Rip Tides Read Online Free

with the canvassing.
    “Ready to go on our favorite kind of home visit?” Lei asked.
    Pono put all the witness statement papers he’d gathered into a file folder. “I wish we could fast-forward this part,” he said.
    “Me too.” Lei sighed.
    * * *
    Stevens stood slowly, feeling his face freeze into an expression he hoped was socially acceptable as he turned to the door. By the puzzlement in his subordinate Brandon’s expression, he didn’t think he’d quite pulled it off.
    “Send her in.” His lips felt stiff. He hadn’t seen his mother in five years. Not since he’d left the LAPD and transferred to a series of posts in Hawaii, in fact. And there was good reason for that.
    His mother, Ellen Rockford Stevens, stepped into the doorway. “Hello, son.”
    Of course she led with reminding him of his obligation to her. Her voice was sanded with years of drink and smoking, but he’d have known it anywhere. She’d made an effort to clean up. Her hair was bottled blonde and brushed, and she’d been a good-looking woman in her prime and still stood taller than most. But her once-bright blue eyes were faded and watery, and she was so thin that skin hung off her bones. She’d always been slim, but this was alarming.
    “Mom.” He came around from his desk and hugged her. It felt like gathering a bundle of sticks for firewood. She smelled of stale cigarettes and the alcohol making its way out of her pores. She clung to him, hiding her face.
    “I have nowhere to go,” she whispered. Her voice was a rasp. He had to tilt his head to hear her even as he shut his office door on the silence that had fallen over his staff out in the front room.
    Stevens’s stomach hollowed as he led her to one of the plastic chairs in front of his desk. “How’d you get here?” he asked, walking back around to sit behind his desk, taking the last few items he’d been packing and setting them in the box, finding comfort in the simple little movements.
    “Took a plane, of course.” She gave a snort of a laugh. “One-way.”
    “Oh.” Stevens pulled out a drawer, rechecked that it was empty, gathering his thoughts.
    He’d known this day might come. His mother was a progressive alcoholic, and when he’d moved from Los Angeles five years ago, she’d already spent time on the streets after being kicked out of bars. He’d gotten so sick of being called to come get her or bail her out he’d come all the way to Hawaii to get his own life going.
    She must have run through everything their father had left her.
    “I can tell you aren’t happy to see me. Haven’t had so much as a Christmas card from you this year.”
    “I gave up after you couldn’t make it to our wedding,” Stevens said, narrowing his eyes at her. “I sent the ticket and everything.”
    “I wasn’t feeling well.”
    “Well, it looks like you still aren’t feeling well.”
    “I’m ready for a new start. I think being here could help.”
    “That’s good, Mom.” He swallowed all the things he wanted to say. “Where are you staying?”
    “I don’t know.” She blinked, and her eyes overflowed. He continued packing so he wouldn’t have to look at her. “I was hoping to stay with you.”
    “Have you contacted Jared?”
    “He didn’t leave me any numbers.” She sounded hurt. “What kind of sons are you, moving six thousand miles out across the ocean? Not even letting me know where you are.”
    “We wanted to have our own lives, Mom.” Stevens dropped a pile of manuals off a shelf into a box with a thud . “You have your life, and it’s in a bottle. Until that changes, we don’t have much in common.”
    She sputtered indignantly. It sounded like an angry kitten.
    Sorrow sliced through him in a way that stole his breath. He owed Ellen life. He owed her respect, whatever her addiction. She was his mother, and she was desperate. He looked up at her.
    “I’ll take you out to our house. You can spend the night, but you’ll have to be in the tent in the