“They sent you out in that suit?” I asked. “Your friends?”

  “They call me a whale when they think I can’t hear,” he said miserably. “But without them I wouldn’t have any friends at all.”

  “My older brother’s about your size. The last time he was out here surfing with me he left a pair of board shorts at my apartment. It’s only a couple of blocks away—you want to come over with me and try them on? Otherwise I might have to arrest you for public indecency.”

  I looked down at his crotch and there was a little wet spot, pre–cum oozing out of his piss–slit and into the shiny red fabric. He looked down himself and gulped a couple of times. I was afraid he was going to cry. “You’re a cop?”

  “Homicide detective. But don’t worry, I won’t turn you in to Vice—as long as I can get you out of that bikini.”

  I reached over and took his hand. “Come on,” I said, standing up. I wrapped his towel, fortunately a super–sized one, around his waist, hoisted my board, and we walked back up the beach together. He asked me about being a gay cop, and then we talked about his college, and a few minutes later we were at my apartment.

  “The first thing we have to do,” I said, once the door was closed behind us, “is get you out of this suit.” I untied the towel and let it drop to the floor, then slipped my hands around his waist, under the waistband of the suit, and pulled it down. As I did, his big dick flopped out. If anything, it was fatter than I had imagined when I saw it pressing against the thin red fabric.

  It wasn’t quite hard, but it stiffened when I dropped to my knees and started licking it. His body shuddered as I wrapped my hands around those big globes of his ass and started moving his dick in and out of my mouth. It was too big for me to swallow comfortably, but he didn’t mind—it was only a minute or two before he started panting and whimpering, and I pulled my mouth off just as he shot a load all over my chest.

  “Sorry,” he said, in a small voice.

  “Never apologize for coming,” I said, standing up.

  “But it’s all over your chest!”

  I wrapped my arms around his waist and pulled him close to me, rubbing my chest against his as I leaned up and kissed him. “Oh, gee, now it’s all over you, too,” I said, when I finally leaned back. “Guess we both have to take showers.”

  My bathroom has a combination tub and shower, plenty big enough for Tom and me—provided we stayed close to each other. I turned the water on spray and then faced him, my hard dick rubbing against his thigh, which was lightly dusted with the same blond hair that freckled his chest.

  We kissed again, and he grabbed my dick and started jerking it. “Slow down, cowboy,” I said, taking hold of his wrist. “Nobody’s in a hurry here, right?”

  He grinned sheepishly. I took a bar of soap and began lathering him up, beginning with his shoulders, then his pecs, paying close attention to his nipples, which stood up like little toy soldiers by the time I was done with them. I spent a long time on the big expanse of his belly, running my hands up and down the smooth acres of flesh, then around and around in circles.

  By this time he was hard again, though there wasn’t much difference in size from soft to hard. I avoided the pubic area, working first down one leg, then the other, squatting down to massage each thigh and calf with lavender–scented soap. Every now and then he’d gulp a little, or sigh, and I kept up a steady patter, complimenting the softness of his flesh, the strength of his tendons, the sheer wonderful size of him.

  I was turned on by how much of him there was. I didn’t quite know why; many guys, Tom’s roommates included, probably saw his fat as unattractive. But I’ve been with skinny guys who have nothing you can hold on to, dicks the size of pencils, lips that make you feel like you’re kissing hard plastic.

  I’ve been with guys I felt I could break if I wasn’t careful, and I was reveling in Tom’s size, even as I turned him around and began soaping the backs of his legs and that wonderful big ass. I greased up a finger with lather and pried apart his ass cheeks to find his puckered hole. Tom hiccupped a little.

  “You like that?” I asked. “You like me to play with your ass?”

  He sighed in response. I took that as a yes. I stood up, lathered my dick back into a rock–hard state, and then pressed myself up against his back. I reached around him for his tits, and fingered them while my dick struggled to make its way through his mountains of flesh and into his ass.

