CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The bar smelled like low tide.

The odor of mildew and stale beer clung to the air inside, but the drinks were cold, and it was relatively quiet compared to the inebriated tourist chaos out on Front Street.

I had originally intended to heave-to in some little noname bay on the leeward side a few miles south of town. Then I thought, to hell with it, sometimes the best place to remain invisible is in plain sight, a needle in a stack of needles. Besides, I believed that both Snyder and I badly needed some distraction from the storms that were gathering strength inside our heads. By the time the sun had descended to a point just over the yardarm, I’d made arrangements to tie up at the guest dock in Lahaina Harbor, locked up the boat, and walked the few blocks along the seawall toward the Lahaina Beach Club.

A couple of Absolut-on-the-rocks later, I felt better prepared to face the crowds and sample some of the barbecued ribs whose smoky aroma had been drifting across the lanai from the restaurant next door.

There was a twenty-minute wait for a table, so we took the last two seats at the bar and listened to the bartender make personal calls between bouts of ragging on his wait staff. In the far corner, a puffy-looking guy wearing a faded black T-shirt strummed a guitar and sang an endless stream of Gordon Lightfoot, Seals & Crofts, and Air Supply; a selection of seventies-lite folk/rock that made me want to shove an ice pick into my ear.

“Oh, my God,” Snyder said for both of us. “That has to fucking stop.”

At the opposite end of the bar, a trio of sunburned coeds sucked at straws that protruded from glassware that was big enough to soak your feet in. They laughed and flicked at their hair in that way that was both youthful and entirely self-conscious.

Snyder watched the girls play with their fruit garnish, which had been artfully impaled on long wooden sticks, one of them performing the ever-popular cherry-stem trick, using her tongue to twist it into a knot while the others looked on expectantly.

“How long ago was that?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Gets a little further out of focus every day.”

“Doesn’t feel like it sometimes.”

“No,” I agreed. “It doesn’t. And at other times, it feels like it happened to somebody else.”

The guitar player stopped momentarily, then adjusted his mic and launched into a particularly grating imitation of Cat Stevens. Snyder squeezed his eyes shut when the college girls began to sing along. I was surprised they knew the song at all.

“Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse,” I said, and tossed some cash on the bar.

The foot traffic on that end of Front Street was heavy, so we ducked up one of the side streets and cut over to a place I knew called the Blue Max, and walked in through the back door. The riffraff hadn’t discovered it yet tonight, so it was only about two-thirds full, mostly locals, and we took a deuce along the second-story rail that overlooked the street. Snyder stepped over to the bar for a couple of after-dinner beers as the sound system rolled out something old and pleasantly familiar by Steve Stills and Manassas. I just sat there and tried to forget what might be waiting for me out there, somewhere below the horizon. Whatever it was, I knew it would still be there in the morning.

Snyder returned to the table about the time the three college girls drifted in, all loose limbs and giggles, daddy’s credit card doing some heavy lifting. The willowy blonde looked like the kind of trouble the two brunettes didn’t even know about. She scoped the place with one pass and headed for a four-top a couple tables away from Snyder and me.

“Your girlfriends are here,” Snyder deadpanned as he set the beers on the table.

“Outstanding,” I said, and turned my attention to my beer.

Snyder lifted his glass, tilted it toward me.

“Better days,” he said.

The beer was icy and the breeze drifting in off the water cooled my skin. I looked out across the channel, watched the torchlights flicker and the outline of Molokai roil and change shape inside the heat waves they threw off.

“I’m Anna,” the voice said. The blonde appeared as if from nowhere, standing beside my chair and offering her hand.

“Mike,” I said. I shook her hand and looked across the table. “And this is Snyder.”

She let go, stumbled a little as she leaned across the table to shake Snyder’s hand. Anna gave us a wet and glassy smile. “We saw you guys at that other place.”

“The Broiler,” I said.

“Right,” she said with certainty, and stood there like she was waiting for more.

“Listen, I—”

“That’s Trish over there,” she interrupted, pointing to one of the girls at her table. “And that is Megan.”

Her friends looked embarrassed, then waved.

“Nice to meet you ladies,” I said. “Hope you girls have a nice time.”

A four-piece band took the stage and began tuning up, while Snyder and I avoided further eye contact with our new friends. Snyder was about to say something when I heard his cell phone ring. He tossed it to me without even looking at it, but I recognized the number and nearly pulled it apart in my haste to pry it open.

It was Lani.

Bar sounds and the noisy laughter of drunk young girls filled my end of the line.

I put a finger in one ear, struggled to hear Lani’s voice as I made my way from the table and down the stairs to the street to find a quiet place to talk.

“I got your messages,” she said. “Whose number is this?”

“Snyder’s.”

“Do I even want to know why I’m not supposed to call you on your own phone?”

