Gargantua (6 page)

Dak laughed as he got in on his side. “Since when does your father think it’s dangerous to go in the water?”

“Since two dumb Americans couldn’t figure out how to get out of a fishing net.”

“Well, he’s not the only one spooked,” Dak said as he started the truck. It stalled. “Derek didn’t get a single ride today—spent the whole day in Manny’s.”

“Manny must’ve
loved
that.”

Dak tried to start the truck again. This time, it stayed on, and they drove off to the beach. “Anyhow, practice ran a little late. Maru was being little Mister Perfectionist again.”

Kulani smiled. Dak was in Friends Anemones, the house band at Rik’s Bar and Grill; he played bongos and other percussion, and was quite good at it. They were hoping to get some gigs on some of the other islands, maybe even in Sydney or Melbourne or Manila.

The trip to the beach took only a few minutes—they wouldn’t have bothered with the vehicle at all if it weren’t for the skis. Dak simply left the car at a spot a short walk from the shore—parking regulations were rather loose on Malau—and they got out.

Kulani moved to the back of the truck, as did Dak. She waited for Dak to open the cab door, but instead he took her in his arms and kissed her.

The kiss took some time—how long, Kulani did not know, nor did she much care. All she cared about was Dak.

“Have I told you recently how beautiful you are?” Dak asked after the kiss ended.

“It’s been
hours.”

“Much too long, then,” he said, and kissed her again. After this last kiss, he smiled, opened the truck, and grabbed a pair of skis.

A small frown on her face, Kulani did likewise with the other pair.

When they reached the edge of the surf, they set the skis down. Before Dak could do anything else, Kulani leaned over and kissed him. Dak was only surprised for a moment, then he returned the kiss.

After they broke it, Kulani waited expectantly—but Dak pushed off into the water. Sighing, Kulani followed.

Within a few minutes, they were in the middle of the ocean, the salt spraying on their faces, the stars shining in the sky, and Kulani staring at Dak’s lovely back.

That back then pivoted and turned, and Kulani looked up to see Dak staring at her. “You’re so beautiful.”

Finally,
she thought, smiling. She imagined that she glowed in the moonlight.

Suddenly, Dak lost his balance—unusual, in and of itself, since Dak had almost perfect balance. Then she started to glide past him.

For some reason, Dak was dead in the water.

“Dak?”

Rather than answer, Dak looked down at his skis. Kulani followed his gaze to the rope attached to the back of the skis, which was, peculiarly, taut.

Kulani looked back up at Dak, but he looked as confused as she. She was about to ask him what was going on, when suddenly, she found herself moving farther away from him, faster.
But that doesn’t make sense.

Then she realized that she wasn’t moving faster—Dak was being pulled
backwards.

“Oh, my God,” Dak said.

Kulani was frozen with indecision—not to mention necessity. Unlike Dak, she had a much harder time keeping her balance, and if she tried to turn around, or maneuver in some other way, she would probably fall into the ocean.
Oh, God, what do I do?

Dak’s skis were moving faster now, and farther away from her. “Help me!” he cried.

A fist of ice closed over Kulani’s heart as Dak finally did lose his balance and fell into the water.

“Dak!”

As he fell, his head hit one of the skis with a sickening
thud.

“Dak!”

With that cry, Kulani lost her balance and fell into the water. She thrashed about for a minute before getting her bearings and breaking through to the surface. She swam over to one of Dak’s skis and found purchase on it.

“Dak! Dak!”

Then she saw the blood.

“Nooooooo!”

More blood, so much that the water turned the color of red wine. So much that Kulani thought she’d drown in it.

She screamed.

She screamed until her throat went raw.

Finally, she stopped screaming and started to cry.

Then Dak’s body floated up to the surface, and the screaming started again.

THREE

U
ntil arriving on Malau, Jack Ellway had never met a head of state. Since arriving, he’d not only met one, but eaten at his restaurant, and now was having dinner with him. He found he was rather enjoying the experience. The fact that said head of state had asked to join him, his son, and Ralph Hale in a humble manner uncharacteristic of most politicians helped, as did the fact that the president’s chosen topic of conversation was Jack’s work.

