Robert Walker - Primal Instinct

Jessica felt her stomach chum, fearing the worst lay ahead of them, getting extremely annoyed at the same time with the short creep that kept poking her ribs with a war club.

She wondered if these people were f6r real or if they were like the survivalists she'd encountered on tf^e mainland, who were more obsessed with a lifestyle than committed to a way of life. The native population was crowded around them, obscuring her view, but she could hear the collective gasp that followed in the wake of Chief Kowona, who parted an Army-issue tarp acting as an entryway cover and came towards them, wearing a thick feathered headdress.

She felt Jim's hand grasp hers and tightly squeeze. “Let me do the talking. If you talk, he'll see it as a sign of weakness.”

“ Whose weakness?”

“ Mine.”

They were forced back on their feet and toward the center of the village, while the chief, acting as if they were not even present, performed a ceremony of dancing before the fire, which was brought to a fever pitch by the natives. But Jim suddenly stopped in his tracks beside her, and Jessica, following his eyes, stared across the fire and the compound to a ten-foot-high wood and bamboo rack that looked like an instrument which normally held fish and possibly goat meat stretched across it for drying in the sun.

A bloodied, mangled man with dark skin and Hawaiian features dangled from the rack, his hands and legs tied to bleeding with thick, native thongs. The man's wounds were man-made, the awful slashes creating a crisscross network of blood and flesh. Below him a Tire kept sending up cinders to rest in his wounds, and dogs sniffed about the dying man's feet, occasionally rising up to lap at the blood as it drained down his calves.

“ Oh, my God,” Jessica moaned. Her worst fears were realized before her eyes. “They may not be cannibals, but they are savages.” Kahoolawe justice appeared both cruel and torturous.

Jessica was roughly forced ahead. She and Parry stood now side by side, staring at the dangling man on the rack, his face a mask of pain and blood. He'd been slashed repeatedly about the face as well as the naked torso and limbs. Jessica recognized a zigzag pattern to the wounds, realizing that each had some ceremonial significance. Her eyes then traveled to the hapless victim's private parts. His penis had been removed and the stub sewed up and burned in order to cauterize the wound and keep him from bleeding to death. A quick death would obviously end the village's and the old chief's pleasure in watching the man die at the rate of a beheaded snake.

“ Oh, God, Jim,” she sobbed, grabbing onto Parry for support. “I never dreamed-”

Awai, the cane cutter in his hand, jabbed it into the suffering man's chin and lifted the face, allowing for study of the features. “Here's your mass killer, Lopaka,” he said.

“ Look closely on him,” bellowed Chief Kowona, still in as thick, feathered headdress, coming forward now. When he removed the headdress, they could clearly see that it was Joseph Kaniola.

“ Why, Kaniola, you son of a bitch. You're behind all this,” cursed Jim before lunging at the newspaperman and being restrained by the men around them. “Getting Oniiwah killed wasn't enough for you, no. You have more blood on your hands than you know what to do with, and now this?”

“ I don't expect either of you to believe me, but I had nothing whatever to do with the abduction of the Oniiwah boy. And I regret with my soul that I used his name in my paper. It was a mistake. I should have expected reprisals, but there's not a man here who hasn't made some mistake in this ugly business.”

Jessica, shaking her head in disbelief, pointedly asked him, “How could you-an educated, civilized man-be a part of this… butchery?”

“ Like you, I am a guest here, no more, no less. Chief Kowona, Lopaka's father, shares my grief at the loss of my son Alan, as well as the combined tears of those who've lost so many daughters, all due to the son he banished from his sight years ago.”

A man with regal bearing, despite being stoop-shouldered, appeared from the largest hut at the center of the village and Jessica, seeing the intricacy of the leis about his neck, the enormity of the handiwork that'd gone into his feathered kahilis and headdress, and his royal clothing, instantly guessed this to be the real Chief Kowona, for wherever he stepped, others hastened from his path, and wherever he pointed, others stared.

Jessica searched the old chief's wrinkled yet hard, leathery and brown countenance and the massive, swollen, heavy eyes, finding there a deep sense of remorse, shame and guilt commingling like ancient tenants. She imagined a well of withheld tears and the pain of not being in a position to allow the free flow of grief.

The old chief's hair, like Lopaka's, was rust-red and about the coal-black eyes she read a resemblance. And this place of red-earth paths recalled to her mind what old Lomelea, the prophet, had seen in his vision, that she'd find the killer in a land of raw earth, scarred not only by the foolishness of human folly, but the tears of a chief over the loss of both his son and his lineage.

“ The old chief feels responsible,” continued Joe Kaniola. “And whether you believe it or not, I also came here from Oahu because I knew you two were getting in over your heads.”

The chief spoke in Hawaiian, Kaniola translating. “So, you now know I and my son have been sufficiently punished for our crimes… Eye for an eye, as the missionaries used to say…”

“ This is awful, Kaniola,” she sternly said, pointing to where Lopaka's twitching body continued to feed the insects that swarmed about so many wounds they could not be counted. “How long has he been made to suffer?”

“ What is this, mock indignation?” asked Kaniola.

“ There's nothing mock about it!”

“ I know the feeling among the authorities, you two included. In a state where they put people like Lopaka into a hospital for the criminally insane, you two were hoping to catch him in the Koolau Range and set the dogs on him and pump your bullets into him. So spare me your canned outrage, Dr. Coran. You see, I know about your previous cases, about Matthew Matisak, Simon Archer and others you've personally seen to eternity or wished to.”

Now the veins in Kaniola's neck told of his anger with her. The chief placed a hand on Kaniola's shoulder and spoke in Hawaiian to him. Kaniola replied in his native tongue before turning back to them and saying, “The old chief wishes to answer your question, Dr. Coran, as to the duration of Lopaka's punishment.”

“ How many days and nights?” asked Jim.

“ Shorter, I assure you, than the suffering he caused when his many victims agonized in their restraints.” Kaniola's reply was a translation of the chief's words, but then he began speaking from his own heart. “Enough of your false outrage. You will take word back with you, Parry. And no one will come behind you to Kahoolawe to make reprisals on these people here. Do you understand this and agree?”

Parry exchanged a look with Jessica. His eyes and the way his teeth were grinding together told her they'd better take the offer as it might be the only one they were likely to receive here.

Jessica helplessly stared anew at the suffering Lopaka, studying closely the features beneath the bloody, pulpy mask his face had become.

“ Ho'okahe wai!” shouted Ben Awai at another of the Hawaiian men, who responded by rushing forward with a leather bucket of water.

“ Waiele,” shouted Ben, and the other man sent the water cascading over the tortured man's face, reviving him but barely.