Maui—the guy the island was named for—supposedly pulled the place up from the ocean floor while fishing. He should’ve thrown it back. Two dead volcanoes made up the island, and in between, a field of sugarcane with low, cheap houses camouflaged on the sere grassy plain, built to minimize losses when they were washed away. He saw plenty of green on the north and eastern faces of the island from the chopper, but the rest of it looked like South Africa again.
Maui’s western flank was surrounded by lesser islands that looked unfinished and empty, or scoured clean of any signs of life, any color but brown. Lanai was a hump of barren rock with some stubble of development at its summit—where rich people went skiing in winter, the pilot told him. The island was once owned by Standard Fruit Company, aka Dole, but now some Microsoft billionaire owned it.
Kaho’Olawe, an even smaller rock to the south, used to be holy ground, denied to living feet. The US Navy continued the native tradition by making it an artillery test firing range. A tiny atoll called Molakini, a horseshoe nub of rock, served as a snorkeling destination.
Molokai loomed like a storm on the northern horizon. Steeper and more forbidding than its naked neighbors, Molokai was swathed in tortured gray clouds, like an island of the dead. It was easy to see them for what they were, from the air. The ocean wasn’t the desert; it was fucking outer space.
The islands were worlds unto themselves, fixed with the same face always into the trade winds and the rains, so the windward sides looked like the Amazon, while the leeward landscapes looked like the Transvaal. The black-red sands of southern Maui were like mounds of rust, washed across the central two-lane highway loops like dried mineral blood.
They dropped him off with his luggage on the Kapalua Plantation golf course on the northwest corner of the island. He jogged across the putting green to take keys to a red rental Mustang from a tubby Hawaiian kid. “You need anything, bruddah, you call Yolo. You got one fat credit line, I hear.” He gave Zef a little tourist guide with numbers handwritten all over it. On the cover, a scribbled shaggy stick figure with a huge dick jizzing out the word “YOLO” and a phone number.
“This a real small island, yeah? They not too many bad men left, but he know guys who work clean, you wanna get hooked up or beef out a crew.”
Zef had thought about very little else. If he could hire a reliable assassin and split the fee, it was all good. And hiring a professional killer should be easy. People had to do it every day. Murders went unsolved all over the place, and Hawaii was no different. You only heard about the ones who fucked up or tried to welsh out on paying.
Lahaina was like Dodge City or Deadwood, the main drag a tourist trap with the neon and plastic wrapped around a core of old gray wood and brick and whalebone. The buildings along the waterfront had balconies like New Orleans, and wood sidewalks leading to posh art galleries, jewelers and T-shirt places and shaved ice huts. There were only three streets running through downtown and they were all blocked up like Black Friday. Zef pulled into a pay lot across from a dive shop and strolled down Front Street.
Hawaiian shaved ice was pretty good, but the fat fuck put weird beans and condensed milk on it, and it melted so fast his hand was purple and he had a brain-freeze trying to keep up, so he tossed the shit in the ocean. He sat on the wall overlooking the harbor. They used to hunt whales out here when there were still too many, and bring the oil and blubber and ambergris here to sell. Now, a ferry took rich people—a few carrying fucking skis and poles, no shit—across the strait to Lanai, and speedboats went by towing tourists attached to parachutes, like they were fishing for giant birds with fat white bait.
Wasn’t so bad… A G could get used to life here, if he was old and had nothing else to look forward to.
It was nice and quiet, and then a slammed pickup truck jerked out of traffic and jumped the curb and a Hawaiian giant with a Mohawk jumped out and came running at him.
Zef looked around, thinking this couldn’t be about him. An old ex-Navy guy with a little Japanese wife was crossing the street on a walker and cussing out the hostess out front of Bubba Gump Shrimp Company, but otherwise the sidewalk was empty. The guy was maybe ten yards away when Zef jumped off the wall and ran, still looking at the fucker over his shoulder.
Ripped like a weightlifter, mid-twenties, huge, juiced pecs chewing up his Da Hui tanktop as he came pumping after Zef, not so much running as kicking the whole world in the face at incredible velocity. Before Zef got ten paces, he was almost close enough for Zef to smell the protein shake and Spam he had for lunch.
