Death in Paradise Read online

  When the Ming’s limousine passed by Lance, he closed the hood, hopped in the Sprinter and followed the car to the Kona airport. The limo had parked in the cell phone lot, to wait for the golfer’s plane to land. Lance parked next to the limo and watched the driver for a few minutes before he made his move. The chauffeur was still looking down at his phone when Ishikawa walked up to the driver’s side window and reached in with a stun gun. He stuck it to the chauffeur’s neck and pulled the trigger, yanked him out of the limo, opened the side door of the van and threw him on the floor.

  After he’d gagged and zip tied the driver, he grabbed the man’s cell phone as he got in the limo, and waited for the call to pick up the golf pro at the curb. Thirty minutes later the limo driver’s cell phone rang and Ishikawa left the cell phone lot to pick up Zhang Wei, less than five minutes later he was in the back of the limo and headed toward certain death.

  Ishikawa drove to the southernmost part of the airport, past where all the private jets parked, and pulled the limo over. Zhang Wei was in the back of the car as he talked on his cell phone and didn’t notice what was going on. Ishikawa walked to the rear passenger side door as he obscured an ice pick. He flung the door open and stabbed Zhang Wei in the chest before he had time to react. Zhang Wei was dead seconds after the pick perforated his heart.

  Ishikawa took the limo back to the cell phone lot and drugged the chauffeur before he put him back in the limo. He returned to the Sprinter and drove out of the parking lot just like any of the other commercial vehicles that came and went that day.

  * * *

  Mr. Lau had been in his office talking on the phone with Governor Fitch about what to do concerning Aloha Village when his secretary burst into the room and handed him a bloody note.

  A message had been pinned to Zhang Wei’s chest that said, “Next time it’s your wife. Then it will be you. The best thing you can do is get back on your private jet and go back to Hong Kong where you came from.”

  It was evident to Lau that someone connected to Jessica Kealoha had murdered Zhang Wei. He’d made a dangerous enemy when he ordered Woo Ching to kill her. What Lau didn’t know was that Jessica’s uncle and grandfather were the leaders of the Japanese mob in Hawaii, and they had no qualms about killing anyone who threatened their family. The yakuza owned Hawaii, and the Triads had not only tried to kill Jessica, but as the yakuza saw it, they were trespassing and would be punished for it.

  There were no secrets on the Big Island, and it didn’t take long for Lau to find out that Jessica was connected to the yakuza–by blood. Even though she was a retired cop, the yakuza would protect her because she was family. Lau knew he had made a formidable enemy now and would have to deal with it. The first thing he did was to call Woo Ching. He knew Woo Ching had not left the island yet, and he would need him for personal security until this situation with Jessica and the yakuza was resolved.

  “There’s a change in plans. I need you to finish the job.”

  “What do you want me to do?” Woo Ching asked.

  “I still need Jessica Kealoha dead.”

  Woo Ching smiled as he listened to his uncle. This time he wouldn’t fail.

  Even though Lau was a relative newcomer to the island, and was there to build a mega gambling resort once gambling became legal, he was Chinese. And they had roots on the island going back to the 1800s, just like the Japanese. As in World War Two, they would fight it out again, but this time it would be a gang war between the two sides. The Triads had about twenty members in Kona, and Lau thought they could handle the yakuza, who he knew had little presence on the Big Island. What he didn’t realize–that was about to change.

  * * *

  The next day Eizō and Jin met again at lunch time in the small diner to plan the next step to kick the Triads out of Hawaii.

  Eizō asked Jin, “Lance sent the message?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  Eizō stared down into his bowl as he stirred the noodles of saimin, then looked up at Jin. “The Triads are tough. Don’t underestimate them. They won’t go until we make it too uncomfortable for them to stay. And if they’ve decided Jessica must die, they won’t stop until she is dead, or we’ve convinced them otherwise.”

  Jin nodded, stirred soy sauce into a small dab of wasabi. “Or until we kill every last one of them.”

