Zero Island (Blessid Trauma Crime Scene Cleaners Book 2) by Chris Bauer (i want to read a book TXT) 📕

standing with his arms extended, his gun pointed at the ground, in the direction of the cooler.

“Sorry, Captain sir,” the seaman said, “but the evidence was about to disappear into the swamp—”

The human torso had been dragged out of the cooler, onto the swampy mud. Three large, expired rats with bullet holes lay next to the torso.

“I hate those Pacific rat bastards, sir.”

20

Sunrise on Mii Landing, the north shore of Miakamii Island. Ella grabbed her spot on the beach, the fourth chair of fifteen, each chair decades old, jutting from the sand like the statues of Easter Island and distant enough inland from the shore to avoid the tides. Carved out of large redwood trees from California that came ashore worn but well-preserved, from transpacific trips on ocean currents pushed by the winds, the natives planted them upright near where they beached, then hollowed them out. The shell lei makers, called stringers, brought their blankets and down-filled cushions to lessen the discomfort of the hundred-year-old hardwood seating. The fifteen seats were arranged in a semi-circle on the coastline close enough to each other for socializing. But this morning, as was the case for so many mornings of late, Ella would be the only craftsperson plying the trade at dawn on the beach. Today she’d finish her work on two shell leis, stringing them together, then knotting and tying off these wonderful, colorful jewels of the ocean, these pupu O Miakamii.

Ella placed her tools on a soft cloth she’d set on the sand. First was a handmade poker five inches in length with a cylindrical burnished-wood handle, the metal poking end used to make the tiniest holes in the tiniest of shells for the insertion of nylon thread. Next to the poker was a metal awl with a thin needle used to thread the nylon. Next to the tools, she set up bowls of shells of various sizes, colors, and shapes. With the softest of touches she went to work, removing every grain of sand from each shell, some of them no larger than a piece of rice. The art of collecting and sewing these rare shells into leis had been handed down generation to generation from her ancestral kupuna. Ella was a master craftsperson in a long line of master craftspeople.

She missed her friends, the women who occupied the other fourteen chairs when times were better and work was plentiful, and who had abandoned the shell trade in favor of other endeavors. Ella would complete two leis today, each about eighteen inches in length so they would sit properly on the neck. It had been weeks of tedious work per lei, but these two were already sold, for three thousand and thirty-five-hundred dollars respectively, one for a Hawaiian wedding, the other to celebrate the birth of a child. Mr. Logan brokered the work for them, no middleman fees involved, a complete pass-through to the artist, part of the pleasure he got from helping his islanders with their livelihood.

Ella began her workday as she did every day, with a prayer to Jesus Christ Her Savior, and she would end her work on the leis with a prayer to Him as well.

She closed out two hours of tedious poking and stringing and put her tools down for a break. Calling to her was the food satchel she’d brought with her, a bushel of mollusks in a burlap sack. At eight a.m. the smelly bushel became Ella’s breakfast, some of the small shells viable for other types of leis after she consumed their contents. One shucking knife, one plate, one empty satchel awaiting shells that were too large for leis, and one hungry mouth awaiting the snail meat from the mollusks of all shapes and sizes. Ella shucked, pulled, sniffed, shuddered, slurped, and swallowed.

Ten minutes into her meal, Ella had surrounded herself with spent shells. She relaxed, releasing a hearty burp that brought with it a satisfied smile.

If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear it…

Behind her, an animal snorted from the scrub brush. The philosophical had begotten a material response.

A wild boar stepped onto the beach, wandered in close to her chair, its curved tusks ominous, its eyes shifty. Another snort followed another step, its boar nose inching closer to her pile of mollusk shells surrounding her in the sand. It nudged the shells, hesitated. Ella and the boar eyed each other in silence, a long moment that ended with Ella speaking.

“Go ahead, have some,” she said.

The boar chomped into the pile, slurped at what remained of the mollusk meat, and crunched the shells with its powerful teeth. Seconds later it stopped, began gagging and sneezing and coughing. After a herky-jerky about-face it expelled the chewed bounty, squealed, and left the beach in a hefty trot.

“Ha!” she called after it. “Same as last week, and the week before. Serves you right, my lovely puaa friend. You know better. Stick with the oysters and the potatoes.”

Snails from the waters surrounding the island became mollusk meat that was, at best, an acquired taste. It had taken centuries of digestive adaptation and intestinal fortitude by their harvesters to enjoy the delicacy without striking the entire Miakamii population dead from consuming it. The boar should have identified it from the pungent smell inside the shells, something that could take a person’s breath away: hydrogen sulfide, the “rotten eggs” odor, boosted by gases from volcanic eruptions and hot springs emanating from deep within the earth. Eons upon eons where the earth’s magma had coughed up its poisonous, dangerous content, with lava exploding into the atmosphere, lava colonizing the soil, and lava streaming into the ocean, all of it settling in the local ecosystem, in the flora and the fauna, and in the seafood.

Ella finished her parting words for the wild puaa’s retreat by chiding the boar for its short memory, thanking it for not partaking in her breakfast—“more for us Miakamiians, my lovely”—then adding her heartfelt condolences, with the Sign