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My Kind of Town Don Chapman |
On second thought
>> Maui
Feeling lucky, Cruz MacKenzie quickly showered and changed at the Waiehu golf course and headed for the other side of the island. He'd stop at Pili's at Maalaea Harbor and knock out a column on his laptop before dinner with Lucien at Chez Paul. The drive would give him a chance to think, and the two places he did his best thinking were behind the wheel of a car on a familiar road and at the symphony. For good measure, he put on the classical station and heard one of the Brandenburg Concertos, one of Bach's better cruising tunes.
Pulling into Pili's parking lot, Cruz had to brake for a loose group of 20 fishermen walking purposefully if indirectly from Pili's toward the dock.
"F--- all sharks!" one said. Funny how swagger sometimes isn't far from stagger. "Dead meat," growled another. "... make the ocean safe again," chimed another voice. The shark hunt was gathering momentum.
Inside, Cruz found a seat at the bar that would give him a look at the harbor, which soon resounded with the rumbled harmony of multiple engines warming. "Pili in tonight?" he asked the bartender.
"In Tahiti this week," she answered. "But I make a pretty good drink."
Her name tag read Lei. "Just coffee right now, please, Lei. Black."
She brought a steaming cup as boats raced out of the harbor. "What's going on out there?" A basic part of newspapering is asking questions to which you already know the answer, because it only counts if somebody else says it.
"They're all hot to kill some sharks," she said with disgust, glancing over her shoulder through the open window. "Idiots. Guess they never saw 'Jaws.' "
The early news was on the TV. While Joe Moore reported that the Shark Task Force still didn't know what had attacked Mrs. Farrell, Daren Guy, the Oahu Boogie Boarder or Steve Paik, Cruz sat at the end of the bar and on the LapFlex typed a story reporting Pat Ohara's strong conviction that it was tiger sharks. "In another development, half a pair of nylon neon lime swimming shorts, similar to the ones that Guy was wearing on the night of the attack, were found by a golfer on the beach at Waiehu Golf Course yesterday."
Cruz was tempted to lead off the column with this, but didn't want to be accused of jumping the gun. What if they weren't Daren's shorts?
"This just in," Joe Moore said in that tone broadcasters use to presage a fresh tragedy. "A helicopter carrying Maui County Medical Examiner Pat Ohara crashed just minutes ago in the West Maui Mountains, killing Ohara and the pilot, Steve Reich. Ironically, they were investigating the crash of a tourist chopper earlier in the day."
"You know, Lei, on second thought, I would take a drink."
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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