“I had to ditch mine,” I said. “I need you to listen carefully, Lani. Something came up when I was in LA, and it might not be good. I can’t say anything more about it. I just need you to trust that I’m doing the right thing here. I can’t be at home, and I can’t tell you where I’m going. But I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“Why do I feel like we keep having this same conversation?” Her voice was calm, like drifting ice.

“I’ve got to take care of this thing,” I said.

Lani made a chuffing sound as the band upstairs ripped into an old Stones song. “Where are you?”

“I’d really rather not say.”

There was silence on the line then, a thick and heavy thing that lasted too long. “You know, for a good guy, Mike, you can really be an asshole.”

A part of me wished like hell that I could take the chance, to tell her the whole story, tell her now, but even half in the bag, I knew it was impossible, even dangerous.

“I’ll stay in touch as best I can,” I said.

“I want you to know something,” she started, but her voice caught. She cleared her throat and began again. “I’m not a jealous woman, Mike. I’m barely even angry. But you scare the hell out of me sometimes. I’m not scared for myself, but for you. The shitty things people do are not your fault. They’re not all your responsibility to fix. But it’s always like this, always so much chaos. All this secrecy and turmoil. I don’t understand what you’re doing, where you’re going. Or even why.”

“I need you to trust me. I can’t say anything more right now.”

“I know. You already said that.”

A young couple glanced at me, leaning there against the wall, phone pressed to my ear. Their faces were relaxed, vacation faces, reddened by a day on the sand. I wondered for a split second what it was like to feel the way they felt, to have never fired a weapon at another human being, never had the explosion of a shotgun shred your flesh, never have felt the flames of a riot at your back or the whistle of a bullet past your ear.

“I’ll see you when I get back, Lani,” I said.

“I don’t know if I can do this.”

The line went dead.

I squeezed the phone to the brink of snapping it in two, barely checked myself from throwing it against the wall. There was a strong pulse in my temples as I looked back across the street, and I felt my storm inching closer, creeping up over that dark horizon.

I made my way back to the boat, leaving Snyder at the Blue Max to fend for himself. There was no escape for me that night, not even with booze and loud music to drown out the echoes in my head.

I had knocked back just enough alcohol to feel morose, reliving every goddamned misstep I’d taken, every bad decision I’d made—a bad trip on the best of days. So I walked alone down Front Street, along the seawall, back toward the harbor. I thought about old cases, about the pedophiles and the wife beaters, the rapists and crackheads, the dealers and stone killers.

And I walked.

I looked at the faces of the civilians I passed. That’s how I still thought of them: civilians. I looked into their faces and saw their lives, the kids and car payments, the mortgages and maxed-out credit cards. I saw the in-laws and the unpaid loans, tight white skirts and tennis lessons, liquor bottles and lipstick stains.

And I walked.

I flashed on that last raw conversation I’d had with J.R. Lennox—the money and the name, but an emptiness so vast it should have its own zip code. That image still haunted me, like a mirror reflection from a past that never happened, and I realized he’d probably trade places with any of the people on Front Street tonight. Even me.

I walked past the jewelry stores and T-shirt shops, past the restaurants and bars. I passed a hundred different couples: couples with kids, couples on their honeymoons, couples with gray hair, couples with red faces, chubby legs and baggy shorts.

I was almost back to the dock, alongside the Pioneer Inn, when the phone rang inside my pocket. I willed it to be Lani, calling to take another stab at our aborted conversation.

“Lani,” I said. “Listen, I—”

“Travis,” the male voice said. “Check your computer.” And hung up.

I ran for the boat, threw open the companionway hatch, went to my nav table and fired up the laptop. I paced the floor as the computer went through its startup crap, then finally logged on to the server and opened my mailbox. It was from Hans:

PD report available courtesy RG, copy attached. Jeff Johnston is lead. Rat photos unavailable as yet. RG will scan and send when possible. Kemp moving under the radar. Happy sailing. Talk later. H.

There were dozens of questions I wanted to write back, but limited myself to a few equally cryptic comments. I told him I was working on some background of my own, and I’d fill him in if anything started to pop.

I downloaded the file he had attached and read through the contents.

Crime scene photos were among what Hans had sent, courtesy of Roger Gaines, so it took me a minute to realize the “rat photos” he mentioned were surveillance shots rumored to have been taken of Hans and me at the victims’ house. Gaines and Hans were going way out on a limb if they were willing to track those pictures down and scan them over.

I looked at the scene photos first.

They showed both victims facedown on the floor, heads lying in viscous black pools. Both had their hands tied behind their backs. They’d been kneeling when the bullets bored into their brainpans.

