My Kind of Town
>> Three-way phone call The Honolulu Soap Co.:
Sunday digest"So what about you, Lil?!" Shauny Nakamoto said. "What happened when that hunk cop cousin of your's came to drive you home?"
Lily Ah Sun's deep breath and long sigh told the story.
"Lily?" Fawn, Shauny's identical but very different twin, sensed something coming that she didn't want to hear. "He's your cousin."
They already knew about Lily getting pulled over by a cop yesterday, and how he took her breath away, and she could tell he was feeling the same way, and then she gave him her license and he gasped. The cop was her cousin Quinn. Until that moment they hadn't spoken in 21 years.
And Shauny and Fawn knew that after Lily and Shauny got drunk yesterday, Lily called Quinn for a ride home.
"Everything was fine," Lily said, "until we got to Foodland. Long story. Anyway, I was so drunk I was leaning on Quinn, and he felt so perfect.
"And then we stopped at Maunalua Bay. Just to talk.
"Nothing happened until I stumbled and I was nose-diving into some rocks, but then Quinn, I don't know how, but somehow he swept me up, his arms were around me, and ..."
"And?!" Shauny, cutting to the chase.
"And we kissed ..."
>> Ala Moana Beach Park
Lt. 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 with the Marines, had a hand in Desert Storm and Bosnia. And now he was going back to World War II.
Ryan walked toward two uniformed police officers who were were speaking with a guy wearing surfer shorts. Ryan flashed his Navy ID. "I'm looking for Detective Sherlock Gomes."
"Right here," the guy in the shorts said.
"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 swimming himself. And then the sub surfaced out of nowhere, lifting Laurie out of the water.
Then he explained how he opened the hatch. But Gomes was not going to tell this Navy guy about seeing the goddess Ho'ola inside the sub, and how she just disappeared. But he did tell Ryan that the lone occupant was a skeleton, the remains of a Japanese sailor believed to have been Shinjo Eiki. Turning away, Ryan thought, Gomes is the kind of guy he'd love to recruit. 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.
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, Ryan had never believed in auras. But he saw one, a white light that seemed to radiate from Fawn. And 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.
>> Sen. Donovan Matsuda-Yee-Dela Cruz-Bishop-Kamaka was scared spitless as he jumped on the moped. Damn, that woman was huge! Like some Hawaiian Amazon. What did she want with him? She'd first approached him on the beach. He was just coming out of the water after his failed attempt to kill HPD Detective Sherlock Gomes with poison darts. Donovan was terrified of her and ran. Keying the ignition, he glanced back. She was beckoning. The senator sped away.
Ho'ola, goddess of life, was neither rebuffed nor surprised. She came to save, but could not force it upon any human.
>> Ryan vaulted up onto the hull of the sub.
With his back to the beach, Ryan slid what looked like a silver Perry Ellis logo off his belt buckle. He stepped quickly to the hatch and looked in.
The Perry Ellis buckle was in fact a video camera. Ryan slowly panned the cam-card, finishing with the skeleton in the pilot's seat.
"Not something you see just every day," Ryan said, joining Gomes on the beach.
"Nope."
"The posse," Ryan said, nodding toward a couple who showed IDs and got past the cops and yellow tape. Ryan recognized them, Pearl Harbor naval intelligence officers.
"I believe this is your's," Ryan said. Meaning the sub.
"Mm," said Capt. Mike Stussy.
"Nn," said Lt. Nancy MacTavish.
A talkative bunch, Gomes thought, these Navy spooks.
While Ryan was glad to have been there to see the sub in person, he was more glad to hand the case off. He was here to assist Martin Luther Washington.
Marty was on vacation and had just returned to the Hale Koa when a Filipina woman grabbed him and said she'd been asked to take part in a plot against America. He grilled her and decided she was for real and called Ryan, his boss in D.C. That was the end of Marty's vacation after just two days. That's how Wilhemina Orlando came by the code name "Sandy." And that's why Ryan was in Honolulu.
Ryan and Marty had gotten a huge break. American intelligence knew about Muhammed Resurreccion, but they'd never gotten anyone inside his organization, neither the legit business side nor the Muslim terrorist side. So they had no idea why he was coming to Honolulu.
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