CHAPTER THREE

Twilight is my favorite time of day to walk the Kona waterfront. The flickering lights of the village begin to cycle on, piercing the encroaching darkness, the heat of the day leeching from the concrete and up through the soles of your sandals while cool wind drifts in off the water.

As I crossed the street from Snyder’s, I glanced out into the bay where the Kehau pulled at her moorings, bow and stern lights glowing. At the foot of the pier, sun-browned children played and swam in the rippling tide that was just beginning to reflect the setting sun. My mind flashed back to the orange glow of flames against the ruined storefronts of South Central LA, the weight of the riot gear I had worn, the heat of my own breath inside the helmet. All of us had been called back into uniform for that, detective or no.

I pushed through the doors of the King Kamehameha Hotel and into a wall of air-conditioning that carried that familiar hotel smell. Carpet cleaner, Windex and a hint of mildew. A few guests wandered the lobby, window shopped in the wide promenade as I headed toward a bank of pay phones that still hung along the far wall.

I turned my back to the reception area, pulled the number from my pocket and placed the call. An hour and ten minutes since I’d spoken to him last. An operator at the other end put me through to Valden’s room. When he picked up, he sounded even more agitated than before.

“Mike,” he said. “I’ve got a problem. A big problem.”

“Take it easy, Valden. Take a breath.”

He made a sound that was half sigh, half laugh, and all desperation. “I’m not sure where to start.”

“The beginning,” I said, feeling like a cop again. “What are you doing in LA?”

“Business. A couple of meetings and a political fund-raiser.”

“How long’ve you been there?” I was trying to calm him down, get him to think straight. If he got any more worked up, he’d have to breathe into a bag.

“Two days,” he said. “I got here Wednesday night. The political thing is Sunday afternoon.”

“Uh huh.”

“Day after tomorrow.”

“I get it,” I said. “Then where to after that?”

“Home,” he said. “Back to New York.”

I looked over my shoulder and out through the glass doors of the lobby. A man in pressed white slacks and Hawaiian shirt was lighting the tiki torches that lined the entry. I smelled the fuel and flame and thought again about those long nights all those years ago, the meltdown in Los Angeles. Same planet, different world.

“So what’s going on, Valden?”

I could hear the rattle of ice in a cocktail tumbler.

“I’ve been, ah . . . been caught, Mike.”

I had to process that for a second. But not much longer. “LeeAnn?”

“No.”

If it wasn’t his wife, the alternatives were worse. “Blackmail?”

“Yes, blackmail,” he said, something resembling shame coloring his words. Though he’d had plenty of opportunity, shame wasn’t an emotion with which my brother was overly familiar.

The hairs on my neck stood on end. See, he and I shared an unpleasant secret—a thirty-year-old confidence involving the death of a friend named Stacy Thorne. We never speak of it. Never. I’d spent more than half my life trying to erase it from my memory, trying to forget his culpability, and my own, however tacit it may have been. Now my mind crawled with the possibility that it may have been uncovered. And if it had, there was no part of his life—or mine—that would ever remain as it had been.

“Go on,” I said. “And choose your words carefully. Are you hearing what I’m telling you?”

A lingering moment of silence hung between us. When he finally spoke, his voice was thin. “Something came up here at the hotel.”

“Please tell me it’s a woman.”

“You could say that.”

The fist that had been crushing my heart let go, and I felt I could breathe again.

Valden and his women. His wayward pecker had caused more trouble for Van de Groot Capital than any ten litigation firms in the country put together. God only knew of how many indiscretions Valden’s wife, LeeAnn, had been spared knowledge. She was a fine woman and a good mother. The better part of me knew he deserved to be caught, deserved what would follow. But LeeAnn didn’t. Neither did my niece and nephew.

The only thing that kept me on the line now was that I knew something my brother didn’t: blackmail can be a very slippery slope. If someone caught him at whatever this bit of misconduct was, worse could easily follow. And nobody needed that. Nobody.

“What’s the play?” I asked.

“They’ve got me on video, Mike.”

“How the hell—”

“Hotel security cameras caught me in the elevator.”

My pulse began to slow, and I thought about how the security system would likely lay out.

“And probably the hall outside your room,” I said. “Got you going in, coming out. Time coded. Probably have you inside as well.”

Valden sighed again. “They couldn’t have—”

“You talk to the local cops?”

“What, are you kidding? The note said if I don’t pay up by Sunday, they’re going to post the video on the goddamned Internet. The cops are the last place I’d go.”

These guys were slick. They knew who Valden was, knew he had ready access to large amounts of cash, knew he couldn’t stall for time on that account.

“How’d they get to you?”

“Shipped me a DVD with the demand, payment instructions, and a sample video clip.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “They’ll send one to your home if you don’t pay.”

“That’s what the demand said. Plus, copies to all our corporate clients and every major TV station in the country.”

“And a posting on the Internet,” I repeated.

“I know,” he interrupted. “I need your help, Mike. Can you do it? Can you help me?”

When our father died, everything between my brother and me had changed. The years hadn’t been kind to our relationship. But he was the only family I had left; Valden, LeeAnn and their kids. I thought about whether I could help him anymore even if I wanted to, about whom I still knew in Los Angeles, how much time it might take.

