Death in Paradise Read online

  Lau had a spy who’d worked at Aloha Village, for the last year, who had instructions to report anything that would help the Triads take control. When he got wind of the beach meeting, he called Woo Ching into his office. “I need you to take care of a problem for me. Be sure that Ms. Kealoha does not reach the bank Monday morning.” Woo Ching nodded and left Lau’s office without a word.

  Woo Ching was the Triads’ most notorious hit man in Hong Kong and had been sent, to the Ming in Kona, for just such an occasion as this. His preferred method of choice would be a car bomb. He would never be able to plant it on Jessica’s 4Runner while it was parked in the Village. So the next best thing was to bury the bomb alongside the road, leaving the resort. Woo Ching would wait until he saw the 4Runner on the road to trigger the bomb with a cell phone detonator.

  27

  The Hit

  At eight thirty on Monday morning, Jessica sat on the lanai of her father’s bungalow, and had her morning tea. The trade winds had blown all the haziness out of Kona the day before, the sky was so clear she could see Mount Haleakala on Maui in the distance. The birds chirped, and the surf broke against the shoreline—a welcome change compared to her mornings in California. When she looked out the window of her apartment in Anaheim, all she saw was a fenced-in patio with two dead plants. She couldn’t keep them alive no matter what she did. And everywhere she looked, when she was at work in the city of Los Angeles, all she saw was death. She didn’t miss it for a second.

  As she daydreamed, a yellow plumeria flower blew onto the lanai from a nearby tree and landed near her feet. She sat her cup of tea down on the table and reached over to pick up the flower. She admired its beauty and held it close to her nostrils, she breathed in the sweet aroma of the flower.

  Her phone buzzed on the table, and interrupted her early morning serenity.

  “My car has a dead battery. I need to take the 4Runner to town this morning,” Jasmine said.

  Jessica twirled the stem of the plumeria between her fingers. “The keys are in it. I have to go to the bank today as soon as you get back, so don’t dally, okay? On second thought, never mind. I’ll take Dad’s Road Runner to the bank. You can keep the 4Runner all day if you need to.”

  “Okay, thanks, I’ll come get it.”

  Ten minutes later, as Jasmine drove on the road that led from the Village to the highway, she came upon a herd of goats that crossed the road, with a stray dog following behind them. It wasn’t unusual to see goats out here, but dogs didn’t venture out onto the lava flow that encased the road between Aloha Village and the main highway. Jasmine collected stray dogs like Pua collected boyfriends. When she wasn’t busy working at the resort, she volunteered at the Humane Society. She stopped the 4Runner and got out to see if she could catch the dog.

  As she walked toward the stray, the dog trotted away and looked back periodically to keep her from coming any closer. It was skittish and would not come to her no matter how much she tried to coax it. Jasmine and the dog were headed right toward the bomb that Woo Ching had planted beside the road, under the cover of darkness, just before sunrise.

  Woo Ching was nearby with binoculars and watched Jasmine and the stray head straight for the bomb. She wore a wide brim sun hat that morning that covered most of her face–he mistook her for Jessica.

  His thumb hovered over the detonator button of the cell phone, as he waited until he was sure she was close enough to the bomb.

  She continued to whistle and clap her hands together, as she tried to entice the skittish dog to come to her. Finally it stopped–a foot away from the bomb, that allowed her to grab his collar. Woo Ching watched through his binoculars–at the last second he saw it wasn’t Jessica and set the detonator down.

  As Woo Ching thought about blowing up Jasmine anyway, he saw a starburst-blue ’69 Road Runner as it came up the road from Aloha Village. Jessica drove, as Sam sat in the passenger seat. The grin on Woo Ching’s face said it all as he looked through the binoculars.

  He grasped the cell phone detonator again and waited for all three of them to be in position before he triggered the bomb.

  28

  Too Close for Comfort

  Woo Ching had placed a small pile of white coral next to where he’d buried the bomb, to mark its location, so he could see it from the high ground on top of the cinder cone. What he didn’t notice at the time, was there were other small piles of coral nearby. They marked a safe path to the beach, for four-wheel-drive vehicles, to keep them from falling into a lava tube, as they crossed over the flow.