Zef jumped off the curb and onto the sloping hood of a minivan, sprang off it onto the roof of a station wagon, and stage-dived into a thick crowd of totally unprepared pedestrians. A fat guy and his wife in matching aloha shirts took his weight. With their half dozen kids and grandkids in matching shirts and muumuus tumbling on top of them, Zef popped up and ran into Old Lahaina Center’s parking lot.
Zef rounded a corner and crashed into a fat lady and knocked over a grandpa in an OLD GUYS RULE T-shirt. Screams and curses echoing behind him, he sprinted through the drifting shoppers like a tight end threading a slow-motion defense. But high and tight on his ass, he heard the fucking Mohawk plowing everyone he’d missed. Somebody tried to tackle Mohawk and whatever happened to the fool set his wife screaming like a Greek funeral.
Zef’s lungs were on fire. Sweat ran into his eyes, blinding him and making him slap at his face. This guy would run him down like a cheetah taking a chain-smoking gazelle in an open sprint, but his muscles would turn to dead weight on him fast in an endurance run. His fucking buddies were circling around the block in their truck, and he didn’t even know what the fuck this was all about.
Zef passed close to a kiosk called Sarongs & Thongs and threw the bikini display down in his wake. He heard Mohawk grunt and a satisfyingly prolonged crash of metal and glass. A tubby security guard shouted at Zef to slow down, but he gave him the finger and ran in the back entrance of Banzai Blacklite Indoor Minigolf.
Day glo-inflected darkness and dank AC were like a moldy bag over his head triggering an acid flashback. Banzai flags, barbed wire, dayglo camouflage and a gaggle of little kids throwing tantrums all over eighteen jungle boobytraps.
An ancient Asian man in a beige forage cap and baggy fatigues stood by the door under yellow newsclippings: LAST TO SURRENDER––Japanese Officer Lived 32 Years As Castaway, Fighting WW2 Alone. Zef snatched a putter out of the old Jap’s hand and blundered into brats that screeched like dry ice on steel underfoot. The screechers’ father started in on him just as Mohawk came in the door.
Zef teed off on Mohawk like a samurai bisecting an uppity peasant. The putter’s head buried in the weightlifter’s taut belly, folding him over as he stampeded past. Zef took an unopened Coke from the brat’s dad and kicked him in the junk. He ran back out to the parking lot and looked around to find no slammed pickup, no Mohawk. Maybe he lost the fucker—
Someone screamed long and high in Banzai Blacklite. Mohawk bounded out the door with a bent putter in each fist. Zef threw the uncracked Coke and hit him in the arm. A putter sailed over Zef’s shoulder and speared a Honda’s windshield.
Across the minigolf lot, Zef jumped a guardrail and went through the Chevron station. He intercepted an older woman as she was about to put the hose in the tank of her Mercedes. “Sorry, Ma,” he said, and he yanked it out of her hands just as Mohawk came around the corner of the gas station.
Zef pulled back the rubber safety sleeve and squeezed the trigger. A thick jet of 96 octane premium unleaded sluiced Mohawk’s mouth and eyes just when he would appreciate it most.
Zef kept spraying the big motherfucker after he collapsed on the pavement, then rapped him on the skull with the hose gun.
Taking out a Bic lighter, he knelt in front of Mohawk. “Fancy a smoke, fok?”
The Hawaiian couldn’t see or hear Zef. His eyes were swollen shut and streaming like runny poached eggs. He vomited a thick paste filled with vitamins and supp
lements and nothing remotely like food.
“Who the fok you working for? Why you wanna fok with me, cheese?”
“You,” Mohawk gasped, still dry-heaving, “killed… Primo…”
Holy fucking shit. Fucking Hawaii Five-Oh… “No way, bitch. I was way tight with Primo. Some local fok ate his face…”
The TV on the gas pump said something that made Zef’s head snap around so fast something tore in his neck. They said something about Mexico’s drug wars coming home. “Bodies of suspected members of Mexico’s notorious Iglesias cartel were found in the Shadow Rock Park area just outside Las Vegas…”
Zef swallowed hard. He recognized the terrain behind the cops escorting plastic bags out of a shallow ravine. It was ten minutes from his parents’ house in Sunrise Manor.
