Repo Shark

by Cody Goodfellow

  Zef curled into a ball and tried to ride it out, but something snatched him out of his death spiral and seemed to be pushing him up, no, it was pulling him down, and he couldn’t tell much but he knew from the burning in his lungs that he was about to inhale a lot of seawater, and something was riding him.

  He felt feet planted in the center of his back, between his shoulder blades, and he felt a grip like steel manacles on his wrists, pulling his arms back and driving his body down towards the sandy bottom and they were still hurtling on in the teeth of the breaking wave and all he could see was foam and he plowed sand with his face but somehow clung to consciousness long enough to see the coral reef rushing at him, and then all was a merciful blur.

  Foamy waves lapped at his face like a dog. He rolled on the sand, then kept rolling until he was well away from that fucking murderous ocean. His face and chest burned and his hand came away bloody when he touched his face, and empty when he touched where his gold chain was supposed to be.

  Touching his nose made him scream into the sand. He started to get up and dizziness sent him sprawling back on his ass. Nobody was looking at him. The surf classes were all gone. A few surfers straddled their boards beyond the waves, but they couldn’t see him. He should get the fuck out of here before the little guy showed up. By rodeo rules, he should be wearing a ribbon.

  Yo, where was his board? He got up and scanned the waves and up and down the shoreline, but the board was gone. The surfers out beyond the waves: One of them was a huge lump, had to be Peapea. He was huddled close to another surfer who had long black hair. It might have been the same one Kewalo was talking to before, but how could he—

  Zef threw his arms out in frustration and winced at a sudden shooting pain in his back that cut through the medley of discomfort.

  When he touched it, he didn’t know what the hell it was, at first. A foreign object embedded in his skin, a lot thicker than a tattoo needle. It hurt more taking it out than when it went in. He had rash on his chest from getting slammed into the bottom. He’d even felt like someone was standing on his back, but that was fucking impossible…

  The object in his hand was a bloody shark’s tooth.

  Somebody had taken Zef’s towel.

  They left his Crocs.

  In his short yet already somewhat legendary career, Zef had stood out early on because he did not focus on the debtor. He didn’t do confrontation. He was a champion bullshitter, but he was a better thief. He focused on the car. But Donny Punani, he already knew, was going to require a radical departure from the formula.

  He drove up Queen Street into an appropriately shady commercial district, fooling with his phone, looking for a cheap clinic to get his nose reset. A pin dropped in the map only a mile away.

  He called Harv.

  “Fok off, you. I’m busy.” In the background, a murmur of indeterminate gender, and the fuzzy rumbling of a hot tub.

  “Then I quit.”

  “Alright, fok, don’t drown in your own period blood.” A long, clumsy pause forced Zef to picture Harv buck naked and slipping into an animal print bathrobe. “What’s the predicament, butterfly?”

  “I think I just got rolled by the debtor.”

  “Fok me. What’d you get entangled with him for?”

  “Didn’t try to… I don’t think he made me, but he’s surrounded by big fuckers all the time. It’s just gonna get messy if I can’t involve the cops.”

  “You seem to have grown quite a pussy already, on your vacation. I’ve never known you to shrink from an opportunity to distinguish yourself. No local police interference will be tolerated.” Harv’s Afrikaaner accent went into overdrive when he got torqued.

  “Yo, how’m I supposed to track him when he got no home, and take it when he got a fokking posse?”

  Harv sighed but Zef knew he was just stringing it out. Something juicy was stuck in his throat. “OK, but you tell anyone—“

  Dropping the car in a Puumano Pay Lot, he crossed the street headed for Dr. Tung’s clinic in the Kamehameha Corner Mall. “Just drop it, uncle.”

  “It isn’t for the bank.” The Harley dealer in Vegas was out of town when the debtor bought the bike. Rally touring across Australia. He never would’ve agreed to the sale price and never would’ve carried the financing himself, but somebody at the dealership did, letting this fat Hawaiian fuck take off with a one-of-a-kind bike for a song on the dealership’s account. When the owner returned and went through the paperwork, he quickly sized it up.

