Paul Levine - Riptide

Jake Lassiter was afraid of drowning. Taking a bullet was a secondary concern. Tangled up under the sail, still hooked into the boom, he flipped the quick-release bar on the harness and swam under the board and out the other side. He was just surfacing when he heard the popping of the Uzi, and after a quick breath, he went under again. He held his breath until his lungs gave out, and then he held it some more, exhaling air until there was nothing left. When he came up a second time, Keaka was gone, though his voice could be heard, a maniacal wailing in the night.

The waves pounded Lassiter and spun him around. He lost his sense of direction, tried to figure out where he was, finally deciding somewhere between the devil and the deep blue sea. Treading water, he bobbed in the waves, knowing it would take a superhuman effort to swim to shore and avoid being sliced to ribbons on the coral. He took a breath, stretched out, and body-surfed fifty yards on the next good-sized roller. He stopped, treaded water again, and tried to locate the boulders in the moonlight.

Then another voice, only this one familiar and sweet, and for a moment Jake Lassiter wondered if the bullets hadn’t really hit him, and maybe he was drifting off to wherever you go if you haven’t been a saint but you never strangled kittens either.

“Jake, are you all right?” Lila’s voice, a whisper among the waves. He turned to find her and caught a breaker in his open mouth and swallowed salt water again, but there she was on a board, talking to him. “Climb up. Just grab the last foot strap, pull yourself up to your knees, and hang on.”

It was a bumpy ride, the board bouncing in the surf, his extra weight fouling up Lila’s balance like a little brother on the back of a kid’s bike. Then the shore break caught them and slammed the board hard against a rock at water’s edge. There was a cr-ack, and they tumbled into the water, the board nosing up on a boulder. Her fin had snapped in two. She retrieved the broken piece, nearly a foot long, curved and sharp as a saber, and hauled the rig onto the beach. The beach was narrow and rocky and ended in a black jungle of bushes, trees, and. towering ferns. Without pausing to rest, Lila dragged the board into the heavy undergrowth. She came back and knelt beside Lassiter, who was lying on his back at the water’s edge.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

Lassiter coughed and gave back some of the Pacific Ocean. “I’m alive and five minutes ago I didn’t think I would be, so I’m fine. What are you… how did you… why?”

“Jake, I knew you wouldn’t let me come along, but I wasn’t going to let you get killed. Do you understand now you have no chance here?”

He sat up but didn’t answer.

Lila said, “I was about a quarter mile behind you when I heard the gunfire. Keaka must think you’re dead. Somewhere in this vegetation, he has two or three boards and complete rigs. We can get some rest, then sail back before sunrise.”

“Sail back? No. I came to do a job, and…”

But he stopped himself, because he knew it was just talk, he was just jabbering away on autopilot. You start something, you finish it. Yeah, sure. Hit that line. Sis, boom, bah. Talk’s cheap, until you’ve been shot at and left for dead.

He surveyed the damage. His board and rig were gone. The harness and gun, too. All he had left were his boxer trunks and a million goose bumps. If he didn’t get shot, he might die of hypothermia. “All right. We’ll sail back. If I ever get back to the mainland, the closest I’ll get to the ocean will be Kansas.”

Lila crouched in the sand, her face luminous in the moonlight. “We should split up and look for those boards. Try not to make any noise. Keaka’s camp is only a mile up the slope and he’s often out at night, walking in the jungle.”

She used the sharp point of the broken fin to draw a map in the sand, showing Lassiter the location of Keaka’s path into the jungle and advising him to stay clear. Lila headed west along the beach, Lassiter east, poking into the bushes, looking for the boards. His feet were cut from the rocks and he was freezing. The black boulders lining the shore took on shapes of strange animals and seemed to follow him. The wind picked up and died, and sounds came from the rocks, howls and shrieks and taunting laughter. He thought of all the places he would rather be, the list filling a dozen yellow legal pads in his mind. Who would go on a mission like this? A putz, Sam Kazdoy would say.

He couldn’t tell how much time had passed. A few minutes, a half hour. He didn’t see Lila, and he didn’t find any boards. Then, a hallucination. What else could it be, a nude woman on the deserted coast of Molokai? There in front of him, not twenty feet away, backlit by the moon over the channel, a petite young woman emerged from the sea, water dripping over small breasts and onto her firm stomach. She looked directly at Lassiter but was silent. Even in the dark, she looked familiar. She looked to her left and Lassiter followed her gaze and as he turned, the moon burst into a thousand suns, his brain jolted as if hit by a sledgehammer. He was on his knees, fighting off the nausea, straining to focus his eyes.

Through the fog he heard Coach Shula yelling at him, or was it Paterno? “Keep your feet, Lassiter! Body square to the line, don’t get blindsided by the tight end. Damnit, eighty-two just cleaned your clock. Now get up and hit somebody!”

Lassiter stood up but didn’t see the tight end. They might have scored by now, who knows, you drift into the middle, the lights go out.

A voice again, rattling around in his brain, but not the coach. “What’s this neighborhood coming to? A man can’t take his wahine out for a midnight swim without some trash drifting ashore.”

Somewhere through the haze, Lassiter saw two Keaka Kealias and two nude women, and they were dancing around him as if he were the Maypole. “You surprised me, haole ” Keaka said, the Uzi still slung on his shoulder. “I thought you would stay in your air-conditioned office, but I learned that you were here, at first I thought for Lila, then I learn, for the bonds. You are a foolish man, because you can’t have either one. You should have stayed home with your big, cushy job and your flat water. You could have lived to be an old man, playing gin rummy at your country club. You are even more of a fool than the little man, Marlin. The goddess of the volcano spared you last night on Crater Road. It was a signal for you to leave, to go home. But you ignored it, violated the kapu of the gods, and now you must pay the price.”

Keaka seemed to be waiting for him to say something, but the cobwebs were still hanging on. “Why are you on Molokai, haole? The bonds are not here. They are in my favorite place, a place known only to me and that haole slut you like so much.”

“I came to kill you,” Lassiter said.

That made the Hawaiian laugh. “Good. You will die on the rocks like Captain Cook, a stupid haole like yourself.”

The world was coming into focus now, and Jake Lassiter saw that Keaka’s loincloth was gone. In naturalibus, Charlie Riggs would have said. The Hawaiian stood there with his feet spread apart, hands on his hips, a warrior king surveying his kingdom, now sullied by an intruder. Lassiter summoned a calm voice. “I should advise you that I left explicit instructions as to where I was going. If I’m not back in the morning, there’ll be a search party.”

Keaka laughed again. “Who did you tell, Captain Kalehauwehe? You seemed to tell him everything else.” He gestured with the Uzi to start walking toward the jungle.

Then another voice. “Keaka, don’t do it. Let him go, he can’t hurt you.” Lila Summers was there, coming out of the darkness, trying to rescue him again.