CHAPTER TWO

I was sitting at Snyder’s bar, doing what I could to avoid the crush of tourists that the cruise ship had disgorged onto Kona’s sundrenched streets. I was drinking an Asahi on ice, waiting for Dave, and enjoying the last hour of normalcy I was to have for a long while, a fact I didn’t know at the time.

The place was relatively quiet for a Friday afternoon, still a little early for the local pau hana clientele, and the tourists hadn’t yet discovered the place that day. Snyder wiped a damp rag across the hardwood bar, then tossed it in a plastic bucket on the floor. He leaned against the wall not far from where I sat, crossed his heavily muscled arms and squinted into the afternoon light.

Rumor had it that Snyder was a retired pot grower from Humboldt County. It was said that he held his assets in the name of some offshore trust in an effort to distance himself from legal trouble either past or present, real or imagined. The islands are awash with wild stories and hearsay. The coconut wireless worked seven days a week, but I did my best to ignore it. I didn’t care to know a thing about Snyder’s past, or anybody else’s; it had nothing to do with me anymore.

“Charter this weekend, Mike?” Snyder asked.

I shook my head. “Just finished a three-day. Nothing more for a while.”

I had begun chartering my seventy-two-foot sailing yacht, the Kehau, for private scuba and luxury cruises around the island, like I had back in the days when I lived in California. It was my constant reminder of how far I’d come since my time with Los Angeles Homicide, and I liked it that way.

He nodded.

“Long weekend for you then.”

I followed his gaze out past the batwing saloon doors into the hot afternoon.

“Looks that way.”

Snyder turned, and tapped a draft for a dishwater blonde in a tank top and board shorts a couple of seats down from me. I’d seen her in here before. Heavy breasts rested on the top of the bar as she leaned in to watch him, studiously avoiding eye contact with me.

“So, you hear about Yosemite?” Snyder asked.

Yosemite is Dave’s nickname. His voice, stature and long drooping mustache make his resemblance to the cartoon character Yosemite Sam almost uncanny. Dave was a friend of mine from Avalon, a small resort town on the island of Santa Catalina off the Southern California coast where I used to run my charter operation. He and another buddy, Rex Blackwood, crewed for me on the trans-Pacific escape I’d made from there following an overly publicized murder case I’d worked. I had returned to Hawaii, my mother’s ancestral home, to put twenty years with the LAPD behind me and restart my retirement. Rex had subsequently bought Dave’s deep-sea fishing business and returned to Avalon; Dave stayed in Kona, and was now a captain for Jake’s Diving Locker, and everybody called him “Yosemite.”

I took a swig of Asahi, wiped the foam from my lip with the back of my wrist.

“What’d he do now?”

Snyder smiled and shook his head.

“Got himself ejected from that public hearing a couple nights ago.”

“The navy deal? The one about the whales?”

“Yeah,” he said. “It was in the paper.”

I remembered the yellowing stack of newspapers I’d retrieved from Snyder’s backroom office. Since I live aboard my boat, Snyder lets me use the place as a permanent address. Whenever I went out on a charter, I temporarily lost touch with the comings-and-goings in our little town. But this navy thing was heavy on everybody’s mind. At least, anyone who gave a damn about the ocean.

“They’re still going ahead with it?”

“Looks like it,” Snyder said. “These hearings were just a show, man. Didn’t matter what the hell anybody around here had to say about it.”

The navy was about to conduct tests of a sophisticated sonar system that used ultralow frequency sound waves to track submarines. It was experimental technology, and they wanted to test it in the waters off Kona. No problem, unless you were in the water when they fired it up. The sound waves had proven to be extremely harmful, even deadly, to mammals. Turned their insides into tapioca pudding. There were documented cases of entire pods of dolphins beaching themselves during panicked attempts to escape the subsurface blast of noise. Humans weren’t allowed within a mile of the test area. Now the navy wanted to run system trials off the Kona coast, aim the sonar at the whales that came to give birth every year, test it on something they deemed less valuable than a submarine. Unbelievable.

“Unbelievable,” I said.

Snyder pursed his lips and nodded like that said it all.

We both turned toward the shaft of sunlight that followed a pair of tourists through the swinging saloon doors. Sunburned noses and loud print shirts they’d never wear at home, huarache sandals on stockinged feet. They padded past the tables toward the bar.

“Piña colada, please,” the first one said.

The second one nodded agreement.

“Make it two.”

Snyder shook his head. “No piña coladas.”

The tourist looked puzzled. “Then how about a Lava Flow?”

“No blender,” Snyder said.

“I see,” the taller one said after a beat. “Mai Tai?”

Snyder cut me a sideways glance, and the blonde at the bar stifled a smile.

“What else,” was all he said.

I was on my third Asahi, and Yosemite still hadn’t shown. Warm tropical air mingled with cigarette smoke—you could still smoke indoors back then—and jukebox music. Snyder was busy at the stick when my cell phone rang. Something told me I shouldn’t answer, but I did. Like I always do.

