The third sailor, breathing into the cop's face, added, “Your guy pulled his gun. but the driver hit him before he could get a round off.”
“ That ain't right, Pete. He fired a shot,” said the jacketless one.
“ Slug must've hit the gas tank,” suggested the Iowa boy.
Fausti turned to his partner and said, “You got that, Phil? This clown wants us to go away, to follow a gas leak.”
“ Goddamnit, that's how it went down. Your guy was trying to stop a car with his body.'“
“ How many in the car?”
'Two, I think. Two was all I saw get in.”
'Two?”
“ A guy and a babe.”
“ What'd they look like?”
“ Kanakas.”
“ What'd they look like?” Phil Janklow repeated his partner's question, ready to take notes on the answer.
The sailor shrugged. “I tol' ya, kanakas. They all look alike to me.”
Phil came over and whispered in his partner's ear. “Maybe we ought to try — “
“ Try? What the fuck're you talking' about, Phil? Try what?”
'Try followin' that trail left by the gas leak.” He pointed to the lingering, scattered flames on the pavement.
“ Shit, Phil, we've got a crime scene on our hands here, and the book says we sit on it until homicide detectives arrive. What's going to happen to us if we go off like fuckin' Sherlock Holmes after a fuel slick?”
“ Homicide?” asked one sailor sober enough to overhear. “Attempted vehicular manslaughter, if you're telling the truth, sailor.”
“ Christ, what reason I got to lie for?”
“ Could maybe've happened another way.”
“ You can't take the word of three U.S. sailors?”
“ I wouldn't take the word of the whole damn Seventh Fleet, pal.” Fausti smiled, watching the sailors' dismay as they kicked about the earth and shook their heads. “It ain't in my job description. Just cool your heels until we can corroborate your story, okay?” He sent Phil into the crowd for anyone who'd volunteer as a witness, and Phil came back with a mix of white tourists, Japanese and Polynesians. They all bore out the sailors' account before the detectives arrived on scene. Fausti told his younger partner that they had done their jobs by the book, so nobody could find fault with the approach they'd taken at the scene.
“ Another night of fun in paradise,” said one of the HPD detectives who asked for a rundown from Fausti and his young partner.
“ Yes, sir… well, the hit-and-run victim was a training sergeant from Midtown, HPD.”
“ You don't say?”
“ Officer Nate Ivers, and he discharged his weapon at the assailant.”
“ Ivers? Christ, I know an Ivers,” said the second detective to his partner. “He's been on a one-man crusade for Kaniola's killer. Damned fool's gone off the deep end, Jack.”
“ Where'd you say he was taken?” asked the first detective.
“ DeRussy medics took him in there,” replied Phil, pointing.
“ Let's go see if he's conscious and talking.”
Young Janklow pulled away from his partner's grasp, stopping the two detectives, informing them about the gas spill and asking, “You think maybe we ought to try to pick up the trail and follow it?”
The detectives laughed in Phil's face, and without saying a word, they walked back to their unmarked cars, where they talked and laughed as if what Phil had said was the funniest joke they'd heard in years.
“ I told you to forget that shit, Phil. You sounded like the fuckin' Hardy Boys.” Fausti slapped his notebook closed and put it away.
“ If we'd got on it right away maybe-” You know how damned fast a fuel spill evaporates in this climate,” said Fausti, trying to ease the bruise to his partner's ego.
“ Yeah… well, that's the friggin' point, and all those bozos can do is laugh at us?”
“ You, partner… they were laughing at you.” Fausti turned to the crowd, shouting, “Okay, folks, show's over. Go'bout your business. Enjoy our fair city… the Jewel of the Pacific…”
14
Still falls the Rain-
Dark as the world of man. black as our loss-
Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails
Upon the Cross.
1 A.M., July 17, somewhere in Honolulu
Lopaka realizes when he reaches his dark little house that his tank has been emptied of gas, that the bullet fired by the cop must've put a hole through his fuel line or gas pan. It seems a miracle that the old Buick didn't explode with the impact of a. 38 slug striking the gas tank. It must've passed clean through without rattling around in there. As it is, he has no way out later tonight to dispose of Hiilani's body, or tomorrow morning for that matter. He worries that someone at the fort might well have seen his license-plate number, that the authorities could be watching him at this very moment.
He steels himself and walks around the car, ready for death by gunshot if it should come. He opens the door and pulls Hiilani's rigid form from the car. She is catatonic, thanks to the drug he's injected. The drug keeps her eyes open no matter how badly she'd like to close them, and as the drug wears down, she feels more, and the more she feels, the more she suffers, which means the more he enjoys himself, and the more he feels like a person of power, filled with the manhood Kelia and his father before her had thought to strip him of.
He takes her into the killing place.
No one stops him.
No one comes crashing in for Hiilani.
A fractional part of him, deep within his long-forgotten soul, long buried in a place in his heart where no light enters, on some wasted island within him, wishes that there was someone capable of stopping him… but nowadays such thoughts barely mature or fully form, broken shells of thought, wisps of smoke, incapable of surviving to the surface.
He is safe to take out his feelings on Kelia once more, and the only one who has ever seen him for what he truly is now lies dead in the street in Waikiki.
“ Come, my sweet, dear Kelia,” he whispers in her ear as he restrains her with the human-hair coils of rope he has fashioned from the heads of earlier victims, restraints that dangle from large metal hoops nailed fast to the rack against the wall, a rack and wall discolored with the markings of his earlier kills.
He restrains only her arms for now. Her eyes plea for mercy, but he has no mercy, only a plan for immortality.
She screams, but the drug is yet too strong to allow full use of her vocal cords. The silent scream is enough to make his penis harden and his underpants wet.
He nonetheless assures himself that what he does next is for the greater power of Ku, the power which he soon will join, to one day find his essence to be the same as the great god, to have mere mortals feeding sacrifices and offerings like Kelia to him.
By now there is no Hiilani. She no longer exists in his mind or eye. She is Kelia, the all-perfect sacrifice.
