Shards (6 page)

I woke up in a helicopter. With fractured ribs and a ruptured spleen, blood oozing down my face from a head wound, I was disappointed that I was still alive. It turned out that taking off my seat belt had saved my life. If I had been wearing it, the engine that ended up in the front seat would have crushed me.

“Were you trying to kill yourself?” a voice asked. I couldn't even see who was asking the question. Still, my lie was automatic.

It was an accident, I was just driving too fast.

The Albuquerque police suspected a suicide attempt. There were no skid marks on the road, no evidence that I had tried to stop or swerve. I continued to lie. When I told my parents it was an accident, they believed me. My father did, anyway, but my mother suspected the truth. She never said so, but I could tell by her actions—moving me to a different high school, working with Josh's parents to break us up—that she was trying to fix the situation without actually talking about it.

In order to keep up with my lie, I pretended I felt lucky to be alive. I actually started to do well in school, and subsequently my
life began to improve. Instead of dealing with the feelings that had led me to that cliff, I lied away their very existence.

To this day, I had told no one the truth about that suicide attempt. Or the pregnancy that preceded it.

It was easy now to blame it all on teenage drama, family angst, but what I felt then was real. That hopelessness, that despair—what would have happened if I had succeeded that night? What would my mother, sister, and grandparents have done if they had lost me?

These questions made me shaky. Normally I was tough. Guys on the force would be crying their eyes out over a body we found or some brutal domestic case, and I would be calm as could be. Cold, even. But Lea was stirring up a part of me even my coldness couldn't cover.

I wondered: somewhere deep inside me, was I still that girl? I carried a firearm now and made arrests, but had I really changed? I had thought that throwing myself into work would make my life complete, but suddenly I felt as lonely and scared as I had felt that day in Tijeras Canyon.

I needed to go for a run to clear my head. I threw on a T-shirt and some running shorts and was starting to do leg stretches when my phone beeped.

Keawe.

Beep, beep.

Keawe again.

I had done nothing but ignore his calls for months, but today without even thinking I picked up the phone.

“Hey,” I said.

“So you're finally talking to me again,” he said. I could almost hear him smiling. No sarcasm at all in his voice.

“Maybe,” I said lightly. “Today, anyway.”

“I'll take what I can get,” he said.

I put the phone on speaker and continued to stretch, pushing away Mo, who was getting excited about a run. A small slice of light from the window cut across the room.

“I heard about your case,” Keawe was saying. “The girl. I'm sorry.”

“It was horrible,” I said. “She was barely fifteen years old.”

“It's not your fault, Alli,” Keawe said. “You were doing your job. The chief said you're proving yourself as a ripper.”

“A lot of good that's doing me,” I said. “I did exactly what Ruben told me to do, but it wasn't right. We weren't following procedure. There's going to be an investigation.” My voice cracked on that last word, and I was embarrassed.

“If there's an investigation,” Keawe said, “Ruben will get the rap for it. Broke-ass.”

I sat on the floor and drew my knees to my chin. “I don't care about that,” I said. “I just care that there are two people dead because of me.” Secretly, though, I was pleased at Keawe's compliment. Since joining the department I'd been working my ass off, putting in insane overtime, taking the senior officers' cases, keeping myself in top physical shape so I could fight if I had to, all the while learning how to defuse situations to make fighting the last resort. At MPD, you were either a ripper—a hardworking go-getter everyone could count on—or a broke. Ruben was a broke: a lazy, unreliable oaf who could make a volatile situation worse.

“Those kids aren't dead because of you, babe,” Keawe was saying. “No one said this line of work was full of happy endings. We should talk about it more. What are you doing today?”

“Working?” I said.

“Bullshit. You've got the day off.”

“How do you know?”

“I've got good investigation skills too,” he said. “I've also got some time. Why don't I take the ferry to Lanai and we can hang out?”

“What about your family?” I asked.

