Repo Shark

by Cody Goodfellow

  The other three local girls scooted into the lobby on awkwardly high wedge heels. Zef rolled his watch cap down over his face and booked across the lot ninja-style, hugging cover when he passed under the stationary security cameras and parkouring across the lawn to the shrubbery surrounding the pool.

  A couple was skinny-dipping in the shallow end and a few surfers on their balcony were staring and pointing. When he saw what they were marveling at, his heart sank. He saw through the open sliding door of Donny Punani’s lanai, lit up a garish red from the taillights of his Harley, which was parked in the living room of his suite. The engine snarled once more, loud enough to backfire and make the surfers hit the deck, then it cut out and someone yanked the curtains and slammed the door.

  Well shit, this fucked up everything. How the fuck was he supposed to…?

  Harden the fuck up and hold tight, rude boy.

  In the adjoining room, he saw Peapea and Kewalo and two more local thugs sweating the other three Hawaiian chicks, playing some kind of drinking game around the table and smoking a joint like a turkey drumstick.

  Kewalo’s braying laughter when Peapea had to empty his cup seemed to set off a car alarm in the parking lot. The girl in Punani’s room squealed even louder, making a song out of his name. The skinny-dippers got out and ran for their room, turned on or terrorized by the sounds. The surfers tried embarrassing them with catcalls and whistles, but the noise just got louder and they went inside, chanting, Punani, Punani.

  Zef crept around the lawn, staying in the bushes and down on his belly, until he crouched behind one of the lounges on Punani’s lanai. Nobody pointed and screamed. Ninja. He turned and ran into a face full of feathers. Dazzling metallic blue, golden iridescent green like an array of gaping, hypnotic eyes. In any other place, he’d be wowed by their beauty, but he nearly shit himself and choked back a high, hysterical scream. The manager said something about her husband’s “stupid birds.” She didn’t say peacocks.

  The big, stupid horny bird rushed at him with tail fanned out and quivering beak parted and hissing like it was fatally aroused. Zef shoved it away but it nipped his fingers and let out a fearsome falsetto shriek. Zef punted the bird away and dropped on his belly in the bushes. The peacock limped across the lanai, wailing pitiably. A goon opened the sliding door and threw an empty rum bottle at it.

  One of the plus-sizers took her drink and shambled for the next room, where the squealing subsided into even more provocative moans and whimpers.

  Breathing harder than when he was running, Zef crawled around the edge of the light spilling out of the living room, his keenly honed senses picking up the telltale brown aroma of the bike’s exhaust mingled with the spoiled tuna stink of a porno set. The curtains were drawn over the sliding door, but they weren’t quite closed on the window. Zef inchwormed over to the wall and skulked up to peek sideways over the windowsill into the darkened room. He stood up once real quick, snapping a sight picture and dropping to process it in his head.

  His boner somehow figured it out before he did. The window offered a panoramic vista of the bed and the bodies on it entangled in a hot, heaving 69, and neither of them was Donny Punani.

  The chubby girls were working each other like maniacs, like they were trying to climb into each other tongue-first and become one really huge Hawaiian girl. The girl on top squeezed her partner’s face with her thighs like she was still riding the motorcycle, crying into her friend’s snatch and screaming Donny Punani’s name.

  And where the fuck was Donny Punani?

  Zef cautiously peered over the windowsill again. The only light came from a bedside lamp and the bathroom, so most of the room was in yellow shadow. But there he was, in a chair at the far corner of the room from the bed, sitting fully clothed with his fingers interlaced in front of his face as if he was contemplating a hospital emergency room, instead of a girl-on-girl bonanza. He didn’t look like a man who’d just had sex. The weird, faraway stare captivated Zef for a while before he even realized Donny wasn’t wearing his sunglasses. But he was looking past the banquet of flesh on his bed, and whatever he was seeing made him unutterably sad. Worst of all, he didn’t look like a man who’d be passing out any time soon.