“I’m not a cop anymore, Valden. I’m just a PI.” A goddamned reluctant PI, at that.

I’d been conscripted by the local police captain a few months earlier, pressed into service on those occasions there was work that needed doing off the books. My license allowed me certain extrajudicial freedoms not afforded to law enforcement. In pursuit of a bail jump, I could cross state lines. I could kick down doors without a warrant, could detain a suspect indefinitely and generally deprive him of his legal rights and treat him like property. I had not yet been put in a position to question the morality of that situation. The captain was a decent man, and so far my efforts had only resulted in taking some genuine degenerates off the board.

“I don’t care. I’ll send the jet.”

“Forget the jet,” I said. “I’ll catch the red-eye. You can pick me up at the airport in the morning.”

Relief slithered down the phone line.

“Thank you, Mike—”

I broke in. There wasn’t time, and I didn’t really want to hear it.

“Just be there. Hawaiian Airlines. It arrives about six in the morning. Look it up.”

I walked back to Snyder’s. Yosemite still hadn’t shown, so I left a message for him, asked him to keep an eye on the Kehau while I was gone. I knew he’d probably use it as an excuse to spend the weekend aboard with his live-in girlfriend.

I debated phoning Lani, who was working the bar down at Lola’s. But I drove down to see her instead. She wasn’t going to be happy.

The place was all whirring blenders and Buffett music, cruise-ship tourists three deep at the bar. Lani was making change from the register, blowing a stray lock of dark hair out of her eyes. It was a good five minutes before she came up for air. When she saw me, her face brightened in a way that hollowed me out.

“What brings you down—” She stopped herself short when she saw the look on my face.

“I just got a call from my brother,” I said.

A question flashed across her brown eyes, and I saw the wind come out of her sails.

“You’re canceling on me again,” she said. The last time had been a last-minute charter. This was different, but I knew it wouldn’t make any difference to her.

“I’m sorry, Lani,” I said. “I have to go to the mainland.”

“When?”

“Tonight.”

Even in the noise of the place, a silence hung between us. I came around the bar to kiss her good-bye, and she offered me a cheek, her body rigid.

“Why?” she asked.

“I can’t really go into it now, Lani.”

She turned to take an order before I could say anything else.

Lately, it had been nothing but false starts and bad timing, a lingering sense of almost. But I will always think of her the way I’d seen her that time at the beach by the old airport. It had been a birthday party for somebody we both knew, long tables full of food and coolers jammed with ice and beer. I’d met Lani some time before, when she worked at the Harbor House, but that night at Shaloma Marks’s birthday, she came in off the beach and almost made me forget who I was. She was dark, with long, thick black hair down to her waist, the trim body of a dancer. A light dusting of sand speckled her ankles and the tops of her feet, and she smelled of the sea and the sun. That night, it was like no one else was there. We talked and drank until the party had long since been packed away, and the moon rose over the rim of the volcano.

Lani told me she’d been married before, but it hadn’t lasted long. Three years. He was a part-time fisherman, part-time truck driver, and a full-time crackhead. The marriage lasted just long enough to ruin her credit and scrape away the last patina of her innocence. But she came out of it with a quiet strength, one void of any hint of self-pity. She called herself a romantic realist, though I didn’t think I completely believed her.

Now, it was like she’d discovered one more splinter in the little bit of hope she still allowed herself. And deep inside that shadow was a piece of something I wasn’t sure I’d put there.

I watched as Lani spoke to the other bartender, crooked a thumb in my direction and came out from behind the bar. She strode past me, walked outside and waited at the quiet end of the lanai. I followed her out, took up a place beside her.

Wind ruffled the deep green leaves of a banana tree as we stood in silence, Lani’s face half in shadow in the last of the afternoon light.

“You’re nothing but contradictions, Mike,” she said softly.

My expression asked the question.

“You’re rich, but you don’t spend money. You have friends who are more loyal than any I’ve ever seen, but everyone else is scared to death of you. You say you came here looking for peace, but you had blood on your hands before you’d even been here two weeks. You’re tender with me, Mike, but violence hangs on you like a dirty sheet.”

“What am I supposed to do with that, Lani?”

Her eyes skipped past me again, stared into the distance as she answered. “I don’t know. I love you, Mike, but sometimes you scare me, too.”

“I’d never do anything to hurt you.”

“That’s not what I mean,” she said, looked into my face, and what I saw there cut me to the bone. “I know I’m what you want, but maybe not what you need. You have everything you say you want right here in front of you, but you won’t reach out and take it.”

I felt like a stranger in my own skin, caught in the lie my life was becoming, the empty place between what I actually was and what I had thought I wanted to be. She saw it on my face, and I saw myself in hers. It wasn’t the depth of what I felt for her, or even the magnetic poles of my desires that were breaking her heart, but my hesitation. Happiness was the emotion I had never learned to trust.

“I won’t bother asking when you’ll be back,” Lani said.

She showed me the most sorrowful smile I had ever seen, brushed the tips of her fingers across my cheek, and she was gone.