wheels vaulted over a clump of boulders and slammed into a grassy slope.
Lila Summers hit the brakes, squealing the tires and sending Jake Lassiter sprawling again. He landed hard on a shoulder that had been separated three times and dislocated twice. She expertly slid the Mazda into a 180-degree turn.
Now what? Lassiter thought they’d beat it down the mountain, but Lila was streaking back up the road, nearing the Blazer where the passenger door was opening — the driver’s door was pinned against the slope — and as a man stepped from the high cab, Lila swung the Mazda off the road toward him. Lassiter felt the jolt and heard a th-ump.
Lila brought the Mazda to a stop and Lassiter jumped out. Sprawled across their hood and front windshield was one of the largest men he had ever seen, aloha shirt pulled up over his huge belly. Lila Summers sat motionless, her hands on the steering wheel, calmly contemplating the sight of the big man’s navel staring through the windshield like a Cyclops.
Blood flowed from the man’s nose and trickled from one of his ears. One eye was closed and a nasty welt was forming on his forehead. But he wasn’t dead, not even unconscious. He was at that very moment pulling himself up with one hand and tearing off the Mazda’s radio aerial with the other. From in front of the pickup, Lassiter grabbed the man’s foot to pull him off the hood, a task no more difficult than dragging a tractor trailer up a hill. The foot, wrapped in a size 15EEE Reebok running shoe, jerked Lassiter toward the hood, then with the kick of a plow horse sent him tumbling into the sand at the side of the road. A sumo wrestler, or maybe defensive line material.
The big man slid off the Mazda and got to his feet, shaky but massive, whipping the aerial back and forth, heading for Lassiter, who crouched on his haunches, his hands trailing along the ground. No one said a word.
The big man got closer, the aerial whining in the air, and Lassiter stayed put. When the man was close enough that Lassiter felt the breeze from the metal whip, he sprang forward, tossing two handfuls of red sand in the man’s face. There was a yelp, the aerial fell, and the man’s hands came up to his eyes.
Lassiter hit him, a good left jab to the right eye, then a short right to his huge belly. The big man simply grunted and blinked, still clawing at his eyes. Lassiter planted his feet and got a lot of hip behind a left hook. The timing was good, but the aim a little high, and it caught the big man square in the middle of his sloping forehead. Slugging Dave Casper’s helmet with a roundhouse right in the AFC Championship game had probably hurt more, but maybe not, Lassiter thought, his knuckles flaring with pain.
The giant grunted again and hit Lassiter in the chest with an open palm. The impact knocked him back three feet. A great pass blocker. The man wiped the blood from his nose, and twisted his face into a vicious smile. “Hit me again, haole.”
Lassiter didn’t, but Lila did, clobbering him from behind with a mast extension, then a second time, and the man crumpled like a buffalo shot through the heart.
“Let’s get him off the road,” she said, looking each way for traffic. It would have been easier with a crane. They pushed and rolled him into a gulley and Lila quickly brought some sturdy quarter-inch boom line from the Mazda.
“Help me get his hands behind his back,” she told Lassiter. Working quickly, she bound the big man’s wrists with a sheepshank knot. He was facedown in the gulley, moaning softly. It took both of them to turn him over.
“Hello, Lomio,” Lila said softly. “You’re not as quick as you used to be, but you’re just as ugly. And you look like you’ve been hit by a truck.” Lila laughed, and a chill went through Jake Lassiter. He tried to think. What was it about this moment, about that laugh, but it wouldn’t compute and he stored it away.
Lila was bent over the bleeding man. “Now, Lomio, tell me where they are. You would have been with Keaka when he hid them.”
The man was silent.
“Oh, Lomio, Lomio! Wherefore art thou… bonds?” Lila said to him theatrically. Enjoying the moment.
Lomio spoke through swollen, bleeding lips. “Up my ass, wahine laikini.”
“Lomio, that’s very crude, calling me a whore.” Then she smashed the mast extension into his ankle. Metal shattered bone. Lomio’s face contorted in pain but he made no sound.
Lila scowled and turned to Lassiter. “C’mon, Jake. Let’s put him in the back of the truck. We’ll have to baby- sit him until he tells us where the bonds are.”
“What if he doesn’t know?”
Lila laughed, the same mocking, chilling laugh. “We’ll find that out, too, if we handle it right. By the time he dies, he’ll tell all his family secrets.”
By the time he dies. What the hell does that mean? The big man was hurt, sure, but the injuries weren’t fatal. And here’s Lila talking about him dying like it was inevitable, like they were going to… well… finish him off.
Lila was very businesslike, no trace of emotion. No anger, no fear. Okay, she’s not like me, Jake Lassiter thought. So what? She’s not like anybody I’ve ever known.
Except that laugh, the taunting of Lomio, that was familiar.
It reminded him of someone, and the memory gnawed at Lassiter, calling back a night of terror and doom.
She sounded just like Keaka Kealia.
CHAPTER 33
Lomio refused to move, so they propped him against the pickup, and when Lila threatened to break both his kneecaps, the giant used his one good leg to hop into the bed. Lila gagged him and pulled an old sail over his head, the smell of sweat and blood fouling the morning air.
They drove down the mountain and across the Central Valley into Lahaina. On a deserted street near the waterfront, Lila parked the pickup under an angel’s-trumpet tree, huge white flowers hanging downward in the shape of a horn, the exotic scent of musk heavy in the air.
“What’re we going to do with him?” Lassiter asked.
“Get him to talk, then find a hole to stuff him into.”
“It’d have to be big enough for a moose.”
Lila’s eyes lit up. “Or a pig. Jake, have you ever been to a luau?”
“No, and I’m not too hungry just now.”
“That’s okay, we don’t have time to eat. We’ll just let Lomio soak up the cultural experience of his ancestors, a long line of Samoan goat-fuckers.”
Her voice was hard. Lila continued to surprise him — so much toughness, so little compassion. Lassiter wondered if part of the attraction was her strength and the danger it courted. Was his button-down life so boring that he needed battles in the jungle and attacks on mountain roads to keep the blood flowing?
They drove another block before turning into an alley where the sign said DELIVERIES ONLY, LAHAINA BEACH HOTEL. Close to the beach a pavilion was set up for the evening luau. Lila pulled to a stop behind a row of pink Tecoma trees and killed the engine.
She pointed to a pile of leaves and banana stalks in the shade of the trees. “That’s an imu, an earthen oven. The boys would have put the pig in there a couple of hours ago. It will take six or seven hours to cook this way, so they shouldn’t be back for a while.”
Lila found a pair of windsurfing gloves in the pickup and they walked to the imu, where she started peeling away the leaves on top. Underneath was a mound of black dirt. “Jake, bring the shovels from the truck.”
He did, checking on Lomio in the back. The man was conscious, but he wouldn’t be doing calculus today. Lila began digging and uncovered sweet potatoes, bananas, taro, and fish wrapped in ti leaves. She removed the food gingerly, feeling the heat through the gloves.
“The leaves make steam,” Lila explained. “They gut the pig and put hot stones in the body cavity to cook from the inside out.”
