CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Monday morning traffic moved slowly over the surface streets as we wound our way from the Mandalay Plaza all the way out to the Burbank airport. The morning had broken cold and gray, with a high overcast cloaking the whole of the LA basin.

Valden and I sat together in the rear seat of his limousine, the privacy divider scrolled up between ourselves and Jimmy, his driver. We had words with respect to what my brother needed to do next in order to best ensure that all of this crap was concluded with prejudice, as well as what he should do for those innocent parties who had been caught in the fallout. Valden had been predictably defensive, but following a brief and ineffective tirade, it had been a predominantly silent ride.

We pulled to a stop at the curb in front of the private aircraft terminal and I faced my brother one last time before I exited the car.

“Just so we’re clear, you’ll do what I told you, right?”

He straightened his tie and drummed his fingers on the leather seat in the space between us. “You’re assigning my Acts of Contrition?”

“Transgressions have consequences, Valden. They don’t require punishment. Thanks for the ride.”

He remained in the car as I gathered my briefcase and bag off the jump seat and got out.

I stopped off at the driver’s side window and waited for Jimmy to roll it down. He masticated his Dentyne and stared at me through a pair of opaque sunglasses.

“I’m sure I don’t need to tell you never to discuss what happened here,” I said.

He moved his eyes off me and gazed through the windshield.

“You are a very difficult man to like,” he said. “I can see why Mr. Van de Groot has issues with you.”

I smiled and tapped the doorframe.

“Keep the shiny side up, Jimmy.”

The woman standing behind the counter at Executive Aviation appraised me with a cool once-over as I passed through the door. Her obdurate gaze reminded me how tired I was of this particular brand of Southern California bullshit.

I gave her my name and she informed me the VGC Gulfstream was fueled and nearly ready for boarding.

I took up a place in the lounge, steeped myself a cup of tea and looked out the window at the line of hotel and rental-car buses making the crawl around the commercial end of the airport loop. I was tired. Bone tired. Tired of petty people, and tired of their scams and petty plans, tired of their pretension and their lies, and the politics of self-interest. I was sick to death of objects and things, sick of shops and storefronts filled with objects and things, and of the perpetual quest to accumulate more and more and more. I was revolted by the notion of hearing any more speeches, disgusted by recycled opinions—I’d heard every goddamned one of them before, as though everything worth saying had already been said a thousand other times by a thousand other people, any one of whom was probably a thousand times smarter than the ones who were saying them now.

It was time to go home.

I was ushered aboard the jet and took a seat near the cockpit. I was traveling alone, but for the flight crew. An attractive attendant offered me a drink, which I declined and looked out the window as the engines ran up.

My mind wandered back on the twenty years I spent on these streets. How the victims were still victims, the robbed were still robbed, the raped were still raped, and the dead were still dead.

We pulled out onto the active runway and awaited permission for takeoff.

Son of a bitch, I thought, every time I come back to this town, it slithers back inside me. I had never intended to be a cynic, never imagined I would feel such contempt, and especially had never wanted to lose hope. I wanted to believe in greater things, like grace, like justice, like integrity; I wanted to believe in heroes or a higher purpose, for Christ’s sake.

As we gained altitude and banked toward the western horizon, I could see the flicker of flames that ornamented the tips of the exhaust stacks at the refinery near Signal Hill. I turned away and pulled the window shade down.

Good-fucking-bye.

It was three o’clock in the afternoon by the time I landed in Kona.

Fifteen minutes later, I had retrieved my Jeep, paid the parking lot attendant, and was heading down Queen Kaahumanu Highway with the wind in my hair. The vog had been cleared from the sky by a steady southern breeze, so the ocean met the sky in a line that was as sharp as a razor, and I tuned the radio to the Hawaiian music station just in time to catch the beginning of Kaikina’s pau hana drive time show. The Makaha Sons were playing their version of “Hopoe.” I cranked the volume and let the warm wind bring me back to a reality I understood.

The parking lot behind Jake’s Diving Locker was jammed with cars by the time I got there, so I parked in the dirt between the Hard Rock and the Yacht Club, stashed my briefcase and carry-on in the lockbox welded to the back of the Jeep, and picked my way across the rocks and gravel.

The air was sweet with gardenia and salt spray, the sky blue and cloudless. Traffic was brisk along Alii Drive, but the boisterous racket of a volleyball game being played on the sand court between the buildings blotted it out. I cut across the freshly clipped grass and stopped at the ice cream place on the corner, the one that Lani and I like to go to after dinner in town, before making the long walk back to the pier, or back to her apartment.

I waited in line behind a pair of middle-aged tourists and their two spoiled kids. Stop throwing napkins, okay, sweetie? Okay, honey? Say please. Say thank you. Don’t step on the nice man’s toes.

A double scoop of haupia ice cream had dripped a thin, white trail down the cone and across the hairs on my wrist by the time I got upstairs to Lola’s. Lani had her back to me—busy making change for a group at the far end of the bar—so I slipped onto a stool on the shady side and waited for her.

A minute later, she turned around and spotted me. She made her way over and showed me a smile that didn’t quite reach all the way to her eyes.

“You’re back,” she said.

“I brought you lunch.”

The corners of her brown eyes turned downward and looked like she might burst into tears. Lani took the cone from my hand and licked around the soft, melted part near the bottom.

