My Kind of Town
>> Ala Moana Beach Park Good vibrations
"To hell with fishing," Jimmy Ahuna muttered after hooking his second puffer of the morning. He was after papio, but he couldn't concentrate, not after what he'd seen in the pre-dawn hours while setting up his poles and brackets on the seawall above the channel that leads from the sea to the quiet waters inside the reef. The same World War II-vintage sub he'd seen at Queen's Beach -- with a big red circle painted on top of the hull, the unmistakable sign of the Rising Sun -- had slid past him in the moonlight, silent, spectral, then submerged out of sight inside the reef. Jimmy, retired from the Pearl Harbor Shipyard, knew what he saw.
The technical term for Jimmy's condition was freaked. All he could do was sit on the seawall, wait and watch to see what the ghost sub would do.
>> "Damn!" Sen. Donovan Matsuda-Yee-Dela Cruz-Bishop-Kamaka spat as the first poison dart sailed harmlessly two inches behind the neck of HPD Detective Sherlock Gomes -- because Gomes chose that moment to dive back into the waist-deep water and begin flailing around again. His attempts to swim would have been laughable if so much wasn't at stake. Donovan had only one more poison dart loaded in his shotgun snorkel. And it had to find the mark. If not, Gomes would ruin everything. He'd tell Donovan's girlfriend Dr. Laurie Tang that Donovan had impregnated Serena Kawainui, the young woman who had crashed his car yesterday. And then Gomes would make Donovan go to a drug rehab clinic, and if he didn't Gomes would arrest him for possession of crystal methamphetamine. That's why Gomes must go.
Donovan didn't like it, but he had to move in even closer for the kill.
>> Only another 150 yards to the end of the beach and Dr. Laurie Tang was swimming strong, what she thought of as "drive" mode -- her stroke, kick, breathing and glide all in sync -- not a sprint, but sustained power. All thoughts of the buff, shirtless Sherlock Gomes, who awaited at the end of her swim to ask about Donovan, had vanished from her head. This was the joy of swimming, the purity of the stroke, the sensation of water flowing fast around her body. That's when Laurie heard an engine start and she nearly jumped out of the water. She stopped swimming, treaded water, looking for the sound of a boat, and saw none.
The water, of course, was too murky to see the submarine just 15 feet below her. But Laurie could hear the engine. She could feel its vibrations in the water. She resumed swimming. Only another 100 yards now.
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