Dark Care sits enthroned behind the Knight.
“ So, where's home, James Parry?” she asked as they bullied their way through the thickening afternoon soup of traffic in downtown Honolulu.
“ Grew up in West Bend, Indiana. Most of the family's still there, 'cept for my brothers and a sister. All of us wanted bigger 'n' better and far away. West Bend was great as kids, but as we got older, it turned into the pits.”
“ It would appear you won.”
“ Won?” He was puzzled.
“ You don't get much farther away than this.”
“ Actually, I've got a brother who lives in Auckland, New Zealand, and my sister's in Tokyo!”
She laughed. “Wrong again.”
“ Hey, look, I'm sorry if we've made you feel as if you're, well, on trial here. We just… we don't have anywhere to turn. We're used to dealing with white-collar crime, street crime, rape, even murder, but this… this is different… something bizarre about this whole thing, something… I don't know… can't finger it…”
“ Something ritualistic, maybe?”
He stared across at her. “Funny you should use that term.”
“ Why's that?”
“ Just that it occurred to me and Tony on separate occasions. I think there's a connection between the victims, something ritualistic, patternistic.”
“ Sounds like you two've given up a few nights' sleep over it. When do I meet Tony?”
“ Tomorrow, and damned straight we've lost sleep.” He fell silent for a time before opening up again. “I figure it this way. Seven disappearances last year over a three-month period. Here it is July again, the trades are peaking, and two already missing, two that we know of… and I expect there'll be five more before season's end.”
“ That what you mean by ritualistic? A killing season, you figure?”
“ Like he's gone and bought his license, yeah.”
“ I've heard of slave rings operating out of this part of the world. You sure these girls just didn't fall prey to various methods of shanghaiing? With no bodies turning up, it's got to be a possibility.”
“ We've scoured the wharves. Shaken out spiders 'n' lizards 'n' rats, sure, but it doesn't play that way, Doctor.”
They arrived at the beautiful Rainbow Tower in the Hilton Hawaii Village in Waikiki, and Parry drove into the winding circle drive, dropping her at the door. “Listen,” he said, his voice taking on a near-conspiratorial tone, which was both curious and pushy at once, “if you need an escort, someone to have dinner with… well, give me a call at either of these numbers.” He handed her his card and sped off.
Her eyes took in the heady, exciting capital city of Hawaii, the seemingly unreal mountain faces carpeted with lush, dense green, reminding her of a visit to Ireland only on the sunniest of days there. Pivoting to her west, she could see the deep azure blue of the Pacific peeking from between the skyscrapers, and she felt the firm touch of the trade winds as they swept over her skin. The winds were so strong that she imagined it would be easy to lift her arms and fly off to wherever winds ran away to.
She felt an urge to rush out to the sand and surf of the beaches here, a desire to return to the sea from which Parry had plucked her, to run from the city, from Parry, from the FBI and her responsibilities here in Oahu. Why not, she desperately wondered. Hadn't her shrink told her that quitting the FBI was one option she could exercise? That such a change in her lifestyle might help quell her bouts with depression and fear?
But her father didn't raise a quitter, so instead she marched briskly into the hotel where she was immediately caught up amid the bustle of tourists both coming and going. She wasn't surprised when, asking for her key at the desk, she was informed of several messages from the mainland-from Quantico, Virginia.
Maybe later she'd get down to the pool, try out that new bathing suit she'd found in that little shop in Lahaina, Maui… maybe…
Somewhere in Honolulu the same night
He shuffles around his place where the furniture is ancient and large and heavy, the end tables made of old crates used to haul grocery items, crates he once thought to turn into rough-hewn works of art, except that the stain had gone too dark and he never could get the polish to take effectively. The lamps are likewise homemade, built of sturdy wood he's gotten for nothing, scrap parts at the mill. The old canvas-covered couch nestles between two enormous lamps carved with the faces of Hawaiian gods, lamps that seldom see use since he is adverse to the light. The floors are gummy with dirt and filth, blood and other seminal matter. He isn't much of a housekeeper and part of the stickiness and the stench is endemic now, ground into the floors, particularly one corner caked with blood.
He is antsy, angry with himself and with circumstances. For so long now he has gone undetected, his work known only to the dark lords of the islands. But now everyone in Honolulu is either reading of, or listening to, news reports on their TVs about his latest work, the killing of two local cops, both Hawaiian-as bad luck would have it. This means an uproar that isn't likely to soon die away. The only hope he has is that someone else might be arrested for the crimes. Local police are now hinting that arrests are forthcoming.
