The door behind him glided open and someone in heavy cowboy boots ambled in and belched loudly enough to produce an echo. “Shitfire, Hawaiians don’t know fuckall about good barbecue.”
Zef whirled around and backed up against the glass case, making the ruined Harley rock on its mounts. Sweet Jesus, not again…
The man was big, tall and barrel-chested, his big grin smeared with barbecue sauce he wiped off on the pearl-button cuffs of an impossibly elaborate embroidered cowboy shirt. Zef never watched TV in the daytime, but he recognized the man instantly from commercials, billboards, bus benches, tabloids at checkout stands. It seemed wrong to see him walk into a room without hearing a wave of canned studio applause.
“Shit, boy, why’re you dressed like you just knocked up one of my daughters?”
Zef floundered for about ten seconds without making anything like a word.
“Like, yo, dawg…”
“Call me ‘dog’ or any of your ghetto honorifics again, and a man will come in here and break your jaw.”
“Uh…”
“D’you know how to ride?”
“Wha—what, like a motorcycle?”
“No, damn it. I’m the proud owner of proof you can’t ride a motorcycle worth a shit. Horses. Do you know how to ride them?”
“N-no… sir…”
“Fine,” he grouched, going over to the window to wave away a trail guide and a couple saddled horses waiting outside. “Go ahead and wear that, then. Thought I heard you were from Nevada…”
Even on the edge of losing his temper, he had that kind of warm, sunny Southern accent that somehow sounded like both a dimwitted hick and a fruity snob at the same time, like that loser vice president who went crazy telling everybody we were all gonna melt if we didn’t stop cows farting.
“You like the house?” Without waiting for Zef to answer, he brought over two glasses of wine from an old Hawaiian man who bowed and turned back into furniture. “I had all the rock taken from the Waipio Valley, where the last of the old cities of refuge on the Big Island was, before Kamehameha leveled them all. Used to be, no matter what you did, they had to grant you sanctuary. It kind of still works, I guess… My wife hates it up here because of the cold. Kids, too, because everybody works on my ranch. So this is where I come when I want to forget what I have to do for a living, and just be a man.” He wrinkled his nose like something smelled. “You know who I am? What I do?”
“I think so… I mean, I don’t watch your show… I hate that talk show shit.” He didn’t say how his mom had all his books and watched his show every afternoon as she rearranged her poisoned candy.
“Not half as much as I do, boy, I tell you what… But who I am ain’t so important. What I am, is a member by marriage of the clan of King Kamehameha. Get your feet off my fuckin’ couch.”
Zef obeyed, head buzzing. This was the whitest Hawaiian ever.
His host went over to stand beside the Harley, set his empty wine glass on its case. “I was gonna have it repaired, but this is more authentic, more… real, you know? Like how the movie ended. You crashed it real good, real good indeed. Looking at this, I would’ve figured the fella who was riding it never walked again, yet here you sit.” He raised his glass to be refilled. “Tough hombre.”
Zef nodded shyly. The wine tasted like vinegary cough syrup.
“Yes, you’re resilient, alright. Not a goal-oriented person, though, yes? More of a subsistence gleaner. Not a strategic person. You get by on whatever thrills and pussy you can scrounge up, and you kind of figure as long as you keep thinking small, you’ll just live forever, pretty much the way you are now.” He toasted Zef again, smile even bigger. He probably had a sweatshop somewhere in Europe where people grew hair matched to his for annual follicle transplants. It looked both ridiculously expensive and expensively ridiculous.
“See, just by looking at your cheap tattoos and your expensive sunglasses, I can tell you have no head for managing money, to say nothing for your raging impulse control issues. You have to fix something in your mind that you want, and work towards it, or people will always take advantage of you, son.”
He refilled their glasses and set the empty bottle on a pedestal beside a bronze bust of himself. “I don’t ride motorcycles, myself. Hate the fucking things. Hate the people who ride them even more. But it’s an iconic item, one of a kind. Its value is almost entirely because so many other people would throw away good money just to have it. I make so much more than I need, that the only thing that makes me want anything anymore, is that somebody else wants it. I know it’s a barrier to my spiritual development, but damn, it sure is funny to hear some maggot spit and cuss and cry as he accepts a direct credit transfer of seven hundred thousand dollars.
