He quickly found a Las Vegas Sentinel feature on the dead Mexicans. It was a big deal because one of them was Raul De La Iglesias, the don who unified the Sinaloa cartels and brought order to the drug trade. Since the bodies were discovered, Culiacan had descended again into internecine warfare, while American authorities were trying to explain how he got into the United States in the first place. According to the decidedly less-awesome-than-on-TV Vegas CSI, the Mexicans were killed almost two weeks ago, and found two days ago. Someone might have reburied them after animals had been at them, which made identification difficult.
Yeti said Primo and Yolo worked for the Iglesias mob. Drugs and labor smuggling, weapons, contract murder, kidnapping, the whole thing, and their footprint spread from Central Mexico to the Philippines.
Zef was all but certain that Kewalo killed Primo. And all three of those fucking freaks were in Las Vegas when these Mexican guys got killed. Something ate their faces, but it wasn’t coyotes.
The same fucking weekend that Doug Zweibel jumped or was thrown from the penthouse of his own hotel… which threw a huge development deal on Maui into the shitter. The same fucking weekend, Donny Punani took the Harley from the dealership, but he didn’t crate it up and have it shipped out of McCarran. He and his two henchmen drove from Vegas to LA on motorcycles.
They didn’t stay in Hollywood or Beverly Hills; they stayed in Long Beach. Which is, unless you have a hard-on for shipping terminals, oil refineries and street crime, a godforsaken shithole.
That narrowed things down considerably. They were only in LA for two days, and…
Xan Hong, a former Communist provincial middle-manager who became an overnight billionaire in real estate and construction and counterfeit goods and drugs. Retired from the business to play with his American real estate empire from a yacht in Long Beach Harbor across from the Queen Mary. And that’s where they found what was left of him.
Another Chinese executive “allegedly” connected to the human smuggling and drug problems in Honolulu turned up dead a couple nights ago in Chinatown.
Donny Punani’s gang got away clean with at least five murders on the mainland, and nobody was even talking about it.
Zef needed more killers.
The food court at the luxurious Whaling Village mall smelled like the world’s biggest garbage disposal trap, and also a locker room. Hotter than outside and everything felt like it’d been dipped in fry grease.
Hodad told him about these two Filipino guys who worked as a team. “They’ll punch any ticket for five grand, man. And they do it clean.”
Not even Hodad knew how they got hooked up, but clients found them steadily, and abusive husbands, unfaithful wives and ungrateful heirs died of unusual but totally plausible accidental circumstances. Zef didn’t believe they could make Donny Punani slip and break his neck in the shower, but it was worth checking out. At this point, anything was.
He ordered a McNugget meal at the McDonald’s from an ancient Asian lady bent almost double under her hat and headset. As she pushed the buttons with pictures of food on them, she looked at Zef oddly, waggling her crayon eyebrows like she was also selling primo Maui Wowie…
“Whatever, sea-hag.” Zef went to sit with the little plastic number that he got instead of food. The tables and chairs were bolted to the floor, and bright orange, like what highway workers and deer hunters wore. Rubbing his eyes, he sipped his soda—flat and warmer than the sweat streaming down his face—and studied the food court denizens. If these guys were truly invisible, they wouldn’t carry on and dress like gangsters. There just wasn’t anywhere to hide, on this fucking island.
A little Asian guy with rubber gloves and mustard stains on his uniform palmed the number placard and reverently set a tray with a paper plate of deep fried lumpia down in its place.
Without looking up, Zef said, “Wrong, I got McDonalds,” but he left it there and Zef was fucking hungry. Still scanning the room, he dipped one in runny pink sauce and damn, what did they put in this shit? Shit was off the hook.
He looked around, realizing he’d made a loud complimentary noise.
The Asian guy hovered over him. His apron said Teri’s Yaki Bowl.
“Isn’t it rude to tip Asians?” Zef said.
“I think we are to meet,” the little guy said. Quiet, so you leaned in without realizing it.
