Mana (14 page)

Lehua stood near the middle of the room. The Attorney General was standing some six feet in front of her next to the swinging kerosene light. Behind her and to her right, a dozen feet away, Lee was cautiously leaning forward and sawing away with a razor-sharp knife the rope that bound Bill, all the time holding the automatic at the base of his captive's skull. The rope frayed, then popped apart. Slowly, the seated figure moved his hands forward, raised them to his mouth and pulled the gag loose. Before he could speak, Page snapped, “If he starts talking, give him another tap on the skull, Lee.” Bill said nothing, leaned forward and rubbed his calves. After a moment, he began to rise. Since Page made no objection, Lee stepped back a foot or so but kept the gun aimed at Bill's head. The tableau froze at that point and Lehua turned to her captor.

If there had been any doubt in her mind before, there was none now. With both Bill and her knowing the identity of the person who had ordered their kidnapping, clearly the intention was to make sure they didn't live long enough to reveal what they knew. If her convictions needed any further confirmation, Page provided it with his next words.

“OK. We don't have any more time for fooling around. I want to know what you have, and I want to have it. Right now! In case you're wondering, I'm not as naive as Phil Cheng. When he told me what happened to his hired guns, he assumed it was just a string of bad luck. I knew better, right from the beginning. They were some of the best in the business. One, I could understand, but three? Never! Of course, the clincher was something Phil couldn't appreciate. Whatever it is that got him and Lester Liu, I'm now absolutely positive you were behind it. Somehow or other, you had something defending you. I want it.”

Lehua began to see a glimmer of hope, a glimmer which died as soon as Page answered her question. “What makes you think you're immune?”

Page's smile was almost gentle. “I've had you tailed ever since the acid throwing, and I know your behavior changed considerably in the last few days. I'm reasonably sure you lost whatever it is, and that that happened shortly after your visit to Anuenue Makua. I still think you know what it's all about.” He shrugged. “Of course, if you don't…why then we'll both be disappointed.”

“All right. It's here,” Lehua said, pointing to the recorder in her hand. She then proceeded to get assurances from Page she and Bill would be freed once he had the secret. While playing out the game with Page neither of them believed in, she begin to make an estimate of distances. Not daring to turn to face Bill and Lee, she decided to assume they were still standing approximately the same way they had been when she had last looked in their direction.

Lifting the recorder waist high with her left hand, she saw Page's eyes focusing on it. Swiftly, she raised her right hand above her shoulder and clenched her fist in the warning used by divers to signal danger ahead. With a quick motion of that hand, she pressed the play button. The loud sound of Annie's voice, which really no longer was hers, filled the air. With another quick gesture, Lehua tossed the machine in Page's direction. A shot rang out, but the sound was lost in what followed.

The smile on Page's face had disappeared, and he reacted as Lehua had hoped he would but feared he would not. Instead of catching the plastic box speaking away in the alien tongue, he struck out at it. The recorder fell short, while the sounds kept coming uninterruptedly out of its speaker. The kerosene lamp broke in mid air, its contents spreading fire over the reed mat.

Page, too, had fallen over backwards to the floor, and something invisible was holding him there, pressing against him, slowly crushing him. Like on a child's face peering through the window of a candy store, his nose began to flatten. His face broadened. The bones began to crumble and shatter. His shoulders began to break under a massive, unseen weight. Meanwhile, the flames were closing in on the immobilized figure, climbing the drapes, racing across the kerosene-soaked mats to join their cousins in the crackling fireplace. The recorder kept spinning out sounds that were becoming harsher and harsher.

Transfixed by what she was seeing, Lehua felt pure terror when someone reached out from behind and grabbed her.

“Quick,” Bill said into her ear. “This place is dry as tinder. It'll be a solid mass of flames in a minute.”

They turned and raced for the door. Lehua hesitated over Lee's prostrate form. Reading her mind, Bill said, “There's nothing that can be done for him now. I caught him across the throat with a karate chop. He's dead.”

They had barely emerged when the fire cracked a window, giving itself more air to consume. Something crumbled with a roar in the house. A flame broke through a weak spot in one of the walls. As they watched the growing inferno, a car came crashing down the driveway and across the open area in front of the house. Uniformed officers with guns drawn, and led by Millie, raced over to them. A second car pulled up alongside the first one, and Captain Silva's bulky figure emerged before it had even had a chance to stop.

Sam's first words were, “It doesn't look like we'll need to call in the firefighters, the rain should have this out in no time.”

“Listen!” Lehua said, still holding onto Bill.

“Someone talking,” Millie said.

“It's just the tape,” Bill announced to the bewildered officers. “Lehua pressed the play button, and it's still running.”

