White, mid-forties, pattern baldness buzzed down to bristly white-blonde stubble over a fierce terminal sunburn. He looked like a plainclothes cop who got busted down regularly. His jaw muscles bunched up like he had nine-volt batteries wadded in his cheeks. His lime green Adidas golf shirt reeked of bongwater.
Oh sure, he remembered now… This guy was driving the car he’d bounced off on Queen Lilioukalani Highway, causing him to drop his two-foot bong just before that shithead kid did in his windshield with a baseball bat.
“Okay,” Zef said, “I feel fine, like, ominna get out…”
Detective Bongwater pushed him down and tightened his straps. “Hey Doris, I think this guy, he’s having a heart attack.”
“No, I’m good, fok you…”
The cop menaced him with a pair of defibrillator paddles. Looking at them cluelessly, he said, “So, do these things work like jumper cables, or what?”
Zef tried to scream, to tell them everything, but the cop behind him stuffed a wad of gauze in his mouth. In a deep, tired voice tinged with a slight local accent, she said, “What you mean, like, do you gotta ground it, or something?”
“Yeah, it don’t even say which one’s the negative…”
“Fucked if I know… I’m no fuckin’ doctor.”
Rubbing them together like a doctor on TV, Bongwater shouted, “CLEAR!”
Zef was struck by lightning. He felt the paddles like the entry and exit of the bolt that tore through him. He convulsed so hard he could’ve snapped his own spine, if he wasn’t restrained.
He felt sick and strange, but not altogether bad. His mouth was dry, except for the freshet of blood from where he’d bitten through his tongue. And his heart… it wasn’t beating.
Sick and dizzy. Shuddering, coughing up the gauze, spraying foam from mouth and asshole. Trying to speak. Trying to say, Please stop.
His heart rolled in his chest and twitched. He gasped burning breaths of luscious air through bubbling rivers of snotty tears.
Paddles rubbing together like eager steel hands, the cop said, “You ready to talk now?”
Zef tried like hell to make his shivering head go up and down.
The male cop tapped him on the forehead. “So you’re the piece of shit who clipped Primo Waialani. Smooth stone killer shit, sticking around to fuck with the body. Hawaiians are crazy for open-coffin funerals, brah. What’d you think, nobody was on your ass after that?”
Zef fumbled with a couple mouthfuls of answers. “Yo, I don’t know nobody named Primo, and omma sue your whole fokking city—”
The cop started laughing. The quiet bitch behind him let out a brief, snorting laugh. “Homeboy, you’re so fucked we don’t even want to arrest you.”
“No way, Five-O! No fokking way, I didn’t do nothing to him, man!” He tried to get up, but the restraining straps gave him not an inch of space. “I’m just a repo man, shit, I only came out here to run down a dead skip…”
Detective Bongwater picked his nose, admiring the booger for a moment, and flicked it at Zef. “Did he burn you on a deal? Primo does that a lot, especially to fuckers from the mainland who try to play the locals.”
“Yo, like I don’t even know him, hardly. He’s trying to front me on some kind of side deal, he said it was legit—”
Bongwater stood up. His head hit the ceiling, then he jumped on the gurney, straddling Zef. Took hold of his ears, pinching the lobes so hard the rush of blood made Zef feel like he was drowning in his own skin. Then he yanked on them like he was trying to tear them clean off. The whole time screaming, “Bullshit. Who d’you work for, the Mexicans? Is that who’s coming in here, trying to start a fucking ghetto drug war on our fucking tropical island paradise?”
Zef tried to answer. Would say anything, given half a chance. The cop’s partner pulled him off. Doris was a chunky Hawaiian woman in her late thirties with bad acne scars and sweating like a lawn sprinkler. She wore a smart suit with a blouse and a string of real pearls. She looked more like the bald cop’s superior than his partner. They whispered for a minute while Zef tried not to puke and drown in it.
Finally, Bongwater got off him. Doris loosened Zef’s straps and mopped his face with a cool towel. Bongwater said, “We don’t really like you for the murders, okay? Maybe you telling the truth and you just came out here for this bike… Or maybe you’re one of Primo’s fucking drug mules.”