  It was a tough go, I have to admit. I was fucking his ass cheeks more than his hole, but it still felt damn good to me. I thought about getting a condom but because I couldn’t get into him I didn’t think I needed one. Just being pressed up against him, his skin sliding against mine, was enough to get me off.

  We rinsed and then stepped out of the tub. Tom immediately wanted to cover himself up with a towel, but I wouldn’t let him. “Where’s that phone of yours?” I asked. “We’ve got to send some photos to your so–called friends.”

  His eyes lit up. I kneeled down in front of him, pulled his fat dick straight out toward my face, and said, “Take this picture.”

  He leaned down and snapped. I stood up and then lay down on the bed, face up, with my legs pulled up to my shoulders. “Come over here. Spread my ass cheeks and stick your dick there. Then take a picture.”

  I loved the feeling of my legs resting on his shoulders, the way he was so big and so close to me. I was hard again, and thought I might come just from being near him.

  “Oh, man,” he said, when he’d snapped the shot and sent it. “Those guys are gonna cream.”

  He stood up and showed me the pictures. They were hot. I rolled over and said, “Come on, sit by me on the bed,” making a place for him next to me.

  “I should get dressed,” he said, looking around the room. “You said I could borrow a pair of your brother’s shorts?”

  “Later. You’re not getting away from me so easily. Come here, you big sexy thing.”

  He sat next to me, and his body language said he wasn’t happy. I stretched out next to him and said, “Would you do something for me?”

  “What?”

  “Lie on top of me.”

  “I can’t. I’ll crush you.”

  “I’m not made of glass, brah. You won’t crush me.”

  He faced me, swung one massive leg over me and balanced on the bed. Then, very carefully, he lowered himself onto me. But he was still supporting himself with his hands; there was almost no pressure on me. I took his head in my hands and brought his lips down to mine. He relaxed as we kissed, and I felt all his weight settle on top of me.

  I had to stop kissing him to take some shallow breaths, but I didn’t mind. It felt good, having all that weight on me. I felt safe and secure under him, and as a cop, I don’t get that feeling very often.

  His dick was rock hard, pressing against my stomach, and so I said, “Rub it. Rub that big dick against me.”

  He did, tentatively at first, but then he started getting into it. He leaned down and kissed me again, harder this time, and my stiff dick was rubbing against his as our tongues dueled, and I could only breathe through my nose so I wasn’t getting that much oxygen to my brain. I think I experienced that heightened sense of orgasm that guys get when they try to strangle themselves while jerking off, because man, was that a powerful sensation. Every nerve ending in my body tensed and then released as the cum shot out of my dick, and at the same time I felt him come, too. He was still there on top of me for a minute, and then he rolled off.

  “I never thought I could come like that,” he said, panting. “That was awesome.”

  I could barely speak. “Me, too,” I croaked.

  “Jerking off in the bathroom is never going to be the same again.”

  I finally got my breath back. “Man, you have the dick of death. There must be enough size queens in Oregon so you never have to jerk off again.”

  “You think?”

  “I know.”

  His phone rang. He looked at the display. “It’s them.”

  “Go ahead, answer it.”

  He did. “With this guy I met at the beach. Yeah, that’s him in the picture.” He listened. “You didn’t, huh? That’s too bad.”

  He looked to me and whispered, “None of them got lucky.”

  “Aw, what a shame.”

  “Right now?” he said into the phone. “We’re just fooling around. I might hang here for a while.” Suddenly he laughed. “What do you mean, you never knew my dick was that big? I’ve been living with you guys for three months.”

  He listened some more, then looked over at me. “Go on, if you want to,” I said. “You’ve worn me out.”

  “All right,” he said back into the phone. “I’m just going to borrow some shorts. That bikini is way too skimpy.”

  He stood up. “Well, if you say so,” he said, after a minute. “All right. I’ll be back to the hotel in a few minutes.” He hung up. “They want to see me in the bikini again. I know the three of them have fooled around together. I guess I’m finally going to get to join in.”

