He counted off. In all, there were nineteen graves without headstones or any markings at all in the clearing. Taking the rental car contract from his pocket, he opened it.
Casimir’s lawnmower was close, just around the side of the hotel front, so he unfolded the thin folder quickly, seeing that the top of contract identified the vehicle as “Borgoña y rojo cuatro puerta Chevrolet Impala.” Burgundy-red four-door Chevrolet Impala.
“The hell, boy,” Casimir yelled at him over the harsh mower sounds. “What are you doing there?”
Kazu stuffed the envelope in his pocket and crawled from the tunnel.
Casimir sounded angry, but looked frightened, perhaps unnerved or uncertain. He took a moment to choose anger and barked at Kazu.
“You wander, you screw off, you don’t get paid. Should I fire you?” He climbed down off the seat and walked over with a strong sway of shoulders for his diminutive shape.
“Just climbed in a ways for a bit of shade,” Kazu lied smoothly. “Sat there for a few minutes.”
Casimir’s eyes were half hidden by his downward arched brow. He pushed Kazu aside and peered inside the dent in the sea-grape wall.
“Just a break, eh?” Some of the edge of anger was gone.
“A break, yes. I’m back to work right now. Please,” he added, “I really need the job.”
Looking mollified, but still worried, Casimir studied Kazu with a disappointed frown.
“Work four more lengths then go take lunch in the basement,” he ordered and returned to his lawnmower.
Kazu watched him round the yellow hotel to the west and assumed he was headed for the long strip of lawn between the hotel and the beach. With his fingers brushing the envelope in his pocket, Kazu returned to his ladder and tools.
Kazu ate a soggy tuna-fish sandwich and drank two reused cups of Pepsi with no ice seated on a run of aluminum AC ducting in the cool of the basement. With the first echoing booms of thunderclaps carrying from the basement side doors, he relaxed. From the day before, he knew that all outdoor work stopped for an hour or two when the daily rains and lightning ran their course.
Returning to his little apartment of sparse and worn-out furnishings, he tried the desk light. It was dead. Breathing the chilled and flavored air from a wall vent, he opened his sketch pads. He reviewed the prior day’s pencil sketches and inked images without touching a pen or pencil. There was Jappy in various poses within the locked cargo hold of the pirate ship. And there was the girl, the newly discovered partner, half penciled and partially inked—her minimally detailed, adorable face above her ripe and pert breasts.
‘Kiki.’ He breathed the flavored air, the name coming to him out of the clouds at the top of his brain. He liked the name immediately and wrote it out. ‘Kiki’ looked and sounded like a perfect name for the girl.
Hand sharpening a fresh pencil, he experimented with ‘Jappy and Kiki,’ ‘Jappy & Kiki,’ and ‘Kiki an’ Jappy.’ Mentally setting that decision aside, he let his mind percolate on storyline and elements and panel sequencing.
Before letting himself fully immerse into the story, he pulled out the stolen phone charger and cabled his old Nokia and plugged it into the desktop outlet. Hearing the initial ping of recharging start, he settled into his artwork. The curiosity with the burnt rental car agreement was set aside like other worldly concerns.
“An hour, maybe two, before the skies clear.”
Jappy and the sexy Kiki explored the tool shelves and constructed weapons and found saws for their escape to the upper deck of the pirate ship. He wrote a side note about the future color pallet, Let’s use dark brown woods, weak lantern light, purple shadows.
He sketched three new scenes ignoring a blunt fist pounding on the apartment door. Departing footsteps followed.
“You’re a wreck. I think I love you.” He gave Kiki her first line of dialogue and sat back grinning as he read the line two more times.
“Only wreck is what I’m going to do to the pirates.” He penciled Jappy’s next line of dialogue. The line was close but too long and not ready for ink.
He pressed on with the story. confident that the editing of the dialogue and the next parts of the story would arrive from that mysterious place near the roof of his brain.
An hour passed.
There was a second heavy knock on the door and this time he allowed it to interrupt. Realizing he had been on rain break for nearly two hours, he closed the image-novel. Turning on his chair, he reached for his old Nokia to check on his savings account. Instead, he stood and eased alongside the foot of the bed to the door where a vibrant yellow card lay on the chipped concrete.
