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“They told you that?”

Jack looked at his son. “Not in those words. You gotta read between the lines.”

Stanley heaved a sigh. Why was his father so difficult? Why was it always nicer when he wasn't around?

“What did he say?”

“He said no.”

“No?”

Jack nodded. “That's what the big man on campus said.”

“So what're we gonna do?”

“I was trying to arrange an alternative. That's why I needed the money wired ASAP.” Jack sounded tired.

“What kind of alternative?”

“The kind you don't want to know about.”

Stanley crossed his arms and looked his father in the eye. “Dad, I want to help. But you've got to let me in on it.”

“I can't.”

“Why not?”

Jack realized that Stanley wasn't going to budge, so he changed the subject.

“You got the phones working?”

“Of course.”

“I need to make a call.”

Stanley led Jack past the large plate-glass window, with its magnificent view of downtown Honolulu, swaying palm
trees and ocean glistening in the background, to a small office.

“Check out the view, Dad.”

Jack stopped himself from snapping at Stanley. He paused to look at the view. “That's nice.”

He meant it. Jack entered the office and turned to close the door after him. Stanley was surprised.

“I need to make the call in private.”

Stanley was instantly suspicious. “Why? What did you do?”

Jack sighed. “Stanley. Trust me. You don't want to know.”

And with that he closed the door.

...

Keith had been sitting in his rental car for four hours. In fact, he could've sat there for days. It didn't bother him. He was patient. Good hunters always are.

Keith rigged the dome light so it wouldn't turn on when he opened the door. He slipped out of the car and walked up toward Sid Tanumafili's house. Keith had been watching it since Sid came home at six o'clock. Since then, all he'd seen or heard was the flicker of a TV set and the occasional flushing of a toilet during the commercials.

He could've killed him. It would've been easy. Sid didn't keep his door locked, and it would've taken Keith only a minute to enter and exit. Sid would've been found lying on the couch with a broken neck. The neighbors wouldn't have heard a thing. They wouldn't have seen a thing. But Keith hadn't worked out his exit strategy. He didn't want surveillance
cameras at the airport catching him trying to go standby back to the mainland. That would give the police too easy a time frame. What he wanted to do was disappear Sid's body. Let it wash up on the beach two weeks after he'd gone back to Vegas. Something like that. He still had to work out the details.

Keith crept along the outside of Sid's house and peered in the kitchen window. He noticed a few empty bottles of Kona beer in the sink, a dirty plate, a Zojirushi fuzzy logic rice cooker, and a handgun on the counter.

The handgun gave him pause. A Smith & Wesson nine-millimeter semiautomatic police issue is a fairly serious weapon, not something your average joe uses for home protection. It signaled to Keith that Sid had some experience.

Keith went back to his car. It had been a long day, and he realized that he'd have to spend the next few days running some intensive background checks. He wanted to know if Sid had been in the military or, worse, if he'd been a policeman. It meant a day of boring paperwork. That was the stuff Keith hated the most. To do it correctly without leaving a trail means creating a maze of information requests to mask the one you really want. It was dreary, tedious, and time-consuming. But if it turned out that Sid had been a cop or a marine, Keith would abort the mission. A murdered cop, even a retired one, would bring too much heat. And a marine? Forget about it. Keith was
semper fi
all the way.

...

Jack watched as Stanley ate some kind of weird-named fish. It was snapper, but they didn't call it that. They called it
uku
or
moi, onaga
or
opakapaka.
And when you said, “What the fuck is that?” they always told you it was some kind of snapper. Like the Eskimos with three hundred words for snow, the Hawaiians had three hundred words for snapper.

“You're not hungry?”

Jack looked down at his food. He'd ordered chicken and wasn't quite convinced that chicken was what they'd brought him. Maybe it was a kind of snapper.

“I ate on the plane.” Jack drained his beer and signaled the waitress for another.

“You want to try some of this?”

“I'm sick of fuckin' fish. All they eat here is fish, fish, fuckin' fish. I eat any more fish I'm gonna vomit.”

