“No way, man. Sharks love me. I’m a vegan, so they know I don’t play their games. What’s the matter, you never shook hands with a leper before?”
Zef choked on his spit trying to scream. He held his hand away from his body like he wanted a trash can to toss it in. “You fokkin’ touched me with leprosy, you motherfokker…” His unclean fist shot out at Hodad’s smiling face, but the guy wasn’t there when the fist showed up. Looking like he got tired of waiting, he was standing on Zef’s left now, until about a tenth of a second before he threw an elbow at his gut.
“Relax, man. It’s not nearly as contagious as they make you think. Nobody wants to look at it, is all.”
“How did you get it, then?”
As he walked, the little old surf geezer did a quick routine, passing both hands in front of his face, inspecting them, then down his neck. “Traded a guy for it.”
“The fok you get in trade?”
Hodad just smiled. “You need help locating a guy.”
“Need a lot more than that. I don’t think you can lift the weight, frankly.”
Hodad continued the inspection, running his hands down his legs, then holding them up and deliberately looking them over. Rolling his eyes, he explained, “No nerve endings. I have to do a visual exam every few minutes just to make sure nothing’s on fire or bleeding.“
Zef blinked. Motherfucker couldn’t feel pain? It was less like a disease, and more like a superpower.
“You’d be right, brother. I’m not a violent man, but I’m good to have around. Nobody knows their way around here like I do, and that’s a fact. And I don’t know what you believe…”
“Pretty much nothing…”
“Right, but you don’t got to believe to see how things work out here. So much mana floating in the air, but hardly anybody knows how to take hold of it and make it work.” He snapped his two fingers in Zef’s face, making him flinch. “So, who’re you looking for?”
Zef studied the spaced-out watercolor seascapes laid out in rows on the ground at his feet. The woman who did them, presumably, snored in a hammock chair. “Native Hawaiian…”
“Ethnic or just legal? I’m third generation Hawaiian on my mother’s…”
“He’s like Polynesian or whatever, yeah, dickhead? Long hair, lotta scars, he’s a karaoke killer…”
“That’s half the island, brother.”
“He and his friends like eating people’s faces… Fok off! Fok off!”
A short guy in a wifebeater and a pimp hat strolled up with a big scarlet macaw on his shoulder. Zef went into a pugilist’s stance and batted his hands at the bird. The parrot fanned its wings and squawked. The little guy backed up after passing a tinfoil bindle to Hodad.
Hodad puffed up his cheeks, then exhaled like he was blowing a pig’s house down. “Dude, say no more. I can help you track him down, no problem. This time of year, he’s holed up in Hana. Kinda hairy to go in and get him, though… But if you don’t, you could be waiting for weeks.”
Hodad stopped at a craft booth. “You’re very talented… how much?”
The woodcutter looked up from the tiki he was chopping with a hatchet. “Fo what? What one you want?” The sullen dullness in his voice was a warning wrapped around a plea for help. But his carvings were pretty badass…
“For the talent, brother. How much do you figure it’s worth to you?”
“Not much… Hardly nobody buy tikis no mo.”
“So how much? I’ll give you two thousand.”
The carver looked up at last. His red-rimmed eyes were choked in wrinkles from a lifetime of squinting at tiny imperfections in koa wood. He looked at the tiki in the old haole’s hands, and at the money.
As they walked away, Zef said, “Yo, what you need money for, if you can afford to blow it on tikis?”
“Oh, this?” he held up the little shrieking totem pole thing he’d paid as much as Zef just offered him to do the job. “This is junk. I’m sure I can do much better, now.”
A scream came from behind them, almost before the other sound. The axe bit into concrete with a tuning fork tone so sharp and pure, it hurt Zef’s ears like the axe itself biting into his head. The tiki carver dropped to his knees, weak from blood loss. The split between his middle and ring fingers extended down to his wrist.
“You should get a massage,” Hodad said.
“What the fok…?”
“If we’re going to do this, we’ve got to be pure, you know?”
“No, I don’t know, and I don’t—“
“No man should know his wife before we do the deed.”