25
Yellow card in hand, Kazu climbed the stairs to the lobby and located the business office up a hall behind the reception desk. Passing the closed door of an infirmary, he entered a door with ‘Management’ stenciled on the beaded glass. There was a modern and orderly secretary’s desk in front of the next door with a second, smaller desk off to the left.
A shirtless, tan, and fit man in his twenties sat at the centered desk typing away on a keyboard with a telephone in the crook of his neck. His hair was shoulder length and the color of wheat, and his handsome face was marred only by frustration as he spoke patiently to the caller. If he saw Kazu at all, he gave no hint.
The girl seated at the desk to the left looked naked at first, the open folder in her lap covering her swimsuit top. Her eyes were down and covered by the spill of wavy brunette hair. She was talking to herself in a soft and husky voice. She appeared much younger than the guy and had delicious caramel smooth skin. Pulling out the page she was looking for, she closed the file and revealed her bikini-covered, full and upright breasts. The slender hills of her thin shoulders and arms framed her sexually attractive upper body. Kazu stepped to her desk.
“Hello,” he said, feeling surprisingly timid, struck by her sensual beauty.
“Help you, bro?” the male secretary called over.
Kazu turned away slowly, reluctantly, holding up the yellow card.
“Oh. Just a sec, let me check.” He interrupted the call at his ear with, “Your yellow card is here. Yes, sure, and of course, I apologize.”
“She’ll see you now.” He covered the mouthpiece, studying Kazu in his worn work clothing.
Kazu walked around the side of the desk.
“Warning, she’s in an angry panic,” the secretary said. “Same old espresso buzz to kill the hangover. Be careful, she eats her young.”
The office was much larger than necessary as all it contained was a three-sided desk in the middle of bare yellow walls without decorations. The carpet was pale purple. The teak desk was covered with mounds of spilling files and computer monitors. Open and untouched food containers and espresso cups and stagnant drink glasses were everywhere.
Constance Snapp sat facing the left side of the U-shaped desk, examining a half-page advertisement in a travel magazine. Two towers of Condé Nast and like magazines were in sloppy stacks. A third tower of lurid Mexican newspapers leaned, the top paper folded open to the classified listings of vacation destinations.
“Ka Choo,” she spoke with a slur, her trembling fingers tapping the glossy page.
“Kazu, yes.” He extended his hand.
“I’m sticking with Ka Choo. You’re a small sneeze of a boy.”
Kazu followed her gaze to the open magazine to the image of the Surf Or… Hotel, looking exclusive and beautiful. The image was surely the original architectural concept illustration.
She closed the Condé Nast.
“That’s okay.” He masked the distaste from her almost funny wordplay.
Keeping her shoulders facing the side desk, she rotated her head slowly, theatrically, as though a distant but important memory had beckoned.
“Take off the shades. Stolen, I’m sure,” she said.
Her chair pivoted around, and she studied Kazu with penetrating eyes while placing her hands flat on the desk. Seeing her left hand for the first tim
e up close, he saw that it wasn’t real but made of smooth latex.
“Yep, the hand that feeds you, ar ar ar. I was my fourth husband’s left-hand man. That gypsy had excellent business sense. Good in bed, but I was better. Cruel negotiator. When we settled the divorce, the gypsy offered the hotel. With a single condition. I’m a tough and smart broad and took it. Bite off the hand that fed me, so to speak.”
Her telephone buzzed and blinked, causing her to twitch in reaction. She scowled at it with wet lips.
“You’ve been asking around about that piece of shit Billy Hamil. Why?”
Caught off guard but already accepting her this-way-and-that run of thoughts, Kazu measured out a lie.
“He’s a friend. Not a close one. When I was a kid…”
“You are a kid.”
“Yes, I read about him in a surfer magazine. His smooth style, hatred of contests, letting the biggest waves go.”