  Maybe in the morning, Zef thought. He’d just stake out the view a little while longer, to make sure…

  The Hawaiian girls just kept on going. Whatever the fucker did to women, he was doing it to them in spite of himself. The look in his eyes seemed to say that he’d take them, he’d have them inside out, but then he’d have to kill them and eat them.

  Maybe the drugs were slowly leaking into his bloodstream from his rectum. Fok, thinking about that shit just got him depressed. If his mood lightened even a little, it would only mean that he had maybe an hour to live.

  He was just thinking about taking off when Donny abruptly leapt out of his chair and barreled out of the room. He said something in a low, gravelly voice that cut the party game off and sent the four thugs scurrying. The other two chicks were already passed out. Within a minute, they’d all cleared out carrying surfboards. Zef was rubbing his hands, wondering if maybe those thick chicks would still be in the mood, or maybe he’d just ride off with the bike…

  The bike raged at being kickstarted indoors. Zef barely had time to roll away with his hands on his head before the sliding glass door shattered and the Harley roared across the lanai and shredded the lawn, fishtailing and and hitting the parking lot with a scream of vaporized rubber.

  Zef pounded the dirt and pressed his forehead into the grass. Think, don’t fokking blow this, don’t do what you always do. Listen—

  The bike was headed north on Farrington. There was fuckall past Waianae, unless Punani was going night-golfing. Makaha, then campsites and Kaena Beach, where the highway just ended. Zef was arsed if he could figure it, how they couldn’t even get one road to go all the way around the fucking island.

  Spring into action.

  Ninja!

  He jumped into the Mustang and gunned it backwards out of the parking space. It felt like he was driving on four flat—

  Fok. He rolled out of the Mustang. His tires were not so much slashed as shredded, steel belt dangling in springy ribbons from the gutted rubber.

  He whirled and jumped out of his crouch, but they had the drop on him.

  The grotesque face hovering over his own was even more off-putting than the Glock lazily aimed at his head. Jimmy Phun shook his head and tucked the gun in his leather jacket. “You starting to see how far over your head you are, now?”

  The moon over the water chased them up the highway, unnaturally full, its overripe umber light picking out the quicksilver foam on the breakers slamming into the rocky shore.

  In a shitty old Hyundai hatchback, Jimmy cruised slowly, scanning the beach and looking for cops who might harass them on the return trip. Past Waianae’s despair, separated by a brown canal in which he saw boys fishing pull up something as long as they were tall, like a cross between a lobster and a tapeworm. Makaha was slightly gentrified, with tiny art galleries and other vanity businesses instead of liquor stores and fast food, but still funkier than the Navy-flavored sprawl around Honolulu.

  After Makaha, civilization gave up. Jagged ridges of lava rock loomed up on their right and crowded down against the highway, threatening to shove them into the ocean, but then they receded and the lunar landscape was exactly like the desert, except for the deeper, darker emptiness on their left.

  “That car was worth more than your fucking motorcycle,” Jimmy bitched.

  “Nobody told you to…”

  “Save your life? Yeah, I’m not gonna try to bill your uncle for it, don’t worry. I’m just saying…”

  “They thought you were dead… But how come nobody knew it was your car…?”

  “It was a fucking special car, okay? It was never put into the system. Untraceable.”

  “So what happened last night?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “
No really, like… did you see me again, after the bar, where you totally fokking ditched me…”

  “I came back, didn’t I? Your uncle’s credit line is maxed out, by the way. You fucked up big time. You were supposed to do like I told you…”

  “His fokking posse was sitting on his bike the whole time he was in there… why you care about it, anyway?”

  “Didn’t Auntie Kalei let you know what you’re fucking with?”

  “You said you didn’t buy all that Hawaiian voodoo bullshit…”

  “Fuckin’ aye I don’t, because if you believe in it, then it works!”

  Jimmy slowed down and passed a shantytown on the beach, dug in among the spiky stands of hala trees and scrub brush, a mauka turnout for Satellite Tracking Station Road, with a handpainted sign pointing in the other direction that said PRAY FOR SEX.