  His wife was the finance manager, and she also worked the floor. She played the dumb blonde to the hilt and usually made commission more often than most of the sales staff. She wasn’t his first wife, either. He punted the old one for this young thing and installed her at the dealership. They’d been together for almost ten years and he’d never had cause to mistrust her before...

  Long, elaborate sigh to build drama while Harv sniffed a line or got a blowjob. “So, to find out that she had fraudulently financed the nicest bike in the store for some Hawaiian smoothie who took it halfway across the Pacific inflicted serious cracks of doubt in the façade of his matrimonial bliss. And when he rushed home just in time to cut her off in the driveway as she was pulling out with the back of her Escalade full of suitcases, he was shattered; his faith in his marriage, in love and trust itself, lay in ruins. With his heart broken wide open, it was all he could do to beat her half to death.”

  By the time Harv paused to catch his breath, Zef was pretty sure the story itself had given him an orgasm.

  “So,” he puffed, “the police should not be informed of the repossession.”

  “But I have the papers…”

  “They’re illegitimate. There’ll be questions. We just want the bike. Don’t make excuses like some kaffir whore. Just get it, hey?”

  Something landed on Zef’s shoulder and sank claws into his flesh. Powerful feathered wings battered his face. He stumbled off the curb, waving his hands, when a flash went off in his face.

  “Beautiful shot! Welcome to the islands, your family back home is gonna love it, print and email, only ten dollars.”

  “What the fok?” A scarlet macaw perched on his shoulder, nibbling his ear with a beak like a tiger claw. A geek with long, kinky brown hair and a Members Only jacket held a digital camera with a printer on his belt that spat out a print of Zef being assaulted by the parrot. He had another parrot, a big blue, on his guano-caked shoulder.

  “I don’t want a picture, fokker, I know what I look like…”

  “But the birds, man, they’re expensive, do it for the birds…” The geek pushed the picture in his hand. Zef looked like he was about to burst into tears in the picture. His nose looked like a smashed tomato. “Show some aloha, brother…”

  Zef took a swing at the photographer. He easily dodged, and the blue parrot went after Zef’s face. Claws raked his cheeks and a godawful squawking filled the air. His hands went to his face, his phone slipping out of his fingers. And suddenly, the scarlet macaw was gone. It flapped off and disappeared behind the strip mall with his cell phone in its clutches like a baby mouse.

  Zef grabbed the photographer by an epaulette. “Your fokking bird mugged me!’

  “Bullshit, man! You assaulted me and scared my fuckin’ bird away! I’m calling the cops right now, man. That bird was worth a thousand dollars…” He held his phone to his ear, but he was angling for some kind of payoff, and then he’d get the phone back from the parrot and sell it…

  Zef looked around. He saw no cops, but cars were slowing down to look at the two street freaks grappling on the corner. Zef deftly hoisted the man closer and headbutted him just as the photographer scooped his groin, which sent him to his knees in the gutter.

  “‘Aloha’ also means ‘fuck you,’” the photographer said, and hocked a wad of bloody snot on him as the blue parrot took his picture back.

  Zef pled emergency priority and bypassed the other vacation casualties in the waiting room. Stingray Butt, Terminal
Sunburn and Hysterical Miscarriage all gave him the gas face, but they weren’t dripping blood on the carpet.

  Dr. Tung didn’t think there was anything funny about his name. He took three hundred to reset Zef’s nose, which was broken in two places and required splints. He disinfected and dressed the abrasions on his face and chest from the macaw and the coral and hooked him up with some topical ointment and heavy-duty antibiotics (“Call or come back immediately if gangrene sets in”) and some weapons-grade laxatives. Zef declined a shot of avian flu vaccine.

  In the car, he slammed half a bottle of the chalky shit and a double shot of the stuff that tasted like crankcase oil. Squirming in tourist traffic for most of the rest of the drive, he left the Mustang in the Illikoi driveway and threw his keys at the desk clerk, who shouted that they didn’t have valet parking.

  Prairie-dogging it all the way down the interminable corridor, he ran past a Filipino maid who should have known better than to park her supply cart so close to the stairs.

