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“True.” Dylan snorted. “Think we should rescue her?”
“Nah. Maybe she’ll learn a thing or two in between all the bullshit.”
“That’d be good. She’s a hard worker, man, but damn” — Dylan nodded at Andy, who was now at the sunscreen rack, eying a tub of Mr. Zog’s Sex Wax with suspicion — “she doesn’t know dick about surfing.”
Luke frowned at his boy. “It’s only been a week. How ’bout you cut her some slack, bro?”
“How ’bout you bite me, haole?”
“Only if you taste like coconuts and pussy, Lahaina.”
There was a moment where they stood there mugging each other by the workbench. Then Dylan cracked a grin. “Coconuts and pussy?”
“Just rolled off the tongue.”
Dylan’s chin dropped, a rare burst of laughter exploding from him as his eyes pinched shut.
It was moments like these Luke lived for. Getting his more stoic best friend to crack. He and Kyle were forever poking the bear.
“Oh my god,” Dylan wheezed. “You have a dirty-ass tongue.”
Luke gave a vulgar wag of the appendage in question. Dylan shot away from the bench. “Alright. I need a cig break.”
“You’re supposed to do that after we consummate our relationship.”
Dylan snorted as he grabbed his smokes from the workbench.
“That’s your one for the day, right?” Luke called after him as he headed for the back door.
“Yes, Mommy.”
Luke sighed as the man disappeared through the emergency exit. He and Kyle had been trying to get Dylan to give up the nicotine for years, but while they had their vices, their buddy had his, and it had been a hard habit for Dylan to break considering both his parents had smoked.
While his dad, Lio, had managed to stop cold turkey in his thirties, Dylan’s mom, Colette, had not and suffered from pretty bad COPD as a result. Of course, that might be the least of her problems considering all the other drugs she was addicted to.
It hadn’t always been so. Aside from the smoking, Colette had been clean when the Kaheles had first moved from Maui into the house next door to the MacCallums when Luke was nine. That had been about a year after his father’s death. Despite her being sober, Luke hadn’t trusted Colette even back then.
Maybe this was because he’d seen something in the dark, solemn eyes of the young boy who’d used to hide outside for hours when Lio Kahele was away on one of his gigs as a commercial fisherman. Luke had seen and recognized the powerless fury in those eyes for what it was.
He’d also recognized the marks on Dylan’s body when he would finally shimmy down from the tree rooted along the fence between their bedrooms. When the bark of that old oak would snag on one of Dylan’s ratty tank tops to reveal a cluster of bruises.
Eventually, Dylan stopped climbing that tree to get away from his bitch of a mom.
Eventually, he started climbing it to hang out with Luke and Mary andtheirmom.
Eventually, they became friends.
More than friends. They became family.
Close enough that a year later, Francesca MacCallum — having spotted a fresh set of bruises one afternoon when she’d taken them all out surfing — had finally had a talk with Lio Kahele about her suspicions. About why she thought Dylan was always hanging at the MacCallums when Lio was away on the boat.
The next morning Colette Kahele was gone.
And none of them had seen her again until many years later when the shop opened, and she’d turned up trying to bum money off Dylan and looking every inch like the strung-out crack-whore she was.
Luke frowned as he thought of the woman at the top of the store’s ‘no-entry’ list. Then, as his gaze sharpened once more on the action on the CCTV, he frowned even more.
What the shit?
