Bagby was on his ass in the front yard, shooting at the front of the house, now engulfed in fire. Nothing else was coming out that door alive.
The van jumped into Reverse and sprayed a curtain of red mud going backwards into Kulike Road. Maja came running up the road with both guns up and pouring lead into the van, screaming like an air raid siren. The van slewed across the road, pointed at Maja, then jumped into Drive and started rolling downhill. The engine screamed and the radiator dumped. Maja dropped the dead mags out of the guns and loaded one with the other under her arm, standing in the road like a gunslinger.
Zef ran up alongside the van and stuck the shotgun in the window, pulled the trigger and shot nothing. The seat was empty. The back doors flew open and Kewalo jumped out into the road and joined the dark before Zef could get turned around.
Maja jumped out of the way of the empty van, which hurtled down the road, headed for the ocean.
Bagby ran out into the road. “Where’d those motherfuckers go?”
Zef pointed up the road. “Find him!” Then he turned to the house. Think like a boss. What the fuck just happened? Kewalo dropped someone—Donny—who went around back into the house and started the fire. Bagby was inside, skull-fucking his friends’ corpses or something, and almost got caught. But Hodad…
“They’re somewhere around, right now! Big bonus on whoever brings me his fokking head.”
“He was right there, man!” Bagby shouted, voice hoarse from smoke. “I double-tapped his fucking ass, clack clack! Fucking came out of nowhere and everything was on fire…”
Zef stalked back out into the road. “You got him…?”
“I shot him, sure,” Bagby said, “but I didn’t stop him.”
“Where the fok is he now?”
“Dude…” Bagby said, with all the gravitas he could muster, “he’s fucking everywhere.”
Dr. Bill’s gonna be shittin’ kittens.
Maja was kneeling over something in the shrubbery across the road. Looking sideways, holding the gun up like a shield, Zef ran over to her. Cops and fire trucks would be here soon. What they would make of this, he had no idea, but fire was probably the best answer.
It had Isidro’s poncho on, but no face, no jaw. The whole front of his skull was gone. His right hand had only a thumb and index finger on it. His other arm was a ghastly red stick from elbow to wrist. He’d thrown up an arm to hold it back, to stop it…
What the fuck was it?
“I’m sorry,” Zef said.
Maja said something in Tagalog. She reached out and her tiny hand was like a pit bull’s jaws on Zef’s biceps. “We kill him many times.”
“Fok yeah,” he said.
The dark was peeled back by headlights. Zef ran to the minivan, thinking he should’ve shot Bagby when he had the chance but it was never too late, when he saw Bagby running for the same van. It backed up out of the driveway, sliding almost sideways in the road. Zef, Bagby and Maja shot at it as it rolled away into the dark.
Zef screamed and waved the shotgun in the air. He almost pulled the trigger, but you couldn’t fire into the sky without killing someone, here.
“Let’s go,” he shouted at Bagby. “Get in the fokking bus!” Screamed, really, his voice cracking.
Someone came out the front door. Zef raised the shotgun, but then lowered it, shaking his head.
Smoking and sizzling in the rain, Hodad walked down the porch with a bale of weed under each arm. “What’d I miss?”
Beyond Kulike Road, the 36 turned into the 360, the infamous Hana Highway. There was no substantive debate about which way to go, whether to chase or give up. They had nowhere else to go.
“He’ll go back to Hana,” Hodad said. “But he could stop anywhere on the road, and you’d never see him.”
“Then you drive,” Zef said.
“Sorry, brother, but I’m legally blind. Also,” holding up a claw, seared and blistered up to his shoulder, “doesn’t hurt, but it plays hell with my reflexes.”
“I’ll drive,” Bagby said. Zef stared at him. He didn’t trust the burnout not to wreck them, but he trusted him in the backseat even less.
“Then move,” Hodad said, getting into the backseat directly behind Bagby. Maja got in the shotgun seat and curled up facing the window.
Zef and Bagby zipped Isidro’s corpse up in a neoprene surfboard sheath and put him on the roof. Hodad threw the bales of weed in the back. Bagby said, “Thanks for saving my crops,” which made Hodad laugh.
