His eyes scan the city streets for his next victim, for someone who resembles Kelia, someone who may walk like her, and whose pattern of life he can approach and intercept. Once their paths cross, he might easily fit into her world, which is his world, too. He's on the same streets every day, doing his job, carting tourists back and forth along the same avenues from the hotels-making some six to seven stops depending-to the sights at Pearl Harbor on his run. Along the way, he must spout the history and culture of the islands to the hungry tourists, who seem to have tattoos over their eyes that scream, “Tell me something I don't know, excite my curiosity, wake me up.”
“ Over to the left, the large building you're looking at is the Bishop Museum, Hawaii's largest and oldest museum. A day's visit in its friendly confines is a delight for all who visit the islands, a real must!” he tells his passengers, but even as he speaks in rote memory of his lines, his mind shifts between past experiences with the Kelias he has known and killed, and the future Kelias he will slay, and he wonders what life will be like after he reaches the final number, seven times seven, the one which will make him immortal.
'The Enoa Bus Line can of course accommodate you on a separate and unique trip to the Bishop Museum, if you wish to see the archaeological treasures of the islands,” he says over the P.A. just as they pass the turn for the famous museum. “Should you wish an extended trip into a truly Hawaiian world of gala festivities, topped off by a traditional evening luau, Enoa buses run daily to the Polynesian Cultural Center on the other side of the island. Read about it on the back of your free Enoa Tours map and plan for a six-hour tour.”
The bus came to a shuddering slowdown with traffic jamming up ahead. “No worry, folks,” he tells his charges. “Just a little accident up 'head on da freeway.” At just the right marker and moment, he adds, “Coming up on your right is the world-famous Hula Bowl, host to the world's finest young athletes, the All-Stars of college football each year after the regular season. The Hula Bowl is also known for being the home of…”
He no longer hears himself, having so often done the stock spiel. His mind is partitioned and while the left side takes care of business in the here and now, the other is considering his choices after dark. He might simply go to Alakana's ABC Liquor and Pharmacy on Ala Moana, the street of abundance, where he'd gotten to know the sales clerk enough to call her by her first name, Hiilani, and while she was younger than Kelia by a few years when Kelia had left him, she was all Hawaiian-no mix. At least she'd claimed to be a full-blood native when he'd jokingly asked if there were any full-bloods left. He had bought his newspaper as usual and had been careful not to overstay his welcome, but he did ask her what she'd do if he showed up that evening to drive her home.
“ In the bus?” she had asked, amused.
“ No, I have a car of my own, a nice car.”
“ Really? But I have a boyfriend.”
“ Is he coming to pick you up?”
“ No, he's too lazy. I have to take the bus usually.”
He'd quickly countered with, “If you were my girl, you wouldn't never ride no public bus.”
She'd only smiled coyly at this. So he had repeated his offer to drive her home, finishing with, “What do you say?”
“ Maybe yes, maybe no. I'll see when I see,” she'd teased.
He recognized bait when he smelled it, and he easily assumed that Hiilani was just as loose and fast as Kelia had been; she just hid it well behind her white smock and long braids, which, if allowed to fall, would trail to her back like Kelia's. While not terribly bright, Hiilani held down a regular job. She wasn't a college girl or a streetwalker like some of the others. She was different from Kia and Linda from the university, who'd both ridden for free in his bus when he'd taken another driver's route for two weeks. They'd teased him about being a bus driver, because earlier in class, he'd bragged about working on a big ranch nearby, saying one day he'd become a lawyer or possibly a doctor. A simple check with the registrar might have told either girl that he was barely capable of paying for one class, let alone a full load, and that he was a failing part-timer at the university.
He had flirted with Kia Wailea, telling her all kinds of stories about himself, building himself up to her. She had seemed disinterested until he suddenly surprised her on the strip, where, after several nights of hunting for a new Kelia, he saw her taking on johns for money. It wasn't long before her friend Linda was doing the same. He saw them in broad daylight doing this; he saw it all from the big tinted windshield of his bus.
It was then that Lopaka began to steadily watch his two classmates to learn their routines. He knew from experience that everyone had a routine, that people walked through patterns of existence that dug ruts as deep as canals, and these two girls were no exception. He counseled himself to be patient, to present himself to the girls whenever and wherever possible as a harmless but interested fellow. He was careful not to pressure either of them, but at the same time to learn their likes. Linda, for instance, was a poetry lover and wanted to write poetry, so he located the only book of poetry he owned, an ancient relic left him by his mother, the only item he'd ever known that belonged to her, a book of Shakespeare's sonnets. It endeared him somewhat to Kia, and greatly to Linda, to give her his mother's book of poems. Some years before giving Linda the book, he'd read the sonnets himself, and he'd underlined passages that appealed to him. The underlined passages spoke to him and to her, the hunter and the hunted in intimate conversation, he thought. Surely, she must know to stay away from him after that, he thought. Meanwhile, he continued to hold an inordinate power over the girls, for he knew their daily routines as well as they. It was only a matter of time before he struck. At the exact right moment, he meant to intersect Kia's and Linda's pathways, so that their meeting by chance beamed brightly like a flash of fate, a surprising crisscross of serendipity, when in fact it was well timed and practiced.
Even when Kia, the more streetwise of the two, questioned that fate, and he confessed to following her, she found it romantic that he should go to such lengths. She teased at first, calling him a stalker, then laughing at her own joke, never really believing him capable of anything but total adoration and awe. Then, too late, she learned the truth of his hunt.
Not for the first time does he realize that the very anonymity of his job, and of the large city of Honolulu, makes success in his hunt possible. The fact he has no friends, no relatives any longer-for they have long since abandoned him-and the fact he is considered an introvert and an 'ae 'e, a wandering, shiftless, rootless, unstable soul, an awkward 'ano'e, and odd duck as the whites say, shying from crowds, parties, relatives, presenting a stiff arm to others-all of it aides in the hunt.
No one has willingly come to his bungalow since Kelia left years before.
Still Hiilani, he tells himself, is a high risk. She has close family ties from what he can tell, and already the island families are outraged about the disappearances of Kia and Linda. It may be safest to go elsewhere tonight in his hunt. He might just return to the Waikiki strip to meet for the fourth or fifth time that heavily made-up streetwalker named Terri, but there's something not quite right about her. There's no way she's a native, despite her dress and that horrid, long black wig she wears, but she does-in her costume-look something like Kelia, and if he were to ignore the fact Terri has no Polynesian blood whatsoever, he might imagine her to be another Kelia.
She could be a cop posing as a hooker, he fears. If not, she's obviously an American girl who's gone native. Terri is slender, petite-Kelia's size-pretty, willing enough if the price is right, but he wants her to come regardless of any transaction. He wants her to open herself to him, to make herself vulnerable to him the way Hiilani already has, the way Kia and Linda did. But there's a hard edge to this Terri that speaks of experience.