Free Mahu by Neil Plakcy

office, showing my badge and asking questions. Finally I found a name, hidden under layers of bureaucracy and red tape. The eventual owner of the Rod and Reel Club, once you went back through level upon level, was Tommy Pang. No other name showed up anywhere.
    By the time I got back to the station, Akoni had returned. The FBI had nothing, he said. No open investigations involving Tommy Pang, no rumors of tong wars, nothing. I told him what I’d found.
    “Doesn’t get us any farther, does it?” he said. “What now?”
    “We wait for Derek to call us back, or we call him again tomorrow. Then we start questioning Tommy’s business associates. Anybody with known tong affiliations. See if this is business-related.”
    He frowned. “You think it could be anything else?”
    “You heard Mrs. Pang. He had ‘company’ sometimes. Maybe the company had a jealous husband or boyfriend.”
    “I hate this part of a case,” he said. “Too many ways to go, no real leads. Just lots of legwork.” He started packing up his stuff.
    “Listen, Akoni, you want to get a beer? We could strategize.”
    “I gotta get home.”
    “Look, I think we ought to talk.”
    He stood up. “We got nothing to talk about. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
    He walked out, and the door shut behind him with a bang.
     

YOU’RE A CHAMP, KIMO
    I sat at my desk for a while, until Alvy Greenberg, one of the uniforms who’d been with us on the drug bust, came in and said, “Hey, Kimo.”
    Alvy was about five years younger than I was, and a surfer, too. We’d met when I’d just come back from the North Shore, when I was in the academy, and because he was maybe interested in becoming a cop we’d talked, off and on, about my experiences there. At the time he’d been a waiter, taking a couple of classes at UH, trying to decide, as I had, if he was good enough to make a career out of surfing.
    He wasn’t, either, and just before I made detective he’d entered the academy. I guess I had been kind of a mentor to him, advising him on how to deal with problems that came up, surfing with him now and then. Once in a while on a holiday weekend we’d throw our boards into my truck and drive up to the North Shore, just to keep our hands in.
    “Hey, Alvy.” He was the kind of guy who looked older than he was, the one you always sent in to buy the beer when you were still illegal. About five-seven, thin, already balding rapidly at twenty-seven , and incredibly ambitious. You c ouldn ’t take the detective’s exam until you’ve had three years on the beat, and most officers wait another year or two beyond that. Alvy had taken the exam right after his third anniversary, just a couple of weeks before. He was still waiting for the results, but we’d already talked about where he might be posted. He didn’t want to leave Waikīkī , but he was tactful enough to realize that unless they expanded our staff, he’d have to wait for me or Akoni to leave. So we’d talked about District 1, which cover ed most of downtown and was administered out of the main headquarters on South Beretania Street. Lots of government and corporate offices, and Chinatown to provide work, and the chance to be at headquarters and make contacts.
    Or maybe District 2, Central O ‘ ahu, which also included a lot of military installations. It wasn’t as glamorous, but he’d get a lot of experience. I was also pushing for District 5, Kalihi, which included the airport, and I agreed with him that the other districts, Pearl City, Waipahu, Windward O ’ ahu, and East Honolulu, wouldn’t be very interesting, and wouldn’t give him the opportunities for advancement he was looking for.
    He walked over and sat on the edge of Akoni’s desk. “That was some bust yesterday, huh?”
    “You can’t win every time,” I said. “Sometimes things just go wrong.”
    “I heard you got another case already.”
    He was an eager guy, handsome in a way, red hair you might almost call auburn, blue eyes. He