“Sorry, man, I didn’t see your weed for all the smoke of that fire you left me in. This here’s mine.” And he held up the other shotgun, resting his pinky on the trigger.
“Whatever, granddad.”
The microbus grumbled, but its indestructible German engine caught and snored amiably on the first try. They rolled out onto Kulike and lurched and bucked while Bagby got acquainted with the clutch.
Zef tensed up around the shotgun. Did he hear sirens, or were his ears ringing from all the gunfire? “Jesus Christ, step on it!”
“I’m fucking doing it, but this shitbox is even worse than that minivan. Which has my fucking Denny CD in it…” He flipped on the hi-beams, which made the visibility worse.
The rain came down in leaden sheets, the jungle stacked up high and tight against the road, which swerved and switched back on itself like a drunken snail’s trail, trying to find its way around the coastal cliff. All of them stared into the dark, eyes peeled for any sign, but there was hardly a shoulder, let alone a turnout. Still, every once in a while, he spotted a cabin or a lanai tucked in the trees, and every once in a while, the turn of the road afforded them a view of the empty, ultimate blackness that must be the ocean far, far below.
The road went on and on and the silence stretched on impossibly. Bagby had turned on the stereo, but the radio was broken and he ejected the Lord Kitchener CD halfway through “Dr. Kitch’s Needle” and chucked it out the window.
Zef tried to stay ahead of shock. He knew it was coming, knew the enormity of what had happened was creeping up on him. When it hit, he was going to be good for nothing at all. And they weren’t done fucking up, tonight. They were in hot pursuit of a badass motherfucker into Indian Country, leaving a flaming crime scene and a busload of bodies that would have to be identified by dental records.
“You’ve done this before, I suppose,” Hodad said.
Zef didn’t look away from the window. “I got a lot on my mind right now, man.”
“Sure you do. I expect you must feel pretty bad about all those kids.”
“They were big enough to steal from gangsters.” Zef tried to sound cold. “Would’ve got deaded tonight, anyway.”
“Exactly my point,” Hodad said. “But this job was way hairier than you told us it was going to be.”
“None of that was my doing,” Zef said.
“But you subcontracted us out of your nut,” Bagby said, “and these guys are fucking monsters, man. I think, given everything we’ve been through together, that we’re entitled to a bigger piece of the pie.”
“Not gonna discuss it now,” Zef said. “Kill somebody I want killed for a change, and we’ll talk about the bonus situation.”
“Bet your boss would be more reasonable.”
“You have no fokking idea, yo.”
“Hey,” Bagby said, “I see them.”
They slowed down, passing a dirt turnout for Papaaea Reservoir. A van was parked just off the shoulder, but it looked like an ice cream truck. But far off ahead, they saw a flash of red. Taillights.
“Speed up, fok,” Zef growled. “He fokking lives here. You think he’s driving like a fokking bitch?”
Bagby let the wheel go and held his hands up in surrender. The bus veered towards a flooded ditch. “You wanna drive, cocksucker? Climb over the seat and drive.”
“Everybody can the negativity for a minute, please?” Hodad stood up in the bus, hanging by a strap from the ceiling. “Our chances of finding him out here on a night like
this are abysmal, even if he wanted us to. And he does want us to find him. Just keep driving, but don’t be looking for the minivan.”
“Sit down and shut up, old man,” Bagby said. “You can keep the fucking weed, but I don’t see you getting a dime of a payout on this motherfucker’s scalp.”
Hodad sat down.
“Don’t worry,” Zef said. “He’s not in charge.”
“Nobody is, brother,” Hodad laughed. “Nobody is.”
“You want us to drop you off, we’ll pull over anywhere.”
“Relax, I didn’t mean anything by it. ‘Events are in the saddle, and ride mankind.’ That’s Emerson… Anyway, don’t beat yourself up. You were doomed from the start.”
“I don’t want to hear it.”
“Who hooked you up with this crew?”
“That’s on a need-to-know basis…”
“I don’t need to know, but whoever it was, he was taking out the island’s trash.”
“He gave me your name first.”
