My Kind of Town
>> Pearl City Stealing memories
It was like a bad dream. Sheila Fernandez had come home from shopping at Pearlridge and noticed immediately that all of the family pictures on the bookshelf were missing. Then she found the kitchen door had been pried open.
Sheila ran her fingers over the the barren shelves of the bookshelf, trying to remember the photos. As long as those photos existed, her son Arthur, now a father himself, would always be a grinning 10-year-old AYSO soccer player. Her daughter Ariel, in nursing school at HPU, would forever be the smiling hula dancer. In their wedding photo, Sheila and her late husband Joseph would always be happy newlyweds with a life before them. But without those photos, it was as if the memories they held began to fade.
Who could have done something so heartless? And why? Desperate, Sheila looked up the number for her old friend Mits Ah Sun. He'd been a cop in Pearl City forever. He'd know what to do.
>> Downtown
Sitting at her home computer in the Executive Center, Van Truong wrote a heartfelt response to an on-line personal ad, saying that like the guy she too was looking for true love, and perhaps they could find it together. And almost immediately after clicking the "send" icon she wished that she hadn't been in such a hurry. Because when Van hit the "receive mail" icon, her i-Mac started going crazy. She'd only posted her ad a few hours ago and all of a sudden she was deluged with e-mail from men, men and more men. Van had never felt so wanted in her life.
>> Waikiki
Lt. Col. Chuck Ryan left his car with the valets at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, walked through the hotel and outside toward the Royal Hawaiian Shopping Center. At the Hermes shop, he paid cash for a blue necktie with little gold owls in a symmetric pattern and asked them to put it in one of the big Hermes logo shopping bags.
Then he took the escalator up one floor, then another. He leaned on the railing, ostensibly watching the people below. Sensing someone to his left, Ryan glanced that way.
"The 49ers have a chance on Sunday," the man in a green UH baseball cap said.
"Is Montana coming back?" Ryan replied, completing their scripted dialogue.
The other man placed an Hermes logo shopping bag on the ground next to Ryan's bag.
"Take the spread against the Falcons," the man said.
"Always," Ryan replied, completing their conversation.
The man leaned down, picked up Ryan's Hermes bag, blended into the crowd.
Ryan waited two minutes, picked up the other man's Hermes bag. Glancing inside, he saw a Manila envelope -- how appropriate for this operation.
Don Chapman is editor of MidWeek.
His serialized novel runs daily in the Star-Bulletin
with weekly summaries on Sunday.
He can be emailed at dchapman@midweek.com