My Kind of Town
>> Pahoa Avenue The Honolulu Soap Co.:
Sunday digestHPD Detective Sherlock Gomes let TheBus get a block ahead before he turned from 16th Avenue and followed. If the woman with the lumpy camouflage backpack had burglarized one of his neighbors -- the backpack had been empty 15 minutes earlier -- he wanted to know where she got off TheBus.
Kate sat in the back of TheBus. She lived a detached life, withdrawn from the world, but watched it carefully. Certifiably paranoid, she spent a lot of time looking back. And so she saw the car following TheBus.
Earlier she'd seen the same car stop and its male driver jump out and race into a house that was just three doors down from the house that she would enter through a side window and leave through the front door. It followed as TheBus turned right at Kokohead, waited while she transferred to the No. 1, and followed again as No. 1 headed down Waialae.
Kate patted the backpack on the seat beside her, felt the sharp edges of picture frames, caressed them like children. Somehow she sensed that the man in the car could take away her new family. So when TheBus stopped at 4th Avenue, her stop, she stayed on.
>> Punchbowl Street
They'd argued all the way from Aina Haina to the H-1 Punchbowl exit, Lily Ah Sun and her brother Laird, who'd surprised her twice this morning. First by just showing up -- he was supposed to be getting a Masters from Stanford Business in two days. Second by announcing the main reason he came home was to tell their baby brother Lance that he was going to hell for being gay, but that he could be cured.
"I swear, Laird," Lily said, turning onto Punchbowl, "I'll deck you if you bring this up with Lance now. He just came out of a coma, for God's sake.
"Here's the other thing: Mom says what roused Lance out of the coma was hearing Greg's voice -- his lover."
Laird winced at the word. "I'll talk to both of them. They can both be cured."
"Over my dead body," Lily said as they crossed Beretania. She pulled into a parking space.
"Why're you parking here?"
"Because we're going to do some research. Ever wonder why our father and his brother quit speaking 21 years ago?"
"No. That's just the way it always was."
"No, it wasn't. And for some reason they refuse to say why."
>> Beretania at Punchbowl
Gomes was being rather obvious, but there's really no discreet way for a single vehicle to tail a city bus. And Gomes wasn't ready to call in help -- he was just going on a hunch. In any event the pursuit was taking him closer to Kalihi and the Honolulu Soap Co., where he wanted to ask Sheets Ah Sun about his interest in a recently discovered illegal chemical dumpsite in Waimanalo. But right now he was going to follow TheBus until the woman got off.
Stopped two lanes to his left, first in line, was an HPD van that had pulled out of HPD headquarters when TheBus stopped for the light at Hale Maka'i. It carried what appeared to be a half-dozen prisoners.
HPD, state sheriffs, federal marshals and military police had been lucky over the years. Strict protocols were followed, great care given by drivers, and there was supposed to be a backup vehicle. The light turned and the HPD van accelerated into the intersection.
Gomes saw it coming, but there was nothing he could do as the Bronco headed mauka on Punchbowl, ran the red, sped into the intersection and smashed into the van.
The impact crushed the driver, knocked unconscious the armed guard and tipped the van over on its side. Gomes accelerated around TheBus and saw five handcuffed criminals scramble out of the broken back window and run across Beretania toward the state Capitol.
>> Punchbowl Street
Lily was feeding the parking meter so she and Laird would have an hour for research at the State Library when they heard metal crushing metal.
They looked up and saw a van lying on its side and one, two ... five guys scrambling out of the van's back window. They wore street clothes but their hands were cuffed.
The five glanced around, took off running toward the State Capitol. Two big guys with wild hair angled directly at Lily and Laird. "Oh s---!" they said.
"Get in the car, you're driving us!" said a tattooed con who's eyes were wilder than his hair.
"You gotta be kidding!" Lily said and kicked him hard in the shins and punched his nose.
The con yelped.
"Let's go, Laird!"
But Laird followed the two escapees as they dashed through traffic on Punchbowl.
>> HPD Detective Sherlock Gomes accelerated his car around TheBus he'd been following. He had no choice but to let it go. Gomes called dispatch, asked them to get a message to the driver of TheBus.
He wanted to be notified when a woman carrying a camouflage backpack got off. Then he drove across the Capitol lawn in pursuit of the escaping cons.
>> In the back of TheBus, Kate watched with relief. Two seats ahead, a young mother tried to calm her crying baby. Kate understood. Her new family in the backpack was crying to go home and meet the rest of the clan back in Kaimuki.
Don Chapman is editor of MidWeek.
His serialized novel runs daily in the Star-Bulletin
with weekly summaries on Sunday.
He can be e-mailed at dchapman@midweek.com