Kula (Surfing Detective Mystery Series) Read online

  “What you want, brah?” Her voice was flat and lifeless.

  “I looking for one dog.” I pulled out Kula’s photo—and my pidgin.

  “You wen’ put up da signs?” she asked.

  “Yeah. You wen’ take ‘em down?”

  “Nah. Why I like take ‘em down fo’?” she asked. “You one cop?”

  “Private investigatah. Dere’s one reward fo’ da dog. One t’ousand dollahs.”

  “I know who wen’ take da signs.” Suddenly she sounded interested.

  “Who?”

  “Worth somet’ing, yeah?” She held out her right hand.

  “How much?” I asked.

  “Hundred.”

  “Can replace da signs fo’ less than dat.”

  “Fifty, den.” She eyed me warily.

  I opened my wallet and pulled out my last twenty. I held it up to her intense gaze.

  Her eyes locked on Alexander Hamilton’s chiseled face for an instant and then she grabbed the bill from my hand. “Moku.”

  “Moku Taliaferro?”

  She nodded.

  I didn’t bother to poke around any longer at 107 Mokulama. If Kula was there, would she have settled so quickly for a twenty?

  I also didn’t bother to tell her Moku was dead.

  twenty

  Instead of getting back into my car, I walked down Mokulama Drive makai, or toward the ocean, to a sand path lined with ironwoods. At the end of the path was Lanikai Beach. In the distance I saw the iconic Mokulua Islands—twin pyramids on the turquoise sea. Heat waves coming up from the beach made the famous islands shimmer. Postcard perfect. I planted my backside in the warm sand, pulled Maile’s card from my wallet, and punched in her number on my cell.

  “Kai?” She sounded concerned. “Anything wrong?”

  “Your cats are fine. How’s Utah?”

  “The workshop is good. And your investigation?”

  “Not so good. A suspect wound up dead last night. His skull was crushed.”

  “Oh!” The surprise in her voice traveled across the miles. “That’s rare in a pet theft case. New territory for me.”

  “Swell.”

  “Do you think he was your man?”

  “I think he took down every poster I put up about Kula’s disappearance.”

  “Posters are usually taken by people who don’t want the pet found, or who want the reward all to themselves. But killing somebody is, well . . . unusual.” Maile was silent a moment.

  “The more I dig into this case,” I said, “the more I think it’s not about Kula at all.

  “Then who?”

  “Maybe Cheyenne Sin—Buckingham’s missing wife? Her disappearance has been bugging me from the start. I think Kula is just a pawn.”

  “A living, breathing pawn,” Maile said, “with high stakes to find him.”

  “What I can’t figure is why was Moku killed? I doubt he could be more than a bit player, hardly worth the risk . . .”

  “Maybe he’s the key to the whole thing,” Maile replied.

  “Why did I ever take this case?”

  “Because you’re a sucker for cold noses and warm hearts?”

  That phrase again. I had used it on Fernandez. Now Maile used it on me.

  “Kai?”

  “Sorry, Maile. See you at the airport on Sunday,” I said, ending the call. There was no point in telling her the truth—I had taken the case to save my business. No other lofty motives, let alone cold noses and warm hearts.

  * * *

  Back at my office later that day I played a new phone message:

  “Ah foun’ yur retriever, boy, an’ Ah fur dam shore dezarve that-thar reward . . .” A pause. “Whut yu waitin’ fur, boy?” Silence. “Boy? . . . Boy?”

  The caller spoke in a drunken redneck twang, not common in the islands. He hung up without giving a number. But he did leave his caller ID.

  Strange. A 775- prefix. He had called from the Big Island. Why would someone on the Big Island call about a dog lost on O‘ahu?

  I called him back.

  “Sammy Bob,” he answered, this time without the slur.

  “Mr. Bob?” I picked up on his cue.

  “Name’s Picket—Sammy Bob Picket,” he corrected me. “Whut kin ah do fer yah?”

  “I’m George, and I’m looking for a dog.” The name sounded plausible enough, especially on short notice.

  “How’re yu, George?” He perked up. “Yah dun called the rite place, boy. Whut kine ah dog yah look’n fur?”

  “Not sure. What kind do you have?”

  “Ah got all kine.”

  “Golden retrievers?” I knew I was pushing my luck, but hoped he’d forgotten his drunken call to my number.

