Repo Shark

by Cody Goodfellow

  What did they think he was going to do, set up an ambush? “And I’ll let you know… uh, when it comes out.”

  Kalakaua was like a midget Vegas Strip on steroids, with the neon and casinos and stripclubs and everything else worth doing squeezed out. The designer boutiques like embassies from hideous alien worlds, the huge hotels like filing cabinets that made the body-farm towers in The Matrix look like country bed & breakfasts. His Mustang faded into the crush of identical rental cars in primary Lego-block colors, Mustang convertibles for couples, PT Cruisers or Navigators for families. This part of Hawaii just made him lonely for home.

  Check the phone. Your prey has many watering holes and hides.

  Ala Moana shopping center was like twelve blocks long. The parking lot alone had its own zip code. It was like Blade Runner with more rich Japs. So many in the endless mob were pale people buried in brand-name merchandise who seemed to have come to Honolulu and never left the mall.

  He bought an aloha shirt, Billabong board shorts, Oakley shades, bright orange Crocs and a UNLV Rebels cap on the company card. Some of that white shit on his nose and a hotel towel swiped from the Surfrider’s poolside lounge, and Zef was ready to work.

  The beach was the first thing to stop him and shake him and make him forget about the job. Las Vegas had no shortage of sunlight, but stand still in Vegas, and you could feel it starting to kill you. Here it was actually somewhat pleasant.

  Beyond a desert of powdered sugar, the ocean was a glistening azure abstraction, the waves impossibly wide and smooth as a bedspread being turned down. Kids with dark skin rode the waves on short boards like birds on a telephone line, swiping at each other and darting back and forth until the wave played out and they dropped out of sight under the next one. White kids and women knelt on trainer boards the size of canoes as smiling surf instructors pushed them down the faces of the puny in-between waves. Like clockwork, every third wave was a modest shelf suitable for riding.

  Zef had actually only seen the ocean once on a trip to LA with his family, but he considered himself a fucking excellent surfer.

  Parking in a pay lot across the park from the beach, he walked past rows of cars, as many local as rental. He ran a few plates through an app that checked them against bank and federal hot lists, just by force of habit. More than once, he’d come across a cherry hidden in plain sight while doing something else.

  This job, in and out. Ten percent on the bike’s sale price of $72,890, plus the side action, if he ever passed it. He tried to clear the known-associate addresses and look for a pharmacy.

  The little differences. Even the grocery stores had tikis and Hawaiian shirts and impulse gift bullshit in the front, where they had slot machines in Nevada. That’s all Hawaii would ever be to a lot of people, just a lot of tacky shit somebody else brought them from the Vons in Honolulu.

  The ocean shut him up and made him forget his plans. It was like the desert, but way more empty. The sky and the sea were mirrors reflecting each other, sandwiching infinity. He was looking at this shit and getting lost in a postcard when he saw the motorcycles.

  It couldn’t be this easy, could it?

  A line of them parked in the front row. Harleys or old Hondas, with a vintage Husqvarna dirt bike for wtf value. No rice-rockets or organ-donor bikes like the young guys and squids favored. A line of those stood across the street with the aggressive separation of a blood feud.

  The sunlight off the chrome was so dazzling that he couldn’t tell anything else about them until he came up among them. A lifted midnight blue Toyota pickup with knobby tractor tires, a roll-cage and a camper shell was parked beside them, sitting crookedly on what must have been royally fucked-up shocks. An empty catamaran trailer was on the other side.

  Nobody was around. Looking out at the waves, he spotted a couple of big native-looking guys standing on their longboards on the lip of a lazy wave wide enough to carry ten riders.

  Shading his eyes, he approached the row of bikes. Seven of them. One was a tricycle thing with a little ice cream freezer on the back. Another had a sidecar. And in the midst of them, shining so hard it made the sun look dull, a cherry chopped, chromed 1962 Harley-Davidson low-compression 1200cc police bike with raked, extended fork and ape-drape handlebars and a custom stars-and-stripes motif on the teardrop tank.

  He stepped off the curb and turned sideways to squeeze in between the bikes. He was looking at the bike like the guy who owned the thing would look, not like a guilty geezer checking to see who’s looking. The dick who owned it was out on the ocean and nobody could stop him.

