What he’d learned in the military—Assassination 101—had been pounded into his head in drill after drill and then tested and reinforced in hostile environments. The operational protocols had become second nature to him: infiltration, execution, extraction. Easy. Effective. Like shampooing your hair: wash, rinse, repeat.
Keith checked his list off in his head. He was here, he’d infiltrated. As far as anyone knew, he was a businessman on vacation. He’d already gone through the phone book and located Sid Tanumafili; that wasn’t difficult, that’s the easy part. Now he had to plan the execution and extraction. These were linked. The last thing you want to do is take out your target and not have a clue how to get your ass out of the area. That, he realized, was the main problem with being on an island. All they had to do was close the airport and he’d be trapped. It’s not like doing a hit in Denver; you can’t just get in your car and drive to Phoenix. You can’t pop somebody and then stroll down to the corner and catch a bus. Nope. Here the rules were different. The extraction had to be part of the execution. It had to be airtight.
Keith ordered a second beer. Everyone else was drinking, and he didn’t want to stick out. Besides, he was enjoying himself. He watched as a large catamaran sounded its horn and drifted slowly to shore. Dozens of tourists, burned a crispy pre-melanoma red from being out on the water all day, clambered off the boat and waddled back to their various hotels. A family from Seattle walked by. Where they had once been as pale as uncooked chicken, they were now scarlet and blistering. The wife was complaining to the husband, bitching and whining, her voice getting higher and higher as she got more and more upset. She was annoyed that the sun was so strong here. Keith had to chuckle. What did she think? That her husband could use the dimmer and take the UV index down a couple of notches? Keith heard the woman start in again. Why did they have to come here, was he trying to give her skin cancer? Why couldn’t they go somewhere else? Keith shook his head and laughed.
...
Yuki knew Francis was in the hospital. She knew where he was and how he got there. But that didn’t mean she was going to visit or send flowers. As far as she was concerned, he got what was coming to him.
She was at work. Someone had to keep things going. Someone had to push the paperwork through. So that’s what she did. Although she had to admit that her heart wasn’t in it.
All she could think about was Lono. The image of him on top of her, thrusting his cock into her, kept replaying in her mind. She could recall his taste, the salty raw flavor of his tongue thrusting into her mouth. She remembered how strong and solid his arms felt. She smiled when she thought about the sweet sweaty whacking sound of their bodies colliding.
Even though they’d made plans to get together tonight, Yuki couldn’t help herself. She daydreamed. She felt her body getting warm, her pulse racing. She got up, locked herself in the bathroom, and masturbated. She let the phone ring.
...
Sid was mad. He and Wilson stood in front of Joseph; their body language—arms crossed, legs hip distance apart, heads cocked slightly—said it all. They weren’t going to take no for an answer.
“After all I done for you?”
Joseph groaned. Nobody likes a guilt trip. “Uncle, I said no.”
“You gonna make my house payment den?”
“I won’t do it.”
“Wot you scared of?”
Joseph glared at Sid. “You go fuck him.”
Sid shrugged. “I be happy to. ’Cause it mean I got food fo’ my family mouth.”
Wilson chimed in. “We all gotta sacrifice, brah.”
Joseph looked at his cousin. “You wouldn’t do it.”
“Sure I would, but he wants you, brah.”
Sid came over and put his arm around Joseph. “People do it fo’ all da time. All over da world men are fuckin’ each other den. It’s no big deal.”
Wilson added his two cents. “It’s okay wit’ Hannah. She said so.”
All his life Joseph had listened to his uncle, ever since his parents had decided to move to the mainland for the security of steady employment and a more affordable standard of living. Without his mother or father around, Joseph had gone to his uncle for guidance. He’d taken his advice about college, which kind of car to buy and how much to pay for it, how to get a mortgage for his house, and what to do when he grew up. They’d sat together and talked and drank and turned Sid’s small fleet of lunch trucks into one of the best production catering companies in the business. Sid was his father figure, his business partner, and his friend. And now he was asking Joseph to whore for the family.
“Sorry. No can.”
Sid shook his head violently. His face grew flushed and his eyes bugged out.
“Once dat guy move in we never get ’im out. Dey take food from our mouth fo’ da rest of our life. You gotta stop ’em before dey get in. Dey just like da vines.”
The vines were a pet peeve of Sid’s. Some visionary brings a vine from the mainland over to Oahu to grow in his yard, a plant not native to the islands, and the next thing you know it’s gone crazy, growing up telephone poles and down the lines until it finds a tree, then covering the tree and killing it, and on and on. The plants were insidious, unstoppable. They had altered the flora and fauna of the island forever. Another invader from the mainland.
“There’s enough work to go around.”
Sid spit on the ground. “Wot we doin’ now den? Wot we doin’?”
It was true. There wasn’t any work at the moment.
“Something will come up. I was talking to Ed the other day. He was getting all kinds of feelers from L.A.”
Sid stared at him. “Look me in da eye den.”
Joseph looked Sid in the eye.
“You gonna do it?”
“No.”
“Fo’ da family den?”
“The gay thing is pau.”
“Even if it mean we hungry?”
