“I’d always heard about that, but I figured it was one of those urban folk tales-you know, some teenaged kid builds an atom bomb for his high school science project, and all he needs is the plutonium to make it work.” I paused to drink some more wine. “Can you give me a list of all everything you think they might need? I can get some uniforms out canvassing stores, see if we can trace any of the items.”
“Everything they used was pretty common, but I’ll put a list together. Who knows, you might get lucky.”
I was sure that was his leg brushing against mine under the table. We locked eyes and smiled. Mike kept looking at me as he twirled a forkful of pasta, lifted it to his mouth, and tasted. An expression somewhat akin to ecstasy passed over his face. “This is fabulous. Go on, taste it. Tell me what you think.”
I tasted. It was pretty terrific. The wine was good, too, and though the place had filled up our table was partially sheltered by a metal trellis with fake grape leaves twining around it. I was feeling more relaxed. Maybe this could turn out to be a date.
“I’d say this is just like my mother used to make, by my mom’s Korean,” Mike said. “And my dad’s from Long Island, so I didn’t see his family much growing up.”
“Your folks meet during the Korean War?” I asked.
Mike nodded. “If you believe them, it was love at first sight. My dad had taken some shrapnel, and my mom was a nurse. He came out of the anesthesia, and hers was the first face he saw.”
He smiled, and our eyes met again. I remembered the first time I’d seen him, at police headquarters. Would that be our story someday-love at first dead chicken?
“They moved back to New York after the war, and my mom worked as a nurse while my dad went to medical school. My mom hated it out east, though. She didn’t fit in, and she wanted to go back to Seoul. So they compromised on Hawai’i. They both work out at Tripler.”
“So how come you don’t have a stethoscope around your neck?”
“Teenaged rebellion? Plus I hated science at the time. Kind of ironic that so much of what I do now revolves around science.”
“You go to school for this stuff?” I asked. “The arson investigation?”
“Took a few courses. Spent a lot of time online.”
I was about to respond when he continued. “The Internet is an amazing thing. I’m still exploring a lot of it myself. I mean, it seems like anything you’re into, there’s something out there. You want to make a bomb, or find out who won the World Series in 1986, or try out some cool new software, all you have to do is point and click.” He looked at me appraisingly. “You must have seen how much gay material is out there. Chat rooms and pictures and stories and all.”
It was finally on the table, the g-word. I tried to phrase what I wanted to say carefully. “You do much of that? Hanging out on line, I mean.”
Our eyes met across the table once again. I could fall in love with those eyes. Clear, light green, steadily focused on me. “I’m working on it. Finally broke down and bought a laptop, got my own account at home a couple of months ago.”
“What’s your screen name?” I’d been on-line with Harry a few times, as he was trying to drag me into the digital generation, and I knew his name was PhysWiz, referring to his Ph. D. in physics from
MIT.
Mike blushed.
“Go on, you can tell me.”
“Toohot.” He paused. “You know, from too hot to handle.”
“Oh, baby,” I said. We locked eyes again.
Time to get back to business. “We’ve got at least one amateur bomb maker with Internet access,” I said. “He may or may not be the sweaty guy who Gunter and my sister-in-law and I all saw around the bathroom. What else do we know?”
We didn’t know much more, though we had a seemingly endless supply of questions. Mike believed that the bomb could have been built in anybody’s kitchen, without requiring much in the way of special supplies. It wasn’t a particularly expensive proposition, either. I laid out for him my plans to research the groups that had opposed the gay marriage lawsuit, and how I had recruited Harry, and Lui’s station, to help. “I managed to catch the five and six o’clock news from the station,” I said. “KVOL did a nice piece on Sandra and Cathy. Maybe tomorrow they’ll come up with some leads.”
By the time we finished off the pasta I was way too stuffed for dessert, but the waiter brought us complimentary little glasses of grappa, a strong Italian brandy. Mike downed his in one shot, so of course I had to do the same.
But I was without the benefit of his Italian ancestry, or his undoubted years of drinking the stuff. Man, did it burn going down! I started coughing and choking, and he laughed. I wondered if this was what dating him would be like, the two of us constantly struggling to get the upper hand.
Somehow that didn’t seem too unpleasant.
SECRETS
Mike insisted on paying the bill. “The fire department can get this one, and the police department can get the next one, all right?” I doubted he’d actually expense the meal-though we’d talked about the case, I couldn’t see him explaining to his chief that he’d had dinner at a romantic Italian restaurant with the only gay cop on the Honolulu police force-or at least the only openly gay one.
My apartment was a half-dozen blocks away, but we drove over in his truck. “The tapes are right behind the seat,” he said, as he began to parallel park in front of my building.
I twisted around to get them and felt waves of pain surging through my back. “Shit.” I thought I whispered but he heard.
“What’s the matter?”
“I’ve got a little burn on my back. I tried to go surfing this morning and ever since I get these wicked twinges.”
He slotted the truck neatly in place. “I’ve got some cream you can use. It’s one of the necessities of life as a fire fighter.”
He got the cream from the case in the truck bed, and we climbed the stairs to my apartment. “And you complain about the way my truck looks,” he said as we walked in.
I had to admit the place looked pretty bad, even by my standards. It’s just one big room, with a kitchenette, though I have this Japanese-style screen I built from broken-down surfboards that separates the bedroom area from the rest of the room. I usually throw dirty clothes onto it. I hadn’t made the bed in the morning, nor had I gone through on one of my weekly binges where I put all the sports equipment away neatly. There were piles of books on the floor and a messy stack of newspapers by the front door, waiting for recycling. At least the kitchen was pretty clean; I try never to go to sleep with dirty dishes in the sink.
He walked over to look at my garbage can. “No fast food wrappers,” he said. “That’s a good sign.”
A good sign of what, I wanted to ask. I was losing my patience again, feeling tired. Oh, I still wanted to get into his pants, and I was getting increasingly confident that he wanted to get into mine as well. But it didn’t have to be that night.
I flipped on the TV and the VCR and slotted the first tape into the drive. He sat on my sofa with a proprietary air and I decided it was time to shift the balance of power a little. “How do you tell when a fireman is dead?” I asked.
He looked at me. “The remote control slips from his hand. That’s the oldest joke in the book.”
“Sometimes the old ones are still funny,” I said. As the first news credits started to roll I sat next to him. Close, so that our thighs were barely touching. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t move away either.
We watched all four tapes carefully, pausing and rewinding, but we didn’t see anybody who looked too interested. The KVOL tape was the last. “Hey, that’s my friend Terri,” I said, as she appeared on the screen. The reporter interviewed her about the party, and the cause. She looked beautiful and poised, despite having just escaped a major fire. I was sure Lui had approached her to appear on camera. Briefly I gave Mike a quick rundown on Terri, including the recent death of her husband, a cop I’d worked with.