“This car was reported abandoned up at the Punchbowl,” he said.
“I was, like… hiking, you know. I got lost.” The key to lying to cops was not to go overboard inventing shit. You’d only cross yourself up. Keep it simple. I was trying to sell drugs, and the guy I was meeting got murdered by some Hawaiians who think I owe them money from a stupid bet.
“Shouldn’t go hiking alone. Or parking, either,” he said with a brief gesture that might be stifling a yawn or miming a blowjob. “Have a nice night, sir.”
The rain shut Honolulu up tight. He rolled over and over in bed until the sheet wound around him so he couldn’t get out when the tidal wave sirens started up. He got up when the people running past his door started screaming.
It was hot outside, but the rain was cold, and came down in dense gray sheets that ran in his eyes in streams and overfilled his pockets. The people were running into streets choked with cars, headed for higher ground but going nowhere, waiting for the tidal wave. Zef raided the minibar, shotgunning the tiny vodka shooters and hell, the tequila and the gin, too, since he was going to die before he threw up, anyway.
The wave still caught everybody with their pants down. It came down from the hills at their backs. It came rushing down from Diamond Head and all the rust-red, mansion-encrusted mountains overlooking Waikiki in a roaring red floodtide that combed the tourists out of the traffic jams and sluiced them out of the hotel ghettos like fleas, swept them out of the shopping malls and swimming pools and into the sea, where the sharks packed the churning water so densely you could almost walk across them.
He was laughing his ass off at this jackoff who rode his Waverunner into the lobby and got boxed in by a swarm of hammerheads. He leaned out over the balcony to see what happened to the idiot when the whole railing sagged under him, struts popping out of sodden, substandard concrete to dump him into the red flood and he thrashed around in the water trying to get onto a second-floor balcony when both of his legs were jerked out from under him in opposing directions. Two sharks had him, and they split him like a wishbone.
He jerked awake to sirens. He leapt out of bed and crouched in the doorway before the smoke overtook him. Coughing and sicking up on himself as he crawled for the door, he tried to remember if he smoked anything, lit any candles, did anything that could have burned the place down… and came up blank.
Did it happen again? Did he black out? He remembered…
Oh Christ, he thought, as it all came back. The dream with the sharks had been better. Tied into a drug dealer’s murder in the worst possible way, on the cops’ radar as a sex tourist sleazebag, and after much ballyhoo and tribulations, the sack of Ecstasy had found its way back to its home in his colon. His last memory before passing out was drunkenly trying to rip the weird coat hangers out of the closet to make a hook to pull the big dildo made of drugs out his asshole.
His room wasn’t on fire, but it was filled with smoke. When he tried to open the door, the palm of his hand practically came off on the knob. Red fucking hot. The door was on fire, on the outside. Swearing, Zef dove out the window and into the corridor.
Two bellhops and a manager-type and a security guard were standing by the door, all of them holding phones except for the security guard, who was spraying a fire extinguisher at the burning door.
Zef was in his jockeys and a tank top. The palm of his hand screamed agony so bright and pure it emptied his mind. He held his mutilated hand out to the manager, who shook his head, unable to look at Zef as he pressed an itemized bill into the smoking blisters. “Just get out before the fire department gets here, and we won’t press charges, okay? Aloha.”
Getting his bags down to the rental car and peeling out of the lot, he berserkered into the dazed Waikiki traffic fully expecting a souped-up hot rod with a blue dome light on the roof to cut him off and the cops to drag him out and cuff him and, after a brief, thoroughly professional interrogation, throw him into a volcano. How many local celebrities’ untimely and fucked up deaths could he get away with being involved in?
And why was he involved? None of this shit had anything to do with the job. He came out here to get a fucking motorcycle and turn it in at a tow yard in Pearl City, get paid and go home. He could still do that. He could still do his fucking job… couldn’t he?
He parked in a mall lot off the street and checked his map while he slathered anesthetic cream and bandages on his toasted hand from the first aid kit thoughtfully provided by the rental company.
If anyone asked, Zef would say he ran down the skip trace himself, but he owed his breakthrough to a phone call that woke him up last night.
