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My Kind of Town Don Chapman |
The perfume mutiny
>> Honolulu
"This is MacKenzie," Cruz said into the hands-free phone while scrolling through 3,000 e-mails.
"Hancock here, how are ya?" The National Marine Service chief was much more polite than he'd been the last time they spoke, at the Kona press conference for which Cruz showed up semi-drunk. "Got a question for you. How sure're you about the half of the shorts they found on Maui?"
The missing half of what could have been the shorts Daren Guy wore the night he was attacked, which Cruz accidentally discovered while playing golf at Waiehu.
"Well, I was the guy who stumbled into the shorts. I held them. They were faded, but not that faded. Looked about the same size. But I don't know. You have the left side, right?"
"Yup."
"This was the right."
"Very odd."
"By the way, I met a guy who believes its tigers. Delbert Pester."
"Called me, too. Actually, I studied under him. And I'd come to the same conclusion. We're making an announcement this afternoon. Definitely tigers. Two o'clock, Ala Moana Hotel."
"Do you still have the other half?"
"I'll bring it along."
>> Off the Big Island
For Sushi Leclaire, the whole reason for using the yacht Pet Shop was that it was so well known, so infamous, with the pink sails and life rings and usually a bevy of beauties aboard. It provided the perfect cover for sneaking his 12 Filipinas onto the Big Island. It would merely look like another frolic for the publisher of Pet Shop magazine.
But now the skipper was keeping all of the pink things stowed away, except under the cover of a moonless night. The boat's name had been changed to Wet Spot. And Paul, Sushi's friend and the former skipper, was unable to be here. Something was wrong.
Sushi had stayed up through the night with the new skipper, whose girlfriend called him Daren, at the wheel. Together they adjusted the sail as needed as they tacked across the sea back to Kona. The moment the first light began to show, they hauled the sails down. Something was indeed wrong.
But Sushi had no choice. If he was to get the girls he plucked from the bars of Manila to the house in the hills above Kona, where the living room was converted to a video studio, this guy, this boat were his only hope.
With first light, the girls, including the local beauty called Sonya, began coming up from a night of rest in the cabin. Daren handed over the wheel to her, gave her their bearing, and he and Sushi went below to sleep, not catching even one whiff of mutiny in the air. Blame it on the perfume.
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