I got up off my stool and took the call outside, catching Snyder’s eye, letting him know I’d be back.

The slender trunks of palms formed graceful shadows across Palani Road as the sun moved toward the horizon. A blue sliver of Kailua Bay shone between the shops along Alii Drive and I caught a familiar scent of plumeria and sea salt as I flipped open the phone.

I was right, I shouldn’t have answered it. It was my brother, Valden.

“Mike?” All my cop instincts prickled. Those habits never go away. Just like the Beretta automatic I still carried. And the other arms I had stashed aboard Kehau, beside my bed and in the galley drawer.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“LA,” he said. Satellite static wrinkled across space for a long moment. “I think I might be in trouble.”

I fought the urge to tell him to call back when he was sure.

My brother and I rarely, if ever, saw eye-to-eye. It is a problem that goes back many years, and has its roots in mistrust and a mutual lack of respect. But there was something unusual in his voice.

“Don’t you have private security for shit like this?”

“No, Mike. This isn’t business.” He hesitated again.

I waited him out.

“It’s a . . . uh . . . personal matter.”

“Don’t jerk me around, Valden,” I said.

“I don’t want to talk about it on your cell,” he whispered. I didn’t blame him. It was easier than people thought to eavesdrop on cell phone calls. Ask the NSA.

“Then what’d you call me for?”

There was another long silence before he answered.

“It may turn out to be nothing,” he said. “But I wanted to know you’d be there if I needed you.”

Not like Valden to ask for anything from me unless he felt he had run out of choices.

“Get a pen, write down this number,” he said. “Call me in an hour.”

“Valden—”

“On a land line, Mike,” he interrupted. “Please.”

I took down the number he gave me, and told him I’d call him back. He sounded relieved, even thanked me. I shut the phone and slipped it back into my shirt pocket, unconsciously ran my fingers across the scar on my shoulder. Even after all this time, it was still tender, raw. Like my mood had just become.

When I went back inside, I heard Snyder talking in whispers to the big-breasted blonde. I couldn’t hear it all, but enough to get the drift.

“. . . Kamahale-Van de Groot . . . wealthy family . . . used to be a cop . . . lives on his sailboat . . .” Giving her the rundown on me. The whole thing, including the name I had been born with, but hadn’t used in a long, long time. She was nodding.

When he noticed me, Snyder stood up straight, threw a guilty look in my direction.

“We were just talking about you,” he said.

“I know,” I said as I took my seat. “You must’ve learned how to whisper in a sawmill.”

The girl turned to get a better look at me, clear blue eyes giving me a cool once-over.

“Van de Groot?” she said. “I thought your name was Travis.”

“It is.” I cut my eyes at Snyder, but he turned away and feigned concentration as he repositioned the small Plexiglas box that sat atop his cash register, the one that contained the crude carving of a jackrabbit that he refused to discuss or explain.

“Van de Groot?” she said again. “Like the company?”

“Yes. Like the company.”

“My God, it’s like the Kennedys or something.”

“Let’s hope not.”

“Seriously.”

“Snyder,” I said, “you started this. Make it stop.”

Sun-bleached eyebrows frowned. Little furrows in a tan, unlined face. Seconds ticked by while Snyder continued to pretend to ignore us.

“You gonna tell me the story?” she asked.

I smiled. Persistent little thing.

“No.”

I poured the last of the beer over the ice in my glass. Snyder took the empty as she eyeballed me. I watched the foam reach for the rim and melt back.

“Will you tell me if I buy you a drink?” She showed me a crooked grin, and she looked better that way.

“For a beer, I’ll give you the short version.”

She moved down the bar and slid onto the chair next to mine. Snyder brought us both fresh drinks.

I told her some of it. How I had dropped my hyphenated last name in order to avoid being treated as The Rich Man’s Son. Michael Travis Kamahale-Van de Groot is a cumbersome mouthful, and carried more baggage than I wanted in this life. I told her about my twenty years with LAPD, fourteen years of it spent as a detective. But that’s where I left it. Nothing about the case in Catalina, or about the cases of Ruby Orlandella or Ashley Logan. Those things belonged to me.

“So now you’re just a hapa haole boat bum,” she said with a smile.

I felt the heft of the lightweight Beretta tucked in the small pouch I’d had sewn into the pocket of my shorts. I had a permit to carry, and I did. Some guys, they get shot and don’t ever want to touch a gun again. Me? I’d have the thing surgically attached if I thought it wouldn’t interfere with foreplay.

“I suppose so,” I said.

She saw something in my expression and started to speak.

I cut her off.

“Thanks for the beer,” I said, and offered my hand. She took it and squeezed gently. “Let’s just keep this between us, okay? Kona’s a small town.”

I slipped a few bills from my wallet and tossed them on the bar for Snyder. As he rang them into the register, I said good-bye to the blonde.

I never did get her name.