her hands drift unseen inside the pack.
“Feels so good,” she purred. “Come try it.”
“Nah, don’t think I could get off on it.” But he joined her anyway, four hands rummaging through small slips of paper, the prize of eagles. And she was right. It felt damn good, a fortune trickling through their fingers…
East Chicago, Indiana Environmental Improvement Revenue Bond, Youngstown Sheet and Tube Project; Jackson County, Mississippi Pollution Control Bond, International Paper Company Project.
… hundreds spilling out in glorious colors. They played with their treasure, reading aloud the tuneless names of municipal sewage projects.
A bright sun had broken through the clouds and mist. A dewy line of sweat beaded on Lila’s upper lip. She said, “We’ve got to get off the island as soon as possible, and we can’t use the airport. Mikala will have cops everywhere.”
“Just don’t ask me to ride a sailboard to San Francisco.”
“I’m thinking of a larger boat. My girlfriend’s father has an old Hatteras docked at Maalaea, the Crooked Rainbow.” As she said it, they both looked up, because above them was a rainbow, its colors brightly etched against the sky. They laughed and kissed, and rolled on top of each other on the wet ground, and for a moment, he forget about the questions without answers.
When they untangled and stood up, Lila said, “I’ll call my girlfriend and make sure the boat’s gassed up and the keys on board. We’ll leave at sunrise for Oahu, and we can fly out of Honolulu for wherever you want.”
“Miami, of course,” Jake Lassiter said, and Lila sat there looking at him as if she wanted to say something but it could wait.
Lila stuffed the coupons into the pack, and Lassiter walked toward the cliff. Haze filled the valley, but still the view was spectacular. He finally felt at peace with his surroundings. It was starting to sink in.
The bonds and the blonde.
He had them both. Then he felt Lila behind him and started to turn toward her. Something stopped him.
There is a sixth sense, some prehistoric synapse so little used as to be virtually extinct in man. It lets us feel a shadow, a movement unheard and unseen at our back. When man was a hunter, when his knuckles still scraped the forest floor, his senses were honed by constant danger. Today, we are oblivious to the bleat of taxicab horns, much less the cry of a bird in the wilderness.
Not knowing why, Lassiter stopped and turned the other way. He felt Lila brush by him, gasp, and stumble against his planted leg. He whirled back and watched her fall into the vast open space; then his right arm shot toward her. He didn’t know how his right hand closed over her wrist. He didn’t tell it what to do, it just reacted. Once, in his rookie year against the Bills, he’d let the tight end breeze by him over the middle. Never seeing the ball, Lassiter had stuck out his hand. The pass was underthrown and smacked flat into his palm and stuck. Brilliant interception, the papers said.
He held her wrist tight, her body dangling into space. Their eyes locked, and Lila looked up at him, her mouth twisted into a spasm of fear. Far below her the stream trickled over volcanic rocks, and mist rose from the ancient burial ground. Chilled, Lassiter hauled her back onto firm ground with one solid tug.
Lila sprawled onto the grass, rubbing the shoulder that had held all her weight. “I don’t know how I could have been so clumsy.” She smiled weakly. “This time you saved my life, Jake. I was so frightened that…”
“No way I could have dropped you. I had you solid.”
She picked up the pack and tossed it over an arm. “For a second I thought… you know… if I were gone, all the bonds would be yours. If it had been Keaka instead of you, he might have just let go, then laughed about it.”
Jake’s eyes narrowed. “I’m not Keaka.”
Lila used a pay phone at a tourist information booth to call her girlfriend. Then they drove out of the Iao Valley and through Wailuku, passing only a few blocks from the County Police Department. Inside the building at that moment, Captain Mikala Kalehauwehe was reviewing transcripts of wiretaps on half a dozen telephones. He had no warrant for the taps, but he had a friend at the telephone company who owed him a favor for looking the other way when the evidence had disappeared in his son’s cocaine case. Nothing had turned up on any of the lines from the windsurfing crash pads around Paia on the north shore. Nothing from the girlfriend Lila used to hang around with in Kihei. Nothing anywhere until the phone rang. They’d just picked up a call.
CHAPTER 35
Signing the register as “Mr. and Mrs. R. Bonds,”Jake Lassiter and Lila Summers checked into a small motel in Maalaea, a tiny town wrapped around the shoreline of a flat bay. They looked over the Crooked Rainbow at the marina. Twin diesel engines ready to power them out of Maui at first light. With Lila on the flying bridge checking the console, Lassiter crawled into the engine compartment.
“Clean, tanks full, fuel lines in good shape,” he called out. “Let’s see if the battery is topped up.”
He popped the battery cover and inspected the chambers. “Everything fine down here.”
He hoisted himself out of the engine compartment onto the deck. Lila was above him on the bridge, staring at the horizon. “Great boat,” he said. “Maybe we’ll get one like it. Catch some grouper and snapper in the Keys. Find an uninhabited island, watch the sun set in the Gulf — “
“Jake,” she interrupted him, “I was thinking it might not be such a good idea to go to Miami.”
“What?”
“If we go to Miami, you’ll have to give back the bonds.”
He crawled the ladder to the bridge. Lila settled demurely in the captain’s chair, knees tucked under her chin, the picture of innocence. She swiveled the chair toward him and cocked her head, waiting.
“I give back half, we keep half,” he said. “That’s my deal.”
Her smile was backed by iron. “No, Jake, you keep half. That’s your deal. The half is yours, not ours.”
“What do you mean? If it weren’t for you, there’d be no coupons at all, none. What’s mine is yours.”
“What if you get tired of me? What if you do what Keaka did, find someone else, and all of a sudden the money’s yours, not ours?”
Jake Lassiter took a moment. “That’s what happened? I thought you left Keaka because of the violence, the murders. That’s what you told me.”
She was silent. The jury shall not infer guilt from the fact that the defendant remains silent. That’s what a judge would say. But in the real world, it’s just the opposite. Cum tacent clamant, Charlie Riggs used to tell him. When they remain silent, they cry out with guilt.
“You lied to me,” Lassiter said.
She looked past him, toward the open sea. “A white lie. I wanted to stop you from going after Keaka, to keep you from being killed. I thought if you knew how dangerous he was…”
“So what did happen with you and Keaka?”
“He was flipping out on his Hawaiian king crap. He wanted to have twenty-one wahines to serve him like Kamehameha the Great. Lee Hu and I were the start of the harem. I told him thanks but no thanks, I didn’t think he was that hot one-on-one.”
First the killings, then a lie, now the bonds, he thought. What other surprises would there be? Time for cross-examine, starting with a leading question. “So what do you want to do with the bonds, keep them?”
“Of course. We earned them.”
“Like Hitter earned Poland.”
“Jake, don’t be foolish. We’ve got them. Why would we give them back?”
“Because they’re not ours!” he thundered in his courtroom voice.
She looked at him as if he were a slow learner. “Jake, we killed two men to get them.”
The we hung there, taunting him, but he ignored it and went back to basics. “Lila, we’ll get half, maybe eight hundred thousand. Isn’t that enough?”