“Sheriff’s spokesman Donald Luna declined to provide details, but confirmed that FBI agents have stepped into the case, which bears all the hallmarks of the brutal executions committed in Mexico, but anonymous department insiders said the forensic evidence was contaminated by animal attacks—”
The slammed pickup roared into the Chevron lot. Zef kicked Mohawk in the face and ran, vaulting over a wooden stake fence and through a thorny wall of bougainvillea.
He was in a pay lot. The pickup went through the fence and clipped two parked cars coming after him. He ran for the little booth with a tired Samoan woman who just pulled down her shade as he passed.
The pickup was right on his ass and anybody at the wheel under those circumstances probably would’ve missed all the signs and driven over the tire spikes, just like he did.
The truck screamed and hissed and face-planted on its front bumper. Zef ran looking over his shoulder, bent double and coughing laughter until a surf school van ran into him and honked. He shoved off the grill and ran through the McDonald’s lot and across Papalua Street.
He could hear them coming after him on foot, one of them shouting, “Stop or I’ll cap your ass.” Another weightlifter, but shorter than most middle school kids, and a big tubby amateur who ran with his hand down his baggy board shorts to keep his concealed gat from falling in the street.
Traffic fell off to a few bicyclists telling him to Mellow out as they passed before he could knock them down, the only sounds the syrupy songs of birds in the trees and his fierce, whipsaw breathing. His legs burned, his shoes felt like they were full of hornets and broken glass. Over his shoulder, the weightlifter was sixty yards back and fading. The tubby bitch was grabbing his chest and leaning against a parked car.
He could get off the street and catch his breath somewhere, then circle back to his car and find this Yolo clown…
The gunshot was not loud at all, just a flat clap, but it startled the birds from the trees. Zef heard it smack the trunk of a tree just ten feet off to his right. The last of the starch in Zef’s shorts went out and he fell down hard on his ass.
He rolled in the street. Crawled between two parked cars. Jumped a ditch and ran across Honoapiilani Highway. Four lanes of screeching, fishtailing tourist traffic. Bum-rushed the entrance of a surf and dive shop. Through the store and out the back behind a Pizza Hut fused with a Taco Bell. Behind him, the midget and the tubby bitch humped across the highway amid the mess made by his crossing. Gun concealed again. Purple fury faces.
Zef felt like he was falling, not running. Falling forward, crazy legs scrambling to catch up, and if his brain was too freaked out to form words, it still felt good for just this moment, to be a skinny little fucker. A bigger man would’ve had to stop for breath and gotten his ass clipped. These fuckers had no idea who they were fucking with. This shitty place almost made him forget who and what he was. Every last one of them would regret their mistake—
Zef was climbing over a fence to hide in a condo pool area when they shot at him again. He heard one of those whining ricochet noises like bullets only make in movies. He jumped the fence and landed bad on one ankle, limped through chaise lounges and sunbathers like meat on a grill. He staggered into a table and knocked over a big umbrella. The midget weightlifter vaulted over the fence. The tubby bitch was circling around. Zef couldn’t remember how many shots he had left.
Through a shaded palm tree arbor and across another lot, and he ran out of land. Beyond a high chainlink fence, there was a canal about twenty feet deep and almost ninety across: steep concrete flood channel walls just like back home, with a little ribbon of scummy green water down below. Nothing but open space in both directions along the canal. And beyond the canal, Walgreens, dive shop, Foot Locker and an Inaminnit Urgent Care Clinic.
“Where he go?” he heard one of them, so close he almost jumped into the canal on reflex.
Just down the canal a hundred feet or so, a thin, rusty corrugated tin drainpipe crossed the canal like a bridge. The fence with barbed wire around it had a sign that said NOT A BRIDGE PLEASE.
He scaled it easily and started to run across when a gunshot went off and he felt the hot ballistic wind just over his shoulder.
Zef dove and flattened, hugging the blistering sheetmetal pipe. Halfway across. Rust crumbs flew up in his face. The pipe settled. Without stopping, he ran on all fours across the pipe like a spider monkey, whooping breathless and shitting hot brown spray down one leg until he leapt over the barbed wire on the far end and it caught on his shirt and tore it clean off.