“If I fixed it, I would’ve just fetished on it until my son stole it to punish me for neglecting him, unaware that I’d had it rigged so it’d crash on him. Then I’d lord it over him and make him earn off the fair market value for a couple years, at least. But this… it’s inspiring. So anyway… to business.” He slammed his glass into Zef’s, crushing it to shards.
“Whatever, man, fok…” Dropping the broken stem, he said, “So what the fok d’you want, man?”
“I gather your visit to our fair islands hasn’t been the vacation of a lifetime.”
“I’m not knocking it, but, like…”
“You hate it here.”
Zef shrugged.
“Well said. Well, then you’ll like this. You want to avenge yourself on this whole place, you do what I’ll pay you half a million dollars to do, and kill Donny Punani.”
“No fucking way.”
Unhearing, the big man went over to a glass table and emptied a vial out on it. “You want some coke? This shit is pure Colombian product from a DEA interdiction in Juarez last month.” Smiling absently, rolling a hundred-dollar bill into a tight tube, he passed it to Zef without touching any himself. “You look more like a tweaker, but you’ve never had coke this pure, I tell you what.”
It smelled like a trap, but for two cardinal points. To wit: Zef didn’t give a fuck what this fruitcake thought of him, and didn’t want to work for him, so if it was a test, he’d fail with flying colors.
Furthermore, if he just wanted to drug or otherwise incapacitate Zef, he could’ve done the wine. But as Zef took the bill, some spark of a glint of something in the big man’s eye made him ask for more wine as he bent over the lines.
When his back was turned, Zef blew into the straw and erased the line.
When he came back with another glass, the big man stared at him like he was trying to ascertain if Zef was, in fact, wearing the jockey shorts he’d been issued. “Yes sir, one tough motherfucker.”
Zef snorted and rolled his eyes and grinned, knocked back the whole glass of wine. Overcome by curiosity, he took a tiny dab of the white stuff under his fingernail and rubbed it on his gums.
His heart went triple-time. The left side of his face went slack and numb as a eunuch’s ball-sac.
“What kind of porn do you favor, Zephyrus? I’m guessing you like girl-girl stuff, strictly. Sure, it flatters your manhood that two women would make themselves available to you sexually, right? But you’re really just intimidated by the sight of another man’s erect penis. Probably some homosexual panic at work there, too.”
“I’m not a ho—I’m not, like, an assassin, man. I’m just a repo ninja.”
“Of course not. That’s why I want you. See, the stone killer thing in action movies, it’s a myth. They never pull one last job and turn into good guys and retire on an island somewhere. The window between becoming a competent assassin and burning out and either offing himself or getting offed by his employers is so short as to not be worth it.
“No, a competent operator in a specialized profession such as automotive repossession, gifted in stealth and blessed with initiative and good old-fashioned gumption, it’s a short jump to contract murder, if he’s properly motivated by hate and fear. Play the hand you’ve
been dealt, kid.”
“But I don’t hate him, and I’m not afraid of him…” That image of Donny holding up the king of Hawaii’s severed head swam up in his mind’s eye.
Fuck it. Zef did a polite bump.
“You should hate him. He sure as hell hates you. And you needn’t fear him, but you damn sure better be afraid of me.”
Zef grinned until he realized it wasn’t a joke. The tiny taste of coke made the defibrillator shock feel like a mild static zap from a shag carpet. Everything was blacklit with intrigue and drama. The big man kept talking.
“Y’see, most of the locals pay lip service to Christian doctrine, but in their hearts, they’re still a very superstitious, spiritually backward people. Indulging in sorcery, animism—”
“Aw, sick! Like, what, like bestiality…?”
