Mahu Fire (10 page)

I can’t be sure because of the darkness but I think he blushed. “I bought it from another guy. I didn’t bother to have it repainted.” He had a big locked case that spanned the bed, and all around it were piles of junk. Scraps of wood and metal, broken down tools, what looked like half a surfboard.

“Don’t bother to clean too often either.”

“Please. I grew up in a house with plastic slipcovers on the sofa and a plastic runner on the hall carpet. My mom used to dust every day. I think I’m in rebellion.”

“My mom would have tried that, too,” I said, as he opened the chest and rooted around in it. “But she had three sons. By the time I was born she’d pretty much given up hope of keeping the house clean.”

He pulled a big yellow suit out and held it up to me. He looked at me appraisingly, checking out my body.

I haven’t got anything to be embarrassed about there; I keep in good shape, between surfing, roller blading and riding my bike.

“I think it’ll fit you.”

Our eyes met, and I knew. Maybe Mike Riccardi didn’t know it himself yet; maybe he knew but he just wasn’t admitting it. But in that glance, when our eyes locked on each other, I knew. This hunky fireman with the sexy mustache and dancing eyes was just as gay as I was.

THROUGH THE FIRE

I held his glance for a minute, smiled, and then said, “So where do you think I can go to put this on?”

We both looked around. It was almost one in the morning by then, and the area had begun to empty out. We were about two blocks away from the offices of the Hawai’i Marriage Project, and the storefronts and office buildings around us were closed and locked. “Just go behind the truck,” he said. “I promise I won’t look.”

“I haven’t got anything you haven’t already seen.” Our eyes met again and he smiled. This had definite possibilities, I thought. Then I yawned, and felt an ache in my back, and once again I was conscious of the hammering in my head, which had muted. I had enough on my plate without wondering how I could get into Mike Riccardi’s pants.

I stripped off my jacket and shirt. My back hurt, but I assumed it was because I’d been laying on the pavement. My shirt was a wreck; the back must have caught a stray ember and there was a big hole with brown edges there.

I did allow myself to wonder, as I pulled my pants off and threw them into the cab of the truck, what Mike Riccardi looked like under all that baggy material. My dick responded, and I had to turn away. In turning, though, I exposed myself to the glare of a spotlight, and I’m pretty sure he saw a revealing silhouette.

I stepped into the suit, and pulled a pair of booties over my good dress shoes—also ruined. I had some trouble getting the suit buttoned up and Mike came over to help me. “You get accustomed to this after a while,” he said. “At least it keeps half your clothes from smelling like smoke.”

Together we walked back to the fire site, me clomping along in the ungainly booties and bulky fire suit. A series of high-intensity lights were focused on the ashy remains, but even so Mike handed me a small flashlight. All the engine companies but one had left, and most of the firemen were standing around in the street talking while their last few fellows prowled around looking for stray embers. Mike called out some greetings as we walked in through what had once been the front wall, and I remembered Robert telling me about the rocks that had come through the window that afternoon, the manure on the sidewalk. I wondered if there was a connection, and told Mike about them.

“My first guess is that this is an amateur bomb, which fits with that kind of shit,” he said. “No pun intended. But let’s keep an open mind as we look around.”

We started a careful, inch-by-inch search, looking for anything that might have been out of place. I saw the melted remains of Robert’s computer, settled in the midst of a hunk of molten steel and plastic that had once been a desk. A couple of the framed posters on the wall were still recognizable, though singed at the edges, and the glass was gone. There wasn’t much else left to say what this place had been or what it had done.

“What’s this?” I asked, pointing my flashlight at a small white object on the floor. I kneeled down and picked it up. It was a piece of plastic about an inch square, with a few round depressions in it. It didn’t look like anything that had been in the office.

“Golf ball.” Mike took it from me and examined it. “Say you want to use a plastic explosive, like RDX. It’s pretty stable stuff, so you have to trigger an initial explosion in order to set it off. What you do, see, is you cut a golf ball in half and you fill it with something that will blow up more easily. There’s a lot of different stuff you can use—I couldn’t speculate yet what might have been in here. But the basic principle is, you put some kind of condensed acid inside some gelatin capsules, and you bury them in the less stable explosive inside the golf ball. After a while, the acid eats through the gelatin, and when it comes in contact with the first explosive, you get a little boom. That sets off the big boom.”

