My Kind of Town
>> Kalihi at King A loyal reader
Running late to meet her brother Lance's lover Greg at Queen's, Lily Ah Sun normally would have sped her teal BMW through the light that turned yellow just as she was about to enter the intersection.
But this time Lily braked hard. A tailgating taxi she hadn't previously noticed nearly ran up her exhaust pipe, screeching to a stop just inches from the bumper. In her rearview mirror, the Samoan cabbie made what-the-hell-are-you-doing motions with his hands. But Lily didn't care. She wanted to read the paper.
She'd bought a copy of the afternoon Star-Bulletin from a street hawker back on Nimitz and had to see again an item on Page One. A three-deck headline over a one-column story: Bloody/Death/At Portlock.
Meaning the guy who'd broken into her house and tried to rape her maid Rosalita until her cousin Quinn came along and shot the creep. Lily re-read the first three graphs, remembering how brave Quinn had been, how selfless, how he'd also been shot in the right thigh and how much he bled.
OK, maybe she was still furious with him for what she saw in his room at Queen's earlier. But after what Quinn had done for her and Rosalita and Elizabeth, the least she could do was answer a couple of his questions.
And what Quinn told her on the phone didn't make any sense. He thought Lily dropped off just one photocopy from her research into the Ah Suns.
In fact it had been a stack, which she'd hurled at him and the hoochie mama who was kissing and fondling him. With a flurry of photocopies swirling through the air, she'd sworn at them both and stomped out. The other weird thing was that Quinn thought that one story -- about the disappearance of Clarence "Bobo" Ah Sun had something to do with the change in her feelings for Quinn.
The real reason seemed fairly self-explanatory to Lily. Either he just didn't get it or he was in deep denial. Ah sure, the old deny-deny-deny ploy. She'd heard it before, like when she caught her boyfriend at UH doing it in his van in the parking structure with her good friend Candy.
But with Quinn, maybe there was something else. Lily's heart leaped at the possibility. Maybe Quinn was just knocked out from the painkillers and the little b-i-t-c-h had been taking advantage of an unconscious man. If that was the case, Lily was soooo wrong.
The cabbie leaned on his horn. Yikes, the light had turned green. The horn kept blaring and blaring. Lily shocked herself by raising a middle finger.
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