Molokai Reef (9 page)

Elaborating,
Mongoose told them that the pier was a popular destination for young
people who came to drink, party, and screw. Not necessarily in that
order. Officially, the pier was under the control of the Harbor
Patrol within the Department of Transportation. The Maui County
Police didn’t have jurisdiction on the pier. They would,
however, wait at the mauka end of the causeway for intoxicated
drivers.

That
explained the witnesses, Gybe thought. It is only circumstantial
since no one saw her at the scene of the crime, at least no one that
he was aware of. The media reports put the time of death between
nine and midnight, which would mean that if Susan were involved, the
victims either had to be with her when she departed the pier or she
had picked them up somewhere along shore.

“
Was
Susan alone when the kids saw her?” Gybe asked.

According
to what Mongoose had heard, no one reported seeing anyone with Susan.
But, he added, her boat had a small cabin. The victims may have
been in the cabin when Susan arrived on the pier.

They
learned that on Wednesday morning Mongoose had witnessed the return
of the Maui Police boat with the bodies aboard. The police
transferred the bodies to the Moloka‘i Princess, the
interisland ferry, for transport to Maui. Moloka‘i was too
small to warrant a medical examiner, so the Maui Medical Examiner
would conduct the autopsies.

“
You
should talk to the M.E.” Mongoose suggested.

“
Good
idea, but will he give us the autopsy report?”

Not
surprisingly, Mongoose had researched the availability of the autopsy
report. On the Internet, he had found reference to an opinion issued
by the Office of Information Practices for Hawai‘i. In their
opinion, “the right to privacy is a personal right that is
generally extinguished upon an individual’s death.”
However, there was a caveat about releasing autopsy reports during an
ongoing police investigation.

Gybe
grabbed this factoid and set his left-brain adrift. Whether through
genetics or learned habits, Gybe often wondered about what seemed
obvious to most people. He supposed that to many, the dead had no
right to privacy. But could this be right? Fair? Ethical?

A
person had rights before birth. That is, if you believe or belong to
one of the hundreds of organizations and religious cults lobbying,
demonstrating, and murdering for fetal rights.

Who
was defending a person’s rights after death? If life didn’t
begin with birth, why should it end with death?

A
corpse rights organization could address one of the biggest cons of
all time. They could hold religions accountable for their promises
of post-death rewards. The rewards, he had read, ranged from
managing your own planet to living on a cloud to a daily supply of
virgins. Today, this multi-billion dollar industry went unregulated.

Suppose
someone bought into the religion program, then discovered that
instead of virgins as rewards, they received viragoes due to a
translation error made by an old date-noshing cleric in the desert.
If the dead had rights, they could sue.

Voting
rights for the dead, once widely used in Chicago, could be
re-instated. The dead would be perfect citizens. The government
could tax their investment income yet wouldn’t have to pay
Social Security or Medicare benefits.

Gybe
saw endless opportunities for activists and social support systems.
ACLU would form a new division. NAADP could parallel the NAACP. The
National Organization of Women might spin off NODW. AARP would morph
into AARDP or form a separate activist organization.

There
could be a new talk show with the theme “No live zone.”
Bumper stickers, T-shirts, billboards, and airplane-towed banners
might read ‘Dead have Rights Too,’ ‘I CAN take it
with me.’ A slew of new magazines and tabloids would hit the
newsstands. Books with titles like
Death for Dummies
,
Dr.
Reaper’s: The Death Diet
,
E-mailing from Beyond
would
require a new section in bookstores.

Neurons
fired at random and eyeballs raced around their sockets until
Mongoose’s voice jolted Gybe back to the universe shared by the
so-called sane people aboard
Makani
; the people who lived in
the space-time continuum supported by many of the world governments.

“
Privacy
rights after death are irrelevant because this afternoon they
scheduled Susan for a preliminary hearing. Under the rules of
discovery, her attorney has access to the autopsy report.”

“
She
doesn’t have an attorney.” Kara interjected.

Exchanging
glances, they knew that it was time to find an attorney for Susan –
someone other than the court appointed one who had represented her
during the video hearing.

“
By
the way,” Mongoose continued, “she was transferred to
Maui just before sunset.”

After
her stormy start with the ’goose, Gybe noticed that Kara sought
to leave on a positive note. Since guys always liked to talk about
their toys, she asked Mongoose what
Makani
meant.

“
In
Hawaiian, it means the wind or breeze.”

They
thanked Mongoose for the brews and information. “Keep your
ears open and let me know anything else you hear.”

Gybe
and Kara had re-boarded the dinghy and were casting off when Mongoose
suggested that they think about the wife of the dead man.

Gybe
rotated the throttle until the dinghy was up on plane and immediately
idled back to coast alongside
Ferrity
. Without asking, he was
taking Kara back to
Ferrity
for another night. He knew that
tomorrow they had to visit the M.E. on Maui. Might as well get an
early start. Kara wanted to find an attorney and Gybe wanted to see
the autopsy report. The widow could wait until their return.

The
sun had long since departed this side of the blue orb when Gybe
nestled the dinghy alongside
Ferrity
. From the liquor locker
he retrieved a bottle of Courvoisier and poured cognac into two
snifters. He handed one to Kara and motioned forward to the
foredeck. Kara grabbed two cushions and followed him to the bow.

The
easterly breeze swung
Ferrity
on her anchor so that she
pointed towards the rising moon. The waning moon was five days past
full. Leaning against the cabintop, Gybe held Kara in one arm and
his cognac in the other.

Like
an upside down bowl into which the Menehune – Hawaiian
Leprechauns – had spilled salt, stars littered the sky from
horizon to horizon. Defying the International Rules of the Road for
boats at anchorage,
Ferrity
showed no light at the top of her
mast. An occasional fish crossing the water-air boundary in its
attempt to escape a predator interrupted the silence, as did the
occasional whale blow. The cognac and Kara warmed his core. Life
was good.