  “Got ‘em.”

  “Are you a dog breeder?”

  “Nah, but ah sells ‘em, an’ ah sells ‘em cheap.”

  “Where are you?” I pushed my luck again.

  “Yah doan got tah worry nun ’bout that-thar,” he said evasively. “Ah deliver.”

  “I’d like to see your goldens before I buy one. Can I come and look?”

  “Yah got five-six hundert?”

  “For the right dog,” I said.

  “Tell yah what yah gonna do . . .”

  I held my breath.

  “Yah drive on up the Hāmākua Coast till yah get tah Laupāhoehoe, then yah call me. Ah’ll lead yah from there.”

  “Where will you meet me?”

  “Locals Only Café . . . ” He paused. “How ‘bout tomorrow afternoon?”

  “Suits me.” I would have agreed to anything.

  “Remembah, George, yah ain’t gonna get no better deal.”

  “See you tomorrow then.”

  “Muchablige.” He hung up.

  twenty-one

  The next morning I caught a 10:50 flight to Hilo, still wondering why a guy on the Big Island would call about a dog lost on O‘ahu. His good-ol’-boy lingo and name also made me wonder.

  The airplane to Hilo was packed with weekend travelers on neighbor island getaways. Holoholo. Looking out the window as the Hawaiian jet descended south along the Big Island’s Hāmākua Coast, I saw the rustic tin roofs of Hilo town nestled along the waterfront, just as I remembered them. Over the years I’ve watched Hilo sink into the economic doldrums when the sugar industry tanked, and then rise again when tourism transformed the quiet hamlet into a New Age mecca of artsy shops, health food stores, and trendy restaurants. In addition to tourism, the island’s recent economy depended on diversified agriculture, not the least of which included illegal cash crops like pakalolo.

  * * *

  After picking up a car at Budget, I drove to Kea‘au, about ten miles south of Hilo. There the road climbs southwest into Volcanoes National Park or due south to Lava Tree State Monument. The south road continues to the former seaside village of Kalapana and its famous black sand beach, both devastated by lava flows. Kea‘au, on higher ground, escaped.

  Once a sugar plantation town on the slopes of the Kīlauea Volcano, Kea‘au has since grown into a suburb of Hilo, boasting a Sure Save market, Ace Hardware, McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, and a couple of gas stations and churches. I wasn’t looking for pizza or religion in Kea‘au. I came to find the Hawai‘i Island Humane Society shelter, one of three on the Big Island.

  The Kea‘au shelter was a one-story, hollow tile, tin-roofed building with detached cathouse and dog kennels—all spotlessly clean. Its utilitarian appearance was softened by spacious green lawns, a few palms and an ‘ulu, or breadfruit tree. The place had a cozy, campus-like feel.

  Inside the facility I explained to a staffer named Alana, whose lava-black hair flowed down to her shoulders, that I was looking for a golden retriever lost on O‘ahu. She said she’d do all she could to help.

  Pet hoarders—people who gather and even steal large numbers of animals—were a problem in the area, Alana told me. They accumulated so many pets that they couldn’t care for them properly and were usually prosecuted under animal cruelty stat
utes.

  “Dis old lady bin keep mo’ den one hundred cats.” Alana started to “talk story” in pidgin. “Her neighbors, dey smell da stink and dey call. So we go check ‘em out. Da cats bin starving. Dey living in one dump. Unsanitary, yeah? Most of ‘em really sick. Some dead awready. We bring all da live cats hea. And da old lady get arrested and go to jail. Cruelty to animals.”

  “You know dis’ guy Sammy Bob Picket?” I asked.

  “Sammy who?”

  “Picket,” I said. “He live in Laupāhoehoe. Maybe he one dog hoarder?”

  “I hear of some guy like dat. But never hear of dis Picket.”

  “Maybe he da same guy?”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  Before I left, Alana told me that another animal control officer had heard rumors of a dog hoarder on the Hāmākua Coast who’d been stealing animals from shelters at Kona and Waimea. But this operator was different. He didn’t just steal and hoard pets, he sold them to hunters of pig and wild boar, and to trainers of fighting dogs. The hoarder was a traumatized Gulf War veteran who drifted to Hawai‘i after the war and never left. How he had ended up, years later, stealing dogs on the Big Island, no one knew.

