Robert W. Walker
Primal Instinct
1
Hawaii, the island of Oahu, the outskirts of Honolulu near Koko Head crater… 1:35 A.M., July 12, 1995
He does a bad Elvis imitation, crooning aloud the words for “Don't Be Cruel” as it's pounding from his car-radio speaker on Hawaii's hottest rock station, KBHT-“Hot Hawaii!” He interrupts himself with a snicker and says, “Too late, hey, Kelia honey… tooooo late for doughn't be cruel, huh, baby?”
He chuckles lightly at his antics and the irony of the Elvis tune, and then he reaches out to his passenger, lifts the disfigured head from the bloodied chest, and stares into the vacant eyes of the dead girl he calls Kelia. He momentarily studies the fact her hands are missing, both severed at the wrists. He doesn't remember slicing them off, nor, for that matter, if he'd earlier taken time to put the hands on ice. If not, he will secure them later, when he gets back home. Lopaka doesn't remember a lot of what he does while in the act itself; he is able only to piece things completely together after long bouts of depression and weeks of flashback. Looking at the dead girl's hands, for months afterward, allows him to relive the whole experience once again, the only thing save another kill that lends respite from his depression, even if temporarily. And he doesn't think the gods will really miss a pair of hands.
Kelia, he says mentally to the dead girl beside him, you 're so good for me now and forever… A touching sentiment with Elvis as backdrop, he thinks.
He has taken his time with Kelia, all night now, and now it is time to send her over. He is secure behind the moonless Hawaiian night and the black interior of the Buick. He stares again into her dead, vacant eyes. To stare into the abyss, into the iris of death, is part of it, he tells himself.
Elvis is replaced by a Neil Diamond song: “You got the way to move me.” The cowboy sings now in unison with Diamond, his gruff voice drowning out the mellow tones. “You got the way to move me… you got the way to move me… ahhhh, ahhhh, owwwww!”
The trade winds have swept over the island of Oahu and the city of Honolulu for several weeks now, the powerful caress like one long, unending, coiling draft begun high atop Mount Haleakala on neighboring Maui, arriving here in full force. Yet the unending wind is adored by the tourists as it allows for lovely, open-air seaside dining, moonlight walks along the beach and palm corridors, making love on the balcony without pesty insects swept up by the trades. It is the same wind that tells him to kill and kill again.
In the bleak darkness of a moonless sky, the wind now batters the trees that line the lavender-lit Ala Moana roadway; the trade winds threaten to lift and toss the car; so strong are the gusts that they make him think it might be the acrid breath of an ancient, tyrannical island god, perhaps Kaneloa, what the Christian religion calls Satan. Perhaps the great Kaneloa wants Lopaka to know that he approves of this night's work. Soulful voices in the “long” wind which careen down from mauka, the mountain side of the island, as always this time of year, speak clearly of the kapus, taboos broken over time.
He travels toward the waiting lips of a hungry sea that will lap up the remains of his prey. Maybe it isn't the wind that tells him to kill; maybe it's God.
His car finds the Kalanianaole, Highway 72 by the road sign, where the smaller tarmac parts with the Interstate, the main thoroughfare through Honolulu and all of Oahu's makai, or southern seaside.
He drives determinedly yet dreamily up the steep cliffs overlooking Hanauma Bay, fifteen miles south of Honolulu. About three miles further south and he'll be at the southernmost tip of Oahu, at the much-visited-by-day, deserted-by-night tourist snare called the Blow Hole. There, at this crevice in the volcanic rock extending in a cavernous ledge over the waters of the Pacific, he'll dump the girl's body.
The Pacific waves roll into the mouth of the cavern there with such force that it drives the waters skyward through the Blow Hole, giving it the appearance of a whale's plume, the terrific geyser effect sending the water up for over twenty feet. The spectacular dance between water and earth creates such a powerful force within the cavem that any object cast into it, such as a human body, is immediately pulverized beyond recognition, handily destroying all evidence of his crime, as it has before, in a matter of minutes.
The girl's clothes, tied in a soft, bloody bundle, will be disposed of elsewhere. She'll leave this world as she entered, with nothing whatever to identify her as the whore and prostitute that she was, a whore of Honolulu.
“ Yeah,” he mutters to himself as he turns off into the well-paved parking lot overlooking the Blow Hole, “trade winds're up.”
When he steps from the car the wind sweeps about his legs, at first a playful animal encouraging him to carry on his work, now at his back like the hand of a benevolent father firmly pushing him forward. If Kelia were alive and walking around the car to meet him, the wind would be blowing her dress up so high that nothing would be hidden. All the Honolulu whores allow the wind to show their wares. But she no longer walks or talks or cries as she did the night before.
1:40 A.M., Koko Head Road
Officer Alan Kaniola was on patrol on the Waialae Road, the old main highway leading out of the city toward the southern end of Oahu. He'd earlier gotten a not-so-unusual report of what appeared to be a street disturbance and a possible kidnapping; at one location a fight had erupted between passengers in two separate vehicles over some slight accident, and at another location along Ala Wai Boulevard there'd been a report of a young girl's having been manhandled and forced into a car apparently against her will. It might be assumed it was a lovers' spat, or an altercation between a hooker and her pimp, but who knows? There was little to identify the car or the attacker, which didn't sound like any pimp Kaniola knew. It was reported as a lackluster vehicle, dark in color, either brown or maroon, lightly tinted blue windows, a battered body but a “souped up” engine, a car otherwise without any distinguishing feature.
Now here was a maroon Buick sedan in ill repair heading out toward Koko Head, a volcanic promontory at the southern end of the island. The car was traveling at a fairly high rate of speed, and something about it made Kaniola curious. He radioed his position and told Dispatch that he was following a suspicious-looking car, and as he said the words he wondered himself how a car might “look” suspicious.
He got a buzz from another patrolman. Thorn Hilani, also a Hawaiian cop. Hilani was a big motorcycle cop, and he, too, had noticed the speeding car that was touring toward Koko Head. Hilani fell in behind his friend Kaniola, saying that he would back him up. It was a quiet night except for ceaseless radio static and the knocking noises caused by wind through the coconut palms and monkeypod trees. By daylight this was a beautiful ride, with the stark-white beaches and ceaseless emerald and blue stretch of water below in Hanauma Bay, which nestled between two claws of land jutting out into the Pacific. At this hour, it was a different matter, with no street lights to guide the patrol car as it twisted and turned its way up the precipice, further and further from the lights of Honolulu. But Kaniola liked old Hawaii and he knew the roads well, and he had backpacked into the mountains on many occasions.
Somehow in the twisting, upward spiral toward Koko Head, Alan Kaniola lost sight of the car he was pursuing, and then he almost passed it where it was parked in the lot overlooking the bay and the famous Blow Hole.
He abruptly halted his patrol car, thrust it into reverse and was backing it up just as Hilani's cycle came around the bend, nearly colliding with him, causing Hilani to swear over the police band and blare out with his cycle horn. “Call in our position, Hilani,” Joe told the other officer.