Page 42 of Talk Story

The morning smelled of wet earth and fern, the green pepper sharpness of growing things—and under it all the mineral cool that breathed up out of the lava tubes like the land was exhaling. Somewhere high above, a pair of ‘apapane traded liquid notes back and forth across the gulch.

Meanwhile, I missed my cat.

Standing there at the lip of the trail buckling into the bulletproof vest Souza handed me, I was hit with the sharp absence of twenty pounds of tortoiseshell opinion that should have been winding around my ankles, complaining about the dew but eager to hit the trail.

Tiki was on Aunt Fae’s lap, no doubt being fed something off a plate, and I was here, and it felt wrong in a way I couldn’t explain.

And not for the first time, I found myself turning the original thing over in my mind. How in the wide world had my cat come trotting into the Ohia post office weeks ago with a potato chip of carved basalt clutched in her jaws? A genuine fragment of petroglyph, snapped clean off a stolen panel, carried in like a tribute and dropped on my desk.

Tiki ranged a long way, sure—she was a barn cat at heart, she went where she pleased—but the valley was miles from home. She couldn’t have walked the whole route. Somebody, somewhere, had handled that stone, dropped it or stashed it close enough that a wandering cat could find it, and my tortoiseshell familiar had decided it belonged to me.

As if she’d known. As if she’d reached into the whole tangled mess and pulled the one thread that would unravel it when she handed it to me with that smug expression she wore sometimes.

I’d probably never know. Some things about that cat I’d have to make peace with.

“Ready,” Keone said beside me, and I came back to the morning and the trail and the job.

“Single file,” Malia said, low. “Texeira’s orders are observe and contain, not engage. We find him, we hold position, we wait for the bird. Kat, Keone, you’re our eyes on the ground. Souza, you’ve got our six. Let’s move.”

We started down.

The trail dropped fast off the pullout, a steep root-riddled scramble that turned the first hundred yards into a careful negotiation of mud, vegetation and stone. Keone went ahead of me with the easy long-legged sureness of a man who’d run these hills as a kid, reading the ground without seeming to. I came next, and behind me Malia and her officer moved with the contained quiet of people who did this for a living.

The canopy closed over us. The light went green and underwater. The temperature dropped a few degrees as the trail bent down toward the gulch and the old cane road, and the sound of an unseen stream rose to meet us, that constant valley music of water finding its way down through black rock to the sea.

We’d gone maybe a quarter mile to where the side trail forked off toward the cave system, when my phone went off against my hip.

Not a ring. A hard insistent triple-buzz I didn’t recognize for half a second—and when I did, my whole body lit up with it.

“Stop!” I pulled the phone out. The screen was flashing a red banner I’d half-forgotten I’d set up: the notification Sophie’s alarm system was rigged to push the instant the cave sensors tripped: MOTION DETECTED—AWAWAKAPU CAVE—CAM 1.

“The alarm,” I breathed. “My alarm. It works! Somebody just walked into the chamber and tripped the cave cameras.” A grin pulled at my face that had no business being there given the circumstances, but I’d half believed the whole five-thousand-dollar surveillance setup would sit out there and never catch a thing. “Malia—we’ve got motion in the cave, right now, this second!”

Malia was at my shoulder in an instant, reading the screen over my arm. “Live?”

“Live. Camera one’s the outer chamber, just inside the entrance.” A second banner stacked under the first as I watched—CAM 2—and my pulse kicked. “There. Camera two, deeper in. They’re moving inward. Somebody’s entering the cave, right now.”

“Or somebody’s already in and moving around,” she said. “Could be Chang. Could be his people. Could be more than one.” She keyed her shoulder radio. “Airship One . . . (a beat of static) . . . be advised, we have motion confirmed inside the cave system—repeat, confirmed motion in the cave, we are proceeding to contain the entrance. Get that bird here ASAP!”

Lei’s voice crackled back, thin and wind-torn, almost drowned by engine noise. “Copy. Eight minutes out. Do not let the suspect back out the entrance.”

The careful pace was over as Malia gave a signal with her hand to move out. We picked up speed on the trail to a fast, controlled jog, the path swallowing us into deeper green, roots and wet stone flying underfoot.

Somewhere ahead of us, behind three fallen boulders and a curtain of fern, a desperate man with everything to lose had entered a dark chamber full of stolen history and tripped a wire he didn’t know was there.

If we moved fast enough, we could have him sealed inside.

I ran, with Keone ahead and the law behind and my phone flashing red in my fist, and now I was glad my cat was safe and far away—because whatever was about to happen at the mouth of that cave, it was no place for Tiki.

14

We came down the last of the side trail in a fast, quiet line and spread out near the mouth of the cave the way Malia signaled us to: she and Souza flanked the entrance with weapons low and ready, Keone and me back and to the side, out of the line of anything that might come out of that dark hole.

The three fallen boulders still half-blocked the entrance the way they had since the day they’d nearly trapped us inside. Beyond them, the cave breathed its cool mineral breath into the morning, and from somewhere back in that blackness came the sounds I’d been praying we’d hear and dreading in equal measure: the scrape of movement, a voice, the small metallic clink of someone touching something with a tool.

Victor and Madison were both in there, but were there more?

“Maui Police.” Malia’s voice cracked into the cave, amplified and doubled by the chamber. “Come out with your hands where we can see them.”