“My point exactly. A leper, a psychotic burnout and a gay Filipino couple who kill tourists for money. You expected a smooth outcome?”
The road seemed to level off and straighten out for a while, which was a relief. They passed the Garden of Eden Arboretum, and then they turned towards the sea and down a narrow ledge alongside a sheer cliff face.
“They must’ve told you all kinds of crazy bullshit to get you out here.” Hodad sounded tired, rubbing disinfectant into his burns. “Big money, maybe even threats. Lot of people out here still think they can do business like that. They’re used to getting their way, and out here, they get to thinking like the old ali’i, the chiefs. Make up a law somebody can’t help but break, and sacrifice your troubles away.” Hodad yawned expansively. His breath smelled sweet, like he’d been chewing herbs, a welcome respite from the scorched hot dog smell of his body. “I don’t reckon I’d trade places with you, right now.”
“I don’t know, man. I’ve seen worse.”
“The hell you have. What would you give, to trade places with someone else, right now?”
“I don’t know… I’d give up a lot. Name it, I’d do it, to get out from under this shit…”
Incongruously, Hodad stuck out his claw. “Whatever happens, it’s been a pleasure working with you.”
Zef looked at the hand with naked distaste.
“Come on, don’t leave me hanging. You can’t get it from a handshake…”
If it would shut him up, Zef shook the creepy claw, and turned to face the window.
Shut Hodad up? Perish the thought. “Hawaii used to love to bathe itself in blood, but those days are long gone. This isn’t Africa or Jamaica or Haiti. Shit like this doesn’t want to happen here. Somebody went to a lot of trouble to bring the old stories to life again. You’re fucking up the story, but that’s the real reason they sent somebody like you.”
Zef leaned against the window, staring and pretending to fall asleep. “I got no time for your stories, old man.”
“You got time now, haole, and this time, you better listen.”
Hodad started talking, telling some kind of story Zef barely heard for studying the road and spacing out. The sound of his voice was like the rain, soothing but maddening at the same time.
When he finally stopped talking, Zef couldn’t say, but when he looked over, he found Hodad gone and the loading door open to the storm.
Bagby laughed. “Motherfucker just jumped out in the middle of the road! Fucking coward…”
Zef turned to look back and he saw nothing. The road ran down to the teeth of the jagged coast, then vanished around a hairpin turn.
Bagby screamed that he saw taillights. They came around the turn and suddenly the taillights were just ahead of them.
Bagby whooped and stomped the gas. The minivan seemed to vanish, and the microbus felt different because the road was gone, and they were flying.
In the beginning, the sky raped the earth and made gods, and the gods raped women and beasts and made monsters.
So taken was he with their beauty and the excitement of their human games, that Ka-moho-alii, king of sharks and brother of Pele, put on a human disguise to visit the people of the Waipio Valley on the island of Hawaii. After he had given them the gift of surfing, he seduced the most beautiful girl in the village and gave her a son. He warned her that she must never allow her son to swim with the other islanders, and never let him eat meat. Then Ka-moho-alii returned to the sea.
Nanaue was a handsome and strong child. Only Kalei, his mother, knew why he always swam alone in a lagoon far from the village, and why he must always wear a mantle of tapa cloth over his shoulders. This was to hide the gaping, razor-toothed mouth that split the skin of his back, always snapping and ravening for flesh.
Kalei kept Nanaue safe and his secret secure until he reached manhood and was taken by his grandfather to eat supper with the other men. Nanaue’s appetite for meat proved bottomless. Nothing could stop the strange new craving the taste of meat had ignited in him.
As a child, Nanaue always swam alone with his mother, but now, he followed the other villagers down to the sea, and one by one, people began to disappear in the surf, eaten alive by a ferocious and freakishly cunning shark.
Though many in the village suspected Nanaue was not quite right, no one could imagine he was behind the attacks. But when the villagers gathered to plant their communal taro patches, a nosy neighbor ripped Nanaue’s cape off his back, revealing his hideous hidden mouth, and got his arm bitten off for his trouble.