“What about, like, if it’s not your wife?”
“I’m not a marriage counselor. But keep hold of your seed, if you want to succeed.” Chuckling, he added, “I just made that up.”
“Great, whatever... so, yo, like…”
“And don’t step in dog shit, or any kind of shit, for that matter.”
“Why?”
“It’s kapu, man. Taboo. Also, it’s, like, shit, man.”
The next guy on Yeti’s list was dead.
The guy after that was a tweaker who showed up late for the interview at a shrimp truck at a crossroads in the middle of sugarcane country. Chewing his tongue and interjecting pointless motorhead chatter whenever Zef let him talk. Dishonorably bounced from the Navy. Said he knew “Indian Country” real well because his ex-wife was “one of them.” Never heard of Donny but would go anywhere and do what he was told. Threatened to shiv Zef when he told him to fuck off. Begged for a second chance even after Zef got up and left. Ran after Zef’s car then dropped in his empty parking space to do pushups until he passed out of sight.
The next guy on the list was supposed to be the easy one.
Zef had to drive out to the little house near the end of Kulike Road on the North Shore, near a funky hippie town called Haiku. He drove past it the first time and had to turn around amid a jumble of trucks and surf wagons at the end of the road.
Jaws was what they called the place. Surf spot, but the waves he saw, three, four stories tall, rising up like skyscraper mouths and crashing down chewing up the earth under their feet, they were scarier than any fucking shark.
Turned around, he saw the sign for the Nectar House, obscured by shaggy walls of bougainvillea and pampas grass. Behind the hedge walls, an overgrown lawn and a couple halfpipes, a drained swimming pool partially filled with stagnant black water.
The rambling 70’s modernist beach house had all its windows smashed in. The driveway out front was paved in crushed green beer bottle glass and cigarette butts. A burnt-out car chassis lay in the deep end of the pool. A naked chick came out on the porch with an unlit cigarette, but bolted back inside when Zef parked out front.
A shirtless kid a few years younger than Zef answered the door. His nose looked freshly broken. A joint like a Cuban cigar hung from his free hand. He nodded and let Zef in when he said who he was looking for. “Just take him with you, alright?”
The house looked like it had hosted a continuous kegger for a couple years, and like most bad parties, it had gone seriously south when the assholes nobody wanted to take home were left alone together. Dank rooms reeked of beer and bongwater and smoke residue. The brown deep pile shag carpet was rigid with gum, puke, surf wax, semen, pizza grease and worse; the walls scabbed with posters and stickers and psychotic graffiti; holes punched in the drywall stuffed with empty bottles and cans, rotten food and condoms.
Nektor Surfware went out of business a couple years prior, but a few successful pro surfers kept the lights on until the last Red Bull Jaws Invitational ended early, only last month. Their big booster got washing-machined and broke his neck just down the road. Zef didn’t exactly give a shit about the trials and tribulations of extreme athletes or the surfwear industry, but Hodad had been quite effusive on the subject. Apparently, the guy he was here for had been quite the shit for a few minutes, a while back.
At the end of a long hallway lined with doors locked or
knocked off their hinges, he found a dude on a waterbed under two bleach-blonde beach bunny burnout chicks who looked like a mother and daughter.
He yanked on the guy’s big toe and said, “Bagby?”
The guy was too tall and built like he was raised on a planet with next to no gravity. He blinked at Zef and levered up on one elbow. “Fuck no,” he said. His toes pointed the way to the bathroom. “Try in there.”
The toilet was filled with syringes. There was a body in the bathtub. A lanky, weirdly overmuscled redhead with a face like if Gary Busey banged a horse lay in the tub up to his chin in cold, soap-scummy water with ratty old Walkman earphones on running to a boombox on the corner of the tub.
Don’t take any shit from him, Hodad said.
Zef hit Pause on the boombox.
He’s like any tool, Hodad said. Don’t let him get rusty. Point him in the right direction when you use him.