Zef looked through him, scanning the crowd. “Naw, I’m waiting for somebody…” He looked at the guy again. Soft brown eyes and a face you’d never find a word to describe. He looked like a Filipino, somewhere between thirty and sixty, with no distinguishing marks except for clusters of ringworm scars that dappled his arm.
“I need—”
“We know what you need. You pay us what we ask. We make arrangement.”
Hodad said these guys were worth it, but they would run up the expense account and cut into Zef’s end. “Well, like, I’m a little, like unconvinced…You got any references? Like…”
A hand passed over the table and left a small newspaper clipping. Billionaire Suffers Bizarre Accident—Brain Injury Was Accidental, Self-Inflicted. Zef skimmed the article, something about some prick billionaire financier who was jogging on Kauai. Tripped while picking his nose and landed on his elbow, driving his index finger up through his sinus and into the front of his brain. Vegetative, not expected to revive, but well cared for by his third wife, ten years younger than her brain-dead husband’s youngest son.
“She didn’t want dead,” the little Filipino said. “His family want estate, but she keep everything. She pay some extra.”
Zef laughed like clearing his throat. “You did this? Fok you…”
“We work quiet. Get to anybody.”
“But this… I don’t know, show me something real, like…”
The Filipino made a sound like a flower wilting. Zef saw him nod at a woman behind the counter at the teriyaki place. She came around pushing a mop bucket into the dining area.
Zef looked around and put his hand over his face. The rich bitch from last night sat a few tables away. She wore a suede bikini that would’ve embarrassed a prettier woman half her age. A big go-cup had slopped strawberry daiquiri across the table and she was complaining to someone on the phone. The old woman at the McDonald’s called out her number, but the honeymooner stood up and shouted for someone to bring it to her.
The moment she stood, the Filipino man went behind her and for just a moment, his hand brushed across the back of her chair. Then he took the mop bucket from the woman and got busy. The yaki bowl lady brought the woman her McDonald’s.
She sat down and started to feed her still complaining mouth when she went rigid in the chair. Her back arched so violently that her belly banged the table and flung her Quarter Pounder and strawberry daiquiri all over her piled shopping bags. A breathless, keening death-shriek came corkscrewing out of her, along with a torrent of blood-flecked foam.
The whole food court sprang into action. People at all the adjacent tables got out their phones to take pictures. The Filipino man knelt beside the rich bitch and lifted her head off the table.
The Filipino woman was next to Zef. “Sea wasp,” she whispered. “Very poison.”
“You’re fokking crazy, yo… You gonna get us all caught…”
“Do you believe?”
Zef looked into her eyes, or tried to. Her hair was too thick under the net, like a doll’s hair, and one of her ears looked like melted plastic. Otherwise, she looked exactly like her male partner.
“Okay, fok, you fokking crazy…”
A man shouting that he was a doctor shoved through the press of spectators. The Filipino man took one of the dying woman’s shopping bags and laid her head gently on it. Before the doctor could get to her, the woman was coughing and crying, but she had recovered from her seizure. “The food… it made me sick.”
“She had McDonald’s,” the Filipino woman said.
“Someone call an ambulance,” the doctor said. He was also wearing only a s
wimsuit. Kneeling and checking her eyes, he looked around in disgust. “Doesn’t anyone here know the number for 911?”
“I thought I was dead,” the woman kept saying, “I was having a stroke…”
Zef pushed his tray away. The Filipino guy came over to the chair. In one hand, he had something wrapped up in saran wrap. In the other, he had a syringe. Poison and antidote.
“I’m not paying for that…”
“Just demonstration,” the little guy said. “You believe now.”
Zef’s key card wouldn’t open his room. When he went down to the front counter to get a fresh one, the desk clerk blandly informed him that Marlon Pussybone had checked out. She made it sound classy and French, then paged the concierge to bring out his baggage.
He was storming around the lobby when a blast of tepid sax flatulence came sharting out of his hoodie’s pouch pocket. He whipped his phone out and was about to crush it like a bug when he realized what it was.