“Even if it means we sell everything and open up a little okazu in Waialua.”
Sid paused. He didn’t say anything for a long time. Wilson stared at Joseph, trying to keep a determined expression on his face. Finally, Sid spoke.
“You not my blood. You not my partner.”
“Uncle, what are you talking about?”
Sid exploded, shouting at Joseph. “You fired! I don’ wanna see you no mo’.”
With that he turned and walked out. Wilson followed. Joseph watched them leave. Saw the screen door smack into the wood and watched as their hulking figures slowly disappeared down the walk. He listened as car doors opened and closed, an engine started, and the car drove off, the tires making sticky sounds on the hot pavement.
...
Francis lay in bed in one of those ridiculous hospital gowns. That was humiliating enough. But the day was young, and Francis knew a fresh round of embarrassment and degradation was on the schedule for later. Already he’d had a parade of first-year residents standing around looking at his cock. They all had their chance, poking and prodding, squeezing and palpating. He’d learned to respond to their commands like a dog: Cough. Inhale. Exhale. They made him roll over and took turns snapping on rubber gloves, lubing up, and sticking their fingers up his ass to jab at his prostate. None of it felt particularly erotic. But the head doctor told him this was a valuable learning experience for his students. They didn’t get to study examples of priapism that often.
Francis understood why. If he hadn’t had the shit kicked out of him on the beach, these pimply med students wouldn’t be standing around admiring his woody. No way. He could think of a million other uses for it.
When he wasn’t being bombarded with inane questions like When did you attain your last orgasm?, Francis was on the phone to the mainland, telling the story of how he survived a brutal attack on the beach. He left out the part about exposing himself to his assistant.
A nurse came in with another bouquet of flowers. These were from the executive producers, and he had her set them right next to the ones from
the network execs. Francis was a little disappointed that he hadn’t gotten any flowers from Chad. Chad was the first person he’d tried to call when he woke up. But, typically, Chad wasn’t home or in the office and, according to his assistant, was “unreachable.” Francis had called Chad’s cell phone and left a message informing him that he had been practically beaten to death. He figured he needed to exaggerate to get Chad’s attention. But still no phone call, no flowers, no nothing.
It occurred to Francis that the only reason to be involved with someone was so they would come and be by your side when you needed a hand to hold or a shoulder to cry on. Francis remembered how he felt as he watched the attack on the World Trade Center on September eleventh. He worried about the people who had no loved ones to call. What if you were just standing there, knowing the end is near, everyone else is on their cell phone muttering I love you and saying good-bye to their families, and you’ve got no one to call? That would suck. That would be him.
The nurse opened the door and smiled. Francis couldn’t tell if her expression was one of pity and empathy or bemusement and sadism. He guessed it was a bit of both as the brain trust trooped into his room and lifted the sheet.
Just when you think they’ve done the most horrible things they can do, they come up with something new. They came in to take measurements, a whole class of them. Gawking like a busload of tourists, making notes and nodding as the doctor in charge rattled off a string of arcane facts and unintelligible medical gibberish. After his little speech and demonstration, he held an impromptu Q&A session before letting each one take a turn molesting the patient.
The students, some of the women tittering and leering like Girl Scouts at a nudist camp, held fancy-looking calipers and other instruments of torture.
They measured from the tip to the base. They measured the circumference, the diameter, the density, and the weight. They took turns at this: snapping on rubber gloves and grabbing his dick like they actually knew what they were doing. He felt the cold touch of the instruments as they went about measuring and calling out numbers. Francis was relieved that they were all speaking metric. Centimeters and millimeters and grams. They might as well have been speaking Chinese. And then one of the pimply-faced little nerds with his white doctor jacket and his plastic pocket protector and stupid stethoscope dangling from his pencil neck piped up with “That’s not even six inches.”
Francis burned with embarrassment. He wanted to scream, to cry, to defend himself. Not even six inches? You wouldn’t know it if I stuck it in your mouth.
And then someone brought some food. They rolled a little cart in front of the bed and left his meal under its clear plastic cover. Because he had six stitches in his lip, the doctor had put him on a liquid diet. Francis took the lid off the food and looked at it. He knew why comedians made fun of hospital food. It was easy. And it was unappetizing: a bowl of clear broth and a plastic cup of lukewarm pudding the color of camel’s teeth. Francis lay back and closed his eyes....
...
He woke up feeling like fried roadkill. His mouth hurt where his stitches were, his ribs ached, his head throbbed, and his cock was still hard.
“Well, well, well. Sleeping Beauty stirs.”
Francis blinked a few times. He recognized the voice. He thought he might still be dreaming.
“I flew all this way. The least you could do is say aloha.”
“Aloha, Chad.”
Chad stood there in all his glory. Fit and well dressed, his hair layered and perfectly highlighted, his teeth bleached to a gleam, his tanning-booth tan making his skin glow with a healthy radiance. He took off his nine-hundred-dollar designer glasses and bent close to Francis.
“Can I see it?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You know.”
“I’m hurt. I’m laying here with stitches in my mouth and bruised ribs, and all you want to do is look at my cock?”
“The doctor told me about your condition.”
