He looked up at me. “She used to sit right in front of him in the canoe,” he said. “I thought she’d talk to him, convince him it was better to shut up.” Tears dripped down his cheeks. “The next time I heard his name it was somebody at the store saying he’d been shot.”
He waved the gun a little. “I swear, I didn’t know she was going to kill him. But what could I do?”
“Did Lucie find out?”
“Stupid little bitch. She tried to shake Mary down. Wanted enough to finance a year around the world, going to surf competitions. Mary told her she was a dumb cunt.”
“How did her friend Ronnie get involved?”
He snorted. “The idiot hacked into the store’s accounts, thinking he could find the money she wanted and take it out. But there wasn’t any money-we’d given it all to Ari.”
Ari finally spoke. “You should have told me, Dario. We could have worked something out. You didn’t have to do… this.”
“I didn’t have a choice,” he said. “Shit, I haven’t had a choice about anything for eleven years.”
Oh, Jesus, I thought. I knew what was coming.
“It was almost eleven years ago, you know that, Kimo?” he asked. “I still remember the first time I saw you.”
I had to keep him talking. At least he wasn’t shooting. “Yeah, Dario? Where was that?”
“At the Surfrider. You had just come home from college and moved up here. You were with Dickie Yamassa, remember him?”
I did. Dickie had gone to Punahou with Terri, Harry and me, but instead of going to college on the mainland the way we all did, he had stayed at UH, surfing the North Shore every chance he had. He was an amazing surfer by then-he had dropped out of UH the year before, started entering tournaments, and started winning.
I slept on Dickie’s floor the first three months I was on the North Shore. He had a girlfriend he stayed with most nights anyway, but we often surfed together during the day, then cruised bars together at night.
“The Surfrider has a lot of memories for us,” I said.
“Jesus, Kimo, I thought the sun rose and set on you, and you hardly knew I was alive. For months- months -I knew where you were all the time, I followed you around, just waiting for you to notice me.”
“I noticed you, Dario. We used to surf together all the time.”
“But you ignored every hint I gave you.”
“I was scared, Dario. I didn’t want to be gay, and the way you kept coming on to me, touching me, saying stuff-what did you expect me to do?”
“I expected you to tell me you loved me, that you wanted to be with me,” Dario said. “Then I finally got the chance to show you how I felt, and you ran away.”
“I’m sorry if I hurt you, Dario.” I started inching closer to him. “I never wanted to. Honestly, I didn’t know how you felt. But maybe things can be better now.”
The noise he made in his throat sounded oddly like the one my father did, when he didn’t believe what I was saying. “I’m serious, Dario. Things can be different. I’m out of the closet now. I’m here on the North Shore.” I inched closer to him. “Give me the gun, and I’ll look after you. Mary is going to have to go to jail, but then you and I can be together.”
“Mary! Where’s Mary? I have to talk to Mary!” He tried to stand up, but he fell back to the floor.
I was close enough that I could tackle him. “Give me the gun, Dario,” I said. We wrestled on the floor, and then another rifle blast shattered one of Bishop’s big glass windows. Dario’s attention was distracted enough that I got my body on top of his, got my hand on his gun hand. I had a knee in his crotch and I was close enough to smell the raw scent of fear and perspiration coming off him.
I mustered up a final burst of strength and wrenched the gun from him, pushing myself back from him. Another rifle burst split the air. “Everybody okay?” I called. “Terri?”
“Okay,” she said shakily.
“How’s Bishop?”
“Dario shot him, and he’s going in and out of consciousness. Kimo, I’m scared. Who’s shooting at us?”
“I thought I knocked Mary Fonseca out and handcuffed her, but either she’s gotten up or somebody else has gotten her rifle. See if you can drag Bishop under the table. Ari, can you help?”
I kept one eye on Dario, who was crying on the floor in front of me, and the other focused on the window. Mary Fonseca was a damned good riflewoman if she was able to shoot with her hands cuffed together.
“What about Brad, Dario? Who killed him, and that college kid? Why?”
“I couldn’t stand to see somebody else have what I couldn’t.” He was crying full blast by then. “I know I shouldn’t have done it. I just went crazy.”
“And me? Did you shoot at me when I was out at Pipeline?”
“I’d never shoot you, Kimo. That must have been Mary. I think she knew how much I cared about you and she was jealous.”
I heard another blast of gunfire, but this one wasn’t aimed inside. There was a volley back and forth, and then I heard a voice call out, “Hello the house. Anybody there? Police!”
“Officer on the scene,” I called back. “Scene secured.”
After
Al Kawamoto was the first in the door, his gun held out ahead of him. In short order, he was followed by uniforms who took custody of Dario, and an ambulance crew that took Bishop Clark away, with Terri by his side.
I sat at the table with Ari, and we reconstructed everything that had happened for Al. When we were done, I drove down to Wahiawa General, where Bishop was in critical condition. Terri’s parents had driven up from Honolulu by then, and her father sat holding his older brother’s hand and talking gently to him.
“I’m so sorry things worked out the way they did,” I said to Terri, when we had walked out together. “If I had known there was any danger I never would have let you go to Bishop’s in the first place.”
“You didn’t know what was going to happen.”
“Yeah, that’s been the theme of my life lately. Everything happens and I don’t have a clue about it. Hell of a detective, huh?”
“You knew there was a connection between Dario’s store and the deaths of the surfers.”
“I should have figured it out sooner. The first time I heard that Dario had a wife, I knew something was funny. I should have looked at him a lot more closely, but I was afraid I was trying to make him the killer because I was scared of him.”
“You weren’t scared of him,” she said, taking my hand. “What you were scared of is inside of you, but you’re working on that.” »
Bishop’s death was big news because of the family’s prominence. And of course they had to note that there had been another Clark death, just a few weeks before. This time, though, I went to the funeral, with my parents. We sat at the Kawaiahao Church in downtown Honolulu, across from Honolulu Hale. The Clarks were descended from early missionaries to the islands, and had ancestors buried in the graveyard behind the church. After a brief service, Bishop took his place among them.
I was in the news again, as Sampson told reporters that I had been working undercover to bring both Fonsecas to justice. Mary was being held for trial for her drug activities, as well as for the murders of Mike Pratt, Lucie Zamora and Ronald Chang. Dario was being held as her accessory for all that, as well as for the murders of Brad Jacobson and Thomas Singer.
I closed up the house at Cane Landing and moved back to my apartment in Waikiki. After a couple of days off, and evaluations by both the department physician and psychiatrist, I drove my battered pickup into downtown Honolulu once more, parked at a meter a block away from the main station, and prepared to start the job I’d thought I was getting all along, as a detective in District 1. I sat in the truck for a minute, though, listening to Keali’i Kaneali’i ask where all the beach boys of Waikiki had gone. This boy, I knew, had gone away, but was back. Secure in that thought, I locked my truck and headed inside.