Toward the end of the meal, Manny said, “Fascinating. If it is not too impertinent, who is paying for all of this?”

Jack swallowed a bite of his delicious boiled mud crab before answering. “Well, I’m working on a partial grant from UCSD. Sorry, that’s the University of—”

“California at San Diego, yes, I know. I received a Master’s in English Literature from their Revelle College,” Manny said.

“Uh, right.” That, like so many things about the Malauan president, surprised Jack. The image he had formed of Manny Moki kept being thrown for a loop with each new revelation.

“So you live in La Jolla?” Manny asked, referring to the San Diego suburb where UCSD’s campus was located.

“No, we’re in San Diego proper, though we haven’t gotten back there much the last few months.”

“Interesting. I must thank you, Mr. Ellway, for indulging an old man’s tedious questions.”

“Oh, not at all,” Jack said, taking a final bite of his mud crab.

“Dad
loves
talking about work,” Brandon said with a roll of his eyes.

Hale laughed. “Occupational hazard, I’m afraid.”

Manny looked down at Jack’s now-empty plate. “I see you enjoyed the mud crabs.”

“Enjoyed
is too mild a word. I’ve never had anything like this. They’re
delicious.”

Brandon asked, “Did Derek catch these, too?”

Manny smiled politely. “It isn’t necessary to send out large fishing boats to catch mud crabs—you may grab them freely from the surf. In fact—”

The president cut himself off at the sound of sirens.

At first, Jack thought very little of the noise. Born in New York City and raised there and in Chicago before settling in San Diego after college, sirens had always been part of the background noise for him growing up, so he barely registered their presence anymore.

Manny, however, seemed to think it was a big deal, as did Hale, who put down his fried tuna and stood up.

A couple of people went outside, then someone ran back in and said breathlessly, “It’s Kulani with the chief—and there’s a body in the back—I think it’s Dak!”

That started a commotion.

“What?”

“It can’t be!”

“I just
saw
Dak at practice.”

“Did she kill him?”

“Oh, my God.”

A tide of humanity swept toward the door, and Jack, Brandon, Hale, and Manny went with it.

The siren belonged to a jeep, of all things, with the word
POLICE
stencilled on the side.
Given how little of this island is paved, that’s probably the most practical vehicle to use for emergencies,
Jack mused. A man in his thirties drove the jeep—presumably Police Chief Joe Movita—and a woman sat on the passenger side, wrapped in a blanket. They came to a halt in front of the clinic.

“Dak and Kulani are a couple of kids,” Doctor Hale explained as they walked briskly toward the clinic, along with a few dozen others, both from Manny’s and elsewhere. “Dak’s in one of the local bands. He and Kulani were gonna be married in a few weeks.”

“Damn,” Jack muttered.

As they approached, Jack heard a trembling voice. It was the woman in the passenger seat—Kulani—sounding like she was in a daze.

“Something . . . pulled him backwards . . . something in the water . . . some
thing . . .”

Jack and Doctor Hale held back, Jack holding Brandon’s hand. They were outsiders here, after all, and he could see fine over the heads of the others. He and Hale would just get in the way of the professionals if they tried to get involved any more.

Speaking of whom, Alyson ran out of the clinic, two orderlies on her heels. The police chief indicated the body in the back. The doctor pulled the sheet back.

Jack held down a gag reflex as she did so. The body looked like it had been
chewed.

“What do you think, Jack?” Hale asked. “Dolphin? Whale?”

Hale spoke in a detached, professional manner, for which Jack was grateful—it gave him a chance to get his bearings. “Either one would be way off course for this time of year.”

“Which would be consistent with your theories about the impact of the seismic activity, yeah?”

Before Jack could answer, he noticed Brandon trying to stand on tiptoe to get a better look. “I can’t see. What’s going on?”

Unbidden, images of that horrible day over a year earlier flowed into Jack’s mind: Doctor Bottroff telling Diane Ellway why she was having those awful headaches; Diane telling Jack in that stoic manner with which she always imparted bad news; trying to make their eleven-year-old son understand, using words like
inoperable
and
brain tumor,
that Mom wasn’t going to be around much longer, never quite able to use the word
dying
; watching as Diane deteriorated, her hair falling out from the chemotherapy; trying to wake her up that one morning and realizing she wasn’t breathing . . .

