She was gone.
Beer was chilling in the fridge and he’d made one fine batch of margaritas before he burnt out the motor on the blender. Chips and pineapple salsa and whatever that purple shit was took up the dining room table, and a mellow Gasoline Monk mix oozed from the intact speaker of the dope alarm clock with iPod dock that he’d lifted from the Hilton. It already felt like a party.
“Where’d she go, man?” Hodad wanted to know.
“You don’t know her?” Zef threw a beer can in the trash. “Thought you knew everybody. You’ve never heard of Auntie Kalei?”
Hodad frowned. “She’s a kahuna. One of the few who claim they can do the old death songs. Steal your soul away, you let her get her claws on you. But not that hottie…”
Zef shivered. “No shit?” He took a joint from his pocket and lit it. “How’s that work?”
Hodad smiled affably and took the joint in his claw. “Everybody’s spirit—your soul, like your ghost before you die, you know, it goes wandering while they’re asleep, you know? They go out looking to party, man, you know, do whatever their body can’t.
Hodad passed the joint but found no takers. “A kahuna will put a few coconut cups of awa out at night, and when the right ghost comes up to take a drink, he just grabs it and eats it. Then he tells the victim his soul’s gone, and within a day or two, he’s just gone.”
Zef choked on smoke, coughed until his eyes ran with tears. “No… way…”
“But that ain’t the worst, brother. A Hawaiian witch can take a ghost and trap it and pray a lot of mana into it, and bind it into a familiar spirit to do her bidding. Fierce and ferocious, and they can’t be killed. Even dying, an unihipilii can’t get free.”
Zef tried to think how he met Auntie Kalei. He couldn’t. She had just eaten with him when he came out of the blackout at the pancake house. “Yeah, whatever, man… I’m pretty sure that didn’t happen to me.”
“Oh, it can happen to anybody, brother. They trick the victim into giving up his soul when it goes wandering, or like, they’ll lure it astray and trap it in something, like a coconut or maybe a bird…”
Zef’s head snapped around on his neck. His heart stopped. “Or a chicken?”
“Sure,” Hodad cracked up. “But don’t sweat it, dude. That shit only works on you if you believe in it.”
Ringworm and Earwig showed up exactly on time, dappled with raindrops and reeking of deep fry grease but dressed in what they probably wore to church. They came in shyly and quietly, eyeing the mess in the kitchen ruefully as they passed into the living room. Hodad offered them a beer, which they politely declined. Ringworm gave him a big pot of sticky rice. Earwig gave Zef a tray of her lumpia, which set him to drooling.
Bagby came last. He brought three growlers of microbrew and a plastic grocery bag that reeked like filthy laundry. A fetid, gangrenous stench filled up the room. Zef ordered him out on the lanai. Ringworm and Earwig followed him, licking their lips.
“Fucking barbarians, all of you,” Bagby shouted. “This here’s the King of all Fruit.”
Hodad covered the hibachi and moved all the other food away. “Man, it’s not even legal to carry that shit on a bus in Singapore, never mind eat it in public.”
Bagby took out a couple spiky green balls. The smell raped Zef’s nose. “Gimme a steak knife, man.”
“Get it yourself,” Zef said.
Earwig went to get one, but Hodad seized the durian fruits and flung them out onto the golf course. First the two exposed ones, and then the whole bag.
Bagby came at him drunken-uncle style with a pocketknife. Hodad sidestepped it, trapped Bagby’s arm and tripped him. The taller, younger, stronger man fell into the lap pool. Hodad was on top of him, holding his head under.
“Yo, man, let him up…” Zef pried Bagby out of Hodad’s iron crab-grip.
Bagby got out smirking like he’d just been the butt of a bad bar joke, and not just almost drowned over some stinky fruit. But his eyes never left Hodad.
“Sorry, man. Bad memories associated with that shit.” Hodad did one of his quick visual checks and stopped, frowning.
“Hey,” Bagby said, “where’s my knife?”
“So this belongs to you?” Hodad pulled Bagby’s pocketknife out of his skinny asscheek, wiped the blade off on his sarong and dropped it in his breast pocket. “Mine now.” He didn’t wince or evince any more discomfort than if Bagby had ripped his shirt.
