Fire Beach: Lei Crime Book 8 (Lei Crime Series) (17 page)

They still hadn’t found Anela Chang. Apparently, Ray had let her out of the SUV along the road, because investigators had found a hidden shed with evidence a quad vehicle had been parked there. Fresh tracks led back onto the road and then disappeared.

Anela could be anywhere, probably traveling under a fake ID and trying to get off the island. If she and Ray were as competent and organized as they seemed to be, she’d have assets stashed somewhere.

Lei tried not to let it worry her, but she’d had run-ins before with enemies who just wouldn’t give up, and the Changs were the most persistent she’d ever dealt with. She was glad Ohale had assigned a patrol officer, now sitting outside Stevens’s room.

Lei needed to touch him. She sneaked her hand up under the plastic tent, scooting to the edge of the chair bed so she could tangle her fingers in his, gently, so as not to wake him.

Her eyes were drifting shut again when she felt his fingers leave hers, and her hand was pushed out. It fell back into her lap.

She sat up, but in the darkness she still couldn’t see if his eyes were open. His breathing had changed, though.

“Are you awake?”

No answer.

She lay back down, troubled. He was still mad at her, and she hated that.

It was a long time before she fell back to sleep.

Morning had come, filling the room with moist, rainy Hilo dawn, when Lei next woke. A nurse was working on Stevens, hooking up a cannula for oxygen. Lei watched as she took his vitals, checking his eyes and down his throat, murmuring softly to tell him what she was doing as she worked. Finally, when the oxygen was turned on, the nurse disassembled the tent.

“Oh, you’re awake,” she said warmly to Lei. “Looks like you could use a shower. You’re welcome to use the one in the bathroom.”

“Thanks,” Lei said. One glance at Stevens’s face showed her that his icy blue eyes hadn’t thawed. She felt too tired to deal with it at the moment. She went to the bathroom and got into the tiny shower stall. The flow of warmish water felt heavenly, but it was awful to dry off with the tiny, thin towel afterward and have to get back into her filthy clothes. She’d go change at the motel. She wanted to go into the station to listen to Ray Solomon’s interview, which she heard was going to be held this morning with his lawyer present.

Dressed, rubbing her dripping hair with the towel, Lei faced Stevens. “I’m going back to the motel and then into the station for a while. I’ll be back to see you at lunch.”

She waited a long minute. He’d closed his eyes, pretending to be asleep, and didn’t answer. She left, her injured eye leaking tears she didn’t notice until they wetted her shirt.

Chapter 17

L
ei sat in the observation room at an old Formica counter riddled with cigarette burns from the old days when smoking was allowed. The local DA sat beside her, playing with his phone as he watched the participants gathering. A tinny audio feed piped in the arrival of Ray Solomon, in a wheelchair pushed by his lawyer, a Mainland transplant called Munson. Captain Ohale and one of his detectives, Lono Smith, were conducting the interview. Lei remembered Lono from when she used to work in Hilo. He was still lean and tall but sported a bushy mustache now. He started in.

Lono: “We have your crew in custody. They’re eager to make deals, so why don’t you be the first and tell us about your operation?”

Solomon: “I don’t hear a deal there.”

Ohale: “Well, we hear Anela Chang was the brains of your operation. Where is she?”

Solomon: “We’re family. I’m not throwing Anela under the bus.”

Lono: “We have a witness who will testify Anela was the real boss.”

Solomon: “Who’s that? They don’t know shit.”

Munson: “Don’t say anything more. We still don’t hear a deal here.”

Ohale: “We don’t have to make a deal, actually. You don’t have anything we want but Anela Chang’s location. We have all we need to bury you and your operation already.”

A long pause. Lei glanced over at the DA. He was a small, dapper Japanese man she’d been briefly introduced to as Tobita. “Going to offer him a deal?” Lei asked.

“We’ll see.” Tobita shrugged. His eyes still flicked back and forth between the tableau in the interview room and his phone.

Solomon: “I was in charge. Anela is a glorified secretary, though she’d be pissed to hear me say it.”

Munson: “Don’t say anything more, sir!”

Solomon: “I want to tell them like it is. What the hell, right? So yeah. I took over my dad’s operation. My dad, Terry Chang. The real, original Terry Chang, not that lame-ass computer kid living up at the family house.”