  They turned off on a dirt road just before the three-row parking lot at the end of the highway, where the end of the island sported a perfect little beach with bone-white dunes in the lee of the ragged edge of Oahu. Kaena Point State Park.

  A bunch of cars and trucks lined the front rows of the shallow, poorly paved lot, thousand-candlepower halogen headlights trained on the monster waves stacking up on the soft white beaches. A few fire rings burned and maybe a couple dozen people stood around drinking and smoking and watching the waves. And yet it felt nothing like a party.

  They turned up the sloping road and Jimmy pulled over and got out. Zef tried to open the door but he couldn’t find the latch, because there wasn’t one. Jimmy yanked the door open and circled back around like he was going to push if Zef didn’t get out. He shouldered his knapsack and started to get out, but then Jimmy got back in and started the car and pushed in the cigarette lighter button. “Get out.”

  “What the fok is that, down there?”

  The lighter popped out of its socket, but the heater coil was cold. Jimmy tossed it out the window with a disgusted hiss. “Night surfing.”

  “How come?”

  “It’s… the waves are bigger, how the fuck should I know, do I look full-blooded Hawaiian to you?”

  “Fok, man… I’m sorry… Look…”

  “I don’t want to hear it. Just go, okay?”

  “No, like, no… but like, listen… I don’t know what the fok I’m doing, out here… They’re fokking playing with me…”

  “You just now figured that out?” Jimmy lit the cigarette off a kitchen match. “Who sent you? Your uncle is fucking clueless. Who paid for this bullshit?”

  “The Harley dealership owner. He just, really likes that bike, I guess…”

  “It’s personal, then? Donny Punani gets ‘em wet wherever he goes. Your friend shouldn’t get so twisted up. Probably nothing happened. He never fucks what he can’t kill.”

  “This the same motherfokker you never heard of, day before yesterday?”

  Jimmy just shrugged and shook his head.

  “OK, I’m going.” Zef got out.

  “They hired you for a good reason, whatever it is. Just take the fucking bike and go home. He’s just a man… until he’s not.”

  The Hyundai coughed and stalled when Jimmy put it in gear. Zef took off running down the road towards the parking lot, then hit the ground and lay on a bed of lava rock as the headlights of the Harley and the Toyota passed over him headed into the lot.

  They made a big detour, if he beat them here. The Toyota parked on the sand, blocking the view of the rings. The thugs went around back and got out a trashcan full of palm liquor. Kewalo shouted something that made the crowd drop their drinks and gather into a tight circle.

  Carrying a ten-foot longboard on his shoulder, Donny Punani strolled out of the parking lot and into the glare of the headlights. Some in the crowd cheered; others made noises like catcalls. Zef wasn’t sure which were which.

  When Donny Punani set down his board and turned his back to Zef where he crouched in the bushes, the repo man forgot for a second why he was here.

  The tattoo covered most of his back in blood-streaming scabs. A parabolic slash that rose up from just above each of his hips to touch the base of his neck, it was insanely ornate, crazed with patterns, but from this distance, it was clearly a mouth filled with jagged, triangular teeth.

  A shark’s mouth.

  And he was going in the ocean with that shit?

  Motherfucker was hardcore.

  But not too bright. Liable to get infected.

  Also. His bike was parked in the lot, and unattended.

  After a final check on his gear, Zef prepared to move when he heard more motorcycles coming.

  A swarm of rice rockets in lurid candy colors with blinking LED’s all over them screamed into the lot and swooped like one huge, glittering wing to alight on the edge of the lot and gun their engines in unison like they’d just got done watching Mad Max and smoking crank.

  As they got off their bikes and shucked their helmets, Zef crept up closer to duck behind the back row of cars, and his heart sank. Eight or ten Jap bikes were parked in a hedgehog formation around Donny’s Harley, hemming it in to make sure there’d be a confrontation after whatever the fuck was going on out on the beach.

