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My Kind of Town Don Chapman |
False Teeth: Day 1
>> Waters off Kona
The man now holding fingers to the triggers of both spear guns leaned against the yacht's spoked wheel and meant it when he said: "What am I going to do with you?"
For the past hour, almost nothing had gone according to his plan. It was a good plan, though quickly conceived. At least the final details were last-minute. But the big picture, the big plan had always been there. Nowhere, however, did it include being aboard this luxury yacht. Blame it on the full moon.
The only other person aboard who was still breathing sat uncomfortably on the corner of an open commercial fisherman's ice cooler and shrugged. It was a lame and lopsided shrug because his right arm, dislocated at the shoulder when he was thrown to the ground and bounced hard and awkward on his own scuba tank, was handcuffed to the ankle of his friend who had quit breathing minutes ago after an underwater shot to the chest from one of those same spear guns. He now lay on a bed of ice in the open cooler. An increasingly red bed of ice.
Moments ago he'd pulled his friend's body from the water half a stroke ahead of a large and urgent tiger shark closing fast on the spreading trail of fresh blood. The sea sloshing up through the stainless steel mesh diver's platform at the back of the boat, the fin circling closer in the halogen moonlight, he'd bent over his motionless friend, saw the spear embedded deep in his chest. This was not going according to their plan either.
>> International waters
The only thing Sushi Leclaire loved as much as the scent of a woman was the smell of money. At this moment, both filled his olfactory, overpowering the briny sea air, especially the scent of 12 young women with all their perfumes and oils. It had been with him since they boarded this Japanese fishing trawler in Manila. And money was riding on the wind. Once he got them transferred to an American-registered vessel and got them delivered to the safe house in Kona, he'd smell money. Lots of money.
He checked his Rolex. His money was maybe just a day or two away. Sushi had hand-picked the young women -- well, girls, really, some of them -- from the bars and streets of Angeles City. He'd paid off their debts to their mama sans, promising them a rich new life in America in exchange for work that involved less effort, less physical contact but just as much acting ability. Sushi purchased authentic-looking visas for the girls and from that moment on this was an illegal operation. And so it would continue to be once they reached Hawaii.
Sushi breathed deep the sea air, smelled money.
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Don Chapman is editor of MidWeek. His serialized novel runs daily in the Star-Bulletin. He can be e-mailed at dchapman@midweek.com