“So they try to be Americans, but they’re fooling nobody. Or they play native for the tourists. Or hit the bottle or the bong or the ice… Shit, you wouldn’t believe the meth problem out here... But some folks, they hold to the old ways for real, see? They do it when nobody’s watching. You never see them, less they want to see you. And you don’t want them to see you—“
A green Challenger cut them off and a siren wailed and threw off a strobing blue light from a dome on its roof. It had no other markings, but the driver was in a uniform. Zef hated asking Jimmy about it.
“Cops here get an allowance to use their own cars, and they’ve only got one chopper. Lot of them have shitty sedans you could lose on a scooter, but that guy probably wrote off most of that fucking Dodge.”
Zef figured they must be in Chinatown, since a lot of the signs were in Chinese. He scanned the curbs and saw a lot of bikes, but they were all rice-rockets. They’d been to five locations on Harv’s list and found nothing.
“Look, Vanilla, I don’t give a flying fuck who you’re looking for… no, you shut up. I’ve lived here my whole life. I’m not afraid of anybody. Long as I don’t have to get involved, whoever you want to fuck with, that’s your business…”
Still looking out the window at a light, watching a couple choppers pass by, Zef said, “The natives got gangs and like, mobbed-up gangster shit?”
“Of course they do, but except for the ones that’re connected to the Yakuza, they’re strictly local. They steal from tourists, do burglaries and deal ice and outdoor weed, but they don’t hardly use guns, ‘less they on the ice. Can’t get too big out here, can’t really hide, but if they get off Oahu, the other islands are still pretty country…”
They turned right off King at the bridge across a dark, defeated little river and turned back into Chinatown to do Hotel Street. The Challenger was parked on a side street behind a Lexus. Just as they passed, Zef saw the officer jump back from the luxury sedan and run back to his car with his mouth wide open in a scream.
Jimmy Phun snorted as they passed. “Nice to see them bust somebody who deserves it for a change.”
They could do this shit all night and come up with nothing. “Donny Punani mean shit to you?”
“Never heard of him,” Jimmy said, looking real hard at his sideview mirror. “I don’t suppose that’s his real name…”
Zef checked his texts from Harv. Nothing new, but back a week, he found the name he kept forgetting. “Nanaue. From the big island… Fok, I don’t know.”
At the next stoplight, Jimmy punched the name into his phone. “He probably cooks ice or grows weed up in the hills. A low-grade gangster. A lot of them like to play outlaw, but they don’t have the sack for real trouble. If he’s in Honolulu, he probably won’t be too conspicuous unless he’s looking to fuck somebody up. Then he’ll be in Waianae.”
“What’s that?”
“Polynesian ghetto on the leeward side. It’s not a safe place to be after dark. If he’s out there, you’re probably not going to find him.”
“Don’t need him, yo. Just need to know where he’s parked. He’s got mad cribs up in Whateverville, homes.”
Jimmy checked his phone one more time. Whatever he saw made him scowl and suck his teeth. “Not going in cold. Here, lemme…”
He executed a tight U-turn in the middle of the narrow two-lane street. A few street freaks hung out in front of a dive bar. An ancient Chinese woman rolled down the bars in front of a tiny market. It wasn’t a tourist trap Chinatown like in San Francisco. It didn’t care to put on airs for tourists. “It’s still a dump,” Jimmy said, “even though the mainland Chinese are trying to buy up downtown. But the Japanese aren’t ready to sell.”
They swung into the gutter to park. Jimmy got out and told Zef, “Just be a few minutes. I got a guy who knows all the island lowlife.”
Jimmy and Zef went around the dismal pack of smokers and panhandlers outside Da Kine Karaoke Bar. A tiny Vietnamese hooker in a blond wig braced Jimmy, but he shook her off. Zef couldn’t get her to look at him. The bouncer was a sullen, tubby Chinese guy with a wide, thick face on a head shaped like a huge toe.
Everything in the club was black lacquer and glass. All the lights were red, except for a warm white spotlight on a Japanese salaryman torturing the Piña Colada Song. A sullen crowd of every color but white packed the narrow space between the bar and a wall covered in bug-eyed, fanged masks and pictures of dragons in Chinese New Year’s parades.
