My Kind of Town
Don Chapman
Bunking down
>> Around Oahu
On Waialua Beach Road, as the CD "Makeout Hits of the '80s" played, old high school classmates Lono Oka'aina and Raydean Gonsalves slow-danced in her living room.
"It's getting late," the bachelor rancher said. "I better be getting back to the ranch."
"You better not!" the recently spurned wife replied and pulled him closer.
And so as much as Lono wanted to be at a secret place at the Rockin' Pikake tomorrow morning to see exactly what kind of exotic species the hunt club would be releasing, there was something he wanted -- needed -- even more. He needed to stay right here with the woman he'd first loved when they were just 16.
Back at that secret place on a remote part of the Rockin' Pikake, Sen. Donovan Matsuda-Yee-Dela Cruz-Bishop-Kamaka finished his sixth can of Bud, reached for a seventh, stopped himself. Among the items in the life-saving cache in the little cave he'd found hidden under a rock outcropping were five cases of Bud. If he could limit himself to a six-pack a day -- not an easy regimen for a man of prodigious tastes -- he could survive here for another 19 days. Maybe by then he could figure out what he was going to do with himself. As he fell asleep on an air mattress he'd found in the cave, no good ideas had yet come into his head.
Down at the Rockin' Pikake, members of the hunt club were bunking down in the back of a custom truck trailer. Each had his own small, but well-appointed cubicle. In his, Victor Primitivo cleaned his Blazer R-93, part of his pre-hunt routine. As always he was careful about details, but thoughts of what he'd be hunting tomorrow, and how he'd go about it, crowded into his thoughts and made his heart race. God, he loved this sport so.
In the club's other customized trailer, the quarters were more cramped and far less comfy.
Shauny Nakamura lay in a dark pen, on an inflatable mattress, under a light blanket. Effects of the drug that knocked her out were wearing off. Shauny tried to think, but she had so few facts.
She knew was one of 20 or so people encaged here. When Victor, the man who'd taken her to lunch and apparently drugged her, and some other men came by earlier, Victor paused and said, "Tomorrow."
One of the men, the one who called her Victor's "quarry" and said if they talked he'd activate the electronic collars around their necks, asked if she was a runner. When she'd nodded, he said that would help, for a while.
If she needed to run tomorrow, she needed sleep tonight. But it wouldn't come. Down the hall a woman cried softly.
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