The newlyweds hit the emergency stop and got off on the second floor. Weeping, Zef banged his head on the door until it opened. He waved his shoe with the key in it at the door, ran into the room and dropped on the toilet.
The bellhop came running to the room with his cell phone, ready to call the cops or paramedics at a moment’s notice, calling out, “Sir, you alright?” when he waded into a brown wall of stench like a river in monsoon season. He turned and fled, holding back vomit with his fingers.
Zef DeGroot screamed, “TOUCHDOWN!”
Running the fan and the shower to cut the smell, he lifted a rubber tube, nine inches long and an inch in diameter, out of the bowl; a double-hulled condom stuffed to ribbed rigidity with Schedule 1 psychoactive substances.
All the shit he’d gone through, from the indignity of inserting it into his rectum and the ensuing, deeply humiliating multiple orgasms, and the fear that it would burst open or work its way back up to his stomach and dissolve, unloading enough MDMA in him at once to make a dubstep rave bearable, to the ungodly yellow mess of it coating him up to his elbow. All of that was behind him now, already eager to be forgotten.
He checked the room for any signs someone had been there in his absence… like himself. But nothing seemed different, except for the general tidiness, the made bed and the purple orchid on his pillow.
He changed into trunks and went down the back stairs to the pool. His neighbors laughed and made hysterical Chinese hooker noises when he passed by. The drunks in the swim-up bar told everyone who sat in their pee about his exploits. “Don’t shit in the pool, too, pally!”
When he didn’t know what else to do, he went back up to his room and did a whole lot of pushups and thought about throwing the TV in the pool. He didn’t even know what he was thinking. So he called the one person who always knew.
“Enjoying your sabbatical, boy?”
“Dad, yo… It’s alright…”
“Hula girls give you the clap yet? You remember never to leave your wallet—“
“Dad! I’m here to work…”
“And yet you overindulged on your first night, and you’ve done regrettable things. And now you’re sitting on the loo because one of those regrettable things is in your bed.”
Geezer always knew. His mates wouldn’t play poker with him. Back in South Africa, he never even needed to beat the truth out of the blacks. He just did it to keep up appearances. “It’s a flash bike, y’know, but this fokker is hard to pin down, and I don’t know the town—“
“Harv said he had retained a local authority. Did you alienate him already?”
“No, he… uh, like…” What could he say on a cell line? “This guy, right, he up and left me. I think he’s scared, right?”
“And now you’re scared.”
“Erm… Nooo…”
“And thinking you can’t fulfill your contract because this client will always be one step ahead of you, until he gets irritated enough to kill you.”
“Yo, I’m not afraid of nothing…”
“Alright, fine. Did ‘nothing’ break your nose?”
“No, it was…I wiped out surfing…”
“So you are getting some vacation in. So wonderful that, even on such a difficult assignment, you’re finding the time to enjoy yourself at Harv’s expense.”
“I didn’t…it’s not like I wanted to…”
“You think you’ve got difficulties, you don’t even know. This cont Zweibel…”
“Your boss…?”
“He’s not my fokking boss, boy. He was a client, and now he’s a headache. Jumped off the roof of his own casino, as if he had any real problems—but now he is my problem, because his security cameras went to shit right before he jumped, and the fokking police are crawling up my ass to cover their own fok-up. These cocksockers wouldn’t survive a day patrol in Soweto. Lost track of half the Jew’s head, and trying to make something more out of it than it is.”
Like a magnet, Joorgen DeGroot had pulled his son’s thoughts into a neat alignment. He knew what to do, but not how to get his father off the phone.
“Look, Dad...I got a masseuse coming, so I gotta get in the shower. You know how those bitches…”
He bit his favorite bait. “They’ll pick your bones clean, those despicable whores… You know, one fokking time, Harv and I—”
The phone trilled in his ear, drowning out Dad’s rambling. “Look Dad, someone’s ringing through.”
“Oh, that’s fine then, but mind your wallet and watch out for Bat-Kaffir, boy—”
He should call Primo. Show some initiative. Don’t wait for that punk to put him on island time. Take the bull—
His phone rang again. It was Primo.