Lei winced inwardly, thinking how much Terence Chang would hate hearing this. She hoped he never did—it was that kind of comment that might provoke him into criminal action, feeling like he had to prove something. She still remembered the first time she’d met Terence, as an angry teen tagging buildings, then later in a red do-rag, brandishing a .357 Magnum. He’d “gone straight,” but she sensed it wouldn’t take much to have him resume the family business, and Ray Solomon’s taunts could be a trigger.

The interview continued, with Solomon talking in detail on how he ran the business—the meth manufacturing in particular. She perked up and paid attention when Solomon described the gambling operation. This was the case that had originally brought her to the Big Island, and now he was handing it to her on a platter.

“We get protection money from businesses, and my tech department works up profiles on the business owners, figures out what we can tap them for. Then we set up profile-driven gambling to rope them in. It’s a low-overhead operation. We have a couple of guys providing muscle and a couple of techies running the games and PayPal accounts. It’s a nice, passive income stream.”

Lei narrowed her eyes even as she took notes. Plainly, there were going to be some suspects she needed to interview from the people they’d rounded up at the compound—unless that “department” was housed elsewhere.

It was at the disclosure of specifics that Solomon clammed up. “Given you enough for today,” he said. “But you can see Anela’s role is small.”

Lei wondered if he was trying to get the attention off Anela. What could his motivation be? She frowned, concentrating on the physical wreck that was Ray Solomon. He appeared confident and self-contained, even in a prison-orange coverall that barely contained his mass.

“Mr. Solomon has given you more than enough to earn some reduced charges,” Munson piped up finally. “What concessions can you give us for information that will actually help this case move forward in court?”

“Let me check with the DA.” Ohale got up and picked up the phone off the wall. It buzzed on the counter in front of Tobita.

“I don’t have anything to offer him unless he wants to give up Anela Chang,” Tobita said. “I’m still not convinced he’s the main man.”

Lei’s estimation of Tobita went up.

Ohale came back and sat at the table. “The DA has nothing to offer you at this time. So far we are charging you with drug manufacturing and trafficking, attempted murder of a police officer, racketeering, and grand larceny.”

Solomon’s full face reddened and his eyes seemed to swell with rage. Then he tipped his head back and laughed. “Bring it on,” he said. “I’m done talking.”

They tried a few more times, but Solomon simply turned his wheelchair away from the table. The interview was over.

“I agree with you,” Lei said to Tobita. “He’s protecting Anela Chang. But why?”

“You’ll have to catch her and see,” the Japanese man said, stroking his phone with a thumb. “This should be interesting.”

“Well, I most likely won’t be there to see it,” Lei said. “My case is the online gambling on Maui.”

“It was good to meet you, then,” Tobita said. “Good luck.”

Lei waited to go out of the observation room until Solomon and his lawyer had rolled down the hall ahead of her as he was taken back to the local jail. His hearing was going to be tomorrow, and she had no doubt the bail was going to be exorbitant.

Ohale and Lono Smith joined her. “How’s Stevens?” Ohale asked.

“He’s going to be fine,” Lei said. “They told me he’ll be discharged this afternoon. Hey, I’m wondering if you rounded up anyone in the raid that seems like the techies he was talking about.”

“They didn’t exactly have departmental badges on,” Ohale said. “But I’ll keep you in mind as we sort out the perps and their charges.”

They walked down the familiar worn hall into the beehive of cubicles in the main room.

“As long as you prosecute them and the gambling stops on Maui, I’ll consider this case closed,” Lei said. “We’ll be going home tomorrow. Got a baby who needs us, and a house that needs rebuilding. See you, Captain.”

He clapped her on the shoulder so that she staggered. “Good to work with you again, Hurricane Lei.”

“Haven’t heard that one,” Lono said. “Got to be a story there.”

“Oh, there’s a story, all right,” Lei said with a grin as she headed for the door. “But I’ll let the captain tell it.”

The bright bougainvillea and fern trees that decorated the parking lot gave it a tropical feel, but it was what it was: a tired, older area in a bad part of Hilo. She stopped, breathed in the moist, fresh air that smelled uniquely Hilo, and found herself scanning for her silver Tacoma in the lot out of habit. She’d gone through two of the vehicles since the one she bought here on the Big Island what felt like a dozen years ago.