Jack shook his head to clear the images.
The last thing Brandon needs is to be exposed to more death.
He put his hand on his son’s shoulder and said, “I think you’d better go back to the hotel, Brandon.”

“Nah, I’m okay,” Brandon said with the self-assuredness of the twelve-year-old who’s already seen everything.

In fact, he’s already seen this, after a fashion, which is exactly why I want him out of here.
“I wasn’t really giving you a vote,” he said gently, giving Brandon’s shoulder a squeeze. “Go on, I’ll be there soon.”

Brandon looked extremely unhappy, but said nothing and obediently headed back toward the Ritz.

Once Brandon was out of sight, Jack started to move in closer to the crowd surrounding Dak’s body, Hale close behind. Alyson had done a quick examination of the body and replaced the blanket. As the two orderlies carried the bodies inside, Alyson put her arm around Kulani, who still seemed to be in a daze.

“Kulani?” Alyson said gently.

At this, Kulani looked up and fixed Alyson with an expression that made Jack’s heart crumple. He knew that face.
It’s the same face that looked back at me in the mirror for months after Diane died.

Alyson led Kulani inside. He hoped that she would show Kulani the same compassion that she showed to a twelve-year-old with a cut finger.

“D’you know what happened?” Hale said. Jack was about to ask the geologist how Jack could possibly know when he’d spent most of the last five hours with Hale himself, when he realized that the question had been asked of Paul Bateman, who was walking over from the police jeep.

Paul’s presence was hardly a surprise. The third death in two nights certainly qualified as news. “Joe told me that something grabbed Dak’s surf skis and pulled him backward. Dragged him through the water. He also told me earlier that, according to their investigation, something dragged the fishing net that those two women drowned in last night. Might be related.”

“I don’t know,” Jack said, “but I think there’s something unusual out there. Some kind of marine life that doesn’t belong here.” He remembered Brandon’s story, told at the beginning of dinner, of a weird head that poked briefly out of the water that afternoon. “Certainly, whatever attacked Dak isn’t native to these parts at this time of year.”

Hale rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “We could go up in my plane tomorrow, scan the waters, see what we see.”

Jack almost sighed.
Wish I had the kind of funding that let me talk casually about “my plane,”
he thought with a silent curse at UCSD’s bean counters. Aloud, he simply said, “Great.” He walked over to where the president was standing, talking with the police chief. “President Moki,” he said—the old man had politely asked Jack to call him “Manny,” since, as he said, “everyone else does,” but Jack couldn’t bring himself to do so, particularly now—“it might be wise to keep everyone out of the water until we know what we’re dealing with.”

“This is nonsense,” came a voice from behind Jack. He saw Derek Lawson approaching.

“Perhaps it would be wise,” Manny said, ignoring Derek. “At least, until we find out what killed our friend Dak.”

“They were surfing at
night,”
Derek said with a bark of unkind laughter. “Stupidity killed him.”

Taking the president’s lead, Jack ignored Derek, and asked, “You’ll keep the waters clear?”

“How long will it take you to survey them?”

Kikko, who, along with Naru, flanked Derek, muttered, “If we can’t fish, we can’t get paid.”

“C’mon, Manny,” Derek said, “don’t let outsiders push you around. This is
our
island.”

For the first time, the president looked at the fisherman. “Excuse me, Derek, but I believe that New Zealand is
your
island.” He spoke in the same even, polite tone that he used at all times, but Jack could tell that he would also brook no further commentary on the subject.

Before the argument could continue, a hush fell over the area. Red Sea-like, the crowd parted for a man as old as President Moki, dressed in the collar of a Christian minister or priest.

Nodding to the old man, Moki said, “Father Rauh.”

The priest simply nodded in return, then entered the clinic.

Moki turned to the chief of police, whose jaw was set so tightly Jack almost thought he’d broken it recently. “What do you think?” the president asked him.

“About closing the waters?” The chief rubbed his not-really-broken jaw. “Normally, I’d say no, but we’ve got three suspicious deaths which might be related—”