Bagby came out of the water like a dolphin, on his feet and slamming an open palm into Zef’s solar plexus. Zef tumbled backwards. Air wouldn’t come into his lungs. He was drowning in his own chest. His head hit the wall hard enough to divot the plaster. He was charging back at the asshole before the cranial trauma could even make its presence known, but the boombox hit him in the crotch and when he tripped and fell down, the earphone cord was wrapped around his neck and he was being garroted and pressed facedown in the filthy bathwater.
In his ear, Bagby whispered, “Uncle?”
Zef blew bubbles and tapped out and eventually was allowed to sit up and cough up the water in his lungs. Then he puked in the tub. “Fokking cocksuck…”
“You shouldn’t interrupt somebody when they’re meditating. You’re not a surfer. How the fuck did you get in here, man?”
If he’d had a gun, Zef would’ve shot the freak, but he found his gut was cool and pragmatic about Bagby as a draft prospect. He needed at least one guy on his team who could actually kill people. “I heard you needed work, and you’re down for… well, shit like… you know.” Still coughing, he took out a joint and sparked it, hit it just enough to burn off the twisted endpaper, passed it to Bagby.
Bagby scratched his arms and shook water out of his coppery red dreadlocks. With a sigh of relief, Zef noticed the freak was wearing swimtrunks. Laughing bitterly, he took the joint and puffed it. “Yeah, I’m looking for work. I don’t care what you want, I’ll do it. When I came out here, I had a Volcom sponsorship… sick gear… trophy hoes… Nectar, bro.”
“Then what happened?”
“I… I’d rather not talk about it. You don’t want to know, literally.” Bagby puffed a good inch off the joint and didn’t exhale. He was splattered with almost purple freckles, as if he’d been pelted by berries. Passing back the joint, his mouth leaking smoke thick as shaving cream, he growled, “I’ll do just about any fucking thing for the money to get the fuck off this fucking island,” he said.
“Are you a junkie?”
“Fuck no.”
“Can you shoot? Can you drive?” Zef hit the joint but not so hard that he’d lose his ability to speak and remember. This was the same deadly purple shit Peapea and Kewalo had bushwhacked him with… fuck, was it only last fucking week?
Again, that nasty laugh. “I can shoot good enough. At the end of the day, it’s not who can shoot straight, it’s who can keep their asshole watertight when the shit goes down. Lotta guys don’t even know they’re yellow until the first time. You face a wave, fifty, seventy feet tall and make it your bitch, you learn how to act faster than most people can think.” Sucking the joint down to a stub and swallowing the roach, he forked out his fingers for another. “How much are we talking about?”
“Three grand, if you’re worth it.”
“Oh, I’ll give you your money’s worth. Thirty-three eighty-nine.”
“What? OK whatever, that’s cool.” Lighting up another joint, he passed it to Bagby.
“When?”
“Starting today. A third now, the rest…”
“Half now.”
“No, I can’t…”
“Fine, fuck off.”
“Alright, shit, what difference does it make?”
“I need to settle some shit.” Bagby hotboxed the joint, got a good inch-long orange-red cherry glowing on the end. “Can I get a ride with you?”
“Sure, that’s cool…”
“Ok, let’s go.”
“What about your sh—your stuff?”
“I don’t have anything left, man. I’m free! Lemme go tell the boss!”
Women screamed. A loud crash and a thud. Bagby came out with a black eye, drywall dust in his hair and a bindle made from a Nektor T-shirt wrapped around some stuff.
“Let’s go, before I get a better offer.”
This is going to work, he told his hands for the ninety-fourth time. It has to…
They had more or less stopped shaking by the time he got through his third piña colada. The cheap rum floated on the top and hit his stomach like weed killer, but he sucked it down and savored the cold turning his brain to a freezer-burned leftover in the back of the icebox. Slowing thought, stopping the second-guessing in its tracks.
He left Bagby in Haiku with a cash retainer and a disposable phone and fled with all due dispatch, stopping at a dive bar in Kihei that seemed to cater to abusive local men of early middle age determined not to reach fifty. The walls were covered in posters for Italian cannibal movies and nekkid snapshots of ex-wives, ex-girlfriends, lewdly and viciously defaced. It smelled like they pissed on the floor. They called him something that probably meant “queer” in their tropical jibber jabber when he ordered a drink from one of the hypnotic Slurpie machines behind the counter.