“Yes, all that. Undeserved fame. I would have set the world on fire if I had chosen that sport. Or any sport. Turn a million heads. You can forget about him now. He’s a no-show. Betcha he’s washed up drunk in some gutter bar.” Changing tact with a half breath, she went on, her words slippery from drink, “Get a couple of clean shirts from my gift shop. They’ll bill you. Sand’s got you your own apartment. You’ll be billed for that as well. You’ll do whatever Sand tells you.”
She took a long pull of clear liquid in a glass and shuddered with a grimace.
“Unlike those Mexicans.” Her eyelashes were thick and black from makeup. They blinked twice over her lovely eyes. “Those retarded children. Their church won’t allow abortions. Too bad…”
Kazu frowned at the angry edge of her voice.
“You listen to Sand. Do whatever he says. Now leave, I’ve got important things to do.”
She slid her chair back. The loose goose skin under both arms swayed. He saw her swollen beer belly.
Kazu backpedaled to the door and left Constance answering her buzzing telephone, biting into the caller, no greeting.
“You gotta hand it to that midget ‘cause he can’t reach, ar ar ar.”
The handsome surfer was absent from his secretary desk, his voice coming from an open side door. Kazu looked for another glimpse of the sexy, caramel-skinned beauty to the right, but she was also away. He stepped to her desk anyway and leaning over, breathed in the air of her work area.
“Peeled orange and spices,” he decided, pulling on his rounded sunglasses.
Her distinctive, sandpaper voice carried from the side room, husky and angry and also amused, “Not even, boy toy. Get back to work.”
Walking across the lobby to the basement stairs, the girl was already working in his creative mind. She would be the model for the magical and sexy Kiki in his new image-novel.
A lingering fear and worry remained from his first face to face with the hotel owner, but thoughts of Jappy and Kiki’s adventures soon erased that. Heading back out to work with Casimir, it came to him that his two fictional characters trapped in the hold of the pirate ship would have a night alone.
“Begin with their first soft kiss.”
Jappy and Kiki’s hands would begin a heated exploration of each other’s bodies.
26
When the sun set that evening, Kazu finished trimming a fifty-yard stretch of endless-reaching jungle branches and vines. He wheeled the ladder and tools to the shed, sweaty and dirty, his fingers stained green. Rounding to the west side of the hotel, he watched the top of the sun sink into the blue Pacific beyond the sweep of white sand.
A party had gathered steam on the topside deck and in the swimming pool. Waiters were busy at the barrel barbecues and the outdoor kitchen behind the buffet on twelve-foot tables. Complimentary punch bowls were out on carts among the crowd on the top deck, ice chunks floating in the liquor-scented juice. Slow and languid tropical music poured from speakers set low to the ground among the couches and tables. The end of the day was marked by tall flaming lanterns. Kazu climbed the side stairs with his head down and slipped inside the lobby doors.
In the gift shop, he avoided the brilliant yellow t-shirts, finding a short stack of black long- sleeve shirts with yellow Surf Or… Hotel logos. The sales clerk rang up the two he held and placed the receipt in a metal box marked ‘Tabs.’
Wanting a shower but desiring a Pepsi, he carried the shirts out onto the top deck. His safe-cracking buddy, Sand, was at the greeting podium filling in as host.
“In the shadows, I assume?” Sand smiled, leading Kazu to a loveseat to the far side of the buffet tables—one of the few not warmed by a lantern.
“Avoid the punch,” Sand advised. “Stuff is pure launch fuel.” He headed back through the crowd to his hosting podium.
Kazu set the shirts on his low table and walked the side steps down into the pool, descending the white tiles until he was chest deep in the sparkling clean water. He took his cap and sunglasses off and fully submerged.
Cooled and his skin refreshed, he put his sunglasses back on and waded to the vacant corner stool at the edge of the bar. He didn’t sit but stood patiently with cap dripping, waiting for any of the five bartenders to notice him.
A few minutes later, he ordered. “I’d like two cans of Pepsi, a bowl of ice, a glass, a plate, and a cheese grater, please.”
The young woman behind the bar nodded along without comment. She had an innocent, sensual beauty with a sly smile and a distant, distracted gaze.
