Unknown Victim by Kay Hadashi (classic books for 11 year olds .TXT) 📕

She looked at the handyman. “Because I don’t want to burn down the Tanizawa’s house.”

“Any problem with the roof?” he asked. “Is the hot water tank working okay?”

“Neither of them leak, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Kenzo gave her a shrug. “House won’t burn down if we do it right.”

“We?” The last thing Gina wanted to do on a day off was rewire the kitchen. She wasn’t responsible for the house, only the gardens. She’d also discovered a place with perfect weather nearly every day and wanted to use it for something other than being the handyman’s apprentice. She had a tennis racket, and there was a park nearby with courts. With a little luck, she might find someone needing a partner. “I guess I should help. I don’t know if we have everything we need, though.”

“Your day off. Don’t have to help.”

“How long will it take?”

He gave her another shrug, this time with a little smile. “Hour, if it goes well.”

“How long if it doesn’t go well?”

He smiled even bigger. “Depends on how long the fire department is here.”

Gina shook her head but laughed. “Okay, let’s do it. I suppose you have what we need in your tool box?”

He waved for her to follow her to his truck, where he already had a length of heavy wire cut, and a toolbox to go with it. The first task was to remove the under-sized wire already in place from the fuse box to the stove, and then pull the new wire through the same holes in the walls. Then a new fuse was put in, and the proper outlet installed. Almost all of it was done in silence, as usual with Kenzo the handyman, and within an hour, Gina was plugging her stove into the outlet.

“Try it,” Kenzo said.

Gina turned on one burner after another. After a moment, she held her hand over each burner to test them.

“Hot?” he asked.

“It’s great! Thanks.”

He began putting his tools away. “Now you know how.”

She turned off the stove again. “I guess it’s true. We learn something new every day.”

“Whether we want to or not,” he muttered.

“Ha! And no fire department, either!”

With that, he was gone, the job done, leaving Gina to the rest of her day.

***

The tennis courts at the nearby community park were deserted. All Gina could do was practice serves using the six balls that she had. Once those were knocked to the opposite side of the court, she’d run to collect them and knock them back again. After an hour of that, she was in a heavy sweat and her water was gone. She collected her balls one last and put them away in their canister. It had felt good to practice during the heat of the afternoon, and she figured she was a pound lighter because of perspiration. With a bottle of Gatorade from a vending machine, she continued mopping sweat from her face as she drove through town, taking herself on a sightseeing tour.

With no real idea of where she was going, Gina would turn the little Datsun in the direction of something that looked interesting. After a while, she had no idea of what part of town she was in, but she was finding as many Buddhist temples and schools as there were churches, or even supermarkets for that matter. Palm trees were everywhere, and she tried snapping pictures of the various types. There were quite a few palms on the estate that still needed to be identified, and images of a new palm-lined entrance were forming in her mind.

She was beginning to recognize a few landmarks, and before she knew it, she was back at the Kapalama Park. To her surprise, every single one of the homeless shelters had disappeared just since that morning. Parking in the same little lot at one side, she walked through the park.

“Where’d everybody go?”

She found patches of flattened grass where mini cardboard homes had been or someone had slept, burned spots where someone had a campfire, and other places that needed mowing. She figured that the city mowers would be there the next day, and wondered if that’s why they’d all left, just to stay out of the way. Finishing her quick little tour of the park, she stopped in the restroom. Even that had been cleaned since the morning.

“They’re a lot more organized than I ever guessed, that’s for sure.”

To get to the freeway, she had to pass Bunzo’s Bar. The parking lot was half full, mostly of pickup trucks. It was good ol’ boys time at the bar.

There was still something strange about the bar that unsettled Gina’s mind whenever she thought of the place.

“Three bartenders, all of them kinda sneaky about things, all of them entirely different from each other. One of them owns the place, but he works in the evening rather than during the day, which is something he lied to me about the first time we met. That doesn’t make sense. Why wouldn’t he want to work when the bar wasn’t so busy, and have the other guy work at night? What was his name again?”

The Datsun’s little engine struggled to get up to freeway speed as she merged into traffic.

“Hughes. What was his deal? A healing scab on his arm that looked suspiciously like a knife wound, and a suspicion of cops, just like the other two bartenders.”

She noticed the time on the dashboard clock, one of the few things that still worked in the old Datsun.

“He said he gets off at five, and made it sound like an invitation. If I hurry, I could shower and be back at Bunzo’s in time to meet him.” She chuckled. “Don’t even have to shower before going to that place.”

Even though her toe was pressing on the gas pedal, she wasn’t convinced it was a good idea to meet Hughes that evening. Even if the scab on his arm had come about as innocently as Detective Kona had implied, there was something about Hughes that didn’t