“He’s in Waianae, dumbshit, on the leeward side, if you’re still looking.”
Zef was still rubbing his eyes and pinching his nipples. “Who the fok…?”
“He’s getting a tattoo tomorrow. Should be there all day. Take the bike then. Do it before tonight.”
“Jimmy? Yo, like—”
Dial tone.
The snarl of traffic around downtown was like a kiddie pool version of real urban traffic, but they’d made all the worst urban planning mistakes on a smaller scale. Outside Honolulu, the urban landscape subsided into the same kind of creepy mass-produced sprawl that choked Las Vegas half to death. Costco, outlet malls, waterslide parks and tan tract homes with fake tile roofs shit out on grids with putting green lawns and two or three SUVs or monster trucks blocking every driveway. The rust-red dust all over everything made it look like the suburbs of Mars.
When even that had fallen behind, the northern mountains pivoted to the east and the last traces of green disappeared, except for the golf courses. Suddenly, it looked more like Nevada than Nevada did. If he didn’t look to his left and the infinite blue horizon, it could be Palm Springs or the Australian outback. He thought tropical islands were supposed to be tropical, with banana trees and perfumed flowers and shit. It made sense this was the part they’d let the natives keep.
Waianae looked like a seaside Indian reservation, the sad kind without a casino. The churches were Pentecostal and Adventist and looked like rocketships or waffle houses. The cars were all shitty and ten years old, at least; the houses were tin-roofed drywall and cinderblock shacks and trucks with ramshackle camper shells on the beaches. Some dumb Hawaiian law said you could camp on the beach here, if you were kama’aina, local.
He buzzed a public basketball court and watched some guys playing way too hard for a pickup ball. Bodies slammed in midair, war-whoops were cut short by larynx-crushing elbows. He had to honk twice to get their attention.
Two motherfuckers had those weird spiral tattoos on their faces, and flicked their tongues at him like fucking snakes. The rest popped knuckles and ground their teeth, tears of venom dripping from their poverty-hardened bodies. Yeah, this was gangster country.
“Can any of you guys make change for a hundred, and tell me how to get to the Makaha Valley Country Club?”
They came after him like he was pussy. He let them reach the parking lot before reversing the Mustang and laying a patch and flipping a bootlegger reverse and standing the car up on its front wheels in a brutal braking maneuver that actually caused two of the pursuing basketball players to crash into the back bumper.
Zef peeled out cackling like Woody Woodpecker on nitrous and ran the red light to turn north on Farrington Highway, cutting off a trash truck.
Reconning downtown Waianae didn’t take but a few minutes, and before he was even sure he had ditched the basketball court gang, he had cause to look in the rearview mirror and kiss himself.
Da Hui Tattoo Parlor was a cinderblock bungalow on a side street with no sidewalks and wild dogs slinking in the gutters. Between Ahuna’s Party Rentals (2 FA 1 XMAS BONCE HOUS3 SP8CIAL!) and a Bible college. A line of bikes was parked in front, a blinding picket line of chrome and custom paint jobs. A couple locals were sitting on a bench on the front porch of the place with a trash bag from McDonald’s between them. He noticed one of them glaring at him befo
re he recognized them.
At least he knew it was the right place.
Peapea pointed at him, rubbing his gut with his other hand the way some guys polished their Camaros in their driveways on a Sunday afternoon. If he was any good at reading lips, Zef distinctly made out the words, Get in my belly, haole boy.
Zef DeGroot was working on his own tattoo when he heard the unmistakable seismic growl of the vintage Harley. Lying on his side on a grimy futon with a mirror propped against the cinderblock wall to see the work in progress on his tailbone, he was almost finished with his masterpiece, and nothing else would have broken his bubble of perfect concentration.
The needle skipped and stabbed a Hitler mustache on the angel’s beatific face. “Fok me,” DeGroot snarled, but he leapt off the futon and peeked through the blinds.
The plate didn’t match, but the bike itself was more familiar to DeGroot than the taste of his own dick, as was the slope-browed profile of the motherfucker who straddled it, rolling a cigarette and soaking up the giggling worship of the tubby wahines who came out of the hotel bar.
