My Kind of Town
Don Chapman
Insatiable
>> Around Oahu
The hunt club renting the Rockin' Pikake Ranch above Kahuku had it down to a science. Tets Nakajima saw to that. In charge of locating and renting appropriate parcels of land, he also employed a stable master, a cook, two drivers. In the months between hunts, they procured a variety of exotic species. Their work made them millionaires, and guaranteed a lifestyle that kept them loyal to the club.
But the system was not perfect. The insatiable, growing lusts of certain members guaranteed that. Victor Primitivo, for example. He wanted the rush of repeating El Paso here at home under the unsuspecting noses of his wife and friends. As much as he loved the hunt, he'd discovered in El Paso that the hunt before the hunt was in some ways even more exciting. It was a hunt unto itself, requiring entirely different skills and far more cunning.
Primitivo first used the technique when the club rented a ranch in west Texas. Weeks before the hunt, he met a Mexican beauty on the Internet -- in a bullfighting site's chat room, www.torotorotoro.com -- and then when he was in El Paso "on business" took her to a lunch from which she never returned.
This time he wanted a trophy of Asian persuasion. The club always provided a variety of quarry for members, and it was possible to place an order for a specific species.
But the hunt before the hunt gave Primitivo such a total sense of immortal power, it wasn't just intoxicating, it was addicting. Like any addiction, it required more and more to achieve that high.
When he arrived for the Texas hunt with the unconscious Chicana, he'd shared his technique with the others. For this hunt Clive, the Aussie, being even further to the right politically than Primitivo and ardently anti-gay, fooled a gay anti-war protest leader at UH into thinking he was gay and liberal, expressing an interest in funding more protests, and met him for dinner. A date rape drug works on both genders.
They should have left procurement to the club pros. Because as careful as Primitivo and the Aussie had been in covering tracks, they'd taken risks and they'd left scattered tracks.
Thus it was that Fawn Nakamura asked HPD Detective Sherlock Gomes to file a missing persons report for her twin Shauny, who'd been seen with Primitivo at Turtle Bay, then later heading toward Kahuku. Gomes had already put out an APB on Primitivo's Escalade. Now it was looking like kidnapping. That got the Feds involved.
Gomes was due at Dr. Laurie Tang's tonight, but there was crime to fight and paperwork to file. So after leaving Fawn at the offices of the Full Faith Fellowship Gospel Tabernacle on Liliha, Gomes headed for HPD headquarters on Beretania.
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