They took Sergei up to the operating room and we all moved to the waiting room there. Eventually the doctor came out and told us that though Sergei had lost a lot of blood, they were able to stabilize him then remove the bullet and close up the entry wound.
“I want to wait here for him,” Tatiana said. “I can’t believe it. I was supposed to look after him.”
“He’s a grown man, Tatiana,” I said. “You can’t look after him forever.”
“Of course I can. He’s my brother.”
I knew how she felt. My brothers had looked after me plenty.
Mike drove me over to the Rod and Reel Club, parking his truck in the alley behind the club. Ray was still there, standing under a streetlight with Julie. He was wearing a clean shirt and talking to Lieutenant Sampson. Tourists moved past us, and I could hear the back beat coming from the club. Life went on in Waikiki. It was hot and humid, and a mosquito kept buzzing around my head.
“You okay, brah?” I asked him as Mike and I walked up.
“Yeah. How’s Sergei?”
“He’ll be all right.”
I turned to Lieutenant Sampson. “You remember Mike Riccardi, from HFD? He’s been working the arson side of the investigation.”
Sampson raised a single eyebrow but didn’t comment on Mike’s presence. “I don’t like it when anyone takes pot shots at my people,” he said. “Let’s meet tomorrow morning and recap where you are on this. Let’s get the ADA involved, too. We’ll see if we’ve got enough evidence to get a search warrant for the gun. If we can get a ballistics match we’ll have something to hold this guy on.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m going to make it my personal mission to arrest Stan LoCicero and make sure he goes to jail for a long, long time.”
Sampson looked at his watch. “I’ve got to roll. Call me if you need anything.” He strode away down the street, and I turned to Ray and Julie.
“You guys want to get a drink?” I asked, only too late realizing that was the wrong thing to say around Mike.
Ray shook his head. “Julie and I are going to have dinner,” he said, holding her around the waist. “I’ll be okay.”
“Any chance that could have been Treasure Chen on the bike?” I asked.
Ray shook his head. “I was talking to Treasure last night at dinner. She told me she had a boyfriend who rode a bike when she was in high school and she hated it. Always afraid she was going to fall off. Could it have been Richard Hu?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I suppose.”
Ray and Julie left, and Mike and I went to talk to Larry Solas, the crime scene tech, who was just finishing up. “I recovered two bullets from the tree over there. I’ll swing past the hospital on my way back to the lab and pick up the bullet they pulled out of your victim. I’m on duty till midnight. I’ll see if I can get you anything on ballistics.”
“Thanks, brah.”
As Larry packed up his big arc lights, the uniform on duty pulled up the plastic cones and let the traffic flow on Kuhio again.
“You want some dinner?” I asked Mike.
“Sure. But what do you say we pick up a pizza and take it to my place?”
A dozen things flew through my head at once. Mike liked his pizza with ham and pineapple. He had a down comforter on his bed that was like resting on clouds. My Wrangler was safe in its parking space at my apartment, but if I stayed the night with Mike he’d have to drop me at home on his way to work. I didn’t have any condoms on me, but I hoped Mike had some.
Had it been Stan LoCicero on the bike? Richard Hu? We didn’t have anything on Stan. There was no way a judge was going to give us a warrant on so little evidence.
More than anything else, I wanted to lie in Mike’s arms.
“Tomorrow’s going to be a hell of a day,” I said, linking my arm in his. “Let’s head for your truck, Romeo.”
WHERE THERE’S SMOKE
As I expected, Mike wanted a large pizza with ham and pineapple. “It was the first meal we ate after we moved here,” he said, while we were waiting at a little pizza place just down the hill from his house in Aiea. “My parents had been talking up Hawai’i to me for a long time, and when we saw there was a Hawaiian pizza on the menu we had to order it.”
I lounged against the counter, under a faded poster of Mt. Vesuvius. Dean Martin was singing “That’s Amore,” and I was starting to relax. “You liked it?”
He nodded. “I’d been worried that Hawai’i would be totally different from New York. I knew we were moving here so my mom would feel more comfortable, and I was worried that everybody would look like her, that they’d all speak Korean or something. And I wouldn’t fit in.”
The counter clerk called our number, and Mike paid for the pie and a six-pack of garlic rolls. “So we went out for pizza after we unpacked our boxes,” he said, while he waited for his change. “And I liked the mix of ham and pineapple, of sweet and savory. The next day, I met this girl next door, and her mom was Japanese and her dad was white. She even kind of looked like me.”
“I always felt like I fit in,” I said, as we walked back to his truck. “And then I went to college in California, and there I was exotic and different. It was weird. I’d look around, and everybody was white, or black, or Japanese, or Chinese. There were no in-betweens, like me. I’d use a Hawaiian word, or talk about eating Spam musubi or something, and people would look at me like I was from another planet.”
“I felt the same way,” he said. “I used to go back to Long Island for summers and holidays, to stay with my dad’s parents, and when it was time for college I figured I’d go there. But it didn’t feel like home anymore. I’d go into this Korean neighborhood in Queens sometimes, just to hear people talking, but they’d look at me like they couldn’t quite figure out what I was.”
It was like old times, hanging out with Mike, talking, eating pizza, and drinking this gourmet root beer he’d found somewhere, a local Hawaiian brand with a hula dancer on the bottle. We sat at his kitchen table eating slices and licking our fingers, and I thought of all the time we’d missed, days and months we could have spent in each other’s company.
He still liked to rip all the soft dough out of the crust, then scoop bits of ham and pineapple into the hollows. And as I remembered, he’d get bits of pizza in his mustache and then snake his tongue out to grab them. It was gross, but endearing.
While we were cleaning up, he bumped into me, and when I turned toward him he wrapped his arms around me. We started to kiss and rub our bodies against each other, and within a short time we were in his bedroom. The comforter on his bed felt just as good as I’d remembered, and so did his body against mine, his tongue in my mouth, and before long, his dick in my ass.
We were slumped next to each other in the afterglow of the kind of sex that makes your eyes roll back in your head when Mike started sniffing. “You smell that?” he asked.
“What? I showered this morning, but it was a long time ago.”
“Not you. Smells like gasoline.”
He jumped off the bed, pulled on a pair of shorts, and ran from the room. I followed, and as I went toward the living room I smelled what he had-gasoline, and above it, smoke.
He grabbed a fire extinguisher from the kitchen and pushed through the screen door to the yard. Over his shoulder, I could see flames licking at the back wall of the garage. “Call 911,” he yelled.
I did, for the second time that night. I gave the dispatcher the address and said it was the residence of a firefighter, then I went outside to help.
If you’re going to have a fire at your house, it’s best to have a trained fireman there with you. Mike knew just what to do, spraying the flames with the extinguisher, and directing me to get the hose and wet down the yard.
There was little in the back that was flammable; all the landscaping was away from the house and there wasn’t any of the usual junk lying around, as you’d find in my parents’ yard. No broken-down furniture, wooden trellis, or anything else that might catch fire.