She nodded again. “Wanna get out? Look around?”
I was torn between the two great needs of my life: the yearning between my legs, and the curiosity between my ears.
And the damn curiosity won.
“Yeah, let’s get out for a second.”
I got out on my side, and came around and opened the door for her.
“See those bushes over there?” she asked. “That’s where she say they drag her.”
And I turned and stared at the darkness of the thicket, as if it could tell me something; but the moonlight didn’t hit the thicket, and there was nothing to see.
But I could hear something.
Someone.
“There’s somebody else here,” I whispered, holding a protective arm in front of her. “Get in the car!”
More than one someone—I could hear them moving, crunching the weeds underfoot, and I hadn’t brought my damn gun! Who would have thought I’d need a goddamn nine-millimeter Browning to go on a goddamn date with a geisha girl housemaid?
Then one by one they emerged from the darkness—four faces, belonging to four men, sullen faces that looked white in the moonlight, but they weren’t white faces, oh no.
They were the faces of the four men, the surviving four, who had brought Thalia Massie to this place to rape and beat her.
And as they advanced toward me like an army of the Island undead, I reached for the handle of my car door, only to feel it slip from my grasp.
The car was pulling out of this lovers’ lane, without me.
From the window as she drove, hands with blood-red nails clutching the wheel, Beatrice called out, “I’ve done what you ask. Now leave me out!”
And somehow I didn’t think she was talking to me.
10
As I backed away, they encircled me, four skulking boys in denim slacks and untucked silk shirts; the shirts were of various dark colors, which had helped them blend into the darkness of the underbrush as they waited. But as I moved backward into the moonlit clearing, and they moved in lockstep with me, four Islanders dancing with the only white mainlander at the colored cotillion, blossoms emerged on the dark blue and dark green and deep purple shirts, flowers of yellow, of ivory, of red, strangely festive apparel for this brooding bunch of savages to have worn on this mission of entrapment.
I stopped, then wheeled within the circle, not liking having any of them behind me. From the pictures in the files I knew them: David Takai, lean as a knife blade, dark-complected, his flat features riding an elongated oval face, sharp bright eyes shining like polished black stones, black hair slicked back; Henry Chang, short, solidly built, eyes bright with resentment, curly hair sitting like an unruly cap atop a smooth, narrow face whose expression seemed on the verge of either tears or rage; Ben Ahakuelo, broad-shouldered boxer, light complected, matinee-idol handsome in part due to heavy eyebrows over dark sad eyes; and Horace Ida, who was a surprise to me, as the photo had shown only the round pudgy face with its slits for eyes and an unruly black shock of pompadour—I was not prepared for that fat-kid puss to sit atop a short, wiry, lean, powerful frame, nor for those eyes to burn with such intelligence, such alertness, such seriousness.
“What the hell do you want with me?” I asked. I did my best to sound indignant, as opposed to scared shitless.
For several moments, the only response came from the nearby surf crashing on the reef, and the rustle of leaves shaking in the wind. Like me. Ida looked over at Ahakuelo, as if seeking for a prompt; but the broad- shouldered mournful-eyed boxer said nothing.
Finally Ida said, “Just wanna talk.” He was facing me now, as I did my slow turn within their circle.
I planted my feet. “Are you the spokesman?”
Ida shrugged. I took that for “yes.”
“If you wanted to talk,” I said, “you should’ve just stopped by my hotel.”
Ida grunted a laugh. “We draw reporters and coppers like shit draws flies. You think Ala Moana boys can go waltzing into Royal Hawaiian?”
Henry Chang was smirking; the expressions of the other two remained grimly blank. These four—with the late Kahahawai—were of course the so-called “Ala Moana boys,” named for this lonely stretch of ruined blacktop along which their crime was supposedly committed.
“Besides,” Ida said with a little shrug, “how we know you pay attention? Here you pay attention.”
He had a point.
“What do you fellas want from me?”
“If we want to fuck you up, we could, right?”
I started turning in a circle again; my hands balled into tight fists. “It might cost you more than you think….”
Now Henry Chang spoke, only it was more of a bark: “But we could, right,
“Yeah,” I admitted; my stomach was jumping—the first guy who hit me in the stomach was getting a cotton candy facial. “Yeah, I think the four of you got me sufficiently outnumbered. What do you say we go one at time, just to be sporting?”
