“Now boarding rows eighteen through thirty-seven,” the agent said through the loudspeaker.
Her bag went into an overhead bin. She took her seat in Economy. Eight and a half hours in here. God help her and her leggy five-ten frame. Sunglasses, with a navy-colored baseball cap that covered her black cornrows: a new look for the native islander. New because it had to be.
Tahiti’s black sand beaches propped up its reputation as a paradise, with only a few roads, mostly dirt, between the populated areas. How much infrastructure did a person really need, had been her argument with herself. She had freedom, distance, and anonymity, which went a long way toward all but guaranteeing her safety, at least in the short run. But she had no livelihood. That’s why she spent four days a week on Bora Bora, another part of the French Polynesian islands and more of a tourist magnet. An expensive commute, but necessary. Bora Bora was where people with money congregated for their South Pacific vacations, to include customized services that were her wheelhouse: massages, personal training, and sometimes, as pleasing as she was to the eye, as an escort.
Good reasons, all three, to get to know her, but she was no longer anybody’s piece of ass in this business. Too impractical—customers talked, and bad reputations could sink business—but the other reason was she refused to fuck anyone for money ever again. Staying ahead of her drug addictions meant she no longer had to.
She’d worked a deal with one of the Bora Bora hotels: they gave her space in a luxurious hut over the water, where she provided her wellness services to a wealthy clientele four days a week in exchange for providing personal training for the hotel execs on staff, all of it on the up and up. She had a steady stream of income to supplement what she brought with her from her former employment on the mainland. Her stash was substantial, and it allowed her to decline training and massage work whenever it didn’t feel right.
New to Bora Bora, and new to where she preferred to call home, Taharuu Beach on Tahiti, she lived quietly with a new identity: Aiata Hauata. Aiata, or “woman who eats clouds.” A Polynesian name she’d liked from past visits. For her it had additional, transcendent significance: eating clouds was drug parlance for smoking and eating opium, something Kaipo had been doing heavily not too long ago after her pill habit had accelerated. Which was before the Hawaiian crime family Ka Hui had taken an interest in her and her expertise: crime scene cleaning, the kind that made crimes look as if they’d never happened. The drug habit nearly cost her her life. Ka Hui fixed all that. But staying with the crime family would have relegated her to trophy status on the arm of one Wally Lanakai, which would have cost her her freedom and her identity as something other than Wally’s woman. She’d left Philadelphia to rid herself of Wally, which meant she had to become a ghost.
Hauata, her chosen surname, she’d picked from a list of Tahitian names on the internet; she had no idea what it meant. The fake passport and identity had cost her thousands. A cheap price to pay for independence, to not be owned by anybody.
This plane ride from Tahiti to Kauai was unrelated to her Tahitian work gig. A rumor kicking about the transient hotel help had found her: the Ka Hui crime family had returned to Hawaii and brought with them their private, legally suspect organ transplant business. Some risk for those who donated, most often the indigent, but, rumor also had it, with a big-money payout as the enticement. Heavy interest in Hawaiian donors with Miakamii island roots, products of a healthy, pristine, disease-less environment. It was a venture she considered cannibalistic, and a line she could never cross again, the losses too personal from both sides of the equation: one dead boyfriend, an organ donor, and one dead mother awaiting an organ transplant that never came.
Her intention: insert herself into the mix. Spread the word among the native islanders about the danger. Become the argument against donating. It might mean sacrificing her individuality, and possibly her freedom, while she got the word out. Could she do that? She was about to find out.
For Kaipo, the Hawaiian mob Ka Hui had been a mixed blessing. A lot of pluses and minuses, the last minus being an overture about marriage. On the ledger’s other side, the pay had been fantastic—enough that it allowed her to relocate here on a whim. It had afforded her protection, invisible as it was, as a single female in Philly providing in-home personal services in an urban environment. And Ka Hui’s crime family had also wrestled into submission the monkey on her back. Correction, they had killed it, many times over, by eliminating every drug dealer who had ever sold to her, first in Hawaii, then on the U.S. mainland, in dramatic fashion. But in some cultures monkeys had multiple lives. How many lives did hers still have?
At least one. People in recovery were told to never forget that. There was always one monkey left, never more than one taste away.
“Anything from the bar, miss?” the flight attendant asked.
“No, I’m good.”
She’d gotten lucky: both seats next to her in Economy were empty. She could stretch out, could recline rather than sleep sitting up.
The plan was to remain in the shadows on Kauai. She’d stay off the radar of one Douglas Logan out of apprehension, and one Wally Lanakai out of self-preservation.
How could
