My Kind of Town
Something big
>>Waikiki
In the crowd that was drawn by sirens and flashing lights to the tragic scene at the intersection of Kuhio and Seaside was Herk Ward, a visitor from Muskogee, Okla. "What the hay-yuck happened here?" he said, stretching "heck" into two syllables.
He got the scoop as News@10 reporter Mina Minimoto did a stand-up report. A Filipino Muslim's suicide bomb exploded, she reported, killing himself and nine other people.
"Filipino Muslim?" the Oklahoman said to nobody in particular. "Didn't rightly know they had such a thing."
"Millions, actually," replied Singh Singh-Singh, a fellow at the East-West Center from India. "And they have an excellent cause -- the same thing you Americans fought the British for, taxation without representation."
"You kill innocent folks, don't matter what your cause is. You're just a murderer, that's all, and your cause can go to hell in the fast lane."
"Agreed," Singh-Singh said. "But such a pity. They should be reaching out to America, not engaging you in terror."
>> 2002 Wilder
Sherlock Gomes' swimming lesson was going, well, swimmingly as Dr. Laurie Tang balanced him on her out-stretched arms and glided around the shallow end. But then he took an accidental gulp of water, choked, came up sputtering.
"I can fix that," Laurie said, demonstrating a form of mouth-to-mouth not recognized by the AMA. Sure enough, Gomes stopped choking. But the mouth-to-mouth continued, the doctor and the detective giving in to the passion they'd each felt since their first meeting. Far off a siren wailed, and although it was a basic element in the soundtrack of both their lives they barely noticed.
But then on a nearby deck chair her pager went off, then his. And suddenly the night was filled with sirens. Laurie started to pull away, but Gomes held her close, not wanting their splendor in the shallow end to be over so soon.
She heard sirens approaching the Queen's ER. "I think I'm going back to work," she whispered, arms around his neck.
"Me too," he whispered back. "Something big happened out there." She looked up into his light brown eyes, touched his cheek. "Something big happened here too, Sherlock. I've never felt like this before."
Heads spinning with happiness even as they planned for a night of hard reality, they hurried back to her condo holding hands, unaware that Laurie had recently received a visitor.
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