  “Go for it,” I said, waving at him from the bed.

  He leaned down over me and kissed me, hard, his tongue roaming around my lips like a predatory animal. “You are awesome,” he said, and then, after squeezing back into that skimpy red bikini, he was gone.

  And so the case of the miserable guy with the big dick was solved. Not one I’ll write up for the police department, though. I’m not sure this is what the tourist office means when they ask us locals to extend the spirit of aloha to our visitors. But hey, it works for me.

  ONLINE, NOBODY KNOWS YOU’RE A DOG

  When I arrived at the House of Lo, a Chinese restaurant just off University Avenue in Mânoa, Jimmy Chang was having a hard time keeping a middle–aged Chinese woman away from the body of a young woman in the back parking lot. It was just after two in the morning, and I was cranky about being on the night shift to start with. Pulling up at the scene, I could see it was going to be a tough call.

  A patrol car with reinforcements was right behind me, so Jimmy turned the hysterical woman over to them and came to talk to me. “The deceased is Susie Lo, a waitress here at her family restaurant.”

  The parking lot started to get busy, as the crime scene techs arrived, followed by the guys from the medical examiner’s office. “That name sounds familiar to me.”

  “She was the one who found the body of that guy up by Honolulu Arts College at Christmas.”

  “Good memory.”

  He shifted uneasily from foot to foot.

  “And?”

  “I might have gone out with her once or twice.”

  I took his arm and walked him over toward University Avenue, where we could stand under a street light away from the rest of the crowd. “Might have, Jimmy?”

  He shrugged. “She wasn’t really a witness. I came here for dinner once and she was my waitress. We started to talk, and we hit it off.”

  “How long did you date her?”

  “I wouldn’t call it dating. We went out once, dinner and a movie, then I think we had coffee once up by her school. That was it.”

  “We’ll get back to that. Tell me how you got here.”

  “911 call from a couple of UH students who were cutting through the parking lot on their way to a club. They found Susie—I mean the deceased. I got here a couple of minutes later.”

  He motioned over the two UH students who had found the body. The girl was freaking out, shivering and shaking, and the boy had his arm around her shoulders. From the tentative way his hand rested on her, I figured it was only a first or second date. They hadn’t seen anyone else in the parking lot, or running past them as they approached. I got their names and numbers and let them go.

  Jimmy’s squad car was parked at the edge of the lot, its lights still strobing the night with blue light. He walked me back to the body, and the crime scene techs stepped away as I knelt down to look at her. Susie Lo was petite and chunky, with long black hair. I remembered how it had hung like a curtain over half her face.

  “Those her parents over there?”

  Jimmy nodded. A female officer was comforting Mrs. Lo, who was alternating between crying hysterically and screaming in Chinese. Mr. Lo stood there, not moving or speaking.

  One of the worst things about my job is talking to the families of victims—particularly right after a crime has been committed. But I sucked it up and walked over to them. I introduced myself and asked if we could go inside the restaurant and sit down. The female patrol officer helped guide Mrs. Lo into the restaurant, which, like most of its kind, was decorated in red and gold. Red for good luck, gold for strength and wealth. I tried to ignore the irony as we sat down at a booth.

  “Restaurant close one o’clock,” Mr. Lo said. “Susie, she leave right away, out back door. She live few blocks away, share apartment with cousin.”

  I wrote down the address and the cousin’s name, Peter Hung. “Peter good boy,” Mr. Lo said. “He go UH. Become engineer.”

  Susie wasn’t dating anyone, not that Mrs. Lo knew of. “She play computer a lot,” her father said. I made a note of that.

  According to her parents, there had been no angry customers, no one who paid a little too much attention to Susie Lo. She was a good student, a talented artist, studying computer animation at Honolulu Arts College.

  In response to an urgent text message from his uncle, Peter Hung showed up at the House of Lo just as the medical examiner’s van carrying the body of his cousin pulled out of the parking lot. After a quick conversation with his aunt and uncle in Cantonese, of which I understood about half a dozen words, he turned to me.