  His key card was in the front pocket of his trunks, but thrusting his battered junk at the door did nothing. He backed up to kick it down. He bounced off the door and nearly went over the railing. Cursing, knees knocking, he wrapped his fist in his shirt to smash the narrow window beside the door. The maid jumped in the way and opened the door with her key. He pushed past her, grunting gratitude all the way to the bathroom.

  He hit the seat and he was like a tube of toothpaste getting stepped on. It felt like a subway train coming out of his ass. The satisfaction was better than an orgasm, which made him worry for a moment if it wasn’t gay to get off on a good bowel movement, but then he started to get alarmed because it wasn’t stopping.

  His guts twisted and wrung themselves out. The pain dropped him off the toilet and wadded him up into a ball for a half hour. When he finally got up and crawled to the toilet, he had a rush of pure satisfaction that numbed him to the discomfort of shedding three percent of his bodyweight in one sitting.

  It didn’t last long. His throat closed up and his last meal tried to escape. The smell was so palpable he could feel the huge, awful brown molecules caroming off his cheeks in the insufficiently conditioned air. He had no idea what shape his cargo was in, but it wouldn’t do it any good to soak in the toilet, though it had built up a nice shell of solid waste while blocking up his large intestine. The soupy mess in the bowl hadn’t had most of the water extracted from it. All his holes tried to close up against the horrible stench, the awful, intimate warmth of the mess, the sickening viscosity of it squishing between his fumbling fingers. The cold kiss of the bowl brushed his knuckles. He swiped his hand around and around until he’d made a whirlpool of his own filth.

  It hadn’t flushed. The bag hadn’t come out and dissolved. It was a double-hulled, vacuum-sealed Mealsaver pouch. The outflow conduit was so narrow it’d take two flushes to dispose of a tampon.

  He probed his belly, palpated his pelvis, his prostate. He couldn’t feel it, but he knew.

  It was still in there.

  Zef wondered if Harv was trying to get ahold of him. He wondered if the parrot could answer the phone.

  The bartender came over with a fresh piña colada. It wasn’t the same guy he’d butted the day before. That guy held down the far end of the bar next to the TV with a worried, lost expression.

  “I wouldn’t drink all those fruity drinks, if I were you,” said some guy on the next stool.

  Zef spun to check out the next guy he was going to have to beat up.

  A lumpy, vaguely Asian-looking guy wore an amazing aloha shirt with volcanoes with gigantic hot chicks coming out of them to claim virgin sacrifices all over it. His arms, neck, everything but his face were even more floridly inked with crazy Japanese tattoos: giant octopi raping Marines in Okinawa surf against rising suns studded with kamikaze lightning bolts. He was chewing gum and looking at Zef as if he’d just had to clean up Zef’s bathroom.

  “Your uncle said you needed a local guide. I’m not touching whatever you’re doing. Don’t want to know. But I can run a skiptrace on your guy and show you around, if you don’t turn out to be too much of an asshole.”

  The bartender put a straight shot of vodka in front of the stranger. “On the house, Phun Boy.” Phun Boy flipped him three or four different varieties of the bird.

  Zef slurped his drink too fast, brainfreeze like an icicle driving up through the roof of his mouth. “What the fok, man? Who the hell are you?”

  “Jimmy Phun. People who want their asses kicked call me Phun Boy.”

  Zef could understand why he would want to be covered in tattoos. Not just to want to have something beautiful—and the snake sleeve down his left arm was all that, with emerald scales so brilliant it looked like powdered bottle glass embedded in his skin—but to have something intentional about his appearance, when everything else about him was a sad accident.

  His face was mostly forehead, and most of the rest was chin. His wildly asymmetrical features were squashed into a concave space between them. He was not quite ugly enough to make a living off letting people gawk at him, but he was pretty close.

  Jimmy Phun stared at his neck. Zef checked himself in the bar mirror. The tattoo on his neck, in letters meant to look like a scar from a hangman’s noose, said REPO NINJA. Jimmy said, “You do that yourself?”

  Zef smiled and blushed. “Yeah, I do all my own…” His voice trailed off as it sank in he wasn’t being complimented.

  “Jesus, what is that?” Jimmy pointed at Zef’s mouth. “Do you have something…?”

