My Kind of Town

by Don Chapman

Sunday, October 14, 2001

The Honolulu Soap Co.:
Sunday digest

At the end of the day you're another day older, and that's all you can say... The line from "Le Miz" is true enough. But at the end of this long, emotional day those who had lived through it had a few more things to say.

Queen's Medical Center

Quinn Ah Sun was somewhere between sleep and the neverland induced by painkillers. But gradually, he began to be aware of the movement of the mind, and then the sound of vaguely familiar voices some distance away. He forced his eyes to open, but what he saw was foreign.

The voices stopped, and then he saw his father rising from a chair. "Welcome back," Mits Ah Sun said, a tear starting in the corner of his eye. "How you feel?"

"Fnchnmnf," Quinn replied, his throat too dry to speak, his brain still drugged.

"I heard what happened," his father said. "I'm proud of you."

And then Quinn remembered. Lily, his long-lost cousin. It was at Lily's house. They'd heard a scream. Quinn ran inside, his Glock 9mm dawn, and interrupted a guy who was trying to rape Lily's maid Rosalita. The mutt got off a shot with his .22, and it caught Quinn in the leg. But Quinn fired and hit the guy in a place that would make impossible for him to rape anyone ever again.

And then another wave of memory. Quinn recalled pulling over a woman for speeding this morning, and the look they shared. Recalled the mutual knowing that this was exactly what each had always wanted. Recalled glancing at her driver's license and the shock that followed when he realized it was his long-lost cousin.

Lily -- where was she now?

2002 Wilder

Dr. Laurie Tang had been awoken twice by phone calls already -- first from Detective Sherlock Gomes, then from her boyfriend Sen. Donovan Matsuda-Yee-Dela Cruz-Bishop-Kamaka. But she'd had just enough sleep that she was no longer exhausted from her long day at the Queen's ER. And so she lay there, tossing and turning, dissecting her true feelings for Donovan. Why was she so upset that he'd been out of touch for three days and that a young woman crashed his car off the Keeaumoku Overpass, drunk, loaded on ice and naked? And why was Laurie so shocked and hurt when the nameless young woman was brought into the ER and just before the anesthesia kicked in whispered to Laurie, "Please save the baby"?

Where did Laurie's feelings come from? She'd taken enough psychology courses to make some educated guesses. Was it love? Or was it her own ambition, the true legacy of her immigrant parents from what used to be called Formosa? Was it the allure of power? The possibility that Laurie could become the next First Lady of Hawaii? Or was it that Donovan was tall, dark, handsome, intelligent, witty and successful, everything she wanted in a man?

Makiki Heights

Sen. Donovan Matsuda-Yee-Dela Cruz-Bishop-Kamaka couldn't sleep, partly because he was still still too wired from the crystal meth he'd been smoking, but mostly because he needed to figure out how to get rid of Detective Sherlock Gomes before he had a chance to talk with Laurie tomorrow morning before Gomes could tell her who fathered Serena's baby or about the crystal meth. In short, Gomes was the only one who could keep Donovan out of Washington Place or make him lose the best First Lady candidate he'd ever met.

The question was how. Donovan knew some boys who could be counted on to perform certain unsavory tasks. But this wasn't ripping his opponent's signs out of yards. This was murder. Donovan would have to do it alone, and he suddenly knew how. Hey, ho, blow the man down.

Royal Hawaiian Hotel

Lily Ah Sun got adjoining oceanview rooms for herself and her maid Rosalita Resurreccion and Rosalita's daughter Elizabeth. Lily's bedroom was such a bloody mess, there was no way she could sleep there.

It had all begun this morning, on her way to work, when a cop pulled her over for speeding on the H-1. And as the cop stood at her car window, they shared a look that lingered, and in that moment Lily knew that at last she'd found the man of her dreams. But then she gave him her driver's license, and he said her name, as if in shock. Without knowing it, she had fallen in love with her cousin Quinn, whom she hadn't seen in 21 years, and he with her.

Then this afternoon, Lily had too much to drink because she was angry at her father, and she called Quinn. And on the way home, there in the moonlight at Maunalua Bay, they shared a kiss that left her breathless.

And when they got to her home, they were on the verge of another kiss. That's when Rosalita started screaming and Quinn pulled a pistol from an ankle holster and ran inside.

As she waited for sleep to take her away, Lily knew two things in heart. When Quinn was released from Queen's, he was coming home with her. And Lily was going to make good on the vow she made to her father earlier tonight to find out what had happened that led her father and his brother to tear the family part. She didn't believe it had anything to do with money, like he said.

What Lily couldn't have guessed is that it had everything to do with her.

---

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