Lehua shook her head. “I just played the tape the way it was rewound last night, but that's the other side. It's playing out the first reading Annie made, and it did it all by itself.”

Chapter 16

By the time they were ready to leave the ranch house grounds, several more patrol cars had entered the clearing. Sam Silva left one of them to watch over the fire, which was now losing its battle with the driving rain. The others formed a procession back to the highway. The consensus, as they drove back down the side of the mountain, was to stop at the nearest police station, which happened to be in Laupahoehoe, to find dry clothes and hot coffee.

Wrapped in a police blanket, with a cup of hot coffee clasped in her hands, Lehua gave an abbreviated account of the night's events. Bill filled in. “Page thought Lehua had some kind of secret weapon, so he kidnapped me and forced her to come up to his old ranch, hoping she could be persuaded to turn the secret over to him.”

“So he was the real head of Angel Tong,” Sam said.

Bill shook his head. “He was more than that. He wasn't shy about talking in front of me, since he had no intention of letting me live long enough to repeat any of what he said.”

Lehua, who was sitting next to him, shivered, then leaned against him. He slipped an arm around her shoulders.

“Page actually controlled three different groups of thugs in the Islands, and played them off against each other. Only one or two in the gangs knew his actual identity. Lee, who was completely devoted to him, was his intermediary and did most of the dirty work. It was an ideal situation from Page's viewpoint. He could give protection to those gangs who paid off and did as he told them, and he could selectively prosecute those who didn't play the game.

“Then, since he had plans to run for US Senator, he could milk the gangs for enormous political contributions. At the same time he could run on a law-and-order platform and point to all the crooks he'd successfully prosecuted. It was an amazing balancing act.

“But Lehua turned out to be a fly in the ointment. She was closing in on Phil Cheng, one of the few gang members who knew Page personally, both as Attorney General, and as the power behind organized crime in Hawai'i. So Page gave Phil the go-ahead to eliminate her. He got increasingly exasperated as Phil's men kept being picked off. That was why he came over here the first time, partly to find out how much Lehua knew about the real boss, and partly to discover the secret of her survival. When that didn't work, he sent Lee out to the lava fields to find me and convince me to take a ride with him. He did—just as I was putting my equipment away in the trunk of my car.” Bill's face had a rueful expression, as he rubbed his head on the spot where Lee had done the convincing.

Sam swiveled his bulk around so he could look full at Lehua without turning his head. “Don't you think it's time you cut me in on the secret?”

Lehua looked at Bill, then switched her glance over to Millie. The sergeant nodded her encouragement. “OK,” Lehua said. “Here goes.” As she told her story, beginning with the cave and the discovery of the talking board, moving on to the unfortunate mosquito on the first night of her possession, giving a true account of the fate of her intended attackers and ending with Phil Cheng's destruction, she watched Sam Silva's expressionless face. At the end of her narrative, she paused and waited for him to comment without asking him what he thought.

There was almost a full minute of silence before he said, in a lugubrious voice, “Maybe that's the easiest way to explain everything that's happened.” The three others in the room broke into laughter at the way he had expressed his doubts, his gloom, and his puzzlement.

“You haven't finished the story,” Sam said, interrupting the laughter. “What happened at the ranch house? Same thing? And how come the fire this time? That's a new twist.”

Bill was the one who took up the narrative at that point, describing how Page paid the penalty of striking out at the recorder as it flew toward him. “I was able to take care of the gunman, thanks to Lehua's warning she was about to do something drastic. I knew just about where he was standing, and took a swing at him with the side of my hand just as Lehua threw the recorder. He got off a shot that went wild. Now, I'm not sure if that's what accounts for the broken kerosene lamp or if was just the force striking out that did it, but once the kerosene spilled on those mats and the flames got started, there would have been no way to stop it even if we'd wanted to.”

“While you're thinking about that, Sam,” Lehua said, “how about explaining how you found us. I didn't see anyone tailing the van when we were driving up there.”

“Thank your ex-AG for that,” Millie said, before Sam could answer, “and maybe you can thank your inefficient police for it too. You see, we didn't get around to taking that tap off of your phone. The minute Lee, or whoever, cut it, an alarm went off. We listened to the tape of that cryptic phone call, and we had a sneaker car go by your apartment. He spotted your cat picture lying on its side. So all we had to do was to tag the right car and, fortunately, the van was the only one out on the street.”

“Tag?” Lehua asked.

“Put a transmitter on it. We figured whoever was in your apartment might be watching, so we borrowed that Hawaiian kid and his basketball.”

“Oh! That's why the ball got away from him.”