“It's an island in the middle of the ocean.”

Jack shot Stanley a look. Stanley shrugged.

“At least it's fresh.” He tried to change the subject. “So what do you think of the new office?”

“It needs a ramp.”

“We'll get one.”

“And rails in the bathroom. I had to claw my way up the wall after taking a shit.”

“I already ordered 'em.”

Jack nodded. His beer arrived, and he proceeded to drink it as quickly as possible.

“You okay?”

“I'm fine.”

But the truth was, Jack wasn't fine. He was anxious, he'd lost his appetite, his palms were clammy, and he was constipated. He hardly responded to the signals being sent to his brain by his constant erection. He was obsessed with two distinct and unpleasant possibilities looming in his future. In
scenario number one, the creepy fountain-obsessed hitman does the job and then kills Jack because he refuses to pay him. In scenario number two, Jack has to go to the fuzz and plea-bargain to save his life. He'd trade protection and life for a conviction of soliciting a murder-for-hire. He'd go to the slammer; he knew that. Wouldn't that be fun? How could he explain his hard-on in the prison showers? What kind of nickname would they give an old cripple with a boner in the big house?

It wasn't like he felt guilty about having Sid offed. That wasn't it. The fucking Sumo deserved it. But things were getting weird, and Jack didn't know what to do. His anxiety was amplified by the fact that he couldn't reach Keith. In fact, the number he'd been calling had mysteriously been disconnected. Jack didn't know what that meant.

It was this combo of paranoia and desperation that had forced Jack to go proactive and hire Baxter. It was an audacious plan. He hoped the young man could pull it off.

...

Chad went back to his hotel. He'd had enough of Francis, his neediness, and his freaky-looking dick. He pulled his rental car around to the front and let the valet take it. Chad slung his black leather Prada carry-on bag over his shoulder and walked into the lobby of the Halekulani. He liked this hotel. Even though it was smack dab in the middle of Waikiki, it was first class all the way. He had stayed here during the filming of a historical epic a few years earlier and had requested the same room: a luxury suite on the corner with views of Diamond Head and the ocean.

After he dropped his bag on the bed and tipped the bellhop, Chad looked around his room for a minute, adjusted the thermostat, and headed downstairs to the bar.

The night was balmy, a humid breeze blowing in from the ocean, the tiki torches flickering and snapping. Chad found a table near the pool. He ordered a mai tai and relaxed. He'd done a quick scan of the relevant males in the bar and had located two possibles and one probable. Now came the easy part: Just sit back, sip your drink, and see who makes eye contact. Chad was a closer. He didn't play games or flirt. He wasn't a tease. Once he made eye contact, it was only a matter of time.

It didn't take long before Chad hooked one. Bingo. We have a winner. Chad smiled to himself as a young man with pale blue eyes and a fabulous physique joined him at his table.

“I'm Chad. What's your name?”

“Keith.”

“Can I buy you a drink, Keith?”

“I could use another beer.”

Chad signaled the waiter as Keith settled into a chair.

“What brings you to the islands? Business or pleasure?”

Keith smiled at Chad. “I'm hoping a little bit of both.”

Chad grinned, his perfectly bleached and veneered teeth gleaming in the flickering tiki light. “A man after my own cock.” Chad was anything but subtle.

Keith grinned. “What about you?”

“I don't want to bore you.”

“You're here to work on your tan.”

The drinks arrived.

“I have a friend in the hospital. I came to cheer him up.”

“Is he okay?”

Chad shrugged. “He got beat up. But like I said, it's boring.”

Keith smiled. “I need to eat something. Do you mind if I grab a menu?”

“I could use some food myself.”

“Be right back.”

Keith got up and walked over to the bar to snag a couple of menus. Chad watched him go. He admired his tight muscular ass and the strong graceful strides. This, Chad realized, was going to be fun. In fact, he was going to ensure it. He took a small plastic bag filled with little pills out of his pocket. He plucked two hits of ecstasy out of the bag, popped one in his mouth, and dropped the other into Keith's beer. Made in Amsterdam, purchased by a young screenwriter, and smuggled into California on the studio's corporate jet, it was the very best money could buy.

