CHAPTER NINETEEN

I parked near the foot of the pier, in the late afternoon shade of a banyan tree that was alive with the rustling of mynah birds that roosted deep inside its branches.

There was no sign of Dave yet, so I took a seat on a weather-beaten railroad tie that served as a parking bumper and waited.

I tried to watch the line of customers clambering up the boarding ramp to the Oceanic Dive boat, or the kinetic preparations of the crew aboard Captain Bean’s booze cruise, but I couldn’t stay focused, kept drifting back to Lola’s.

My relationship with Lani had always been one of silences. From the beginning, it had been those long, quiet moments that we fell into, a nearly tangible thing we indulged ourselves in as we learned to know one another. They were sensual silences at first, but they had lately begun to change into something different, stretching into lapses that demanded interpretation as they grew deeper.

I could see she was searching for me inside those widening silences, but that’s not where I could be found. I was in the spaces between, on the uncharted islands I constructed for myself where there was no police work, but perhaps very little else. I had sailed away from that other coast so I could begin again, start over; there were so many things I didn’t want to bring into this new life. But despite my strongest intentions, those things had begun to seep between the cracks and fissures, into the spaces and silences like smoke, and stained everything they touched.

I looked mauka, past the steeple of the Congregational Church, to a mountain dotted with rooftops, the evidence left behind by intermittent surges of economic development. In between lay expanses of lush green coffee, papaya, mango, and the untamed and untended soil grown over with philodendrons, tall native grasses and heavy vines. My eyes played across familiar landmarks until I located my coffee plantation, certain that Tino was still up there working.

I was pulled back by the spontaneous musical laughter of a gathering of little girls in the distance. They were preparing for a hula class, and their noises rippled across the narrow throat of the channel from Hulihee Palace, where ladies wearing oversized woven-straw hats waited on the wide swath of lawn for the show to begin.

“Hey, Mike,” Snyder said, startling me. He had strolled across the street, on the way to his bar, and seen me sitting there. I hadn’t heard his approach. “How was LA?”

“The same,” I said. “If that’s the center of our cultural universe, we’re fucked.”

“I’ve got your mail over at the bar. You want it?”

“I’ll grab it later on.”

Snyder stepped into the shade beside me, placed one hand across his brow to block out the glare as it flashed off the rippling chop, and looked out toward the Kehau. Wafts of rock music carried over to us on the wind.

“Been going nonstop like that since you left. I assume Yosemite is boat-sitting.”

“Good guess.”

“You’re a hell of a good host when you’re not on the island,” he said and clapped me on the shoulder as he began to walk away. “Come by and get your mail once you’ve hosed the puke out of the gunwales. I’ll have an Asahi waiting.”

I watched him walk away, past the children as they played in the lagoon that bounded the hotel.

When I looked back again toward Kehau, I saw my skiff, the Chingadera, ripping toward me, and for no reason at all, felt the first trace of respite from my toxic mood.

“I wasn’t expecting you ’til tomorrow,” Yosemite said. “I thought that’s what you told me when you called.”

“It is tomorrow,” I said, and tossed my bag and briefcase on the deck of the skiff.

An expression that almost passed as embarrassment crossed his face. It disappeared as quickly as it had come. He was wearing a T-shirt that said BEAUTY IS ONLY A LIGHT SWITCH AWAY, and he smelled of beer, fresh fruit and rum.

“Time’s a motherfucker,” he said and pushed away from the dock with the sole of his bare foot.

He smiled and pulled a cold beer from a covered cooler, handed it to me.

“I stopped by Jake’s on the way over. Teri said she hasn’t seen you in a couple days.”

He tossed off a loose shrug.

“Taking care of your boat, bro,” he said. “Can’t leave Kehau out here by herself. That’s not why you’re paying me the big bucks.”

I took a pull off the beer, smiled and shook my head. “You smell like a party.”

“It’s a ‘Welcome Home’ party.”

“For who?”

“For you.”

Dave kicked up the throttle and sent a flume of white water across our wake.

“Thought you weren’t expecting me until tomorrow,” I reminded him, shouting over the roar of the twin Evinrudes.

He took on a pained expression, explaining something to a dim student. “Getting an early start, man. You’ve met me, right?”

Five minutes later, I was climbing up the aft ladder and boarding the Kehau. There were at least thirty people in various stages of inebriation and undress on deck, about half of whom I recognized. No telling where the others had come from. Dave collects people like others collect loose change.

The stereo was blasting out something from the eighties, while a pair of sturdy-looking girls danced with one another on the foredeck, naked to the waist. A tall, skinny guy I had never seen before leaned against the chrome railing and watched the two girls dance while he puffed on a hand-rolled cigarette that cast a dubious odor in my direction. If he was any higher he’d need to paint numbers on his tail.

“Yosemite,” I said. “I’m going below to stow my gear.”

Dave nodded and made for the bar. I grabbed his arm and pulled him close enough so I didn’t have to shout.

“When I come back topside, I don’t want to see anything illegal happening up here.” I shot my eyes across at the skinny guy poofing the bone. “Okay?”

Dave appeared alarmed, as he should have been. The Coast Guard takes a dim view of the presence of controlled substances found aboard commercial vessels. I could lose my license, maybe even my boat.