He enjoys learning about the politicizing of his crimes, the furor he has caused between the races. Still, not a word about the disappearance of his latest Kelia. He's read one or two items about the so-called Trade Winds Killer, a phantom stalker on the islands between April and August, but to date nothing has linked him to the crimes, and police have not recovered one shred of evidence to prove the murders have actually taken place. They can only point to “disappearances.” So long as they find no bodies, he reasons, they can never find nor prosecute him, even if they know! With the lack of physical evidence and eyewitnesses, nothing whatever to link him-or anyone, for that matter-with the deaths, a U.S. court of law would not dare touch such a case. God bless the Blow Hole and the U.S.A.
Policemen, a white guy and a Samoan, spoke to him once, for a statement, when they were canvassing the district for any possible witnesses to a killing he'd committed the year before, but they never returned.
They still don't know how he does it, or the kind of weapon he uses on his victims. He means not to make the mistakes of other killers. He means never to give his enemies the least satisfaction or opportunity or magic to hold over his head…
Have to get some sleep, he tells himself now. His dreams have been disturbed by roaring gods since his stupidity: drawing the attention of the two Hawaiian police in the first place, and then having to kill them. He dreams of landscapes littered with his own serated flesh and blood, of cavernous tunnels into which he's been cast, where demons of bizarre shape, size and lurid color give chase, trampling him and tearing parts of him away. These caverns are interconnected, the walls running with a yellow, stewy gruel, and the moment he escapes one, he finds himself trapped in another, sliding down a wall, unable to stop his spiraling progression downward toward yet a deeper prison, a filthy hole. Dante's Inferno or someplace only the Hawaiian gods knew of, Kehena?
Such troubled sleep will not help him on the job tomorrow, or when he goes cruising. He has a number of other sacrifices to make between now and when the trades decide to leave the islands. The winds could be capricious. They might leave at any time.
Maybe warm milk with a dollop of cocoa, tinged with a tad of vanilla extract, he thinks. He's read somewhere that sleep is helped along by some chemical in hot milk. Trypteeo-something.
He steps into his ramshackle kitchen in the dingy and cramped bungalow, its black memories and dark corners echoing in his consciousness. He snatches open the small icebox and pulls forth a quart of aging milk.
He pays no attention to the odors emanating from his icebox, closing it on the collection of hands he's kept as souvenirs of his conquests. He now quickly warms his milk to a temperature most men could not tolerate. Once the cocoa is prepared as he likes it, he wanders about the empty, wailing house he once shared with Kelia. The shadows, even the wood and the wood grain in the walls, are alive with Kelia's many ghosts who scream at him. Kelia has long ago left him, deserted him. She had to die for that indignity and she has… At least in his mind, he has killed her many times over now. He would like to kill the real Kelia, but he knows he can't, at least not now, perhaps never unless she comes back home…
He fervently misses their former life together on the island of Maui and later here on Oahu. She was alive and well, living with friends on the mainland in California, afraid one day that he would come for her. But if Kelia were ever to be murdered, the family-everyone-would know who had killed her.
So he kills Kelia by killing the others who are-or were-like Kelia.
He occasionally wonders if Kelia hasn't at some time snuck back onto the island of Oahu without his knowing. He gets reports from relatives now and again, but they are vague, unsure. His people don't come around him. Most think him strange. Most of them think that he lives too much in the past.
He is a big man, although short at five-ten, stout and strong, proud of his strength, his barbells always nearby. His living room is taken up by his equipment and he routinely works out here until his muscles bulge.
He must keep in shape for his self-esteem and for the passionate work he does for his gods.
He likes to keep the house dark. Without A.C. or the hope of air-conditioning, he keeps the place cavelike and cool, accepting the dankness over the heat. He once had a dream of building a house into the side of one of the mountains, for natural cooling and heating. He'd dreamed of building it for Kelia. God, that was so long ago, when he and Kelia first lived together on Maui. He realizes the old dream is in ruins; only his new dream can come to pass now.
He lifts his long sugarcane knife, his favorite of several he owns. He has a rack of such knives along with several Japanese swords he has purchased over the years. He has a fascination for shiny steel blades; he likes their feel, the cool evenness of the metal as it is ripped from its scabbard, the way it cleanly slides into flesh and out again without disturbance to the metal. A powerful knife is like the phallus a god dangles between enormous legs, and lately, he has begun to think of his own body as a steel blade to be put to use by the gods of Oahu and the islands.
“ Have to get rest… sleep,” he anxiously tells himself now. He has suffered now for two years with bouts of insomnia; it is one of the reasons he willingly accepts night-shift work from 2 to 10 P.M. He's become used to sleeping three or four hours a day, scouting the downtown area for a while before going on duty, and then returning afterwards to the streets of Oahu to continue his hunt. But today is his day off.
