I'M GETTING CLOSER TO MY HOME
“...I’ve been lost now, days uncounted...”
‘Moral ambiguity,’ that was my answer when Boy asked me about the contract I fulfilled on behalf of Edmund Poli, and yet I ended up killing Edmund too? I interrupted a long lifeline of Poli’s money which kept police officers and politicians happy. Imagine that? A Hawaiian man with money to move and shake the powers that be, someone who sways the tide of business and politics? That was Edmond Poli; in another lifetime he would have been a ruling monarch, a high ranking Ali’i, but he was a mob boss who for the sake of appearances, went legit.
In his long career, he’s caused many a family to lose a father, a husband, a brother, and a son. Why was Jerry Hovan any different? No doubt he was like any other accountant who got smart and figured out how to re-direct his bosses money to a dummy account. For Jerry, it was ten million dollars and he had to go into hiding, finding him or anyone else isn’t too difficult once you figure out what their vice is. Vices are a great way to lay out the bait, the fish come around eventually and the rest is gravy. I keep a low profile so that no one knows who I am, and for those who contract with me, they know well enough not to rat me out. It’s written in fine print when I first do business with someone, that way there’s no misunderstanding if I have to show up at their doorstep and kill them point blank. Boy had a person who he thought was a friend but it turned out that he was a snitch who tried to give me up to a seasoned police detective, luckily he didn’t know all the details and he didn’t know who I was. But who knows who else he may have told? I’ll have to pull that trigger when I get a clear shot, so to say.
….………
The contract is a drug dealer, it’s usually the kind of contract I don’t take a second look at. People in that world have a good habit of taking each other out like rats in a barrel. There’s really no need for someone like me, but this one caught my attention. His own family took out the contract and they want him gone; unless the wife and kids are involved in manufacturing and distributing the product, then I would say that they are probably victims of it. It’s a Kapolei address right off of Farrington on a street called Oaniani, the garage is empty and there doesn’t seem to be anyone home, except that there’s a tall Hawaiian girl standing out front. She looks to be all of sixteen years old, the pigtails don’t make her seem out of place at all but the only odd thing about her is her Togepi Lapras Pokemon back pack. She watches me as I circle the block twice before parking down the road a piece. When I finally walk up to the drive way she approaches me with an air of impatience, “I’m the contract, you’re the guy right?”
I look her over but I don’t reply right away and I can see she’s annoyed. “The contract for the family and drug dealer?”
“Right,” In situations like this I keep the talk down to one-word answers.
“The family is at a safe house,” she continues. “There’s still a bunch of crackheads in there that I need to be gone before I can get rid of the drug dealer.”
“I’m pretty sure that the contract was for me to get rid of the drug dealer on behalf of the family,” I interrupted. To emphasize my point I removed my gun from the inside of my coat and held it in my right hand as we spoke. For a teenage girl, she wasn’t fazed in the least, “You have that contract on you?”
“Yeah,” back to the one-word answers again.
“Well? Let’s take a look at it and see where you went wrong?” I took the safety off my 9mm and clicked the hammer back while I reached in my other pocket and removed the contract. Undeterred by my weapon, the girl stepped forward and snatched the contract from my hand. She glanced at it and handed it back to me, “Read it again and this time ACTUALLY read it.”
She was right, the contract stated that it was ‘A’ family that needed the help, it was not the family themselves who signed the contract, it was her.
“What about wanting the father gone?” I’m sure my voice was filled with acidic irritation but this girl’s demeanor told me that she’d been through a few things herself and such a young age. It’s probably why she wasn’t bothered by my sunny personality.
“The details of that are too touchy to write on a contract; your part in this is to go in there and clear the house of all the crackheads so that I can deal with the father,” she instructed.
“How exactly are you going to do that?” I was curious now, for someone who talked so big, I wanted to see how she was going to back it up.
“If you’d go in there and do what I ask, then you can watch while I work,” half sarcasm and half confidence but all balls, you gotta love it.
“Get rid of or clear?” I had to be sure like I said before, people ask for one thing when they really mean something else.
“Clear,” she said. “Like getting rid of acne.”
….……..
Good thing these crackheads were sober, they reacted well to the sight of my 9mm and screamed pretty good when I took to their joints with my steampunk hammer. They cleared out in no time but I found it strange that they left with no threats of coming back in order to exact their revenge. The girl was in the house before I even knew she was there, I had no idea that she’d gone upstairs until I heard thundering footsteps coming down the stairs mixed together with her screams.