  His outstretched hand was an inch from the handlebars. The other was in his pocket, fingering the ignition key. His right foot was an inch off the ground, cocked to go over the teardrop tank and sit his skinny ass on the leather seat, which looked like a huge pat of black butter. The ignition lock did not appear to be engaged, but there was a padlock on the neck that would take a few minutes to pick.

  “Eh haole, you got one lighter?”

  He froze and looked up with an idiotic half-smile. “For real? Yo, sure, hold up…”

  He’d been spotted, but had he been made? He could just walk away and try again later or he could offer some bullshit about how he had a bike just like this at home and, whoa, brainfart… All of this ran through his mind in less time than it took for his forebrain to think, Fok. Such are the ways of the ninja.

  Ice cold yet supple as a rubber, he turned and said, “Sure, brother…” and he didn’t even scream when he saw them.

  They were sitting on the tailgate of the Toyota. The one who held his hand out for the lighter was about Zef’s height and had maybe fifty to seventy pounds on him. But he looked like a ventriloquist’s dummy next to his friend.

  The big one was close to seven feet and weighed at least three Zefs. Naked to the waist, he wore a sarong, but his epic belly more than hid his junk. His whole right side was tattooed dead black with little designs and symbols in it. Even his face, which was the size of a goddamn frying pan. He had a trash bag full of Mc Rib sandwiches under one arm. Blinking at Zef incuriously, he cracked the cardboard boxes and gobbled sandwiches like he was shelling peanuts.

  The “little” guy wore a faded red T-shirt that said I NOT LATE… I STAY ON ISLAND TIME and a ratty pair of board shorts. His hair was prematurely silver, his skin ashy and oddly wrinkled all over. His left arm was in a fiberglass cast from shoulder to fingers. In his free hand, he held a three-sheeter joint the size of a burrito.

  Slowly, feigning lazy unconcern, Zef patted himself down. He never smoked tobacco, but having fire handy got him into interesting conversations. He found his new tiki lighter with blinking red LED eyes and tossed it to the little guy. Sidling out from between the bikes, he slouched over to stand before the two and watched wistfully as the little guy turned the tapered prow of the joint over the flame like a fine cigar. The big guy just looked at him, not because he gave a shit, but his head was pointed that way and he couldn’t be bothered to move it. A snake on a hot rock had more initiative.

  Just smile and nod like he’s fascinating. Talking right now wouldn’t make these guys like him.

  But he got bored. “You know these guys with the bikes?”

  “Buncha pussies, I promise,” the little guy said, sucking the joint tip to a fiercely glowing ember. He stuck out a hand and took Zef’s in a sandpaper grip. “Kewalo, brah. Welcome to my islands.”

  Something about the way he said it told Zef he was being fucked with. Kewalo let out a huge gust of smoke. He looked like one of the Four Winds on old maps, blowing up a storm.

  “ZzzzZebediah, yo. Thanks.” Zef kept out his hand for his lighter, but Kewalo passed him the joint, instead. Zef was apt to turn it down, but the big guy rumbled so Zef decided to push back. One hit on a blunt wouldn’t dull his edge, and what was the fucking hurry? He wasn’t even here eight hours yet and damn it wasn’t a blunt and it tasted like pineapple and it filled up his chest until his lungs reached down to his knees.r />
  “Holy shit, yo,” he croaked, coughing so hard he threw up a little bit and his eyes felt like they were melting but these guys didn’t care, they were awesome, fuck a lei and a kiss, this was how to welcome weary travelers to the mighty Sandwich Islands.

  “Eh, you like da kine, yeah?” Kewalo laughed like he had maracas and rattlesnakes in his lungs.

  “Smooth,” Zef managed. The big guy took the joint from him and hit it hard, eyes nailed to something over Zef’s shoulder. Zef turned around, suddenly sure he’d see a cop car—what did Honolulu five-oh cars even look like? Shit, this shit was making him paranoid.

  “Better than Maui Wowie, I promise,” Kewalo said. “Old-school strain, yeah, but we made it bionic.” He hit the joint and blew oily liquid smoke rings, then passed to Zef. “How long you on the island, Z?”