He is not easily satisfied. His princesses all must be elegant, at least in appearance, to appease his gods. They must be strong- willed, not the pliant, easy pickups that will get into a car with just anyone. He likes them to stand up to him, to fight. It shows their courage, that they're worthy of his plan to re-ignite the powerful lords of the islands who speak to him, speak through him, urging him along the path he has chosen.
“ Lopaka,” they each in turn call out to him. “Lopaka… son of chiefs before you…”
“ It is you… Cowboy Lopaka. “
They each reach out to him through their sonorous voices. Their voices all mesh into one when they chant his name. The sound of it reverberates through his brain. They claim him as one of their own.
“ Lopaka…”
“ We, your gods, need you… beg you…”
“… feed the hunger…”
“… hunger that is great…”
“… feed the blood-sky-fire that feeds you…”
“… empty yourself into us…”
“… into the unbearable fire coursing through us…”
“… find us… give us your fire heart…”
“… give us our daily red…
He stands it-the suffering of those ethereal voices, dripping with unimaginable sorrow, stabbing at his brain-until he can stand it no more.
This is how he remembers it in the beginning, with the first life he ever sacrificed to the voices. It had begun with the noises in the wind, voices only he could hear, even long before he ever knew Kelia. He'd tried to change after meeting Kelia, whose presence at first ended the lamenting voices inside his head. For a time the voices were silent and held in check.
After Kelia had left, he slowly came to a startling realization: The gods had chosen Kelia for him, to grant him a special insight into their spectral world. Kelia was really the kind of sacrifice they wanted. And finally, he'd known what the gods wanted of him, why he had been born, why he had come here from his true homeland, what his purpose, after all, was… and why he killed. All part of a plan beyond even his full comprehension.
He is so focused by them when he kills that it happens independently of him, as if his limbs and his mind are overtaken by the powers who speak through his actions, as if he is no more than an arrow of his gods, as if he is not even truly present in the normal sense.
The next day, after he kills, he's awakened into a new body and being, refreshed and feeling clear-headed, remembering only the final moments before she finally expired, her blood spewing about him, painting him as he carves on and ejaculates on the body.
His ingenious method of disposing of the bodies he also owes to the inspiration of his gods.
In time, under the most common of circumstances, he will remember snatches of what he has done-or rather, what they have done, until eventually flashes of memory will reveal everything-absolutely everything.
He recalls only one name for all his victims, Kelia-for they are all one and the same when they belong to him; they are no longer Lindas or Kias, but Kelias. He knows they are all alike; that they are all shallow little creatures, interested only in pop music and rock stars, in mindless magazines and makeup, in instant gratification-“What's between their legs”-in becoming yet another dark-skinned haole, loving all things white. Western and decadent. Kelia-the real Kelia-is a full-blood Hawaiian, rarer these days than a virgin, but the Kelias he has sent to his gods were all of mixed blood, and now the gods are repeating their demand for a full-blood Hawaiian. He has tried to get it right, but the intermarriage between the races makes it near impossible here in Oahu to find such a flower for his gods.
To him, there seems little difference, just so they look like Kelia, so that when he begins to hack away with the cane knives or the swords, he might voyeuristically enjoy Kelia's torturous death again; it seems of no importance what kind of blood it is while he is catching it in his hands, sending it to the ceiling and walls or rubbing it into his nude body in an ecstatic orgy of body art.
His little bungalow's walls bear the marks of many such deaths now. It is fortunate that he lives at the end of a dead-end street against a vacant lot, his closest neighbors the clannish Portuguese down the block. No one ever seems disturbed by the noise or the odors coming from his home.
But now with the killing of the two Hawaiian cops, he worries. They are not killings he planned or wanted, particularly since the men killed were Hawaiians, and most certainly he was not told to take these lives by his Hawaiian gods, who have, for the moment, abandoned him. His gods speak continually of regeneration and rebirth, of a great empowering of the Hawaiian race far beyond what the Hawaiian politicians and newspapers scream for. How then do they feel about his having killed two strong Hawaiian warriors? He now wonders.
Warriors, hell… he rationalizes his last killings. They were working for the man, playing white cop.
He now puts his head against his pillow on the bloodstained couch and tries desperately to pretend that his eyes are weary, that he is sleepy. The drugs he uses have helped to bring him down; still, his eyes roam about the little place, marking where the previous night's fresh blood, brighter in color, shining in the glow of the oil lamp, has splattered the ceiling fan. He is effectively painting his interior in crimson, all since Kelia's leaving.
