Selfer rushed down to her, his face flushed. He wasn’t smiling. “What are you doing here?”

She wiggled her empty glass. “I ran out,” she said, “whisky, neat.”

“Right.” He fixed her one and one for him in seconds flat. He lit two Camels and bounded down to her, gulped, set a lit cigarette in her hand, sucked on his. Gulped.

“You okay? You not sleeping very well?” she said.

“I’m not sleeping at all.” He rubbed at his temple.

Kanani couldn’t believe her eyes, ears, nose. In a mere few weeks, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Selfer had declined from one of the smoothest haoles she ever met to someone more like a rattled old gentleman from another era adrift in a new age where smoothness and subtlety played no part. It was such a contrast to Lansdale with his cockamamie sayings and that crazy look in his eye. If Selfer was the suave poet, Lansdale was the brash advertising man, and all knew who would win that day.

“I’m just . . . preoccupied, dear,” Selfer added. He flicked his already half-sucked Camel into the ashtray, a polished coconut shell. He set a hand on her wrist. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it. Where’s Wendell?” she said. She hadn’t planned to ask this first. It just came out.

Selfer stared a moment as if trying to recall the name. “Lett, Wendell, he is . . . on a mission. That’s all I know.”

“So now it’s a ‘mission,’ is it?”

Selfer put on a smile finally and poured them another and swooped back down with two more lit Camels. His hair seemed more in place somehow, and his face relaxing. This was more like it. He crossed his legs, showing off his smooth, nearly feminine ankles, and brushed ash off his knee, though there wasn’t one speck.

“So, you hear about the recent arrival?” she said.

“There’s a recent arrival?”

“Francisco Baptiste.”

Selfer’s leg dropped. “How do you know about him?”

“I saw him. Accidently. Passing through camp.”

“Oh. Oh, I see,” Selfer said, his eyes darting around but they couldn’t keep up with his mind, which was apparently racing. A single bead of sweat appeared on his forehead, and he pushed it back up under his hair with a manicured fingertip. This wasn’t a good sign. She was hoping to find that Selfer was helping to control Frankie somehow. But someone else was clearly running Frankie. Selfer might not even know who or why.

“I knew him from Honolulu,” she said. “Everyone called him Frankie. Not sure what he goes by here.”

“Ah, yes, of course you would know him.” Selfer nodded like a person pretending to still know the score. “What do you make of him?”

“He’s all business. But he can bust ’em up if he needs to.”

“Bust ’em up?”