“What happened?”
“Hank Boyle comes in here just after they start grading the site and wants an emergency delivery—twenty-five hundred cubic yards of concrete. You know how many trucks that is?”
“A truck holds nine yards. Isn’t that where the expression ‘the whole nine yards’ comes from?”
“Very good. You want a job?”
“No thanks,” Koa responded, wiping some of the concrete dust from his face.
“Boyle wants two-hundred-eighty truckloads of concrete, like yesterday.”
“And you guys delivered?”
“Yeah, we delivered, but we jacked the price up by 50 percent. We brought in all the temporary drivers and layers we could find and still had guys working eighteen-hour shifts. Ran thirty trucks a day for ten days.”
“Jesus.” Koa had seen the six-foot walls at KonaWili, but he still asked the question. “Where’d they put all that concrete?”
“I wasn’t out at the site, but my guys said they were pouring some kind of concrete bunker under the school.”
Koa wanted more. “Can we talk to one of the drivers who was out there?”
“Sure.” Ozzy picked up a telephone from a table in the corner of the room, dialed, and asked, “Is Keao around?” He waited a moment before saying, “Send him in here.”
A couple of minutes later, a huge Hawaiian man, dressed in cement-covered coveralls, stepped into the room. “Keao,” Ozzy introduced the driver, “this is my brother Arsenio and Detective Kāne. They want to know about the rush job down at KonaWili.”
Though Keao looked to be all of two-hundred-fifty pounds, he was taller than Ozzy and his massive shoulders and arms bulged with muscle. A match, Koa thought, for my fisherman friend, Hook Hao. Keao pulled a chair from the end of the table. One of those plastic bucket chairs with metal legs. The chair legs bowed outward, and creaked under Keao’s weight, but held. Keao ran a hand through his hair, sending a shower of concrete dust onto the table and the floor. “Crazy fuckin’ job.”
“Aloha, Keao,” Koa began. “Tell us what you saw out there.”
“Crazy fuckin’ job,” Keao repeated. “Started out fillin’ a goddamn hole, ’cept it wouldn’t fill. Took seventy trucks even with all the accelerators.”
“Accelerators?”
“Chemicals. Makes the concrete harden faster.”
Koa did the math. “You poured more than six hundred cubic yards of concrete into a hole?”
“Yeah, ’cept your ’rithmetic is screwed up. It was six-hundred-thirty yards.”
“Got it,” Koa conceded. “But you filled the hole?”
“Yeah. We filled the damn hole.”
“And then?” Koa prodded.
“Then we poured the bunker.”
“Bunker?”
“Yeah. A big cube with floor, walls, and top six feet thick, like one of the damn military ammo bunkers up at Pōhakuloa.”
There it was, stark as a movie in Technicolor. Tony Pwalú uncovered the volcanic vent. Hank Boyle filled it with concrete and covered it with a bunker. What had Tatum said: “Trying to seal a volcanic vent is beyond stupid. Just causes the pressure to build up until you get an explosive release.” Boyle created a ticking time bomb just waiting for rainwater to flash into steam under millions of pounds of pressure. Six-hundred-thirty cubic yards of concrete might be a big cork in the neck of the volcanic bottle, but it didn’t stand a chance against Pele—ka wahine ‘ai pōhaku, the stone-eating woman.
Koa stared at Keao. “You ever ask Boyle’s people what they were doing?”
“Yeah, once.”
“And?” Koa prompted.
“The foreman told me to mind my own business and get the fuckin’ concrete poured.”
“Ever see a building inspector at the site?”
Keao laughed. “Sure. When Zak showed up, Boyle’s guys gave him a six-pack and a fifty. He signed off and crawled back in his hole. He’s a joke.”
Koa pulled the papers for the rush job across the table and focused on the government order number. Unlike the first set of documents, this one said: “Change Order No. 1” followed by the original contract number. Koa had seen the original contract, but no change order. “I didn’t know there was a change order.”
“Had to be a change order,” Ozzy responded. “Otherwise we don’t get paid.”
“You have a copy?” Koa asked.
“I don’t, but the accounting department will. The gov gets a special rate, but we’ve got all kinds of contractors in here blathering on about how the state sponsors their jobs, trying to get the government rate. We have a simple rule: no state contract, no state discount.”
“Can you get me a copy?”
“Sure.” Ozzy left the room and came back a few minutes later. He handed Koa a copy of an official state document. The DOE change order for “environmental improvements” increased the contract price for the school from nine-point-nine million dollars to eleven million dollars. It bore the signature of Francine Na‘auao, head of the DOE. Environmental improvements, Koa thought, like sealing up a volcanic vent. Still, the numbers puzzled Koa. “The rush concrete job didn’t cost a million-one, did it?” he asked.
“Hell no,” Ozzy responded. “With the surcharge and overtime, it barely topped four hundred thousand.”
The concrete had cost roughly a third of the $1,100,000 authorized by the change order. What, Koa wondered, about the remaining $700,000? Bribes? But to whom? Gommes stood to make tens of millions from the project. So too did Makela, who supposedly owned 40 percent. They had incentive enough. Boyle? Had he been bribed? Probably. Why else would a contractor knowingly cover up a volcanic vent? What about Na‘auao? Had some of that money found its way back to her? Or Witherspoon? Or were there other silent partners who had extracted a toll for participating in the conspiracy? They—whoever they were—killed fourteen children and four teachers. Koa intended to chase them, every one of them, to the ends of the earth.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
RAIN AND FOG returned that night and continued into the following morning, making the road slippery and the visibility poor. “Where’d this shitty weather come from?” Basa asked. “Kona’s supposed to be sunny.”
“It’s a Kona front, weather coming in from the west. We’re getting more western storms. Must be global warming,” Koa responded.
“Hope it doesn’t start the damn vent spewing again,” Basa said.
Koa, too, worried about another volcanic blowup on Hualālai, one that might be even worse than the one that had killed the kids. “From your lips to God’s ears.”
“Hey,” Basa suddenly caught on, “you’re worried about more than just the school, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, you heard Tatum. Kona’s at risk if Hualālai blows.”
“Jesus, that would be awful.” Basa paused. “Didn’t he say we’d have some warning?”
“Yeah. I hope he knows what he’s talking about.”
“Me, too.” Basa paused, wiping the condensation off the inside of the windshield before changing the subject. “We’re gonna get soaked, and for what? Talking to this doctor is gonna be a colossal waste of time.”