Unburying Hope (46 page)

The right to left, left to right driving
motions gave her little room to think.
 
They would pull into town, she plotted.
 
They’d go first to the dive shop there, it had to be close
to the ocean.
 
She’d leave Rosalinda
and Malia in the car and walk in and look around, waiting to see who was there
before saying Eddie’s name.
 
If it
was safe, she could bring Rosalinda and Malia out of the car, she thought, more
eyes to case the area.
 
If it was all
quiet, then they could drive up to Malia’s house in the hillside, the house
where her daughter had died.
 

Chapter
Fifty

Hana was a sleepy place.
 
All the trellised lanais, the shake
roofs blended in with the natural setting, unlike the flat tourist towns of
Western Maui that glared with stucco and unnatural colors.
 
The lush greenery lent a dark cast to
the area and she drove in to the downtown on the left, away from the jungle of
overgrowth that seemed to majestically swallow up the hills and mountain on the
right.

She drove slowly, steering towards the
water.
 
Rosalinda sat up and Malia
was also on high alert, her face looking quickly around.

“I been here years ago,” her voice softly said,
“my daughter lost here.”

Celeste turned her head to Malia, “Lost?”

“She ran away here.”
 
Her lips pursed, her face overcome, Malia lowered her voice
to a bare whisper, “Lost here.”

“I’m so sorry,” Celeste answered.
 
“I should not have brought you.
 
Either of you.”
 
She looked in her rearview mirror at
Rosalinda who stared intently back at her.
 
“Rosalinda, I should have left you at home,” she said
apologetically.

“You good mother,” Malia said, patting
Celeste’s hand with compassion.

“I don’t know about that,” Celeste said, still
looking at Rosalinda in the rear view.

Rosalinda’s eyes rose and color came to her
cheeks.
 

She pulled into a parking spot in front of
several storefronts, one of them a dive shop.
 
“Stay here,” she said, loping from the car.
 
A few feet away, she heard her car
doors open and she spun to see Rosalinda stumbling out of the car, Malia
scrambling out of the front seat to grab the girl and right her.
 
“Get back in the car,” Celeste said in
a gruff, quieted yell.

“I’m sick,” Rosalinda said.
 

Malia waved Celeste on, “I take her to bathroom.”
 
Malia supported her.
 
Just a head taller than Rosalinda, she
was not as fragile as she looked, Celeste realized.

Knowing that speed and time were her allies,
she moved forward, into the quiet dive shop.

A longhaired man stood up behind the
counter.
 
He wore a beige t-shirt
with a silver beaded necklace weighted down onto his barrel chest by medallions
that looked Native American.
 
Metallic
drums, feathers, totems hung from leather straps, tangled in his curly gray
chest hair.

“You going diving?” he said, looking at her
quizzically.
 
“Boats have already
gone out.
 
Your hotel should have
told you that.”

“No,” Celeste said, looking around the shop, wondering
how she could ask about Eddie.

“You want a t-shirt?” he asked, pulling a
bright yellow t-shirt onto the counter with HANA printed in garish royal blue,
“A souvenir for your kid?”

“I live here,” Celeste said, disdain in her
voice.
 
It wasn’t so offensive that
he was trying to sell her, it was that he’d so definitively pegged her as a
tourist with glaring taste.

A cop walked in the door behind her, clad in a
dark navy blue uniform with a huge reflective DEA sewn on the front and back of
his button down shirt.
 
His shirt
was tight and Celeste could see the outlined bulge of a bulletproof vest
underneath.

The clerk stiffened, “Get you something,
Officer?”

The cop walked deliberately towards the clerk,
glancing only cursorily at Celeste and Celeste retreated, hoping that he too
thought she was here as a tourist.

“I’m not looking for any ice, if that’s what
you’re asking,” the cop said under his breath.

“You know I’m clean,” the clerk protested.

“Yeah,” smirked the cop.
 
He turned and Celeste followed his gaze
to see his partner standing imposingly in the doorway, listening to a headset
attached to a walkie-talkie on his belt.
 
She wondered if she’d come a few minutes too late, just in time to be in
the middle of a drug bust.

“Shit’s going down,” the back cop called out,
his voice booming.
 
“There’s half a
dozen cars headed up into the hillside, it looks like a fucking Hollywood Mafia
showdown.”

“I’m clean, I swear it.”
 
The clerk fingered his medallions as
though he were praying with rosary beads.

“I know you don’t want to go back to prison.”

“No way, I’m clean,” he protested vehemently.

“Where do I get meth? “
 
The second cop stepped into the store,
wearing the same DEA shirt, the letters shimmering under the store’s recessed
lighting.

“What?”
 
The clerk looked surprised.

“Where’s the fucking dealer in this town.”

“Not here,” the clerk said, asserting
himself.
 
“Up in the hills,” he
said, pointing out the front door.

The closest cop pulled out his gun,
brandishing it.

Celeste gasped and both cops looked at her,
recalculating quickly to take her unexpected presence into account.

“Lady, get back to your hotel.”

“She’s,” the clerk started to speak.

“Leaving,” Celeste blurted out.
 
She willed her body to move towards the
hulking cops, unsure she’d be able to muscle past them to the door out to the
street.

Malia pushed past the larger cop, thrusting
herself and Rosalinda, whom she held close to her chest, through towards
Celeste.
 
“Come on, honey,” she
said, toddling over to Celeste, “I want to eat, let’s go to buffet.”

The cops stared at her, a small Japanese woman
holding tight to a long black haired girl with a bandage around her head,
walking towards Celeste.

Celeste felt their tension, they wanted her
gone.

