Night on Fire Read online

  For Jack & Jill

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Mahalo to my extraordinary editor, Kelley Ragland, and everyone at Minotaur Books.

  For their friendship, guidance, and support throughout this past year, I would also like to thank Vincent Antoniello, Rick and Tabbatha Chesler, Denis Dooley, Joe and Andrea Gaydos, Chip Hughes, John Krusas, Marc MacNaughton, Ray McManamon, Stefanie Pintoff, Joel Price, and David Rosenfelt.

  Thanks, as always, to my wife, Jill, for her infinite patience, and to my son, Jack, who lights even the darkest nights.

  There is no such thing as justice—in or out of court.

  —Clarence Darrow,

  interview in Chicago, April 1936

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  Part I: Wishful Sinful

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Part II: Love Her Madly

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Part III: Waiting for the Sun

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Part IV: End of the Night

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Also by Douglas Corleone

  Copyright

  PART I

  WISHFUL SINFUL

  CHAPTER 1

  I’m about to get laid.

  It’s about time, too, because I’ve been chatting up this cougar since happy hour. It’s now a shade past eleven and the dozen or so mai tais I threw back tonight are threatening to render my downstairs tenant utterly useless.

  We’re drinking at Kanaloa’s, a small outdoor beach bar and grill at the Kupulupulu Beach Resort in Ko Olina, about a half-hour drive from Honolulu. This is where I live now; not at the hotel per se, but in a villa just a stone’s throw away. Here’s why.

  “I’m so drunk,” the cougar says as she sets down her eighth Tropical Itch.

  Ko Olina is a 640-acre oceanfront property in the town of Kapolei on the leeward side of Oahu. The property once served as a playground for Hawaiian royalty, but now services a different sort—primarily upscale vacationers from the U.S. mainland and Japan who would gladly pay a few thousand dollars extra to avoid the hordes of revelers down in Waikiki. The cougar I’m presently pursuing is one of those few, though right now I remember precious little else about her.

  “Mmmm,” she purrs, tugging at the red silk tie I wore to court today. She’s trying like hell to be sexy, I know, but at the moment it feels as though she’s tightening a red silk noose around my throat.

  Koa the barkeep winks at me as he watches the show—a performance he catches a good four times a week. He’s smiling, too, because Koa was standing right there behind the bar when I met the cougar this afternoon. He heard her go on and on about how she was such a lightweight, such a cheap date. How I’d probably have her in bed by eight if I played my cards right. That would’ve worked just fine for me because I’ve got to be on the road at the scream of dawn, in order to make it back to Honolulu in time for a nine A.M. calendar call before Judge Matsui.

  Down the other end of the bar a young lady in a stunning red dress lights up, and Koa excuses himself. This inevitably occurs once or twice a night, someone visiting the islands unable to comprehend why they can’t smoke at a bar, even if it’s outside. They can’t seem to understand why people like myself don’t want to choke on their secondhand smoke while casually sipping a mai tai under the clean evening sky. Fortunately, most smokers don’t give Koa or the other bartenders a hard time.

  This one does.

  With a bewildered look on her face she stares up at the stars as though maybe they can explain.

  “Please,” Koa says to her. “It doesn’t bother me personally, but it’s the law. Both the bar and I can get fined.”

  “Whatever,” she says. “If you get fined, I’ll pay it. Just let me finish this one fucking smoke.”

  The man she’s with appears embarrassed, his face tinged red in the bleak light of the outdoor bar. When he rests a hand on his girl’s shoulder she brushes it away like he’s a mosquito.

  “… the fuck off me,” she says.

  She lifts her tropical drink off the bar and, carrying the glass in one hand, the lit cigarette in the other, she heads this way, making for the opening in the small iron gate.

  As she passes us, I get a good look at her face and immediately reconsider my support of no-smoking policies.

  Koa follows her behind the bar. “I’m sorry, miss,” he calls after her, “but you can’t take your drink beyond the gate.”

  She turns on her heels with a look that almost makes me duck, the drink in her hand now looking more like a lethal weapon than a refreshing rum-based beverage. “I can’t smoke inside the gate, I can’t drink outside the gate. How in the hell am I supposed to enjoy myself?”

  Koa doesn’t have an answer to this, one of life’s greater mysteries.

  She tosses the cigarette on the ground and as it rolls past my foot, I stamp it out with my shoe, hoping there isn’t enough alcohol on my sole to catch fire.

  She storms past us again, drink still in hand, and settles back down at her original spot at the end of the bar.

  By now, everyone at Kanaloa’s is watching.

  Koa returns to me and the cougar and apologizes. But by the time he takes another drink order, the looker is again yelling something at her date. Something about him being a fucking liar.

  “Can you believe those two just got hitched this afternoon?” Koa says to me.

  “No kidding,” I say, a small part of me dying inside because she’s taken.

  Koa motions to the shimmering stretch of sand abutting the man-made lagoon across from the bar. “Right there on the beach, they said their vows,” he says, mixing a piña colada. “Had about seven or eight guests.”

