Zero Island (Blessid Trauma Crime Scene Cleaners Book 2) by Chris Bauer (mobi ebook reader .TXT) 📗

bonfire. Tom dragged the man across sand and dirt, out of harm’s way, and propped him against a tree while some of the plane’s aluminum skin ignited. The rest of the plane went up like gasoline-drenched charcoal in a fire pit, the lone remaining wing left intact.

Out of breath and seated next to his new charge, Tom watched the fire. The pilot’s eyes opened behind his goggles, the dancing flames reflecting off the lenses, terror overtaking him, his shrieking protests in Japanese. He groped at a breast pocket in his aviator jacket, his hand not behaving, him unable to unbutton it. Tom did it for him, the pilot protesting, a weak attempt at resistance until the battered man drifted into unconsciousness again. Tom lifted out the pocket’s contents, some yellow papers. He unfolded them.

The markings were in Japanese, unreadable to him, but there were maps. Drawings of Miakamii, the rest of the Hawaiian Islands, and the other Leeward Islands leading west from Kauai. Small depictions of numerous U.S. warships docked in what Tom knew as Pearl Harbor on the island of Oahu.

These were the pilot’s orders. They detailed his mission, in Japanese and pictorially.

Goodness… he was returning from a bombing run…

Tom’s wife entered the clearing, called then ran to him.

“No, stay back, Lani,” he shouted in Miakamiian. “This man may be dangerous. His gun is over there. Bring it to me, then go back into the village. Find someone who can speak Japanese. And we need a stretcher. For now he will be our prisoner. We need to find out what happened to the places marked on these maps.” But he already had a pretty good idea what that was.

Lani did as told. Tom removed the pilot’s leather helmet, unzipped his flight jacket, and aimed the gun at the sleeping man’s head while he waited for him to regain consciousness.

Help arrived by way of their islander friends and someone who could read and speak a little Japanese. What would come to be known as The Miakamii Siege, an event that terrorized Miakamii’s small native population, began when a Japanese sympathizer on the island liberated their prisoner. Tom and Lani Imakila ended it with a late-night ambush, Tom hurling the pilot into a stone wall after taking three slugs from the pilot’s gun, to the groin, the stomach, and the upper leg. Lani pounced, bashing the pilot’s head with a rock. A wounded Tom finished the pilot off by slashing his throat.

Two suicides followed, both islanders of Japanese descent who had provided the pilot hospice. The pilot’s body was dumped into the channel. The islanders cannibalized the rest of the plane, spiriting away anything usable, including one aerial machine gun and its ammunition taken from a wing unaffected by the fire. When the U.S. Navy finally came to investigate, there was little left of the wreck to recover.

Internment camps opened in the islands and on the U.S. mainland shortly thereafter.

“Any chance someone was trying to get at you with this hit, Evan?”

Evan’s stern gaze met Philo’s similar countenance. “No. Hell, I don’t know. I don’t think so.” He shook his head, but Philo could tell he believed himself a little less as each second passed until he returned to the same resolve. “Better fucking not be that. No.”

On the closest Miakamiian mountain ridge, the U.S. Navy’s fully functioning unmanned radar early-warning system went through its paces 24/7, watching the skies, maintaining an all’s-clear signal. And if it ever wasn’t all clear, the installation was there to send a different message, whereby the U.S. could open its war gates of hell in response. The system was CO Evan Malcolm’s responsibility as part of the Kauai military outpost until the end of this year, when he was due to retire. North Korea, China, Russia all seemed less friendly toward the U.S. day after day. The closest physical threat to Hawaii—Japan—was now a U.S. friend, although some second- and third-generation Hawaiians would forever remain skeptical.

Patrick exited the hallway fresh from his assessment of the bedroom, spoke to Philo.

“Need a deep clean under the floor beneath the bed, sir, might even need to replace the plywood and the underlayment, maybe a blast of enzymes in the crawl space below it, too. I can get into it and take a look, sir.”

“Thanks, Patrick. Evan, we’ll look into who carries environmental cleaning supplies in the neighborhood, make some calls, scour the internet. Okay with you?”

A weak nod from Evan.

“And Philo sir?”

“What?”

Patrick held out a small, cloudy plastic drinking cup. “From the bathroom, sir. See, ah, I found this there—”

Philo and Evan looked inside the cup. “What are we looking at, Patrick? A big mothball?”

“Um, no, sir,” Patrick said. “Dry ice.”

A low fog surrounded the white-gray dry ice chunk, making the bottom of the cup look eerie. Too big for a mothball, Philo knew now, his nose in the cup. Didn’t smell like a mothball either. Didn’t smell at all. Extremely cold. A hallmark of dry ice, the solid version of carbon dioxide, was no smell. Frozen water had a smell; frozen CO2 did not.

“Why didn’t it melt?” Evan asked.

“Dry ice doesn’t melt, it sublimates,” Philo said. “Transitions from solid to a gas, no liquid form in between. Might take more than twenty-four hours to fully sublimate, depending on how large the piece or pieces were, and if there was any insulation. Any reason Miya would have dry ice in her bathtub, Evan?”

“No idea.”

“The bathroom, sir,” Patrick interjected, “it’s a mess. Something happened in the bathroom.”

They reentered the bedroom, marched to the master bath, to a door that wasn’t open during their first pass through the bedroom. “You open this door, Patrick?” Philo asked.

“Yes, sir.”

White porcelain slipper tub, standalone shower stall, toilet, a counter with two elevated basin sinks, fishhook spigots that leaned over them, his and hers mirrors above it all. Pastel blue-green walls, white wainscoting halfway up. The tile floor, also white, had black shoe scuff marks between the tub and the door. The