  Zef totally forgot the question halfway into his second hit. “Holy shit,” he coughed, “it’s really fokking beautiful here. You guys don’t know how lucky you are, to have this all the time…”

  The big guy growled, crushed Zef’s hand in his paw when he took the joint.

  What… was the... question…? “Oh yeah… Just a week. Here on business, actually. You guys here for business? Cos I know a guy, yo, who’s looking to move—”

  “Mind your own fuckin’ business,” the big guy snarled, blasting smoke out his flaring nostrils like live steam.

  “Be cool, Peapea,” said Kewalo. “He not even passin’ out.”

  The joint came around again. Zef took a good look inward before he took another hit. The last two (or three…?) were sitting on his skull like a thirty-pound steel helmet. He was worried about being out in the open, he wanted to crawl into a crack, was that a thing? Claustrophilia?

  Anyway… what?

  Right… the bike… It was ten feet away and he had the key and lockpicks in a trick pocket in his sneakers. The owner was somewhere nearby and these fuckers might not care if he took it, hell, they might even be cool with it, maybe they hated… what’s his name… Punani.

  When he was done coughing, he tried to steer the conversation back to the motorcycles, but talk turned to surfing.

  The waves on Ala Moana this time of day were regular as clockwork and just as exciting, but they had plenty of stamina, and many of the tourists who bought a longboard after their first surf lesson took them out here to discover that they had no idea what the fuck they were doing. When they dumped in the shallows a few hundred yards out on the coral, they often ditched their boards and everything else in a panic to get to land. And the five o’clock swell, when the trade winds turned, was something to see. Behind the little guy sat a box filled with designer sunglasses, watches, cell phones and hotel key cards.

  “Peapea,” Kewalo said, “you goin’ out for the swell, brah?”

  The big guy got off the truck, which bounced up on its shocks, and pulled a surfboard down off a rack atop the camper shell. The board was a fucking canoe. Nearly twelve feet of ugly black resin like it was made of tar, fitted with skegs like fucking scimitars.

  Zef said, “You guys going out right now?”

  Kewalo looked at him like he was a dipshit and wiggled his busted wing. “No, I going to stay here and jack off.”

  Zef had one of those flashes he always got with pot—call it pregret—when he knew that something he was about to say was fucking retarded, but he couldn’t stop himself. “Longboards are like training wheels,” he said.

  “Eh haole boy, you ride the wild surf on a little trick board on one wave machine back home?” Kewalo cackled and Peapea joined in.

  Zef said, “Yo, I cut up the waves on Malibu, bitch,” which wasn’t strictly speaking true, unless one afternoon of bodyboarding counted. But Zef was an excellent waterskier and a champion indoor surfer, and it suddenly seemed important as hell that he prove it to these tubby island punks. “I could outride tons-o-fun here, if you had any real waves, and if I had my—”

  “Use my board,” Kewalo said, and the big guy put a board in front of him. Shorter than Peapea’s, it was still big enough for three guys to use for fishing.

  “I only use a short board, yo. Too bad, too, ‘cos I could show you some mad Cali style, like…”

  “He want a short board, Peapea.” Kewalo smiled real big as Peapea took down another board and dropped it on Zef. It was just over seven feet and ridiculously wide. Gorgeous unpainted koa wood under layers of resin polished until it shimmered like a mirror. Shit, why not? He wasn’t going to get the bike away from the little guy, anyway, and hey, the little shit still had his lighter…

  “Bet you a hundred you don’t get up once,” Kewalo grinned. Half his teeth were gold.

  Zef snapped, “Keep my money dry,” and shouldered the board. The weight almost threw him backwards into the row of motorcycles, but he tilted the huge board and chased it towards the ocean. Suckers didn’t know who they were messing with.

  Zef didn’t like to spread the word around, but he was the champion surfer of Las Vegas. He rode the nose of a short board continuously for three hours, thirty-eight minutes, twenty-nine seconds in the Wave Tube at Circus Circus Adventuredome. His record there was still unbeaten.

  He kicked off his Crocs and dropped his beach gear in the sand. Hot MILF tourists watched their kids cry and flail through surf school. Too-tan, leathery wahines on all fours showed the kids how to get up on the board on the sand. Zef marveled at their asses in the air and walked through a Japanese couple’s wedding photo shoot with a raging boner tenting his shorts.