Shrugging off help, Hodad took a first aid kit out of his medicine bag.
“Fuck it.” Bagby shook green pool water out of his hair, walking inside. “Where’s the tequila?”
“So like, how many of you know who Donny Punani is?”
Hodad shrugged and nodded like he’d been asked if he was familiar with the Pacific Ocean. Ringworm pursed his lips. Earwig cracked a shy smile.
“So everybody…”
“Kill a local,” Ringworm said, emptying a Sprite can into a plastic cup of ice, “it’s a lot complicated. Cost extra.”
“What the fok, you said you’d do anybody…”
“We live here after you go home,” Ringworm said. “Nobody who live on Maui care about tourists.”
“Nobody will touch you for this,” Zef said. “Not the law, not the pineapple mafia, nobody. Everybody wants him deaded.”
“Everybody but him and his friends…”
“Fuck the nips, man,” Bagby slurred. Tequila covered up something worse on his breath. “I’ll do it for their share. All you fags stay here, I’ll go do it myself. Where the fuck is he?”
Zef looked to Hodad, who stood up holding a pint of IPA in his claw. “So nobody gets confused, I’m not a shooter, I’m just the native guide on this safari.
“Pauwalu Don Nanaue, a.k.a. Donny or Johnny Punani, has never been arrested or prosecuted, but everybody on these islands knows he’s a drug smuggler, a mainland mob sellout and a killer. There are even stories that he was a…”
“Fuck stories,” Zef said. “Facts.”
Hodad grinned. “Whatever, man. So the grapevine says he’s holed up in Hana. He’s got all the action he can handle out there, and nobody will ever rat him out. They’re afraid of him, mostly, but they hate him because all their women want to fuck him.”
Zef pictured the view of Donny’s room—the girls grinding each other while he sat fuming. He wasn’t in it for the pussy. “So let’s go over there,” he said.
“Not a good plan. It’s Indian Country, brother. The locals who don’t want to play Tonto shows for the tourists are dug in on the coast and up in the cloud forests. Folks who spit on the flag and see all white men as a hostile occupying force. And since their Queen was overthrown…”
“Get to the fucking point, professor!” Bagby threw a beer can.
Hodad caught the can and threw it back, drained his pint and wiped his mouth with a claw. “Sorry, I actually used to be a professor.”
He beckoned them all around the dining room table and unfolded a Triple-A roadmap. “Anyway, we’re here.” He pointed to their spot at six o’clock on the island. Hana was at two o’clock, but getting there was not easy. The road to Hana was in the Guinness Book for most waterfalls and bridges on a single road, but that didn’t begin to do it justice. Cleaving to the coastal cliffs that thrust out into the sea and then retreat into countless narrow, rain-carved canyons, the skinny, mostly two-lane road often became a one-way track over antique bridges clogged with day-tripping tourist idiots in rental minivans. Wildlife preserves, botanical gardens, lava tube tours and zip lines dotted the coast, but the village at the end was an anticlimax. No resorts, no franchises, no fast food, no tourist amenities. Roadside stands had flowers and fruit laid out for sale, but no one was there to take your money. Just a box for the cash and the sense that people who couldn’t stand to deal with you were somewhere nearby, watching...
Hodad said Donny was somewhere along the road, probably not in Hana proper. “They harvest a couple times a season, so he could be anywhere up i
n the mountains, if he’s around at all. They say he goes out on the ocean for days at a time…”
Zef looked at the map with his brow furrowed. “Why don’t we go round the other way?” It was a straight shot around the bottom of the island to Hana, with not a damned thing between them but dirt.
“Well, there’s nothing out there, and it doesn’t get much rain. The road is fucked up… Parts of it are closed during the winter to get worked on, but there’s no real reason you couldn’t just come in on a boat…”
“They see us coming,” Ringworm said.
Tracing a route from the development in Wailea, Zef figured it’d be a cinch to go that way, but there seemed to be no road connecting the whole southwest portion of Maui with the southeastern coast road. You had to go to Kahului on the north shore, then double back on a parallel road. “What the fok, yo?”
“There is a shortcut, but it’s private,” Hodad said.
“That fucking TV shrink has a ranch up there,” Bagby said. “He’s never even there, but his people have it fenced off.”