Lei thought of Dr. Wilson, who lived and worked in Hilo, and wondered if she’d have time for a quick visit with her former therapist—but she didn’t want to get into telling that astute woman the situation that existed between her and Stevens. She needed to get back to him at the hospital, anyway.

Lei wished she thought he’d be happy to see her.

Stevens hated getting into the wheelchair and having Lei push him down the gleaming linoleum halls of the hospital for checkout late that evening. They’d eaten dinner in the cafeteria. He hoped it was his last hospital meal for a while.

Stevens somehow managed not to speak to her the whole time the doctor had met with them and explained the course of his recovery. He’d been prescribed rest, extra oxygen until the lungs healed enough to process air more effectively, and a course of antibiotics in case of a secondary infection. Follow-up visits to their doctor on Maui had been set up, and now they were heading back to Lei’s motel.

He sucked a careful breath through his nose, but it still hurt because the blow to his back from the round during the raid had bruised his already-inflamed lungs. The extreme exertion of running out of the compound had finished him off. SWAT had picked him up, collapsed on the side of the road, out of pity.

All of this was because of Lei.

Hearing her walking behind him, her hands on the wheelchair grips, he had to admit she’d been right. She’d pulled this off. Pushed the envelope all the way out there to find answers and eliminate their enemy while he stayed at home with the baby and barely got out of their burning house alive. Then he’d worked himself over physically and never accomplished a thing to help or protect his wife.

Stevens felt weak. Useless. He wanted to hate her for it. He couldn’t quite do that, but he could give her the cold shoulder for a while, even knowing his reaction was childish.

Lei completed the checkout process and sighed as she folded the hospital bill and put it in her pocket. “At least major medical kicked in on this. It was all covered.”

He didn’t answer.

She pushed the wheelchair through the sliding front doors of the hospital. Out in the entrance, light, blowing rain kissed Stevens’s cheeks and tossed the decorative palms in the parking lot. The sun had gone down, and the sky was the black of Tahitian pearl. He smelled that lush, green smell that was Hilo, feeling a pang of nostalgia for his time living here.

“Wait here. I’ll bring the car,” Lei said.

Stevens didn’t obey. He stood slowly, picked up the oxygen canister, and walked down into the parking lot. Lei walked alongside him, glancing up at him with a frown.

“Stubborn. You don’t even know where I parked the car.” She caught his hand and tugged it. “Over here.”

Just getting to the car winded Stevens, and once in the car, he shut his eyes and focused on getting his breath back as she got in her side and started the car. “You’re not going to believe what a dive we’re in.”

He didn’t answer. It was all he could do.

She drove them to a cut-rate motel under the banyan trees where she’d been staying. He waited in the car while she went in and paid for another night. The doctor had said he wasn’t in shape to deal with going to the airport tonight, and even he knew it.

She came back. “Follow me.” She didn’t open the door for him or try to help, and he was fiercely glad of it. He didn’t want her help.

She unlocked the faded turquoise door of a room on the second floor. A queen-sized bed parked in the middle of the room was covered in a striped, dark spread. A rickety chest of drawers and a plastic-covered armchair with a lamp beside it completed the decor.

“Home sweet home,” she said.

“We need another room,” Stevens rasped out.

“Why?”

“Need two beds.”

“Since when do we need two beds?”

He stepped inside and ignored her, going to the phone. He picked up the handset and dialed for the front desk.

She snatched the handset out of his hand and plunked it down. “I know you’re pissed. Say what you’ve got to say. Let’s get this over with.”

He picked the phone up, dialed again. “We need a room with two beds,” he said to the front desk. Lei huffed out a breath, muttering, and stomped away to pick up and throw her few belongings into her duffel bag.

The front desk directed Stevens to a room a couple doors down. “Door’s unlocked. Come pick up the key,” the front desk man said. Stevens picked up his bag and the oxygen canister and walked down the hall to the other room.

He was settled on his own double bed, stripped down to a T-shirt and boxers, the TV on, when Lei returned with the key. She set her things down and went into the bathroom.

A minute later he heard the shower running.

He thought of her in there, her face turned up into the warm water. Streams of it flowing down her breasts, which were fuller every time he saw them. Water rippling down the river of her spine, over the dimpled curves of that fantastic ass. Water gushing down those long, strong legs, over her toned arms.