Fire Beach: Lei Crime Book 8 (Lei Crime Series) (21 page)

Using her abs, she tightened her body hard to sit up even as she reached down with her right hand to the ankle holster, pulling the little six-shot revolver and flicking off the safety as Stevens dumped her onto her feet. She tossed off the towel and spun into a shooting stance. Anela was turning to face her, weapon in hand, when Lei shot her. Lei simultaneously heard the reports of Stevens’s gun as he shot the man directly across from them and the traitor pilot sitting beside him.

Anela dropped backward out of sight as Lei turned to shoot the driver in the shoulder as he was turning, reaching for his gun, his mouth open in surprise. He keeled over, falling backward out of the open driver’s side door.

Ben, sitting beside Lei and Stevens, raised his hands in the air. His eyes were huge.

Lei grabbed the roll bar as dizziness sagged her knees. She used the bar to hold herself up as she turned her weapon on the guy across from them whom Stevens had shot. He was holding his shoulder, his mouth opening and closing, but he’d dropped the rifle.

Stevens kicked the pilot’s pistol and the Ni`ihau man’s hunting rifle out of the back of the Jeep. “We have to find something to tie them up with.”

As if to punctuate that, the driver had staggered to his feet and was making for the bushes. Lei was in no shape to chase him, so she held her weapon on the two remaining men on the bench. Stevens leaped out the back of the Jeep, running.

He hit the driver from behind, knocking him to the ground. He kept him down with a knee in his back and shouted to Lei, “I need some restraints!”

Lei looked around the Jeep and rifled the men’s pockets. She found a pocketknife in the Ni`ihau man’s pocket and gave it to Ben.

“Tear up this towel.” She handed Ben the bloodstained towel. The young man jumped to help, cutting the tough edging so that he could rip the towel into long strips.

Anela was no longer a threat; nor was she going anywhere. Lei looked away from her body and back at the two she had to keep an eye on.

Things went better after that.

Lei and Ben tied their prisoners, and Stevens secured his. All were moved to lie wedged together in the back of the Jeep, moaning from their injuries but not in danger of dying. Ben and Stevens did some rudimentary first aid as Lei gathered their cell phones and found her own, calling the 911 operator on Kaua`i again.

Once again she identified herself with her badge number.

“Did your team find the downed plane on Ni`ihau?” Lei asked.

“We did. They didn’t find anyone there but a family who’d escaped from the hijackers.”

“Well, Lieutenant Stevens and I are safe along with Ben, one of the pilots. We have the hijackers and their colleagues in custody, but we have a fatality—Anela Chang, who was hijacking the plane with the help of one of the pilots.” Lei looked around at the steep, rocky four-wheel-drive trail and the surrounding wind-scrubbed, brushy area. It looked tough to land a helicopter here. “We can drive to a better location to rendezvous, but we don’t want to leave the body—we want to leave it just where it fell for the investigation.”

Stevens, crouched by Anela’s body, looked at Lei and nodded agreement. Lei finally really looked at the fallen woman.

Anela’s pistol was still in her hand. She’d been turning to shoot, but Lei had gotten her first. There was a neat hole in her forehead from the small-caliber round from Lei’s snub-nosed ankle piece. She was sure the back of Anela’s head was messier. The woman had fallen backward out of the Jeep, and one of her feet, in a businessman’s loafer, still rested in the doorframe of the vehicle.

“One moment. Let us triangulate off your phone signal, and then the pilot will set the bird down as close to your location as he can,” the 911 operator said.

Lei sat down in the driver’s seat and felt the collective extremes of the last few days overwhelm her now that they were safe. Pain was talking to her from all over her body, but most concerning was a clenching in her guts, a punch to the lower back. She puzzled over how she could have hurt herself there, but with falling down the stairs of the plane, there was no telling.

Ben had reclaimed his phone, and they’d allowed him to call his wife—“but no one else until you give your statement.” The young man was pacing, talking, and gesticulating. Stevens had picked up one of the hunting rifles and reloaded his holsters. Bristling with weapons, he stood near, keeping an eye on their prisoners and looking out for any intruders.

Lei heard the thrum of the chopper’s approach overhead, and she looked up into the deep blue sky. Poufs of dazzling white cloud scudded by, and as she often did, Lei felt the contrast of the beauty around them and the ugliness of their humanity. She leaned her head on the steering wheel, conscious of the dead woman a few feet away, the thumping pain of her head, and of an increasing dull agony in her abdomen.

“You okay?” Stevens asked, frowning.

“I don’t think so. I think you better have them take me to the hospital. Something’s wrong.” Lei wrapped her arms around her waist and raised her eyes to Stevens, feeling her face twist at the pain and her eyes fill with terrified tears. “Something’s wrong with Baby.”

