My Kind of Town
Pre-death hallucinations
>> Queen's Medical Center
Lily Ah Sun tried to scream, but could only make muffled gagging sounds. The Samoan cabbie had one huge hang around her throat and was trying to yank her out through the BMW's window. She clawed at his arm with one hand, clung to the steering wheel with the other, but he was three times her size, and angry, and she was helpless against him. Cursing and sweating, he had her head and shoulders out the window now, and through her tears she saw him draw his other hand back and ball it up into a fist the size of a toaster oven. She was going to die. Over one little Finger.
As if through a mist, beyond her throttled screams and the grunts and curses of the cabbie, Lily thought she heard a man yell "Hey, asshole, I said stop! Police!"
And then she thought she heard a woman scream "No, Quinn, stop!"
But even as she fought and screamed, Lily knew that couldn't be right. Her cousin Quinn was upstairs in a hospital bed with a gunshot wound to his leg. Maybe this was just a pre-death hallucination.
That's when the cabbie screamed in pain and she felt his grip loosen.
>> Arizona Memorial -- Theater 2
The line for the movie started to move forward and Commander Chuck Ryan glanced back, glad as always to see Lt. Martin Luther Washington covering his 6.
SOP, since his was a two-man operation, was for Ryan and Marty to each cover one of the two exits. But Ryan had a feeling. Was it intuition, experience, paranoia? Maybe a little of each? Whatever, Ryan wanted to sit as close as possible to Muhammed Resurreccion and the three females with him -- Rosalita Resurreccion, her little daughter Elizabeth and Muhammed's driver "Sandy."
He wanted to sit close enough that he could affably comment on the beautiful bouquet of flowers that Rosalita carried, say he wished he'd thought of bringing flowers himself, and ask in a neighborly kind of way if he could smell their sweet island aroma, reaching for the flowers as he did so, and peripherally keeping an eye on Muhammed's reaction.
Ryan entered the theater, adjusting his eyes to the muted light. People went into two directions here, either straight ahead down the stairs on the right side or along the back of the theater and then down the stairs on the left. Muhammed seemed to know exactly where he wanted to sit -- an aisle seat on the right. He found one seven rows down, motioned for the ladies to take seats to the inside, Rosalita first, then Elizabeth and Sandy.
Ryan saw several open seats directly behind them and made his move.
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