My Kind of Town
My Kind of Town
Take this, my blood
>> Queen's Medical Center
Lily Ah Sun was O-Positive, the universal donor, and gave blood once a year when the Blood Bank's needlemobile came to the Honolulu Soap Co. parking lot. Lily, wanting to set a good example for employees, was always first in line. And until today she had never considered giving blood an erotic experience.
But this time she was giving her blood to her cousin Quinn, and knowing that her blood would soon be coursing through his veins gave Lily a warm feeling inside. You can't get much closer than that. Well, there was that last step of physical intimacy -- one day she would give herself to him in that way, and soon she hoped. But for now she was giving Quinn her blood, and it gave a her a little quiver of excitement.
It mixed with the worry. He'd tried to walk to the bathroom, stood up too fast, stumbled, bumped a chair and reopened the gunshot wound to his right thigh. He needed blood.
The needle came out and a blood tech took away the plastic pouch that contained a pint of her life-giving blood.
They had to do a couple of tests before it could go to Quinn. How could Lily know that one of those tests had the power to help solve the mystery of why her father and Quinn's father quit speaking 21 years ago.
>> Above Waialua
The concept was to sell illegal drugs to fund political action. Mixing, as it did, two of Sen. Donovan Matsuda-Yee-Dela Cruz-Bishop-Kamaka's favorite things, drugs and politics, it seemed at first like the perfect job.
The reality was something else. "Heavy," the other guys described the crystal meth sale that would be going down tonight. The senator went over every detail of how it would happen, and was convinced that the boys knew what they were doing. And they would all be armed.
Now the senator was curious about the politics. When he asked about it, Sam said, "Isaac was the one into politics." As in Isaac Kunia, the guy they thought they were pulling from the overturned police van but instead got him because at the last minute a change was made in the list of passengers to be transported from HPD to OCCC.
"Isaac wrote everything down," the one called Lude said, pointing to a stack of notebooks.
While the others went to package the crystal meth and load it into the van, the senator sat down with Isaac Kunia's notebooks. He wrote in an expansive script, full of flourishes, like the goals and plans he described.
The more he read, the more the senator wondered what the heck he'd gotten himself into. And if he could get out.
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