request it.”
“Will do.” She pushed a sealed envelope toward him. “Can you give this to Stevens?”
“No way.” Pono held his hands up, refusing to touch it. “You know the saying, ‘shoot the messenger’? Well, that man is armed.”
“Chicken.” She pulled the envelope back. “I thought you had the stones to hand a guy a Dear John letter.”
“I wouldn’t do that for my sister back in eighth grade, and I’m not going to do it for you. Do your own dirty work.” He stood up. “Okay. I’m taking this in and I’m going to try and get you back on active duty. I can’t take one more day with Jenkins, so don’t let me down.”
“Thanks. I’ll call you tomorrow.” She followed him outside to his huge lifted truck, pulled up on the sidewalk.
She took the mail out of the box. He waited silently to see if there was anything new while she flipped through the slim pile. Nothing. She waved him off and he hopped up into the truck. Lei didn’t feel safe even after she got back into the house.
Back in the kitchen, she cleared the beer bottles away into the recycling bag. Pono’s bottle cap had been left on the table. She picked it up, put it in her pocket. Sat down and took out her phone, speed-dialed Stevens. She put her hand in her pocket and played with the cap as his phone rang.
“Lei. How you feeling?”
“Better, thanks. Listen, I have something to tell you.”
“I don’t like the sound of that. Let me come over, we’ll talk in person.”
“No. This is fine. I need to just say it.” She took a deep breath, squeezed the bottle cap in her hand so the sharp crimped metal bit into her fingers. “I can’t be with you. This was a mistake.”
Silence.
“What’s going on?” His voice was soft, kind. Easy tears welled in her eyes and she squeezed the cap harder. She felt one of the tiny ridges break the skin and she welcomed the pain.
“Nothing. I’m just not ready to be in a relationship. This has all been too much and I need you to leave me alone.”
“Okay. I understand that.” His voice was cautious now. “We can take all the time you need. In fact, I was thinking we needed to go back to the beginning a bit-that’s why I brought flowers.”
The tears spilled down her cheeks. She held her breath so she wouldn’t sob, feeling blood welling into the palm clutching the bottlecap.
“No. No. I am just not right for you, Stevens. Leave me alone, I’m telling you. It’s over.”
She closed the phone with a snap, couldn’t help throwing it away from her even as she cried out in dismay. It skittered across the table and crashed to the floor in two pieces.
She took her hand out of her pocket, went to the sink. The bottlecap had cut her palm. She held her hand under the sink, watching the blood well and disappear for a long moment. Then she took the bottlecap in the hand with the cast and dug it deliberately into the meat of her arm just below the elbow, dragging it downward.
The roar of pain washed over her, a burning that felt like absolution. She did it a few more times until all she could think about was the hot throbbing of her arm. She watched the blood trickle off her elbow into the sink, a hypnotizing watercolor of pinkening droplets as it melted into running water.
This crazy shit was the kind of thing you did when you were Damaged Goods.
The calm that follows pain came to her at last.
She blotted the cuts with a paper towel and striped them with antibiotic ointment in the bathroom, covered them with a band-aid. She also took care of the nasty bite on her collarbone, changing the bandage by looking in the mirror. She never once looked at her own eyes.
Lei changed into running clothes, went back into the kitchen and put the phone back together, anchoring the pieces with a strip of duct tape. Fortunately it still worked. She slipped the bottlecap into the pocket of her running shorts as she called the station and requested Lieutenant Ohale.
“Hey Lieutenant. Lei here. I’d like to request to come back on active duty.”
“Yeah, Pono came by to see me already.” She heard the creaking of his overworked office chair. “Good to hear from you. How’s the wrist?”
“Getting stronger every day,” she said with forced cheerfulness. “I did an hour of target practice yesterday and it held up fine.” She looked at the wrist, ignoring the dull ache it gave her back.
“So what about those counseling sessions? And I wanted you to have that extra post-trauma debriefing after the incident with Ito.”
“All done,” she lied. She knew Dr. Wilson had turned in the evaluation paper in good faith, and guilt stabbed her before she ruthlessly quashed it. She couldn’t afford to let the psychologist know what was going on. Her only chance to get back to normal was to get back to work and find Charlie Kwon herself.
“A few more days, okay? The investigation is wrapping up. When you do come back I want you to wear a sling. Last thing I need is some workmen’s comp claim years from now.”
“Deal,” Lei said. “Thanks, Lieutenant.” She closed the phone, snapped her fingers for Keiki, and took the truck out onto the road toward Volcano Park.
She couldn’t be home when Stevens came by-he’d never accept just a phone call to break things off.
Chapter 44
Lei ran down the narrow path along the crater, Keiki ahead of her, the dog’s ears laid back. She’d chosen the lush side of the park where massive fern trees arched over the trail winding along the cliff’s edge. The north side of the volcano caught rain, and a primordial jungle of ohia trees, wild ginger, and hundreds of ferns blanketed the slopes while the south side stretched away in miles of raw black lava. Knobbed guava roots reached up to tangle her feet, and off to the right the caldera steamed gently, a vast black moonscape hundreds of feet below the path.
The sheer scope of the scenery failed to distract her today.
The brittle calm from cutting herself had evaporated halfway to the Park. Her mind churned with nauseating memories she couldn’t stifle. Over and over again Kwon’s face loomed, his pupils darkening her vision as she remembered and felt again all the ways he’d raped her.
The drop off the massive cliff she ran along seemed to pull at her, an almost magnetic tug. Her agony of self loathing, her rage, her dim future as Damaged Goods could be over. How easy would it be to just take a running leap out into space? She pictured a cartwheeling fall, the vast distance to the bottom of the crater more than high enough to make sure the jump was fatal. Her mind played the jump again and again as her body ran on autopilot.
Lei increased her speed, having to concentrate fully on the treacherous ground, the emptiness of total effort finally extinguishing the fantasies. She ran all out, oblivious to the exotic beauty of the setting.
God, help me. I can’t take much more of this, she thought. The prayer echoed in her pulse. God help me, God help me.
Keiki began to lag, her tongue lolling. Lei pulled up at a vista area bordered by the service road, resting her hands on her knees as she caught her breath, looking out over the drop behind the low steel safety barrier, but no longer feeling that murderous pull so strongly toward the edge. With a pang of guilt, she wondered what would happen to her dog if she were gone. Keiki quested through the long grass for moisture, lapping at dewdrops.
“Sorry, baby,” Lei panted. “I have a drink for you.” She took a water bottle out of the pocket of her windbreaker, now tied around her waist. She poured water into her palm, holding it for the big dog to drink.
The shoulder holster was hot and itchy. She unbuckled it and laid it on a picnic table, sat on the table with her feet on the bench and let the wind off the caldera cool her face.
She noticed the sweet piercing song of the apapane at last, the rare, red honeycreeper that called the park home. She looked across the vast expanse of the volcano to the distant rim. A steam vent exhaled vapor that blew off the edge in a falling cloud. The sky arched overhead, a dome of soothing blue. All was right with the world.
She let go of Keiki’s leash, letting the dog nose through the grass and flop down to rest after a good roll. She
