Page 49 of Talk Story

I came up out of the cave mouth into a blast of daylight that turned the world white and blinked until it resolved into two running shapes splitting apart outside: Madison veering left toward the trail in her ruined slacks, slow and stumbling, and the other woman breaking right and heading across the open ground, fast, a backpack bouncing on her shoulders, dark hair coming loose from its braid.

Patel was going for the valley rim, for some unknown exit.

“Keone! Get Madison!” I yelled. “I’ve got this one!”

I am not built for domesticity. I burn the food when I cook. I’m way too independent. But one thing I do well is run.

I’ve run since I was a teenager, and my legs are long. Running is one thing my body has always done well—and today I had on my size 11 Nikes because I dressed this morning for a “day off” that never happened.

I put my head down and ran after Patel. The slope didn’t matter. Altitude didn’t matter. I ate the ground between us in long driving strides, arms pumping, the pili grass whipping my legs.

Dr. Susanna Patel’s academic composure dissolved into the desperate scramble of a middle-aged woman who’d spent her career behind a desk and had badly misjudged who’d be chasing her.

I caught her thirty yards up the slope.

I didn’t tackle her like in the movies.

I drew even, matched her, and then I hooked an arm across her chest and used momentum and weight and the simple physics of a taller body moving faster to take her down sideways into the long grass, twisting so she went under me, and I landed on top.

I knocked the wind out of her in a single whuff. Her backpack jammed up against my ribs. She thrashed hard, an elbow catching my cheekbone, and I ignored it the way I’d been trained to, got her arm bent up behind her, put my knee in the small of her back, and leaned into it.

“Dr. Patel,” I said, breathing hard. “I got you. Give it up.”

“You don’t understand,” she gasped. “Those papers—do you have any idea what that archive is worth? To the field? To me? Twenty years of grant-begging and adjunct slights and I could find something that rewrites the whole land history of East Maui . . .”

“And the Changs were paying you to find it,” I said. That made sense and it wasn’t a guess, the whole shape of it dropping into place: credentials that were a little too convenient, the way she surfaced at exactly the right moment with exactly the right story. “They hired you to locate the archive before anyone else could—and you figured you’d hand them whatever protected their claim, keep the rest, and walk away with the find of your career. You were working both sides.”

“I was going to make sure the archive survived,” she wheezed, which was not a denial.

“Save it for your lawyer.” I didn’t loosen up an ounce.

Below us I heard Keone’s voice. “I got you, easy there, Madison.”

I risked a peek down the slope to see Mr. K with both arms wrapped around a limp, sobbing Madison Chang, who hadn’t made it forty feet and didn’t have the fight left to make it more. He had her contained without hurting her, gentle as a man penning a calf. His eyes found mine across the distance and he gave me a single nod.

“Kat.” Malia called from the cave mouth. “You got her?”

“Yup. I’ve got Patel,” I called. I shifted my weight and felt the lumpy give of gear and gathered things, a field kit hastily stuffed.

That reminded me of the archive in Pali’s backpack; I dearly wished we hadn’t let him walk away with it.

Patel had come for the archive—to sell it to the Changs and keep its glory for herself. She’d failed. The archive wasn’t hers and it wasn’t the Changs’ and that part was good.

Patel’s wanting it I understood, root and branch. It was Pali’s claiming of the archive that I didn’t understand. Pali had no big career to make and no buyer to please, but a man like him doesn’t go toe-to-toe with cops for a bag of paper unless he means to do something with it.

The small wrong feeling I’d set aside in the dark stopped being so small. What was Pali Moku’s agenda? I had no real idea, when it came right down to it.

Malia came limping out of the cave one painful step at a time, her face ashen and set, her weapon holstered. She braced against a boulder for balance. “Anyone seen Souza?”

Keone answered. “He’s up the trail and conscious. Bleeding from the head, but okay.”

“I radioed Lei. The medics on the north rim will come back after their run to Kahului to get Souza.”

I hauled Patel up from the grass and marched her down the slope to where Malia, Keone and Madison stood near the cave entrance.

Malia reached us and stood in front of Patel, swaying a little. I watched her put the personal away and become the careful officer who took notes in precise shorthand.

She removed cuffs from her belt as I turned Patel and presented her wrists. Balancing on her good leg, Malia ratcheted the cuffs on. “Susanna Patel, you’re under arrest for assault on a police officer, and we’ll be adding to those charges.” She recited the Miranda rights. “Do you understand these rights as I have explained them to you?”