Aaron Elkins - Where there's a will

John lowered his voice to a hiss. “That’s what this is really about, isn’t it, Teddy? They made you look like idiots, and now you want to get back at them.”

Fukida glared at him, opened his mouth to shout some more, changed his mind, and settled back, shaking his head. After a second he sat up straight again, snorted, and angrily flung his cap into a corner. “I don’t understand you, Lau. You walk in here uninvited, you rake up all kinds of dirty laundry, you tell me we got this wrong and that wrong, you raise a million questions… and then when I tell you, well, maybe there’s something to it and we ought to reopen, you climb all over me. What do you want? Do you want us to investigate? Or do you want us to drop it?”

John had calmed down while Fukida spoke. He looked about as miserable as his open, cheerful face would permit. “Yes,” he said. “And yes.”

A beat passed before Fukida spoke. “What is that, zen? I don’t get it.”

Gideon did. It was what had been bothering John all day; the conflict between human being and lawman. By coming to Fukida, he felt, understandably enough, as if he were betraying his friends. But as a cop himself, he couldn’t bring himself to pretend that all the equivocations, misrepresentations, omissions, and generally dubious behavior on the part of this family he’d known so long had never occurred.

“I have an idea,” Gideon said. “For all we know, we’re blowing things up way out of proportion. Basically, we’re operating without facts. Maybe they didn’t do anything illegal. Maybe we’re seeing things all wrong. I know it looks bad, but maybe there’s a simple explanation for everything that we haven’t thought of.”

John’s and Fukida’s faces showed that they believed this about as much as he did, but that they were willing to listen.

“So what I suggest, before you go barreling in in any kind of official way, Sergeant, is that you let us poke around a little more. Discreetly, of course.”

“Like how?”

“Well, like the two of us-John and I-going back and having a chat with Axel. Informally. We were going to do that anyway, before we decided to come back here. Bring up some of these same questions and see what he has to say.”

Fukida was shaking his head. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for civilians-”

“Who you calling a civilian?” John demanded. “And who dug up this stuff for you in the first place? Where would you be if not for us? Exactly where you were ten years ago-fat and happy and way out on a limb you didn’t even know you were on.”

“That’s the truth,” Fukida grumbled. “Happy, that’s for sure. Okay, I won’t do anything for a couple days. Go talk to Axel. Don’t shake things up, though. Be discreet, you know?”

John put a hand to his heart. “Discretion is my middle name.”

“This is good,” John said as they headed to the truck. “I trust Axel. He’ll level with us.”

“I hope so.”

John climbed in and buckled the seat belt. “Especially if we nudge him a little,” he said under his breath.

The old man didn’t look up as John and Gideon climbed the steps of the front porch. He was moving slowly along on his knees, his mouth full of nails, hammering down the warped ends of the porch floorboards.

“Hey, Willie,” John said. “I see they got you doing handyman jobs now, huh?”

“Got me doing everything,” the old man muttered through the nails, still not looking up. “What else is new? You name it, I do it.”

Then something about John’s voice got his attention. He looked up, tipped back his curling, sweat-stained, flower-garlanded hat, spat the nails into his hand, and grinned. His good-natured face was as weathered, and almost as dark as the unpainted wood of the porch.

“What do you know, it’s Johnny Lau, the kid that could never get enough to eat. You done growing yet?”

“I sure hope so,” John said. “It’s not easy finding shoes this big. How’s it going, boss?”

“Not bad. Fine.” He got to his feet, wincing a little as his knees straightened. A short, stubby man in old jeans and ancient, scuffed work boots. “You know, I saw you out here on the porch yesterday. Thought it was you. So how come you didn’t say hello?”

“Well, you know,” John said.

“Yeah, right. I’m Willie Akau,” he said to Gideon. “Foreman here. I’m the guy that taught Johnny everything he knows. All the important stuff, anyway.”

“Truer than you think,” John said. “Willie, we’re looking for Axel. Is he inside?”

“Naw, he’s out at Paddock Number Four with the rest of ’em.”

“They branding?”

“Branding, castrating, inoculating, the whole bit. Springtime, you know? Tell you what, I’m about done here and I want to see how they’re doing anyway. Lemme get one of them Japanese quarter horses, and we’ll go out and have a look.”

“Japanese quarter horses?” a puzzled John echoed. “What’re they?”

Willie grinned at him. “Things have changed since you worked here, brudda. A Japanese quarter horse-that’s what we call a Honda ATV.”

“ATV? What, you paniolos don’t ride horses anymore?”

“Sure we do, most of the time. I was thinking about your friend. He don’t look like no horseman to me.”

Gideon laughed. “You’re right about that.” A few years earlier, in Oregon, he’d been thrown from a horse, fallen down a hillside, suffered a concussion, and almost gotten squashed flat when the terrified horse came within inches of rolling over him. Since then he’d been leery of getting on one again.

“Looks like some kind of professor or something.”

“Right again.” Good God, he thought, has it come to that? Have I started looking like a professor? “How can you tell?”

“It’s your aura,” John said. “Okay, Willie, let’s get going.”

“I’ll get the ATV. You better sit in back, Professor. Easier to hold onto the roll bar back there.”

The ATV that Willie came back with wasn’t a Honda, but a yellow, six-wheel-drive Argo equipped with caterpillar tracks; a cross between a beach buggy and a topless mini-tank, with room for six.

“Thought you’d be more comfortable in this monster, Professor. Safer, you know? Make sure you hold on tight to that bar now.”

Muttering, Gideon got into the back as instructed but determinedly refused to grasp the roll bar, twice coming perilously close to tumbling out as a result. But once they got off the dirt trails and onto the grass-cushioned, rolling hills the ride smoothed out, and they made it to the paddock without incident. Willie went into the pipe-fenced corral to join his paniolos. Gideon and John stayed outside, leaning on the fence with Axel.

From his reading, and from what John had told him, Gideon expected-and hoped for-a colorful scene, with whooping paniolos roping the calves and throwing them, rodeo style, for the branding. But ranching, as he kept hearing, had changed. All it took was a little quiet clucking and nudging for the horsemen to urge the five or six dozen calves, one at a time, up a ramp and into the “squeeze box,” a narrow, ten-foot-long wooden enclosure in which, Axel explained, they were inoculated against blackleg, branded with the Little Hoaloha “LH,” had their ears notched for tags, and, if they were bulls, painlessly castrated-the method involved a rubber band that would cut off blood supply to the testes over the next few weeks; not a knife or a set of pincers, as in the old days. And everything was under the supervision of a veterinarian who was in there with them; another change from the old days.

There was no terrified baying or bellowing from the squeeze box. After a minute or two, the calf would simply emerge from the other end, snorting and shaking its head, but looking more offended than hurt or frightened. And in would come the next one.