Nobody seemed to notice when he rocked the bike off its stand and stood up on the starter. This part was tricky, because Harley starters were engineered for a heavier brand of rider than Zef DeGroot, who, for all his uncanny flexibility and wiry physical prowess, weighed less than some people’s dogs.
He stood up on the starter. A couple people noticed him as they ran by, too panicked to do anything about it. Donny Punani was maybe a hundred yards away, and nobody was stopping him.
The bike seemed to slip out from under him like soap in the shower and smash into the nearest rice rocket. Flailing to keep the huge, heavy bike from tipping over, he jumped off and threw his meager weight against the chassis, but his feet landed squarely in mineral oil. He danced and fast-pedaled just to stay on his feet, pushing the Harley like a plow through the pack of bikes. He’d taken pains not to get the mineral oil anywhere near the Harley, but the fucking lot was on the slightest of inclines, so it had run everywhere. The rice rockets all tipped over and skidded across the lot to logjam Kewalo’s Toyota.
People noticed Zef.
In the midst of the mass exodus, one of the bikers who had been fleeing Donny Punani now shouted at him and came running.
Zef jumped on the starter and got the Harley to fart.
The biker slipped in the mineral oil and sprawled chin-first on the asphalt.
Donny Punani seemed to hear the sound of his hog and knocked Kewalo down running for the lot.
Another biker threw his helmet at Zef, who ducked it easily as he kicked the starter.
The engine caught and let out its trademark drowsy growl, bitching about having to work twice in one night. Donny Punani was maybe a hundred feet away and closing. He pointed at Zef and shouted something. Zef honestly wished he knew what it was, because it set his stooges to whooping like gladiator dogs in a pit fight.
Zef dropped his card, the one that said, “Your vehicle has been repossessed by an agent of AAACE ASSET RECOVERY SPECIALISTS. THANK YOU FOR YOUR BUSINESS!” He put in his earbuds and hit his secret car chase playlist, straddled the seat and jerked on the throttle, crying out as the blisters on his palm burst.
The bike lurched and spun on the lake of mineral oil until two more bikers got close enough for Zef to see they were crying, then the slick tires finally bit into naked tarmac and jolted in the wrong direction. Wobbling, straightening out with more throttle, he found himself soaring down the line of cars as several of them tried to back out of their spaces in a drunken, terrified panic.
It was a magical moment, and would’ve been sheer perfection if he could steer the fucking thing. The ape-drape handlebars were higher than his shoulders and he practically had to stand up on the pegs and throw his weight over the tank to get it to change course at all. He glanced off one truck bumper, throwing out a foot to fend it off, and veered between a camper and a huge local lunatic who tried to tackle him off the bike. That idiot got a ninja hand chop across his trachea as Zef passed, almost bowling over two wasted wahines and crashing sideways into the postal Jeep before he found the access road to the highway.
Zef felt steady enough to look over his shoulder at Donny as he shifted and opened up the throttle. Donny was standing there in the parking lot with his arms out like he was trying to call down lightning or something and it made Zef want to laugh, but then he heard thunder. It was kind of flat and muted. Donny went down holding his chest.
The narrow two-lane highway barely contained the runaway Harley. He knew the bikes he’d knocked over were twice as fast, but at least he wouldn’t have to worry about Donny fucking Punani anymore.
Nobody had a gun on the beach or they would’ve shot Donny when he came out of the waves with their champ’s head. And the sound of the shot was distant and almost seemed to come after Donny got hit. It had come from behind him, way up the slope, where the dirt road turned off the dead end of the highway.
It didn’t matter. Nothing did, but what he had between his legs.
The first Harley-Davidson was designed as a racing bike and it swept the first American Motorcycle Association races, but by World War Two, the Wisconsin company had ceded the racing field to the Europeans and opted instead to make the heavy, loud, intimidating bikes that cops would ride to catch them. The 1962 FL was an awesome touring bike, built to cruise the wastelands with minimal pit stops. On Oahu, it was like keeping a bald eagle in a canary cage.