Oh shit. Suddenly, he felt strung out again.
“I’d like a progress report.” Sigh of relief. It was only the amateur dentist dick who gave him the underwear.
“I’d like to know what the fok is going on with my hotel…”
“You’re being moved. You’re attracting too much attention.”
“What the fok?”
“A man matching your description was involved in a foot chase and gunfight in Lahaina.”
“I don’t what the fok you’re talking about, man…”
“You don’t watch the local news…?”
“Why should I?”
“You should. This is a small pond. Sudden, violent actions make ripples…”
“I’m not here to watch birds, am I? Yo, tell your boss…”
“There is no ‘boss.’ You work for me.”
Deep breath. “So tell yourself that shit is getting done. You can relax, I always deliver.”
“Yes, I’m looking at your last ‘delivery’ right now. Try not to make such a mess of this one.”
Swallow it. Here came the concierge with his duffel bag, holding it like it had just been fumigated for vermin. “Where am I staying, now?”
The condo was in the midst of Wailea Estates, a gated “secure community” surrounded by a golf course, on the south side of the island. Armed security guard in a pillbox out front might’ve been a mannequin or a cardboard cutout. He didn’t so much as nod when Zef cruised into the lot.
The lap pool on the back lanai was filled ankle-deep with lost golf balls. Dreary tan stucco exterior. Furnished with Ikea showroom leftovers, off-brand kitchen appliances in muted colors that gave the unmistakable impression of punishment. Like this was where the big man kept mistresses who had annoyed or disappointed him. The bookshelves were filled with his self-help books in ten different languages. Pull Your Pants Up, Dawg! Dr. Bill Raps With America’s Youth was left on the bedside nightstand. DVD’s of his best shows and special self-improvement videos were stacked everywhere else.
He turned on the TV and dumped his duffel bag out on the bed. Everything from his room at the Hilton was there, plus a manila envelope too heavy to contain mail. He thumbed it open, giving himself a nasty paper cut that he sucked, cursing, as he let the contents hit the counter.
Five thousand dollars in grubby twenties and hundreds. And in a smaller, white envelope labeled MOTIVATION, three separate sandwich baggies. One contained a bunch of pills; the second a couple dozen thin, machine-rolled joints; the third had almost an ounce of white, crystalline powder.
He stashed it all in his suitcase. Shit would be useful for steering Bagby, maybe, but he would have to keep away from it, himself. He needed to strategize, but his brain was just so much cotton wadding stuffed in his aching head.
The news anchor said a young lady named Mariko who’d come from Osaka to be married was struck in the head by a tumbling bullet and killed instantly on Kaanapali Beach yesterday afternoon while posing for pictures. Authorities were hoping someone would come forward, but while witnesses reported hearing gunshots in nearby Lahaina, the terrible tragedy was unlikely to be solved.
Zef turned off the TV and went to get his iPod and the MOTIVATION bag.
This shit was nothing like the coke Dr. Bill plied him with. Crystalline granules like sea salt that burned his sinuses like sulfuric acid and left his mind doing Tasmanian devil tornadoes around his skull. He figured it had to be ice, or even glass—highly refined, pure, clean crystal meth.
He’d only tapped out a brief bump to take the edge off the unwelcome feeling that he’d had something to do with killing some random Jap chick on her wedding day, but when he realized he wasn’t going to sleep for at least twenty-four hours, he chopped up a fat S-O-S and snorted it and got dressed to go walkabout until he figured out what he was going to do. He rushed into the living room and practically charged into her arms.
“Fok!” He jumped back and knocked over a vase, which he caught, dead ready to beat someone’s head in.
She stood in the open sliding glass door off the lanai. “The front door was locked,” she said with a smile.
It smelled like her, that musty, flowers and spice smell, but this one was younger, maybe half the hag’s age, maybe another of her nieces. Her hair was long, thick and unruly with flowers lost in it, but it was black, not gray.
