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My Kind of Town Don Chapman |
A good thing
>> Above Kahuku
From bad to worse, that's all it was, Sen. Donovan Matsuda-Yee-Dela Cruz-Bishop-Kamaka was thinking as he escaped on the ATV he borrowed from a dead guy. And every time something good looked like it might be happening, something worse came along.
Busted for drugs by HPD Detective Sherlock Gomes, the senator was mistakenly rescued from the police van taking him to OCCC, which seemed like a good thing.
But the gang, big into drugs, mistakenly accused one of their own as a snitch, which was punishable by death on the spot, and they told the senator to pull the trigger. Instead he saved the guy, Sam, and they got away with $100,000 in ice, plus a vehicle and a pistol apiece, which seemed like a good thing.
But then Sam tried to shoot him, and the senator dashed through the dark forest, out-ran Sam and spent a night sleeping under a tree, and at last found the small cave, which was filled with Bud and other staples, and that seemed like a good thing.
But then the shooting started, and just 35 yards down the rocky slope from his hiding place two guys on horseback were chasing down two young females wearing sandals and electronic dogs collars. They were just seconds from killing the women when fate intervened, and the senator gave fate an assist and killed one of the guys with a perfect shot from his Glock 9mm and wounded the other enough that one of the girls could finish him off with a huge Arabic sword, which all in all seemed like a good thing.
But then he called to them, which seemed downright noble, and the dog collars turned out to be GPS-active, and soon there were reinforcements on the way. The senator and the young woman Shauny took out one of the reinforcements, leaving just one more, but that guy fired a smoke canister at them, flushed them from the cave, and was firing at them when from somewhere above an unseen party shot the guy and saved them, which definitely seemed like a good thing.
But the one who did the shooting, trying to convince them that he was on the level and not one of the hunters, called out that he was on the phone with an HPD detective named Sherlock Gomes. The senator's heart nearly stopped.
When he added that Gomes was going to call Shauny's twin sister Fawn, she and the other one, Imelda, collapsed in tears. While the smoke still swirled, the senator grabbed three cases of Bud and a few other things from the cave and hustled down the hill, loaded the stuff on the back of the ATV and sped away, which seemed like a good thing.
Which made him nervous.
Don Chapman is editor of MidWeek. His serialized novel runs daily in the Star-Bulletin. He can be e-mailed at dchapman@midweek.com