Zef felt eyes on him but he tried to play it cool, hanging just close enough to Jimmy as not to seem like his date. It looked like a service industry night at any cheap off-Strip club in Vegas. Some of the Hawaiians in the crowd still wore their hotel uniforms.
Jimmy leaned over the bar to talk into the bartender’s ear. She shook her head and tapped her watch. Jimmy ordered drinks and came back to hand Zef a big glass of melted rainbow sherbet with a parasol and whipped cream and a cherry on it.
“Fok you, man.”
“Guy I need to talk to should be in any minute. Why don’t you just…”
“Way ahead of you, Phun Boy.” Zef knocked back half the frothy, icy drink, wincing at the cold and the overpowering volume of dirt-cheap white rum and the aftertaste like cherry cough syrup. He slithered through the crowd, wary of starting trouble, well aware of forbidding glares from all around the room as he went to the DJ booth. Instead of a sign-up list, they had a brass urn filled with paper slips next to the fat songbook. Zef scribbled his name and his song on a slip and dropped it in just as the song ended and the Japanese guy bowed off the tiny stage.
Jimmy shook his head. “Your uncle was right,” he said. “You are an idiot.”
Zef ordered a rum and coke. The DJ drew the next name and was about to read it when the back door opened and a bunch of huge Hawaiians came in.
Zef shrunk down behind Jimmy and watched through the hideous hapa dick’s receding hairline.
Four guys came into the bar and the crowd made room. Older women shouted and threw arms around one or another of them as they passed and guys hugged them, so it was almost impossible to see them. But when the crowd parted and the DJ came down from the booth, one guy in the party stood out as the star. He was about six-eight or more, maybe two-sixty, not much of it fat. Fifty, with a finely creased, crudely chiseled face, and silver streaks in long black hair pulled back in a loose ponytail. A black dress shirt and charcoal pinstripe slacks made him look like two Hong Kong gangsters trying to sneak into a movie in one suit.
Zef stared at the guy for a full fifteen seconds, watching him endure a sloppy hug from the DJ and take the mic to politely frightened applause from the crowd, before he realized he was looking at Donny Punani.
“Oh fok… dude… it’s the motherfokking debtor.”
“Where?”
“The guy on the fokking stage, yo.”
Jimmy just shook his head sadly and tried to act like an ugly tiki.
The other guys… oh shit, the little guy he owed a hundred bucks blocked the back door. The fucking giant wasn’t here, thank fuck.
What was the fuck going to sing? “Tiny Bubbles?”
The music started. A homely, parched sounding cowboy violin blew through the room like a wind off the desert, driving tumbleweeds and the shadows of circling buzzards.
And with a voice like leather worn and battered to a creamy softness, he totally fucking owned “Cool Water.” When Zef closed his eyes, it sounded like Marty Robbins, with the slightest tinge of Lorne Greene.
Zef slid down the wall, headed for the front door. The fucking bike was somewhere nearby. Game, set, match, motherfuckers—
Jimmy grabbed his sleeve and jerked him back. “It’s really bad manners to walk out when somebody’s singing.”
“But that’s the fucking mark, yo…” He stopped dead when he looked for the front door and couldn’t find it. There was a huge Hawaiian in the way. Peapea looked around the bar, nostrils flaring like he could smell that Zef was here,
but did he see him?
Jimmy pinned him to the wall until the last haunting coda of “Cool Water” died away to ferocious applause. As sullen as they seemed when Zef walked in, now they didn’t want Donny to leave the stage. Donny Punani assayed a lazy bow and scanned the room with his sleepy eyes once before he went to sit down.
Zef broke free and moved for the back door with the hood of his sweatshirt pulled up. Peapea reached over the bar to grab a bottle of rum. The bartender strenuously avoided noticing. The way looked clear. Zef got three steps towards the door when they called his name.
He kept going, but hands trapped him and pushed him back towards the stage.