He hit the ground rolling and came up with a rock in his hand and the midget was stumbling along the pipe with his hands out like a circus tightrope walker while the tubby bitch covered him with the gun.
Zef took aim and hurled the rock in a perfect spiral longbomb pass. The midget raised his hands up like to catch it, but the sun was in his eyes, and then so was the rock. It clocked him solidly in the forehead, sent him flying backwards to land straddling the pipe, then he rolled off backwards and landed headfirst in the slimy channel.
The tubby bitch screamed and fired once more into the air in his frustration. Zef threw a few more rocks at him, taunting him to come get some, but the goon ignored him to get down to save his friend.
Doubled over coughing, Zef lay until he could breathe and then called the number from the matchbook.
It rang. He heard it ring in his ear. And also down in the shallow canal. Sitting up, he saw the tubby bitch picking his way down the embankment to rescue his friend, who was maybe or maybe not breathing.
Yolo. “Fokking hell!”
Maybe he should call the big man’s people right away and order another gangster.
A huge old Ford Bronco full of surfboards cut him off and three local guys with long, fierce hair got out.
“You wanna ride,” the littlest one said. He was big enough that Zef would get a nosebleed climbing him.
“Yeah, sure. You know where the Hilton is, right?”
They thought that was funny.
No way were they cops, and yet they felt like cops, the way a fucker took hold of his head to push him down as he got in the back seat, and yet they couldn’t seem to get him in without steering him into the doorpost twice.
The marina was on the south side, at the bottom of the valley between the two dead volcanoes, next to an aquarium and a minigolf and a Carl’s Jr. A fat guy in Titleist golfwear splattered with fish blood came storming up the dock with a squealing grade-schooler under each arm and an older boy in tow silently crying and staring daggers at his dad, and a flushed, drunken wife who berated him up the dock to the parking lot. “Why didn’t you do something? Your son will be telling this to a therapist, and how do you think you’re gonna come off, Papa? I’ll tell you why you didn’t do anything, and why you never will. He’s twice the man you ever were…”
Zef followed the local posse down the pier to a big grotty fishing boat with a shark hanging by its tail over the stern.
A huge old Hawaiian with white hair down to his elbows leaned against the gunwale of the boat, watching the family flee. He burped and cut the rope so the shark fell to the pier and flopped almost onto Zef’s shoes. “Don’t for
get your trophy, fuckers,” he growled.
Zef looked at the shark. Pretty decent-sized fish—seven feet long, maybe a hundred pounds and change. Its mouth was torn and streaming blood onto the white plastic, and its pectoral fins had been chopped off.
“Try to show haoles something about nature,” the giant said, “you wasting your time.”
Zef stood on the dock, wondering what the fuck to do. He wanted to get on this boat about as much as he wanted to fuck that shark. Two of the big longhaired fuckers who brought him there crowded him up the gangplank.
“Yo, why you got such a hard-on for sharks?”
The plank bobbed under him as the two big guys backed the fuck away from the boat.
The old kanaka grinned. “They got a hard-on for me. Permission to come aboard granted, motherfucker.”
Zef stepped over the gunwale, averting his eyes from the big old local’s wide, flushed face. Bad idea.
Looking at his shoes, looking for his shoes… He had no feet. Or calves. Or knees. Or thighs. His huge torso terminated in a slightly abbreviated pelvis, but both legs had apparently been amputated at the hip joint. Amputated, or eaten.
He dropped off the gunwale and padded across the deck on catcher’s mitt hands. His arms were thicker than Zef’s thighs, gnarly worker’s muscles under a deceptive layer of fat. He closed in on Zef and offered a hand to shake. He stood perfectly balanced on the other hand. He still came up to Zef’s shoulder. When he had legs, he must’ve stood almost seven feet tall.
“Maui Isaiah Waiwaiole. People call me Yeti.” Turning to roll up the ropes the thugs tossed him from the dock, he gently shoved Zef into a fishing chair at the stern and padded to the bridge. A little old geek standing at the wheel gave him a thumbs up.
The boat snarled and threw up a roostertail twenty feet high as it blasted out of the marina. The two big thugs watched until they were out on open water, like they were expecting Zef to jump and try to swim for it. He had been thinking about it.
Repo Shark Page 13