It was truly an amazing bike. But it sure as fuck wasn’t fast enough…
He climbed jerkily through the gears on the silver, moonlit road, looking over his shoulder. The waves rose and pounded up the beach to send walls of spray arcing over the road. The ocean looked fucking pissed.
A monster truck with a bunch of screaming locals in the back flew past him, swerving all over the road like they were fighting over the steering wheel. He topped out around sixty but kept braking when the road got squirrelly. Nightmare flashes of laying five million dollars down on a flooded hairpin turn made him ease up on the throttle, but he kept looking over his shoulder. No one was coming. The darkness just rolled up the road behind him. The lights of Waianae hove up around the bend and he passed a couple trucks at an intersection and they honked at him friendly-like. They recognized the bike. Zef sped up, ran the red light. Nobody was going to mistake him for Donny Punani, even at this hour.
It was another twelve miles around the island to the lockup in Pearl City. After Waianae, the road passed a strip of resorts before it turned into a proper four-lane highway. He’d seen cars that could only be unmarked cops on the overpass in Kapiolani, near the Costco-Target complex. One was there now, but he was cool… did this stupid state have a helmet law?
He was cool, everything was cool. He passed under the bridge and he was passing a garbage truck on the right shoulder when the Harley’s liquid growl was unceremoniously drowned out by a wailing, whining rocket thruster blue-hot with crumpled Doppler effect as it flew up his ass.
Zef stood on the pegs and looked over his right shoulder just as the rice rocket overtook him. Zef felt whipped by the wind of its passage. It seemed to rip right through his leather jacket, his tracksuit and his undershirt to peel his back down to his last layer of skin.
The pain of it was so total it almost sent him forward over the handlebars. The Harley swerved left and clipped one of its many superfluous turn mirrors off the rusty hull of the garbage truck.
He elbowed off the truck and accelerated to clear it and swoop into the fast lane. The faster bike’s taillights described a waggling crimson trail as it whipped around another car and then flipped a retarded U-turn in the opposing traffic lanes and came back at him.
The wind howled on his back, an icy saw across his naked shoulder blades. What the fuck was that? He thought of Primo’s faceless skull in his lap…
The bike blipped its horn at him as it passed, Kewalo straddling a red Kawasaki Ninja. His arm came up to wave, red palm outstretched. Zef flinched away, but just as Kewalo passed, he jerked into Zef’s path and touched his sleeve. Tag, you’re it.
Zef’s jacket and shirt sleeves came apart and slid down over his hand. Zef flinched and skidded within inches of the concrete center divider.
The wailing of the Ninja’s overtaxed engine faded into the slipstream, but before Zef had caught his breath, the fucker was back.
Zef hung from the handlebars,throttle wide open, the Ninja right at his back and whooping like it was laughing at him. Zef tried to put a contractor’s pickup truck between them before the next pass, but the Ninja clung to him. Zef looked back.
No.
He wanted to call time out and just refuse this. The Ninja was popping a wheelie at seventy-five and coming up behind him with the front wheel upraised like a huge hammer. Zef gunned the engine and hugged the truck. His knapsack slid down his arm, and then it occurred to him and he knew it probably wouldn’t help, but it was so dastardly and stupid and wrong that he just had to try it.
The contractor’s truck was loaded with racks of huge mirrored
glass panels. Averting his face, Zef swung the knapsack at his reflection. He jerked the bike hard to the right as the walls of glass came tumbling off the truck. They smashed into the pavement like the raw ingredients of the Big Bang. Flying shards of dazzling moonlight danced in his wake, bouncing and becoming smaller and sharper and turning into a hurricane by the time the Ninja flew through it, still balanced on its back wheel. Both tires burst at once and the bike seemed to try to trade places with its rider. Coccooned in broken mirror glass, Kewalo tumbled onto the highway and came to rest under the wheels of some unfortunate in a rental minivan, with the cartwheeling Ninja hot on his heels.
Zef took stock of the situation. Shock was already setting in, along with the endorphin rush of somehow continuing to not die or wreck the bike, to alleviate the pain of his back, his hand, and his face. He took it up to eighty when the highway allowed for it, thinking, this is my bike, now. I have paid for it. I own it. Nobody else is going to try to take it from me.
