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He would awake soon and be able to prey on his fellow humans some other day. He might even improve his language skills.

    Of the other thief there was no sign.
    I smugly congratulated myself on the outcome of the battle. I’d taken my lumps and had given a few; one foe was vanquished, the other fled. They’d been warned early on. Only their persistence had caused them hurt. That they were both at least a quarter century younger was satisfying for the moment.
    But as I drove back toward Pearl Harbor I still felt as if I’d kicked the family dog.

 
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    5
    I t was too soon to talk to the detective in charge of the case. I didn’t yet know enough to ask intelligent questions. My level of understanding wasn’t what it should have been, and only a dose of old-fashioned hard work would remedy that deficiency.
    According to the file, Mary MacGruder had worked in one of the hotels along Waikiki Beach. The place was one of the landmarks of Hawaii, and once upon a time I’d spent a pleasant week playing tourist there with a woman I’d hoped might be the love of my life. She would have been, were I willing to settle down to a forty-hour week, pension plan, health benefits and a 401-K. She hadn’t made those demands. She hadn’t made any, but she’d expected me to make the offer, and the absence of the offer hung there between us until she got smart and went back to the mainland. I was another disappointment in her life, a familiar part for me to play.
    The hotel had seven bars, and with the sun going down it wasn’t the worst assignment I’d ever given myself, moving from bar to bar, nursing white wine and making small talk with the waitresses to find someone who might have known the admiral’s daughter. The turnover in those places is high, but there’s always one waitress who’s been there since they poured
the foundation, and in the third bar I tried, the one on the lanai next to the white sand beach, I found Louise.
    My table was about the size of a cocktail tray, wedged against some boulders between two palm trees. The bar was crowded and Louise was busy hustling drinks, but she was the kind of waitress who could talk fast and serve fast and never lose her nerve or her memory. I vaguely remembered her as a cocktail waitress from my romantic interlude here. Hers was a personality that sticks with you. You get the service, you get what you order, and if you’re any kind of interesting at all, you’ll get fast, popping sarcasm to go with it. If anyone would remember Mary MacGruder, it would be Louise.
    Security guards were shooing people off the beach while carpenters assembled a portable stage on the sand in front of the bar. Most of the big hotels have some kind of commemoration marking the end of another day in paradise. The Hilton Hawaiian Village shoots fireworks over its own lagoon and the Royal Hawaiian has a luau, complete with a roasted pig. I didn’t know what this hotel had planned for the event, and I didn’t care. The bar would be packed until the show was over, and then it would be deserted as the tourists sought their celebration elsewhere. I gave up my table to a young sunburned couple wearing matching Aloha shirts and new rings on the third fingers of their left hands.
    I removed my sandals and walked along the edge of the Pacific, watching the sun go down beyond the reef. It was another of nature’s spectaculars, something we expect as an entitlement as Kama’aina, children of the land. Clouds drifting south from Barber’s Point reflected a limitless, flamingo orange-pink sky.
    My shoulder ached. My knee hurt. Max had warned me I was getting too old for this. Maybe he was right. He would know better than most. It didn’t bring me joy, banging on those car thieves, and it didn’t bring satisfaction, either. Violence always left a bitter aftertaste, a bile from the soul. But I wouldn’t deny that part of me,