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My Kind of Town Don Chapman |
The lead story
>> Big Island
It was the strangest thing any of them in the chopper had ever seen, and Nick Ornellas got it on tape. The former Honolulu-cop-turned-insurance-agent had brought along a hand-held video cam to document the new lava flow's destruction of homes and coffee fields. Now he'd just recorded a woman in a silver bikini, whom Cruz MacKenzie recognized as Sonya Chan, chasing a guy who'd been mobbed and beaten by a dozen brown-skinned women, firing a pistol at him as he limped away.
And when the approaching lava divided into two streams, trapping the guy between hot lava and the rocky point above the little bay, the chopper swooped in, dangled a rope for the guy. But he waved it away and at last, lava mere inches away, he leaped into the sea, where a huge shark promptly attacked and ate him as lava followed into the sea.
"I think," Cruz said, "you've got the lead story this evening on any network you want to do business with." And Cruz had the print media exclusive.
"Probably ought to find out who he was."
"Then there's those three bodies back there," Ornellas said.
As the pilot put the chopper down in the crushed lava parking area above the beach, an Asian male was herding the brown-skinned women into a silver van.
"Wouldn't bother, pal, I was you," the pilot said. "Lava's closed the road. Only way out is chopper or boat."
When Sonya saw that one of the three men exiting the chopper was Cruz, her former lover, she ran to him, hugged him tightly and began to cry.
"So who was that guy," Cruz said, "and what'd he do?"
"You don't know? Omigod!" she blurted through tears and sobs. "That was ... that was Daren! He ..."
"Daren Guy?!" Ornellas and Cruz said as one.
"Yes!" And she told them the story of how Daren had faked his own death by shark attack that night after winning the Lotto and taking out the insurance policy with Ornellas. And somehow her idiot friend Paul, skipper of the yacht Pet Shop, had tried to kill Daren because Paul had this insane idea Sonya liked him, and instead Daren killed Paul and his crewman and fled in the yacht, which he renamed Wet Shop. And, yes, that was him dressed as the old captain, and he'd fooled her into sailing away with him to meet Daren. Then he turned out to be Daren, and everything was fine until she found his journal, which said he planned to kill her and his cousin Virgil Root and then become his own beneficiary.
"You mean his twin brother," Cruz said.
"Help," they heard a man moan from behind the blue Jeep and hurried in that direction.
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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