My Kind of Town
Following a paranoid
>> Beretania Street
Kate, whose checklist of certifiably diagnosed mental illnesses included paranoia, kept looking back. And the old green car kept following TheBus. It had been there since she boarded the No. 3 at 16th and Pahoa, then followed onto Kokohead and waited for her to transfer to the No. 1. It followed down Waialae and was still there at 4th Avenue, her stop, and so she rode on, past the Humane Society onto Beretania. When TheBus made a stop, the car stopped and waited when it could have easily passed and gotten to wherever the male driver was going a lot faster. It's not paranoia, is it, if you really are being followed?
The green car followed her all the way down Beretania, past University and McCully and Keeaumoku, past HPD headquarters to Punchbowl.
Stopped four vehicles behind TheBus, HPD Detective Sherlock Gomes was being rather obvious, but there's really no other way for a single vehicle to tail a city bus. And Gomes wasn't ready to call in help -- he was just going on a hunch. He'd seen a woman on his street with an empty backpack. Fifteen minutes later the backpack was stuffed. Maybe she'd burglarized one of his neighbors, maybe not. In any event the pursuit was taking him closer to Kalihi and the Honolulu Soap Co., where he wanted to ask Sheets Ah Sun about his interest in a recently discovered illegal chemical dumpsite in Waimanalo. But the main thing now was to follow TheBus until the woman with the expedition-size desert camouflage backpack got off.
Stopped two lanes to his left, first in line, was an HPD van that had pulled out of HPD headquarters when TheBus stopped for the light at Hale Maka'i. It carried what appeared to be a half-dozen prisoners, obviously being transferred to OCCC or Halawa. This, Gomes knew, was Hawaii's version of freighting nuclear materials through populous areas on trains, as they did on the mainland. Every day in Honolulu criminals were moved from jail to prison to courthouse to ER. Each trip involved risks -- traveling on busy, raging roads, carrying murderers and rapists past homes and schools.
But HPD, state sheriffs, federal marshals and military police had been lucky over the years. Good and lucky. Strict protocols were followed, great care given by drivers, and there was supposed to be a backup vehicle. The light turned and the HPD van accelerated into the intersection.
Gomes saw it coming, even before the tires started screeching, but there was nothing he could do to stop the older model blue Bronco heading mauka on Punchbowl from running the red, speeding into the intersection, smashing into the van's driver door.
Don Chapman is editor of MidWeek.
His serialized novel runs daily in the Star-Bulletin
with weekly summaries on Sunday.
He can be e-mailed at dchapman@midweek.com