Posted 5:17 PM by Alfred

D A R K

part 10

The filing cabinet, surprisingly, was mostly full of information about, of all things, groceries. Chan’s front business was as a supermarket entrepreneur, and apparently he was actually kind of serious about it. Dark’s gloved fingers flipped through various folders that documented some of Chan’s dealings in the local market. From the files it looked like Chan owned minority stakes in Foodland Supermarkets in Kaneohe and Sunset Beach. The majority of his interests, however, lay in ventures in Honolulu’s Chinatown. The borough was much smaller in scale than those of most mainland equivalents, but still a vital part of downtown Honolulu, with its own interconnecting seams of an underworld, as well as a bustling system of Chinese grocery outlets, and it was in this community that Chan was regarded as something of a kingpin.

Other than the files on Robbie Chan’s business enterprises, there was a file on the house, containing various documents, some files on some automobiles, and a file simply marked “etcetera.” He flipped through the etcetera file, and the description was valid. There was all kinds of stuff in there, ranging from brochures for outer island resorts to a receipt from a dog shampooing. There were even a few photographs. One showed Chan with a short Asian man, the two of them smoking cigars on a golf course. There were a few of a baby crawling around on a green carpet, and one of the dog that Dark had knocked out in the yard. He was about to put the file back and move on in his search when he came upon the last item, a page cut out of a newspaper. Dark unfolded it and discovered it was from the LA Weekly, maybe 5 months ago, and wouldn’t you fuckin know it boys and girls? It was a write-up on Kylie Dusk, Los Angeles’ most controversial stripper, local counterculture icon, and sometime girlfriend to Rion Dark.

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