Neil Plakcy - Mahu

By the fourth fiche, I was annoyed and intrigued. I started taking notes and drawing lines on my pad from one company to the next. It took me all afternoon. I went back and forth between the records library and the tax office, showing my badge and asking questions. Finally I found a name, hidden under layers of bureaucracy and red tape. The eventual owner of the Rod and Reel Club, once you went back through level upon level, was Tommy Pang. No other name showed up anywhere.

By the time I got back to the station, Akoni had returned. The FBI had nothing, he said. No open investigations involving Tommy Pang, no rumors of tong wars, nothing. I told him what I’d found.

“Doesn’t get us any farther, does it?” he said. “What now?”

“We wait for Derek to call us back, or we call him again tomorrow. Then we start questioning Tommy’s business associates. Anybody with known tong affiliations. See if this is business-related.”

He frowned. “You think it could be anything else?”

“You heard Mrs. Pang. He had ‘company’ sometimes. Maybe the company had a jealous husband or boyfriend.”

“I hate this part of a case,” he said. “Too many ways to go, no real leads. Just lots of legwork.” He started packing up his stuff.

“Listen, Akoni, you want to get a beer? We could strategize.”

“I gotta get home.”

“Look, I think we ought to talk.”

He stood up. “We got nothing to talk about. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

He walked out, and the door shut behind him with a bang.

I sat at my desk for a while, until Alvy Greenberg, one of the uniforms who’d been with us on the drug bust, came in and said, “Hey, Kimo.”

Alvy was about five years younger than I was, and a surfer, too. We’d met when I’d just come back from the North Shore, when I was in the academy, and because he was maybe interested in becoming a cop we’d talked, off and on, about my experiences there. At the time he’d been a waiter, taking a couple of classes at UH, trying to decide, as I had, if he was good enough to make a career out of surfing.

He wasn’t, either, and just before I made detective he’d entered the academy. I guess I had been kind of a mentor to him, advising him on how to deal with problems that came up, surfing with him now and then. Once in a while on a holiday weekend we’d throw our boards into my truck and drive up to the North Shore, just to keep our hands in.

“Hey, Alvy.” He was the kind of guy who looked older than he was, the one you always sent in to buy the beer when you were still illegal. About five-seven, thin, already balding rapidly at twenty-seven, and incredibly ambitious. You couldn’t take the detective’s exam until you’ve had three years on the beat, and most officers wait another year or two beyond that. Alvy had taken the exam right after his third anniversary, just a couple of weeks before. He was still waiting for the results, but we’d already talked about where he might be posted. He didn’t want to leave Waikiki, but he was tactful enough to realize that unless they expanded our staff, he’d have to wait for me or Akoni to leave. So we’d talked about District 1, which covered most of downtown and was administered out of the main headquarters on South Beretania Street. Lots of government and corporate offices, and Chinatown to provide work, and the chance to be at headquarters and make contacts.

Or maybe District 2, Central O‘ahu, which also included a lot of military installations. It wasn’t as glamorous, but he’d get a lot of experience. I was also pushing for District 5, Kalihi, which included the airport, and I agreed with him that the other districts, Pearl City, Waipahu, Windward O’ahu, and East Honolulu, wouldn’t be very interesting, and wouldn’t give him the opportunities for advancement he was looking for.

He walked over and sat on the edge of Akoni’s desk. “That was some bust yesterday, huh?”

“You can’t win every time,” I said. “Sometimes things just go wrong.”

“I heard you got another case already.”

He was an eager guy, handsome in a way, red hair you might almost call auburn, blue eyes. He was a little too skinny to be a great surfer-he didn’t have enough weight to master the really big waves, but he made up for it with endurance.

If you want to be a good surfer, I mean a really good one, you have to work at it. You have to be totally focused on making yourself the best surfer you can be. You spend hours out on the water, learning to anticipate the waves, practicing your moves. You have to understand a little about physics, a little about oceanography, a little about wind speed. Surfing has to be what you live for.

I thought I could live for surfing when I was twenty-two, crashing on the floor of somebody’s house on the North Shore, surfing Haleiwa from dawn to dusk and talking surfing the rest of the time. Nobody screwed around too much up there-we were too focused, and at the end of the day, too tired. So I could ignore the part of my brain that was always scared, always holding my secret.

Then I came in fifth in the Pipeline Spring Championships. By March, the great winter waves on the North Shore have died down a little, and the best surfers have gone to chase waves elsewhere on the globe. So I wasn’t facing top competition, but still, it was the best I’d ever done. I was riding high, thinking I was finally reaching for my potential. Most surfers start when they’re fifteen or sixteen, peak in their early twenties, and lose the competitive edge by thirty. I was twenty-three, and at the top of my form.

A bunch of the guys took me out drinking that night, buying me beers and shots until they closed the bar and dawn started to streak the dark sky over the North Shore. I was in no condition to drive home, so my buddy Dario dragged me over to his place to crash. He was staying at a one-room cottage north of Haleiwa, right on the sand. I remember wanting to lay down right there on the beach, I was so wasted.

The next thing I remember is waking up in Dario’s bed, naked, with his mouth on my left nipple. He bit and sucked at both nipples until they were hard and sore, and then licked a trail down my stomach to my crotch, where he gave me a blow job.

Then I must have passed out again, because when I woke again it was almost noon and there was a note on the refrigerator from Dario. “You’re a champ, Kimo,” it read. “I’m on the water.”

I felt paralyzed. My mouth was dry and my head pounded, and my body was sore in unaccustomed places. When I looked in the mirror I saw my nipples were raw and red, and I had a hickey on the side of my neck. I knew then that I had made the best showing I would ever make in a competition. It would only get harder to keep holding back my desire for men, and the effort I had to put to that task would take away from what I had left for surfing.

So I left. I hitched back to the place where I was staying, packed up, and went home. After hanging around my parents’ house for a while, I entered the police academy, the most macho thing I could think to do. I thought if anything could save me from being gay, being a cop would be it.

Alvy and I talked for a while, and eventually I felt better. If Akoni couldn’t deal with me, that was his problem. Alvy went back to the locker room to change out of his uniform, and I walked home.

There were still a couple of hours of daylight left when I got home, so I went surfing. It felt good to empty my mind of all my troubles-my sexuality, the danger I might face if I came out as a gay cop, the dead ends in Tommy Pang’s murder case.

On my way home, I stopped at a little grocery just across Lili’uokalani from my apartment and picked up some shrimp, mushrooms, and red and green peppers to grill on my little barbecue. It’s a tiny, dark little store, and from the outside you’d think it was nothing more than a place for cigarettes and beer. But the owners, an elderly Chinese couple, took a fierce pride in the quality of the produce, and it was better than any grocery I knew in Honolulu. The clerk was a surfer, and he let me run up a tab when I didn’t have cash with me. “How were the waves?” he asked as he rang me up.