Donny Punani was back.
One at a time, he took them round the parking lot, their drunken war-whoops like a seasick siren while the others shrieked and burnt each other with cigarettes.
They were all very impressed with the bike. But none of them knew. Maybe Donny didn’t even know about what Zef DeGroot had found out, today. It had given him new eyes, new resolve, a whole new set of balls.
Harv called him in the car. “Having a nice vacation, Zephyrus?”
Not even his fucking parents called him by his full first name. “Yo, I’m on the fokking case, but there been, like… obstacles.”
Harv made a sound that couldn’t find a way out of him in words. Almost chewing the receiver he said, “You just keep fokking doing what I’m not paying you to do, boy, and see what it gets you.”
“Look, Harv, I’m on his shit like a sunburn, but he’s got people…”
“Alright, fok it. Maybe there’s no alternative to make you understand the urgency… Fok, I tell you, Joorgen would never let affairs get so sideways…”
Zef knew this was no time to talk back. Harv was always intense, but he never sounded scared. “What’s the real deal, Harv?”
“This bike is worth a lot more than the Hawaiian put up for it. It’s not just some custom bike made up like the Captain America chopper from Easy Rider.”
“OK…”
“You fokking nitwit, it is the fokking Easy Rider chopper.”
Zef sat down and took a deep breath before he meekly asked, “Who the fok is the Easy Rider?”
The growl came back, more exasperated than ever. “It’s a wonder your generation doesn’t drown in the fokking shower, boy. Easy Rider was this hippie movie from the 60’s about some drug smugglers who get done for, hey, but the bike in the movie… you say you saw the property, over there?”
“Fok, Harv, I been closer to it than I ever been to my mother, but…”
“And you say it didn’t look familiar to you?”
“Uh… maybe a little? Like, I seen choppers before and I seen ‘em with, like, the flag shit on the tank like that…”
“That’s the most recognizable motorcycle in the world, boy. I can’t believe you didn’t…”
“Well, if it’s such a famous fokking bike, then why am I the only one looking for it? Why ain’t it on the news? Why am I only getting…?” He trailed off not because he ran out of breath, but because his brain finally caught up to his mouth and he figured out his own answers.
“You’re too dumb to know this, so you’ll probably forget it… They bought two LAPD bikes at auction and chopped them in ’69. One of them got sorted in the movie, but the other, this hippie actor put it in storage, but somebody broke in and took the bike.”
“So, like… the dealer…”
“Nobody wants to know how he got it. The hippie actor, he figured it got stripped for parts, since the movie hadn’t come out yet, when it happened. It never resurfaced. In ’93, they made a perfect replica for the silver anniversary. It’s in the Harley-Davidson Museum, but it’s only a fake.
“So this bike is worth, like…?”
“It’s an old piece of shit police bike, but if it’s verified, it’d probably go for more than five.”
“Five…?”
“Million. Dollars. Shitforbrains.”
“But, like, it’ll never go to auction, because it’s hot, right, so, like… it’s worth a lot less… and a whole lot more, ain’t it?”
“First half-smart thing I’ve ever heard you say, boy. So, you starting to see how important it is that you stop fokking about and deliver the property?”
“Uh, like… yeah. But…”
“But what?”
“But if it’s, like… you know…”
“Yes, your fee. Right… Triple it.”
Zef let the pause go sour and stink up the air between them. Finally, he said, “Five times.”
“Boy, you’re not irreplaceable…”
“I’ll have it tonight. You can pay me two hundred thousand for it, or we can all see what kind of reward the hippie actor will put up.”
“Pretty sure he’s a poor motherfokker now. Adverts for hippie rock music compilations, and whatnot. Put it out of your head, Zephyrus. Somebody else would clip you before we could even get to you, if you were to show the wrong kind of initiative. That’s the kind of game this is. Everybody plays their part, everybody wins.”
“I’m a player, Uncle Harv.”
“I have faith in you, nephew. Call me soon with good news. I’m going to go sodomize someone.”