15

Not
to be caught with his pants off twice, Gybe awoke before Kara. The
water he had drawn for coffee was heating on the propane stove when
she slid out of the vee-berth, hair awry, eyes sleepy, naked, and
pivoted into the head. He heard the water pump kick on as she
started the shower. Would she heed his warnings about water usage?

Any
boat away from the dock had to conserve water. Gybe had installed a
reverse osmosis PUR watermaker last year, but he preferred not to use
it in Hawaiian anchorages. The poor land practices resulted in
runoff laden with silt and other detritus that could clog the
pre-filters. His water tanks held eighty-nine gallons. He had
topped off the tanks three days ago at Ke‘ehi Lagoon near
Honolulu International Airport.

He
heard a short scream – a girl screech – above the running
water in the head. Nothing followed so he ignored it.

Gybe
was sitting in the cockpit when Kara climbed through the companionway
with a mug of coffee in her left hand. She wore one of his T-shirts,
the one that said “Rehab is for Quitters”, and from the
jostling beneath the shirt, little else. Kara had towel-dried her
low maintenance hair. Across from him, she sat and folded her legs
beneath herself.

“
Morning.”
She smiled and tossed a small black object in his lap. “Found
your pet in the sink.”

A
black crab, slightly larger than a quarter, sidled off Gybe’s
lap and dropped to the sole of the cockpit. “You didn’t
hurt him, did you?”

Gybe
thought about the sink in the head. It drained through a
three-quarter inch hose that exited through a hole just above the
waterline. Sometimes, crabs crawled up the hose and rested in the
sink.

“
You
ready for a sail?” Gybe watched the crab fall into the
scupper. The scupper led straight to the water beneath the boat. If
a breaking wave crashed into the cockpit, the four scuppers would
drain the water back to the ocean.

“
Maybe
when I finish my coffee. How long will it take? Are we in a hurry?”
Kara moved across and sat next to Gybe, shoulders and thighs
touching.

He
had better watch this one, Gybe thought. Bed her a couple of more
times and she would start nesting. “The marine weather
forecast predicts light winds this morning, which is good because we
have to sail east – into the wind – to get to Maui. It’s
about fifteen miles.”

Reviewing
his earlier foreboding, Gybe caressed her thigh. “We have
enough time to…” From physics, he knew that for every
charm there was an equal and opposite anti-charm. He could get rid
of her when the time came but as they used to say in old movies
“light ’em if you got ’em, boys.”

After
a second shower and a quick breakfast, Gybe was anxious to set sail.
Before he could get underway, he needed to stow the dinghy. Although
the passage to Maui was short, about fifteen miles, it involved
crossing Pailolo Channel, which separated Maui from Moloka‘i.
Experienced sailors respected the channels between the islands of
Hawai‘i regardless of the weather forecast.

From
the dinghy, Gybe handed life jackets, oars, and fuel tank up to Kara.
She sat them on deck until he could stow them later. He slipped the
harness onto the outboard. A small block and tackle connected the
harness to the motor lifting davit. Kara pulled the line and the
outboard lifted clear of the dinghy. Free of the motor and gear, the
dinghy weight was down to a more manageable eighty pounds. From the
foredeck, he pulled it over the lifelines and laid it on deck. He
unscrewed the air release valves.

Back
in the cockpit, he stowed the oars and gear then lashed the motor to
its mount on the stern pulpit. By this time, the dinghy had
deflated. Kara helped him roll it into a tight cylinder. He threw a
line around the giant rubber cannoli and stowed it in the port sail
locker.

Gybe
started
Ferrity
’s four-cylinder Yanmar diesel, then
walked to the stern and checked that a good stream of exhaust water
was exiting overboard. An engine-driven water pump pulled seawater
through a heat exchanger to cool the engine. Beyond the heat
exchanger, the warmed water entered the exhaust system before spewing
overboard with the exhaust gases.

He
walked up the starboard side to the bow and then back along the port
side. His practiced eye checking that everything was in its place
and lashed down. Then he went below deck to conduct a similar cabin
survey. Visualizing the vessel at a thirty-degree angle of heel, he
looked for things that would fall. He stowed the breakfast dishes, a
toothbrush and toothpaste that Kara had left lying in the head, and
dogged-down the portlights and hatches.

Kara
sat in the cockpit when he returned with a chart and binoculars. A
less experienced or more careless sailor would have scoffed at Gybe’s
preparation. This was a day sail. Hell, you could see the
destination. The forecaster predicted light winds and three to five
foot seas in the channel. Aboard
Ferrity
,
Gybe was the
master; it was his way or the seaway. Might make a good t-shirt
slogan, he thought.

He
gave the orders, the crew obeyed, and discussion was later. Hawai‘i
floated two thousand miles from the nearest sizable landmass. If
something happened and they drifted with the trades beyond Lāna‘i,
they would be at sea a very long time.

If he
were near land, he would jettison a mutinous crew. Deep at sea, he
would break out the duct tape. He preferred to sail alone.

Gybe
opened a locker and retrieved two inflatable safety vests with built
in harnesses. “Slip this on.”

He
handed one to Kara, showed her how to adjust the straps, and
explained how to inflate it. The harness included a CO2 cartridge
that should inflate the air bladder when she pulled the ripcord.
There was a separate tube pinned to the vest for manual inflation.

“
Any
questions?”

Gybe
stationed Kara at the wheel after explaining the simple engine
controls. “One lever. Push it forward, the transmission
shifts into forward. Pushing it further forward accelerates.
Reverse works the same. Lever straight up is neutral. Do NOT shift
from fast forward to fast reverse without pausing in neutral.”