All the oxygen had gone out of the air. Stevens drew in breaths, but they just burned his lungs. He was smothering: buried, burning, drowning. He flailed, fighting for that last breath.

He woke as his thrashing elbow hit the wooden arm of the chair, sending a jangle of excruciating nerve pain up his arm. He sat up, holding his elbow in the dim glow of the hospital-room floor strip, and glanced over at the bed, hoping he hadn’t woken Lei.

She was awake. He saw the gleam of her eyes in the dim light, the shine of tears on her cheeks. He was already as close to her as he could be in the chair, but now he took her hand. “Are you hurting?” he whispered.

They’d given her some sort of medication to stop the contractions she’d been having. She’d been bleeding when they first got to the hospital, but the medicine seemed to have worked because the symptoms had backed off. Lei had refused any pain medications for her head injury, not wanting it to affect the baby.

The hours between when the helicopters had reached them and now were a painful and terrifying blur he hoped never to relive.

“Head hurts,” she whispered back. “Tummy hurts. I’m so scared, Michael. I want this baby so much. I never expected to feel this way.”

“Me too,” he said. He pulled her over so her forehead touched his, and their breath mingled in the warm space between their bodies. “But if something happens, there will be others.”

She pulled away from him, crossing her arms over her belly in that protective gesture he was coming to know. “I don’t want any others.” She turned her face away.

He wasn’t going to let her withdraw. He got up and gently moved her over in the bed, climbing in with her, turned on his side so he was wedged beside the support bars. He pulled her into his arms and, when she finally relaxed, her breath smoothing out in sleep, he wriggled them around until he was on his back and she on her side, her head in her special spot, her body stretched along his.

Warm, supported, sheltered.

He could feel their heartbeats falling into the same rhythm.

And when he finally slept, he didn’t dream.

Chapter 22

S
tevens sat with the Kaua`i detectives that had responded to the emergency call from Ni`ihau. He and Lei had been on the medevac helicopter, which had flown her to the closest hospital, Kaua`i’s Wilcox Memorial. They’d spent the night there along with the hijackers they’d shot. Stevens had turned both their peashooter revolvers in to the ballistics department, but they’d been too occupied with Lei’s crisis to give statements.

“It’s been a few years.” Lei’s former nemesis from her stint on Kaua`i, short, muscular Detective “Fury” Furukawa, clapped Stevens on the shoulder in male camaraderie. “Nice takedown out there.”

“Team effort with Lei,” Stevens said.

“Yeah. About that,” Furukawa said, flipping open a file filled with crime-scene photos of the Jeep. Anela’s body sprawled out of the vehicle, one of her feet still caught in the Jeep’s door. “How’s Lei doing?”

Stevens had the feeling Furukawa was asking strictly for form’s sake, and he was glad to know Lei’s former partner, Jack Jenkins, and Captain Fernandez, who’d always been supportive, were watching the interview. They had friends, even on Kaua`i, the most remote of the islands.

“Hanging in there. Not in any shape for an interview yet.” Stevens pushed a hand through his hair, deliberately turning his thoughts away from Lei, still curled up in that hospital bed.

“Well, then. Why don’t you start by walking us through the events.”

Stevens gave his statement, grateful when, halfway through, his union rep arrived to sit in. He didn’t entirely trust Furukawa or his sidekick, Flea, two men who’d resented his and Lei’s presence on Kaua`i when they’d worked there some years ago.

“So, when you whispered to Lei to get up shooting when the Jeep stopped, did you tell her to kill Anela Chang?”

“We were in a life-or-death situation. I told her to ‘take out’ Anela and the driver, because I thought I could push her up into a better position to shoot them than the men directly across from us, who I was in a better position to get. If I shot at Anela and the driver, I would have had to get Lei off my lap, stand up, turn, aim, et cetera. All we had was speed and the element of surprise. We were lucky it was enough.”

“I just find it interesting that Lei shot Anela in the head and the driver in the back of the shoulder.”

“We had to use deadly force. Anela has a gun in her hand, as you can plainly see, and Lei was close to her. Too close to miss.” Stevens felt his breathing hitching with agitation as he stabbed the photo emphatically with his finger.

“And yet you didn’t shoot to kill the men across from you.”

“Neither had their weapon at the ready. The Ni`ihau man had set his rifle down on his lap. The pilot had tucked his weapon in his belt. It’s a split-second decision. When I fire, I’m prepared to use deadly force in every circumstance—but I took a chance that it wasn’t necessary this time. Anela was the only one holding a weapon at the ready.”

“And she’s one of those behind the attacks on your home and family, if what the Big Island investigators say is true.”

