Shards Read online

  I came back to Maui after the funeral and really wasn’t able to put together much clean time. Maybe a week here or there when I thought there would be a drug test. Or a couple of days. Instead of stopping using, I began to speedball and mix dope.

  Things were spiraling down with Keawe, too. My behavior was more erratic. I wasn’t generally a yeller, but I started having fights with him, yelling on the phone and calling him names, which is never right to do with someone you love. I made it really difficult for him, and he didn’t understand what I was doing.

  And then one Monday morning, I walked into a drug test. By this time, I had mapped out the pattern of the department’s supposedly random testing—usually every third month, toward the end of the month. Rarely on Mondays. Around then, I would cut back on my using and drink as much water as I could, trying to flush the drug out of my system. Meth withdrawals made me extremely tired, so I would ramp up for them by taking massive quantities of every kind of legal upper. Caffeine pills, NoDoz. So far I had passed all the tests. I started to get nervous. I had been lucky and knew it was only a matter of time before my luck would run out.

  This test had come sooner than I expected.

  A few hours after the test, I started to hear rumors in the department that someone had tested positive. I knew it had to be me. I figured the best thing to do was to own up, so I headed down the hall to talk to the chief. My meth paranoia convinced me that this unexpected test was orchestrated all because of me. They knew—everybody knew—and all they needed was proof.

  Walking down the hallway, about to be caught, I was in some ways relieved. I would be done. No more lying, no more hiding.

  “Hey, Alli.”

  I turned to see Slim motioning me over to his desk.

  “Did you hear?” he whispered. “Klemm tested dirty.”

  “Klemm?” I asked.

  Slim smirked. He had never liked Klemm. Across the room I could see the chief at Klemm’s desk, motioning him to stand up. Slim and I watched the two of them walk down the hallway past us and into the chief’s office. The door closed behind them and we all knew what that meant.

  Klemm was one of the Wailuku patrol guys. He was into narcotics work too, and had wanted to get into vice, but he tested positive for ice that day and was forced to resign.

  The same drug test that he failed, I passed. Klemm got fired, and within the month, I was promoted to vice.

  11

  One Friday morning, I got called out of patrol to meet with Assistant Chief Patrick. Patrick was an asshole by all accounts, but he ran the vice division of the department so I had worked hard to stay on his good side.

  He was smiling when I entered his office.

  “Alli, come in, come in,” he said, sounding strangely jolly. “I gotta tell you, Alli, you didn’t give the best panel interview—”

  “I know, sir. They nailed me with some very difficult questions.” The panel had asked me the HRS number for a Schedule II drug, and I had gotten it wrong. I had walked out of the interview positive that I’d blown it.

  “So your interview wasn’t so hot,” Patrick said, “but you are the most qualified officer for the position. Your record speaks for itself. I wanted to meet with you personally to make sure that you accept this position.”

  “Position?” I said, confused.

  “Vice,” he said. “We want you. You want us?”

  “Yes. Yes, sir!” It started to sink in: I was being promoted to vice.

  “But I need to ask you this. How do you feel about being the only female in the division, Alli?” he asked.

  It pissed me off that everyone in the department called me by my first name. They would never do that to a guy.

  I tried to answer Patrick’s question. “It comes with the territory,” I said. “I was the only female on Lanai. The only female in Lahaina.”

  “Lahaina has Peters on patrol.”

  “She’s been on injury leave since I’ve been there,” I said.

  “Right, plus she’s a tita,” he said, using the Hawaiian term for dyke. I had met Peters once or twice; she was fairly big and masculine-looking, but I hated the label.

  Patrick suddenly became very stern. “I expect a lot out of you, Alli. We’ve never had a girl in vice before, and you’ll need to prove yourself.”

  “I will,” I said. I started to launch into a long speech about how this was my dream, how I would do my department proud, how I would—but he cut me off.

  “You’ve got two weeks left in patrol before you’re assigned to me,” he said. “The staff doesn’t know yet, so you’ll have to keep quiet.”