  Woo Ching clicked the dial button on the cell phone detonator, but the explosion he expected to kill the trio was at least a hundred feet away from them. The bomb was far enough away that Sam, Jessica, and Jasmine were out of the kill zone; the 4Runner was positioned at such an angle that it took the brunt of the force from the blast. The front windshield was blown out, and a lava rock two feet in diameter landed on the hood.

  Just before the bomb exploded, Jasmine had run back down the road to where Sam and Jessica had stopped behind the 4Runner. She leaned in the window, and talked to them about the stray dog she had stopped for, when the bomb blast ripped through the morning calm.

  “What the hell was that! Are you guys okay?” Sam said. Jasmine had been knocked down by the force of the blast. Jessica jumped out of the car to check on her.

  “Are you okay, honey? Does it hurt anywhere?” Jessica could see the terror in her little sister’s eyes and surveyed Jasmine for any visible shrapnel wounds, but she saw none.

  “I’m okay,” Jasmine said, as she sat up, dazed and bewildered.

  Jessica scanned the surrounding area, and looked for any signs of the bomber. While Sam and Jasmine were still stunned, Jessica knew what had just happened. After two tours in Iraq with the National Guard, she’d seen her share of IEDs in-country and knew someone had just tried to kill them.

  “The first thing we need to do is get off this road before something else bad happens,” Jessica said. “Come on honey,” Jessica said, as she reached for Jasmine’s hand to get her back on her feet.

  She helped Jasmine and the stray border collie into the backseat of the Road Runner. Sam sat shotgun, and they didn’t waste any time getting back to the safety of Aloha Village.

  When Woo Ching saw the bomb explode too far away from the targets, he heaved the cell phone detonator against a pile of rocks. He then hiked down the backside of the cinder cone to the beach and snuck back to the Ming to report the failed attempt to Mr. Lau.

  * * *

  Woo Ching eyes looked toward the floor as he said, “The bomb missed the target.” There wasn’t a trace of anger on Lau’s face as he stood over the model of the proposed Ming expansion, moving pieces around the eight-foot-long table as he listened. Lau shifted his eyes toward the Triad’s top assassin. “Since you failed, you should go back to Hong Kong, you seem to be incapable of handling a simple hit. I’ll deal with this another way.”

  Woo Ching nodded and left the room. But he had aspirations of being in charge of the Triads, in the not-so-distant future, and could not return to Hong Kong until the job was complete. He had never failed to carry out an assignment, and this would not be the first time.

  29

  Security

  Get cousin Keoki and tell him to stay with you at all times until I sort this out. Under no circumstance are you to leave the Village until you hear from me.” As tears filled Jasmine’s eyes, Jessica gave her a reassuring hug, as they stood outside the resort’s office.

  While Jessica got her sister situated, Sam ran to his bungalow, which was a short distance from the office, to get the satellite phone he kept for emergencies. He called Jim Davis, the captain of The Ohana.

  “How far out are you from the island? There’s been an incident here, and I need you to send a security team ASAP.”

  “About fifteen miles. How many men would you like me to send, sir?” Captain Davis asked.

  “Send ten guys in the Sikorsky and ha
ve it land on the old airstrip behind the Village. At the same time, launch the tender and send it, too. I need it to take us to Honokohau Harbor. Have the team in khaki shorts and aloha shirts–tell them to keep the guns out of sight. I want them as low-profile as possible. They can use my bungalow as a command post. Continue on to Kailua Bay as planned and then set anchor there. I’ll be staying on board The Ohana until this situation is under control.”

  Jim Davis had been the skipper of The Ohana a long time and had never heard such urgency in Sam’s voice. Sam hired only retired Navy SEALs to provide shipboard security and seamanship on his superyacht. Actually, “superyacht” was an understatement. The Ohana was ninety-nine thousand tons and four hundred and fourteen feet long, with a crew of fifty-seven.

  Sam walked at a brisk pace back toward the office where he met Jessica, who had waited out front for him. He watched as she tied up her hair into a messy bun. “I’m not sure if I’m having a hot flash or it’s the humidity and all this excitement,” she said, as she fanned herself.