Okay, this was nothing he didn’t ask for. He knew “Follow The Leader” by Eric B and Rakim better than he knew the National Anthem. Classic old-school shit, also the newest hip hop on their catalog.
Even if this pineapple-head motherfucker knew what Zef was up to in the islands, what was he going to do? How many repos have you failed to bring in?
Zero.
Is this the motherfucker who’s going to get the best of you?
Hell no.
Donny Punani was talking to a sturdy native girl in a waitress’s uniform. He took her hand and sat still when another one slapped his face.
The crowd was getting ugly.
Zef took the mic from the DJ and stepped onto the little platform. A monitor on the ceiling would show him the lyrics, but he wouldn’t need them. Shaking off the tension like a boxer, tugging the drawstrings of his hoodie tight to hide his face, he got into character and waited for the crushing bass pulse he knew so well.
But instead, a whiny slack-key guitar riff echoed out of the PA. The natives went apeshit. They loved this song like it was their national anthem. Even as they clapped, he saw dull, drunken eyes blink clear and blaze with fierce intensity as they took in his every gesture. Walking out on your own song was probably the apex of antisocial behavior in these parts.
The DJ had his back turned and was sweating a pretty wahine. Donny Punani leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers under his chin. A waitress put a bottle of Everclear and a tumbler on the table and sat on his lap.
The words started to roll across the screen. Zef couldn’t recognize a single syllable. It was some kind of Hawaiian gibberish like a cat walking across a keyboard with only half the keys working. Trying to sound the lyrics out on the fly made the crowd come to its feet hooting and spitting. Bottles flew at his face.
The crowd dissolved into knots of internecine brawls. Dodging while bottles shattered on his arms and ribs and the side of his head, Zef ran for the door, but he didn’t get off the dance floor before he ran into Peapea.
“Haole boy!” In the deep red light, Peapea’s left half was a shadow of a ghost, except for his glittering, hungry eye. Half the bottles thrown at Zef bounced off Peapea’s back. “You owe my cuz one bet!”
Zef punched the man-mountain in the mouth. The punch was swift but weak, barely splitting the thick lips, let alone denting the big grin. Peapea was just opening his mouth to give his frank opinion of said punch, when he got hit six more times before he could raise a tree trunk arm to block the rain of blows to his face. The cumulative effect put out the lights, but he was so fucking big, he couldn’t find his way to the floor. Zef shoved him back and ran up his falling body to leap on the bar.
Running down the bar, kicking drinks into the crowd, he sprang like an unarmed samurai onto the nearest kanaka, planting a foot on his shoulder and launching himself over the next three to come sprawling down on two more with his elbows and knees flailing like a tornado full of doorknobs.
They parted under the full force of his wrath and suddenly he was throwing elbows at the door. He kicked it open and hit the sidewalk, sweeping the bouncer’s barstool so he dropped into the doorway to trip the first of the mob coming after his ass.
Jimmy’s Shelby peeled out into the street and rushed at him. Zef jumped back across the hood of a Honda as the Shelby screamed past him and out of Chinatown. Fokking coward—
Zef was in the street with his back turned when the Harley passed by and the rider kicked his legs out from under him. Zef landed on his bony ass and rolled under a car as three more bikes tore off after Jimmy’s vintage muscle car.
As soon as the sound of motors faded, Zef rolled out from under the car and checked the street. A bunch of irate Hawaiians in front of the bar saw him and began to give chase. Whooping with exhaustion, Zef ran down the street, and still somehow found the dexterity to answer his phone.
“Smooth move, shithead. You just got us Custered.”
“Custard? What the fok you mean, us? You better come back and pick me up…”
“Your friends aren’t letting me turn around. Tell your uncle not to expect his deposit back.”
The line went dead.
At the next intersection he saw nobody was chasing him, but off down the alley, he saw a shitload of random cars with blue lights parked around that same Lexus. Oh shit. He kept walking, totally casual, totally cool, and then he started running, because he heard motorcycles coming from everywhere but directly overhead, and then the drugs they put in his drink back at the bar started to kick in, and he forgot where he was going.
Then he forgot who he was.