“It’s even worse. Shut up now.” Putting a hand over Zef’s quivering lips, he went on, “So some people are trapped in this cycle of ignorance, and some other people take advantage of it. Your friend Donny Punani has gotten a free pass all his life from the Hawaiian community because they think he’s some kind of a demigod—”
“Like Hercules? Or like Thor, like in that…”
“Right, exactly, very astute, gold star, Zephyrus. So anyway, this sack of entitlement passes himself off as some kind of god just because his mom didn’t know who his dad was. The legend goes that he’s one of Don Ho’s bastards, from when he used to sing at Honey’s, back when it was still in Kaneohe. You know, ‘Tiny Bubbles,’ all that shit?”
Zef, nodding the whole time, nodded faster. “If you say so.”
“Fine. So that shit might even be true... I hear the sonfoabitch can sing the panties off a nun. But then his mom went batshit crazy and was going around saying her Donny was a ghost-god and that her real baby-daddy was a shark, can you believe that shit? And not just a shark, but King of the sharks, who could change into a man but was really a dragon or some such shit, and she was looking for someone to kill him…”
Omigod. “What’s her name?”
“What? Who?”
“The old wi—the mother.”
“Goddamn, I don’t know. That shit’s not gonna snort itself, ya know.”
Zef noticed the sweat-rivets popping on the big man’s forehead. The coke made him nervous. Dicks like this got off on their own self-control, like it was just another drug. Zef took his time with the next line.
Smooth as a tomahawk to the face. He wished that pussy Punani was here, right now. “So, like, how come you hate this fokker so much?”
Knocking off the bottle without dirtying a glass, the big man said, “So all along, this shitbird’s been talking up this line of nativist supremacy bullshit. Hawaii for Hawaiians, bring back the King, all that shit. But when it finally comes time to walk the walk and do something about all the terrible hotels and ocean liners and tourism ruining his homeland, he goes on vacation in Las Vegas.”
Zef looked up from the mirror, dust spilling out of his nose. The big man pointed a remote at a big portrait of himself by Thomas Kinkade. The ghastly painting vanished, replaced by a video loop of Zef’s Dad’s boss, Doug Zweibel, escorting two astronomically expensive whores down a hotel hallway to his penthouse suite. When the doors closed on the empty hall, the image jumped and crackled with static.
“That’s the security camera feed from the night ol’ Doug killed himself. None of those girls remember a fucking thing.” Looking significantly at Zef, he finally said, “Anything with a pussy, he can turn on or off like a lightswitch… but I guess you already discovered that.”
“I get it, fok. Go on…”
“So, here’s the thing… The wizard-science shit you see on CSI notwithstanding, LVPD is a bunch of dipshits who couldn’t find coke in Paris Hilton’s purse without a TV crew to help plant it, so when the coroner came up short about half a head, nobody figured on foul play, but they got this bit of something they withheld from the media… It’s amazing what you can find out when you have fifteen-hundred-dollar-an-hour lawyers at your beck and call…
“What they found in what was left of ol’ Doug’s head was a tooth, Zephyrus. A shark’s tooth.”
Zef’s heart skipped a beat.
“How to explain such a thing? Fucked if I can, but it sounds like somebody trying to send a message. But I’m not praising myself too highly when I say I’m a hell of a lot smarter than the Vegas detectives, so instead of following Punani here, they’ve been leaning real hard on your poor old father.”
“What’s this got to do with my Dad?”
The big man poured out more coke but guarded it with an arm, plowing it around with a security card. “I hear jail and interrogation is hardest on ex-cops, boy… They know what to expect, but the helplessness eats them up inside. And if they’ve got half a brain over there, the Vegas dicks’ve got some big black bastard on his case.
“So anyway, they’ve got no leads except for this tooth and the security system on the top three floors going sideways and sticking on a loop right before Zweibel got offed. Now, Zweibel had the whole top floor, but that same night, a high-roller’s suite was rented to a party on a card backed by a stolen ID. They were supposedly in their room after ten, but the cameras, like I said… Any of these pieces of smegma look familiar to you?”
Zef looked at the big flat screen and nearly ruined the fine Corinthian leather couch. Of course. Prowling the same abominably carpeted hotel: Punani, Kewalo and Peapea.
