Molokai Reef (30 page)

The
man was lying on his back. As they got closer, they saw the
trembling and convulsing. There weren’t any fishermen in the
area, but the usual parade of cars cruised the causeway and around
the pier parking area. Gybe doubted that the people in the cars
could see the downed man.

What
was wrong with him?

55

Flyn
retrieved a flashlight from her backpack and splayed its beam on the
man. He looked to be in his mid-twenties, was very thin, and of
island ancestry. Blood covered most of his shirt, but she could just
make out the shirt’s message – Just Say No. Fresh blood
bubbled from his mouth and nose with each attempt to breathe.

Gybe
had dialed 911 and returned to her side. They heard the siren and
stepped back from the victim who was now thrashing his arms and legs.
Neither felt inclined to offer CPR or comfort to the convulsing man.

The
police officer had finished collecting their names, when the
ambulance drove onto the causeway with lights flashing and sirens
wailing. Gybe and Flyn hadn’t witnessed anything so there was
little information for the officer to collect. He closed his
notebook and tucked it into a shirt pocket.

“
What
do you think happened?” Gybe asked, but knew the answer.

“
Drugs
would be my guess.”

Gybe
dropped Flyn at her boat then angled towards
Ferrity
. Before
he touched the hull, he sensed the violation. Someone had been on
his boat. Adrenaline purged the alcohol from his system. His body
and mind went to full alert.

Aboard
the boat, he found that someone had cut the lock on the hatch and
removed the hatch boards. Gybe grabbed a flashlight from a bracket
near the companionway. In the other hand, he grabbed a stainless
steel winch handle. The five-pound handle had a good heft. Like a
TV detective with a gun, Gybe stood to one side and aimed the
flashlight into the saloon. “Anyone there?”

He
heard no gunfire, no noises, and no response to his query.

Below
decks,
Ferrity
was divided into three compartments. His
stateroom or main berth occupied the vee of the bow. Just aft of the
stateroom, on the port side, was the enclosed head. The rest of the
living space included the saloon, galley, and navigation station. No
one was aboard. But, someone had been. Spices, jars, cans, and pans
were strewn about the galley. In the saloon, books lay on the cabin
sole and the settee cushions were overturned – some sliced
open. In the head, medicine bottles were piled in the sink.
Cleaning supplies, normally stowed beneath the sink, were heaped in
the toilet. Forward, the stateroom was intact. Nothing seemed to
have been disturbed there.

Gybe
returned to the saloon and sat down at the nav station across from
the galley.

Like
the sextant before it, the nav station was becoming an anachronism on
modern boats. It seemed that everyone was switching to electronic
charts displayed on flat panel displays. Few boaters used paper
charts anymore. The nav station on
Ferrity
had been built for
real charts. One could wedge into the seat and sit securely in the
roughest seaway. In front of the seat, a sloping flat surface, the
chart table, was large enough to display the biggest chart when it
was folded in half. At sea, Gybe often sat at the nav station and
wrote in his journal. Tonight he sat and wondered who had tossed his
boat.

Then
he saw the jar.

The
tropics teemed with life. Some life forms were welcome some were
not. On a boat, one struggled to keep the vermin ashore. Rats and
roaches were the most pervasive and once aboard, the most prolific
and destructive intruders. Spiders were another pest, but Gybe had
learned to live with spiders.

To
prevent the introduction of the multi-legged critters, the first rule
was never bring cardboard aboard. Roaches hid in boxes and laid
their eggs in the seams. As another precaution, Gybe dunked hands of
bananas and other fruit and vegetables in the ocean for several
moments to purge the spiders and roaches. When tied to a pier, rats
could skitter across
Ferrity
’s dock lines. But while
cruising the islands, he seldom tied to a shore.

No
matter the caution, roaches still managed to get aboard. Some
cockroaches would fly to the boat. In the past, he had tried roach
hotels, motels, condos, and B & Bs. They didn’t work. In
his experience, boric acid was the most effective roach-a-cide.