Lola’s was fairly quiet, between customer rushes, and it was not quite time for happy hour, so I just sat there watching her, seeing that girl as I had seen her, the girl at the beach with the sand dusting the tops of her feet. She was wearing a red hibiscus tucked behind her left ear, long hair falling free, now and again catching a gust that blew in off the bay.

“You’re staring at me,” she said, and brought me back to the bar at Lola’s.

“I know.”

Neither of us had been happy with the way I had left for the mainland. I had amends of my own to make.

“Listen,” I began, “I’m sorry I wasn’t—”

Lani held up a hand, glanced hastily around the bar.

“I’ll buy you a beer,” she said.

I watched her step back toward the cooler. She returned a minute later with a bottle of Asahi and a tall glass filled with ice. Her eyes never left mine as she poured it and put the bottle down softly as the beer foam met the rim.

“Threads, Mike,” she said softly. “I’ve been thinking about threads.”

I watched her search my face for understanding, not finding it.

“Like a knitted sweater,” she said. “Most times, if you pull one of those loose threads, the whole thing starts to come apart.”

“And you think that’s what’s happening here? With us?”

She gazed out toward the bay and frowned as she collected her thoughts.

“No, not exactly. It’s more like . . . It’s like you miss a flight you were supposed to take. You forget to set your alarm, and you suddenly wake up all panicky. You’re late. You throw all the stuff you had lying on the bathroom counter into your suitcase, and you race around the house locking the doors, grabbing your car keys and rushing to the airport. You park your car, run through the lot to the ticket counter and when you get there the ticket agent tells you your plane already took off. You’re all upset, right? So you take the next flight, like three hours later, and you sit around the airportangry and upset, kicking yourself for not setting the alarm clock.”

She hesitated then, only for a moment, waiting for me. I nodded, watching her tie her story together.

“But then you finally get to where you were going,” she continued. “And you find out that the plane you missed—the one you were supposed to be on—crashed and killed everybody on board. It’s like that. It’s as though you’re alive just because you forgot to set your stupid alarm.”

I sat in silence for a long moment, looked past her, looked past the tourists seated along the railing, out to the Kehau as she lay on her moorings. I took a deep breath, held it a little too long.

“Mike?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I really am.”

“It occurred to me,” she said,. “While you were gone.”

I felt a knowing anger then. Not a hot-skinned, burning anger, but the kind that moves in like frustration’s abusive stepfather.

“You’re upset that I left the way I did,” I said.

Her smile was patient, a little sad. “No.”

“Then what?”

“It’s your priorities, Mike. You’re just so damned independent, so God damned self-sufficient. I want to be needed.”

It sliced straight through me, that bit of truth. For most of my life, I’d desired independence more than anything, had even changed my name to attain it. But I never imagined that independence carried a downside, never thought it would exact a price. And then I thought that maybe it wasn’t independence at all.

I thought about how I had felt when I was a cop. There had been times I was so consumed by the job I was sure if it were ever taken away, I’d completely disappear. I wasn’t that man now, didn’t want to be.

“There’s nothing I need more than I need you, Lani,” I said.

It appeared in her eyes at that moment. That thing I’d grown to love about her. The dim reflection of whatever hope she still allowed herself, and the kind of wisdom of experience I knew she had never asked for.

I started to say something, but she waved me off. She dabbed her eyes with a cocktail napkin and tried to smile.

“I have to go,” she said.

I leaned across the bar and kissed the soft skin behind her ear.

“I love you, Mike,” she whispered. A tear escaped along her cheek and she hugged herself tight. She turned away before I could ruin it with another word.

I stopped in at Jake’s Diving Locker to see if Yosemite was working.

The place smelled of wet suits and newly printed T-shirts. Framed photos of manta rays and tropical fish and Jerry Garcia wearing an aloha shirt hung along the walls. An eel hunkered down among the rocks inside a huge aquarium and I watched some kids tap on its acrylic walls. Yellow tangs and Moorish idols swam in aggravated circles seeking escape from the attention of the irritating little bastards.

“Good God, Mike. You all right?” It was Teri, one of the owners. “You look like something my cat coughed up.”

“Just a little tired,” I lied. “Dave around?”

Teri rolled her eyes. “Your boat’s been a floating party for the past two days.”

Perfect.

I thanked her and called Yosemite on the cell phone as I walked back to the Jeep. Yelling to make himself heard above the music that blasted in the background, he told me he’d pick me up at the pier in ten minutes. I jumped into my Jeep, cranked the engine and headed out, leaving a rooster tail of gravel dust floating across the lot.

I came to a stop at the corner and waited to make the turn onto Alii. I cast my eyes up between the palms and into the shade of Lola’s bar, feeling void and sodden. A loud honk from a rented convertible behind me sent a sudden rush of adrenaline straight to my brain, and I felt something untamed threaten to breach the wall and cut loose in a kind of nameless, pointless hostility.

I’d had enough. Enough Valden Van de Groot and limo drivers named Jimmy. Enough Phillip Lennox and congressmen named anything, and enough mainland attitude to last three lifetimes. Then it all drained away, leaving only that bone-deep fatigue I had awakened with that morning.

I threw the big Jeep into gear, pulled out onto the street, and did something I swear I will never do again: I wondered what the hell else could possibly go wrong.