My brothers and their wives had gone home to their families, leaving my mother alone with my father. He was grumpy, refusing to eat his dinner and demanding again to go home. “Maybe you can talk to him,” my mother said when I arrived. “He’s driving me crazy.”
My father sat up in bed when he saw me come in. There was more color in his face than the day before, and he looked stronger, more rested. “Kimo. Do you know where they put my clothes? I want you to find my clothes so that I can go home.”
I looked at him sitting there, an IV hooked into his left arm, some kind of wires attaching him to a heart monitor going out the other side, and I started to laugh.
“What are you laughing at? I could still kick your ass if I wanted to.”
“You couldn’t even kick a pebble along the street,” I said. “And you aren’t going to be able to if you don’t eat. What was wrong with dinner?” I pointed to the nearly untouched plate sitting on his bedside table.
“Lousy. They left all the taste out.”
“I’m starving.” I picked up the fork and tasted the meat loaf. It wasn’t terrific, but it wasn’t that bad either. “This is okay. You sure you don’t want some?” He looked toward the wall.
I moved the table over his legs and sat on the bed next to him. I picked up a forkful of meat loaf and started waving it in front of his face. “Here’s the airplane, flying around the sky. It wants to come into the hangar.”
“I remember we used to feed you that way,” my mother said. She, too, looked better, as if she’d finally gotten some sleep the night before.
“It didn’t work then either,” my father said, continuing to face the wall.
I waved the fork around in front of his face some more. “Come on, open the hangar so the plane can come in.” Grudgingly he opened his mouth and I stuck the forkful of food in. He chewed and swallowed, and then looked at me. “How about some mashed potatoes?” I asked.
I scooped some up and he took them, a little less grudgingly.
“Good job, Dad.”
I fed myself a forkful of the meat loaf, and my father said, “Hey, whose dinner is that, anyway?” I looked at my mother and we exchanged smiles, and my father took the knife and fork from me and started to eat.
It was nice sitting there, the three of us. I remembered what it was like after Haoa had moved into the dorms at UH, when Lui was away at Berkeley. I had my parents all to myself, after years of sharing them. We would sit down for dinner together and I’d tell them about what happened at school, and my father would talk about the job he was working on, and my mother would fill in when conversation lagged.
After my father finished eating, we sat and watched TV together, some dumb comedy I had never seen before. I wanted to call Mike Riccardi, but I was bashful about doing it in front of my parents, because even though I wanted to talk to him about his progress on the case, and about mine, I just wanted to hear his voice, and find out when I could see him again.
So I didn’t call. For a while, instead, I forgot I was a grown up, a homicide detective who was responsible for finding out why a man had died, why my friends and my father had been hospitalized. I hung out with my parents watching TV, like I had done when I was a teenager. It was a pretty nice feeling. ????
I woke up from a nightmare around two a.m. I couldn’t remember the details, but it had scared the shit out of me. I think I was chasing somebody, and then he pulled a gun. He wasn’t aiming at me, though; he was aiming just behind me, and I didn’t know who was back there, but I was sure it was somebody I cared about.
I knew I couldn’t go back to sleep. I was restless and agitated and worried that the nightmare would come back as soon as I closed my eyes. So I pulled on shorts, a T-shirt and slippas, and went out for a walk.
The air was warm and uncomfortably dry, and the smell of smoke seemed to roll in from the windward side of the island. I wondered if the case Mike had been investigating up in central O’ahu was related to the bombing, if all those fires at gay and lesbian owned businesses had just been warm-ups for the big event. Or worse, if the bombers would continue to terrorize my island. What if the bombing had just been one more step toward a much larger goal?
I walked the couple of blocks down Lili’uokalani to Kalakaua, which was buzzing with activity, mostly of the tourist type. The bars were still open, the street brightly lit, cars cruising slowly. I spotted a couple of prostitutes; it was clear that the Vice raids hadn’t been completely successful. A couple of the prostitutes were gay men; one of them recognized me and took my arm, trying to entice me off to a motel room with him-or maybe just a dark alley.
I pointedly looked away, and my eye caught a guy in a sedan just across from me. Traffic was stopped at a light, and his window was down.
I recognized the look Gunter had described-that combination of fear and longing. The guy was a john, for sure, and within a block or two some hooker would catch up to him.
But there was something more. Our eyes locked, and then he looked away. Had he been cruising me? He looked familiar. Had I met him at the Rod and Reel Club late one night? Worse, had I slept with him and then forgotten?
As the light changed and he accelerated away, I realized that he looked like the guy in the sketch-the sweaty guy from the party. I shook off the prostitute’s hand and started running, darting between the tourists and the street hawkers, trying to catch the guy. But his car was a nondescript dark sedan, and he was gone before I could get a glimpse of his license plate.
Was it the same guy? Or was I just so tired and sleep-deprived that I was imagining things? I yawned, and went back home. I wasn’t going to be any use unless I got some rest.
GUNTER’S OVEN
When I’m investigating a case, nothing clears my head like surfing. There’s something about getting out there among the waves, surrounded by sea and sky, that helps me focus my concentration, free my subconscious mind to look for patterns and ask questions I haven’t thought of yet.
But my back was still red and scaly, flaking skin all over my sheets that Saturday morning, so I knew surfing was out. I decided to roller blade instead, and, to make the best of a bad situation, to blade over to Gunter’s house and see how he was doing, now that he was home from the hospital. Before I left, though, I tried to get hold of Mike Riccardi but couldn’t reach him, leaving him a message.
It was a gorgeous morning, only a few puffy clouds congregating over the tops of the Ko’olau mountains. The bad news was that meant there wasn’t going to be any rain.
The rest of the sky was a luminous light blue. A gentle trade wind ruffled the tops of the palm trees as I bladed toward Diamond Head on Ala Wai Boulevard, shutting out the hotel vans and idle tourists in rental cars, the blaring horns and distant sirens. Instead I concentrated on the serene waters of the canal next to me, on the outrigger canoes full of weekend athletes that pulled past, grunting and shouting. Diamond Head itself loomed ahead of me, its brown and green flanks still free of development.
I crossed the triangular intersection where Ala Wai ends at Kapahulu and continued on behind Diamond Head Elementary to Gunter’s little house. The windows were open and his car was in the driveway. I skated up to the front door and rang the bell, looking down at the welcome mat as I did. It read, “Prize Patroclass="underline" Sorry we missed you. Leave the $1,000,000 check under the mat.”
Gunter came to the door looking sexy in a tank top that read “America’s Most Wanted” and a pair of tight nylon running shorts slit up the side. He’d gotten a new haircut, shaving the sides down to nothing and leaving only a crown of blond fuzz at the top. I could see rough red patches on one side of his head, and he still had a couple of bandages on his arms.