My Kind of Town
>> Kaimuki Thinking of you
Shaving in the shower, HPD Detective Sherlock Gomes had no idea that two people he was thinking about were also thinking of him.
>> 2002 Wilder
Blame it on the glass of Kendall-Jackson Riesling she'd sipped while picking up the living room. Now Dr. Laurie Tang found herself also putting fresh sheets on the bed. How silly! Sherlock Gomes was only coming for dinner. Laurie patted down the bed, took another sip of what she thought was the perfect wine, fruity but tart.
TIme to shower. Stripping down, her head was filled with images of Sherlock this morning at Ala Moana, the way he looked in nothing but surf shorts, so lean and muscular. She stood naked before the full-length mirror in the bathroom, wondered what Sherlock thought of her body. She'd been wearing only a swimsuit that kept few secrets. But it did hide the one thing it was supposed to -- the jagged scar on her abdomen where a so-called doctor butchered an emergency appendectomy when she was 10. That's why Laurie preferred one-piece swimsuits and her men in the dark. But Sherlock might be different.
Yes, it had to be the wine, because here was a first: she was bathing for a man. Each pass of the heather-scented glycerine bar across her skin was for him. He might touch her there later.
>> Makiki Heights
Machiavelli Wang paced as he rattled off all that needed to be done to re-establish Sen. Donovan Matsuda-Yee-Dela Cruz-Bishop-Kamaka as the Democrats' best hope of keeping a grip on Washington Place, the foremost need getting him cleaned up and back in the public eye. But as his campaign manager talked, the senator knew that none of it mattered.
"Shut up," he said.
Machiavelli was not accustomed to being told what to do. He was the boss. "Excuse me?"
"We've got a bigger problem," the senator said, glancing at a clock on the wall. "And barely 14 hours to solve it."
"What're you talking about?"
He told Machiavelli about the visit from Sherlock Gomes and how Gomes busted him for possession of ice and pot. And that Gomes said the only way to avoid jail was to be on a plane to a drug rehab clinic in Portland in the morning. "I thought I could handle it alone."
"Thus the blowgun?"
The senator nodded sheepishly.
"There are some things, Donovan, that a man of your station should not attempt to do yourself. That's why we have professionals."
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