  “I got it, sir.”

  I walked around with that secret for two weeks. Kid stuff compared to the bigger things I was concealing from my friends and colleagues. It was hardest not to tell Keawe. He had been against my applying for vice right from the start. Vice comes with a bit of prestige and a bigger paycheck, and that wasn’t what he wanted for me while he was still a patrolman.

  He was the first person I told when Patrick gave me clearance. As I suspected, he wasn’t pleased.

  “I don’t think you can handle it, babe,” he said. “Patrol is one thing, but vice—those are real guys’ guys. They’re not gonna let you into their club so easy.”

  “I’ll have to make them,” I said aggressively. His negativity pissed me off. “I’ll show them I can be one of the boys.”

  To join vice was to move up in the department—literally. The vice office was on the second floor, above patrol, and patrolmen would rarely get to go up there. I was issued a bunch of cool vice equipment, all brand-new, and a Glock .27, smaller and more compact than patrol’s Glock .22. All the vice officers and detectives used a .27, and the patrolmen were jealous. Most cops have nicknames for their weapons, and I called my new Glock Gunther.

  Vice was such a creative division. You could work as hard or as little as you wanted in vice, but everyone who got promoted to the division was a workaholic like me anyway. I had to show up at the office at eight thirty to appease the brass, but after that my day was mine to plan. Total freedom. Nobody was checking up on me, so I could make my own cases.

  And find places to smoke dope with greater ease.

  • • •

  Keawe was right—it was hard being a female coming into the division. Vice guys were beer-drinking, adrenaline-fueled, women-loving men. They accepted me to a certain degree, but at the same time I was always an outsider.

  Early on in vice, I was assigned to work surveillance with one of my partners, Maliko, assisting the FBI in an important case. I was a little nervous about working with him. He was an okay cop, but he was one of Keawe’s best friends, and one of the few people who knew about our affair.

  On our first night doing surveillance together, he brought his PlayStation Portable with him.

  “Anything special you want to watch, Alli?” he asked me.

  “No, but is now the time to be watching movies?”

  “Now is definitely the time. We can’t do anything yet anyway.”

  We were waiting for a call from command post to tell us where they wanted us staged, but sometimes unexpected things happen during surveillance—a third party shows up, for example, or there are lookouts. You really have to be on point.

  “But—” I started to say.

  “Trust me on this, Officer Moore. I’ve been around awhile.”

  I was pissed when Maliko started staring at his PSP. I felt we needed to be on our A game when working with the feds. I later found out all the other vice guys had PSPs.

  “I can put something else on if you tell me what you want to watch.”

  “I don’t care what you watch,” I said.

  “You’re a cool chick,” he said.

  A minute or two later, bored, I looked over to see what he was watching.

  Porn.

  Jesus.

  My mind started racing, and I didn’t know what I was going to do. Instead of kicking his ass or telling him what a fucke
r he was being, I just laughed and said, “You’re a riot, Maliko.”

  I felt so uncomfortable. He didn’t make a move on me or anything, but he continued watching for about an hour until we got the call from the feds.

  Later that week, Maliko told me jokingly, “I think I’m addicted to porn.”

  I should have said, You think? Get some help, you fucker. But I wanted to be cool, so I said, “There’s nothing wrong with watching two people make love, but you should probably talk to your wife about what’s going on with you.”

  “Are you kidding?” he said. “I could never talk to her about this. She’s a conservative type. Not like you, Moore. I can talk to you about anything. That must be why Keawe likes you so much.”

  I was concerned that Maliko was hitting on me, but at the same time I took pride in the fact that I was one of the boys. In that situation, I thought agreeing with Maliko, making him feel comfortable with a somewhat serious problem at the cost of my feelings and morals, was what made me fit in.

  I made men feel that they could be themselves around me, that I would be cool with it. I did the same thing with Keawe. He told me that at home he was stifled, but that he loved being around me because I was accepting of everything he did. I made the mistake of thinking I was showing him true love. In reality, I was confusing being a yes-man with unconditional love.

