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  Praise for Cody Goodfellow:

  “Cody Goodfellow’s imagination is a freeway flyer, and his prose is a ride on a rocket-sled. He’s one of the two or three god-damned best writers in the Genres today.” --MICHAEL SHEA, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Nifft the Lean and Copping Squid

  “Goodfellow’s voice sweeps you away like the undertow of a tsunami, and once you’re in, he’s got you pinned.” ––MICHAEL ARNZEN, author of Grave Markings

  “One of the best writers of our generation.”

  —BRIAN KEENE, author of The Rising and Dark Hollow

  A Broken River Books original

  Broken River Books

  103 Beal Street

  Norman, OK 73069

  Copyright © 2014 by Cody Goodfellow

  Cover art copyright © 2013 by Mike Dubisch

  http://mikedubischart.webs.com/

  Cover design copyright © 2014 by Matthew Revert

  www.matthewrevert.com

  Interior design by J David Osborne

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Where the names of actual celebrities or corporate entities appear, they are used for fictional purposes and do not constitute assertions of fact. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-1-940885-10-0

  Printed in the USA.

  BROKEN RIVER BOOKS

  NORMAN, OK

  For Tim,

  Ali’i of Agoura

  “It’s a pity you can’t savor a bit of their very sweet language. They sing, ‘Welcome, welcome, strong and handsome white man. Welcome, welcome, seductive and beautiful white woman. You will teach me the secret of your elegance, wherefore you can seduce your men. I will teach you the secret of my dance, wherefore I seduce mine.’”

  — Narrator, Mondo Cane (1962).

  Aloha ino oe, eia ibonei paha oe e make ai, ke ai mainei Pele.

  (“Compassion great to you! Close here, perhaps, is your death; Pele comes devouring.”)

  —from “Pele And Kahawali” in Ellis’s Tour Of Hawaii.

  The kid in 318 was making the whole hotel nervous.

  Horse-faced, whippet-skinny, with a brackish accent like a blend of Australian and Dutch via extensive and inexpert orthodontic surgery. Jailhouse tats on his knuckles and slithering up his wrists like toxic smoke from a plastic fire under the cuffs of his Upper Playground hoodie. Room reserved for a three-day stay by somebody local, premium no limit high roller treatment in the third cheapest hotel in Waikiki. Only chumps and crooks and diehard fans of Dog The Bounty Hunter stayed at the Illikoi, and nobody ever, even at the peak of tourist season, made reservations.

  He coughed an ugly noise for a name and inked an illegible graffiti tag on the register. Took his key-card and a pair of bulky but suspiciously light suitcases and went to his room, then around the corner to the nearest ABC Store. Returned a half hour later with two deluxe shopping bags and holed up in Room 318. An hour later, one of Wo Fuk’s third-string girls slinked through the lobby and up the back stairs. Half an hour later, the furniture started flying.

  Awakening a sleepwalker was once widely supposed to be dangerous, but no such helpful old wives’ tales exist about interrupting a man engrossed in what the kids call “pillbugging,” or giving himself a blowjob.

  The prostitute was trying to break down the hotel room door with the fire extinguisher. Drunk, dumb and clumsy as she was, her aim was bad. Huge wrecking-ball holes in the plaster. A day-glo slanderscape of Diamond Head fell to the burnt orange shag carpet. If she wasn’t so wasted, she might have noticed that the door was unlocked. Bitch polished off a fifth of Malibu and a sickening vanilla cigar before she even quoted him a rate. Zef should’ve got off the bed and let her out, but he was busy.

  He had to get off, and she was just smothering him. When he shoved her off the bed and threw her clothes at her, he meant for her to take her cash and leave, but she sloshed into the bathroom to top off her sinuses before the next john. When she came out and saw him curled up in the winter lotus position in the middle of the bed, she quite understandably freaked out.