  It sounded to me like Picket might match the profile of this trafficker in stolen pets.

  “I go check ‘em out.” I headed for the door.

  Alana replied, “Maybe he Lolo.” By which she meant crazy.

  “Maybe.” I waved goodbye.

  “Be careful,” she called after me.

  * * *

  I pulled away from the shelter and drove up the windward coast. A half dozen seaside villages drifted by before I reached Laupāhoehoe. At the once-booming sugar town’s most famous landmark, Laupāhoehoe Point Park, windswept ironwoods and palms clung to a craggy black point in the turbulent sea. The Point’s rugged beauty wasn’t speaking to me today. I was heading mauka, or inland, in search of a man I didn’t really want to meet.

  I followed Picket’s directions to a fifties-style diner called Locals Only Café. Over the sweetly-sad blare of Ricky Nelson’s “Poor little Fool” on the jukebox, I asked a waitress dressed in a pink carhop outfit where I might find a man named Sammy Bob who sold dogs.

  “Oh, dat guy.” She frowned. “Why you want ‘em fo’?”

  “I looking for one golden retrievah.”

  She gave me a curious look and said she only knew general directions—up the sloping land mauka off the highway. She’d heard that Picket was hard to find. From the expression on her face and the way she talked about him, I could tell Picket wasn’t her friend. In fact, I figured she didn’t like the guy. So I wasn’t worried she would tip him off that I was coming unannounced.

  My plan was not to call and not to link myself with the lost dog. I would just show up as a guy wanting to buy a retriever.

  I drove up a narrow blacktop called manowai‘ōpae Homestead Road. It wandered deep into the country until there was nothing but fields and woods on either side of me. The pavement ran out. I turned onto a dirt road and kept wandering, dust kicking up behind my rental car. There was nothing much out there, aside from overgrown cane fields and woods. Even if Picket didn’t steal dogs, his seclusion suggested he had something to hide.

  Eventually the road turned into a tire-rutted trail and then a dry creek bed. Soon I couldn’t even tell if there was a road at all. The woods were thick. I was going into nowhere. I reached instinctively for my Smith & Wesson and then remembered that I hadn’t packed it. The hassle of flying inter-island with a handgun.

  I was cursing myself for getting lost—maybe I should have called Sammy?—when I saw a shack far off through the trees. I stopped my car in the creek bed and started walking into a jungle. The green canopy grew darker and more tangled. I began to hear dogs whining and smelled the now-familiar odor I’d whiffed at Lou’s puppy mill. I hoped the breeze that brought the stink my way would also keep my scent from the dogs’ keen noses.

  In a clearing a rotting plantation shack stood ringed with trash. Between the shack and me were the remnants of a bonfire and what looked like charred dog collars and blackened tags and licenses. Beyond the shack was dog city. Or dog ghetto. Animals were everywhere: tied to rusted out vehicles, a cast-off refrigerator and stove, and plywood crates. There must have been three-dozen dogs in plain sight and more hidden elsewhere.

  I scanned the crowd for Kula, keeping far enough away and out of sight to avoid the barking frenzy that I knew would erupt if I was sniffed or spotted. None of the dogs even remotely resembled Kula. If any were purebreds, I couldn’t tell. The animals were skin and bones. Some faintly resembled breeds I’d seen before, but their emaciated bodies and mangy fur rendered them all pitifully alike.

  Before that moment I couldn’t have imagined animals in worse condition than those at Lou’s puppy mill. But here they were, staring me in the face. I’d never been an animal rights advocate, but scenes like these might make me one. And more were coming.

  Staked close to the shack were two bony pit bulls tied with leather leads. Their jaws were huge. One was white with a black spot and the other tan. Their pale yellow eyes reminded me of the tiger shark that attacked me at Laniākea. I must have gotten too close because, suddenly, their big jaws gaped, their lips curled, and out came their teeth. The leather straps tightened with a frightened snap. Attack mode. Pit bulls sometimes get a bad rap for being predators, but this pair seemed worthy of the reputation.

  As the two dogs pulled and snarled, the shack’s door flew open and a man stepped out with a double-barrel shotgun.

  “Whut n’ hell . . .” He pointed the shotgun at me.