Doris said, “He bunched up his butt when you said that.”
“You saw that? I saw that, too.”
“Whatta you think?”
“I think maybe you should see if they got an enema kit.”
“No way! I’m not holding…”
“So talk.”
“What happened to it? To the bike?”
“It was totaled out, dipshit,” Bongwater cackled. “You wrecked it good, brah.”
Doris ripped open a big plastic pouch. Rubber tubes and a sack of saline and mineral oil spilled out. Zef stopped trying not to puke.
“Come on, don’t make a fucking mess in here.” Bongwater headlocked him and clamped his jaw and pinched his nose shut. It backflushed into his lungs, burning like Tabasco sauce. He thrashed fit to bust the straps. Drowning in his own puke.
“Jesus, let him go,” Doris said.
Split lips and tongue added briny red broth to the vomit that came out his nose, scouring his sinuses with acidic Hawaiian barbecue.
“So what’s so special about the bike you couldn’t go through normal channels? Just ‘cos it was the bike from the… what’s that fucking movie, Doris?”
“Easy Rider.”
“Yeah.”
“No, (choke, spit), it’s just (snort, gag) a real fancy replica, like… Anyway, (gag, spit) fok, you don’t need to fok with me no more, it’s fokkin’ Donny Punani, that’s who you want…”
Now Doris got in his face. “Don’t tell us fucking bullshit ghost stories, boy. You operated on my islands, it’s GTA at least, I promise. Whose bike did you take?”
“I told you already, it was Do—”
Zef couldn’t see what the big Hawaiian lady cop was doing, but apparently neither could her partner, not until it was too late.
When she leaned over Zef, he shrieked at her empty eyes and the cloth in her hand, but she pressed it over her partner’s face and slammed his head into the row of lockers behind him so hard he left a red star on it.
“Hey,” Zef said, but she didn’t answer. She got up and opened the back door, and grunting with effort, dragged her partner to the threshold and dumped him on the shoulder of a road with only infrequent streetlamps to show it was anyplace at all. She closed the doors and bent down over him like she was going to kiss him, but then out came the rag and he was breathing ether and blackness.
Dark room.
Black walls, no windows. Red light from a slit under a door. Hot like a sauna, wrapped in steaming sheets and turning over to get up only tangled his legs and he wasn’t going nowhere but his head was floating away…
And the heat… the heat was coming from her.
He thought it was the cop at first, but no, not unless she’d been wearing a fat suit. Her naked back, rippling muscle trimmed with baby fat, falls of ebony hair plastered to golden skin slick with sweat, hair down to the floor crowned in plumeria and hibiscus flowers hiding the better half of everything.
Head bowed, she rocked ever so slightly, voluptuous golden curves glistening like honey, cocked a round, bounteous hip and made him hear music. Waves raced down her spine to break on the lithe, chiseled pillars of her legs.
He reached out for her, but he was handcuffed to the bed frame.
Don’t scream, don’t give her the satisfaction, but he made the frame shriek, made his wrists slick with sweat and slimed with blood, but they just bit deeper.
She turned and he saw her face for just a moment before her hair blocked it, her eyes gleaming like something wild on fire inside, like something only superficially human. It was the stare of a bad man getting dragged o
ut of the strip club at last call, a wolf in the zoo before feeding time. It scared the shit out of him, but it made the blood rush to his cock so hard he damn near came red.
Undulating, and now he could feel the rhythm that throbbed from deep within her, heavier than the heat. She ran her hands up her inner thighs and parted her sex with both hands and then brought her fingers to her lips. The smell of wine and blood spilled on hot coals filled the room.
She fell across his lap. Hair washed over his legs like a wave of hot sand. Her full, strong lips were like a branding iron. Her kisses raised blisters on his thighs.
He closed his eyes and held his breath and bit into the meat of his biceps to hold back the screams.
Her mouth was first a jet of live steam bathing his cock, then a fiery vacuum singeing the hair off his balls and making his hips buck and arch to get himself deeper into her. It burned and blasted and broke him, worked his whole body, every last drop of his life into his erection. He tried to force himself to ejaculate. Even dying like this would be better than burning to death on the edge.
