“A high-octane story rife with action, from U.S. streets to Guatemalan jungles.” – Kirkus
“A terrifying depiction of one man’s battle against the CIA and Latin American death squads.” – BBC
“With detailed descriptions of actual jungle battles and manhunts, vanishing rain forests and the ferocity of guerrilla war, House of Jaguar also reveals the CIA’s role in both death squads and drug running, twin scourges of Central America.” – Newton Chronicle (UK)
“Bond grips the reader from the very first page. An ideal thriller for the beach, but be prepared to be there when the sun goes down.” – Herald Express (UK)
Saving Paradise
“Bond is one of the 21st Century’s most exciting authors … An action-packed, must read novel … taking readers behind the alluring façade of Hawaii’s pristine beaches and tourist traps into a festering underworld of murder, intrigue and corruption.” – Washington Times
“A complex, entertaining … lusciously convoluted story.” – Kirkus
“Highly recommended.” – Midwest Book Review
“A highly atmospheric thriller focusing on a side of Hawaiian life that tourists seldom see.” – Book Chase
“He’s a tough guy, a cynic who describes the problems of the world as a bottomless pit, but can’t stop trying to solve them. He’s Pono Hawkins, the hero of Mike Bond’s new Hawaii-based thriller, Saving Paradise … an intersection of fiction and real life.” – Hawaii Public Radio
“A complex murder mystery about political and corporate greed and corruption … Bond’s vivid descriptions of Hawaii bring Saving Paradise vibrantly to life.” – Book Reviews and More
I want it all,
and I want it now.
− Queen
What I love is to go too far.
− Charlotte Gainsbourg
She don’t lie, cocaine.
− JJ Cale
What is not sought in the right way is not found.
− I Ching
CONTENTS
GOOD KILLERS
LADY COKE
TREADMILL
STEAL FROM A THIEF
THE CAVE
NOT TO WORRY
PAIN KILLERS
CONTRA TODOS
LITTLE BIG HORN
A GUN FOR LIFE
TAMARACK WAY
DEA
THE RAGMAN’S DAUGHTER
LIAR’S PARADOX
GRACE
NINE MILLION EASY
INTELLIGENCE
BACK IN THE GAME
ONLY HUMAN
BREAD AND CIRCUSES
RAISE YOU
IN GOD’S HANDS
WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS
BEYOND THE MAZE
FAIRPLAY
HOW THE WORLD WORKS
BULLETPROOF
BAD DREAM
WE CAN FIX THIS
DIE OF FEAR
DOORWAY TO HEAVEN
PURGATORY
TOO BAD
GOOD KILLERS
THE RAVEN TUCKED its wings tighter to its body and shivered. It tugged one foot from the frozen bough, then the other, scanned across the snowy treetops to the distant icy peaks. Nothing moved but the sweep of bitter wind in the pine boughs.
Far too cold for life. Rabbits, mice and chipmunks all gone to earth, chickadees taking a last refuge in the firs. Coyotes denned, none leaving prey – no guts, no skins, no bones. Deer yarding up in the young spruce but none starving yet.
The early hunger season, before the men come. When they come they kill everything – elk, moose, deer, bear, wolves, coyotes, grouse, raccoons and many others, leaving guts, lungs, heads, skins and legs all over the blood-blackened snow. Many more animals get away injured and die later. So the men make food for all winter. Marrow bones and frozen innards to dig out when cold cracks the trees.
Now that the cold had returned the men would come. And this season of early hunger would be done.
Men bringing death. Good men. Good killers.
THE MAN followed the blood trail up the mountain through deep snow toward a steep ridge of young aspen. Frothy lung blood spattered the white crust: the elk wouldn’t last much longer.
The man halted gasping, bent over hands on knees, sucking in the thin air, and wiped frozen sweat from his face. He stood wearily, rifle in his right hand, and climbed toward the ridge.
Below the top he turned to look out over thousands of miles of conifered crests, glaciated cliffs and valleys of firs and lodgepoles all covered in white, and beyond them the faraway mountains shimmering in their blankets of snow and ice. It felt sacred and deep, this ice and cliffs and forests of wild creatures, this frozen wind, the sighing pines and scurrying drifts. It wakened something deep inside him. How the whole earth once was, when people were in a better place.
He took a deep breath, loving its icy sting in his lungs. Almost like a drug, this air. How it changes you. Renews you. He climbed the last few hundred feet to the ridgetop where in a little saddle fringed by oak brush the elk stood huffing out his blood.
The man faced him, forty yards apart. “I’m sorry.” He raised the Winchester and aimed for the elk’s brain.
Their eyes locked, and in that instant he was sure the elk understood, and his last glance was eternal hatred.
THE REGRET was always like this. You hunted because you loved it, to be back in our primeval life, how we’ve lived for millions of years … And the elk so overpopulated that they eroded the stream channels and ate down the willows and cottonwoods to the bone. But it was always painful to kill, he hated it. Life lives on death – but he still regretted it.
He leaned the Winchester against an aspen trunk and knelt beside the dead elk. “Thank you, for giving your life.” That was how Curt, their half-Cheyenne guide, would say it. To reach out to the elk’s spirit on its way to the death world.
He cut the elk’s throat and dragged him headfirst downhill to let him bleed out, sliced down the chest and belly and down each leg. The guts steamed in the subzero sun when he pulled them out. But already the elk was cooling and lines of ticks were running down his legs and halting at the snow.
When the man heard the sound behind him he paid it no mind, busy cutting the elk’s thick-furred skin away from the ribs. Then he heard it again, turned and leaped to his feet, the skinning knife useless in his hand.
A big grizzly. The kind so huge he towers over everything, his thick fur copper-bright, his shoulders so wide they crush down trees, his jaws like steel, enormous teeth.
The grizzly trotted down the slope toward the man, a dreamy cold look in his black eyes.
The man stumbled backwards from the elk, realized the Winchester was too far to