“Oh, they're in California for a few days,” he said casually. “Visiting Colleen's parents.”

His plan was so transparent. His wife and children out of the picture for a while, he was ready to swoop in on me, just as he had tried to do the night before I left Maui. But he had been calling me at least twice a week since I got to Lanai. All those times couldn't have been predatory. Some of them must have been in honor of the friendship we had started to build while we worked together.

“So what do you say?” he asked, trying to sound casual. Then, with more feeling, he said, “I've really missed you, Alli.”

“Don't come to Lanai,” I said. “I've got to get off this island. I'll come to Maui.”

“You will?”

I found myself smiling at how excited he sounded. “Yes,” I answered. “I'll take the ten-thirty boat. I'll call you when I get in.”

“No need to call,” he said. “I'll meet the ferry.”

•  •  •

I had exactly forty-five minutes on the ferry to wonder why the fuck I was agreeing to see Keawe, but in typical fashion I avoided thinking at all. Instead, I watched a group of dolphins off to the right, one of them doing triple axial spins. Molokai passed off to the left. I nodded at one or two people I knew on the ferry, but most people on board were tourists. Three twenty-something girls with great bodies and bad sunburns. A honeymoon couple. A golfer who looked pretty dejected. It was late July, high tourist season.

The ticket taker came around, chatting to everybody. The golfer
handed him money and the ticket taker shook his head. “You got to buy the tickets before you get on the boat,” he said.

“What do you do with stowaways?” the golfer asked.

“They get to go halfway for free.”

The golfer laughed.

The ticket taker said, “You can pay on the other end.”

The ferry was expensive for tourists, but they offered
kama'aina
rates for Hawaiian residents, and MPD always paid for my ferry trips. That was part of my compensation.

I liked listening to everyone's conversations but couldn't bring myself to start up a conversation on my own. No one talked to me, either. Maybe it was because of Mo. He loved riding the ferry back and forth, but people usually kept their distance from a 180-pound mastiff. My mom or sister would have made best friends by the time we got to the other side. They were so different from me.

When we docked in Lahaina, I spotted Keawe immediately. He was leaning against the fence, wearing a powder-blue T-shirt that cut just at the place on the biceps a girl loves to look at. He smiled and walked toward me for a hug.

“Hi, gorgeous,” he said. The hug felt tense, not because of me, but because of those around us. Maui was so small—someone was bound to know at least one of us. It had to be a friendship hug, in case someone saw. The hug was just long enough for me to feel the heat of his skin. I looked up at his face—his smooth brown skin, his close-cut black hair, his warm brown eyes.
He
was the gorgeous one.

“So where do you want to go?” he asked. He patted Mo on the head. “The beach? Should we dump the mutt and get some lunch?”

“Sure,” I said. It didn't matter what I said at this point because we both knew where we were going.

My shakiness disappeared once I was with Keawe. Within moments,
I felt strong again, no longer vulnerable to the tragic mistakes of teenage girls. He felt like my savior.

Unfortunately, my good sense was gone too.

In less than half an hour, we were in my apartment in Kihei, pulling each other's clothes off.

•  •  •

We spent a day and a half holed up in my apartment. Keawe went out to L&L for chicken katsu once or twice, but mostly we stayed in bed.

And we talked. I told him about Pete Cordiello and how frustrating it was to not be able to bring him down. We talked about Lea. I cried a little over that, and at one point I told him, “I don't think I'm tough enough to be a cop.”

“I don't believe that for a second, Alli,” he said. “You've held your own. Look at you, coming into the department a
haole
girl and turning out to be president of your recruit class. You know what kind of bets we placed on you?”

“Yeah, I heard.” MPD cops were huge sexists, but they did respect female cops once they proved themselves. I knew I had earned respect within the department, but the outside community was a different story. Every time I arrested someone, it was “You
haole
bitch!” Trying to gain the trust of someone who hated me the second they saw me had given me some verbal judo skills, but it sure as hell wasn't easy.