  • • •

  Now that I was in vice, I was finally doing what I had always wanted to do: focusing on narcotics, getting them out of the community. My career had become less about the law and more about community, and I remembered what had drawn me to MPD in the first place—my love for the island and its friendly, welcoming atmosphere. Vice only made me more of an advocate for the community I loved. I still believed that narcotics were the root of so much crime in Hawaii—property crime, domestic violence, theft—and I still wanted to eradicate drugs from the islands. I just wanted enough left for me.

  I understood what a hypocrite I was being, but I didn’t care.

  In one of my first assignments for vice, I got to be part of the marijuana eradication team (ERAD). Off Piilani Highway there was a military airfield hidden in the cane fields. Everyone knew about it, but it was rarely used except by MPD. We had to coordinate with the DEA and helicopter pilots from Maui and Oahu to send out helicopters over Maui, Molokai, and Lanai.

  First up was being fitted for my flight suit. That was one of the best days ever, all Top Gun with MPD vice patches and flight patches all over the suit. Because they had never had a female vice officer before, they had to scramble to find a suit small enough to fit me. I felt like such a badass.

  We worked out of three helicopters—two large military DEA helicopters and one smaller model that ran interference for us, checking for any dangers on the ground or in the air. Armed men, for example, or telephone wires.

  We flew all over the three islands to harvest marijuana from the cane fields and lava fields below. It was gorgeous. The islands looked so lush and green, the ocean lively and blue. I almost forgot we were on a mission. I got caught up in the view until one of my partners yelled, “I’ve got something!”

  We rappelled from the helicopter down a thick yellow cord into the marijuana fields. With machetes, we cut away the marijuana plants. It was hard work, really hot, and we got covered with marijuana tar. Once we’d harvested the field, we wrapped the plants in ropes and hoisted them up to the helicopters, stuffing them inside the cab so we could fly back to the military airport to burn them.

  I was the last one left on the ground, and just when I was expecting to be pulled back into the helicopter, they let me hang there in my harness, dragging me lightly over the tops of the trees.

  “Welcome to vice, Officer Moore!” the guys yelled down at me, laughing. It was my initiation onto the team.

  “Woohoo!” I yelled, waving one arm at them while holding on for dear life with my other.

  Marijuana eradication team was an amazing experience for an adrenaline junkie like me. It should have been the time of my life, but all I kept thinking was, How can I fit in a hit while I’m up here?

  12

  By this point, all my money was going to ice. All of it. The flight to Oahu was $200, renting a car was another $100, and I would pay Angel $200 for my dope and $60 to $100 for hers. I didn’t have $600 to spend every two weeks, and my bills were falling behind. I was broke. I pawned a video camera I had and would have pawned other things but I didn’t have much to begin with. I was always working and wasn’t a very materialistic person. Before I knew it I was calling my mom to help me pay the rent.

  Finally, I was left with only one choice: I was going to have to stop paying for my dope.

  Being in vice made that easy.

  I turned to my CIs. After they made a buy with a drug dealer, they’d bring me back the dope. Before sending it to the evidence locker, I would skim a bit off the top, then weigh and submit what was left. No one was any the wiser.

  Skimming off the top of my CIs’ buys was a new low for me. By using, I was breaking the law every day, but in my mind I was maintaining some degree of morality until I started tampering with department evidence.

  My using was getting heavy. If I got up at midnight, I would do a hit, go see Keawe, then do a hit in my car before work. After work I would do another hit so I could drive home without falling asleep at the wheel. I also kept ice in my pocket to smoke in the bathroom of the station. I had carefully undone the stitching of my tennis shoes, and that was where I kept my pipe.

  As my using progressed, so did my efforts to hide it. I had an ice bump on my thumb from holding down my lighter to light a pipe. I wore a Band-Aid over the bump and told everyone I had a hangnail. I wore colored contacts to conceal the size of my pupils, which got so wide my eyes looked black. I chewed gum all the time—even though ice has no smell, I was paranoid that Keawe would somehow taste it when he kissed me or get some sort of residual high.