The photos that didn’t focus on the victims themselves showed every room in the house, taken from a number of different angles. I parsed through them all, seeing that place again, room by room. It was in the same condition it had been in when I’d left, right down to the mess I’d made of the computer system in the back room.

I studied the victims one last time before I moved on to the text.

The bodies had been discovered by one of their girlfriends after he failed to show up for a coffee date Monday morning. She called 9-1-1 from the house, and had been found vomiting on the front lawn by the time the responding officers arrived.

Cause of death was listed as two .25 caliber bullets to the back of each victim’s head. There were no exit wounds, as the bullets were still lodged inside of their respective skulls, and the little finger of each one’s right hand had been severed.

A preliminary search of the premises showed indications of a struggle, certain electronic equipment having been smashed and/or stolen. There was no other evidence of robbery, though both victims were missing driver’s licenses from wallets that otherwise still contained credit cards and cash. No murder weapon was recovered at the scene.

A canvass of the neighborhood revealed nothing out of the ordinary, other than a report of what might have been an altercation, said altercation being heard by a next-door neighbor in the early hours of Sunday afternoon. The neighbor placed the time at somewhere between one and three o’clock, but was unable to be more precise.

A number of fingerprints had been collected at the scene, and processing was continuing as of the time the report had been written. There was some additional blah, blah, blah, that I knew I’d return to later, but I’d read what I needed for the time being. This was clearly a professional hit, either perpetrated by unknown accomplices to the blackmail, or contractors associated with my brother. Or a cop.

I shut the laptop and went up on deck, looked back at the street life in Lahaina, let the wind clear my mind. I stood there on the fantail, listening as the sounds of a bygone whaling town morphed into the commercial tumult of its own future. Masthead pennants popped and rigging sang, and the sea broke against the seawall as it had for hundreds of years. But now, amplified music blared from car stereos, and the thrum of an endless line of internal combustion engines rumbled over the same streets that had once been rutted by the narrow wheels of horse-drawn carriages. Potted ferns grew in hanging planters, nailed to the beams and rafters of saloons where drunken whalers had once exchanged musket fire and the sudden slash of knives.

I had begun pacing Kehau, wondering why there had been no mention of my prints at the crime scene, nor any mention of surveillance photos of Hans and me, when Snyder ambled down the ramp.

“Where’d you get off to, bud?”

“Phone call,” I said. “Had to take it outside.”

He weaved slightly, standing there on the dock looking up at me.

“You coming aboard?” I asked him.

Snyder shook his head, shrugged, and moved aft to climb the ladder. I held out a hand to steady him, and assisted him over the transom. He landed stiff-legged on the rear deck, and I saw that he was in worse shape than I’d first thought.

Snyder looked at me, something hidden behind his beery eyes. He backed himself up to the captain’s chair and sat himself in it.

“Mind if I make an observation?” he asked.

“Why not?”

“You’re stuck between worlds, my man. I know the look, and I am familiar with the symptoms. I’ve been there.”

“And?”

“Look around,” he said, gesturing broadly toward the open ocean. “There’s a reason people like you and me choose to live in a place like this. A place with a two-thousand-mile moat around our houses. Hell, man, you don’t even have a house. Your whole life is surrounded by water.”

“What’s your point, Snyder?”

“We are not the kind of people who appreciate shit sneaking up on us.”

He crossed his arms and leaned back into the chair. He closed his eyes for a few seconds and smiled to himself. “How about a nightcap?”

“I can’t imagine that will help either of us,” I said.

“Don’t see how it’ll do any harm, either. What’s it going to do, put you in a bad mood? You’re already there, and you’re all by yourself.”

He had a point. I reached into the Coleman and pulled two bottles from the ice and uncapped them.

“You finished with your observations already?” I asked. “Pretty pithy for a bartender.”

“I was not speaking as a bartender. I was speaking as a man who has walked a mile in your flip-flops, bud.”

“Then let’s hear it.”

He leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees.

“You want peace in your world, but you can’t handle injustice. You want a life with Lani, but you’re afraid all the shit from your other life will follow you through the door. So what do you do, right?”

I took a long pull from the bottle and listened. I couldn’t argue with what he’d said.

“You either stand still and let Darwin have his way,” he continued. “Or you put the boots on their throats, drop the shit where it belongs and pull the chain.”

“Full throttle or fuck it.”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

We drank for a while in silence and listened to the night.

“Thanks for the use of your phone,” I said finally. I withdrew it from my pocket and held it out to him.

“I don’t need it right now,” he said. “You hang on to it. It’s making your life miserable, and I don’t want it.”

“We’re both going to need new numbers when this thing is over.”

He nodded and that faraway expression took over his face again.

“You’re a good man, Mike Travis,” he said. Then he nodded to himself, confirming his judgment. He stood and slow-motioned his way down the stairwell, through the galley and into his stateroom below.