Last Light

Начало книги

When Makani Hisoka-O’Brien met the murderer, she thought he was a nice guy, perhaps just the one with whom she might want to share her life.

That warm Wednesday in August, the Southern California sky was as wide as the universe, as deep as infinity, as blue as Makani’s eyes, and she could no more resist the call of the ocean than she could switch off her compulsion to breathe.

Her mother, Kiku, insisted that Makani had been born in the ocean, even though in fact she had been born on the island of Oahu, in a Honolulu hospital. What her sweet mahuakine meant was that Makani had been conceived in the sea, in the gently breaking surf, on a deserted and moonlit beach. Makani had pieced this saucy truth together from a series of little things her parents had said over the years and from looks they exchanged and meaningful smiles they shared. Although she was a native Hawaiian, Kiku had been taught reserve and discretion by her traditionalist Japanese mother; she would not speak of lovemaking in any but the most oblique fashion. Heeding the call of the surf, the bed of her conception, Makani drove her street rod, a glossy black ’54 Chevrolet Bel Air that had been chopped and shaved and peaked and frenched and sparkled, to Balboa Peninsula, the land mass that shielded Newport Harbor from the open sea. The Chevy purred like a panther, because she had dropped into it a GM Performance Parts high-output 383ci small-block V-8. She wasn’t a street racer, but if California was ever plagued by road bandits, she would be able to outrun them all.

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