  There wasn’t a lot of room for Keawe in my life at this point. He came third after the drug and the job, and though he didn’t know about the drug, he was pissed when I ignored him. He wanted me available whenever he was and called me way too often. I would set my phone to vibrate, and often the phone would ring off the desk when I didn’t answer it after his many calls.

  I was terribly, terribly thin, but I wasn’t getting the face-of-meth look like you saw on the posters hanging on bus stops all over Maui. I wasn’t a picker, I didn’t have sores, my teeth weren’t falling out. I was lucky. Lucky, or unlucky? Maybe if I had showed some of those outward signs earlier, someone would have figured out what was going on with me. I could have gotten some help.

  Later, I found it hard to believe that no one suspected I was using. My family was so far away, but how could Keawe not know? Or Dina? Or Erin? They saw me every day. All my MPD colleagues were trained to recognize drug use—why didn’t they recognize it in me? Looking back on this time later, I sometimes found myself angry at them for not seeing what I was taking such great pains to conceal.

  Why didn’t one of my goddamned drug tests come back positive? How was I able to pass every single one?

  A couple of months into vice, there was rumor of another drug test coming and I tried to flush the dope out of my system. Withdrawals took me down hard and fast this time. I was supposed to meet Keawe at work at midnight, as usual. He called all night, but I didn’t hear the phone. I slept for twenty-four hours straight, and when I woke up I discovered that I was two hours late for my shift. I had never missed work before, and I was scared.

  I called Wilkes immediately.

  “Moore!” he said. “Where the hell are you? We’ve been calling and calling.”

  “You were?” I asked. “I didn’t hear.”

  “Hell, yes. I was about to send a patrolman out.”

  “I’m so sorry, sir,” I said. “I overslept. I can’t believe it. I was just so tired, I’ve been working so hard—”

  “We all know that,” he said. “Jesus. The
hours you keep, I’m amazed this is your first no-call/no-show.”

  “I understand there will be disciplinary action,” I said. “But I’m on my way right now, and I’ll finish out my shift.”

  “Of course. Listen, I’ll go easy on you since this is your first time.” He was teasing me, I could hear it in his voice. He wasn’t going to do anything. “Just don’t let it happen again,” he said, sounding like some teenager’s dad.

  “Got it, sir.”

  I scrambled to get ready, knowing I wasn’t in real trouble—yet. Everybody knew how hard I worked, how strong my arrest record was. They weren’t about to come down on me for something like this. I knew cops who routinely had to be called in after late nights and parties, but I did not have that reputation. I would be fine.

  When I hung up the phone, I realized I was trembling. I reached for my ice pipe. I couldn’t function without the stuff. Damn any drug tests—there was no way I could justify stopping.

  • • •

  Meanwhile, I had a new CI, a huge Samoan dealer named Kal who I’d gotten through working with Oscar. I’d carried Oscar into vice with me as an informant, and we had been working our way up the drug tree together for a while until we got to Kal. I executed a search warrant on Kal’s house and car and found about an eight ball of cocaine. An eight ball isn’t very much, but it turns out that Kal was a big-time player and also involved in the organized crime on Maui. I managed to flip him, and he was about to introduce us to a big dealer in Kihei who was moving pounds, but for now he was still doing buys for us.

  One buy that Kal did brought in a huge packet of ice. When I took it from him he shook his head sadly and said, “I’m sorry to see this go. This is the best, purest shit you’ll ever get.”

  I couldn’t wait to smoke it.

  I didn’t want to bother fitting work around my dope schedule, so I made up the lie that my mother had died and I had to go back to Albuquerque to her funeral. MPD had been so nice when my granddad died that I knew they would give me the time off.

  I called my sergeant to tell him. “Jesus, Alli, that’s horrible. Take all the time you need.”