My Kind of Town
Shadows and light
>> Ala Moana Beach ParkLt. Col. Chuck Ryan had to touch the faded red circle painted on the hull to believe it -- an honest-to-God WWII-vintage Japanese mini-sub. A Navy intelligence officer, Ryan did a tour in Vietnam, had a hand in Desert Storm and Bosnia. And now he was going back to the future and World War II, his father's war.
Ryan patted the Rising Sun, turned away and walked toward two uniformed police officers who were speaking with a muscular local guy wearing red surfer shorts. Ryan flashed his Navy ID. "I'm looking for Detective Sherlock Gomes."
"Right here," the guy in the shorts said.
"Work clothes, detective?"
Gomes loved a comedian. "Yes, sir. Standard issue."
"I was told you're the one who opened the hatch."
"You heard right."
"I'd appreciate hearing the story from you."
So Gomes told Ryan of how he'd been there to ask Dr. Laurie Tang about her boyfriend Sen. Donovan Matsuda-Yee-Dela Cruz-Bishop-Kamaka. While she went off to swim, he was getting in some swimming himself --a better way of saying that he was nearly drowning in three feet of water. Then the sub surfaced out of nowhere, lifting Laurie out of the water and she rode it to the beach like a cowgirl.
And yeah, then he jumped up and opened the hatch. Gomes paused, made a decision. He was not going to tell this Navy guy about seeing the goddess Ho'ola inside the sub, and how she just disappeared, and then they saw her later too. That was too weird. But he did tell Ryan that the lone occupant was a skeleton, the remains of a Japanese sailor believed to have been Shinjo Eiki. "See for yourself," he added, nodded toward to the sub.
Turning away, Ryan thought that at first glance Gomes is the kind of guy he'd love to recruit away from the police. He's intelligent, dedicated, fit.
But Gomes was not a guy who could handle the shadows of the spook trade. He was a daylight kind of guy, above board and by the rules. Not everybody could handle the shadows and bending the rules as needed.
Come to think of it, now that he'd met Fawn Nakamoto, Ryan was liking the shadows less and less. Until he met the 27-year-old virgin yesterday, Ryan had never believed in auras. But he saw one, a white light that seemed to radiate from Fawn's heart and surrounded her in warmth and purity. In that moment, he knew he wanted always to stand in her light. It wasn't until this moment that he realized he would have to choose, Fawn's light or the ever-shifting shadows.
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