  The water was warm but not uncomfortably so, not like the Caribbean, which felt like a huge basin of sweat. He stepped out into the water and did the sting ray shuffle until the spent waves came up to his knees. Then he gratefully dropped the board in the water and laid down on it.

  It felt bloody ridiculous, but paddling out, he found that the board sliced through the waves and glided over the fields of coral to where the bottom became ridges of soft sand and dropped off into a bright topaz void. The board was magnificent, fully fucking rude. Embedded in the wood, he now noticed, here and there, crystal clear within the resin, were shark teeth.

  The waves were crap. A few other riders sat astride their boards in the dazzling spray of scattered sunlight off the water. Zef could already feel his Euro-honky skin crisping.

  Way off on his right, he saw the SS Peapea wallowing out against the rollers, making little headway. The fat fucker wasn’t even going to get out there before Zef was headed in to collect his winnings.

  He could barely make out more than stick figure silhouettes of the people on the beach, but he could see what he figured was Kewalo in his red T-shirt. He was standing next to a big guy with long black hair that shone with silver in the sunlight. The guy tore off his shirt and headed down towards the water when somebody behind Zef shouted and he turned around and son of a bitch, a real wave was rearing up out of the placid sea, gathering mass and rising until it blocked out the setting sun. The water was so clear that he could see through it like green glass. Twelve feet tall, and the crown of spray shaved off by the wind seemed to double its height.

  Suddenly, Zef was very cold, but that wasn’t why he shivered. Even peeing his suit didn’t help much when the wave started to drag Zef into its yawning maw. Furiously paddling and trying to turn around with his feet, Zef had just laid down and closed his eyes when the wave passed beneath him, lifting him eight feet and then dropping him behind it as it pounded closer to the shore before reaching critical mass and breaking. A few junior surfers rode it in, but the bulk of the riders, the natives, ducked it and paddled even further out. Even Zef knew that every third wave was the keeper.

  The next one was even taller, but it threw Zef over its shoulder and raced for the shore, breaking on the coral fields and wiping out a platoon of tourists.

  The next one would be the one, and Zef would ride it in. He searched for Peapea in the coral field, but was shocked to find the giant way out past zero break, laying prone on his longboard like a
walrus on an ice floe.

  He looked to the shore once more and scoped out the little guy, who was jumping around and waving his arms, trying to get his attention, or somebody else’s…

  The sun went out. A chill wind rasped over the water, sucked into the vacuum as the ocean seemed to turn sideways. Zef looked up at the wave but he couldn’t see the top of it without rolling off the board. He began frantically paddling, chanting, “Fok fok fok!” to keep from hyperventilating.

  He was shooting down the face of the wave and he could feel rather than see the tube closing in all around him. He remembered what to do, what he did at Circus Circus and at the water park, but the worst thing that could happen there was that girls would point and laugh when the wave machine spat you out.

  He gathered his legs under him and crouched on the board. It held his weight and didn’t wobble and if he closed his eyes, he felt like he was in a boat, not plummeting into the trough of a wave that was closing over him like the jaws of a monstrous garbage disposal.

  He stood up. And it was easy, for a glorious, pregnant second. He twisted his body on the board as he stood and the board pivoted under him to shoot for the mouth of the tube, picking up speed until the wave itself seemed to freeze over and he was out in the sunshine again for just a second and he was searching the shore for that little guy with his lighter and his hundred bucks.

  And then, just like that, his surfboard was gone. His feet clung to the waxy deck but his body rolled off and smashed into the collapsing tube of the wave. The initial impact was like hitting concrete. The water gave him road rash before it swallowed him.

  These waves were not like the ones at the Adventuredome. It was like falling headfirst into an industrial washing machine on the rinse cycle. He rolled with it like an empty suit, seeing only bubbles and thinking only to close his mouth and try to find the surface. There was no surface, there was no bottom, there was only the wave and it would never end, because even if he escaped it, he would be in bed somewhere in his old age and awaiting death and when he closed his eyes, he would still be whirling in the grip of this fucking wave.