My Kind of Town
>> 2002 Wilder Whose baby?
Exhausted after a long day at the Queen's ER, Dr. Laurie Tang crashed early -- well before the 10 o'clock news. Laurie was a news junkie, but she was tired of seeing the image of a naked young woman being lifted from Sen. Donovan Matsuda-Yee-Dela Cruz-Bishop-Kamaka's car after she crashed it off the Keeaumoku Overpass this morning.
Of course, Laurie had known about the woman crashing Donovan's car even before she picked up a copy of the evening Star-Bulletin, which played Johnny B. Goo's photo of the crash scene on Page One, or saw the TV news. Laurie was on duty when the EMS crew brought her into the ER and mentioned "she was driving the senator's car."
That was weird enough. And then just before the anesthesia kicked in the young woman whispered "please save the baby."
Baby? Whose baby? Donovan's?
Laurie was thinking she ought to hand off this patient to someone who might have fewer mixed emotions, but then the ER got swamped after that 40-car pile-up on the H-1 in Mapunapuna, so Laurie put a tourniquet on her emotions and patched up the nameless young woman's broken arm and picked glass fragments out of her face.
Laurie had wanted to call Donovan immediately and ask him about the young woman, but then Laurie's team got the young man who'd been attacked at the hate crimes bill rally at the Capitol, fell and hit the back of his head on a curb.
Laurie's sleep had already been interrupted once, by HPD detective Sherlock Gomes, asking about Donovan. She'd told him she had plenty of questions too because Donovan had been out of touch for three days.
And now her slumber was interrupted again. She expected it was the ER, calling her back in. But no, she didn't recognize the number displayed on her caller ID. She picked up the phone.
"Hey, Laurie, it's me. How ya doin'?"
Laurie had so many questions, but the first one to escape her lips was "Donovan, where the hell have you been?!"
Uh-oh. The senator had been so busy thinking up a story to explain Serena crashing his car, he hadn't thought about that excuse. Plus, the crystal meth and the beer were still blurring his logic. "Oh, uh, out of town."
"Where?"
And then the senator did what all great manipulators do. He turned it around, put the guilt on Laurie. "Aren't you even going to ask how I'm doing?"
Laurie understood guilt. She'd been raised on it.
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