My Kind of Town
>> Arizona Memorial Muhammed the florist
The moment that Muham-med Resurreccion turned to go back to the van, Navy intelligence officer Lt. Martin Luther Washington pulled his secure-line ear plug from his pocket.
"Hold on, Chuck," he said. "Muhammed is returning to the van."
"Too late. I'm already here."
In fact, he was idling in the crowded lot, waiting for a sunburned family to climb into an SUV -- three kids arguing over who was going to sit where -- and vacate the parking space.
"Geez, I see him coming."
Leaving Wilhemina, Rosalita and Elizabeth to wait outside the visitor center, Muhammed walked back across the parking lot, opened the silver-blue rental van's passenger door, scooped up the bouquet of flowers he'd left behind.
Muhammed reached under the driver's seat, retrieved the small block of plastique left there by Wilhemina's cousin Rey Orlando yesterday. Muhammed quickly pressed it into the bottom of the flowers, molding it like putty around the base of the stems as florists sometimes do to preserve cut flowers. He pressed a radio-receiver/blasting cap microchip into the plastique, embedded it all the way, and patted his trouser pocket, felt what would appear to be a normal radio-control car-lock device. But this one was modified and had a range of two miles.
>> Honolulu Soap Co.
Lily Ah Sun loved check lists. She'd discovered them at Punahou, sophomore year. Changed her life. Write down everything you need to do in a list, then check each one off when it's completed. Each little check mark was a victory, an accomplishment, a good feeling. Lily's current to-do list had just one more item, returning the call from her cousin Quinn. He'd sounded confused, or maybe just goofy with painkillers.
Apparently, he thought that she'd dropped off just one photocopy of old news stories in his room at Queen's. In fact there was a stack of them. That one was about the disappearance of Clarence "Bobo" Ah Sun. And apparently Quinn thought that had something to do with why Lily no longer wanted to see him. Instead, it had everything to do with what Lily saw when she walked into his room and caught him kissing and getting fondled by that hoochie mama.
Lily's Mont Blanc hovered over the list.
"To hell with you, Quinn Ah Sun," she said. "You can think what you want to think." And instead of making a check mark beside his name, she scratched it out entirely.
Time to go meet her brother Lance's lover Greg at Queen's. It wouldn't be so hard to avoid Quinn's room. All she had to do was remember how Quinn didn't seem to object at all to what that little b-i-t-c-h was doing.
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