  “Going to be one hell of a honeymoon,” I say, my eyes still glued to the couple. She’s hotter than the Hawaiian sun, the guy not so much. But isn’t that the way it always is.

  After a good long gulp of her final Tropical Itch, the cougar finally caves. “Wanna come upstairs and see my room?” she says, loud enough for half the bar to hear.

  Be
fore I can answer Koa has already set down my check.

  I glance around. A number of patrons have turned their heads in our direction. The rest remain focused on the show at the other end of the bar, the looker still going off on her husband, using a selection of words that would have made George Carlin cringe.

  I slide my blue Bank of Hawaii debit card across the bar, trying not to look any of the half dozen waitresses in the eye as the cougar slips her hands into my suit jacket and proceeds to frisk me.

  “Do you think I’m pretty?” she asks.

  “Of course, baby,” I say.

  And she is. Even earlier—before my fourth mai tai—I thought so. Now, of course, it’s dark, I’m dizzy with drink, and it’s all I can do to see the signature line on the debit card receipt Koa’s just handed me.

  For some reason my eyes keep darting toward the other end of the bar, toward the looker and the drink she’s holding, the only light surrounding her that of the full moon and flaming tiki torches, the trays of glowing blue martinis still being schlepped around by the staff.

  As the band plays “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” for the ninth or tenth time tonight, I dip into my pocket for Koa’s tip. All I have is a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill, but he’s earned it. In fact, if memory serves, Koa made the introductions, same as he does every night, boasting to the cougar about how I’m a big-time attorney, my name always in the papers, my mug constantly on TV. Hell, he’s even TiVo’d some of my better clips in case I ever need help making the sale.

  At the other end of the bar, the looker and her husband continue quarreling, battling the band for vocal supremacy.

  Koa smiles and winks at me. “You handle divorces, Kevin?”

  I fish a business card out of my pocket. “Give her my number,” I tell him, setting my card atop his tip. “I don’t usually go to family court, but for her I’d make an exception.”

  A lot of exceptions.

  “Liar,” the looker yells again, and smacks her husband across his face.

  I wince and turn back to the cougar. “Wanna get out of here?”

  She nods, an intoxicating smile playing on her lips. I cast my eyes on the cougar as I drain the remainder of my mai tai, turning the glass bottoms up until the ice hits my teeth. Dark hair and big brown eyes, a body that could still stop traffic. I can’t yet remember her name but that’s not important, so long as I keep calling her “baby” and recall a few personal facts. Now that I’m staring into her eyes, some of those facts are starting to come back to me.

  The cougar hails from some small city in Arizona, I think. Maybe Arkansas or Alabama. Possibly Alaska, though I doubt it. She’s either a freelance journalist here on assignment or an editor here on holiday. Something to do with books or magazines, something in print. She has a dead father or stepfather, a sick mom somewhere in the Midwest. Or maybe the Middle East. A younger brother—that I remember—a good-for-nothing drunk and gambler she hasn’t spoken to in years. He sounded interesting, like someone I could shoot the shit with over a beer.

  And, oh yeah, she’s thirty-nine.

  They’re all thirty-nine while they’re here.

  CHAPTER 2

  “Would you be a sweetheart and get me a bottle of water?” she says, rubbing my chest as I’m about to drift off to sleep. “There’s a vending machine just down the hall.”

  There’s also a sink in the bathroom and that’s just where I head, ripping the protective plastic from the flimsy plastic cup provided for our convenience by the eight-hundred-dollar-a-night resort. Groggy and naked, I hold the cup under the bathroom faucet and spin the knob, waiting for the tepid water to spout forth. But all I hear is a soft swooshing sound and the cup and the sink remain dry as a bone.

  I briefly consider just falling back into bed, but I don’t feel like getting dressed and walking home. And I fear that’s just where this will lead if I don’t manage to snag the cougar some Dasani or Aquafina before the night’s end. So I suck it up, slip into my boxers, and snatch two singles off the cougar’s nightstand.

  Then I head for the door. I’m only thirty-two but I don’t recover from drinking quite as rapidly as I used to, and I’m concerned I’m going to be too sick to make it to court in the morning. My partner Jake Harper might be able to cover for me, but it’s almost one A.M. and I have little doubt that he’s drunk, too, probably still banging back glasses of Jameson at Whiskey Bar in downtown Honolulu, swaying to live Irish drinking music with that girlfriend of his. I wonder briefly if I’ll still be hitting the bottle as hard as he is when I’m sixty-seven.

  After unlatching three locks I step out into the hall, shielding my eyes from the lights. I pad down the Shining-esque corridor lumbering like a George A. Romero zombie, not dressed but still dripping with sweat. The usual trade winds have been absent from the leeward side these days, and the heat is really starting to get to me. After only eighteen months in the islands, I’m already starving for a nice ice cold day of New York City winter. Maybe even a nor’easter.