  I froze. He was the embodiment of the redneck voice I’d heard on the phone: stringy gray hair, greasy beard, scabby limbs scorched by the sun, cigarette dangling from his lower lip.

  “Listen up. Ah gonna shoot yah ass, whoever yah are . . .” He sighted down both barrels.

  twenty-two

  “Don’t shoot, Sammy Bob . . .” I tried to calm him. “It’s me, George.”

  “George who?”

  “I called yesterday. You said you’d show me some dogs.”

  “Dang-it, George.” He lowered his shotgun. “Ah tol’ yah to call me from the café. Doan yah remember nothin’? How n’ hell did yah fine me?”

  “I asked in town. Somebody said you were up here, so I just drove.” I stepped into the clearing as he walked toward me. The stink coming off him was nearly as strong as the stink of his dogs.

  “Alright, George.” He scratched his greasy hair to help himself remember. “You was look’n for a golden retriever, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Ah kin give ya a better deal then them pet stores, or them fancy high-priced breeders. You jus’ come with me. Ah gonna put mah gun in the house. You doan gotta worry none. Jus’ come with me.”

  He set his shotgun inside the door and led me back toward the cobbled kennels. On the way we walked by the two pit bulls, who went ballistic. I jumped back. Their leather straps snapped so tight again I thought they’d break. I’d have preferred chains.

  “Stay back! They’ll take ya hand off,” Picket said. “Ah otta know.” He held up his left hand, whose middle finger was missing above the first knuckle. “Them dang pit bulls hate everybody, ah tell you. They’d eat me alive, if ah let ‘em loose.”

  “Why do you keep them around?” I was curious.

  “Good question, George. You’d a thunk ah’d kilt ‘em awready. But ah can’t. Them’s worth too dang much money as fight’n dogs.” He chuckled. “If they doan kill me firs’.”

  “So where are your retrievers?” I scanned the makeshift kennels.

  “Ah doan keep my goldens out here. No way, boy. Them there dogs is fer hunt’n an’ fight’n. Or fer folks that gotta hanker’n to et ‘em. Nah, ya doan wan’ none of them.”

  He turned us around and walked to the door of his shack. “Come on in, hear?” He motioned me to follow.

  His shack was no larger than my Waikīkī studio apar
tment. Now I’m not the tidiest housekeeper, but Sammy Bob didn’t bother at all. Trash was everywhere, piled up to heights that would make even Mililani Lou green with envy. But he didn’t go in for rum like she did. His drink of choice was Kentucky bourbon. Empty quart bottles seemed to float like ghost ships on the sea of litter that was his floor. Maybe that’s what he’d been drinking when he first called me. Anyway, his place reeked like something had crawled inside and died.

  “Wanna smoke?”

  I shook my head as he lit a cigarette. The shack filled with smoke; there wasn’t much ventilation. I looked up and saw two tiny holes in the roof to which the smoke ascended. He then led me to an adjoining room, no more than a closet, where a half dozen animals were curled up on newspapers.

  “This here’s some purebreds, George. Them’s nice dogs.”

  When I looked in, the animals cowered. A skeletal black creature that might have been a Labrador glanced up at me fearfully. Another with the brown and black markings of a Rottweiler squealed faintly. The rest hardly moved a muscle. I couldn’t tell if they were drugged or traumatized or just weak from lack of food, water and fresh air. I tried to pet the black dog, but he recoiled from me.

  That feeling of revulsion I had had looking at his outdoor dogs came back again. Only stronger. I wanted to turn away, but didn’t.

  “I don’t see a golden here,” I said.

  “Hold on, George. Thought ya might like to see that-thar nice lab. Goldens is in the nex’ room.”

  Picket slid open a door to a group of smaller animals. I saw what looked like a mangy Maltese, a dirty cocker spaniel with cheerless eyes, and a toy poodle with long, matted hair. Another sad sight. I tried not to show Picket what I was feeling.

  “Nah, nex’ room.” He opened a third door to the bathroom. “Now, this here’s what ya look’n fer, George. I gots two. Take yer pick for six hundert. Cash and carry, boy.”

  On the grungy floor curled up around a toilet and pedestal sink were two golden retrievers—thin and dull brown. Both lay unnaturally still. Compared to the photo of Kula, those famished animals looked like victims of a concentration camp—a Dachau for dogs. It made me sadder than sad. But I tried not to show it.