Impatiently, Zef said, “So going to get him is a waste of time.”
“We’d probably never find him,” Hodad said.
“No fucking way we’d get out alive,” Bagby said.
“I thought so. That’s why we’re going to get him to come to us.”
Zef rooted around in a pile of Dr. Bill books and found a notepad he’d jotted some things down on. “What do we know about this Punani fucker? He likes to take motorcycles that don’t belong to him, and he likes to sing. So we set up a karaoke contest, and make the prize a motorcycle.”
He sat back and wished he had a mic to throw to the floor. Peace out, bitches!
“And then what?” Hodad said.
“Then we kill him! Fok, why did I hire you punkass fakers?”
Hodad said, “It offers a lot of advantages, but how much time and money can you afford to throw away…”
“I like it,” Ringworm said. “We can work better if we bring him in.”
“Kill him many times,” Earwig put in.
Bagby said, “Assuming you can get all this shit together, how do you want it done?”
“We take no chances. He’s got to be dead for real. If you have to check for a pulse, he’s not dead.”
“What you got, man?”
Zef pushed back from the table. This was the sweet part. Moving expansively, keeping all eyes on him, he went to the living room and pulled an Army footlocker out from under the coffee table. One of Yeti’s longhaired thugs delivered it first thing in the morning.
He opened it and let them marvel.
Two shotguns, four automatics and an authentic AK-47 that looked like a battlefield trophy. Guy told him these were lifted from a safe in a vacation home in Haiku. If they were caught, it was an added burglary beef.
“Gnarly,” Bagby said. “Dibs on the AK.”
Zef and Ringworm each took a neat Italian semiauto shotgun; Earwig took a .25 Beretta and hummed the James Bond theme under her breath. Bagby grabbed the assault rifle and stuffed the pockets of his cargo shorts with banana clips.
Watching him poke and prod the gun, Zef asked, “You ever shoot one?”
“A Hawaiian? Not yet, why?” A wubbing dubstep ringtone sounded from his pocket. He went in the kitchen.
Hodad asked, “So when do we spring your plan?”
“Shit’s already on,” Zef said. “Gonna see about renting a bike tomorrow, and go to a Kinko’s or whatever and make flyers. We set it up with a club in Lahaina…”
“OK, wait…” Bagby came back in. “So we could do all that gay shit with the karaoke and the flyers and shit. OR,” pointing to his phone, “we could grab our guns and go to where he is right… fucking… now.”
Clouds tossed and roiled in the sky like laundry in a giant washing machine. The wipers screeched, flinging buckets of water off the windshield about half as fast as it was coming down.
Racing north on 311 through a sugarcane wasteland of black, harvested stalks, Zef tried to come across like he was in charge of what was happening, like he understood it.
Last week, he would’ve said he didn’t believe there was such thing as a soul. Now, he tried to convince himself that his soul wasn’t trapped in a chicken or a coconut.
This was him striking back. This was his fist coming down. This wasn’t a drug using him for a sock puppet. Wasn’t some TV asshole or a witch making him do their bidding. Wasn’t some burnout surfer hijacked his hit squad to strongarm his frienemies’ stash.
It sounded stupid, on the face of it.
And the more Bagby had talked, the worse it got. “No time to explain, he’s gonna be there in an hour…”
“Where?”
“North Shore. Tick tock, bitches.”
Ringworm and Earwig were against it. Hodad reluctantly agreed it was worth trying. Before casting the tie-breaking vote, Zef adjourned to the bathroom and did a blast of ice.
Fucking aye.
He offered Ringworm and Earwig a grand each to walk away, but they stood pat.
Bagby explained in the fuckpad’s fancy new minivan while he drove. Hodad studied a map and Zef tried to look like he knew how to handle a Glock 9mm.
So these “friends” of Lowell Bagby’s—a couple of whom were total kooks, but overall brothers of the board and bud… Anyway, they were all flat broke and facing eviction from paradise. Backs to the wall, they had used uncharacteristic ingenuity in stealing a couple clones from an outdoor grow in a canyon up above Hanehoi Stream in the hills. Instead of smoking them, they planted them out back of the house, and before you know it, the shit had taken off.