“I have an erection. It’s not the first time.”
“C’mon. Please. Maybe I’ll do something nice for you.”
“Fine. Just close the door.”
Chad put his glasses back on, closed the door, and lifted up the sheet like an excited child unwrapping toys at Christmas. Then he froze.
“Oh, my God.” Chad gasped, his left hand shooting up and covering his mouth. “Honey, what did you do to yourself?”
“It’s the stupid doctors; they’ve been poking it every half hour.”
“How long have you been like this?”
“Two days. I think. I haven’t been keeping score, you know.” Not like you, he thought. “Why? What’s wrong?”
“Your dick is blue.”
Francis lifted up the sheet and looked for himself. Sure enough, there it was, just under six inches long and the color of a Smurf.
...
Joseph sat under a tree and watched the waves wash in. The water was clear and green, like an old Coca-Cola bottle, and he could see bits of kelp and a few small jellyfish rolling around in the surge. On the far end of the beach, a couple of giant sea turtles lay sunning in the sand. Joseph thought he ought to be brooding, but he didn’t really know what to brood about. He didn’t even really know what to think of the last twenty-four hours. The best he could figure is that everyone he knew had gone insane.
“I thought I’d find you here.”
He looked up to see Hannah standing there. She’d already changed out of her teacher clothes and was wearing a tank top and board shorts. She looked good. Strong and clean and sexy. Joseph couldn’t help himself, he smiled at her even though he was perplexed by her decision to take Sid’s side.
“Somebody’s got to watch the turtles.”
“Mind if I join you?”
“Just don’t try and convince me to do anything I don’t want to do.”
Hannah smiled sheepishly and sat down, plopping her butt in the sand. Out of habit, she began to glide her hand across the sand, grading it, smoothing it out around her.
“What did he say?”
“He fired me.”
Hannah was surprised. “What?”
Joseph looked at her and nodded.
“But it’s half your company.”
“Then he disowned me.”
Hannah shook her head. “He’s just mad. You know how he gets sometimes. Tomorrow he’ll come back and ask why you weren’t at the office cleaning the trucks or something.”
“Tomorrow I might not be here.”
Hannah looked at the sand. She began to draw wavy lines in it with her fingertips.
Joseph watched her. “I thought we were monogamous.”
Hannah bit her lip. “We are.”
“So why’d you want me to do it?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I thought it might shake things up.”
Joseph squinted off down the beach and watched as one of the sea turtles slowly dragged itself back toward the water. It was a heavy, tortuous process as it scraped and pulled and dug into the sand with its flippers, fighting gravity with all its strength, until the first blast of ocean smacked into it and the turtle lifted off the beach, momentarily weightless, spinning like a top on the water, and was pulled out to sea, riding the wave like a reverse surfer.
...
“I don’t want to do any more anal.” She said it like she meant it.
Lono didn’t have to ask why. He could imagine. He took a sip of hot green tea and smiled across the table at the two women. They were looking good. They had to. In the old days it was enough just to be willing to do the job. But this was the modern world, the market for pussy was glutted, and if you wanted to stand out from the crowd you had to offer something better than the skanky whore or strung-out runaway. Any old junkie can suck your dick, but the discriminating customer, the man with a significant bankroll who has come to the islands to relax and play a little golf—unless he’s like that movie star who craved the jolt of frisson from sexual
encounters with the gamier purveyors of cheap pussy and fast blow jobs in cars; unless he’s like that—the discriminating customer is going to want a higher quality product. He’s going to want this year’s model, not some old jalopy. And even if you provide them with someone young and beautiful and exotic, the discriminating customer is going to want more than just a spin between the sheets; he’s going to want something memorable. He’s going to want a fantasy fulfilled. And he’ll pay top dollar for it.
Some pimps think it’s enough to keep the girls out on the street and working. They could be fifty-year-old glue sniffers with crabs and a wicked dose of the clap, it didn’t matter, so long as they were out bringing home the Benjamins. But the smart pimp elevated his game. He stayed off the streets and under the radar.
Lono was a smart pimp. No skanky-ass dope fiends for him. His girls had to be fit and well groomed. Lono provided health club memberships, personal trainers, whatever they needed to get in shape and stay that way. He got girls who were young but not illegally so, and he trained them to be outgoing, personable, and in control. They may have dressed provocatively, letting nipples protrude or cleavage be revealed, but they were wholesome, classy, and clean.
Lono was a stylist. His girls were archetypes. They came dressed as hula girls, geishas, nurses, newscasters, Laker girls, teenage rock stars, cheerleaders, or the girl-next-door. They were memorable. They fulfilled fantasies. They were very expensive. Lono was often surprised how many men requested someone dressed in a smart suit with a briefcase. Like fucking your female boss could empower you.
The girls Lono employed were like actresses. They played their parts and said their lines, professional to the core. They preyed on the simple psychology of men. They were good girls who’d let their hair down and go wild because you were so sexy you drove them crazy. Or they were bad girls who just wanted to be good because you had saved them. And always because you, the paying customer, had the biggest cock they’d ever seen.
“I keep getting hemorrhoids.”
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