O appeared with Dominic’s medical bag. “Not too bad,” Dominic said, speaking in a reassuring voice. “I’ll stop the bleeding and get you bandaged and then we’ll head over to the emergency room for a proper cleanup.”
Mike and I stepped back and let Dominic and Soon-O take over. They worked so smoothly together, and I envied them that. Mike and I alternated between love and anger so often I couldn’t imagine us ever working together.
Looking at him, I saw his mouth was set in a grim line. I was sure he was going to blame me for what had happened to Dakota.
Maybe I’d hit a nerve with Andy Gardiner, and he had sent Pika and Taki—or come himself—to take me out. Dakota was almost as tall as I was, with the same dark hair, though his was longer, and I could imagine someone might have mistaken him for me.
But it was also possible that Dakota had been the target. Perhaps Pika and Taki knew that Dakota had seen them outside the warehouse, and they were trying to wipe out a witness. Or one of Angelina’s drug-dealing associates was trying to kill him because of something we knew nothing about.
There were an awful lot of possibilities why someone would want to kill a fourteen-year-old boy. Too many.
Dominic stood up. “I’ll drive,” he said. “Soon-O will sit in the back seat with Dakota. You boys can follow us.”
He helped Dakota stand up and put his arm around the boy as they hobbled across the yard to the driveway on the Riccardis’ side of the house. Mike grabbed Roby’s leash, and took him to the house while I started my Jeep.
Dominic and Soon-O were already gone by the time Mike jumped in. “What hospital?” I asked him.
“Tripler, of course.”
Tripler was the Army Medical Center where Dominic and Soon-O worked. Though Dakota didn’t have any armed forces connection, so technically wasn’t eligible for care there, I knew that wouldn’t stop Dominic.
I backed down the driveway. “Who was it?” Mike asked.
“I don’t know. I saw a dark car speeding away.”
“But it had to be someone from one of your cases.” He turned to face me. “This is what it’s going to be like if we have kids, isn’t it? We’ll always be afraid that someone will come after us, or our kid?”
I tried not to respond to the anger in his voice. That would escalate the problem and we’d be at each other’s throats before we got to the hospital. “Dakota witnessed a man being led to his murder,” I said carefully. “And his mother’s in prison, and we don’t know what he’s been doing between the time she went away and the time we took him in. So there are way too many variables right now to make any conclusions.”
He didn’t answer, just turned forward. I parked in a visitor’s spot a few hundred feet from the emergency room entrance. “I understand what you meant now,” Mike said as we jumped out of the Jeep. “About the danger from both our jobs. I thought you just meant you and me. But now I see you meant a kid, too.”
“We can’t let fear run our lives,” I said.
We caught up to Dominic, Soon-O and Dakota at the check-in desk. The triage nurse knew Soon-O and found Dakota a treatment room. “You boys wait out here,” Dominic said as he and Soon-O led Dakota through a pair of swinging doors.
Mike and I sat down across from each other on hard plastic chairs and I dialed Terri’s number.
“We’re on our way,” she said, as soon as I explained where we were.
I ended the call and looked at Mike. “I need to call Ray and let him know what happened.”
“You can go outside,” he said. “I’ll wait here.”
I recognized the tone of his voice and wanted to rise to it, but instead I took a deep breath and walked back out to the parking lot.
“You and Julie and Vinnie all right?” I asked Ray, as soon as he answered his cell.
“Yeah. What’s wrong?”
I told him about the shooting.
“Jesus! How is he?”
“I think he’s okay. Dominic took care of him right away. We’re at the ER at Tripler now.”
“What can I do to help?”
“Be careful,” I said. “We don’t know who shot at Dakota or why. If they were after me, they could come for you next.”
Ray and Julie had been saving for a house, but for now they were still in an apartment in a Waikiki high-rise, with a doorman and a key-coded elevator. “Don’t go out tonight,” I said. “I’ll let you know if anything else happens.”
“How’s Mike taking this?”
“He’s freaked. I am, too, but I’m trying to hold it together.”
“Call if you need anything.”
I started walking around the parking lot. I wanted to get in the Jeep and drive over to Andy Gardiner’s house and confront him—but that was a bad idea. Instead I called Harry Ho. I hadn’t been able to dig up any dirt on Gardiner legitimately, but Harry had excellent hacking skills, which he loved to practice in legitimate ways whenever he could.
“Hey, brah, I’ve got a job for you,” I said, when he answered. “I need anything you can find on a guy named Andre Gardiner.”
“Hold on, let me get a pen. You sound really pissed off. What did this guy do to you?”
“Did Terri tell you Mike and I are taking in a foster kid?” I asked.
“Yeah, we talked yesterday. He’s staying with her now, right?”
“Uh-huh. Except he was over our house tonight walking Roby, and somebody took a couple of shots at them.”
“Are they okay?”
“Yeah. Dakota took a bullet in the leg, but we’re here at Tripler so Dominic can make sure he gets taken care of.”
“And you think this guy was responsible? Why?”
“It’s a gut feeling now.” I explained quickly about the death of Senator LeJeune, and the involvement of Gardiner’s father.
“Spell the names.”
I did.
“I’ll get right on it. I’ll call you when I have something.”
“Thanks, brah. You’re the best.” I hesitated for a minute, before hanging up. “You and Brandon,” I said. “I mean, I know you care about him. How did you know? I mean, did you just wake up one day and...”
“I thought he was a cute kid when I met him,” Harry said. “And then Arleen and I started dating, and she made sure that I spent time with him so I would know for sure that they were a package deal.”
I stepped onto the curb to let a speeding SUV barrel past me, toward the ER door.
“I pretty much knew as soon as I met Arleen that she was the one. I had already bought her the ring, and I was getting ready to propose, and suddenly I realized that I wasn’t just marrying her, but that I was taking Brandon on, too.”
The doors to the SUV opened and a man and woman spilled out, the woman carrying a baby in her arms.
“And I was so happy about that,” Harry said. “I realized that I loved Brandon just as much as I did Arleen, and I wanted both of them in my life. For their own selves, not just because he came with her. He’s a great little guy, you know. Sometimes he’s a brat and sometimes he’s just annoying, but he’s mine now.”
The woman carrying the baby rushed into the ER as the man stood there watching, then got back into the car and pulled slowly forward toward the parking lot.
“Thanks, brah,” I said. Then I went back into the ER myself to see what I could do.