Stevens set his jaw and didn’t answer. He didn’t like where this was going.

“So do you think a head shot was necessary to stop Anela Chang?”

The union rep finally interjected. “Lieutenant Stevens can only speak to his own actions.”

“So tell us again how you knew the plane was being hijacked.”

Stevens went through it again and again as Fury and Flea tried to find a hole, an inconsistency in the story, a variation that showed Lei and Stevens setting Anela up for slaughter—at least that’s what it felt like to Stevens. He was grateful that there were multiple witnesses, especially the pilot Ben, who could corroborate events.

Stevens’s phone had been vibrating in his pocket for the last half hour when the union rep finally brought things to a close. Stevens checked his phone. Multiple calls from Wilcox Memorial flashed up at him, and his heart rate spiked.

“Excuse me. I have to see what this is.” Stevens stood and turned away to listen to a nurse telling him to return to the hospital. “Your wife’s taken a turn for the worse.”

Stevens ran out of the interview room, hitting the door with his shoulder. Jack Jenkins, his fresh young face worried, burst out of the observation room to fall into step beside Stevens as he headed for the front doors of the building. “Take me back to the hospital. Lei’s having trouble.” The lead ball of dread and fear in the pit of Stevens’s stomach made him short of breath.

Lei didn’t want to wake up. There was some very good reason not to, and as the cottony darkness of medication receded, she tried in vain to cling to it.

But slowly, inevitably, as if an unstoppable force like the tide was depositing her on a shore, waves of consciousness pushed her higher and higher into wakefulness. And there was nothing there she wanted.

She remembered now why she didn’t want to wake up.

Baby is gone.

Lei’s whole body convulsed in a thrashing movement of self-protection as she curled up tight around her empty womb, her arms and legs pulling in close, the IV in her hand snagging on something and bringing her up short.

She opened her eyes. Stevens was there beside her. He reached a fumbling hand to untangle the plastic tubing, trying to keep the needle from ripping out of the back of her hand. She reached up to touch his face.

“Tell me it didn’t happen,” she begged.

Instant tears filled Stevens’s arctic-blue eyes and welled over. Those blue eyes, haggard under dark brows, told her Baby was gone.

“No!” Lei cried. “No! No! No!” She rolled back and forth in the bed, arms tight around herself. The IV needle broke out o
f her hand, and the rails of the bed rattled as she banged against them.

She knew her wails of grief were inappropriate and weak, and she didn’t care. Nothing existed but this terrible rending, this loss of hope, future, and love—the death of someone she’d known in a magical way, if even for a short time, and that she’d wanted to know all her life.

So many losses.
All of those losses piled on her. She was drowning in them.

Her childhood, stolen from her by abuse and drugs.

Aunty Rosario, her guardian and beloved
hanai
mom, gone so recently.

Her mother, Maylene, lost to her addiction.

Her grandmother, Yumi, whom she’d never known.

Anchara murdered.

And now Baby.

People came. There were noises and soothing hands and Stevens trying to comfort her, but nothing made any difference, nor ever would. They must have given her something, because finally, merciful darkness closed over her head.

The next time Lei woke up, it was because light was stabbing the backs of her eyes. There was a dull throbbing in her uterus. Her mouth was cottony with thirst, but she also had to pee.

She remembered.

The energy for any movement was gone. She lay still, feeling utterly flat.

Flat and mangled, like roadkill.

Flat as an open desert road with nothing for miles in any direction.

Lei opened her eyes. The room was empty, and she was relieved no one was there. She didn’t even want to see Stevens right now. She reached over and pressed the button that lifted the bed up. She noticed her left hand was bandaged where the IV had been torn out. They’d put a new one in her right hand.

Carefully, Lei swung her legs to the side of the bed and used the steel pole with its rolling wheels to help her stand, and shuffling like a crone, she went into the bathroom.

Lei’s underwear crinkled with a bloodstained pad as she went to sit on the toilet. Tears welled at the sight. She managed to pee and then got herself back into bed.

The feeling in her body, mind, and heart was like being an Egyptian mummy, she decided. Her organs had been chopped up and pulled out through her aching throat with a hook. Her body was a hollow wreck wrapped in bandages, her soul waiting for some far-from-certain resurrection.

“Ba-ba-ba!” Lei heard from the door, and her eyes flew open.

“Kiet!” she exclaimed. Stevens came toward her holding the baby. Kiet strained toward her, his mouth open with that pearly single tooth gleaming, rooster tail of black hair aquiver.

Lei folded the baby into her arms, and he felt wonderful and smelled perfect, like powder and milk. She burst into noisy tears at how good holding him felt and how utterly devastated she still was. Her emotions were a tornado, swirling and conflicted.