  Zef was well aware he was tweaking out the whole hotel. You don’t become a living weapon, an elite repo ninja, without noticing your effect on regular people on the rare occasions when you must slip out of the shadows. It’s so easy to forget that the natural abilities you’ve come to take for granted are extraordinary or even frightening to others. In many parts of the world, he could probably still be burned as a witch, if suckers could catch him.

  For instance, most men in a similar predicament would probably finish themselves off manually or perhaps into the stolen underpants of the source of disappointment and frustration. But few men were as resourceful as Zef DeGroot, or as limber.

  So, confronted with the sight of her disgruntled trick rolled up like a garden hose and somehow deep-throating himself, she must’ve thought he was having a seizure. She picked him up by his ophidian hips and shook him.

  Zef bit himself where he could afford it least. Arms and legs windmilling, he caught a dresser with one foot and sent them careening backwards into the window air conditioner, which popped out of its housing and fell three stories to smash on the concrete apron just short of the pool.

  By now, a crowd had gathered on the surrounding balconies and around the pool, even the semi-permanent inhabitants of the swim-up bar. When the hooker came out cursing in Cantonese and a pair of coral pink stirrup leggings, the whole hotel gave her a standing ovation.

  Zef watched through a slit in the curtains. “Fok,” he grumbled, “bitch blew my cover.”

  The whole point of holing up in the Illikoi was to be invisible until he leapt out of the shadows to strike. Such was his reputation that no one would dismiss his appearance in Honolulu as just another badass on vacation. Zef DeGroot had been summoned by the powers of darkness to execute a commission of the highest urgency. Hawaii wasn’t shit but another job. Everybody in America dreamed of blocking a toilet in Hawaii, but everybody in Hawaii wanted to go to Vegas.

  But ever since he got off the plane, he couldn’t so much as think about the mission. He couldn’t get his nut off, couldn’t even pass the vacuum-sealed plastic bag lodged somewhere in his lower intestine, not even after popping enough Maalox to move Gibraltar.

  Fok.

  The Christmas tree in the Illikoi’s lobby didn’t look decorated so much as it seemed to have lost an ornament fight. Lopsided garlands of gold tinsel made the flocked Douglas fir look like it was slowly tipping over, and the tacky tiki ornaments had been fired into it at high velocity with clear malicious intent. With a tree that nice, Zef could understand why they’d want to leave it up halfway through February.

  He took a deep breath of the breeze, trying to have a vacation moment. The air smelled nice. Low tide added a gamey bite to the desert-clean air rolling in off the waves, and some sweet yet tangy floral aroma gave it a lovely tropical flavor.

  See, was that so hard? He felt so relaxed he could hardly hear his own pulse drowning out the surf and the slack key guitar muzak and the tinnitus from the fucking flight over.

  He asked the bellhop about what kind of flowers made the smell in the lobby and he just gave him a weird look. “Those flowers don’t smell, brah,” he said, pointing to the elaborate helliconia and bird of paradise displays on low tables throughout the lobby.

  “But the smell, it’s like perfume,” Zef s
aid, waving his hand around and trying not to look like a fag. “It’s, you know, pretty…”

  The bellhop nodded and winked and went away. He came back with a dishrag that he was pouring something on. The perfume smell came on way too strong. It was tile sealant. Winking again, he handed Zef the folded rag. Zef gave him five bucks but threw the rag in the trash.

  The guy at the bar didn’t want to tell him where to find a decent whore, and he didn’t even know what Ecstasy was. A leathery old Jersey Jew covered in melanomas, he had that spacey passive arrogance of all the old-school island transplants.

  “You came here on a jet, right? When I came out here, when I was still a haole, people still did the cruise ships. That way was better. A whole week of nothing but a blue void, man… you need that to clear your mental palate, to be ready for this.”

  Zef looked out at Waikiki, as dirty, loud and crowded as the Strip. “It has its peculiarities, but big cities are all...”

  “I don’t mean Honolulu, man. I mean the islands. They call it America, but it’s soooo not. America is a layer of plastic shrink-wrap over the islands, but you can wander off the tourist track and fall through a hole into a whole other world. It’s like getting trapped under ice, but you won’t ever want to come back.”