They tried to take it from him again.
The monster truck came up on his left and Peapea was standing up in the bed, hanging over the side like he was going to scoop Zef right off the Harley.
No way. Zef braked and tried to scrape them off against a dump truck, but the Toyota recklessly crowded him to the edge of the road, snapping off his remaining side mirrors.
The highway was getting too crowded for this Road Warrior bullshit. The truck pinned him against the wall but had to relent and swerve around a poky Pinto in the slow lane. Before he could change course, the truck pinned him again and Peapea caught him around the neck and lifted him off the pegs. Some kid in the passenger seat hung out the window to try and grab the handlebars to keep the bike from going under the truck. Zef, slapping and scratching the meaty, monstrous eel of an arm clutching him in a sleeper hold, started to see spots. Nothing he did seemed to faze the fat fucker.
Zef was not strong, or heavy, or particularly blessed with much reach or dexterity. But when pressed, a man capable of otterpopping can summon all kinds of unusual physical resources.
Squirming around in the sweat-slick cave of meat, Zef fumbled until he cupped the man’s exceptionally small genitalia and honked them like an old-timey automobile horn.
Peapea folded and dropped him, but a reflexive deathgrip closed on his hair, which was maybe an inch long on top and pink walls of sunburnt dandruff everywhere else, but just long enough for him to dangle from over the wobbling Harley. All bodily control went straight away and he was a ball of white fire, so intense was this new outrage. But through his own screams, he heard someone in the truck roaring at the kid not to drop his bike, and he felt the Harley just beyond his flailing feet like a botched hanging feels the chair just out of reach underfoot.
His hand chopped out at the same place he’d grabbed before, and suddenly he was free.
Falling. And then he was on the bike and he hung on for dear life and Peapea fell on his ass in the truck, sending it careening into the oncoming traffic. Zef fishtailed to the right and bounced off a bright orange Dodge Charger.
The driver was a balding white guy who looked somewhat out of place with a two-foot waterpipe clamped to his lips, but then he dropped the bong and slapped a blue flashing dome light on his dashboard, which made total sense.
“PULL OVER,” the cop said into a PA so loud it gave Zef’s ears a black eye. He swerved away from the car and yanked on the throttle. The Harley pulled away from the Charger just as the monster truck swerved artlessly into his lane from the left, intent on smashing him into the cop car. Even at maximum acceleration, only half of him was going to clear the truck’s front bumper. He could see the stupid punk hanging out the window with a wooden Louisville Slugger baseball bat cocked, the whipping wind making a floppy, moronic mask of his teenage face.
The cop looked like murder with hemorrhoids, and his partner, a big Asian woman, looked even more pissed, but at least patient enough to fire a warning shot with the pistol she was pointing at Zef.
For once, the bike’s sturdiness worked in his favor. At the first touch of the handbrake, he didn’t lay the bike down and go skating across the grooved roadway like cheese across a grater, but merely lurched up against the handlebars and seemed to be yanked backwards and out from between gnashing steel walls.
The kid’s baseball bat smashed the cops’ windshield. Truck tires ground against the Charger like it was going to climb right over the muscle car. The cops slewed sideways off the shoulder and out of sight with horn stuck on and airbags deployed.
The truck seemed to hover in Zef’s path. The bike was squirreling out under him. He let off the brake and seemed to shoot forward into the arc of the baseball bat. He leaned way back, his fingernails digging into the rubber grips on the handlebars. It passed right in front of his face and smashed the speedometer. The kid was overextended and hanging out the window by his knees.
Zef had the merest glimpse of the driver’s shaggy silhouetted profile.
He was still staring when the bat clipped the side of his head. Not much force behind it, but the blow fell on his ear, which seemed to fill with fire and melt off his head. Blind reflex lashed out to catch the bat and rip it free of the kid’s hands. The Harley swerved into the truck again and Zef felt rather than saw Peapea diving against the bed of the truck and reaching for him with a paw like a pie plate.