We didn't talk about his wife. He never brought her up and neither did I. When she called, he politely took the phone onto the lanai. They were short conversations, exchanges of information. Married conversations. Keawe and Colleen had been married for seven years. He told me there wasn't a whole lot left between them except their three beautiful little children.

This weekend with Keawe was just what I needed. He was attentive and sweet, and he had the most incredible way of making me feel loved with just a look. The sex was phenomenal. But I knew it had to stay a onetime thing; there was no way in hell I was getting deeply involved with a married man. The next day, I would go back to Lanai, he would pick his wife up from the airport, and that would be that.

“I'll call you tonight,” he said when he dropped Mo and me off at the ferry. I tried not to roll my eyes.

“I'll be waiting,” I said, laughing. I was sure he had gotten what he wanted, and maybe I had too. I didn't want to dwell on any feelings I might be having about him.

But he did call that night. He called just after eleven, and we talked until three in the morning. Talked about anything. Every little stupid thing that popped into our heads. His pajamas had a hole in them. I needed to get a new toaster. He loved jelly doughnuts. Mo had bad breath. He hoped his softball team would win the next day. All these things were so inconsequential, but I hadn't had anyone to talk to like that since Dalton and I had broken up. I had never been very good at having lots of girlfriends to giggle and share things with, but I had almost always had a boyfriend. I missed having one now.

We laughed a lot, quietly—his wife, still on California time, was sleeping, and he was speaking to me from the bathroom at the other end of the house.

The next day I felt energized, more like myself again, and I threw myself straight back into work.

“You seem better, Alli,” Walker
said when I walked into the station on Monday.

“I am better,” I said, and the two of us went straight back to dealing with our buddy Cordiello.

It killed me that we hadn't been able to pin anything on Cordiello yet. We had finally intercepted one of his packages, but he sent a runner to pick it up, making it impossible for us to connect the dope to him. Walker and I could never figure out what he did to scare people, but Cordiello was widely feared. It was hard to get anyone on Lanai to speak out against Pete Cordiello. He was smart enough to build a family and a lifestyle. He wasn't a troublemaker, and he didn't hang out with troublemakers. He was always respectful with police officers. Yet we knew by the numbers of Jet Skis and ATVs he was buying, by the elaborate parties he gave—flying
strippers in from Oahu and paying for all the beer—that he was a major player.

Eventually we would catch him, I knew that. These guys weren't smart enough to not get caught. We
do
catch them, and then they leave the women and children who love them with the house that gets seized and the vehicles that get seized, and that's a whole other mess. But for now, his neighbors weren't talking, and our surveillance hadn't panned out yet.

Lieutenant Ruben, still dealing with the MPD chief over the Lea case, saw Walker and me plotting, and specifically said, “Don't stir up trouble, you two. We need to keep our profile low and exemplary for the next few weeks.”

We didn't listen. Desperate to find out where Pete stored his dope, we talked Ruben into letting us do random boat checks. Technically MPD had no jurisdiction on boats, but Ruben okayed it as a proactive measure and told us not to get into trouble.

We decided to do a boat check that night. Boats were where fifty percent of our dope came from, and I was sure if we did enough of them we'd locate Pete's.

At the docks, we saw some Matson shipping containers that were of interest to us.

“What do you think?” I asked Walker.

“Let's go for it,” he said.

We chose one to inspect but struggled to get it open.

“Let's try another one,” Walker said.

“Nah,” I said. “This one may be extra secure for a reason.” We used all the force we could produce between the two of us and got it open.

“Shit!” I yelled.

“Literally!” Walker said.

The container was full of manure, now pouring out onto us.

“Ruben is going to kill us,” I said. We had to go into the office tracking manure into the station. We left manure in the brand-new patrol car.

Keawe loved that story when I told him about it on the phone that night. We talked for two hours, and another two hours the next night.