  Zef finished his drink and noticed people staring at him. His stomach rumbled, bitching about the syrupy booze and the blockage and the shitty airplane Salisbury steak that still hadn’t found its way out of him. He was a skinny guy with a metabolism like a coyote.

  “Relax, brah,” the old Jew said with a horrid fake island accent. “You on island time now.” A stupid capped grin split his death-freckled face. His teeth looked like they were carved out of soap.

  Eyes left, right, and nobody was looking. Zef tossed a twenty on the counter and left a finger on it. When the bartender came in to snatch it, Zef leaned over the bar and headbutted him so hard he rebounded off the sink behind him and dropped out of sight like a hand puppet.

  He left the twenty. He wasn’t a dick, or anything.

  In the lobby, when he asked for messages, the Hindi desk clerk tossed him a cheap cell phone.

  “It’s been ringing for an hour,” the clerk said. Zef frowned. There’d been a smiling Hawaiian wahine working when he checked in. This guy had the give-no-fucks attitude of an owner’s immediate family, and now the lobby stank of curry.

  Zef hit redial. Harv answered, “Howzit?”

  Harv was one of Zef’s dad’s mates back in Johannesburg. Old-school uniform cops, all less than five years from their pension when the shit hit the fan in South Africa. Apartheid got scrapped and they emigrated in a group, pooled their resources and bought Nevada businesses and real estate with Springbok gym bags filled with Krugerrands. Harv ran the top towing and repo outfit in Vegas that wasn’t Mob- or Mormon-owned. He was one of those jolly, giant guys who’s always super nice and helpful because he once lost control so bad, he still scares himself. Like his hands could go berserk at any minute and start breaking people like eggs for no fucking reason. Like he’s trying to keep an angry dog in the back of his head from biting your hands off.

  The agency didn’t have an office in Honolulu, and if they could work with the local repo men, they wouldn’t have had to send out for Zef. Shit like this wasn’t supposed to be a problem on an island.

  “Where’s my car?”

  Harv was probably dicking around with Google Earth. “Across the street, in the lot, but you won’t need it. Look at the phone. Familiarize yourself with its functionality.” Like a lot of old-school Afrikaaners, Harv dug over-pronouncing Latinate diction, and like most dumb cops, he thought big words made him sound smarter.

  The map had a bunch of icons on it, little digital pins spread all over Oahu. Outside the city, there was nothing but Army bases, tract homes, golf courses and cane fields and country. Zef groaned. His quarry had a lot of friends in the middle of nowhere. “Those are his known associates’ localities. He seems to not have a permanent address. He was born in the Waipio Valley on the big island.”

  Outside, the air was two parts tropical perfume and four parts auto exhaust and diarrhea. The lot across from the hotel had nothing but rental Mustangs and minivans. A huge banyan tree sprouted from the ruined pavement and cast the whole lot in a green, sweaty shade. It was practically raining pigeon and parrot shit.

  “Which car?”

  “Yellow Mustang. Key in a casket under the rear driver’s wheel well, or else somebody…” The thought terminated in a crush of gritting teeth.

  “Relax, unclefucker. It’s here.” In the car on the street, he asked, “Why did somebody have to come all the way out here, dick?”

  “We needed a rock star.”

  Zef hung up.

  Dad could give him the really real, but Dad was currently facing off with the LVPD over the apparent suicide of Doug Zweibel, the douche who owned the hotel chain that ran the Illikoi.

  Zef didn’t really need to know why, but it did give him pause that nobody local would touch the fucking guy. It was an island, for fuck’s sake; soap in a bathtub. Zef knew only as much as he needed to. Curiosity seldom paid off in this business. Get in, get the goods, get out… but you don’t steal somebody’s car without getting a taste of their life.