He shrugged. “You can read about it all over the Internet. If you’re an amateur, you don’t know much about using clocks and timing mechanisms, so you go for something simpler, like this.”

“You must have been hell as a teenager,” I said.

“Hey, did you know everything you know about homicide when you were a kid?” He smiled.

We were joined by a couple of agents from the local office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. They were dispatched to investigate any kind of bombing, and these two weren’t happy about getting roused out of bed in the early hours of the morning.

Mike and I went through everything we knew with them, and after a while I was yawning and stumbling on my feet. At one point I fell against Mike and he grabbed me. But it didn’t even feel sexy; I was just exhausted. The ATF guys left, promising to come back in the morning. “Come on, I think it’s time to get you home,” Mike said to me.

I yawned again. “My truck’s in the garage.” I smiled. “I think it’s a little neater than yours.”

“Let’s leave it there overnight. I don’t want to see you falling asleep behind the wheel. Where do you live?”

“Waikiki.” I yawned again.

“Almost on my way. Come on, let’s go.”

I tried to argue but I was just too tired. I remember getting into the truck, and then we were on Kalakaua Avenue and he was gently shaking me awake. “Sorry, bud, but I need a little more direction.”

“Left at Lili’uokalani,” I yawned. “Geez, we’re here already.”

“Yeah, you’re not the best driving companion.” He looked over at me and smiled. I directed him to my building, and he pulled up in front. I stumbled as I got out of the truck, but got my balance before he could help me.

“I can make it.”

He nodded. “Thing is, you don’t want that suit inside your place. You’ll be weeks getting the smell of smoke out.” He grinned. “The voice of experience.”

“Okay.” It seemed perfectly reasonable to me. I unbuttoned the suit and let it drop from my shoulders. There was a warm breeze off the ocean that tickled the skin on my back as I stepped out of the boots and the legs of the suit.

“Whoa,” he said. “I didn’t mean you should strip down right here on the street.” He moved to stand between me and any passing car, although there weren’t any.

“I wear less than this any day on the beach,” I said, looking down at my boxers. It was hard to relate all those parts that I saw, legs, and arms and torso, to my body. I felt disconnected from them. I reached into the cab and got my shirt, pants and shoes. I tried to muster up some dignity as I turned, naked but for socks and boxers, to climb the steps to my apartment. But I stumbled again.

“Let me walk you up the stairs.” He put an arm around my shoulders, and I shivered from the contact.

“You gonna tuck me in, too?” I asked.

“Maybe another night.” We walked up the steps and I fumbled for my keys. He took them from me and opened the door.

I wanted to kiss him good night. I wanted to touch my skin to his and feel what that was like. But instead I said, “Will you call me tomorrow with whatever you find out?”

He smiled. “It’s already tomorrow, bud. I’ll call you later. Get some sleep.” He gave me a pat on the butt that moved me a step further inside, and turned away.

I must have made it to the bed under my own power, because that’s where I was a couple hours later when I woke up. My mouth was dry and my head was pounding, but my bladder was full. It was almost dawn and after I finished in the bathroom I couldn’t go back to sleep. I kept remembering the fire, worrying about the people I knew who had been inside, thinking about how much I had to figure out.

Whenever my head is too full, I go surfing. There’s something about the serenity of the water, the discipline of the physical activity, that helps me put everything in perspective. So I pulled on my board shorts and rubber slippas, tried to smooth down my unruly hair, and grabbed a board. Everything around me smelled like ashes until I walked outside and caught a fresh, sweet breeze, full of sea water, frangipani and the last, lingering scents of yesterday’s coconut tanning lotions.

I love to be outside in those moments just before dawn, when the city streets are quiet, the tall palms dozing under a fading quilt of stars. Even before you can see the sun, the sky begins to lighten, the night’s blue-black shading into the palest blue imaginable. When I was a little kid working my coloring books, I used to search for a blue just that shade, composed, it seemed to me, of equal parts of yellow and white. I never got just the right mix; maybe that’s why my art career didn’t continue beyond kindergarten.