“Address?” the cop spat at the clerk,
reholstering his gun.

In a low voice, the clerk stumbled to say an
address, spelling it out.
 

Celeste felt Malia bristle next to her.

The cops backed out of the store, turned and
raced to their car, gunning their engine, peeling out of the quiet street.

The clerk rubbed sweat off his face, pulled
his hair back into a ponytail.
 
He
fingered his medallions and Celeste could tell that he would have run himself
if she and Malia and Rosalinda weren’t still standing there.
 
But he would have run in the other
direction, she thought, anywhere away from the sudden influx of federal
officers.

She had been torn herself.
 
She found herself hugging Rosalinda,
sheltering her in her arms before taking a chance and moving forward to talk to
the frozen clerk.

“I’m looking for someone,” she said, watching
as his eyes focused and engaged hers.
 
His eyebrows were overgrown, she saw, long black and gray hairs sprouted
out of his forehead, framing deep, dark eyes that looked at her with pain.
 
His story was bad, she could feel, but
he looked at her with more compassion than fear and she felt suddenly that this
was the man that Eddie had told her about, with whom he’d considered partnering
before deciding to open the Kihei place himself.

“Yeah,” his voice softened and he looked at
each of them, his eyes warming between their heights, his face losing its
abject fear to a recognition that he nodded into.

“We’re looking for Eddie ----,” she said,
watching his face for a response.

“He’s not here,” the clerk blurted, looking
from Celeste to Rosalinda, then to Malia.
 
“You okay, Grandma?” he said, coming around the desk to stand close to
Malia.
 
“Those bastards shouldn’t
have pulled their guns out.”
 
He
gently patted her back.
 
“You
okay?”

“Fine,” Malia said, giving him a hug.

“You two know each other?” Celeste was
stunned.

“Everyone knows Grandma here.”

“I own lots of property on island, I tell
you,” Malia said to Celeste, “You no think I Donald Trump but I am.
 
I own this building.”

“Everyone knows you?” Celeste was
confused.
 
“Those cops know you?”

“No, they’re Feds, they shouldn’t be here,”
the clerk said.
 
“Time to hide out,
I’d say.
 
Something big and bad is
going down and you do NOT want to be wandering the streets if the DEA is
canvassing.
 
You’re Eddie’s old
lady,” the clerk whistled.
 
“And
his baby girl.”
 
He leaned over and
offered his hand to Rosalinda for a shake.

“Have you seen him?” Celeste asked, no longer
able to hide her desperation.

“No, I heard from him a couple of days ago
though.
 
He said the meth dealers
are about to go all-out war on each other.
 
And they can poison and blow up neighborhoods with their
chemical shit.
 
You won’t see those
DEA guys looking like that much longer.”

“What do you mean?” Celeste asked.

“The Haz Mat suits are coming out, I’d
say.
 
First responders have to wear
protective gear so they don’t get burned by the chemicals in the air.”

“There are going to be loud boom but no chemical,”
Malia corrected him.
 
“We get out
of town.”
 
She shooed Celeste and
Rosalinda towards the door.

“Tell Eddie we’re okay and heading home,”
Celeste said, “if you can contact him.
 
Tell him to come home,” she begged.

The clerk looked at Rosalinda, “I’m sorry, bad
things are going down.
 
Get out of
here.”
 
He turned to Celeste, “The
fumes alone from a meth lab will send you to the hospital and scar your lungs
and eyes and skin.
 
And I don’t
have any gas masks, but” he said, but his eyes widened, “I do have these.”
 
He grabbed two scuba tanks and three
masks, following them out of the store.
 
He rushed them into their car and said, “If you smell fumes, use
these.
 
I assume you know how?
 
Since your old man’s a diver?”

Celeste was grateful that she’d worn the gear
into hideously cold and murky Lake St. Clair back home because she recognized
the buddy tubes and the masks.
 
With great care, she put one on Rosalinda’s mouth and chin
and opened the valve on the tank, pulling the tabs to size the straps so that
they were nearly tight on her little head.

From the hillside behind them, a sound
shattered the air around them, thunder erupted and, as they turned
instinctively to see what was happening, a fireball rose from the hillside in
front of them.

“Get the fuck out of here,” the clerk shouted,
pushing Malia gently into her passenger seat in the car.
 
He strapped her seatbelt on her and got
Rosalinda’s on her as Celeste turned the car ignition on.
 

“Could Eddie be up there?” Celeste asked, her
voice tremulous.

“I don’t know,” he answered honestly.
 
“He could be.
 
You get out, I’m heading up there.”

The air became saturated with a burning
ammonia smell that hurt Celeste’s nasal passages and lungs as she breathed,
fear ignited hyperventilation in her chest at the memory of the nighttime
explosion outside the bar in Detroit.

Malia screamed in fear, clutching her heart.
 
“That my house!”

Celeste pulled the straps on Malia’s
mouthpiece over her fluffy hair, adjusting the air valve on the tank on the
floor at Malia’s feet.
 
“My
house!
 
Eddie in the wall up
there!
 
But not supposed to be
fire!
 
Supposed to only be sound!”

Black smoke billowed down the hill into town
and screams broke out all around them.

“If Eddie’s in Hana, he’s up there.
 
And if he’s up there,” the clerk said,
looking up as a second fiery blast took out enough of the hillside to create a
crater of red dirt with flames obliterating any remaining vegetation around the
black flashes of fire, “he’d want you out of here.
 
Drive, god damn it,” he yelled, slamming his fists on the
now closed car door.
 
“You owe it
to him to live, if he can’t.”