“Close the basement door! Close the basement door! Close the basement door!” I could hear her and someone else coming, she was chasing somebody. I kicked the basement door shut and drew my 9mm, waiting to see whoever it was that was about to hightail it into the kitchen. Maybe just the sight of my Kel-Tec P11 alone will be enough to stop this person dead in his tracks. To my surprise, it wasn’t a person, well, I mean it was a person but he wasn’t flesh and blood anymore. His body was covered in prison tattoos and he wore a pair of white prison shorts with nothing on his feet and he was completely transparent. This was the ghost of the husband and father who was also the drug dealer on the contract. He came to a sliding stop in front of the closed basement door and only had a moment to look at me in fear before he turned his attention to the girl who had just entered the kitchen. At that point, his back was now facing me and he had a big gaping hole in the back his head, just where the neck and the skull met. The girl had a medium sized square mirror in both hands and held it up for the ghost of the drug dealer to see.
“See your true self as you are, not as you want the world to see you!” The ghost's face went wide and his mouth dropped, in the reflection was a little boy who was terrified at what looked back at him from reality. From inside the mirror, the child saw the grown-up version of himself and a deep dark despair consumed him, from reality the ghost of the drug dealer saw the child in the mirror morph into a demon with red eyes and black scales for skin. I wouldn’t have believed it if I didn’t see it with my own eyes. The girl lifted the mirror over her head and threw it to the floor where it shattered into nothing but shards. The drug dealers ghost let out a scream that I will never forget, and I've heard screams of pain that will turn you white, but nothing like this. His apparition was gone soon after.
….……..
Twenty minutes later and the girl and I are sweeping up all the glass and using wet paper towels to pick up any of the smaller pieces we might have missed. Afterward, she made the two of us some sandwiches and bought a six-pack of soda that we took out to the front driveway. We sat on a couple of chairs and enjoyed our meal, the sun was setting and I found that it was nice to have a moment to breathe.
“You saw it didn’t you?” She had a maturity about her this girl, she was plucky and funny.
“Saw what exactly?” I knew what she meant but I wanted to hear her explanation, but she was one step ahead of me.
“Don’t play dumb, it doesn’t work for you. You saw that thing in the mirror which means that you saw the embodiment of evil, but it saw you too. Your life is never going to be the same after this,” there was that unshakable confidence again.
“I’ve seen the evil that men do and how it lives after them, but nothing like today. It’s like the face of everything that happens for the bad, except it wasn’t behind the scenes, it was right there in front of me,” It was a nice feeling to share something like this without being laughed at, not that anyone was ever stupid enough to laugh at me. “How’d you get here by the way? You need a ride home?”
“No,” she smiled. “My ride should be here any second.”
Exactly on cue, a black Chrysler Imperial Crown drives up and sitting behind the wheel is the guard from Boys office. I look at the girl again and I can’t help but ask, “Who are you? I never got your name.”
She extended her right hand while finishing off her sandwich with the other, “Tabby Kahana, but hopefully Napualawa. I think my uncle is going to make me his hanai.”
I had to know so I had to ask, “Which Napualawa ?”
“Boy Napualawa,” she smiled. “You kinda remind me of him actually, except that you’re kinda weird around females aren’t you? ”
She stood up and thanked me for my help and reached into her backpack and removed a thick envelope and handed it to me. “That’s your taste,” she said. She jumped into the back seat of the car and waved, the guard looked at me and smiled and then shook his head almost as if to say that he knew something important that I didn’t know and was probably never going to find out about.
….……..
“Hello?” The voice answered on the other end. I was more than irritated at this point and I wanted answers. “You told me to keep things tight and yet today I find out that my contract is not from the family who I thought took it out, it was your niece, Tabby! Are you TRYING to get people smart about me?”
“She needed extra help, so I gave her your information. You two made a good team, no one is going to know that it was you out there.” Boy, ever behind the scenes moving the chess pieces around; he had this planned all along.
“Alright, but do me a favor? In the future, no more contracts with any of your family members okay?”
….…….
The line went dead after that, Boy looked at his phone and said, “They’re your family too, you just don’t know it yet.”
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