Though it was late at night, Zef went through his morning meditation ritual before he left. This consisted of cleansing his mind and focusing on his goals for the day before he emptied his mind of everything and projected his excess chi energy into the vagina of every beautiful woman in the world. It would be a hell of a thing to deny them, if he didn’t come back to pleasure them in the morning.
He polished off the leftovers from New No. Two Chinese BBQ and checked his kit one last time before packing it into his knapsack and strapping it tight to his back.
The Holokai Seaside was indeed a beachfront hotel at stunningly reasonable rates, probably owing to its proximity to Oahu’s largest sewage treatment plant. He had cruised the area looking only for a cheap place to drop off his shit while he looked for Punani, but then he saw the three-story pale pink horseshoe around a sad, leaking swimming pool, surrounded by miserable plumeria trees furry with whitefly infestation. It still might have gone unnoticed if not for the huge, dark blue Toyota monster pickup in the parking lot.
Checking in using his ID and credit card for Robert Saber, his luck turned out even better. The gregarious old hag who ran the front desk was the owner’s widow. She fed a small army of feral cats that lived in the office and the lobby; they wouldn’t go outside because of her dead husband’s “stupid birds,” and because “the Flips” were eating them when their welfare checks ran out. Draped in a knee-length cable-knit cardigan seemingly knitted out of cat hair that screamed shut-in hypochondriac over flannel pajamas, she had come out of her shell to natter like a magpie as she followed Zef to his room with the commanding view of the parking lot and highway and treatment plant.
Much that weighed on her mind had to do with those people in three adjoining rooms on the ground floor facing the ocean. With little urging, she went on to describe how they came and went at all hours and threw wild parties and left unspeakable messes in the swimming pool. Their “ringleader” was pretty nohea, she admitted, but they were involved in drugs. She had a nose for such things. Anybody local who threw money around like they did had to be dealing “ice” or cheating the federal government.
Peeking through the curtains, he watched Punani drop off one tittering butterball and pick up another. Zef came down the stairs but took the beach door and circled around the building. The parking lot was less than half full and t
here were three bikes against the curb. He assumed Holokai Seaside didn’t have a valet lot.
Zef crouched between a sickly hibiscus bush and a beater Mazda pickup with a shell that he was pretty sure had someone sleeping under it.
Ever since he got off the phone with Harv, Zef had been unable to resist picking at the scab.
The most expensive bike in the world was some fruity Ecosse bespoke superbike that tops out at 250 mph and sells for 3.6 million. The most anyone ever paid for a Harley was some custom rubbish called the Cosmic Starship. It fetched a million at auction. This piece of shit CHP-surplus chopper was worth more than both of those, just because of some shitty old hippie movie?
He’d endured the trailers and some scenes from Easy Rider on YouTube, but was unable to get into it. It wasn’t even good bike porn. No chases, no decent fights and the only sex scenes were all fucked because everybody making the film was clearly tripping balls the whole time. But then he watched the last two minutes of the film. He’d watched the end a dozen times or more, and he watched it again, right then.
The end of the movie was the movie, no need for all that happy hippie horseshit before it. Open on two longhaired freaks riding high through Dixieland, and a couple shitkickers show up to push their shit in where nobody will ever know. That shot of the wreckage of Captain America’s bike flying off the road onto the grassy knoll, followed by the camera lifting off and flying away like an untethered soul—that shit meant something his blood understood, even if his head couldn’t fathom it, yet. But now it made a little more sense that some cunt would pay five mil for the chopper.
This shit had to end soon. Motherfucker had been under the needle for at least eight hours continuously, and the fatties were drumming on his back. He was wearing shades and his hair was wind-whipped and hung down over his face when he stopped to switch riders again. His grin was tired but infectious. The girls wanted to go back to his room. He stood up on the pegs and took off. A porker clung to his thighs with her face pressed into his ass as he roared out of the lobby turnaround and into the parking lot. Zef ducked into the hibiscus under the sweep of his headlight. Whiteflies fluttered out of their flossy nests and went up his nose, but Donny Punani was long gone and didn’t hear him sneeze.
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