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My Kind of Town Don Chapman |
It’s a match
>> Maui
Pat Ohara, Maui medical examiner, jumped down from the sixth fairway at Waiehu to the beach and waded into the water with his shoes still on. "Dry Joys," he explained, and took the weathered fabric Cruz MacKenzie had just unwound from his ankle.
He held up exactly half of a pair of swimming trunks, cut right down middle. Though stained, faded and tattered, at one time the nylon shorts had been neon lime.
"Omigod! It's ..."
"Sure looks like ..."
"... Daren Guy's shorts." A shiver raced through Cruz. First Daren's whiskers, now his shorts.
"Could be coincidence. There's a lot of stuff floating around in the ocean. After a while it all starts to look alike."
"No, I know. I've seen the other half. This is a match."
"Have to be tested." Ohara withdrew a baggie from a pocket of his golf bag, placed the tattered half-shorts inside, zip-locked it. "My bet is the shark that ate him ended up over here and got hooked. One thing they often do when they're hooked is regurgitate whatever is in their stomachs."
Yama and Dickie continued the round without Cruz and Ohara. Walking sloshing -- together -- back to the clubhouse, Cruz had a chance for an impromptu interview.
"What can you tell me about the Farrell woman?"
Ohara took a deep breath, not from the walking. "You should have seen what was left of her. She was missing an arm, part of her ribs and parts of both legs."
"The state task force still hasn't announced what did it."
"Politics! It was a tiger shark. You do any fishing?"
"Not much any more."
"My brother-in-law has a boat, we go almost every week. And tell you what, there're more sharks out there than even a few years ago. We had a 13-footer cruise past the boat the other week. With the Farrell woman, that one was almost like a cat, playing with a mouse before killing it. Hit her repeatedly. With the guy Paik, looks like one big chomp, the shark got its meal and was gone. Or maybe he didn't like the taste and spit it out again."
"In other words, unpredictable."
"Same as grizzly bears up in Alaska. I was at a forensic seminar in Anchorage. We looked at a couple of guys who'd been mauled by bears -- different bears, different modes. Unpredictable."
Ohara's cell rang as they huffed and puffed up the hill that is the ninth hole. "Ohara... yeah... geez... OK." He put the phone back on his belt.
"Tourist chopper just crashed in the West Maui Mountains. I gotta go up there and look at the bodies. Wanna come?"
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
Don Chapman is editor of MidWeek. His serialized novel runs daily in the Star-Bulletin. He can be e-mailed at dchapman@midweek.com