Then he forgot that he was forgetting.
“Maple syrup,” he said. “Everything… that isn’t something else… is maple syrup.”
When Zef came to, or suddenly became able to think and act and remember, he was sitting in a booth in an Original Pancake House, mopping up the last traces of something he could just barely taste from a platter the size of a hubcap.
His brain and body convulsed like when the power comes on after a blackout, when all the lights and appliances kick in.
His mouth was full of food. It was running like he was talking to himself, but he had no idea what he’d just been talking about. It was like walking into a room where strangers stopped talking about you and just stared, waiting for you to leave.
Blood on his knuckles, and his right hand screamed a little when he did anything with it. His nose was still broken. His dummy wallet was gone from his hip pocket, but his lock picks, hotel key, billfold and his real ID were still in his shoes. His cash was light almost a hundred. Grime and mud on his pants and shirt, like he’d been rolling in the gutter, or worse.
Sun just coming up outside and the street was filled with rush hour traffic. About ten people, some of whom looked like they had jobs to go to, were still enjoying breakfast and the paper. A little round mailman at the table next to him was reading the Advertiser’s local section. On the front page was a color picture of a car being hauled out of a canal by a crane while cops and firemen watched. The car was a red Shelby GT convertible. CHINATOWN STREET RACE TURNS DEADLY, said the headline.
Zef held out a dollar. “Yo, yo… lemme buy that paper off you…?”
The mailman turned away in his seat, wrinkling his nose. “They sell them up front. Get your own, yeah?”
Zef slouched out of the booth. The manager hovered around the door, smiling but fully expecting him to dine and dash.
“Yo,” he said, “newspaper?”
The manager sold him one for a dollar. He found change in his front pocket and shook it out in his hand, then hid it and choked back puke.
Among the quarters and dimes and loose breath mints was a little silver barbell-shaped thing that was sticky with blood. He figured it must be some kind of nipple piercing, because it still had most of a man’s nipple attached to it.
Also, he had never in his whole life seen these pants he was wearing. They were baggy houndstooth slacks with a cracked leather belt as slim as an extension cord. A thrift store tag was stapled to the zipper.
He wiped the blood off four quarters and took the paper. Reading the same way small children type, he stitched it together, but he had to go over it three times before he realized how little anyone else knew.
This sweet ’69 Shelby GTO was
doing “in excess of 90 MPH” westbound on North Kukui Street while racing with one or more motorcycles around eleven last night, when it broke the railing and went off the bridge into the Nu’uanu canal, taking one of the bikes (oh fok no) out with it. No bodies recovered, no survivors expected. The car was, oddly enough, not registered and had been inactive with the Hawaii DMV since 1989. HPD were hopeful that someone could ID the current owner. The motorcycle, a late-model Honda (yes!) was registered to an unidentified North Shore resident who reported it stolen a week ago.
Zef went to sit in his booth and only then noticed the used plates and coffee mug across from his.
He’d been eating with somebody, just before his brain started working again. Maybe two or three, by the extent of the wreckage.
The remains of an omelette and some blueberry pancakes and some sticky rice and Spam and some purple shit that looked like if you ate the sticky rice with some beet juice and then puked it up into a side dish.
Only one set of silverware, though. Big eater.
There was deep burgundy lipstick on the mug. Zephyrus, you dog, you…
A check was tucked under his plate. It was for forty-two bucks, and he only had thirty-three. Figuring there was a better than even chance he would get rolled or arrested last night, he’d only brought a hundred and forty bucks, and he didn’t remember paying for anything at the… that place where he… did he sing a country song last night?
The last thing he remembered was that ugly private dick blowing him a kiss as someone put a microphone into his hand and he finished a drink…
Someone slipped him a fucking date-rape drug.
Looking around guiltily, he stuck his hand down the back of his unfamiliar pants. They came up stinking but not bloody and he appeared to still have both kidneys. Thank Christ for small favors.
He remembered… that grizzled, sleepy-eyed Hawaiian motherfucker sneering at him over the waitress’s shoulder, like he knew.
Repo Shark Page 4