A dozen things flew through my head at once. Mike liked his pizza with ham and pineapple. He had a down comforter on his bed that was like resting on clouds. My Wrangler was safe in its parking space at my apartment, but if I stayed the night with Mike he’d have to drop me at home on his way to work. I didn’t have any condoms on me, but I hoped Mike had some.
Had it been Stan LoCicero on the bike? Richard Hu? We didn’t have anything on Stan. There was no way a judge was going to give us a warrant on so little evidence.
More than anything else, I wanted to lie in Mike’s arms.
“Tomorrow’s going to be a hell of a day,” I said, linking my arm in his. “Let’s head for your truck, Romeo.”
WHERE THERE’S SMOKE
As I expected, Mike wanted a large pizza with ham and pineapple. “It was the first meal we ate after we moved here,” he said, while we were waiting at a little pizza place just down the hill from his house in Aiea. “My parents had been talking up Hawai’i to me for a long time, and when we saw there was a Hawaiian pizza on the menu we had to order it.”
I lounged against the counter, under a faded poster of Mt. Vesuvius. Dean Martin was singing “That’s Amore,” and I was starting to relax. “You liked it?”
He nodded. “I’d been worried that Hawai’i would be totally different from New York. I knew we were moving here so my mom would feel more comfortable, and I was worried that everybody would look like her, that they’d all speak Korean or something. And I wouldn’t fit in.”
The counter clerk called our number, and Mike paid for the pie and a six-pack of garlic rolls. “So we went out for pizza after we unpacked our boxes,” he said, while he waited for his change. “And I liked the mix of ham and pineapple, of sweet and savory. The next day, I met this girl next door, and her mom was Japanese and her dad was white. She even kind of looked like me.”
“I always felt like I fit in,” I said, as we walked back to his truck. “And then I went to college in California, and there I was exotic and different. It was weird. I’d look around, and everybody was white, or black, or Japanese, or Chinese. There were no in-betweens, like me. I’d use a Hawaiian word, or talk about eating Spam musubi or something, and people would look at me like I was from another planet.”
“I felt the same way,” he said. “I used to go back to Long Island for summers and holidays, to stay with my dad’s parents, and when it was time for college I figured I’d go there. But it didn’t feel like home anymore. I’d go into this Korean neighborhood in Queens sometimes, just to hear people talking, but they’d look at me like they couldn’t quite figure out what I was.”
It was like old times, hanging out with Mike, talking, eating pizza, and drinking this gourmet root beer he’d found somewhere, a local Hawaiian brand with a hula dancer on the bottle. We sat at his kitchen table eating slices and licking our fingers, and I thought of all the time we’d missed, days and months we could have spent in each other’s company.
He still liked to rip all the soft dough out of the crust, then scoop bits of ham and pineapple into the hollows. And as I remembered, he’d get bits of pizza in his mustache and then snake his tongue out to grab them. It was gross, but endearing.
While we were cleaning up, he bumped into me, and when I turned toward him he wrapped his arms around me. We started to kiss and rub our bodies against each other, and within a short time we were in his bedroom. The comforter on his bed felt just as good as I’d remembered, and so did his body against mine, his tongue in my mouth, and before long, his dick in my ass.
We were slumped next to each other in the afterglow of the kind of sex that makes your eyes roll back in your head when Mike started sniffing. “You smell that?” he asked.
“What? I showered this morning, but it was a long time ago.”
“Not you. Smells like gasoline.”
He jumped off the bed, pulled on a pair of shorts, and ran from the room. I followed, and as I went toward the living room I smelled what he had-gasoline, and above it, smoke.
He grabbed a fire extinguisher from the kitchen and pushed through the screen door to the yard. Over his shoulder, I could see flames licking at the back wall of the garage. “Call 911,” he yelled.
I did, for the second time that night. I gave the dispatcher the address and said it was the residence of a firefighter, then I went outside to help.
If you’re going to have a fire at your house, it’s best to have a trained fireman there with you. Mike knew just what to do, spraying the flames with the extinguisher, and directing me to get the hose and wet down the yard.
There was little in the back that was flammable; all the landscaping was away from the house and there wasn’t any of the usual junk lying around, as you’d find in my parents’ yard. No broken-down furniture, wooden trellis, or anything else that might catch fire.
“Get my parents out,” Mike yelled, as he sprayed the extinguisher.
The flames were moving along the back wall in the direction of his parents’ half, so I ran around to the front, barefoot, wearing only my shorts, and banged on their door. It was just after midnight, and from the lack of light I was sure his parents were asleep. How long would it take me to rouse them? I looked around for a window I could break, and finding none, pounded on the door again.
His father answered, wearing a nightshirt imprinted with Japanese characters, and I had a feeling the look of distaste on his face had to do with both my presence, and my attire. “Get out,” I said. “Mike’s side of the house is on fire.”
He turned into the house and began yelling for his wife, disappearing inside. I wasn’t sure if I should wait to see if they needed help evacuating, or return to Mike. The arrival of the first fire engine told me I didn’t have to do either, and I stepped back to let the professionals do their job.
Clouds covered the moon, but the truck’s headlights and the flames lit up the area like daytime. The firemen hustled Mike out of the way and I met up with him alongside the house, where we had a view of the back but were out of the way.
“What the fuck?” he said. “Somebody tried to burn my house down.”
He was agitated, yelling and jumping up and down. I tried to grab his arm, but he shook me off. We were both drenched in sweat, but the adrenaline was running out, and I just gave up and leaned back against a tree.
“Had to be Stan LoCicero,” I said, when he’d calmed down. “Unless you’ve got some other case going?”
“Not one where they’d try to burn me out. Damn, we’ve got to catch this bastard.”
I wondered if Stan was still around, if he’d found some vantage point to watch the fire and make sure he’d been successful. “He must have come back to the Rod and Reel Club after the shooting and heard me and Lieutenant Sampson talk about nailing him. I bet he thought he could get me out of the picture.”
Mike’s parents came around the corner then. His father had pulled on a long raincoat, and his bare calves made him look like a flasher. I couldn’t laugh, though. He wore plastic rubber slippas, and his gray-and-black hair was tousled.
His wife, whom I’d only seen previously in her nurse’s uniform, was wrapped in an elaborate embroidered dressing gown. She wore fuzzy pink slippers and her short dark hair hung sleekly around her face.
“It’s okay,” Mike said, going over to hug them. “We caught the fire before it got to your side.” By then, the firefighters had extinguished the flames, but were hosing everything down just to be sure. Mike led his parents down to the street where they could talk privately, and I followed just behind.
“What happened, Michael?” his father asked.
With an utterly straight face, Mike said, “I’ll have to investigate the source and conditions of the fire before I can make any conclusions.”
His father looked from him to me. I walked over to them. “I’m afraid this might be my fault.”
“Kimo,” Mike said.
“I’m not surprised,” Dr. Riccardi said. “Since you came into my son’s life, detective, we’ve seen nothing but