The swim bar crowd was older surfers with their odd hats and splayed-out cash on the teak bar. They were talking insistently among themselves when not speaking softly to the beautiful young women and girls in wet swimsuits beside each.
The girl seated to the left before him turned and looked him over, giving him a merry smile, but not her eyes. Her bare shoulders were surfer strong, and her skin was tanned chocolate. “Avoiding the death punch? Wise.” She swung back around to the stocky man at her right side.
When his order was placed on the side of the bar, Kazu said, “Thank you. Can you put it on my tab?”
“You sign the bill, and I sure will.”
He watched her weave away among her fellow bartenders, all friendly, chatting, and barely dressed.
On the edge of the bar, he shaved the ice and slid it into the large glass. He carried the two soda cans and glass back across the water and up the side steps.
Back at his loveseat, he studied the woman in her forties on a couch ten feet away. She was being entertained by a handsome young man in clean, bright yellow Surf Or… Hotel shorts. Kazu noted the pale circle on the woman’s ring finger. Her befuddled gaze caught Kazu’s, and her smile tightened away, clearly not liking a boy watching her.
Kazu looked down and opened a can of Pepsi and poured it slowly into the shaved ice. While the party out before him grew even more boisterous, he delighted in the first sip and savored the sugary cold flowing down his throat and chest and belly.
Pouring from the second can, he spoke to the glass, “This one, slower.”
His thoughts of dinner were stirred by the barbecuing meat smoke drifting through the crowd. Looking in that direction, he didn’t see the tipsy surfer spill onto his loveseat, causing it to scratch back a couple of inches.
“Esellent landing,” the surfer slurred, completely ignoring Kazu, his unfocused blue eyes to the young girl whose hand he had managed to keep hold of.
Kazu recognized the girl by the floral pattern of her bikini top and her smooth caramel skin and curly brunette hair. With her falling hair, he hadn’t fully seen her face in Constance Snapp’s office. His first look sucked the breath from his chest.
Displeased by the guy’s rough tug on her hand, her smile cringed to one side before filling out. “Gentle,” she told the drunk.
Kazu looked into her beautiful cocoa eyes seeing their intelligent sparkle.
An elbow plowed into his ribs.
“Get off my couch, employee,” the guy growled, the words slippery.
; Kazu barked in pain and bent over coughing.
The surfer’s drink spilled from his free hand, splashing Kazu’s knee and shin. Still coughing, he heard more of the girl’s voice—husky, yet smooth music admonishing the drunk.
“No more of that, surfer boy, or I’ll walk.”
“You’ll walk… After you suck my…”
The surfer bellowed in pain.
Kazu’s hand was in the surfer’s lap locked around his testicles, crushing them together. The drunk’s leg shot out, and he screamed. Kazu didn’t relent. Instead, he squeezed tighter. The surfer’s shoulder cocked back to fire a punch, his yells drawing attention from the evening partiers.
Kazu hefted his clench on the guy’s balls. The shoulder sagged, and the surfer’s eyes went skyward, his chin up, his next scream trailing off to a whimpered, “Please…”
“No, I don’t think so,” Kazu said calmly. “You need this memory to last.”
The guy let out an anguished groan and bent forward.
The girl didn’t say a word.
The surfer sobbed and garbled, “Please, please.” Kazu looked up to her. Her dazzling brown eyes were steady, taking in all of Kazu, ignoring the guy in his grasp.
Two waiters ran up to the table and tried to break up Kazu and the drunk. Kazu ignored their efforts to ply them apart, his gaze on the girl’s sly smile.
“Who are you?” she asked in her sandpaper voice.
“Kazu Danser,” he answered over the top of the struggle, seeing the gap to the side in her fine, white teeth. Three teeth were missing from the back left, almost marring her smile. He admired the fact that her beauty wasn’t perfect.
A waiter punched Kazu in the chest. Another struck the side of his head, knocking off his sunglasses. Kazu released his hold on the whimpering surfer’s balls but not because of the blows.
“That’ll last,” he said to the girl.
The waiters raised the guy to his feet and escorted him away, his body hunched over.
The Girl in the Hotel Page 15