  Eizō nodded with a slight smile. “Jin, I know you and Jessica have had differences in the past. But she’s still my granddaughter. The cops can’t protect her. It’s up to us.”

  Even though Eizō had retired and handed the day-to-day operations of the yakuza over to Jin years before, Eizō still had the final say about anything related to yakuza business in Hawaii. Jin never questioned the orders of his father, who spent most of his days tending to his prize-winning koi.

  “Get the men together and go to Kona. The Triads won’t go without a fight,” Eizō said, as he slid his bowl of saimin away with a look of disgust on his face.

  “Hai!” Jin answered.

  The yakuza had a fleet of fishing boats they operated out of Oahu. Jin sent the biggest one of them which had a crew of twenty-three men. That was all he would need to teach the Triads a lesson.

  32

  Uncle Jack

  Sam’s tender dropped him and Jessica off at the fuel dock at Honokohau Harbor. They walked over to the A Hui Hou’s slip to borrow Uncle Jack’s truck.

  When they arrived at the slip, Uncle Jack sat in the fighting chair, nursed a beer while he read Fish News and puffed on a cigar.

  When he saw them he put the cigar out and got up, grabbed a small backpack out of the saloon he’d gotten ready for Jessica earlier. He brought it out to the cockpit and set it in the fighting chair.

  “You guys look good for people who almost got blown up today.” Uncle Jack smiled.

  “Nothing like a bomb first thing in the morning to get your day started off right,” Sam joked. Jessica cut her eyes toward him. It was apparent she didn’t see the humor in it.

  Uncle Jack picked his cigar back up, relit it and took a drag. “After you called me, I thought about how the bomb was made and came to the conclusion it had to have been assembled using chemicals bought without suspicion.” Jessica nodded. She knew where he was going with this, and Sam did too. Although he wasn’t in law enforcement, he was a smart guy, and his first thought had been of the Oklahoma City bombing–a fertilizer bomb.

  Uncle Jack handed Jessica a surveillance photo of Woo Ching. She knew the next step to take after going to the bank to deposit the check from Auntie Loana. A trip to the farm supply store to see if anyone who worked there recognized the man in the photo.

  “There’s a Smith & Wesson Slim Nine in the bag and ten paper targets to keep the cops from arresting you for concealed carry. Just remember, you’re on the way to target practice.” Uncle Jack winked.

  Smiling at Uncle Jack, Jessica grabbed the bag with one hand and held out her other.

  “Oops, sorry. Here’s the keys to my old Ford. You can’t miss it. It’s parked over there.” Uncle Jack pointed east toward the parking lot in front of the Fishing Club building, about a hundred yards from the Hui Hou.

  Uncle Jack had a blue-and-white ’67 Ford Bronco with a 351 Cleveland engine. Jessica was always excited to drive her dad and Uncle Jack’s vehicles because they both always had to drive something that was fast. She figured they were both a couple of adrenaline junkies that got off on going a hundred and thirty miles an hour down the Queen K when nobody was around. Just thinking about it produced a warm memory of how her dad would take her to the Hilo drag strip and let her race his Road Runner when she was sixteen. By the time she had turned seventeen, she was a feared bracket racer at the track, she regularly proved that women had faster reflexes than men. All things being equal, she would win nine times out of ten.

  Uncle Jack’s Bronco looked like an old piece of crap, just the way he liked it. He never had to worry about anybody banging into it in a parking lot. Even though the
paint job was faded and it had primer grey that covered the previous rust spots, it was in fair condition from outward appearances. In street racer jargon, it was a sleeper. Under the hood was a custom-built street/strip dyno-tuned engine that put out an easy five hundred horsepower to the ground which made it down right exciting when the gas pedal was mashed to the floor.

  Sam strapped in, as he sat shotgun, as Jessica fired up the big Ford engine and pointed the rocket, disguised as a Bronco, toward the bank in town so they could deposit the check that would save Aloha Village.

