Ray and I followed Stan, keeping a safe distance back in rush-hour traffic on the Kalaniana’ole Highway. “Stan seems to think he can blackmail me, based on the photos and video,” I said, looking out the window. I turned back to Ray. “Obviously he doesn’t know who he’s up against.”
“Obviously not.” Ray turned into Hawai’i Kai and climbed up to the community of Kalama Valley, nestled near the foot of Koko Head crater.
It’s a quiet suburban neighborhood, favored by those who want less congestion than in the rest of Hawai’i Kai. Stan pulled into the driveway of a nicely kept ranch with a tall hibiscus hedge around the entire property. Behind the shield of red and yellow blossoms and green leaves stood two coconut palms. He went inside, coming back out a minute later with a Siberian Husky on an expandable leash.
He was smoking a cigar, letting the dog pull him along the curving street as it sniffed and peed. We slouched back in the SUV, and Stan went in the opposite direction with the dog, so he didn’t spot us.
The Ko’olau Mountains provided a lush backdrop to clean streets and manicured lawns. Every house had flowering plants in the yard, all shades and sizes of hibiscus and bougainvillea. “Ritzy area,” Ray said. “Stan must be doing pretty well for himself.”
A half hour after Stan returned with the dog, the garage door opened, and Stan, dressed in full leathers, roared out on his Harley, a red do-rag wrapped around his head. We followed him back down to the Kalaniana’ole Highway, but instead of heading toward Honolulu he turned in the other direction.
At least we had a great view as we stayed a couple of cars behind him, going past Makapu’u Point, where the surfers were catching the last few waves before darkness fell. In the distance we could see Rabbit Island, now a seabird sanctuary, and a couple of albatross and frigatebirds soaring over the ocean.
Stan pulled up in the parking lot of a biker bar outside Waimanalo Beach. The wind was whipping the waves to a white froth, spraying a fine layer of sand across the highway. We parked across the road and about a quarter of a mile away. “You think I ought to go in there?” Ray asked.
I looked at him. “You?”
“Well, the guy knows you,” he said.
“Look at the lineup of bikes out there. Don’t you think you’d stand out?”
“I can be tough when I have to.”
“I don’t doubt it. But to be effective you’d need some leathers and a bike, and we don’t have either of those. I say we give up on surveillance tonight. We’ve got a lot of research to do tomorrow morning. I doubt Stan’s going to pick up a guy tonight at this bar.”
“You never know. He’s a gay biker, after all.”
“If there was such a thing as a gay biker bar on O’ahu, I’d know it,” I said. “After all, I am the official homosexual of the Honolulu Police Department.”
“As opposed to the unofficial ones,” Ray said, putting the SUV in gear.
“We don’t talk about them.”
On our way back downtown, I called Haoa and found out that he and Tatiana were at the office, photocopying the records on every employee. “Remember, just because there’s no paperwork, it doesn’t mean the guy’s illegal,” I said. “It could just be that Sergei’s sloppy.”
“Yeah, go on thinking that,” Haoa said.
We rolled the windows down and the trade winds swept in the cooling night air. Was Sergei just trying to satisfy Haoa’s constant need for staff? Or was there something else? I’d seen the photos of him on MenSayHi, so I knew he had more than just a tangential connection to Mr. Hu and Stan.
Rather than making the turn onto Lili’uokalani, which would have put him in the wrong direction for home, Ray dropped me off on Kalakaua and I walked around for a few minutes, trying to work things out.
The constant parade of car headlights, combined with the neon and the store lighting, made it hard to see any stars, but a slice of moon hung above the ocean, clouds moving swiftly past it. There was a cacophony of noise around me-rap music, car horns, and loud laughter-but I felt cocooned from it all, my brain working through the case. But by the time I got home I hadn’t come up with anything new. After I’d stripped off my shirt and fixed some dinner, I relaxed with a book for a while. Around nine I called Mike. “Hey, what’s up?”
“Hanging out,” he said. “Your burn guy from last night go to the
ER?”
“I don’t know. Didn’t hear from him.”
“Don’t you have a buddy in the ER?”
That stumped me. Had I said something about Dr. Phil? I didn’t think so. “How’d you know that?”
There was silence on Mike’s end. Finally he said, “You went to Raimundo’s.”
I remembered back to my first date with Dr. Phil, the day I’d gotten my hair cut at Puerto Peinado and had my hair washed by Jingtao. “Yeah?”
“Raimundo remembered you from when we used to go there. I was in a couple of days later and he mentioned it to me.”
That was interesting. I had occasionally obsessed about Mike myself during the time we’d been apart, once seeing his truck parked on Kalakaua and scouring the area looking for him. “We have a new lead,” I said. I told him about going out to Mililani to see Lenny.
“You had sex with Lenny?” Mike asked. “Me, too.”
“Really? Were you on MenSayHi?”
“Yup. That’s how you met him?”
“You didn’t have sex with Richard Hu, did you?”
“Don’t recognize the name. He a friend of Lenny’s?”
“You could say that.”
“Lenny and I didn’t click,” Mike said.
“Lucky you. At least there wouldn’t be any pictures of you.”
“Pictures?”
I told him about the photos I’d found of my ass getting plowed by Lucas. “I’m online,” Mike said. “I’ll have to check it out.”
“It’s nothing you haven’t seen,” I said, but I heard his fingers clicking furiously in the background.
“Where is it? One of the photo sets?”
“You have a premium membership?”
“Come on, fess up. Like you said, it’s nothing I haven’t seen.”
“Set 34,” I said.
There was clicking on his end, and then a low whistle. “Man, that is hot,” he said. “I’m jealous.”
“Jealous why? Because Lucas’s dick is bigger than yours?”
“I’m jealous because you have a hot ass that ought to belong to me,” he said. “You know, last night, if your buddy Gunter hadn’t come over, I might have…”
“I know. I might have too.”
“Well. Where does that leave us?”
“You at your computer drooling over pictures of my ass. Me here remembering your dick.”
“Are you naked?”
“I could be.”
“So could I.”
I closed my eyes and remembered Mike’s body. His chest was hairy, his stomach flat. A trail of black hair led from the cleft of his chest down to his crotch. I’d already pulled off my shirt when I got home; as I was thinking of Mike I shucked my shorts and boxers.
“I’m naked now,” I said, my voice catching a little. “I’m thinking about your body. You are so fucking hot.”
“So are you. I’m stroking my nipple, and it’s getting hard.”
We went on, each of us spurring the other on to orgasm. Mike groaned and caught his breath, and I knew he’d come. That was enough to put me over the edge.
“Man,” he said, when he’d gotten his breath back. “Are we ever going to do this in person again?”
“We might. In the meantime, I’ll call my friend in the ER. I haven’t seen him in a while. He’s pretty hot.”
“You bastard. Can’t you just check the department computer and see if there’s a report of his assault?”
“Yeah, but I like the idea of you being jealous.”
THE FEDERAL CASE
After I hung up with Mike, I logged into the department intranet and found an assault record for Fouad Khan. It read just the way we had told him to tell the story.