Or maybe District 2, Central O‘ahu, which also included a lot of military installations. It wasn’t as glamorous, but he’d get a lot of experience. I was also pushing for District 5, Kalihi, which included the airport, and I agreed with him that the other districts, Pearl City, Waipahu, Windward O’ahu, and East Honolulu, wouldn’t be very interesting, and wouldn’t give him the opportunities for advancement he was looking for.
He walked over and sat on the edge of Akoni’s desk. “That was some bust yesterday, huh?”
“You can’t win every time,” I said. “Sometimes things just go wrong.”
“I heard you got another case already.”
He was an eager guy, handsome in a way, red hair you might almost call auburn, blue eyes. He was a little too skinny to be a great surfer-he didn’t have enough weight to master the really big waves, but he made up for it with endurance.
If you want to be a good surfer, I mean a really good one, you have to work at it. You have to be totally focused on making yourself the best surfer you can be. You spend hours out on the water, learning to anticipate the waves, practicing your moves. You have to understand a little about physics, a little about oceanography, a little about wind speed. Surfing has to be what you live for.
I thought I could live for surfing when I was twenty-two, crashing on the floor of somebody’s house on the North Shore, surfing Haleiwa from dawn to dusk and talking surfing the rest of the time. Nobody screwed around too much up there-we were too focused, and at the end of the day, too tired. So I could ignore the part of my brain that was always scared, always holding my secret.
Then I came in fifth in the Pipeline Spring Championships. By March, the great winter waves on the North Shore have died down a little, and the best surfers have gone to chase waves elsewhere on the globe. So I wasn’t facing top competition, but still, it was the best I’d ever done. I was riding high, thinking I was finally reaching for my potential. Most surfers start when they’re fifteen or sixteen, peak in their early twenties, and lose the competitive edge by thirty. I was twenty-three, and at the top of my form.
A bunch of the guys took me out drinking that night, buying me beers and shots until they closed the bar and dawn started to streak the dark sky over the North Shore. I was in no condition to drive home, so my buddy Dario dragged me over to his place to crash. He was staying at a one-room cottage north of Haleiwa, right on the sand. I remember wanting to lay down right there on the beach, I was so wasted.
The next thing I remember is waking up in Dario’s bed, naked, with his mouth on my left nipple. He bit and sucked at both nipples until they were hard and sore, and then licked a trail down my stomach to my crotch, where he gave me a blow job.
Then I must have passed out again, because when I woke again it was almost noon and there was a note on the refrigerator from Dario. “You’re a champ, Kimo,” it read. “I’m on the water.”
I felt paralyzed. My mouth was dry and my head pounded, and my body was sore in unaccustomed places. When I looked in the mirror I saw my nipples were raw and red, and I had a hickey on the side of my neck. I knew then that I had made the best showing I would ever make in a competition. It would only get harder to keep holding back my desire for men, and the effort I had to put to that task would take away from what I had left for surfing.
So I left. I hitched back to the place where I was staying, packed up, and went home. After hanging around my parents’ house for a while, I entered the police academy, the most macho thing I could think to do. I thought if anything could save me from being gay, being a cop would be it.
Alvy and I talked for a while, and eventually I felt better. If Akoni couldn’t deal with me, that was his problem. Alvy went back to the locker room to change out of his uniform, and I walked home.
There were still a couple of hours of daylight left when I got home, so I went surfing. It felt good to empty my mind of all my troubles-my sexuality, the danger I might face if I came out as a gay cop, the dead ends in Tommy Pang’s murder case.
On my way home, I stopped at a little grocery just across Lili’uokalani from my apartment and picked up some shrimp, mushrooms, and red and green peppers to grill on my little barbecue. It’s a tiny, dark little store, and from the outside you’d think it was nothing more than a place for cigarettes and beer. But the owners, an elderly Chinese couple, took a fierce pride in the quality of the produce, and it was better than any grocery I knew in Honolulu. The clerk was a surfer, and he let me run up a tab when I didn’t have cash with me. “How were the waves?” he asked as he rang me up.
“I got a couple of good ones. Not many, though.”
“Yeah, it’s been slow.”
He was a skinny blond dude, long stringy hair, and tiny silver rings in his right ear, his nose and his left eyebrow. He was wearing a tank top and as he reached for a bag his shirt shifted a little and I noticed he’d gotten his nipple pierced, too. To avoid looking at him anymore I turned a bit and scanned the store. “Hey, throw these in too, will you?” I asked, spotting a bag of chocolate-covered Oreos and putting them on the counter.
“Eating healthy, dude,” he said, with a smirk. “These are killer, by the way. I keep a bag behind the counter and scarf them for energy sometimes.”
Back outside, the sun was setting through the low motels and high-rise towers, turning the sky a range of pastels from yellow to blue. It was a peaceful time of day, and I started to feel like someday I might get my life back in order again, and that in the end all the uproar might just be worth it.
I skewered the shrimp and veggies and grilled them, and put them on a plate over rice. With a Rhino Chaser, it was a perfect supper, and then I sat back with a Sue Grafton mystery until I was yawning more than I was reading. I could do this, I thought, as I crawled into bed, under the Hawaiian quilt my haole grandmother had pieced together in the first days after she’d married my grandfather, when she was struggling to fit into life as Mrs. Keali‘i Kanapa‘aka. I could make a nice life for myself, by myself, without the complications of romance or sex. But then, as sleep overcame me and I snuggled up next to my pillow and I missed having someone next to me, I doubted my own resolve.
DEREK AND WAYNE
The next morning, Akoni and I spent the first hour of our shift catching up on paperwork. By nine o’clock I was ready to get back to Tommy Pang’s murder. “I’m tired of giving Derek time to grieve,” I said. I picked up the phone and dialed Derek’s number, and was rewarded by a sleepy voice in my ear.
I introduced myself and asked if I was speaking to Derek Pang. “Derek can’t really speak to anyone now,” the voice said. “He’s very upset.”
“Mr. Gallagher, I know Mr. Pang is upset, and I sympathize with him, but we’re investigating a murder. I’m sure he’ll recognize it’s very important to catch whoever killed his father. We need to talk to you both as soon as possible. How soon could you see us?”
He tried to put me off but I wouldn’t give up. Finally he said, “Give us an hour?”
I agreed to meet them at their apartment at ten o’clock. Akoni printed out a list of known tong members we could ask Derek about, and then we sat and brainstormed on a bunch of questions as well. At nine-thirty we headed Ewa from Waikiki, hitting a lot of traffic on Ala Moana Boulevard. The address Wayne had given me was for a pair of luxury high-rise condominiums in Kaka‘ako, an industrial neighborhood across from the port of Honolulu, out past the Kewalo basin, with its assemblage of small boats.