The sun was just peeking over the tops of the Ko’olau mountains as I reached Kuhio Beach Park and launched my surfboard into the water. There were only a few other surfers around, the hard-core who, like me, have a physical need that draws them out on the waves. I lay flat on my stomach and paddled out past the low breakers, feeling my cheek against the cool Fiberglas of my board.

Back on land, the high-rise hotels and the little stores on Kalakaua Avenue were just waking up. In the distance I could see the fading green hills, with patches of brown from the protracted dry spell. I thought if I could just stay out there, waiting for the perfect wave, I could keep the world and its troubles at bay. I knew that almost as soon as I launched my day it would get away from me—too many calls to make, reports to read, details to organize. I was facing a major investigation alone, without any preparation, already physically debilitated.

I felt a good wave building beneath me, and stood to ride it. At the same time, though, the sun jumped quickly above the mountaintops, as it does in the tropics, and the flash of blinding light stabbed at my retinas. I lost my balance, and went tumbling into the cool water. Almost immediately I jumped up, howling in pain.

I learned to swim before I could walk, and the sea has always been kind to me, even at its most stern. This blinding pain in my back, though, was new and terrible. I dragged myself and my board out to shallow water and stood, trying to look around over my shoulder. What I saw there disturbed me—a big patch of my skin was raw and red, probably from a burn I’d suffered the night before and not noticed. Not until it came into contact with salt water, that is.

Reluctantly I splashed out of the surf and carried my board home. I wanted nothing more than an hour or so of uncomplicated surfing, clearing my head for the work before me, but I was not to be so lucky. Instead I showered quickly and awkwardly tried to lather some sunburn cream on my back, without noticeable effect. I pulled on a pair of light cotton pants and a polo shirt and realized I was starving.

It was barely six-thirty, too early to go into the office. The streets were still empty of tourists, only the occasional hotel employee or store clerk hurrying to work as I walked over to my favorite breakfast place, a buffet restaurant in a hotel right on the water. It’s called the Beachside Broiler, and you can sit at tables overlooking the sand, eat your fill of pineapple and papaya, ham and eggs and biscuits and whatever else you want. I like to go there after surfing sometimes, when my body is tired and aching but I still need to be near the water.

Connie, the elderly hostess who favored sarongs and way too much eye makeup, smiled when she saw me walk in. “Kimo! You hero!” She reached down to the pile of morning newspapers next to the register and held one up to me, the front half from the masthead to the fold. There was a huge picture of me coming out of the fire, Sandra over my back. I guess I must have blushed.

“Hey everybody, Kimo big hero!” she said to the restaurant at large. There were about twenty people there, mostly Midwesterners on package tours, and a few of them looked up with mild interest. “He save lady from big fire last night.”

There was some slight applause. “Come on, Connie,” I said. She wouldn’t take money for my breakfast, just handed me a tray and waved me through. I walked all around both steam tables, loading up on bacon, eggs and sausages. It was going to be a long day and I wasn’t sure I’d get any lunch at all, maybe not even dinner.

When I’d finally piled as much food on my tray as possible I walked over to the long counter that faces the water. I laid the paper down face up and put my tray next to it. Just then one of the Midwestern couples, an elderly pair in matching aloha shirts, blue pineapples against a purple backdrop, came up to me. “You did a good thing, son,” the man said. He reached out to shake my hand.

“I knew she was inside,” I said. “I didn’t think about it.”

“We’d be proud to have police officers like you back home,” his wife said. “You just hold your head up high and don’t listen to anything bad anybody says about you, all right?”

I didn’t quite understand what she meant, but I nodded anyway. “I will. Thank you.”

“Enjoy your breakfast,” the man said, and they left. I was puzzling over his wife’s comments when I opened the paper and saw the headline, in big hundred-point type, just below the fold. “Gay cop saves woman at gay marriage party,” it read.

Oh, God. It was starting again.