  * * *

  The drive into town was uneventful and after she deposited Auntie Loana’s check, for one point two million dollars, Jessica called Jasmine to let her know Aloha Village could pay bills without worry now. And that she and Sam were on their way to try and find out who’d tried to kill them earlier that day.

  When they walked into the farm supply store and showed the photo of Woo Ching to the young man who worked that day, the clerk remembered he’d seen him in the store because he had been wearing a suit. At the time, the clerk had thought it was strange a guy in a suit wanted to buy fertilizer.

  Sam and Jessica thanked the clerk and headed back to the harbor to return Uncle Jack’s Bronco.

  Sam asked Jessica. “What do you think?”

  “Let’s find Woo Ching and hope he forces me to put a bullet in him.”

  Sam’s eyes grew big.

  Then she laughed. “I’m just kidding. Sort of. Okay, not,” she said with a passive aggressive tone.

  “How about we go talk to the Kona PD instead, before going back to the harbor?” Sam suggested.

  “If we were on the mainland, that would be the right way to handle this. But the thing that scares me is that talking to the police here might be the same as discussing it with Mr. Lau himself because of spies in the department.”

  She thought about it for a moment. “Let’s go see my old partner, Sid Akiona, I heard a while back he still works there. He’s the only one I would trust.”

  “Why do you think the department has spies?” Sam asked.

  “Most of the cops working there are somebody's cousin–here on the island. That’s why we have to be very careful about who we talk to.”

  Sam nodded.

  Jessica continued to talk as she drove toward the police station,

  “When I started out in law enforcement, I got hired by the Kona PD after graduating from the police academy. And like I said, Sid was my training officer. He was a standup guy. When the department accused me of theft, as a young rookie, Sid was the only one who’d stood up for me. He knew for a fact I didn’t steal the missing fifty thousand dollars out of the police evidence room. At the time, it was still an old boys’ club and women had not been welcome in the department. Any way they could get rid of a woman was okay with most of the upper echelon, and I was no exception. Everyone knew the theft allegation was a ruse. But I had made a powerful enemy when I wrote the chief of police a ticket for being parked in a red zone at a local hotel, where he was having a nooner with his mistress. Even the internal affairs detectives, who investigated the missing money, knew I didn’t do it. But I was being blamed by a senior officer who was the brother-in-law of the chief. There was talk around the station that one of the evidence room workers had stolen the money, but they never filed charges and I was the scapegoat they’d tried to pin it on. I had allegedly been the last one in the room before the theft was discovered. I was cleared six months after the investigation. But it was obvious to me that the stink of the accusation would never go away. That was when I quit and moved to LA, so I could go to work for a big-city department where nepotism isn’t allowed.”

  Jessica had a mixture of butterflies and hostility in her gut as she turned the Bronco off of the highway just a half a block a way from the station.

  33

  Kona PD

  Jessica parked the Bronco far enough away from the entrance to the police station so that nobody, inside the building, would see what she and Sam were doing while seated inside the vehicle. Uncle Jack had a custom-built gun safe installed into the floor of the Bronco; Jessica put the Smith & Wesson Slim Nine inside it and locked the door. No need to test out Uncle’s target practice excuse story, she thought.

  Sam and Jessica walked through the front, double glass doors and up to the desk sergeant. “Is Officer Sid Akiona on shift today?” Jessica asked the young policeman behind the counter.

  “Yes, the watch commander is in his office, I believe. Let me see for sure. Who should I tell him is here to see him?”

  “Tell him Jessica Kealoha.”

  A few minutes later, the young policeman returned with Sid Akiona, who was now Captain Akiona. Sid’s face lit up with a welcoming smile when he saw Jessica. He was genuinely glad to see her. It had been close to twenty years since the last time they had seen each other. After a warm embrace, Jessica introduced Sam. He shook the captain’s hand, though he wasn’t crazy about the way the captain looked at Jessica, like they had once been more than just coworkers. It was a weird feeling Sam couldn’t seem to shake while they were talking.

