My Kind of Town
>> Queen's Medical Center The whole idea
Dreams and reality were hard to tell apart for Quinn Ah Sun, just roused by a slamming door from vivid dreams inspired by the painkiller they'd given him for the gunshot wound to his right thigh.
Maybe Gwen Roselovich from HPD Dispatch, her lipstick smeared across her face, was in the dream too.
"Where did the tall naked Hawaiian woman go?" Quinn said, still woozy.
"What?"
"She was just here. Ho'ola. The goddess."
"Only goddess here is me, Sweetie," Gwen said, wiping lipstick from Quinn's face and ignoring the newspaper photocopies scattered across the floor.
"OK," he said, and drifted back into dreamland, looking for Ho'ola again. Gwen was just pulling herself together again, wiping lipstick from her chin and readjusting her clothing, when Nurse Nina Ramones entered the room to check on the patient.
"What happened here?" Nina said reprovingly, pointing at the papers on the floor.
"They got spilled."
Papers, Nina thought, do not get spilled. Milk gets spilled.
"I'm Gwen," she said, repouffing her hair. "Hi. Quinn's father asked me to check on him during my lunch. I was just about to go."
Gwen softly touched Quinn's cheek, then quickly gathered up the papers. Photocopies of old newspaper articles, she saw, all about the Ah Sun family.
She was sure that Sgt. Mits Ah Sun would want a report on this too.
When the door had closed, Nina stood over the knocked-out patient. There was something about this man. First Nina caught a woman, later identified as his first cousin, on the bed with him, her clothing askew. And now this hoochie mama was obviously doing something with him to get her makeup and clothing so wrecked.
All of which told Nina that the competition was wide open. Recently divorced and already tired of sleeping alone, Nina was willing to audition. That's why she had volunteered to work an extra four hours of overtime today. When he awoke, it was her turn to give Patient Ah Sun a sponge bath.
>> Pearl City
HPD Sgt. Ah Sun was at his desk when the call came from Gwen Roselovich: "Quinn was good," she reported. "I mean, he was sleeping, but doing well ... By the way, his cousin dropped off some papers, photocopies of old newspaper articles, all about your family ... Well, no, she didn't exactly drop them off.
She threw them. She wasn't very happy to see me there ..."
That, of course, was the whole idea.
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