Ducking under the crook of the handlebars, Zef licked out one-handed with the captured bat and caught the kid across the back of his head. He went ragdoll and slipped right out the window into the rushing river of concrete beneath them.
Zef swung again and caught Peapea across his forearm, sending him tumbling against the cab. The truck rocked on its shocks. Zef hit the truck and his hand went numb. The bat split apart like a Barry Bonds roidgasm. The truck seemed to pivot towards him and bounce alarmingly so that its spinning right front wheel came up on him like a buzzsaw.
He didn’t know what to do and nothing would save him, so he just stabbed the wheel with the shiv of shattered bat in his hand and the whirling blur of knobby tire ripped it out of his hand and he was shoved away so hard his right peg struck sparks off the concrete. He fought the Harley to bank away from the shoulder. He didn’t dare look but the truck was flipping end over end alongside him and then he was shooting down a canyon of backed-up traffic and the truck smashed into the back end of a dump truck.
“Boo-yah!” Zef flipped the bird over his shoulder. Suddenly the traffic was gone and he shot through the frozen street theater of a five-car pileup with police cars, ambulances, tow trucks and even a news van with its antenna tower fully extended. Cops turned to look, paramedics cursed him and horns honked in long blaring stabs that could only be salutes to his untameable glory.
The freeway was preternaturally clear past the accident. He made it to Pearl City in three empty minutes and swooped down the offramp to slalom past stopped traffic and run the light.
The tow yard was at the end of the street, the only lights that were on in this godforsaken industrial backwater. At least they left the gate open when they ran out to the accident, he thought, seeing the outer gate hanging wide open and the garage at the back of the lot that history would remember forever as the place where the world’s greatest repo man presented the world’s most valuable motorcycle for field appraisal.
He wasn’t really watching where he was going as he roared up the driveway of JGA Towing, but he somehow saw it anyway—a shiny seam in the world that shone in the light from the tow yard’s halogen spotlights, a spiderweb stretched taut across the entrance at the height of his collarbone. He studied it long enough to wonder what it was, but not long enough by half to do anything about it.
It felt like fire across his chest and the Harley ripped free of him and he was flying backwards. He heard the bike hit the curb and cartwheel across the lot and some part of his brain, he would later insist to himself, was calculating the cost of each echoing impact right up until the moment he landed on his head and everythi
ng went black.
He awoke to a concerned face endowed with big brown eyes so clear and bright and lustrous, he was sorry when he realized they belonged to a man.
“You had a pretty gnarly accident tonight, my friend. Do you know where you are?”
Ambulance. He was in the back of one and this fresh-faced local kid was a paramedic. They weren’t moving. There were no sirens. Was he dead?
He had to think, which was harder than usual. He hurt all over, like lying on a bed of sharp teeth, and his neck ached and burned like he’d been hanged. Just beneath his skin, a cold bubble of numbness quite unlike anything he’d ever pay to experience hid a world of grievous bodily harm, so he clung to it like death doing taxes.
“What happened to me, please? Am I…can’t feel…?”
“You’re restrained. We gave you a local anesthetic for the road rash. You really should’ve been wearing a helmet, brah. Do you know what day it is? Can you follow my finger?”
His mind shook itself down for clues, not to answer the paramedic, but for himself. The motorcycle—the last thing, he was riding the motorcycle and those fuckers tried to take it back, but he dusted them. He remembered reaching the lockup, but he couldn’t figure how he got here, unless the getting away was a dream.
“Yeah, you were going pretty fast and you would’ve got there, too, only somebody strung this angling line across the gateway. Twenty-pound testline, brah. You’re lucky you were standing up, so you didn’t get decapitated.”
Maybe it was all a dream. Maybe he was still in Las Vegas. That would be fucking tits. “So I’m gonna be alright, right?”
This other guy pushed the paramedic aside, leaned down to drip sweat in his eyes and fill Zef’s world with his shitty hungry breath. At first, Zef didn’t recognize him, but right away he caught on that this was no paramedic. “Sorry, buddy,” the new guy said, “but no, I’m afraid you’re fucked.”
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