  “I heard about your father, Jessica. I’m so sorry for your loss,” Akiona said.

  “Thank you. The reason we’re here today is that someone tried to blow us up two days ago, with a roadside bomb planted near the exit of Aloha Village. It exploded about sixty yards from us. We were lucky no one was injured.”

  Captain Akiona’s face was expressionless as Sam and Jessica recounted the harrowing details of how they’d almost lost their lives and how they suspected Woo Ching.

  Jessica also mentioned that she and Sam had gone to the farm supply store to see if Woo Ching had been there to buy fertilizer; they suspected it was the main ingredient used to make the bomb. And that they found a clerk who positively identified Woo Ching, from a photo they showed him, as having purchased a bag of fertilizer.

  Akiona looked puzzled and then asked, “Where did you get the photo of the guy?”

  “My uncle, Jack Murphy.”

  “You think this Woo Ching is responsible?”

  Jessica nodded. “If it’s not him, then it was probably Mother Teresa.”

  “I see you haven’t lost your keen sense of humor. We’ll start looking for this guy, and if we find him, we’ll bring him in for a chat and see if we can make a case.”

  Sam and Jessica both shook the captain’s hand and thanked him for his time. Sam then asked one last question before they left.

  “What’s the chances of getting a concealed carry permit these days?”

  Jessica already knew the answer but stood by patiently, knowing what the reply would be.

  Captain Akiona shook his head. “The chief won’t issue them. Never has and said he never will.”

  “Even if we’re in danger?” Sam asked.

  “The chief is adamant about not having civilians walking around carrying guns.”

  “Interesting.” Sam shook his head in disbelief.

  Jessica smiled and thanked the captain again for his time, then grabbed Sam’s hand and steered him toward the door.

  As Sam and Jessica drove out of the police station parking lot, Sam looked at Jessica. “Maybe I’m wrong, but I felt an underlying tension between you and Captain Akiona back there. Did you and the good captain have something going on once upon a time?”

  Jessica steered the Bronco onto the Queen K Highway to head back toward the harbor. Sam reached down to unlock the gun safe, as he waited for her to answer. She kept her eyes on the road and finally answered, “Let’s just say that when we were partners on the night shift–he wanted to be naked partners, too. But I wasn’t interested.” She placed her right hand on Sam’s thigh.

  Sam felt jealous as he thought about another man wanting Jessica. But her hand on his thigh made the jealous feelings fade away.

  Sam’s phone buzzed in his pocket, and he looked down to see who the text was from.

  “Why don’t we stay on my boat until this is over?
I got a text that The Ohana has arrived and is anchored in Kailua Bay.”

  Jessica didn’t hesitate. “I can’t leave Jasmine alone. I know she’s safe with your guys there in the Village, but I have to go back to the resort until this is over.”

  Sam sighed, but he understood where she was coming from. “Okay, back to the Village we go. I’ll call the tender to pick us up at the harbor after we return the Bronco.”

  Jessica looked at Sam and smiled. “Since your guys have taken over your bungalow, you’ll have to stay with me–at mine.”

  Sam grinned. “Well, if you insist.” And they both laughed.

  34

  Sashimi Maru

  The Sashimi Maru had trolled the Kona coast for the past few days. It appeared to be a Japanese fishing boat like any other. Except what wasn’t obvious it belonged to the yakuza. It was the largest tuna boat they ran out of Oahu, and besides catching fish, it was a tool used to launder money. And now its crew plotted their attack on the Triads. With a crew of twenty-three, they had no fear of the Triads outnumbering them.

  Their plan was simple: go ashore at night and burn Lau’s villa to the ground while he slept. The worst-case scenario was that he survived the fire. But the fire should be enough to convince him, if he managed to survive, that staying in Kona would be hazardous to his health if he managed to survive, and he should go back to China. The best-case scenario was that he died in the fire, and the Triads in Hong Kong would know Hawaii was enemy territory. There would be an understanding that if they ever came back, they’d would pay with their lives.