  “It smells like it’s getting ready to rain, so it’s probably not hormones. I couldn’t deal with that right now, too.” Sam nodded as he admired her hot, sweaty jungle look for a moment.

  Not wanting to alert any of the Village’s guests who were within earshot, coming and going into the office, she whispered, “We need to get to town, but we also need to not get killed on the way there.”

  Sam pulled the sat phone out of his pocket. “I have a plan. My tender will get here in about an hour, and we can take it to the Kailua Pier and get a taxi to the bank. Oh, by the way, I’ve taken the liberty of having some of my security force from my boat stay here and keep the Village safe.”

  Jessica studied Sam’s face for a moment, thinking, Who are you? Her first thought was that she didn’t need his help, but knew accepting it was the right thing to do.

  She ignored her first thought and said, “That would be great, thank you.” In the back of her mind was, What tender is he talking about? How big is his “boat”?

  She had no choice but to let Sam help her. Self-reliant to a fault had always been a thing with her, ever since her mother had passed away, when she and her sisters were near adolescence. Since she was the oldest, her father had made her responsible for everything around the house.

  Sam and Jessica walked down the beach toward the Ming to wait for the tender to arrive. There were a handful of guests that snorkeled in the bay and one guy that walked about twenty yards behind them, with a towel and a boom box that blasted an explicit rap song.

  Jessica needed to call Uncle Jack and share the morning’s assassination attempt with him, but first, she had to deal with a problem on the beach. And that problem’s name was Grayson Roderick. Mr. Obnoxious—as Jasmine referred to him, had checked into the resort a week before and had quickly become a thorn in Jasmine’s side with his constant complaints. But his intent today was to spread his unpleasantness and his loud music on the beach.

  One of the selling points of Aloha Village, that differentiated it from all other resorts in Hawaii, was its “unplugged” policy—no electronics in the common areas or on the beach.

  It was clear this guy didn’t care about the rules. Jessica walked over to him where he had parked himself on the beach and asked him politely if he could turn down the music. She didn’t even mention that he was breaking the rules. He glanced at her, and continued to talk on his cell phone as if she wasn’t even there. She was in no mood for that nonsense. She picked up the ghetto blaster and hurled it into the bay before she walked back to where Sam sat on the beach.

  As Mr. Obnoxious charged toward them, Sam jumped up and stepped in front of Jessica before the guy got within ten feet of her. He reached into his pocket for his wallet to offer to pay for the man’s stereo. The buffoon answered with a fist that came toward Sam’s face. Sam ducked and came back up with an uppercut that caught Roderick on the chin and knocked him out cold.

  Sam liked to box to stay in shape almost as much as he liked to make money. “You should have taken the money,” Sam said, as he pulled out his wallet and threw two hundred bucks at the guy lying in the sand. The bills landed next to the least favorite person on the beach. “This should cover your boom box.”

  When Roderick came to a few minutes later, Jasmine and cousin Keoki escorted him to his bungalow so he could pack–they’d enjoyed him all they could stand.

  “We’ll refund your money. You’re out of here as soon as you pack. We’ve called you a taxi. Or we can call the cops and have you arrested for assault. Your choice,” Jasmine said. As Roderick reached for his suitcase, she added, “Excellent choice.”

  Jessica didn’t even skip a beat, she had been on her phone, and had left a message on Uncle Jack’s answering machine, while Sam had defended her. It’d been years since a man had taken up for her. Chivalry wasn’t dead and a girl could get used to that. Little did Sam know, she didn’t need him to defend her, but she liked that he had.

  30

  Uncle Jack Hui Hou

  Uncle Jack was in the head of the Hui Hou when he heard Jessica leave a message on his answering machine. “Someone just tried to blow us up with an IED on the road leaving the Village.”

  He grumbled something to himself about never eating spicy Thai food again as he dialed Jessica’s phone number.

  “Where are you now?”

  “Sitting on the beach at the Village, waiting for Sam’s tender to pick us up–it’s too dangerous to drive to town.”

  “Stop by. We need to talk.”

  “That’s why I’m calling. I have a check to deposit that will save the Village, and I need to borrow your Bronco.”

