On Friday, Ray and I went around to homeless shelters and showed pictures of Jingtao, without making any connections. I was glad we had Saturday and Sunday off; maybe something would break over the weekend.
Ray was doing special duty both days-security for a gun show at the Blaisdell Center-so he was fine with an easy Friday. Me, I was bored and antsy, trying not to think about Mike, or about my dinner that night with Haoa, Tatiana, and Sergei.
Sergei, like his sister, was tall, sturdy, and blond. He’d bummed around a bunch of jobs in Alaska-working the pipeline, cooking at a diner, helping train dogs for the Iditarod. It didn’t sound like we had anything in common except being gay. Not the kind of fix up I was looking forward to.
I arrived at my brother’s house just before seven. My truck was making some unhappy noises on the steep, twisting climb up into St. Louis Heights, and I thought that I’d have to make an appointment to take it in for what would turn out to be some very expensive repair.
Most of the houses in the neighborhood had no yards to speak of, front or back, but Haoa’s was on a wedge-shaped corner lot. Walking into his backyard is like entering a tropical exhibit at a botanical garden. Combine my brother’s intuitive feel for plants and flowers with Tatiana’s artistic sensibility, and you get a lush landscape full of short and tall palms; spiky red and orange heliconia; the five-petaled plumeria with orange centers and a frosting of white at the edge; dark red anthurium; and single, double, and triple hibiscus in red, pink, purple, and white. The sensory overload is amazing-from the bright colors of the flowers, to the glossy green leaves, to the scent of the tuberose. It’s like being draped in a full-body lei.
I’d met Sergei before and liked him. Maybe it was a physical thing; I prefer my men big and beefy, and he had that in spades-six two, broad-shouldered, with thighs like tree trunks. He had tribal tattoos around both biceps, which bulged out of his short-sleeved aloha shirt. He wore long board shorts and rubber slippas, and his hair was the same honey blond as Tatiana’s and nearly as long.
My brother was grilling steaks, and Tatiana went inside to get the salad. I asked Sergei, “What brings you to Hawai’i?”
He laughed. “It’s Tatiana’s turn to watch me. Everybody else in the family has given up.” He downed his wine in one big gulp. “I was staying in our sister Natasha’s guesthouse until her husband caught me screwing the neighbor’s teenaged son in the sauna.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Hey, he was eighteen, and horny. Nothing illegal about it. Of course, Arnie had the whole sauna ripped out and rebuilt afterward. Tasha was pissed about that.”
Tatiana returned and the meal passed quickly. I laughed and joked with my brother, my sister-in-law, and Sergei. At some point his bare toes were tickling the inside of my leg, and at another point he reached over to touch my hand and an electric current shot through my body.
I helped Haoa clean up the grill after dinner. “You ever go over to the center on Waialae Avenue?” I asked, scrubbing a grate with a bristled brush.
“The one that burned? Sometimes.”
I knew Haoa placed the occasional bet on ball games, and that he and his college buddies played poker together. “You know anything about gambling over there?”
He looked up from tying up a bag of trash. “You still investigating that fire?”
“Yeah. We think there might have been gambling going on out of the acupuncture clinic.”
He shrugged. “Not that I knew of.”
Sergei was house-sitting for Haoa and Tatiana’s neighbors who were on a round-the-world cruise, and after dinner I walked down the hill with him so he could show me his digs. I was pretty sure he’d be showing me something else, too, and I was fine with that.
The living room, dining room, and kitchen were all fine; what I wanted to see was the master bedroom suite. Sergei flipped on the overhead lights as we walked in, and I flipped them off.
He turned to me, and I wrapped my arms around his broad back and pulled him in for a kiss. “Hey, there, sexy,” he said, when we parted.
Sergei unbuttoned my aloha shirt and dropped it to the floor, then attacked my nipples with his mouth. First one, then the next; starting with a gentle licking and sucking, then just the hint of teeth, then it felt like he’d grabbed them in his jaws and started twisting.
All I had to do was whimper and moan and rub his head and shoulders. Every now and then he’d pull off for a deep kiss, and by the time my nipples were tender and achy the rest of me was hungering for his touch. We stripped in the moonlight and tumbled into bed, talking in low voices as we touched and stroked each other.
Sex with Sergei was like a return to a more innocent past, before all the kinky stuff I’d gotten involved in. I was relieved that I could enjoy sex that was romantic and gentle once again. Though he was wild, everything he did was approached in the spirit of fun. “You like that, Kimo?” he asked, as he tickled my butt hole with his tongue. “That turns you on?” he whispered, as he stroked my sensitive inner thigh and I squirmed under his touch.
