My Kind of Town
>> Ala Moana Beach Park Don’t inhale
Sen. Donovan Matsuda-Yee-Dela Cruz-Bishop-Kamaka's fascination with blow guns started innocently enough. He'd hosted a conference of indigenous peoples and one of the attendees, a member of a Native American tribe from the Southwest, had presented him with a hand-carved blow gun and some darts.
Blow guns, he explained, had been around for 40,000 years and had seemed to appear at the same time all over the globe. In olden times, his people had hunted deer and other species with blow guns.
How, Donovan wondered, could such a small dart bring down a big deer? The answer was rattlesnake venom on the dart tips. You just had to be careful not to prick your own skin -- and not to inhale the dart. Since then, Donovan had collected blow guns from around the world. And until last night blow guns were just a hobby -- a hobby at which he'd gotten good enough to hit a papaya-thieving mynah from 30 yards.
But then last night Donovan decided that HPD Detective Sherlock Gomes had to go -- partly because he might tell Donovan's girlfriend Dr. Laurie Tang that Donovan had fathered the child in the woman who crashed Donovan's car off the Keeaumoku Overpass yesterday, partly because of Gomes' promise that if Donovan didn't go to that drug rehab center in Portland then Gomes would arrest him. The latter would end Donovan's dream of being governor, the former would cost him the best First Lady candidate he'd ever met.
So Donovan had turned his 18-inch, shotgun snorkel into a double-barrel blow gun and soaked two dart tips in poison available at any garden shop. The basic poison was strychnine, which when introduced to the blood stream produced stiffening and convulsions. The label said there was a little arsenic too for good measure. This morning Donovan inserted one dart into each barrel.
Watching through his mask from 25 yards away, with just his shoulders and head out of the calm water, Donovan saw Gomes tentatively wade out to where the water just reached his knees. Taking deep, nervous breaths, he pulled on his goggles. The great Gomes didn't know how to swim and was obviously scared. How is it that a kid born and raised in Hawaii doesn't know how to swim? Ridiculous.
Donovan tilted the snorkel toward Gomes, inhaled slowly and was about to blow when a Japanese newlywed couple ran into the water, splashing and laughing, and stopped between Donovan and Gomes.
Donovan took two steps into deeper water to get a better angle.
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