“Yo—“
“I’m real pissed you stood me up last night.”
“I did what? I didn’t even—”
Last night.
Fok.
“I don’t know who you talked to last night, but it wasn’t me… I mean, I was mad fucked up, like…”
“Well, you got one chance and you fucked up royal, you know?”
“Yeah, I, um…” Was it a pimp move to apologize to Hawaiians? Apologizing was almost universally for pussies. “Listen, yo… I don’t need this shit from you, if you don’t want to do business…”
“Twelve.”
“What?”
“If you still want to sell to me, that’s all I’m paying, I promise.”
“Oh, fok you! Listen, I got fokking doped at—”
“Like I care. Tonight, same place at eleven…”
“Yo, what place? Shit, I don’t remember, and I don’t see how you called me…”
“You called me, dipshit, from a fucking pay phone in Chinatown.”
“OK… where do we meet?”
“Punchbowl, on the overlook. Don’t fuckin’ forget again, brah, or I won’t forget you, I promise.”
“And I promise you, broo—” Zef started, but he was ranting at a dial tone.
He flopped on the bed and turned on the TV. A fat native guy—Jesus, the fattest guy he’d ever seen—was singing Hawaii’s favorite song, a cover of It’s A Wonderful World where the big dope forgets the words and starts mangling the Wizard Of Oz song. Zef cut a hole in the condom and started counting out tablets into his palm. He fell asleep before he got to forty.
They threw him out of the hotel bar and he was cruising the deserted moonlit beach wasted. He was naked, but he found hats, sunglasses, snorkels and flippers and tourist shit everywhere. He wrapped himself in a hotel towel, picked up a Titleist golf cap to find a skull underneath, half-buried in the ice-white sand.
He couldn’t go off the beach, for someone was waiting for him in the alleys between the looming, windowless tombstone hotels. The black glass surf pounded up the shore to smash into a palisade of sinking sand. Zef walked along the eroded edge, looking for his pants. The cold wind stung him with flung sand, scouring his naked ass. He picked up a surfer’s shirt, but it clung to the sand, wet and filled with driftwood bones. A human ribcage.
Slipping on the shirt, he stumbled along the seawall, thinking, this is no place for a vacation, until it crumbled under him and he rolled ass-over-head into the mud. Sinking into frigid quicksand, he clawed at the wall but only pulled it down on his head, burying himself waist-deep in instant concrete, and the wave was coming and the wind so cold blew down from the dark side of the moon, and the sound so loud, he couldn’t hear his own screams when he looked back and the wave rearing up behind him was not a wave at all, but a vast cavern of teeth.
He got three Red Bull and vodkas in and went out in the Mustang. He cruised the beaches and the clubs and got as far west as Pearl City and found no Punani before he had to go to Punchbowl.
The spot was the same as in every town with enough young single people living with their parents; an unlit dead-end road with a soft shoulder or a parking lot and a view of the lights, where the cops didn’t come by too often and everybody was too busy to mind anyone e
lse’s business. Fourteen cars and a couple monster trucks were lined up and discreetly spaced, facing the city and the sea.
It seemed like a good place to meet, until he actually pulled into it and turned off his engine. Almost ten minutes early because for a change he was actually able to find the place without losing his shit and throwing the map out the window.
The radio was tuned to a reggae station, the least annoying thing he could find on the radio, the lazy-tongued singer warning him that love is contagious. The cars on either side of him had their windows fogged up. He reclined his seat. He didn’t want to get out and go peering in at fat wahines getting drilled by pimply flat sailors’ asses.
This was only one of the many reasons Zef never tried to make a career or even a hobby of dealing drugs, the primary one being that his Dad would literally kick him to death. Somehow, whether you were buying or selling, you always ended up waiting. In the repo game, you often had to stake out a debtor’s place, but it was a whole different situation when you were the hunter.
He called Primo.
On the fifth ring, “What?” Deep, labored breathing. It didn’t sound like Primo came alone.
