36
“We’re in position, boss,” Magpie said on the phone to Wally. Wally rubbed his brow, at a loss. A lot on his mind.
He exited a different chicken slaughterhouse building on the farm property after having his men toss room after room in an exhaustive search, no Kaipo inside. He’d moved from anger to grief with each passing moment, but the hate and the need for revenge still drove him.
Their casualties from the post-fight skirmish: the number of Ka Hui dead, zero; number wounded, three. All would live. Yabuki’s casualties, from what Wally could tell: many more wounded, two dead. Neither of the dead was Yabuki, which was all Wally cared about.
“Tell me what you see, Magpie. Your surroundings. I want to feel this.”
“One dead Japanese yacht guy, boss, draped over the con, a rifle shot to the head. My doing when we boarded from the Navy outboard.”
More description from Magpie, wearing night goggles: a well-appointed bridge, even for a yacht, a nervous U.S. Navy commander standing next to Magpie, eager to get on with it, and the island’s calm lagoon, lit by the moon. Some monk seals were on the beach, sleeping, paying no attention to them.
“Raising my binoculars, boss.”
He mentioned the view of the channel separating Miakamii from Kauai, leading to the lagoon, with a soft chop and moonlit whitecaps. Mentioned the whine of an outboard engine, moving slowly across the channel, Magpie seeing two people aboard.
“It’s Yabuki, boss, closing in. Fifty yards.”
He again mentioned the Navy commander on his left, who now raised the rocket launcher to his shoulder. The launcher’s red laser dotted the chest of one of the outboard’s occupants.
“Is Commander Malcolm ready, Magpie?”
“I believe he is, boss.”
“We owe this to him.”
“I know, boss.”
“Anything else, Magpie?”
“Yabuki sees the laser on his chest, boss. Now he sees me in his binoculars, looking at him.”
“Take him out.”
Magpie’s final description was his tap of CO Evan Malcolm’s shoulder, the commander’s face drawn into a fist, his depression of the trigger, and the release of a screaming projectile traveling something short of Mach One that struck the bow of Yabuki’s approaching outboard and raised it ten feet out of the water while halving his body, showering the channel with sheet metal, nautical gear, a Samurai sword, and human body parts.
A knock at Wally Lanakai’s hotel room door. Wally’s armed man looked through the peephole, called behind him to his boss.
“Mr. Lanakai? Sir?”
“What?” Wally sat slouched on a sofa in front of a TV, sipping a bottle of beer, anywhere from his sixth to his tenth.
“It’s a hotel staff person with a package.”
Wally stumbled to the door, swept it aside, and grabbed the small cardboard box out of the delivery man’s hands before slamming the door in his face. He turned the box over and over, looking through bloodshot eyes for the return address, then read return-address-sounding words somewhere on it that meant nothing to him. Fumbling while peeling off the paper, he found a white Styrofoam container inside, the size of a meatloaf, double-wrapped in mailing tape. He dropped the unopened container to the floor like it was contaminated and pulled back. Tears formed, further compromising his eyes, him unable to pick up the package.
His unsteady voice demanded that his man open it.
The lid aside, Wally peeked in, saw a reddish-brown internal organ the size of his hand, packed in dry ice.
The human chemical factory. A miracle organ. The cure for Alzheimer’s.
A full liver, not a partial. Wally had never taken a full liver from any living person who hadn’t deserved to die, had even walked away from a million and a half bucks from a cop who threatened to close him down.
“Kaipo…”
He didn’t want this one.
Wally sobered up enough to call Douglas Logan, who answered immediately. In a few short words, Wally retracted his offer for the purchase of Miakamii Island or any of the island’s businesses. He’d lost Kaipo for good, and he wanted nothing to do with that fucking island ever again.
37
They settled into the chairs as Douglas Logan’s guests and would be fed a nice brunch when they were through talking to him in his ranch office.
“Commander Malcolm—Evan. Mr. Trout, and Mr. Stakes. So glad you’re able to join me. So let me begin with a confession.”
The Kauai Police Department had been overwhelmed physically with the carnage and multiple investigations in progress. Exploded cars with the bodies of local Yakuza redistributed along coastal Highway 50, near the U.S. Naval base’s Howling Sands Airport. A stolen sanitation department vehicle on the same highway, ready for the scrap heap after its decimation at the hands of mobsters. The street sweeper operator’s revised statement that said no, he didn’t know nothing about no body parts in no cooler, he’d been mistaken, it was his ruined lunch-bucket he was complaining about on his 9-1-1 call. An abandoned chicken farm that had more blood, all human, no fowl, in its slaughterhouses than the place had experienced in decades, but no bodies to attach to it. An abandoned yacht registered to a Japanese corporation left floating in the channel, no one on board. A midnight report of a fire in the channel, but no vessel to attribute it to. The NTSB and Terry Koo’s hounding of Douglas Logan because someone had monkeyed with the evidence of the helicopter crash on Miakamii, with Logan unable to provide an explanation.
And a woman named Aiata Hauata, former Yakuza hostage, her location unknown, who had checked herself out of Kauai’s Veterans Memorial Hospital in Waimea a day after she’d been ambulanced there, treated for an abdominal laceration.
“Miakamii is a relic,” was how Logan began his admission. “A beautiful gift to us. We’re able to see the majesty, and listen to the language, of a Hawaii of hundreds and hundreds of years past. It has struggled to remain a way of life for its people, and for my family as its curators. But it is in incredible decline,