  The deadbeat’s legal name was Pauwalu Don Nanaue—54, no criminal record—but everybody called him Donny Punani. He came out to Vegas the month prior and stayed at Caesars for the long holiday weekend. High roller suite and food and everything, and they never billed him for any of it. He bought the Harley in Vegas and drove it to LA, then sent it air-freight back to Honolulu. Somewhere along the line, his credit turned out to be fairy gold, and the dealer wanted the bike back.

  Easiest kind of grab, but apparently, this Donny Punani was some kind of big deal in the islands. The locals were scared. Fine. Zef DeGroot didn’t run on island time. He’d have it done and be back at the airport before the fat pineapple-head knew it was missing.

  He thought he could unwind and enjoy a vacation, but this place had his ass puckered even harder than home. It came across all syrupy and serene like, but little things snowballed into big things until the whole place seemed out to fuck him over. He didn’t like the way they said, “on Oahu,” instead of “in.” Nobody lived on Los Angeles or on New York. The subtle distinction made it feel like he wasn’t in a place, but on top of something that could get washed away or just sink back into the sea.

  The language wasn’t doing him any favors, either. It sounded pretty exotic at first, but the fuckers only used like half the alphabet, so the words stuttered and repeated like a baby babbling—Wai-napanapa, Havapipi…

  OK, some of them were kind of dope.

  Nobody hung a lei or planted a kiss on him at the airport, either.

  Before he started the car, he thought about it for a few minutes, then switched to a prepaid phone and called Primo. Fuck it. He always worked better under a deadline.

  Primo came to Vegas to deal cards, but like a lot of transients, he was less than religious with paying his bills. Zef’s colleague Finley snapped up his Corvette in front of Primo’s condo in the north end, and Primo came after him on a little 500cc dirt bike. Pacing him across the golf course, jumping the fence and passing him on the freeway at four thirty in the fucking morning. Got sideways in front of the ‘vette so Finley had to stop, and this crazy fucking Hawaiian rolls up to his window and goes, “Hey, you like to party?”

  He wasn’t sore about the car at all, but he really needed the briefcase full of weed and blow under the spare tire in the trunk. Finley let him take it and Primo hooked him up, which he knew would be no fun without someone to stay up with, so he hooked Zef up, too. Primo stayed in touch with Finley for a couple weeks before he went back home, but Zef only met him once. He fronted all kinds of shit for the hotel trade, but harped on how they couldn’t get decent E in Hawaii. He may or may not have fucked up a transaction with the Mexicans, so he was the only Hawaiian who didn’t want to go back to L
as Vegas.

  “Yo, Primo.”

  Dope-addled pidgin English, thick with sleep. “Eh, brah. Who this?”

  “Zef, man, like… Finley’s friend… He told you I’d call, you know… when I was, like…”

  The silence was like thick, sucking mud. “Right, when you comin’ out? Soon, yeah? We get fucked up then, I promise.”

  “Yo, I’m already out here now, man.”

  “Fuck… really? No way! Did the Fin come with you?”

  “No, I’m here for work, but like… yo, did he tell you what I was bringing?”

  Zef could practically smell the burning gears through the phone line. The sleepy accent dropped like a mask. “How many you got? How pure is it?”

  “Two hundred stamped tabs of pure from Amsterdam. Can you move that weight?”

  “Not right away… You brought it with you?”

  “Yeah. It’s… close by.”

  “Alright, listen… yeah. I get one bad feeling about you, I don’t just walk away. I’m not a guy to fuck with on this rock, you know?”

  Zef’s voice snuck out of his mouth. “Yes—Yeah… Fok, man… I want twenty each.”

  “Get fucked, you think I’m Japanese? Twelve.”

  “Yo, I’m not paying you to take them. I’m wise to how much it fetches, over here. Eighteen or go to hell—”

  “Shit, who else you think you can sell this shit to? You know anybody else in Honolulu, white boy? You don’t even know me.”

  Zef waited for a counter-offer, but the sleepy breathing on the other end was like a saw on his nerves. “Sixteen,” he finally said.

  “Do better.”

  “Fifteen, and fok you, fokking fok.”

  “Tomorrow midnight, for shuah. I let you know where later.”