Boric
acid was a white powder with the consistency of chalk dust. A
sixteen-ounce yellow bottle cost a few dollars. Enough boric acid
for a decade. When the roaches walked through the white powder, it
adhered to their legs and antennae. Clean as cats, the roaches
preened by licking their many little paws. The acid dissolved their
insides. Like skull orchards, only roach husks remained. It was
very effective.

Because
the original container was so large, Gybe transferred some of the
boric acid to a small jar formerly used for peanut butter. In large
letters, he had written ‘Boric acid’ on the sides and lid
of the plastic jar. He kept the jar under the sink in the head.

Now,
the open jar sat on the chart table. Beside the jar, a butter knife
lay near a small pile of the white powder. Two shadowy traces
paralleled a neatly formed white line.

Darwin
scores again, Gybe smirked, the dumb shit couldn’t read.

56

Kara
walked down the ramp from the
Moloka‘i Princess
a little
before 8:00 a.m. She had caught the 6:30 ferry from Lahaina. From
the dinghy dock, she waved to the anchored boats. Flyn saw her
first, so she bounced into her dinghy and pointed towards shore.
With Kara onboard, Flyn headed towards
Ferrity
.

Fresh
brewed coffee permeated the air as the two women scampered aboard.
Gybe produced two steaming mugs of coffee and returned to the galley.
There was a portlight, propped open, on the port side of the
companionway. In rough seas when the companionway was closed, the
cook could pass food through the portlight to the watchstander in the
cockpit. Through this portlight, Gybe handed Flyn a large bowl of
fresh cut fruit. In the bowl, she saw bananas, mango, apples, and
strawberries. Next from the portlight, she retrieved individual
bowls of granola and a tub of yogurt.

Gybe
joined the two women as the last of the tour buses belched away from
the ferry terminal. Silence returned to the harbor. Typical of
December mornings, the wind was calm. Three boats –
Ferrity
,
Makani
, and Flyn’s boat – rested at anchor. Since
there was neither wind nor current, the boats drifted at random
around their anchor rodes.

“
How
is Susan?” Gybe asked as he took the empty bowls and returned
them to the galley.

Kara
informed them that she was still in jail. The judge still refused to
set bail. The public defender assigned to Susan’s case was
eager and she had graduated from an Ivy League school before
returning to her native state. But, Susan would be her first murder
case. Like the situation in most cities, there was a shortage of
experienced public defenders. They were even scarcer on small
islands.

“
Can’t
you hire someone else?” Flyn interjected.

“
We
could if we had the money. Oceans Now is a non-profit organization.
Our limited operating funds come from donations. Those donations
barely provide a subsistence salary for some employees. Most of our
workers receive no salary.”

“
Won’t
other environmental organizations help in this crisis?”

Kara
frowned. “Environmental orgs are as competitive as the worst
capitalist. The fight for customers – donors – is fierce
and ugly. When an org fails, there is a scramble to recruit the
former members. One group happy, the other sad.”

“
Besides,
this isn’t an environmental issue. Susan has been accused of
murder.”

“
Does
she have any ideas about who framed her?” Gybe asked.

She
had no idea. Kara wasn’t even sure there had been a frame. It
wasn’t as though someone had planted the murder weapon in
Susan’s closet.

For
Flyn’s benefit, Gybe replayed Susan’s alibi. “On
the night of the murder, Susan took her boat to the reef. After
anchoring she stoked up a fat one and masturbated under the
moonlight.”

“
No.”
Kara scowled at Gybe then looked to Flyn and rolled her eyes.

“
Smack
him if you need.” Flyn suggested.

“
She
dives to the bottom where she works through her yoga exercises before
sitting quietly and meditating.”

“
Wow.
That sounds exciting. When she gets out of jail, I want her to take
me on one of these yoga diving expeditions.”

