Page 63 of Hidden Falls

“Only Sasha’s emergency snack stash. You’re welcome to it.” Jenkins, steering with one hand, popped the glove box, revealing several foil packets of graham cracker treats.

“My son Jonas loves these.” Marcella ripped open the packet and shoved several of the small bear-shaped crackers into her mouth. “Just what I needed.”

She was glad to have a little something in her stomach as Jenkins, following the GPS directions of his phone locked into a holder near the steering wheel, increased speed and then turned abruptly into an older neighborhood near the Ka‘ahumanu Mall in downtown Kahului.

He took his foot off the gas as the GPS intoned, “in a quarter mile, your destination is on your left.”

Marcella slipped down a bit in her seat, donning her sunglasses. She scanned the houses on either side of the road. A typical working-class neighborhood in Hawaii, the houses had probably been mostly built in the 1970s of cement block and wood; most of them were one-story bungalows with open carports, cluttered driveways, and a few large, heat-tolerant trees: mango, avocado, and ornamental shower trees.

“There it is,” Jenkins pointed, as the GPS simultaneously announced, “You have arrived.”

Marcella craned her neck as unobtrusively as she could but saw no one who might be watching them at a run-down looking two-story stucco home with a tall, straggling hibiscus hedge around the yard and a couple of cars in the driveway. The house seemed like it might have been slightly upscale from the rest at one time, but no longer. “That hedge could provide cover if we park a few blocks away and work our way back.”

“Yeah, but there are a lot of neighbors and dogs. With our vests, we stand out. I think we should pull up on the side, out of view, and rush the building.”

“Let’s keep moving and then do another pass. Wish your car was a little less flashy,” Marcella said.

“It blends perfectly here,” Jenkins grinned.

He wasn’t wrong—this was a muscle car neighborhood. Many of the driveways had some project vehicle up on blocks being worked on.

“Yeah, but I don’t want to take a chance on more than another pass. We need to surprise him,” Marcella said. “That’s critical.”

Jenkins turned right and they drove for another block before lapping back around and passing the target house again.

Still no movement or signs of life; the target house’s windows were covered with closed blinds, and the two cars in the driveway were junkers that hadn’t moved in years; their tires had melted into the concrete. “He doesn’t have a getaway vehicle outside. That’s something.”

Jenkins glanced at Marcella as they turned the corner of the block again. “Let’s park directly behind the house and run through the neighbor’s backyard, then breach the hedge. It’s thin. Shouldn’t be hard.”

“What if there’s a dog?” Dogs were a frequent hazard of this kind of operation. Marcella wasn’t a fan of beasts lunging out of bushes to grab her leg.

“We’ll have to cross that bridge if we come to it.”

“Worth a try, I guess.” Marcella didn’t love their cobbled-together plan.

“You guess right, babe.”

“That’s Special Agent Scott to you, J-Boy.”

Jenkins grinned as he pulled up beside a waist-high cement block wall surrounding a one-story bungalow directly behind the target house. Potted palms every few feet decorated the top of a utilitarian wall. The hibiscus hedge surrounding Paulson’s property was visible on the other side of the intervening dwelling and its yard.

Marcella got out and snapped the car door shut as quietly as she could. “There’s a trash alley between the properties.” Marcella pointed to a narrow gap between the yards of the adjacent houses.

Jenkins nodded, tugging down his MPD ball cap and locking the car. “Let’s move.”

Midmorning sunlight bathed the yard. Marcella’s body heated up immediately inside the ballistic vest with the additional excitement of the imminent breach. Jenkins joined her as she drew her weapon and trotted down the graveled alley toward the tall hibiscus hedge, its red flowers a beacon.

A dog barked nearby, but it wasn’t in the yard they were passing, nor in the target house, which Marcella could glimpse through the spindly branches of the untrimmed hedge.

She paused when she reached the tall row of hibiscus; now that she was close to it, getting through looked close to impossible. She scanned around and noticed an opening where one of the bushes had died. Dead branches still filled the area, but when she grabbed them, the brittle wood broke away easily in her hands. Jenkins joined her, and they quickly cleared an opening wide enough to wedge through.

At the last minute, Marcella pulled back and let Jenkins move forward to lead—this was his case, his island, and she was just the backup, though that was never her favorite position.

She exhaled stress and excitement.

“Let’s do this,” Jenkins said, and wedged roughly through the gap in the hedge.

Marcella sucked in her gut and wiggled through the opening. Branches caught on her vest and pants; she wrenched herself through, glad their entry point was hidden from the back of the house by a large ‘ulubreadfruit tree heavy with fruit.

---