Zero Island (Blessid Trauma Crime Scene Cleaners Book 2) Chris Bauer (free reads TXT) 📖

Wait. Vena’s phone, Kaipo’s delayed text to her… it had been a distraction. Had she missed something when inspecting the bathroom? Had she checked inside the tub…?

Back in Vena’s master bath again. She pulled back the tub’s shower curtain.

“No. My dear baby… Oh no. Vena—”

Tucked into the tub, her face and neck streaked from black hair dye, her torso splayed open bad as from a wild animal attack—her blood had pooled at the bottom of the tub, frozen there beneath the ice chunks surrounding it. Dry, not regular ice. So savage an evisceration… was it payback for harboring Kaipo? Had she been tortured? Why not wait for Kaipo to return?

She had to get out.

The Uber arrived and she climbed into the back seat with her backpack, her guns and phones tucked inside, plus a trash bag that included everything she used to clean up after herself. The car door closed. She reconfirmed with the driver a destination, held herself together until she no longer could.

The wave of guilt and remorse finally breached the levee, her eyes streaming tears from behind her sunglasses. She let them fall, unrestrained and with abandon, maintaining as best as she could a stoic appearance as her tears wet her fidgeting hands. Vena’s house faded in the rear view.

“You okay, miss?” the driver said, focused on her in the mirror.

“Turn at this next corner, please. Stop the car and wait while I make a quick call.”

Kaipo opened the door, stood outside for privacy, and made an anonymous 9-1-1 call to report finding Vena’s body. Back inside the car—

“Let’s go. A different address than what I gave you, please. It’s not as far.”

She wanted a drink, she wanted drugs, she needed to numb her conscience into the next millennium.

15

At Home with the Waumami Family. It would make a wonderful weekly radio program, Ella had often told Ben. She pulled apart more lobster meat, fed herself from the comfort of her canvas lounge chair. She and Ben were on the beach, a campfire between them. They’d scattered their rock lobster shells within tossing distance, which was also within picking-up distance, because that’s what they would be doing after they finished their dinner. Always leave your environment cleaner than it was before you entered it. Another Logan family saying, and a good one. It kept Miakamii the paradise that it was.

“Just like that Prairie Home Companion on the radio, my love. I miss that program so much. Horseback riding, farming, picket fences, porches, bicycles. Our bees. The island’s livestock. Our shell jewelry. Our church services.”

“Indeed,” Ben said. “People could learn how little they need to enjoy their lives.”

They had radio feeds from the mainland, had an old Philco tabletop, a Cathedral model, with a battery backing up its solar-generated power; a few stations at least. They’d listened to Garrison Keillor religiously while he was still on the air. The Philco was good enough for their parents for entertainment, and their grandparents, so it was good enough for Ella and Ben.

The sun to their backs, low in the sky, reflected off the glistening swells of the Pacific rising and falling between their island and Kauai. A different reflection caught Ella’s eye.

“Some late-day company,” she said. The glint of binoculars from one location, a boat. Something they were accustomed to because of the scrutiny the island received. “More voyeurs, Ben.”

“Interested in watching us eat our dinner. They’re harmless. I saw them motor up then stall their engine.”

Always under a microscope. Something the past and present Prohibited Island residents had to live with; decades and decades of busybodies. Distant envy at their little paradise.

Time to give these gawkers a little show, Ella thought. Let them see the Miakamii savages doing what savages do.

She removed her hunting knife from its hand-sewn leather sheath, all ten inches of shiny steel, and began picking her teeth with it. Ben used his own hunting knife to remove the meat from another spiny lobster shell. These were their standard responses to behavior that was so rude and presumptuous. After their displays, Ella retrieved her binoculars to give their observers a taste of what it felt like to be watched.

“Benign tourists, Ben honey,” she said, lowering her spyglasses.

“Yes. But something has changed.”

Ben reached for and found his wife’s hand and gave it a loving squeeze, the two of them enjoying the last rays of sunlight slipping below the tree line behind them, illuminating the ocean, a sparkling, tropical postcard view.

“Ella dear, I must give you my regrets. It’s been a wonderful dinner. I want to check on a few traps, maybe stop into the church before we retire. Would you mind—”

“I’ll clean up and put out the fire, sweetie. I’m going to relax here a little longer.”

Ella awakened with a minor start, the sea in front of her dark now below the stars, the lights of Kauai on the horizon. She’d drifted off to the rolling waves and a pleasant breeze, the tide on the rise but not a challenge to where they’d placed their chairs for their evening dinner. The noise of an airplane engine had jerked her awake, was gaining strength. Not a jet, but rather a piston-driven propeller aircraft. Ella concentrated on the sound.

“A Staggerwing,” she said to herself, satisfied at having identified it by the engine noise. A Beechcraft product, a biplane revered for its beauty and performance and place in Americana, the model dating from the thirties and forties. She’d familiarized herself with many aircraft sounds after repeated visits to Hawaiian island hangars over the years. “How nostalgic,” she said before settling back into the white noise of her dreamland’s soundtrack.

The noisy engine sounds morphed. Ella’s eyes opened again, were slits, her foggy brain analyzing brassy bursts of gunfire somewhere in her dream, layering them into hazy memories of childhood days at school and in church, and in the fields on the island. Oddly enough, they fit into all of it, much