Driving back from the bar. The dark had closed in and the stars were unbearably bright, nothing in sight beyond the glow of his headlamps. There were lots of observatories out here, Hodad told him, because no light pollution. One more thing he didn’t need to know crammed into his head like a flu virus, weakening him when he had to be stronger than he knew he was.
The logic was so simple, he followed it over and over, right off the same cliff. He had to kill this guy. One guy. But he was not a killer. But he had an expense account. Sure, the subcontractors were flakes, but how many reliable professional hitmen would sign on for a murder safari like this? So instead of being an assassin, he had to be a ringleader, a master of men, a bandit chief…
Freefall.
It felt like he was falling whenever he closed his eyes. Was this what all those pussies complained about on TV? Was this a panic attack? They had drugs for this shit, didn’t they? The big man said drugs were for weaklings, especially the prescription kind. Take you for example, that bullying Dixie voice drawled in his head. Slapping himself didn’t shut it up.
He followed the road along the seaside and stomped on the brake, cursing the red and blue sunrise.
A couple police cars sat on the uphill side of the road with their lights turning. A dozen or so ordinary cars and trucks lined both sides of the road. Off to the right, a few widely separated pools of klieg light described the rough outlines of a construction site. In the center, under a light that made it look like a misplaced tourist attraction, a bunch of natives in grass skirts and togas and diapers were doing some sort of pagan ritual shit.
Zef rolled up, trying to drive the speed limit and think sober, legal thoughts. A cop stepped out in front of his car, waving a flashlight. Zef stopped and held his breath.
The cop was a cherubic local. Smiling awkwardly at Zef, he said, “OK, you must be lost. This isn’t for tourists.”
Zef suddenly felt sloshed. Talking out the side of his mouth, he said, “I’m going back to Kaanapali, sir…”
“Oh, please don’t sir me, sir, I work for a living.” The cop scowled at him for a second longer, then cracked a smile. “Just kidding, relax, brah. Anyway, this road dead ends about fifty yards up, where they were going to put the golf course, so what you need to do…”
“What’
re they doing, over there?”
“What? Oh, them? It’s harmless, really. It’s a traditional purification ceremony.”
“Looks like a funeral…”
A group of men in feathered capes gathered around a hole, and began to dig. Under the earth lay a bed of glowing coals, and underneath that…
Zef’s mouth watered. He could smell it from here. They were roasting a pig.
“They were gonna put up a big new resort right here, yeah? Would’a been a lot of jobs, too, but the guy who runs the parent company or whatever? He jumped off some casino in Las Vegas, for real, though. My brother-in-law was over there when it happened, only at Circus Circus, ‘cos he got kids…”
Zef tuned him out and stared at the ritual. As the men unearthed the pig, a man in a bright red robe held up short stone axes and descended upon the carcass to carve it up. Another in priest’s robes and a ti leaf headdress moved stiffly around the group, sprinkling water from a calabash gourd on the people and then on the construction equipment.
“So, like,” Zef interrupted, “are they gonna share that pork?”
The cop laughed. “Oh, no, but that’s funny!”
“How come?”
“It’s like a protest, kinda...? The pig is like a stand-in for the casino guy, I think, or white people in general, no offense… They’re gonna offer the meat to the gods by burning it or chucking it in the sea, something like that, and keep the bones for some magic stuff… I don’t know this stuff too well, you know? My parents raised me Lutheran… But like, it’s supposed to take his curse off the land and then the hotel won’t happen. But that’s crazy, it’ll get built sooner or later and all these same people are gonna be working there…”
Zef wished the cop a wonderful evening and turned around, driving slowly past the construction site and the weird ritual again.
The priest carving up the pig was not kneeling.
He had no legs.
All the computers were tied up in the business center, but Zef stood behind one asshole with his hand tucked halfway down the front of his sweatpants until he logged off, cursing under his breath about how fucking golf reservations weren’t worth this.
Repo Shark Page 15