“Auntie Kalei said you’d need to finish your massage.” Her voice was higher, less husky, but every bit as lascivious.
“I don’t need a massage…”
“You still jacked up from crashing that bike. Auntie made you to heal quick, but you need to finish your cleanse, I promise.”
Now that he thought about it, he probably still should be in a hospital bed. And yet, the bruises all over his body were already yellowing and faded, the countless cuts, contusions and road-rash scabbed over. His nose was still tender and his voice sounded like he had a kazoo shoved up his sinuses, but it seemed to have healed. But was that anything to do with the old witch?
She was gentle, at first almost tickling, like mice running up and down his arms, but it still hurt. In the middle of her work on his back, he cried out with shooting gas pains like corkscrews winding into his belly. He rolled off the bed and barely made it to the bathroom.
It erupted out of his mouth onto the bathmat and the toilet seat. He slipped in it and dropped in the bathtub just when it really got going.
It was runny and nothing like anything he’d ever eaten. He knew without poking around in it that his drugs weren’t in there. It smelled worse than shit or vomit had any right to. It was black. Not like he’d eaten a lot of fungus or even like digested blood, but black, like crankcase oil.
The smell and the taste in his mouth almost made him puke again before he flushed. He felt a surge of endorphins, much more than the brief euphoria of puking up a lot of alcohol, but like he’d purged everything bad, down to his cells. He felt new.
He looked through a crack in the door at her. She looked like Auntie Kalei just enough, and she made him feel the way he felt on Oahu, like his balls were full of lead shot. Only worse. He’d thought he was losing his shit when he felt that way about an old witch, like a weird response to panic and maybe responding sexually to someone he recognized and hoped might help him.
He tried all his sexual defense tricks against her. He tried to picture her as a man. Couldn’t.
Sweat gleamed on the ripeness of her body as she disrobed, stripping down to a camisole and panties and pouring scented oil onto her hands.
He pictured his mother, but it didn’t help, even when he imagined her in the throes of a herpes outbreak. Your father’s little dividend from his last boy’s holiday, she called it. Sores so bad she sometimes had to wear a veil.
It didn’t help a bit.
“Come back and lay down,” she said, rubbing her hands together. He noticed a bandage around one hand.
He came over with the towel tented in front of him and dove onto the bed on his belly.
“No,” she said, giggl
ing. “Turn over.”
“You’ve been cleansed,” she said, when he was falling asleep, “but still not purified. You should pray.”
Irritable, he said, “Pray to who?”
“Whoever you believe in.”
Sitting up too fast, he hit the headboard and a Chinese edition of Pull Your Pants Up, Dawg! fell in his lap. “I don’t believe in shit that don’t exist.”
“You don’t need faith in shit that do exist. Faith in something, or he eat you up.”
“If I can’t do it myself, then maybe I’ll try praying.”
Hodad showed up early with a bag of fresh scallops and a hibachi, and had Zef grilling on the lanai before the other guests arrived for lunch.
“Pissing down rain out there, man!” He came close enough that Zef wanted to cover his mouth. He was soaked, but it was sunny outside.
“Hey,” Hodad whispered, “who’s that smoking hot wahine, with, like, only flowers for a bikini?”
“What the fok? What the fok you mean, man?”
“In the kitchen, making poi! She yours, man?”
“Get out of here, fok…”
Zef went into the kitchen. Auntie Kalei was cooking that starchy purple shit again. She blew him a big toothless kiss.
Zef remembered falling asleep next to the girl just before dawn, thinking he should be up for twenty-four hours off the ice he snorted, but content, clean and strong.
She was gone when he woke up, of course. He’d done a tiny bump in the bathroom to fortify his wits and chemically reaffirm his confidence in the Plan that he’d figured out between fucking and crashing. Now, his brain felt like a stainless steel paperweight and his hands wanted to feed somebody some teeth. Now, he was jerky and prone to babble and worst of all, he was starting to feel warmly towards these psycho pieces of shit.
“Get out,” he said.
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