My Kind of Town
>> H-1, Town-bound Horror, hordes, hyphens
When Mr. Donald Chock suffered a massive fatal heart attack, he was moving at 50 mph down the on ramp from Puuloa. He was dead before his cherry '72 Mustang swerved across the right lane and into the middle where it was broad-sided by a van.
The van careened into the left lane, where it hit two cars, a Cadillac and the VW that was tailgating it. The Mustang was knocked back into the right lane, where it was crushed by a school bus full of children from Aliamanu Elementary on an excursion to the Academy of Arts.
And then the trouble really started.
>> Cartwright Field
Crowd control is never simple even on a good day, but HPD solo bike Officer Quinn Ah Sun found that a combination of friendliness and firmness plus his weightlifter's physique helped.
And Quinn was naturally charming in a John Wayne kind of way, if John Wayne had graduated from Kamehameha. And if worse came to worse, well, he was armed. But God forbid he should ever have to fire his sidearm in the line of duty. If that happened, he'd probably screwed up somewhere already.
At the moment he was still a force of one. And the news was quickly spreading about the infamous canary yellow Town Car lying upside down on the first base line. And so the crowd was quickly growing. Urban vultures, he thought, waiting for a death. And that didn't count the media horde from four TV stations, AP and both daily newspapers, plus various free- lancers that had descended on him like flying termites with notepads.
And right now there wasn't anything Quinn could do but keep the crowd back and hope that the senator was alive. And that both Jaws and some HPD reinforcements would hurry the heck up.
>> Democrat Street
Call the driver of the faded gray sedan a punk. Call him a creep. Call him twisted. And you'd be right. But the thing was, he turned out exactly the way his parents raised him.
After he was busted for stealing his first car, at age 12, a shrink at the youth facility in Kailua diagnosed him as "emotionally numb." But the slaps to the back of the head and the punches to the stomach he endured at home still hurt. He knew pain. It was the one thing his family had taught him. It was the one thing he knew how to give.
That's why he was following the babe in the teal Beamer who just parked at the Honolulu Soap Co. in a stall reserved for "Lily."
Don Chapman is editor of MidWeek.
His serialized novel runs daily in the Star-Bulletin.
He can be emailed at dchapman@midweek.com