  The biker gang took the beach to loud, barking cheers from the crowd. In colorful rashguards and baggy black boardshorts, they filed through the crowd hitting high fives and accepting paper cups of the shit from the trashcan. A longboard with an island sunset airbrushed on its deck was passed over the heads of the crowd until it came into the hands of the tallest of the bikers. In the harsh halogen lights, his face was a sculpted study in perfect proportion: cheekbones like straight razors, wide high brow unwrinkled by any trace of worry, and a strong, outthrust jaw that framed a wide smile that seemed to throw off its own light. No doubt, he was one beautiful motherfucker.

  While Zef was reevaluating his heterosexuality, the others stood apart from the surfing stud and the crowd fell silent as Donny Punani came out to stand chest to chest with him. Shorter, thicker, gnarled with scars and oddly overgrown knots of muscle, Donny looked like a tiki chopped out of red lava rock with an axe, his grim face hidden by a veil of unruly obsidian hair.

  A short woman came between them and held up a smoking bunch of grass, making a net of smoke to bind them as she chanted something in a low growl lost to the hammering surf. Zef wasn’t sure, but he looked around the lot and spotted the postal Jeep.

  No way, she was much too old. In a crow’s croak, she called out something and the crowd repeated it and both men charged down the beach with their boards under their arms.

  The waves were breaking almost right on the shore, but they rose up in fearsome, foaming walls several hundred yards out. Tube city, a traffic jam of perfectly formed deathtraps. Even from up here, they looked twice the size of the men who disappeared into the breakers, so he had to figure they were well over twenty feet high.

  The whole crowd was watching them. He saw nobody in the lot. Crouching, he jogged over to the cluster of motorcycles. They were on the near edge of the lot to the crowd but screened by a couple pickups with their lights on, so he figured he’d be well covered. The other bikes would be a problem for a lesser repo man, but he’d assembled a crack field kit and he was prepared for this eventuality.

  Kneeling down beside the outside row of rice rockets, he went through his knapsack and took out a jug of mineral oil, cracked the lid and started pouring it around the wheels. It was a lot easier than messing with the steering locks and as a bonus, it’d make chasing him a lot more interesting.

  Peeking out from the bikes, he heard the crowd roar to drown out the ocean. The rider in the fiery rashguard come down the face of a wave like a scalpel carving God’s ass cheek, slicing back up the wall to ride just outside the mouth of the tube.

  Something came shooting out of the tube like a moray eel out of a reef and intercepted the other rider. Maybe Donny hit him, maybe he just cut him off, but the other rider seemed to fly apart, body and board flailing and flying and smashing into the ru
shing black water like eggs on concrete to vanish down the tube.

  The crowd erupted in cheers and outraged shouting. Shoving and flying fists split the group.

  Work faster. Zef rocked the first bike back and forth in the mineral oil until it came loose and slicked any way he pushed it like it was on ice. It was a tricked Kawasaki racer with a sweet cardinal red and gold paintjob. Across the red teardrop tank in discreetly ornate gold script, it said KAMEHAMEHA IX. He moved it aside and did the next one and the next with one eye on the crowd.

  The fighting had settled down, the old witch yapping at the kids to keep them in line. It looked like the lady—Auntie Kalei—from the pancake house, but this one had white hair and her back was bent almost into a shepherd’s crook. Maybe it was her grandmother.

  Move move move.

  The last bike was clear. He got out his pick and went to work on the padlock, which came open almost instantly. The key went into the ignition lock perfectly. He straddled the bike, the final objective of his mission, the key to getting on with his life and off this motherfucking island.

  He took one last look down at the beach.

  Donny Punani came striding out of the surf and dropped his board on the sand. And held up the head of his opponent by the hair.

  The crowd went berserk. People turned and ran for the parking lot. People rushed Donny or ran down the beach or just fell to their knees like their whole worlds were suddenly, irreparably fucked.

  Donny came up the beach, shoving aside fools with economical gestures from which they’d probably never recover, and tossed the head into the nearest fire ring. The bikers rushed him, but Kewalo and Peapea drove them back. Peapea picked one up and threw him into the fire ring with the blazing severed head. Kewalo fought like a pussy, but he bitch-slapped a guy a head taller than him and the guy went down screaming. His face, the whole left side of it, was just gone.