It was more involuntary twitch than act of will that made him open his eyes and look down.
She wasn’t even touching him. Her breath twisted and warped the air and played over his skin. Thick curls of smoke trickled from her lips and nose as she rose up, climbing to squat over him. Her skin glowed dull red, her face in shadow from the crackling torch of flowers ablaze in her obsidian hair.
Deep inside her, the tree of her lady parts glowed right through her skin like veins of magma in a glass volcano. The heat from her belly and breasts made his skin bubble and crisp. His vision blurred as blisters erupted on his eyeballs.
Under him, the sheets and mattress caught fire. He convulsed on the Viking funeral pyre as she took his cock in her hand and rolled her hips over it, then in one great surge, took him inside her.
The bed frame cracked, the metal gone soft buckled and his hands came free. The bed fell to the floor and he clawed at the furniture crumbled into black ashes the walls the black disintegrated and underneath glowing white molten rock at the heart of the earth the beating rhythm her heartbeat. He came into her and was cremated and the walls fell in and they burned—
He came awake kicking and thrashing and shaking cursing wet all over and it was hot, God, fok, it was so hot… like trapped in a car parked in the desert, but not… He touched himself to make sure he was still there.
He lay on a queen-sized bed. A lattice of dull reddish sunlight filtered through blinds sketching out a blank, barely furnished bedroom. The same hula girl painting from his room at the Illikoi hung on the opposite wall.
He was handcuffed. He was naked. And she—
In the corner, on a chair, the husky Hawaiian cop sat with her gun in her hand, pointed at him like he wasn’t naked and cuffed to a bed. Her face in the shadows was unreadable, but her eyes were wide and white and more terrified of him than he was of her—
He tried to sit up, to make his parched mouth ask for water, but she jumped up and made like she intended to feed him the gun.
“Stay back, fucker! You stay down!” She wore the same gray blazer and skirt from the ambulance, but her buttons were done up lopsided, a slit torn in her skirt almost up to her goods, hair a crooked mess like she’d slept on it. She backed up to the door and disappeared through it, turning in the hall to run, and what the fuck was her problem, he didn’t know, but the last thing he saw before she was gone, a garter of discolored white cotton around one of her ankles. Panties.
Somewhere several empty rooms away, he heard a door slam.
He flipped over on the bed and stretched out his free arm to lift the blinds. Outside, beige walls and green heaving turf—condos around a golf course. He still had crumbs of asphalt embedded in his skin, but when he threw back the sheets, he jolted backward into the headboard.
His cock was a red, sticky mess. Moaning, “No,” as a mantra. His balls, Oh God, she’d taken his balls—
Upon closer examination, he found his essential masculine equipment undamaged, but then he wiped his hands on the sheet and let out a disgusted shitstorm of Afrikaaner profanity. None of the blood was his, which meant it must be hers…
It took less than half an hour to detach the flimsy plywood headboard from the metal frame and get free of the bed. Lightheaded with hunger and increasingly agonized by road rash and miscellaneous contusions and the unthinkable defilement of his nether regions, he forced himself to stand up and make his way out of the bedroom.
He stopped in the bathroom and gulped water from the fancy Bosch sink fixture, washed the sticky red mess off his groin and his own dried blood off his face and chest. Bruises ringed his eyes, starbursts of scabs from glass and scratches ran down his arms, blisters and tender patches of hairless, scar-shiny pink skin. He wondered how much of it he’d gotten in the motorcycle wreck and how many came from… after.
This wasn’t a dream. It was done, one way or the other. Time to go. Time to get the fuck out of here, off this island, back to America, Nevada, Las Vegas, and never, ever, ever come back. When he got back, he would no doubt have to answer some questions, like what happened to the item he was sent to collect.
Never. He never had ever totaled a repo. Never. And this one was worth… a lot more than his life, that was for sure.
In the next room, his phone rang. He turned too fast to go get it and crashed into the towel rack, ripped it out of the wall trying not to fall down. He smashed the mirror with the towel rod. He went to get his phone, picked it up and answered without looking and instantly regretted it.
