She looked away. There was something about the pause Lassiter didn’t like, another evasive witness framing a reply, testing how it sounds in the mind instead of just letting the lips speak the quick truth. Finally she said, “After he killed the Cuban doper, I told him I was tired of the violence. I wanted it to stop. He promised it would. Then we got home, and he said he would kill the robber, sorry, the burglar who hired us to take the coupons to Bimini. I knew then it would never end. Keaka didn’t want it to end.”
“So you left him?”
“Keaka pretty much guessed what happened on Bimini, called me a haole slut, asked me to choose sides. We said some nasty things to each other, then I left. I’ve been staying with a girl friend in Kihei. Keaka didn’t tell me about the setup on Crater Road last night. He would have been afraid I’d warn you.”
“Would you have?”
“Of course.”
“Why? Why betray your first lover, the man who taught you so much?”
“I wouldn’t look at it that way. I just want you to live a good life and be happy and grow old and die in bed and not on a rocky mountainside.”
It wasn’t quite what he wanted to hear. An All-American because I love you would have done nicely.
“Lila, I’m going after Keaka, with or without your help. It would just be easier if you’re on my team.”
She looked away again, turning toward the ocean. She was silent for a long moment, and Lassiter stood there, smelling the sweet fragrances of the tropical fruits, waiting. Finally, she told him where to put a board in the water, at Makaluapuna Point on the northwest coast of Maui by the lava rocks called Dragon’s Teeth. It was nearly deserted there, she said, only the nearby plantation village of Honokahua framed by a double line of Norfolk pine trees.
At the house in Kihei where Lila had been staying, she opened the garage and hauled out an old eleven-foot board, her harness, and a rig.
“Don’t drift too far downwind,” she told him, “and sail port of the lighted weather buoy to get through the rocks on the Molokai side.”
In the fading light, she handed him a stainless-steel Colt Python to carry in the pouch of a harness. He wanted to ask what she was doing with the gun, and what jobs with Keaka ended in their jungle celebrations. But he didn’t ask. He just put the gun in a sandwich bag and pressed it closed by its plastic zipper, sealing it like an office worker packing his lunch.
“You don’t have to do this to prove anything to me,” Lila said. Then she kissed him, long and slow, as if it were the last time, and as she turned away, Lassiter thought he saw a tear in the corner of her eye. But then again, maybe it was the light.
He could have said that he wasn’t trying to prove anything to her, but he didn’t say that. He could have told her what it felt like to lie facedown in the cold gravel as your friend is dying in a burst of flames — dying instead of you — but he didn’t say that either. He didn’t say anything. He just threw the board, the boom, the mast, and the sail into the bed of her old Mazda pickup. Then, as the sun set over Lanai and the coast of Maui was bathed in a peaceful orange glow, he drove to Makaluapuna Point, looking for the rocks called Dragon’s Teeth, wondering if anyone is ever ready to die.
CHAPTER 28
It was from early Polynesians — Tahitians, Samoans, and Tongans — that the seeds of Keaka Kealia grew. Lean and strong, Keaka surfed Maui’s north shore, another island boy dark as a kukui nut. Surfing taught him balance and agility, and a thousand years of history imbued him with courage and a love of the wind and sea. When windsurfing came to the island from California, he learned that too, first on an old twelve-foot floater without foot straps, a Model A relic of the sport. With his natural strength, Keaka sailed for hours in thirty-knot winds over rough seas.
In the beginning he did not own a harness, the vest that hooks into a boom line and relieves pressure on the arms, so he developed stamina beyond that of the others, though the tendons of his elbows swelled from the constant strain. He luxuriated in the drag of stretching muscles, a blend of pleasure and pain, a natural euphoria from the sheer physical act of conquering the sea. While still an amateur, he completed a 360, a complete flip, lifting the bow off a wave, mast upside down kissing the water, then bringing the board all the way around, landing smoothly, and trimming the sail to pick up speed in search of the next wave.
By eighteen Keaka Kealia had grown into a rugged, handsome man, dark eyes set on a wide face, lithe and graceful in every movement. He worked part-time in a rental shop, giving lessons to the tourists, occasionally bedding down teenage girls from L.A. who were lured, yet frightened, by his hard brown body and brooding demeanor. Unlike the other beach boys, his mind was not socked in by a fog of Maui Wowie. He read books, studying the ways of his ancestors. The old Hawaiian folk songs spoke to Keaka, told him of the gods and of the spirits of the sea. He longed for that age, to gather fish from the ocean and ride above it on a board descended from the voyaging canoes of his ancestors.
He watched with disgust as developers built condos hard by the beach. To find sanctuary from the tourists and the timeshare hucksters, he sailed nine miles across the Pailolo Channel to the island of Molokai and made a campsite in the jungle there. A century earlier, the island was deserted except for a leper colony, and Keaka, always aware of links to the past, appreciated the irony.
He cleared an area on the slopes of the Molokai Forest Reserve and slowly built a hale, a thatched hut. He removed the bark from the timbers with a stone chisel and dried pili grass in the sun for the roof. He made water bottles and poi bowls from gourds, and he slept on a lauhala mat of woven leaves. He hunted pheasants and goats and cooked his prey over open fires. At night Keaka Kealia dreamed he was a warrior of King Kalaniopuu, and with weapons of stone, he attacked Captain Cook’s pale sailors, crushing their skulls and gutting them with sharpened sticks. Those he did not kill he drove into the sea, then watched with joy as they floundered in the surf, disappearing forever from view.
Jake Lassiter wished he had a wet suit. There was a chill in the night air, and the black water even sounded cold slapping the rocky shore. His feet felt it first, then his chest, as spray from the shore break hit him.
He beach-started in the shallow water that broke across the volcanic shelf and, looking down, thought he saw a human skull wedged between two rocks, reflecting the moonlight. A wave pounded the rocks, and the skull, if that’s what it was, disappeared.
The crossing shouldn’t be that difficult, he told himself. He had made longer trips, though not at night and not in unfamiliar waters. And not with murder on his mind.
Is that what it would be if he crept into Keaka’s camp and pounced on him under a sky lit with stars? Sure it would, he decided. First-degree, too. Premeditated and cold-blooded. No, that’s wrong. His feet were cold; his blood was hot. Hot with thoughts of Berto strung up in a swamp and Tubby pushed over a cliff. And Lila — what had Keaka done to Lila Summers, what had he made her? A thief? Yes, surely that. They were in it together in Miami, and who knows what before then. A murderer? No, he couldn’t bring himself to acknowledge that Lila had anything to do with the killings. That was all Keaka’s doing, he told himself. Then told himself again, just to make sure.
The wind let up at sundown, just a puff by Maui standards, twelve to fifteen knots from the northeast. He could sail on a starboard tack all the way across the Pailolo Channel. From the beach at Honokahua he could see Molokai, silhouetted in the darkness, rising like a black monolith, its southern coastline a jungle devoid of lights. The night was clear and a three-quarter moon cast a milky glow on the peaking waves. Lassiter fell once getting beyond the surf line, but once was enough. Freezing now, a shivering, bone-deep cold.
The water was choppy and the board pitched beneath him, but in a few minutes his legs were making the adjustments, knees bending, weight shifting without any message from his brain, just doing it on autopilot. At the same time, his arms were letting out the sail and raking it in, allowing the rhythms of the wind and water dictate