  He was a skinny, pimply kid, and reminded me a lot of what my friend Harry had looked like when we were in high school. He was wearing baggy pants that looked like pajama bottoms and a UH T–shirt. He didn’t look sleepy; he’d probably been up late studying.

  Mr. and Mrs. Lo wanted to close the restaurant, so Peter and I walked out to the parking lot and I leaned against my truck while we talked. “Your aunt and uncle told me Susie was a sweet girl,” I said. “I don’t mean any disrespect here, but I have to know anything I can about her in order to find out who killed her.”

  He shrugged. “There aren’t any hidden secrets, detective. Susie was just who everybody thought—a sweet girl, a little nerdy, a good artist. She’s had a couple of boyfriends but nothing serious. We never got threatening phone calls and she never told me she was frightened of anybody.”

  “How about when she found that body at Christmas?” I asked. “Did she get upset about that?”

  “Sure. It freaked her out. But she didn’t know the guy and she got over it.”

  I made arrangements to meet him the next day at the apartment they had shared, and he left. By then, the crime scene techs had gone over the parking lot and packed up and Jimmy Chang had left for another call. Susie’s body had gone to the morgue, and her parents had shut the restaurant down. The parking lot was empty except for me and my truck, lonely and a little scary in the late night. I stayed there for a few minutes, trying to get a feel for Susie Lo and who might have killed her, but I didn’t get anything.

  The next afternoon I met Peter Hung at a small two–bedroom a few blocks off University, in a neighborhood of low–rise buildings, both residential and commercial, that catered to the UH student body. The campus itself was just down the hill. “How come you don’t live in the dorm?” I asked Peter after he led me inside.

  “My parents and Susie’s parents all wanted us to live at home. The only way they agreed to let us out of the house was if we kept an eye on each other.” He gave me a half grin. “Neither of us were troublemakers, but you know parents.”

  The art on the walls in Susie’s room was disturbing—lots of dark swirls and evil creatures, but Peter assured me his cousin just liked the style. “She was sort of a Goth in high school, but she got over it.”

  He turned on her computer and showed me some of her school projects. In one Flash movie, a Chinese dragon hatched from an egg, grew to full size, and flew away. It was beautifully drawn and smoothly animated. “I’ve got to study, detective,” Peter said. “I’ve got an exam tomorrow, and I’m going to have to spend a lot of time at my aunt and uncle’s over the next few days.”

  He left me in Susie’s room and I started clicking on stuff on her desktop. I opened a text file labeled “Chat,” and started to read a transcript of a session between two people, one called Li–Chi and the other Ultimareus. At first it was a lot of the “Hey, how you doing,” stuff, but quickly it got racy, describing sexual positions and adventures in graphic detail. Both Li–Chi and Ultimareus were male—which made me wonder how Susie had gotten hold of their chat transcript.

  As I read I had to remind myself that I was investigating a murder, not surfing some gay chat room. When I finished, I asked Peter what he knew about it.

  He glanced at the beginning of the file. “Li–Chi was the name Susie used when she was playing The Last Emperor.”

  “What’s that?”

  “An online role–playing game. It takes place around the turn of the century, when there were factions warring for control in China, and the last emperor was a little boy. You can be a warrior, or a courtesan, or pretty much anything you want.”

  “What was Susie?”

  “I don’t know. We didn’t talk about the game much.”

  “Did she play a lot?”

  “Every day. Don’t get me wrong, she always did her homework first.”

  “I’m not going to tell on her,” I said. “Can you get me into the game?”

  “I think so.” I moved over, and he clicked a few things. Susie had saved her password, and soon we were facing a picture of The Forbidden City on the screen. Peter was navigating us along a pathway when a text message box popped up.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry!” the message read. It was from Ultimareus, the person Susie had been communicating with in the chat transcript. “I was so sure I hurt you and I’ve been feeling so bad.”