“Enjoying your vacation, son?”
When Zef was a boy, he was so stubborn, he would refuse medicine even he knew would make him better. No reason he could remember, no hope or fear that motivated him. He’d be up screaming in agony all night with a toothache or an ear infection and still refuse any medicine. Almost died of fever a couple times, and diarrhea on a trip to Mexico.
His Dad would go right at him, threatening punishments of increasingly surreal brutality until he had his son in a sleeper hold with a teaspoonful of grape cough syrup in his other hand.
But his ma would pamper and humor him when he had a fever. She’d bring him his sippy cup of milk, and she’d apologize for pestering him until he fell asleep with the milk tipped over alongside his snoring face.
When he was old enough for real cups he noticed that the milk she brought him was purple. She just dumped the medicine into the milk and stirred it up with a wink at her own cleverness.
Not that he ever had a reason to trust his mallie. She collected candy. Dad said her ma never let her have sugar, so she was fixed on it, but she never ate the stuff, herself. Bought up retailers’ display cases of candies at Costco and everywhere foreign they went and added them to her shrine in the sewing room. It was an irresistable candy panorama, but every last piece was poisoned, sprayed with a parethrum insecticide. One kid at the first sleepover he hosted got sick and almost died when he was seven, and nobody was allowed to stay over, ever again.
It wasn’t that Mum was out to hurt anyone. She just hated confrontations, so she let the mark think he’d got his way and then came at him from behind, usually for his own good.
But now it was Dad, using the Purple Milk voice.
“Son, don’t fret over the bike. It’s just a thing. Everyone is simply grateful that you’re alright. Just put it out of your mind and come home.”
And that was the fucked thing about it… because up until just now, he wanted to do just that. But something in Dad’s voice stank like the bait in a trap.
“Harv must be awful pissed, like...”
“Well, who wouldn’t be? He’s disappointed, surely, but he understands these things happen. Bikes get cracked up, they get fixed. It’ll take a bit of money, but it can be fixed up good as new.”
“Is his insurance gonna cover it then?”
“Of course not, you fool. But the damage estimate came to about sixty thousand doll
ars, y’see…”
Zef’s ass puckered and sucked wind. He understood vividly. “But I still recovered the…”
“Less damages, son. You took the contract for forty thousand.”
“Yo, he fokking tripled that shit.”
“That was before you made a mess.”
“So in his head I owe him twenty thousand dollars for finding his stupid bike for him, but he’s just going to walk away?”
Dad didn’t answer, but he heard a voice. Was his hand over the phone? Who else was there? Would he sell out his son to one of his old friends?
His voice cracked when he said, “But after all I went through…”
“You still got a nice vacation out of the deal, didn’t you, boy?”
Zef thought he was in pretty solid shape until he tried to put his clothes on. His left arm was not broken, but it acted like it was. Likewise his ribs on that side. His back looked like bacon. He screamed when he slid into his shirt, gave up on tying his shoes. His pants had been scissored off him by the paramedics, so he just rocked his baggy boxers.
He was shuffling for the front door when the witch breezed in the back with an armload of groceries and a miniature TV.
Zef backed up towards the front door. “Yo, like, I was just leaving, so like…”
“Take the bag, stupid haole. You wen go, then go, but you better see this one paper first.”
Mistrustful, he came over and took the string of canvas public television tote bags and dropped them on the counter. She held out a Honolulu Advertiser, shook it until he took it. At the bottom of the front page, under her stubby, tapping finger: LOCAL SURF HERO LOST IN TRAGIC NIGHT SURF ACCIDENT. The picture was of the local Donny Punani surfed against.
Zef took the paper, looking at the beaming grin in the oversaturated pic of the kid holding a huge surfing trophy. He shrugged. “Nothing to do with me. My job is—”
She didn’t take the paper back. She held up a cheap little automatic pistol and let him taste the barrel.
“You had one job. You fuck up so big they tell stories about you. Your Hawaiian name Hewakeiki… You like that?”
Repo Shark Page 10