  Eyes half shut, I glimpse a sign for the vending machines and turn right, dismayed to find a kid of four or five dangling a wrinkled dollar bill in front of the Coke machine, apparently trying to decide which beverage best suits his palate, or which best complements the package of Drake’s Devil Dogs he has waiting for him back at the room.

  I sigh loudly enough for him to hear me, hoping he’ll catch the hint. He doesn’t. Doesn’t appear to be the sharpest crayon in the box either. It’s an awful thing to think, I know, but it’s nearing one A.M. and I have to brave heavy H-1 traffic and the big hard Hawaiian sun in just a few hours, and someway, somehow, I’ve got to sleep off the half gallon of light and dark rum that is presently engaged in a race war in the pit of my stomach. So sue me.

  “Need a hand, kid?” I say, trying to speed things along.

  The kid looks me up and down, and I’m suddenly conscious of the fact that I’m not wearing clothes, that I’m standing in front of a preschooler in a pair of pineapple-pattern boxer shorts, asking the kid if I can lend him a hand. As a criminal defense attorney, I realize this is how you end up at a criminal defense attorney’s door. Hell, this is how you end up on Dateline.

  The kid shakes his head.

  “Shouldn’t you be in bed?” I say, then hope like hell that Chris Hanson isn’t lurking around the corner with the “To Catch A Predator” microphones and cameras. I swear, NBC viewers, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.

  “I’m thirsty,” the kid says.

  “So’s the cougar,” I mumble, “so let’s get this show on the road.”

  “Huh?”

  “Nothing,” I say, motioning toward the vending machine. “Go ahead.”

  The kid turns back to the machine, still swinging his wrinkled old dollar. “Grandma got some soda from room service,” he says, “but it tasted all oogie. I don’t think there was any sugar in it. Grandma’s a diet-betic. I just want a Dr Pepper, but look…” He points to his selection. “The red light is lit. That means it’s all out.”

  “Maybe they have some Dr Pepper on another floor,” I suggest.

  He stares up at me as though he’d forgotten I was standing here, his messy brown hair falling into his eyes. Looking at him, I almost feel sorry for the kid. Almost.

  “Will you come with me?” he asks.

  I shake my head. “No can do, kid.” I move toward the machine with my own two bills and notice the red light is lit over the Dasani bottled water, too. The luck just keeps on coming. “On the other hand,” I say with a sigh, “I’d be more than happy to.”

  The kid holds out his grubby paw and I grudgingly accept it, escorting him to the stairwell to avoid the elevators. In the stairwell the echoes of our footfalls ricochet off the cement walls like stray bullets, his Sunday shoes clopping like a pony’s, my bare feet slapping against the stairs like a wet seal’s flippers. On the next landing I catch our reflection in the glass case that houses the fire extinguisher. A tiny kid and a tall nearly nude stranger hol
ding hands in an empty hotel stairwell at one A.M. This doesn’t look good for anybody. If someone spots us, I’m off to jail. Me with my pineapple boxers, reeking of rum and cougar sex, promising a preschooler a refreshing Dr Pepper from a vending machine on a lower floor of a tropical beach resort.

  “Sorry about the way I’m dressed, kid,” I say as we approach the door to the fifteenth floor of the Liholiho Tower.

  “Oh, that’s okay,” he says. “I heard some girls saying you looked really warm in your suit before.”

  I pause, my hand on the door handle. “What’s that?”

  “Downstairs in the lobby,” he says. “I saw you before, talking to some old lady.”

  “Hey, kid, she isn’t that old.”

  He shrugs. “Anyway, while you were talking to the old lady, some young lady was talking about how you looked really hot in your suit,” he says, “and her friend said she’d like to help get you out of it.”

  “Is that so?” I say, smiling. I open the door to the fifteenth floor. “Hey, how old are you, kid?”

  He holds six fingers in the air. Then he says, “Four.”

  Smart kid.

  As we move down the hall toward the vending machines I warn the kid not to make any noise, then realize that if Chris Hanson’s around, I’m only getting myself in deeper and deeper. This transcript’s apt to buy me four to six years at the Halawa Correctional Facility, at least.

  “Here we are,” I say, thrilled to see not a single red light on the machine, not by the Dr Pepper, not by the Dasani. “And it looks like we’re good to go.”

  The kid rushes up to the Coke machine and tries to push his wrinkled old dollar bill into the slot. The machine spits it back out.

  “Let me try,” I say, plucking the bill from the kid’s tiny hands and smoothing it out against the wall. I slide it in. This time the machine swallows it down.

  The kid’s eyes light up.

  “Okay,” I say, holding out my hand. “Now one more.”

  The kid shrugs, looks up at me as though I just spoke to him in Mandarin Chinese.

  “You don’t have another single?” I say. “No change?”

  The kid pulls out his pockets like an elegant hobo. An old gum wrapper flutters to the floor but nothing else. “Grandma don’t have no more change,” he says. “I threw it all in the fountain downstairs with the fish. I had to make a bunch of wishes.”