“Goddamn it,” he said. “I told everybody about that.”

“I don’t see a thing,” I said. “Just get it the hell off my boat.”

I shouldered my way through a galley full of people and into the narrow companionway that led to my stateroom. My eyes strayed across the new doorjamb, at the place where the old one had once absorbed the brunt of a shotgun blast that had been meant for me. I opened the door and walked into the master stateroom, which was mercifully devoid of party guests, and closed out the noise wafting down from the galley. Bass notes reverberated through the hull and the footfalls of dancers bounced off the ceiling as I unlocked the drawer beside the bed where I had stowed my Beretta Tomcat. It is a sweet little .32 caliber with an overall length of about five inches, weighing in at just more than twelve ounces. Fifteen in the clip and fit perfectly in the special pockets I’d had sewn into my shorts. It was almost completely undetectable when I carried, and packed more muscle than the Bobcat model I used to carry.

Now that I was back home, I would put all my weapons back where I usually keep them: one in the galley, one in the wheelhouse, and one in the nightstand. Despite the distance from my old life, I never liked being too far from firepower.

After putting in my papers with the LAPD, I had studied meditation for a while in an effort to provide a bit of yang to balance the yin of the violence that represented the other aspects of my life. So I sat for a moment in the relative quiet of my stateroom, and focused on an imaginary spot on the wall, trying like hell to regain my center. As I attempted to empty my mind, the images of the past seventy-two hours flashed through: images of airports and flight lounges, limousines and rental cars and hotel bars. I saw Hans and Mie, Valden and Lennox and Kelleher, cocktail parties and blackmail schemes until they all ran together into an unruly abstract triptych that demanded I either hang it for display right there on my wall or burn the bastard to a crisp and flush the ashes.

I opened my eyes and decided a hot shower and a change of clothes would more effectively help adjust my attitude.

When I came back topside some time later, Yosemite was busy ferrying a batch of people back toward the pier in the Chingadera. I asked his girlfriend, Rosie, what he was up to. She told me Dave didn’t think that that particular group had a proper appreciation for the house rules.

“Hell with ’em,” she said. “The party’s more manageable without ’em anyway.”

Rosie was a redhead with a full-throttle brain and a temper to match, and a fierce loyalty to the people she considered friends. Dave had fallen for her the minute he met her. Their roommate, Melinda, was another story.

“So, is Lani coming?” Rosie asked me.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

She looked puzzled. “Working?”

I shook my head.

Rosie spoke in a tone that was part assurance, part condolence. “She’ll be okay.”

We stood there for a few beats, allowing the breeze to blow the awkwardness away. She tossed a glance over my shoulder toward shore, toward Lola’s, then back to me.

“Let’s get you a beer,” she said. “This is supposed to be a party, goddamn it.”

By midnight the only remaining sounds in the air were the rush of waves as they broke against the seawall, snippets of bad karaoke from one of the bars along Alii Drive, and the animated conversation taking place in the stern cockpit of my yacht. There were only five or six of us left by then, each just a little more drunk than we were letting on.

The coals from the barbecue grill cast a throbbing glow on the faces gathered around the banquette, and I watched from my place in the captain’s chair, bare feet propped on the wheel, as Rosie got up a bit unsteadily and handed Melinda the bottle of Jack Daniel’s she’d been drinking from. Dave held out a hand to support her, and then she disappeared down the stairs. Melinda was the third roommate in the house Dave and Rosie shared upslope, in the Palisades. She was a dark-skinned brunette who was long on opinions that were short on research, and who harbored a simmering dislike for me whose origin I had never understood. In deference to the obvious absence of Lani, she was taking it uncharacteristically easy on me.

Melinda took a pull at the whiskey bottle that was being passed from hand to hand and chased it with a beer. She convulsed with a belch, and her eyes went momentarily glassy. Dave took the bottle from her, wiped the neck with his shirttail and took a pull for himself.

I heard Rosie rummaging through the CD drawer below as I looked up into the clear night sky. The southern wind had kept up for most of the afternoon, and the moon had disappeared. The atmosphere was crisp and flooded with stars.

A minute later, Janis Joplin’s voice wailed from the stereo. Rosie was singing along with her and gyrating her way back topside, and Melinda had popped back to life.

The whole thing suddenly felt like a wake. I must have had an odd expression on my face, because Rosie came up behind me and began massaging my shoulders, as if to take all my pain away. I shot Dave a questioning look, and the one he gave me back told me to shut up and roll with it.

“C’mon, Mike,” she said. “Try to relax.”

I wasn’t in the mood for this anymore.

“I’m going to bed.”

Melinda rolled her eyes and took a sloppy pull from her beer.

Nobody else seemed to notice when I stood up, stretched, and lobbed my empty Asahi into the cooler.

I left Rosie, Dave and the rest of them. Melinda was rocking slowly back to sleep as she sat on the deck, her head resting against the bulkhead. I descended the stairs with their voices at my back, climbed into my bed, and tried to fall asleep to the lazy rhythm of water slapping the hull, the draw and strain of Kehau’s mooring ropes, and the hint of Lani’s perfume on my pillow.