Tantō. A Japanese word she knew. A small ceremonial sword used as a knife… for disembowelment.
The adjacent room went silent. Footsteps were followed by the rearranging of furniture, followed by the distinctive sound of steel scraping steel, a long blade or saber being removed from a metal sheath. This was not the tantō. Silence resumed, no voices, raised or otherwise, no speaking, only whimpering, then soft crying, then silence again, until—
“I am sorry, Oyabun, for my weakness then, and for my weakness now.” Her assailant’s voice. “Please forgive me, O Master. Please, let me live…”
“Begging… does not become a Samurai,” Mr. Yabuki grunted.
“But I will do better—”
One angry yell from Yabuki in Japanese ended it. A thump on the floor. To Kaipo, the thud revealed an unconscionable outcome. Not hara-kiri; a beheading.
She’d now changed her mind. It had been a huge mistake to think she could ever be satisfied returning to mob life by hooking up with Wally again in any form, even temporarily. She needed to get off these islands immediately. Chances of that outcome were looking slim.
Within the hour, she was moved to a different room farther down the motel wing. An hour after that, Mr. Yabuki moved into the room next to hers.
28
Wally and Magpie walked past the storefront’s security detail in the lobby and approached the nurses’ station.
“Surgery starts soon, Mr. Lanakai,” Nancy said. She giggled, covered her mouth. “Sorry, sir. Our new patient, I love her, she’s always made me laugh so hard…”
A loud voice carried from down the hallway. Distinctively raspy, the African-American female comic was no stranger to foul language on stage and off. Repeated F-bombs and cocksuckers took up three quarters of the joke she was trying to tell.
Wally Lanakai’s diminutive Hawaiian nurse administrator was in stitches, their two patients, prospective donor and recipient, in various stages of surgery preparedness. Nancy lifted copies of paperwork off her desk and handed them to Wally. NDAs that he’d seen already, all signed by each doctor, nurse, patient, donor, and Wally. It wasn’t like a court of law would ever see these documents if a participant breached the NDA, knowing this business operated below the radar and bordered on unethical, but the prospect of retaliation put more teeth into Wally’s verbal threats of “you’ll be sorry” if any of the participants blew the whistle.
Suddenly the echoing guffaws from the hallway shut off, the joke cut short just before the punchline. Wally recognized the territory. The plaque in the woman’s brain had choked her off mid-sentence, leaving the speaker bewildered, confused. Nancy made busy work for herself at the desk, did not comment, the territory familiar to her as well. Dementia took no prisoners, could silence the best and the most gifted in all walks of life, and it did so without notice, without discrimination.
Two surgeries were scheduled back-to-back, surgery number one, removing a living-donor partial liver from a Miakamiian man. Surgery number two, grafting the partial liver from surgery number one onto the liver of a beloved comedienne from the smoky clubs of the seventies and eighties and the late-night talk shows of the nineties. Wally and Magpie passed Nancy’s station, entered the main hallway.
The banter started up again as abruptly as it had stopped, good-natured ribbing that the female comic had for her doctors and her donor. As they approached the operating theater, a large man—untucked tropical shirt with red parrots, shorts, silver swag around his neck, and a Rolex—appeared at the end of the hall and trudged toward them. The comic’s son. A masked nurse in full surgical gear exited the surgical theater, was on her way into the windowed anteroom to secure the doors. She switched on the overhead “IN USE” sign for the hallway.
“What the hell, Lanakai, what took you so long?” the hustling man called. They met midway, outside the operating room. “I’ve been waiting for you. I do not want you to start the surgery…”
Wally reacted, pointed at the nurse through the window, pounded it, then raised one wait-a-moment finger when he had her attention, signifying the surgery shouldn’t start yet.
“What’s the problem?” Wally said.
“I just read what my mother signed. She’s getting only part of a liver? I don’t think so.”
The problem for Wally and Magpie was this man was a cop—retired SWAT—and not all that clean. He was someone who could make things difficult for them going forward, if not right now, the testosterone levels in the hallway rising.
“That’s the way live donor transplants work,” Wally said. “It has to be that way. Partial livers for both parties. She’ll be back to her pre-dementia self in no time. You’ll just need to be patient with her.”
“Transplant the whole liver,” he said.
“I can’t do that,” Wally said. “You know why.”
“Yes, you can. I already checked out the donor. This guy’s a drug user with a record. Shit happens.”
“Shoplifting and receiving stolen goods. Hardly a record. And he’s in recovery. Four years. I don’t take active drug users as donors. If they lie to me about it, trust me, that’s when the shit happens. The answer’s no.”
“She’ll pay double. She’ll double your fee, Lanakai—”
“A million and a half? That’s… No. She doesn’t need the whole liver—”
“Make it happen or my mother and I leave now. I know people. Do it, or I shut this operation down.”
The discussion now had a large audience: doctors, nurses, the lobby bodyguards, and tiny Nancy. Magpie interceded, a hand on Wally’s chest, pushing him out of the way. Magpie got in the ex-cop’s face. “Back off, asshole…”
“Enough,” Wally shouted. He pushed past Magpie.
He eyed his audience with a sweeping look into the operating room, then down the hallway, returning his gaze to confront this pain-in-the-ass, uninformed, dirty-cop