Gybe
brought the conversation back to the present problem. “Nice
alibi. The prosecutor thinks she’s a murderer and
eco-terrorist while the townsfolk think she is a witch. But, oh no,
they are wrong. Susan is really a New Ager who meditates underwater
during a full moon.” Gybe searched for words. “A
werewolf. No that’s not right, a were-seal.”

“
She’s
innocent, she doesn’t need an alibi.”

They
talked for a few more minutes about Susan, then Gybe brought Kara up
to date on what they had discovered at SynCorn.

“
Flyn
and I are on our way to meet Les. We’ll drop you at the pier.”

“
I
want to go.” Kara whined.

“
Sorry.
Not this time. You know how Les reacted the last time he and I met.
I don’t want you there if he gets nutty again.”

“
What
about Flyn?”

“
Look
Kara, it isn’t because you are a woman. Flyn and I have worked
together before. We can do the good guy – bad guy routine.
You would be in the way.”

Kara
sulked while Gybe motored the dinghy to the pier. She walked to the
’vair, got in, and started it. Still angry, she revved the
engine and popped the clutch. The engine hesitated, backfired twice,
and the car lurched forward. A man in an old Army jacket, holding a
fishing pole, jumped off the pier.

“
She
took that well.” Gybe noted. “The maturity of the
modern Mendocino woman.”

57

From
the pay phone, Gybe telephoned Les and convinced him with a reference
to the Tonto Group that it would be better to meet away from
SynCorn’s offices.

While
Gybe was on the phone, Flyn had returned to
Ferrity
and then
her boat to retrieve their bicycles. They mounted up and rode up the
causeway towards shore and town. Les had agreed to meet them at the
Kioea Beach Park, about a mile west of town.

Between
town and the park, wide shoulders bordered the two-lane road. They
reached the park before Les.

Cognizant
of the signs warning of falling coconuts, they pushed the bikes
around the edge of the coconut grove.

From
a sign, they learned that King Kamehameha V had planted one thousand
royal coconut palm trees on the site in the 1860’s. Each tree
represented a warrior in his army. He had selected the site because
it encompassed seven sacred ponds. Almost one hundred fifty years
later, the Kapuaiwa Coconut grove had dwindled to a few hundred
trees.

Staring
up the limbless trunks, Gybe wondered if his reflexes could dodge a
falling coconut. He recalled that the equation for the distance an
object fell was equal to one-half the gravitational constant
multiplied by the square of the time in seconds. (D = ½*g*t**2)
He rearranged the equation, rounded the gravitational constant to
ten meters/sec/sec and used twenty meters as the height of the trees.
Ignoring air resistance, a coconut would hit the ground about one
and a half seconds after it broke free from a tree. Hmmm, he would
need an alcohol-free processor and good reflexes to dodge a down
bound coconut.

Island
legend maintained that at least one hundred fifty people per year
died from falling coconuts. But a column in an alternative newspaper
titled Straight Dope by Cecil Adams debunked the myth. According to
the column, the data didn’t support anywhere near that number
of deaths. It did admit that the data was sparse and collected from
tropical regions not known for their record keeping.

Flyn
and Gybe walked the bicycles along the edge of the grove with Gybe
wearing his helmet.

“
It’s
beautiful here.” Flyn commented as they reached the sandy
beach. “The water is so still and clear.” She waded
away from the beach. “And shallow. Probably shallow all the
way to the reef.”

They
both turned towards the sound of Les’s black Lincoln Navigator
crunching over the coral-covered parking lot. Crushed coral
substituted for gravel on many tropical islands. Spotting them on
the beach, Les crossed the lot boundary, bumped over a shallow curb,
ignored the warning signs, and slalomed the huge sport utility
vehicle through the coconut grove.

A
gentle gust of wind loosed a coconut, which dead-centered the picnic
table sized hood of the SUV. A distracted Les plowed into the next
palm and stopped. The raining coconuts sounded like two Tibetan
monks announcing dinner with a large gong.