Diamond Head by Charles Knief Read Free Book Online Page B

Chawlie himself might be just a little afraid of the man. “He has entertainment company, construction company, fishing boats.”
    â€œDo the police know about this man?”
    Chawlie spat once again. “If police know anything, you think they would know where to look? Or you think they have their hands where their hands should not be?” He let that hang between us before continuing. “Besides, if police try to get into his business, he smell them right away. But you different.”
    â€œMe? How am I different?”
    Chawlie laughed and spat another time past the statue of Sun Yat-sen. “He smell a cop. He also smell another crook. He smell you he think, Hell, you no cop. You a crook!”

 
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    8
    D uchess wallowed in a slight chop, a stray trade wind ruffling the calm surface of Pearl Harbor, the breeze banging the rigging against the wooden mast. I checked the lines and went below. Duchess is all wood. There’s no fiberglass, no aluminum, no plastic on her. She is not a Tupperware boat. In a deliberate contravention of the notion that lighter is better, she has the only wooden stick in the marina. She’s an anachronism, like her owner.
    Duchess contains everything I own. She has complete stores of food and full tanks of water and diesel. To leave in a hurry it would only be necessary to slip the dock lines and motor out of the channel. I’m a confirmed nomad and I like it that way.
    Like water, food and fuel, I keep all my cash on board, a fact no one is privy to. I removed the five thousand dollars from my backpack and went forward to the chain locker. Inside, at the forward peak behind a false panel in the bulkheads, is my bank. There was nearly two hundred thousand dollars in hundreds and fifties stored there in neat, banded piles. My retirement fund. It’s a big space, and the stacks of bills looked small, considering what they would buy.
    Short term, the money would purchase a lot of shiny, pretty toys, but for the long term it wouldn’t buy much. I needed at
least five times that amount before I was satisfied. I didn’t want to spend my declining years scrambling for enough change to buy dog food. And that is a vast improvement over the ideas of the future I’d previously held. There had been a time when retirement was not a consideration. The possibility of living that long never crossed my mind. From an actuarial standpoint I’d exceeded my life expectancy several times and I’d lived my life accordingly.
    I felt ragged from too little sleep, too much alcohol and caffeine and too much pointless conversation. Chawlie’s request was an unwelcome burden and took me out of focus, whether Thompson had anything to do with Mary MacGruder’s death or not. The fight with the two local boys depressed me. My shoulder hurt. I didn’t know where to go or what to do next and I was almost too tired to care.
    A warm shower relaxed me and I headed to my bunk in the forward cabin. Something about the air disturbed me, the humidity insinuating itself around every inch of flesh the way it does when a hurricane is near.
    It didn’t have to be a hurricane. What I’d learned about Mary MacGruder was making my skin crawl of its own accord. I pulled the Atlas of Asia down from the bookshelves that lined my bunk and opened it to my favorite passage. Nestled inside a cutout was my Colt .45 1911A Gold Cup automatic pistol. I checked the load and slipped it under my pillow before I crawled naked between the percale.
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    I awoke the next morning full of purpose. Since everything seemed to be a dead end and I still didn’t have anything to take to the police I decided to find the private investigator who had visited the hotel, and see where that would take me.
    The yellow pages had only one private investigator whose name ended in A. Robert W. Souza had an address listed in Waikiki, beneath the western flank of Diamond Head. It wasn’t
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