“So this piece of shit is partying in the building when Doug Zweibel gets his head smashed in and goes off the top of his own hotel, and then he takes your client’s property and bangs his wife, too…
“Actually, apropos of nothing, this is just too sad not to share…” He got up and ambled back over to the wreck, leaving Zef and the coke alone together. “He tells me all this when I’m trying to close the deal. He put her in the hospital, this fellow you were working for, but she insisted the Hawaiian never touched her. She wanted him to, she told him—and at the extremities to which he’d taken her, she was in no position to lie—but he wouldn’t do the deed. Said it would kill her. But she was trying to go find him when he caught her.” He ran his hands over the ruined motorcycle. “Love, American style.”
Zef wasn’t doing well, being in the same room with the coke. Another molecule of it and he would agree to anything. “So, you were saying…”
The big man hit a button on his remote. Nothing happened. “So these bad motherfuckers come back to Hawaii…” Again. The Kinkade portrait came back. “God damn it, what the fuck good is this piece of shit?” He threw the remote at a huge Lalique glass sculpture and shattered it, which seemed to calm him down.
“I don’t need to tell ya, folks’re shittin’ kittens. Now, you may be wondering why I give a shit about your Dad, or some dickscrape Jew casino owner… Well, Zweibel is my partner, in the same sense that you’re my employee. I bought him out of a huge hole he’d dug for himself in Atlantic City, so I’m using his muscle to expand his hotel chain into the islands and the Caribbean. Cuba is just a dead dictator away, and we’re going to be first in on it… or we were, anyway. With Doug dead and his holdings tied up in court, a bunch of massive projects are dying on the vine, and the source of all our troubles is that fat poi-eating, blue-balled motherfucker.”
“And you want me to dead him for half a million…”
“I don’t expect you to do it yourself; we’ll help you with support and cover all expenses.”
“But he’s some kind of ganglord…”
“A small-time pot dealer with delusions of grandeur. His fucking posse doesn’t even carry guns. He thinks he’s untouchable. He took this motorcycle because it was a totem of American power. He thought riding it would be like teabagging Uncle Sam, like it’d make him bulletproof. That’s how his mind works. You and a couple cutouts show up at his door with heavy artillery, his own people will turn a blind eye and let you waste him. They’re afraid of him, the dumb fuckin’ sea-hicks.”
“I probably could, but you’ve got something I can’t buy. You’ve got a motive. You came over here to repossess a motorcycle, and he gave you the full Wile E. Coyote treatment. You’re down to your last inch of skin, boy. If they catch you—and we’ll move heaven and earth to insure they don’t—then they’ll know the why and the what, case closed.
“So, you have no better friend than me, Zephyrus. But if you decide not to accept this commission, or if you duck out on your responsibility or attempt to implicate me in the unlikely event of your arrest, then your father will suddenly become the prime suspect in the murder of Doug Zweibel.”
“Whatthefok—”
“Secret Cayman Islands accounts stuffed with embezzled funds will suddenly materialize in Joorgen DeGroot’s name, and his security business will be embroiled in a web of shady dealings. The Feds love criminal enterprises, it means they get to take your house and your car and all your material possessions and sell them at auction. By the time anyone even gets around to asking your father what he knows about Zweibel’s death in a court of law, he’ll be a ghost.”
Blowing the last of the coke into Zef’s face, the big man laughed ominously. “But none of that needs to happen, does it?”
“Fok, man, this isn’t the way to…”
“Make friends? Influence people? Don’t try to lay that trip on me, baby. A wise man once said, ‘I never ask a man for a favor unless I have his pecker in my pocket.’”
Zef ran a finger over the glass and rubbed it against his gums. Already, the shit was wearing off. He felt cold and feeble.
“So, do we have a deal, or do you want to hear a bit more about what’s behind Door Number Two?”
Everyone said Maui was different, and they nodded like this was some sage fucking shit. Oahu was a big tourist trap, but on Maui the peaceful and sedate pace of the islands held sway. Zef didn’t need to turn off his new iPod or close his eyes and listen to his breathing to discover for himself how different it was, because there was nothing fucking here.
Repo Shark Page 12
