“Don’t tell me. I know what I’m doing. Sure, maybe I never fought up on the line, rear-line staffer like me, but . . . You know something? Maybe it is about time I do get in a fight.” Selfer shot up, adjusting his holster, pushing back his hair.

“Can you get me out of here or not?” Lett said.

“What?” Selfer whipped around. “How can I? I don’t know the score. I need to know the score, see.”

“Can Kanani help? Tell me she’s still up there.”

“She is, but, I don’t know. I just can’t trust her. It’s too risky. And now there’s that heavy Francisco to worry about, and I can’t know if those two Hawaiians will stick together or not.”

“Lansdale?”

Selfer laughed. “Oh, Lansdale’s out, gone, scot-free. On to the next con. It’s that Francisco I have to worry about now. He makes Lansdale look like a file clerk.”

Selfer felt at his holster again, and he stepped back, out of Lett’s cell, into the corridor.

“Water,” Lett said after him, but Selfer didn’t respond.

35.

Kanani didn’t like returning to the boogie house bungalow, not after Frankie had found her there. She couldn’t get it out of her mind. He had made her slide her chair closer to him on the gold chaise. Then his eyes went narrow and dark inside. He warned her never to run from him again when she had a secret that he also knew. Because he would be right behind her, again and again.

“Promise me,” he’d said, “that you tell me, and only me, if that fool Selfer or anyone else makes any moves that could endanger the pact I made with Lansdale and those head haoles who run Lansdale.”

“Who runs Lansdale?” she had dared to ask.

Frankie’s face went hard and crimson, and he admitted that he didn’t know. “Has to be big kahunas from the mainland,” he said. “Who else?”

So she promised Frankie, she had to. Charlie Selfer certainly wasn’t a man she could stay loyal to, she told him—if she were playing that quaint old sort of loyalty game she wouldn’t have left the likes of Wendell Lett to his own sorry devices.

Frankie laughed at that.

“Besides, we Hawaiians gonna stick together,” she added. She didn’t elaborate that Frankie himself was practicing about as much loyalty to his fellow Hawaiian as the imperialists who first came bearing their power and greed, as the colonialists, as the so-called democratic Americans with their shameless and manifest land grabs.

At the same time, she fought the realization swelling inside her that she was making her own play from a position of unrepentant greed. A person could argue that against her. Her own faddah certainly could. He might even claim she would never live it down.