But I know none of these things when all at once the new voice says, in a low, emphatic tone: You're gonna die.
        Steve, Mary says, tensing up beside me.
        Before I can reply, something heavy clunks to the floor on the other side of the coffee table, the force of its impact resonating through the floor into the flesh of my flushed cheek. On the other side of the screen door, the young haole policeman, come to investigate the report of a possible abduction, has noticed something highly suspicious about the man standing in the middle of the living room where four other people lie on the floor, their heads covered by blankets: The kidnapper is still wearing the nylon stocking over his head.
        Today, twenty-something years later, I still don't know if the policeman actually saw the gunman's pistol before it dropped to the floor. Later that same evening, when we are all safe, I will check with the others to make sure I heard the policeman's command correctly. Not Freeze or Drop it, but You're gonna die.

        “It was all over pretty quickly,” Phil tells Sheyene. “There were some delays. The policeman had a radio, but he had some kind of difficulty communicating with the other police upstairs, the ones who arrived later. There must have been fifteen police cars out front, by the time he finally led us up. Still, the whole thing lasted maybe forty-five minutes.”
        I shake my head. “It was more like five hours. From the time Mrs. Krause first screamed to the time the police finally let us go home, about five hours.”
        Phil smiles at me and shrugs. Though we were never separated that night on the mountain, his mind's eye cannot see the same stretch of time. Which of us is right?
        Quickly, Phil tells the rest of it: How the officer covered us with his revolver while we crawled on our bellies up the exterior steps to the street in front of Mark's house, where the battalion of police awaited us. How, who knows how many minutes or hours later, from the street we heard Mark's landlady scream a second time, when, after being freed by the police, she discovered a third gunman—one we'd never seen—hiding behind her shower curtain.
        Phil doesn't mention how when the police finally gathered us all behind the line of squad cars, Mary fell into my arms, sobbing, releasing at last everything she had kept hidden beneath the blanket. Our bodies seemed to meld there, on that dark street whose name I can't remember, at the top of Wilhelmina Rise. We didn't speak, didn't move, just drew the cool mountain air in and out of our lungs in perfect rhythm as events whirled on around us.
        The night of the Elephant Gang was a chance to start over, I want to tell Mary now, tonight, in Phil and Ann's apartment. But the truth is we both knew that, even then. Later that same night, after we'd given our statements to the police, we returned to our room at the Hawaiian Crown in the crowded middle of Waikiki. We sat on our lanai, sipped Primo from bottles, gazed toward slivers of black ocean—and told ourselves that very thing.

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