“So you saw the performance? That kid's going to go a long way, either as a basketball player or as an actor. He did a great job. When he retrieved the ball, he just held the transmitter up under the fender. The magnet on it did the rest. We were able to trace every movement of the van without any patrol cars having to be nearby. We'd have arrived a hell of a lot sooner if we'd been able to find that driveway. In the pitch dark and pouring rain, we passed it twice before we spotted it.”

* * *

Somewhere, there had been a dream she could not distinguish from reality. Lehua opened her eyes to see the first soft light of the early morning just barely showing the outlines of the bedroom furniture. Bill was on his back breathing almost soundlessly. She decided not to try unraveling the dream.

The morning was cold by Hawai'i standards. She sat upright, swung her legs over the edge of the bed, felt the cool tiles, and searched under the bed with her feet for the crocheted booties. She finally managed to locate them and to slip them on. Groping in the semi-darkness through the closet, she found a cotton bathrobe and decided to surprise Bill with a cup of coffee in bed.

* * *

There was a soft knock. Lehua finished emptying the four-cup measure of water into the automatic coffee maker, switched it on, and headed for the door. Glancing up at the clock, she wondered who would be up and around and visiting before seven in the morning. It took her several moments to recognize her unexpected visitor.

With a gesture to her mouth, the woman indicated she couldn't speak, and that confirmed Lehua's recognition of Annie's niece. The tall, gaunt woman shook her head when Lehua invited her in. Instead, she handed Lehua a note and a small brown envelope. The note read: “Auntie Annie died last night. She asked me to give you this.”

Lehua looked at her visitor, who was shaking her head ambiguously and already retreating to the stairs leading back to the street. Closing the door behind her, Lehua reread the note, feeling the loss of someone she had hardly known but who had had such a profound impact on her life. Stuffing the packet into her bathrobe pocket, she started back to the bedroom.

Bill was still sleeping, or feigning sleep. Lehua suspected the latter, but said nothing. She went around to his side of the bed, sat and read the dozen words again. Feeling Bill's hand rubbing her back, she turned and broke the news to him. After a pause, Bill said, “I guess it was to be expected. She must have been well into her nineties. I know it sounds kind of selfish, but I wish I could have had one more long talk with her about the island's volcanoes. What was it she gave you?”

Lehua fished the packet out of her pocket and handed it to Bill, who turned over the envelope, looking for clues as to its contents.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I have no idea. I haven't opened it yet. Take a look.”

Bill smiled. “You sound like you don't want any more gifts from Auntie Annie.”

Lehua returned his smile. “Maybe that's it. I guess I don't really want to open it myself.”

While she spoke, Bill peeled off the transparent tape sealing one end of the envelope. Peering in at its contents, he said, “Well, I'll be damned!” He emptied the envelope out onto the palm of his hand. A whale's tooth threaded to a length of pig-gut cord fell out.

Lehua stared at the ornament in disbelief. “How did she know?”

“How did she know?” Bill echoed. “How did she know what?”

“She must have known the legends, and that there's some connection between me and what happened in them.”

Bill shrugged. “I suppose it's possible. She was a shrewd old gal, but I can't see this means anything.” As he spoke he slipped the cord over his head and grinned at Lehua.

“Don't,” she said. “Please!”

Bill quickly took off the ornament. “Lehua! I know you've gone through a lot, but don't start seeing spooks everywhere. What's happened can be explained. We've always had a lot of mysteries in science, and we study them. We don't let the unknown panic us.”

Lehua smiled. “O.K., but you'll have to be patient. It's going to take a while for me to get back to normal.” She reached over, kissed him on the forehead, got up and said, “Stay right there, and I'll get you some coffee for humoring me.”

She had just poured two mugs when the phone rang. Putting the coffee down on the dish-up table, she reached for the portable phone in time to hear Bill saying, “Hello?”

A familiar and excited voice at the other end said, “Hi, Bill. It's Ed. Magma's piling up under Mauna Kea.”

“You mean Mauna Loa. Think we've got another one coming like eighty-four? What kind of readings are we getting?”

“I don't mean Mauna Loa, I mean Mauna Kea.” There was a moment of silence.

“I can't believe it.”

“You better believe it. The seismographs are going crazy. The first micro quakes started around twelve last night, but no one was monitoring the graphs. Hell! Who would've expected the sleepy old white mountain to wake up now. It's been at least twenty-thousand years since it's even whispered.”

Bill's voice sounded as excited as Lehua had ever heard it. “I'm leaving in about two minutes. I'll meet you at the mid-level facility.” Lehua flicked off the switch on the phone and put it back on the shelf. She could hear Bill in the bedroom, evidently in the midst of a frantic search for his clothes. That was when she suddenly felt something. Could it have been a quake? A just barely perceptible one?

The now-pink sky shone through the kitchen window, lighting up the coffee in the white mugs. The liquid in the cups sloshed back and forth—slowly at first.

END