“Let me guess. She’s a Miakamii native.”
“Yep.”
“How did they pay her?”
“The expense reimbursements were in cash. Other amounts came in donations to a crowdfund page she set up for herself. A rent party fund, or grocery funds for the indigent crowdfund, something like that. They suggested she create it. Total payments to her over a few days came to fifteen thousand bucks. Slick, in my opinion.”
Her remarks hung out there, Kaipo moving past what she already knew: Wally Lanakai was a smart operator when it came to collecting and handing out payoffs.
“You said she walked away, as in she’s doing fine after the surgery?”
“Back on her feet already, slinging drinks and food at Love Your Lava Beach Club in Kapaa.”
Vena elaborated, answered more questions about who, what, and when, finally getting to the where. “She said the surgery was in a shuttered healthcare facility, the donor and the recipient on site at the same time. It took about seven hours. Clean, professional, comfortable. She wasn’t able to eat or drink for a few days, and the staples came out a week later. She spent time in post-op care somewhere, a week I think it was, in a spa, received pain meds, has a little scarring, but no other aftereffects. Her words.”
Fucking Wally. Kaipo often wondered what he could have done with his life if he’d gone legit instead of all-mobster; gone corporate instead of criminal. But asking that about him meant she had to ask the same question about herself.
What she’d done for him, how she’d cleaned up crime scenes after him and his mob folks… how close she’d come to killing people herself…
She stopped her introspection.
“Vena. Listen carefully. Ka Hui—Wally Lanakai—is organized crime—”
“No shit.”
“Wally murders people when his survival instinct dictates it, also murders them when it doesn’t. Murders them when they don’t give him what he wants. Murders them when things go wrong, like with some of these surgeries.”
Kaipo lifted her backpack to the table, unzipped it, and took out a thick aluminum case. She flipped open the cover and removed a cushioned tray, in it a Glock 17. She laid the tray with the handgun in it flat on the table between them. Vena didn’t take her eyes off it.
“What the fuck, Kaipo.”
“I’ve seen the aftermath. I now carry this, even have a license for it. Tell your friend, and have her tell her friends, and you tell your other friends, to not get involved in what’s going down with those surgeries no matter how much money’s offered.”
Vena’s glances stuttered between the handgun on the table and Kaipo. The dead air remained unstirred until—
“Why are you here, then? You bolted him once and went into hiding. You’ve got a new identity…”
“All true.”
“So who are you again? Your new name? Aiata…?”
“Aiata Hauata. Nice to meet you, Vena Akina.”
“Whatever. Seriously, why do this? Why come back to Hawaii? Wait… the copter crash on Miakamii?”
“Not the reason. Something’s not right about that crash, but that’s not why.”
Vena absently tugged at a piece of jewelry on her wrist. Kaipo’s mind drifted, keyed on Vena’s bracelet as a sweet, shared remembrance of theirs. One similar to Vena’s was in Kaipo’s suitcase.
“You still have it,” Kaipo said, smiling.
“Sure do. I love my special momi snot.”
“I love my special momi snot, too,” Kaipo repeated, a tender response to a tender comment.
Momi, or Hawaiian for pearls. Snot, specifically snail snot, was the shell itself. Snot on a half shell, snot with a hat, snot that walks: Miakamii nicknames for the tiny colorful mussel shells strung together that graced Vena’s wrist. Stripes on some of the shells, starry dots on others. Tans and reds and iridescent blues. They’d made them for each other when they were in their teens. It was what BFF girls did on Miakamii.
“Someone murdered that pilot, Kaipo. The news says it was a tourist. Or someone posing as a tourist. Ka Hui comes back and bingo, the Logan family loses a helicopter and its Miakamiian pilot and some livestock, and the island church gets damaged, too.”
“The Logans ever lose a copter before?” Kaipo said.
“Not that I’m aware of.”
“That’s the part that doesn’t work.” Kaipo tapped the side of her nearly empty lemonade glass with her nails, thinking. “The Hawaiian mob and the Logans coexisted on Kauai for a long time, didn’t interfere with each other. And they’re in the organ harvesting business now. The shells, the mollusks—the disease immunities—Wally wouldn’t lose good, transplantable Miakamiian organs to the ocean. If he wanted the pilot dead he’d have had him killed on land, then he would have taken his liver.” She poured herself more lemonade, sipped. “He won’t kill the goose that laid the golden egg. Plus I don’t think he’d do anything to hurt that island.”
“Well someone did. You see the news coverage?”
Vena pulled up news reports on her phone. Photos taken from the air by Kauai news stations reporting on the crash, their own helicopters and planes hovering over the site before the Navy scrambled their helo gunships to chase them off. “The livestock pens took most of the hit. There was no damage to the school, but see there, the church… something took out a window.”
In Kaipo’s mind that was a shame, but no big deal. She worshipped in that church, as did all natives born and raised there. But the church and school weren’t getting heavy usage nowadays, or so the drumbeats were saying, a declining population and all that. A disappearing way of life.
“Back to why you came back, Kaipo. What do you plan to do?”
“What I’m doing now, with you. Have you give me some leads. Spread the word. In person and below the radar, naming names where necessary. Hoping you do the same. A whisper campaign that
