CHAPTER FORTY

I climbed into a bottle and stayed there for the better part of three days.

I wasn’t useless drunk, just drunk enough to pace myself so that it required less than forty-eight hours to find the bottom of a half gallon of Absolut that still had the seal on it when I’d started. It’s the nights I don’t remember much. But Snyder had the helm, and the Kehau was sailing a fine reach before the trades. It would be another four days before we would be back in Kona.

Even in the depths of my intoxication, though, my awareness of the costs and consequences of the events of the past two weeks in my life threatened to eat through the lining of my soul. The sun wouldn’t burn it away, and the alcohol wouldn’t purify it; I couldn’t sweat it out, and there was nowhere for me to run.

I’d seen J.R. make good on his promise to May Ling. I had been in the room when his lawyer called to say that he had found a statute in the immigration law that had been established to protect people who had been smuggled into the country against their will. The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act. It not only made May Ling and her son eligible to remain in the US, it allowed her to sue her captors.

J.R. was footing the bills in an effort to locate Joey Soong and anyone else he could find who had been involved in May Ling’s abduction. I knew J.R. would never let go until Soong was roasting on a spit in some remote corner of hell.

I had shaken the hand of J.R. Lennox, accepted a shuddering embrazo as he stepped from his limousine and into the executive aircraft terminal. I had seen him climb the stairway to his Gulfstream IV.

“Make it right, J.R.,” I said.

I silently wished him a better kind of life as I watched the jet disappear behind a long reef of low clouds.

After that, I had gone back to the harbor, readied the Kehau to make for home, turned the helm over to Snyder, and slid into that bottle. On the morning of the third day, I climbed back out.

The afternoon had gone gray, but the sun poured through intermittent holes in the cloud cover and formed bright circles of light, like stepping-stones that had been laid out across the hammered steel surface of the sea.

“I’ll take the helm,” I said, a steaming mug of Mango Ceylon in my hand for a change.

“All yours, bud,” Snyder said, and went below to get himself a beer.

It wasn’t long before he nodded off, leaving me to my thoughts as I scanned the horizon. My mind picked at loose strands, like the bitter end of a rope that couldn’t be properly spliced. The beginning seemed so long ago, that first message from my brother, his first panicked call for help. I tried to fit it together with everything that came after.

I kept coming back to Congressman Kelleher, his aggressively anti-Chinese political agenda, and his meeting with Valden at the Mandalay Plaza. And it began to come together.

The simplest way to have torpedoed Kelleher’s trade legislation would have been to dig up dirt on Kelleher himself. Joey Soong—either by applying pressure to Phillip Lennox, or by some means of his own—likely bribed hotel security in order to find something that could be used to compromise the congressman. Unfortunately for Valden, Kelleher played by the rules when he was on the road, and there was no dirt to be gathered. But the security man and his computer buddy went entrepreneurial. They saw my brother, found out who he was, and went after him when the Kelleher well ran dry.

I was Lennox and Joey Soong’s bad surprise when I showed up in LA and came far too close to exposing the Chinese connection. So Soong had the blackmailers murdered, had their fingers carved off in that time-honored tradition as proof of the kill.

When Kemp attempted to turn the investigation toward Hans and me, Soong was probably laughing his ass off. But when Thel Mishow began looking into the ownership structure of the Mandalay Plaza on my behalf, things heated-up back in Hong Kong. I had been ambushed and beaten in the park as a warning. A warning I hadn’t understood until now.

It had all been about Kelleher, and Valden had been in the wrong place at exactly the wrong time. I couldn’t help but imagine whether everything might have been different if my brother hadn’t stepped out on his wife that night, or whether Phillip Lennox had already set an unalterable course.

I engaged the autopilot and made my way forward.

I checked the rigging, the lines and the set of the sheets. I leaned over the rail, watched the quicksilver sea slip beneath the hull and caught the taste of salt spray on my tongue. I thought back to the spinner dolphins Snyder and I had seen on the uphill run, recalling how Lani loved to swim with them in the early mornings at Kealakekua Bay.

I went back to the cockpit, took my place in the chair and breathed deeply into the empty place I felt in my chest.

Snyder had awakened from his nap and was resting his arms along the aft rail and watching the wake trail away.

“You all right, Travis?”

I had quit being an LA detective to find peace, to come home to Kona to build a life. Lani had seen me through all of it, all the chaos and loss and collateral damage. Her voice was still an echo from the last time we’d spoken. I thought about who I really was, what we both seemed to want, and didn’t know how much more I could expect her to take.

“I had a friend once,” Snyder said. “He was a pilot. He used to say that God is God, but the devil is us.”

Snyder stood there quietly after that, as lost in his own thoughts as I was in mine. As the sun slipped below the horizon, I sat at the wheel, glanced up at the sails that pushed the Kehau through the swells toward Kona, and watched rain bleed from a distant cloud.