It yielded indoor quality and bud density when left alone outside. So naturally, they started selling the shit. This had been Bagby’s pet project, but the ingrates had usurped his fledgling empire and taken all the profits for themselves. Which had turned out to be not the brightest idea, because the plants they stole were Donny Punani’s property.
The unique purple strain was pretty hard to mistake for someone else’s. So they returned from surfing this morning to find a very polite handwritten note on the dashboard of the Nektorsled, thanking them for caring for his plants and informing them of his intention to come collect them at low tide at 5PM, which he assumed would find them at home.
Bagby’s bros had contacted him not so much to plead for help as to curse him for ratting them out, which was ridiculous, because Bagby wasn’t some kind of punk who rolled over on people, and anyway, this shit was like bionic Kula Crippler… And it was this spooky, radioactive blacklight purple, so sooner or later there was going to be a reckoning, which was why this was all so perfect.
“It’s like when you’re out past the breakwater and a storm is coming in. You surf, little man?”
Zef said yes and didn’t even register the slight until Bagby was talking again. It looked like they were doing seventy through a car wash.
Bagby finally passed the joint he’d been bogarting. Smoke poured out of him with his words, on and on. “It’s like we’re right in position and the swell is building and we’re about to drop into tube city. You know my man Shane?”
Zef said no he didn’t, and thank god he didn’t give Bagby any of the ice. His plan was a good one, like inspired by those crafty Fed sting operations where they’d send out these notices to all these fugitives and crooks with outstanding warrants that they won a boat, and they always showed up and said, Where’s my boat?
Face it, the plan was brilliant, but it would have taken a week of setup and another couple grand out of pocket to stage a karaoke contest and find a bunch of clowns to fill it out and rent a bike, and the outcome would be as sure as one of those Roadrunner cartoons.
And when it was over and Donny Punani got away again and took the rental bike and fucked off to the next island, Zef would truly and finally snap, and he would be just like the psychotic burnout in the driver’s seat who was still talking…
“…Fags said it was my faul
t, what happened, but they got it all backwards, man. Shane lived in the Tube. There’s only one wave, and when you catch up to it, it’s that one forever moment, right? Shane came to me the night before, man, and we’d partied before all the time, no big, but he said to me, ‘Lowell, I need to dose up and vision-quest, brother, because I’m going to die tomorrow, and I really want to know if I have to.’”
The joint came round to him again. Bagby hit it, staring into the rain. “He saw it coming, man. He figured it out. Paddled out and never came back. That’s the way to go, man, when I’m through with this shit… Just paddle out.”
“I’m only paying for Donny,” Zef said, in a weak voice he hated. “Whatever shit you got going with your friends, chill it ‘till our deal is closed, or…”
“Or what?” Bagby laughed. “Relax, man. All things are working to produce the highest good.” Fishing a CD out of his pocket, he said, “Hey, how about some mood music?”
Zef braced himself for speed metal, dub reggae or even techno, but this… it was so much worse. It was like Muzak on bad acid… Freaky birdcalls, hissing rain and croaking frogs came from every corner of the van. Fruity xylophone and marimba runs made like malaria shivers.
“Martin Denny was a fucking genius, man. That pansy Baxter may’ve wrote most of his hits, but Denny fucking invented the whole exotica movement right there, man, as a live lounge act. Ruled Don the Beachcomber’s in the Sixties, back when Waikiki still had a decent split peak. I would’ve killed to see that shit, back in the day. Y’know, nobody in Waikiki even remembers Don’s, let alone Denny. Fucking disgraceful, don’t you agree?”
Zef agreed, hoping that would end it.
It didn’t.
If anything, it was raining twice as hard on the north shore. The slope of Kulike Road became a sluice. As they got close, Bagby doused their headlights. The apron of gray rain in front of them vanished.
“Shut up!” Bagby hissed, turned around and snapped shut the pulldown monitor on which Ringworm and Earwig were watching cartoons.
They slowed to a crawl as they passed the bougainvillea hedge walls of Nektorhaus. No cars parked on the road. A couple VW microbuses and an old Mazda pickup with a camper shell, but nothing that set Bagby off. No motorcycles, but who would be out on a bike in this weather?
Repo Shark Page 17