The whole village fell upon Nanaue and bound him up with ropes, and made ready an oven to incinerate him, for such a misbegotten offspring of a shark-god must be utterly destroyed. But Nanaue transformed and slipped out of captivity, swimming down a stream to gain the ocean, ahead of the rocks and spears thrown by the people of Waipio.
Driven from the land but unable to survive for long in the open ocean, Nanaue turned up next at Hana on Maui‘s north shore, where he soon won the hand of a chiefess and a place of honor in the kingdom. Before long, he challenged others to swimming contests, only to disappear while, in his place, a rogue shark appeared to devour Nanaue’s opponent. Others simply vanished without a trace, always when Nanaue was absent.
Nanaue chafed at having to hide, and eventually gave up all pretense of a double life. Dragging a beautiful girl into the waves in full view of the village, he transformed and ate her. The people of Hana tried to catch him, but he escaped again, this time to the neighboring island of Molokai.
When swimmers and fishermen again began to disappear, the people of Molokai consulted their kahunas, who maintained an inter-island gossip conduit that soon brought news of the shark-man’s rampage on Maui. The fishermen of Molokai cast their nets and captured Nanaue, dragged him onto the beach, dismembered him and stuck the monstrous fillets into an oven to be cremated. Nanaue’s corpse was so massive that blood and fluids gushing out of it doused the flames, forcing them to cut his body into strips to dry, and to cut down a whole bamboo grove as kindling, to finally rid the world of him.
You know what it was like? It was like one of those annoying old Twilight Zone episodes, where some guy goes back in time to kill Hitler or save Tupac or whatever, and through his attempts to change history, he instead ends up saving Hitler and killing Tupac…?
It was like that.
Engine racing, higher and higher like an airplane prop, the bus floated for a long, fat second. Long enough for Bagby to say, “That ain’t right,” and Zef to stand up between the seats and scream, “Fokking hippie!”
The moon hung dead center in their view through a ragged hole in the clouds, etching the rain and the heaving sea with silver filigree. Beautiful—
They fell for a few seconds, at least, long enough for Zef to see the minivan’s taillights gutter out beneath the waves below them, for Bagby to throw open his door, saying, “Ain’t that a bitch,” and for Maja to brace her feet against the dashboard, and Zef to keep screa
ming.
The face of the waves hit them like a black brick wall. The flat front end of the microbus smashed into it and passed every cubic ounce of impact onto its contents. Zef somersaulted into the windshield like a bug, landing on his tailbone just as the safety glass pulverized and gave way to a piledriver of frigid seawater. Bagby seemed to have pulled one of those ingenious cartoon maneuvers where the droopy dog or the woodpecker jumps off the falling elevator at exactly the right moment, and emerges unscathed from a devastating wreck.
Zef had the wind knocked out of him by the fall and then was flung back up through the descending microbus, now the world’s shittiest submarine. Water slammed into him from the open loading door, crushing him against the far wall and up into a bubble of air trapped in the back of the compartment. Awash in burrito wrappers and flipflops, Zef gasped for air. Something brushed and slithered by his legs. He squawked and kicked out. Something shaggy bobbed up to cling to his arm. Maja’s wig.
OK, this isn’t a Bug and it’s not floating, so you have to go. It was so fucking cold, he could barely think, let alone move.
Move!
Numb, fumbling, he ducked underwater, found the doorway and was swept out into the ocean. He could see only blackness shot through with strings of bright silver bubbles that told him which way was up. The sky was bright, shining down into the sea. Picking out hordes of long, sleek torpedo shapes between him and the surface.
A newborn wave lifted him up from the inky deep so fast his ears popped and his gut surged, but before he could break through, the tide receded and sucked him back down. His lungs swelled up with nothing.
Clawing his way to the surface, he felt something else brush his leg. This time, he was pretty sure it wasn’t a Filipino transvestite hitman’s wig.
Then it bumped him.
Every bubble of air he let out of his mouth left him heavier, weaker, sinking… He kicked and paddled and crawled, feeling like he was trying to squirm out of a fist of black ice closing around him, crushing him—
Slim, razor-finned bodies slipped past him, converging on something behind and below him, something he fervently hoped was Lowell Bagby.
Repo Shark Page 19