  “Okay, I’ll have it waiting for you. Do you have a weapon with you?”

  “No, all my guns are still in the shipping container.”

  “I’ll have a nine-millimeter ready for you, too.”

  “Thanks.” And Jessica clicked off her cell phone.

  After he’d gotten off the phone with Jessica Uncle Jack didn’t waste any time dialing Jin Tanaka.

  Jin didn’t recognize Uncle Jack’s phone number and let it go to voicemail.

  “Jin, we have a problem.” Uncle Jack proceeded to leave a message that detailed what had just happened to Jessica, Sam, and Jasmine. Uncle Jack couldn’t protect his nieces, but he knew the yakuza would–they were family.

  * * *

  Twenty minutes before the tender arrived at Aloha Village, the Sikorsky helicopter landed and dropped off the security force to secure the Village. Sam took the team leader around and introduced him to Jasmine, cousin Keoki and other key employees of the small resort before he went back to the beach to wait for the tender to arrive.

  Sam reassured Jessica that his guys would keep a low profile and they’d blend in so as not to alarm the guests. She knew there was safety in numbers, and she felt safe with Sam. Soon, they spotted the tender as it came into the bay in front of the resort. Technically, it was called a tender, but in most circles, people would call it a small yacht.

  Jessica stared at the two-tone white and dark blue boat as is drifted in toward the beach. “About sixty feet?” she asked.

  “Good guess, sixty-five,” Sam replied.

  “Aloha, Mr. Stewart,” yelled Terry Barnes, the coxswain, as he drifted the big boat up as close to the beach in front of Aloha Village as he could get without getting stuck in the shallows. Sam and Jessica waded out, and Terry helped them both aboard from the rear swim deck.

  “Good to see you again, Mr. Stewart,” Terry said.

  “As it is you, Mr. Barnes,” Sam answered as he shook Terry’s hand.

  Sam placed his hand on the small of Jessica’s back. “This is Jessica Kealoha.”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Ms. Kealoha.”

  “Aloha, Terry. You can call me Jessica.”

  “Honey, if you go down below to the saloon, you can make yourself comfortable. I’ll be down there in a minute,” Sam said.

  Jessica gave
Sam a devilish look as she stepped through the sliding glass door to enter the saloon. It’s good to have someone who calls you honey, she thought.

  As she headed for the saloon, Sam gave Terry instructions to take them to the Hui Hou’s slip at the harbor.

  31

  Golf Pro

  Jin listened to Jack Murphy’s message, while on his way to eat dinner with his ninety-four-year-old father, Eizō. They met every week to talk about yakuza business. His father was the original yakuza boss who had started the gang in Hawaii. The meeting always took place at a little out-of-the-way diner in downtown Honolulu that had the best saimin in town.

  Though Jin was the boss of the yakuza in Hawaii, Eizō insisted he call Lance Ishikawa in Kona, the yakuza’s enforcer on the Big Island. For the most part, the yakuza had a strict hands-off policy regarding the outer islands, except for a few nefarious activities here and there. This was family the Triads had messed with, and now it was time to send them a message. A dead body should get their attention.

  * * *

  Mr. Lau was going to host a critical golf tournament at the Ming and had sent his chauffeur to meet the plane of Zhang Wei, a golf pro from Shanghai that Mr. Lau had personally invited to play in the tournament. Mr. Wei was a very famous and influential golfer in China and could send a lot of business to the Ming, if he liked the resort and its golf course.

  Lance Ishikawa parked alongside the road which exited the Ming, propped open the hood of his Sprinter van to make it look like he had engine trouble. The vehicle looked like any of the island tour vans that came and went from the Ming–except it wasn’t. It was a yakuza murder wagon in disguise. Inside were all the tools necessary to dispose of a body without leaving a trace. Jin had taught Lance that the best way to get rid of a body was to put it in a fifty-five-gallon drum, fill it with concrete, and dump it at sea. If there was no body, then there was no evidence and would be no conviction. This time was different, they would send the body back to the Ming to make a point. It was risky from a prosecution standpoint, but necessary. There would be no mistaking the message they had sent the Triads.