“I’m here… Is this Primo?”
A low, long growling chuckle. “For shuah, brah.”
“Where are you?”
“You figure it out, I promise.” Laughing, he hung up.
Zef stuck the bag of pills down his shirt and tucked his shirt into his track pants.
It didn’t take a detective to figure it out. The iridescent green Nissan Cube seven cars away had vanity plates: PRIMO1. It was one of those boxy minivans that looked like a French police truck. Lights and engine off, stereo playing the same reggae song pretty loud, all triple-tinted windows rolled up. Primo was slumped forward against his steering wheel with his head at a funny angle, like he was puking on the floorboards, or getting some head.
Zef tapped on the hood as he went around the front of the Cube, opened the door and climbed into the passenger seat. A palpable cloud of stale pot smoke spilled out like snow.
He knew something was wrong before he reached over and turned on the light. It was such a powerful flash that he almost just got out and walked away, but what the fuck was he going to do with this shit? He couldn’t just put it on Craigslist or cram it back up his asshole when he went home.
He turned the light off.
Even in the dark, he could still see it. Probably always would.
Primo’s neck was snapped. The jaunty angle of his head and discoloration around his throat looked like he’d gotten whiplash while breaking the sound barrier in a jet. And his face was gone.
The skin and most of his facial muscle was flayed cleanly off his head in a starburst shape—but really, it was the shape of a hand, the stripes of naked skull on the forehead corresponding to a set of fingers. His naked eyes, stripped of lids, stared wonderingly at him as if waiting for the answer to a Really Big Question. It looked as if someone had simply ripped his face off with one sweep of a razor-clawed hand.
He was starting to get out when he saw the blue light flashing, way off down at the end of the line of cars. A cop sat in the driver’s seat of a pimped-out El Camino while his partner went down the line peeking in windows with a big flashlight.
Right now, he was looking into Zef’s empty Mustang and wondering what the fuck. The road ended at a trail that went up into the shaggy green hills above Honolulu. He could report his car stolen, but there was no getting out. If he took off now in the Cube, they’d pull him over. Even if he ditched the tabs, he’d have a shitload of fun trying to explain the faceless dead drug dealer whose car he’d stolen.
The cop walked on to the next car, knocking on the roof with his light and giving a big thumbs-up.
Do you want to go out like this? he asked himself.
Do you have a better idea?
And just then, he had a perfectly horrible idea.
Primo must’ve been dead when his face was torn off, because the steering wheel and dashboard were only dappled with blood. Most of it had pooled in his lap and on the black rubber floormats.
Work fast. He got up and dragged Primo into the passenger seat. The Hawaiian was big, but he was able to do it once panic set in, though something in his back and something else in his abdomen snapped like cheap shoestrings.
Sitting in the pool of cool, half-clotted blood in the driver’s seat and trying to look relaxed took a whole different kind of resolve.
The cop was only two cars away.
Zef kicked off his shoes and ripped off his socks, used them to wipe the blood off the steering wheel, then rolled them up and stuffed them in his pocket.
The cop was looking into the next car.
Zef lifted his hips off the blood-slick seat and slid his track pants down to his knees. The best disguise is something nobody wants to look at.
The cop tapped on his window.
“Go away!” Zef shouted. “It’s a free fokking country, ain’t it?”
“Roll down your window, sir. You’ve got nothing I haven’t seen before…”
Zef cranked the window halfway down and handed over his license.
The cop choked up. “Put that shit away, I don’t want to fucking know you.”
“Do you mind, officer?” Zef put his hand on the back of Primo’s head, which was buried in Zef’s lap. Shivering with terror and barely-contained panic, he made Primo’s head bounce in his lap as if he was hard at work, and tried to look like a man getting a blowjob.
“You’re over eighteen, right?”
“I’m twenty-four, and, um… so’s he.” Zef rolled his hips to make Primo’s head nod. “He’s, uh, pretty wasted, like… but like, he’s not gonna drive.”