He wonders again if Kelia will ever return. Wonders if he will ever again find her. Again… perhaps a pointless time frame as long as she refuses to understand. Still, he wonders and wanders over the shards of his past, the moments when he tried to convince her, what he might have said to otherwise convince her to accept her fate, to become a sacrificial lamb. Now the what-ifs cram into his mind. He wonders if he can gain her back, what then? Might she understand now more than she did? Would she ever willingly share his newfound religion with him? Or would she again run… again too afraid to allow him a single cut, much less willingly sacrifice her life for his beliefs.
He stares at the still-blaring TV set. Reporters are jockeying for position around the federal building downtown, trying to get some joker in a beige suit to talk about the deaths of two kanaka cops. It looks like a re-hash of the earlier news programs, and so he pretty well ignores it, just letting the voices wash over his brain, their tedium hopefully helping him to get the sleep he so needs, when suddenly his ears perk at the mention of a supposed human body part found at the Blow Hole.
“ Ho'ino wale, damn! Kuamuamu. r' he curses.
He instantly sits upright, staring at questioner and questioned. The FBI man wears expensive Costa Del Mar dark glasses and has handsome haole features, is tall and ruddy-complexioned. He quickly denies knowledge of any body parts dredged from the Blow Hole.
“ It's impossible,” Lopaka tells himself.
The TV voice continues. “Seems some boys were playing a prank, a practical joke, with some mannequin parts,” says the FBI man named on the screen as Parry. “Scared a few tourists using broken parts of mannequin. That's all.”
They got part of her out. They found part of Kelia… He cringes, stares about at the evidence of multiple murder all around him. He wonders what he must do. Wonders what his gods want him to do. He can't possibly go on as if nothing has happened, as if all is right with his world, as if they don't know anything about him anymore, and aren't actively searching for him this fucking moment. Before now authorities knew only what the gods wanted them to know, only that a shadowy “maybe-man” called the Trade Winds Killer whom they hadn't a clue about was abducting whores. But now? Now they know something about him, and they know something about Kelia; they have a part of her, something that belongs to Ku… and they'll have the Blow Hole staked out.
The thought terrifies him.
He imagines they know his name, his place of work, where he lives. That they have the living Kelia in custody and under questioning, grilling her. He imagines they have the dead Kelia's head, and the damned thing is speaking to them from its parched lips.
He envisions them crashing through his door with huge animal nets and a cage to put him into; imagines them dragging him before the TV cameras now focused on a second FBI man named Gagliano. He imagines being dragged into a court of law, being sentenced to a life behind bars unless he is executed by some angry cop or relative.
“ Hell,” he tries to convince himself, “such a quick end mightn't be so bad, really.”
It'd mean an end to all his unrest, to the fevered state of his soul; maybe in the next life he'll be a god, a real god… not some make-believe god, or at least somebody. In this life, what chance did he have with his father always standing over him? His bloody father was the reason he chose to leave home to seek out a place of his own, and perhaps why he hears the voices in the trade winds, and perhaps why he helps the evil ones to feed upon the Kelias of the world. His father was one of the sharks, and so was he…
In this life, if he'd never heard the voices telling him what to do, what would he be? Nothing, less than the sand on the beach, dirt. Besides, now on the rare occasion when he dares disobey his gods, they torch his brain with a searing red poker that scorches with a great fever of disquiet. It is the worst kind of torture imaginable, like super-heated, jagged knives being slowly placed into his eyes and ears, and the only release comes with slaughtering sacrifices in the manner of his own torture, as if Ku is showing him the way it is done.
He remembers heating the sword the night before, thrusting it, searing flesh.
The gods warn constantly of tortures far in excess of anything mankind might do to him, that these god-directed tortures wait for him should he fail to do what he is told. If he were locked up and unable to provide for his gods, what then might they do to him? He shudders at the thought. Now a moment of calm washes over his brain. What does he have to worry about? he asks himself. No one has the first idea that he's guilty of anything, that he's the Trade Winds Killer, and they never will. He closes his eyes and sleeps his fitful, drug-induced sleep until a calm peace descends like an unexpected gift…
He dreams of a lush forested backyard and a hiding place where once he felt safe, a place where Father can't find him. The dream lulls him into deeper and more peaceful sleep at first, but then the forested area is stripped away, the soft, billowy dream colors turning crimson and black, the dream itself replaced in a sudden eclipse of images…
Another dream or another's dream? A dream out of the mind of a god? A vision? his subconscious is asking. It's an unfamiliar landscape; it's not his dream… coming from someplace else, someone else…
… deceptively simple and pleasing, a pair of enormous hazel eyes looking squarely into his brain, as if…
He gasps on realizing the woman's soft eyes are looking into his brain, slicing with a laser, his removed scalp pulled over his eyes. The eyes are those of a giant Kelia, larger than Diamond Head, larger than the island itself, boring into him and lifting everything from his mind and knowing. She always knew.
He must find Kelia… must destroy her.