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

Wally had absorbed Douglas Logan’s input at the police station. That the Japanese Yakuza had not stayed in the lanes they’d established for themselves pre-WWII. Their activity had expanded beyond the Japanese-Hawaiian communities. Ruthless and barbaric in their dispensing of violence, they were bumping up against other neighborhoods, some of them where Logan’s ranch employees lived.

And where, Wally speculated, they were rushing to fill the space that his Ka Hui family’s exit years back had vacated. Were the trafficked organs appeasements to Ka Hui, the prior ruling class, or was the prior ruling class being ridiculed, or worse yet, framed?

“… and get me an inventory of what’s in there, Magpie.”

“Everything, boss?”

“Just the guns and ammo. Especially the military-grade shit.”

18

“You sure of the address, ma’am?” the Uber driver asked.

The address was right, Kaipo’s timing was wrong. Three years too late. Three years since her last visit here, which was during the time she was handling mob cleaning projects in Hawaii for Wally Lanakai. Which begot Wally’s scorched-earth approach to keeping her sober when he realized she had an addiction problem. The Uber driver idled his vehicle in front of a sprawling ranch home on a small property in a residential neighborhood. The house was boarded up due to extensive fire damage. Halloween decorations were still on the lawn. Typical crystal meth house approach, the owners wanting to blend in, maintain a quiet coexistence, decorate for the holidays, keep the grass cut and the bushes trimmed, etc. Until, apparently, one end of the home burst into flames from a meth lab explosion in a bedroom. Amateur manufacturers, riding the wave. Meth production in Hawaii had reached pandemic proportions, proliferating in quiet neighborhoods as well as out-of-the-way barns on empty plantation farmland, operating below the radar. Everyone wanted some of the action because anyone could make the product. But not always safely.

Meth never interested her. Heroin and opium did, and the mom-and-pop business operating out of this address peddled whatever drugs could make them money. This one operation hadn’t caught Wally Lanakai’s attention. Which meant they’d sold to her back then because they hadn’t known what Wally would do to them if he found out they had.

“Hold on,” she said to the driver. Exasperated, she checked her phone, scrolled further down her contact list.

On her mind as she thumbed around her screen: Vena. Alive before Kaipo showed up on her doorstep, dead now. Too painful to accept. Kaipo needed to numb herself, right the hell now.

A few more texts to local Kauai contacts that were years old. Private phone numbers, not burners. She was using her alias. It got her only one response, and that was, I don’t know you. Not interested.

No quick fix, damn it. She closed her eyes, searched deep for a reassessment of her short-term needs.

Inconsistencies. They impinged on her guilty conscience, questioning her grasp of the situation. Her close friend had been gutted, her organs taken. Wally was in the organ redistribution business, ergo, this was Wally’s doing. But if Wally had tracked her to Vena’s, he would have waited for Kaipo to return. She’d gotten in and out with no issue.

Something was off.

Maybe it wasn’t Wally. Maybe there was a competitor. Someone a lot sloppier than him, the mess left behind on purpose to incriminate him. To expose Wally’s new business model. To expose him.

A turf war. Which meant maybe Vena’s grotesque murder wasn’t Kaipo’s fault.

But why Vena then?

“Miss, do you have another destination for me?”

More scrolling. “Yes. The Lihue landfill.”

Trash trucks idled near the gated entrance, seagulls hovered overhead, swooping and diving and peeling off to follow the scent to the mother lode itself, the two-hundred-acre landfill, a cornucopia beyond the fence. Adjacent to the landfill, a maintenance yard anchored by an orange brick building the size of a supermarket absorbed a steady diet of street sweepers and trash trucks on their way inside a separate steel cyclone fence. It was quitting time for the first shift, the sweepers parking side by side in straight lines, fanning away from the building. Kaipo took a chance, had the Uber driver leave her near the employee parking lot where she knew she’d see the workers as they exited the building. She stood just outside the fence, her back against a mustard-yellow Plymouth Duster in the first row, her arms crossed. Her face widened into a toothy grin the size of a harmonica when she picked someone out of a crowd of tired street sweeper jockeys on their approach to their cars.

“If it isn’t Birdy Tatoto,” Kaipo said before Birdy noticed her.

“My God. Kaipo, is that you?” Her friend quickly closed the distance. Long face, dark complexion, thin, looking thrift-store chic with a loose checkered top and distressed jeans. A beak-like nose. So appropriate a nickname.

“Sure is, Birdy. You look great, hon. And”—she made a production out of sniffing her face and neck while holding her shoulders in her hands—“you smell good, too. What is that, Dove soap?”

Birdy pulled Kaipo in, spoke into her shoulder as they hugged. “The county finally gave us showers and a locker room. No more stinking like an outhouse when we leave here. You look really wonderful, Kaipo. I mean—really—you look fantastic. Are you, um, you know—”

“Sober? Yes.” Her smile turned upside down, then it returned. “It’s a struggle every day, Birdy. Two years, four months, twenty-eight days. Every day a new trigger. But you know that.”

Trigger. Bad choice of words.

Birdy, unfazed, looked at her watch. “Three years, four months, four days, and… six hours.”

Birdy was Kaipo’s Narcotics Anonymous sponsor. Pinpointing her sobriety date was telling. It was etched in Kaipo’s persona as the day Birdy had lost her boyfriend to a self-inflicted gunshot. The boyfriend’s solution to his heroin addiction. Something she and Kaipo both shared, the loss of loved ones to drugged-out suicides, although Kaipo’s lover had the decency not to do it in front of her.

Happier memories were needed. “Tell