His body was like a candy shop I hadn’t visited in a long time. I remembered how much I enjoyed sucking cock, kissing a guy, feeling the weight of a big man sprawled on top of me. We had sex in a couple of different positions, him in me, me in him, until we both were so wiped out all we could do was lie there and breathe.
As Sergei was drifting off to sleep I remembered the sound of Mike in my bed, me on the other side of the Japanese screen, and despite the thorough fucking I’d just gotten from the sexy Sergei, I missed the touch of my hunky fireman.
I drove down to Waikiki the next morning, cheerful after a little more romping with Sergei. I’d had some great sex with a guy who knew how to enjoy another man’s body, and I had two days off to relax and forget about the arson and murder at the shopping center. I was just trying to decide what to do with my free time when my cell phone rang.
Harry wanted to know if I’d join him and Arleen for lunch. One of her many cousins had opened a little cafe in Aiea and they wanted to give him some business. I arranged to meet them at noon, and spent the morning rollerblading, reading, and puttering around the apartment.
My truck groaned again as I climbed up Aiea Heights Drive, and I reminded myself to make an appointment at the garage. “We’ve got some news,” Harry said, after we’d been seated at a cafe table. “Arleen and I are getting married.”
“About time,” I said.
“We wanted to make sure Brandon was okay with it,” Harry said. Brandon was Arleen’s eight-year-old, from a guy she’d forgotten before the boy was born.
“What’s not to be okay?”
“Harry loves Brandon, and Brandon loves Harry,” Arleen said. “I think it was just your friend here taking his sweet time.”
“So when’s the wedding? And am I going to be the best man?”
“April,” Harry said. “And yes, you’re the best man.”
“There’s more,” Arleen said. “We’re buying a house. Just up the street from here. We wanted to show it to you.”
The rest of the lunch was taken up with details-buying the house, fixing it up, selling Harry’s condo in Waikiki, where Brandon would go to school, and so on. I think I zoned out for a bit, thinking about the case, wondering if my brother had known more than he let on. Was he gambling at the clinic?
When we finished eating, I followed Harry’s SUV up a couple of winding streets to the new house. They hadn’t closed the sale yet so they didn’t have a key, but we walked around outside, peering in the windows. “Looks great, brah,” I said, as we came back to the street. “I’m sure you’ll be very happy here.”
We hugged, and then he and Arleen piled into the SUV and drove off, and I got into my truck.
It wouldn’t start.
I cursed a couple of times, then reached for my cell phone to call for a tow.
The phone battery was dead. I was sure it had been charged when I used it earlier in the day, but it must have been low then, and run down while I was at lunch.
I cursed again. I was stuck in a residential neighborhood, no pay phone in sight. I could always walk up to a random house, but it was the middle of a Saturday afternoon and most of the driveways around me were empty.
I could walk downhill toward Aiea Field, look for a business, and maybe hail a patrol car, if one passed me. I was staring out over the steering wheel at the street ahead of me when I saw the sign at the intersection, and realized it marked the street where Mike Riccardi lived.
He’d driven me past the house once, pointing it out, but I’d never been inside. I have a pretty good visual memory, so I thought I could recognize it again. But did I want to?
Hell, he owed me a favor, after that drunken visit Thursday night. And all I needed was to use the phone and call a tow truck. If Mike was around, and feeling generous, he could drive me home. But that was it.
Before I could change my mind, I got out of the truck and started walking to the corner. I turned onto his street and began climbing. After a couple of twists and turns, I saw his truck ahead of me, parked on the street, the yellow and red flames streaking the side.
There was just one problem: I couldn’t tell which half of the duplex belonged to him, and which half to his parents. It was that “the lady or the tiger” dilemma-from the short story we’d read in high school English class. Behind one door lurked a tiger; pick that door and get ripped to shreds. Behind the other door was a beautiful lady-or in my case, a handsome guy. Pick the right door and live happily ever after; pick the wrong door and confront the doctor who’d diagnosed my gonorrhea, and who blamed me for breaking his son’s heart.
I stood on the street, rethinking my plans. Suddenly, the idea of walking down to Aiea Field seemed a lot better. But any time I think about running away from something that scares me I know I have to man up instead.
I took a guess that Mike’s half was the right-hand side, because there were a couple of weeds under one window. I didn’t think his father would tolerate any unwanted foliage. I walked up the path and knocked on the door.
The man who answered didn’t look happy to see me. “What are you doing here?” he asked.