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My Kind of Town Don Chapman |
Bud’s big getaway
>> Above Kahuku
When at last Lono Oka'aina and Raydean Gonsalves clambered down the rocky slope to the special place he'd planned to take her for a romantic picnic, acrid smoke still swirled. They followed the sound of tears and found Shauny Nakamura and Imelda Iglesia the Manila street kid sitting against the lava face, clutching one another and sobbing.
Raydean motioned for Lono to stay back. This was a girl thing.
Which was fine with Lono. Emotional trauma was not his specialty. "It's going to be OK now," she cooed, touched Shauny's shoulder with one hand, the girl's with the other, knelt beside them, and immediately found herself part of a three-way hug.
Seeing the way Raydean responded to them, and they to her, Lono's heart swelled. She was a good woman, rock solid. His cell phone vibrated then. It was HPD Detective Sherlock Gomes. Lono cleared his voice. "Uh, ladies ..."
Shauny looked up, saw a tall, lean Hawaiian paniolo in a white hat handing her a tiny cell phone. Nothing had made sense for the longest time now.
"It's Detective Gomes," he said. "And your sister."
Shauny grabbed the phone, listened breathlessly as Gomes identified himself, asked if she really was Shauny Nakamura, twin of Fawn. "Yes!"
And then she heard Fawn's voice, and they were both talking at once and blubbering indecipherably except for the I love you toos. Between blubbers and tears, Fawn managed to explain that it was their friend Lily who had called the detective after getting a weird call from Shauny's call, which Shauny had no idea what she was talking about, but it didn't matter right now. And then there were more tears and blubbered I love yous.
Gomes came back on, told Shauny a medevac chopper was on the way and would take them to the Queen's ER to be checked, and he'd meet them there, but meanwhile stay behind cover in case there were other members of the hunt club sent to find them.
It wasn't until she'd handed the phone back to the paniolo and he'd ended the call that Shauny remembered their new friend.
"Donovan!" she called.
"Who?" Raydean said.
"The man who saved us before you did. Where'd he go?"
They checked the cave and all around the area, but there was no sign of him. Shauny noted that three cases of Bud and some jerky were also missing. Lono noticed it too. "Who is this guy?"
The staccato cackle of an ATV engine firing to life rattled the silence of the forest. Down the slope Shauny saw their new friend Sen. Donovan Matsuda-Yee-Dela Cruz-Bishop-Kamaka speeding away on the ATV, the Bud strapped to the back.
Don Chapman is editor of MidWeek. His serialized novel runs daily in the Star-Bulletin. He can be e-mailed at dchapman@midweek.com