Keith came back with a couple of menus. He handed one to Chad and then sat down.

“See anything you'd like to eat?”

...

At first he couldn't tell what was wrong. Everything looked the same, but it was somehow different. The air had been displaced, the atmosphere altered. Joseph looked around his house, his mouth dropping open in astonishment as the slow, burning realization that he'd been dumped crawled into his consciousness. While he was out, Hannah had come and taken all her stuff.

He went to the bedroom and opened the set of drawers she'd used for almost a decade. They were empty. He looked
in the bathroom. Her shampoo and conditioner, even the empty bottles that somehow managed to stay stuck in soap scum for months on end, were gone. Her makeup—not that she wore much—and hairbrush, combs, hair product, tampons, eye drops, three dozen tubes of Dr. Pepper–flavored Lip Smackers lip balm—she was addicted to those—and a big bag of cotton balls. . . all gone.

With a rising sense of dread fomenting in his stomach, he went to the kitchen. Joseph threw open the refrigerator door to find that she'd removed all the containers of her favorite brand of yogurt and the Cholula Mexican hot sauce she liked to dump on almost everything.

Joseph picked up the phone, hit the speed dial, and got her message machine. He hung up without leaving a message and walked into the living room. He sat heavily on the couch and looked around. Even though she didn't have that many things in his house—the average visitor might not even notice any difference in the before and after of her leaving—to Joseph it seemed like his home had been stripped bare by bandits.

Tears welled up in his eyes. He tried to suppress them but failed, and the warm wet tears rolled down his face.

Baxter had kept his sunglasses on during the flight. Not like he needed to, but he thought that's what hitmen do. They keep their shades on. It didn't even occur to him that it looked strange until a friendly ophthalmologist in the next row asked him if his eyes were bothering him. Baxter was trying to look inconspicuous, like the guys in the movies. He glared at the ophthalmologist and tried to think of something tough and funny to say. But nothing came to mind, and after an uncomfortable pause the ophthalmologist went back to reading his in-flight magazine.

Movie depictions of contract killers were the only point of reference he had, and he'd seen every movie on the subject ever made. There were a lot of them, from samurai epics, to Westerns, to movies about La Cosa Nostra, to the Hong Kong gun-battle ballets, to the new breed of postmodern Derrida-influenced deconstructions of the hitman genre—he devoured them all and had built up an impressive DVD library.

His favorites were the new ones. The supercool team of hipster killers dressed in black, their hair slicked with product, driving vintage muscle cars, hanging out with icy-beautiful women and talking about cheeseburgers.
They were his heroes. He wanted to be like them. So he sat on the plane dressed in black jeans and a black shirt with his sunglasses on, acting cool and glaring at friendly ophthalmologists.

He was glad he had his sunglasses on when he walked out of baggage claim and into the broiling tropical sun.

Reggie, a slender man with a limited intelligence, stood smoking a cigarette by the curb. He was also dressed in black with sunglasses and stood like he was posing for the cover of
International Contract Killer
magazine. Baxter saw him and nodded. Reggie returned the nod and dramatically flicked his cigarette into the street.

“Nice flight?”

“Yeah. Nice.”

They had agreed to arrive at the airport separately and take different seats on the flight. The plan was to travel incognito. Unconnected. No one's going to remember some guy sitting by himself. They'd be anonymous, covert, and deeply cool. The fact that they were both dressed from head to toe in black and on the same flight was a bit of a miscalculation, and twice the flight attendant had asked if they'd like to sit together.

“Did you reserve a car?”

Baxter nodded. “Mustang convertible.”

Reggie smiled. “You rock.”

Reggie was one of Baxter's oldest friends. They'd met in high school and hung out. Fifteen years later they were still hanging out. Reggie, who tended bar at the Hard Rock Hotel, shared Baxter's fascination with the criminal underworld and jumped at the chance to come along and be a real bad guy
with Baxter. It was a career opportunity, and it sure beat tending bar.