Robert Walker - Primal Instinct

“ Condition is,” she said firmly, “you go home and get some rest, too.”

“ No… think I'll come back here, sit with Ivers. Want to be here when he comes around. The man doesn't have any family.”

“ He means a lot to you.”

“ A lot I owe him, yeah. He taught me how to work Honolulu.”

“ Aha, so that's how you know so much.”

“ Ivers is a white native. Came with the place. Actually, worked Maui for years before coming to HPD. He tipped me off to the disappearances there. No one knows the islands like him.”

“ Look. The Rainbow's not ten minutes from here. Come with me, sack out on the sofa till dawn and then-”

“ I don't know, Jess.” He bit his lower lip, jiggled his keys in his pocket, shuffled his feet and shook his head.

“ What possible good can you do if you collapse? Think of it, you want to have your breakdown here?”

Around them, the military-green walls, cabinets and the yellow lights of the waiting room, even the cola and snack machines, seemed out of another time. “Military doctors aren't always the best,” Parry said. “Thought I'd see about transferring Nate to a better facility.”

“ I told you, I talked with his doctor. Flores is going to get your friend through this, and the burns weren't as bad as they might've been. He's going to come through this.”

“ Sir?” a voice at the doorway timidly called.

Parry turned and stared at a young patrol officer in uniform.

“ What is it, officer?”

“ My partner and me… we were first on scene at the incident outside the fort, sir, and well… I understand you want to know all the details? We got a call from the suits handling the case.”

“ Yeah, right, sure do. Officer ahh…”

“ Janklow, sir. Phil Janklow.”

Phil told them all that he knew, including the information regarding the gas leak which he was still brooding about. “We got an APB out on the car, but without a plate number, well…” He didn't offer much hope.

Jessica got a confused picture of the events, but Parry concentrated on the car, getting what he could from Janklow about the make and model of the vehicle. Much of what the police had gotten from eyewitnesses clashed and contradicted, but the car's description remained firm.

After Janklow was gone, Parry said to Jessica, “The description of the car could fit with what we know of the car that Kaniola followed out to Koko Head the night he and Thom Hilani died. Nate was looking for that car.”

“ So if it is the same guy…” Her eyes lit up. “We've got a sketch of the suspect and possibly a description of his car. Come tomorrow, he'll be feeling the noose tightening. I just hope you have all the corridors off the island covered.”

“ We do.”

Parry, beyond fatigue now, agreed to take her up on her offer of the sofa in her room, and together they left the hospital for the Rainbow Tower. On the way to his car, Parry said, “When Ivers gets his eyesight back, I want him to have a look at our sketch of the suspect. See if it rings any bells.”

“ According to the doctors, he rang quite a few bells around here.”

Parry attempted a laugh. “Come on, Doctor. You must be as dog-tired as I am.”

“ You'll get no argument there.”

“ An unconditional agreement?” She only slightly flinched at the remark.

They both knew that the morning papers would be carrying the police sketch of the suspect on page one, and that things would be thrown into high gear. Anything could happen. Tips could flow in. The killer might well kill himself, or try to put as much distance between himself and Oahu as possible, which meant some form of passage off the island.”We'll both need as much sleep as we can get if we're going to be any good tomorrow spearheading 'Operation Containment,'“ Parry told her as they walked out to the parking lot and his car.

The Hawaiian night was calm, at peace, the wind a gentle, pulsating, cheek-caressing reminder to Jessica of the fragility of this tropical island world. Built upon volcanic rock, riddled with air pockets and underground rivers of lava, given birth by a cauldron in the boiling depths of the sea. The land mass was little more than a mighty coral reef created for the gods of Hawaiian legend whose sense of sport was often cruel.

She knew the truth, that the islands were a strange illusion created by an unruly, chaotic earth continually evolving, and that what was taken for granted here as terra firma was only as good as the faith people put in it, which might, faith and all, be gone with the next fiery eruption. She even imagined the river of fire come like a dragon to play out a billion-year-old game of hide-and-seek with life and death in the balance.

Hawaii was the ultimate land of illusion. Here even nature in all her lustrous, plush, enticing fantasy conspired in the deception, for while Hawaii purported to be paradise and perfection at every turn, Jessica had seen the seams, the pit viper in the garden, particularly here in Honolulu, where the darker aspects, the underbelly of the city, were as bleak and foul as anything she'd seen in D.C., Chicago or New York.

Here every illusion was forged by nature, save the sprawling city of Honolulu, yet nature conspired with the city to mask its meaner aspect. Honolulu stood a shimmering man-made Babel filled with the voices of every tongue, hugging an ocean that could destroy it at any time. The city acted as a modern jungle for such predators as the Trade Winds Killer. Nature's illusive calm and man's monuments, seemingly pleased to be in close proximity here in Oahu, left an unsettling insecurity in Jessica Coran, even as she looked past James Parry's muscular form to the lazy Pacific below.

Here was illusion, with the changing tide meeting the sky on the horizon; here the abundant cover of leaf and fruit, there light, a rainbow of shadow, lavender skies, where softly painted darkness, bird and arrow, water and drought, wind and calm, cloud and mountain, sun and rain, all mingled in a dance along a high wire of conflict and tension called life. Like the teeming sea itself, the land of the pineapple, guava, mango, papaya and sugarcane was rich in color and beauty with countless varieties of multicolored birds and flowers, some blossoms mimicking the appearance of birds. The land of the monkeypod tree, the flaming poinciana and the ancient Indian banyan represented for Jessica, and all who came under Hawaii's spell, a paradise that affirmed life's richest bounties over despair, decay and death. Yet it was an unforgiving land too, pitiless toward the foolish or uninitiated. It was a world where East and West clashed, one devouring the other. She'd seen the ambiguity of Hawaii in the single branch of a passion-fruit tree whose flowers, symbolizing Christ's passion, flourished even as its fruit went rotting on the bough, filling the air with an acrid and sour odor which mingled with the rotting overabundance of guavas and mangoes growing wild along ancient footpaths that'd become paved highways.

She'd witnessed the same contrasts on Maui, where beauty and death were enshrined atop Maui's Haleakala summit, where the rare silversword flourished amid an arid, lunar landscape. She now recalled for Jim her visit up the winding highway to Mount Haleakala, House of the Sun, where Maui-of-the-thousand-tricks, impatient with the gods, had fooled them into creating Maui from the sea by connecting two volcanoes, Puu and Kukui, into the spectacular gorges and valleys, giving Maui the name “Valley Isle.” Haleakala, at 10,023 feet, was home to the world's largest dormant caldera, twenty-one miles in circumference, and now it housed men and high-tech instruments in Science City, a collection of blockhouses and scanning devices to track NASA launches, satellites and the activity of the sun.