The cop’s nostrils flared, hoovering up the pot smell. He flicked the flashlight over the Cube’s interior, clearly not wanting to see anything more. “Goddamn perverts,” the cop mumbled.
“Yo, we’re not doing nothing they’re not doing. It’s all just love, yo…”
The cop’s furrowed brow and sunken, lost look made Zef forget the cold, dead man’s face seeping blood into his crotch. “Shut up, fucko.” In a local tone, he shouted, “After all she got to deal with, Primo, I just hope yo auntie not find out. Nice night,” he said. He went to the next car.
Zef watched him walk away. It took a year off his life, every second he let Primo rest on him. His jockeys were soaked through with tacky, lukewarm blood, his hoodie plastered to his chest with sweat.
Only when the cop was in his own car did he try to move. His legs had gone to sleep. His fingers were cold and clumsy. Primo slipped out of his lap and fell facedown on the floor between the seats.
Tears tried to come out when he ripped off his pants and shucked off his boxers. He looked around for something to put them in, but the car was clean. Primo had no wallet on him, certainly no envelope with his money in it.
“How’re you gonna fok me now, Lord?” he asked the ceiling.
Two or three cars pulled out and took off. The cops in the El Camino finally kicked on their lights and rolled. “Go home, Primo,” he shouted as they passed, then turned down Nuuanu Road to Honolulu.
Fok me, the cop knew him, his auntie and shit. He’d sure remember the face of the stranger Primo was blowing, when they found Primo’s faceless corpse. This was so much worse than getting caught with drugs. This was just… The whole thing was supposed to be so easy… just a quick meet and he’d make some extra scratch. It was hardly Scarface; just some pocket money, who would kill over something like that? How could his luck have gone so fucking bad, since he came here?
He took a deep breath of the fresh night air from the open window. The Cube smelled like Primo must’ve shit his board shorts. The weed stench was familiar—pungent like overripe fruit and brown flowers, and it was so familiar because he’d smelled it and smoked it only yesterday.
Pineapple—
Old-school strain, yeah, but we made it bionic—
Zef flashed on
the scene at the pancake house. Kewalo’s hand shredding the laminate off the table like his hands were made of razors…
Zef climbed out of the Cube and walked around behind the other cars to the Mustang. He climbed in and stuffed his bloody socks and underwear into a McDonalds bag in the passenger footwell.
The car started right up. Peter Tosh wanted to legalize it. Burglars shot him dead in his house in Jamaica. Burglars in the Caribbean traditionally went to work naked and covered in grease or chicken fat, so nobody could catch them. Anything on earth was only a fleeting refuge from what he was living through.
He drove well below whatever the speed limit was. An oncoming car flashed its brights at him. He swerved and hit the gas, whimpering with panic until he figured out his lights were off.
He had to pull over to cry. It wasn’t some sissy thing at all, but full-on thunderous soul-rending crying. His hand found the bag filled with MDMA in his shirt and he pulled it out. He wanted to chuck it into the canyon plunging into blackness just beyond the shoulder of the road. Wanted to forget the whole thing, maybe forget the Harley, too.
And that’s when the cop pulled up behind him and blipped his siren.
“Oh fok, no no no.” He twisted in his seat, looking at the lights, kicking the sack of bloody clothes under the seat and the bag stuffed with Ecstasy was suddenly very heavy, twenty to life in the palm of his hand, and the bag of bloody underclothes just gravy, if they could pin it on him. Thank God this wasn’t in Nevada, where they still did lethal injection…
“STEP OUT OF THE CAR, PLEASE,” said an amplified old cop’s voice.
His body knew what to do to save itself, even if his mind still couldn’t accept that this was happening. With a disturbing feeling of routine, he leaned forward and slid his hands down and grabbed his pants.
“NOW, SIR,” said the cop.
Zef slowly got out, wiping off his hands with a moist towelette thoughtfully provided by National Car Rental. It was a different cop in a Camry, Asian and older than his Dad.
The cop looked at his ID, gave him a desultory pat-down and shone his flashlight under the seats.
Repo Shark Page 6