My Kind of Town
>> 2002 Wilder Other plans
Crouched around the corner, Salvatore Innuendo heard water splashing in the kitchen sink. It was unbelievable that Dr. Laurie Tang was washing dishes even as sirens outside screamed her name, calling her back to the Queen's ER. How do you explain a woman?
And Innuendo did not have time to wait for her domestic compulsions. According to what he'd overheard, HPD Detective Sherlock Gomes would return from retrieving the doctor's cell phone at the pool in just a couple of minutes. Before that happened he had to take her out of play. Then he would await his real target.
Innuendo wanted to accomplish that as quickly as possible. He had other plans for the evening, which were interrupted when Machiavelli Wang asked him to kill Gomes before he could force Sen. Donovan Matsuda-Yee-Dela Cruz-Bishop-Kamaka into a drug rehab clinic. Innuendo had been tracking a pedophile priest with plans to mete out the proper punishment. When this subject had come up during his days at the Vatican Security office over 20 years ago, Innuendo suggested silent strikes to emasculate the offending priests. No, he was told, the church would handle it a different way. But that hadn't worked, had it?
But first things first. Innuendo stepped from the guest bathroom, designing a quick battle plan based on his earlier scouting of the condo.
>> Gomes prided himself on his powers of deduction, induction, reduction and just generally figuring stuff out. He hoped this was one of those times. Because here he was, creeping down the foyer of Laurie's condo with his Glock 9mm short-barrel drawn. And Gomes never carried a gun. It was part of his legend with certain police beat reporters. Why tonight? Part logic, part intuition. He'd been chastened earlier when a deranged cabbie attacked Lily Ah Sun in the Queen's ER parking lot and tried choking her to death, and Gomes had to fetch his unloaded pistol from the trunk of his car. His delay nearly cost Ms. Ah Sun her life.
And then this evening when he signed in with the security guard, Gomes noted that he was the second person in 10 minutes to declare Laurie's condo as their destination. It gave him a funny feeling.
And so he'd come to dinner with the gun strapped under his billowy silk aloha shirt. But as glad as he was to have it, at the moment it was his second weapon of choice. The first, a damp 5-foot beach towel tightly rolled into a rat-tail whip, dangled from his left hand. Rat-tailing was one of the skills he'd learned at Leilehua High. Who said high school P.E. was a waste of time?
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