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My Kind of Town Don Chapman |
Blood in the water
>> Maui
Maui medical examiner Pat Ohara's cell rang as he and Cruz MacKenzie huffed and puffed up the hill that is Waiehu's ninth hole with a heavy load -- not their golf bags on pull carts, but what Cruz believed was the missing half of Daren Guy's shark-chomped neon lime surf shorts.
"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? You might find it interesting. There's a formula for determining which body part goes with which body. It's pretty neat.
"No thanks, I have a dinner tonight. Maybe another time." "Sure."
"How'd you get into this line of work."
"I liked science as a kid."
Cruz nodded. "Understood. I liked words and look where it got me, writing stories about what happened a minute ago and calling it yesterday and referring to tomorrow as today."
"Plus, you have to have a sense of humor." Ohara did not smile. "Basic survival technique, eh?" Ohara turned and followed the approaching thwap-a-thwap sound of a helicopter. He walked faster. "Oh, the other thing about the Farrell woman, I haven't seen this or heard it in any of the media. But I think it's important to get this out to people. You know how they say sharks are attracted to blood?"
"Sure."
"Mrs. Farrell was menstruating. Maybe there's a good reason why Hawaiian women never used to go to the beach when they were having their periods. Like, something that got encoded way back in the genetic combination. Now, with all these mini-pads and things they wear, well, if it was me, I'd stay out of the water. That's what I told my daughter. It may not be politically correct, but is being PC worth a life?"
The three-seat chopper set down beside the practice putting green. Still wearing his spikes, Ohara tossed his golf bag into the back of the chopper and climbed aboard clutching the baggie that held what could have been the other half of Daren Guy's shark-bitten shorts. The chopper took off immediately and Ohara shouted through cupped hands: "By the way, you knocked that shot from the beach about six inches from the cup. I'll give you the putt. Nice birdie." Not counting penalty strokes.
>> Off the Big Island
"There it is!" Daren Guy called and Sonya Chan came bounding up from below in an itsy bitsy white bikini. "It's huge!" she said. Viewed from a sailboat, 200 miles from land, the fishing boat Tuna Maru took up a large part of the horizon. And their futures, it appeared.
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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
