Mahu Fire by Neil Plakcy Page B

search, looking for anything that might have been out of place. I saw the melted remains of Robert’s computer, settled in the midst of a hunk of molten steel and plastic that had once been a desk. A couple of the framed posters on the wall were still recognizable, though singed at the edges, and the glass was gone. There wasn’t much else left to say what this place had been or what it had done.
    “What’s this?” I asked, pointing my flashlight at a small white object on the floor. I kneeled down and picked it up. It was a piece of plastic about an inch square, with a few round depressions in it. It didn’t look like anything that had been in the office.
    “Golf ball.” Mike took it from me and examined it. “Say you want to use a plastic explosive, like RDX. It’s pretty stable stuff, so you have to trigger an initial explosion in order to set it off. What you do, see, is you cut a golf ball in half and you fill it with something that will blow up more easily. There’s a lot of different stuff you can use—I couldn’t speculate yet what might have been in here. But the basic principle is, you put some kind of condensed acid inside some gelatin capsules, and you bury them in the less stable explosive inside the golf ball. After a while, the acid eats through the gelatin, and when it comes in contact with the first explosive, you get a little boom. That sets off the big boom.”
    He shrugged. “You can read about it all over the Internet. If you’re an amateur, you don’t know much about using clocks and timing mechanisms, so you go for something simpler, like this.”
    “You must have been hell as a teenager,” I said.
    “Hey, did you know everything you know about homicide when you were a kid?” He smiled.
    We were joined by a couple of agents from the local office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. They were dispatched to investigate any kind of bombing, and these two weren’t happy about getting roused out of bed in the early hours of the morning.
    Mike and I went through everything we knew with them, and after a while I was yawning and stumbling on my feet. At one point I fell against Mike and he grabbed me. But it didn’t even feel sexy; I was just exhausted. The ATF guys left, promising to come back in the morning. “Come on, I think it’s time to get you home,” Mike said to me.
    I yawned again. “My truck’s in the garage.” I smiled. “I think it’s a little neater than yours.”
    “Let’s leave it there overnight. I don’t want to see you falling asleep behind the wheel. Where do you live?”
    “Waikiki.” I yawned again.
    “Almost on my way. Come on, let’s go.”
    I tried to argue but I was just too tired. I remember getting into the truck, and then we were on Kalakaua Avenue and he was gently shaking me awake. “Sorry, bud, but I need a little more direction.”
    “Left at Lili’uokalani,” I yawned. “Geez, we’re here already.”
    “Yeah, you’re not the best driving companion.” He looked over at me and smiled. I directed him to my building, and he pulled up in front. I stumbled as I got out of the truck, but got my balance before he could help me.
    “I can make it.”
    He nodded. “Thing is, you don’t want that suit inside your place. You’ll be weeks getting the smell of smoke out.” He grinned. “The voice of experience.”
    “Okay.” It seemed perfectly reasonable to me. I unbuttoned the suit and let it drop from my shoulders. There was a warm breeze off the ocean that tickled the skin on my back as I stepped out of the boots and the legs of the suit.
    “Whoa,” he said. “I didn’t mean you should strip down right here on the street.” He moved to stand between me and any passing car, although there weren’t any.
    “I wear less than this any day on the beach,” I said, looking down at my boxers. It was hard to relate all those parts that I saw, legs, and arms and torso, to my body. I felt disconnected from them. I