My Kind of Town
>> Queen's Medical Center Ambushed
Ambush. The word is derived from ancient terms, from a variety of languages and cultures. It is a primitive, even primeval concept, and it's at the core of who we are. Maybe lying in wait to catch your dinner is a basic part of human behavior. Maybe we learned it from beasts that would dine on us. Either way, it's a tactic that applies to so many other areas of life -- business, relationships, sports, trial lawyer tactics -- that we should be more aware of the possibility of being ambushed. But the beauty of a good ambush, of course, is that it comes as a total blindside surprise. Just by walking into his son Quinn's room, HPD Sgt. Mits Ah Sun walked into an ambush. He just didn't know it right away.
"Oh, Lily, hi," he said to his long-lost niece. What the heck was she doing here, acting so cozy with Quinn. Gwen Roselovich said Lily had been furious when she caught Gwen in Quinn's room and stomped out in a jealous rage. The surprise on his face must have been obvious.
"Guess I'm the last person on Earth you expected to see here, huh, Uncle?" she said. Trying not to gloat.
"Mm." He shrugged, changed subjects. "How're you feeling, son?"
"To be honest, Pops, pretty much pissed off."
"Oh?"
"Gwen just left," Lily said. "She told us everything."
Ambushed, and no place to run.
"I can't believe you'd send Gwen over here, Pops, to interfere with my relationship with Lily. That's what pisses me off -- you didn't treat me like a man."
"It almost worked, you know," Lily said, moving closer to Quinn, patting his hand, positioning herself between Mits and his son. "But it didn't."
"It was for your own good," Mits fired back. "My God, you're cousins!"
"Exactly," Quinn said. "We're ohana. What good came from keeping us apart for 21 years?"
That's where Mits' argument ran out of momentum. The only people the contrived feud between Mits and his brother Sheets had helped was themselves -- and that was debatable. They'd missed out on so much.
"You don't have to speak with your brother if you don't want to, but you can't stop us," Quinn said. "And we have a lot of catching up to do."
"Gwen also mentioned," Lily said, "that she'd given you all of the photocopies I left with Quinn." Well, thrown at him. "Where are they?"
"Circular-filed," Mits said.
"Looks like I'm going back to the State Library," Lily said.
"Unless," Quinn said, "you'd like to come clean about Bobo, Pops."
Mits would take his chances with Lily's research. That could tell them only so much of the story.
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