  Zef smiled wide, skinning back his lips to show off the only tattoo he’d paid someone else to do, and yes, if you must know, it was on a dare.

  Inside his lower lip, in letters big enough to read from across the bar, it read, WISEBLOOD.

  “You gonna buy me a drink or something, or…” Jimmy’s forehead and chin almost met as he scowled.

  Zef ordered a Jack and Coke “and something with an umbrella in it for my excellent friend.”

  Jimmy took out his phone. “Why don’t you tell me who you’re looking for, and I’ll get started while you finish your drinks?”

  It almost all came out, but Zef bit his tongue. If Harv didn’t tell this prick anything, then why should I? “Yo, why don’t you just drive? I got a list. When we find his, uh—the vehicle, you’ll drop me off.”

  “Whatever. Who you think gave your uncle that list in the first place?” Dropping cash on his tab, Jimmy led him out to the turnaround. Zef tried to hide his boner. A cherry ’69 Shelby GT-500 convertible in metallic flake crimson with gold detail, like a giant Hot Wheels car.

  Zef climbed in and immediately started twiddling the stereo dial. No hip hop anywhere, just shitty classic rock and reggae. “How much this set you back?”

  The engine was rebuilt to street racing specs. It felt like an earthquake. “Seven hundred.” Jimmy laid a patch burning out of the driveway and onto Kalakaua, cutting between a tour bus and a honking herd of minivans. Zef was pressed back in his seat as they kept accelerating. He could not reach out to change the station to save his life.

  They leveled out and crossed a canal on a bridge and then executed a series of jack moves down alleys and side streets to lose whoever might be tailing them. “Got it at an auction. Nothing ever leaves an island. A sailor who never came back from ‘Nam left it in a storage space. A Marine who bought it at auction in ’86 was one of a couple dozen who got killed in Just Cause…”

  “What?”

  “Panama, Wiseblood.” His widow kept it in a garage for over a decade, until she remarried and went back to the mainland. The last owner was sent to South Korea, where he bought it in a student riot while guarding an Army post in Seoul. The car sat in a storage space until Jimmy bought it.

  “Asians are real superstitious,” he said, “islanders even more so. And sailors? Nobody else even bid on it.”

  Outside, the hotels turned to motels and massage parlors and sushi buffets. Zef said, “Cos it’s a f
okking death-car, yo. It’s like, cursed…”

  “Not for me. I’m not in the military. Where are we going first?”

  “Take me to a Verizon store first. I need a new phone.”

  “Okay, man. Whatever you say.” His rolling eyes laid out the subtext: You some detective, white boy.

  “I didn’t lose it, Phun Boy! Fokking parrot stole it!”

  Once you got to know Jimmy Phun and got past his unlikable exterior, he wasn’t just abrasive and abrupt. He also became aggressively morose and boring.

  “Three days. That’s how long civilization would last out here, if the ships stopped coming. Three days ‘til the gas and the fast food get used up, and the lights go out.”

  Zef poked at his confusing new phone, bouncing unanswered texts off Harv. “Good times, for sure. You a native?”

  “Like, was I born here? Yes, but I’m not a pineapple. I’m hapa.” Heading off the next dumb question, he added, “Half Chinese, half Portuguese, and I don’t have acromegaly. I’m just supernaturally handsome.” He didn’t explain what the fuck aquamegaliens were.

  “Half the native Hawaiians can’t even swim. A lot of them, they hate the ocean. It used to protect them from the world, but now it’s no protection from all the bad things, so it’s just a prison. The outside world’s like outer fucking space to them, man.”

  Seen in this light, Honolulu was like Vegas with an even bigger desert and no fucking action. It had no recognizable spine like the Strip, but the jumble of towers and the shelves of greenery-infested hillside studded with gleaming estates like the displays of a jewelry store—it had the same feel of a fragile bubble in an alien and hostile environment. He saw the same look on many people’s faces, the same face you saw everywhere in Vegas or LA when they got bit in the ass taking it for granted—pockets picked, luggage swiped, cameras, iPhones and iPods and wheelchairs, when they realized that this splendid, beautiful place where so many lived was nobody’s home.