Page 9 of Deadly Aloha
“Everything,” Aftermath grumbled. “You name it, they’re in it.”
“They can’t have been here long,” Tangaloa muttered. “Whatever they’re doing in that storage yard, it’s new. Otherwise, I would have heard about them prior to your arrival.”
“It’s too dark,” Red complained, his nose nearly up to the screen. “I can’t make out what it is they’re moving.”
“Boxes,” I answered, unhelpfully. “One of my guys tried to get closer to look inside, but was nearly caught.” I put my feet up on the table, crossing them at the ankles. “You two up for an all-nighter?”
I was definitely going to need a nap soon, and maybe a blowjob. I was not looking forward to staying up again tonight, especially with the late-night shoot booked for tomorrow at thenightclub. But I wanted this favor done and over with. I wanted the Bloody Scorpions, and the Royal Bastards, off my island.
I wanted life to go back to fucking normal.
“Will our women be safe here?” Aftermath asked.
“No reason for them not to be,” I said plainly. “I doubt the Bloody Scorpions know about me or my connection to Jameson. And even if they did, the twins are…” I paused, not entirely sure how to describe them.
“Scarily deadly,” Tangaloa inputted for me.
I’d allow that description.
Aftermath looked to Tangaloa as if he was sizing him up differently for the first time. “Do you have weapons we can borrow? Red said you run guns.”
Tangaloa’s smile turned feral. “‘Guns’ is so bland a word. I runweapons.” With the crook of his finger, Tangaloa indicated for them to follow him.
We headed down to the basement. My house was old, sat above sea level, and was far enough back from the ocean that digging hadn’t been an issue for my ancestors. Since the basement had originally been made for storage, it made me wonder how my ancestors would feel if they saw how I used it now.
Behind a shelf of staged camera equipment, Tangaloa pulled a hidden latch to swing the shelf forward. Lights blinked on to reveal a secret room. Several years ago, a severe hurricane had uprooted a tree behind my house and left behind a massive hole. Tangaloa was nothing if not an opportunist. He lowered aConexbox into the hole, filled the exterior with concrete, and then covered it with dirt and grass to hide it. After that, he drilled a hole in my basement wall to be able to access it.
Tangaloa didn’t just deal in guns like handguns, automatic and semi-automatic rifles, and shotguns. He also had hand grenades, grenade launchers, flame throwers, and some not-so-common weaponry, like tomahawks, boomerangs, blowguns, slingshots, throwing knives, shuriken, kukri swords, and whips. Plus some traditional Hawai‘ian weaponry, like shark-toothed knuckledusters, clubs, and spears.
Aftermath looked like he’d just stepped through the Pearly Gates of Heaven as he took it all in. “This is fucking incredible.”
Tangaloa gave a nonchalant shrug, but also said condescendingly, “I know.” He tossed Aftermath a black gym bag from the corner of the room. “Grab what you can. We’re going to get bloody on this one.”
I couldn’t help the surge of anticipation and adrenaline I felt at those words. Good. It had been a long time since I’d gotten my hands bloody.
Chapter Three
One of the things I loved most about my island was that there was never a lack of hiding spots. We prided ourselves on our natural landscapes, dense foliage, and captivating scenery. So, the problem wasn’t where to hide to stakeout the storage yard, but which place wasbetter. We ended up taking the SUV due to the armor it provided and parked it over a ridge that looked down upon the yard from the east.
Tangaloa and I knew these woods, so we were on scouting duty while Red and Aftermath stayed up at the SUV. We grabbed some of my higher-tech cameras to try to get better pictures than my people had been able to grab last night. Most of my guys had scrapes with the Law in one way or another. Some were still doing petty shit, but I had a hard rule that they were to bring none of it back to my farm or house. What they chose to do on their own time and dime was their business, and I did not want to be mixed up in it. In my opinion, if the police knew your name, you weren’t that good of a criminal.
After we ran the Bloody Scorpions off my island, I was going back to my boring life. Well, notboring. Well…I guess it was. I mean, I fucked a lot and I… Okay, all I really did was fuck. I rode Koa, ate, shit, slept, surfed, and fucked. I blinked, whenhad my life turnedboring? That wasn’t me. I wasn’tbored. At least, I didn’t think I was, but maybe I was. I loved fucking, and the variety of shoots we did kept things entertaining at the very least.
Maybe ‘boring’ wasn’t the right word. ‘Complacent’ worked better. I’d become complacent in my life. Day in and day out, it was the same thing. Over and over and over again. I was thirty-five years old. When had I turned into an old fuddy-duddy?
Shit. I glanced at Tangaloa to my left. We were crouched near the docks under a broken streetlight. I hadn’t expected the Bloody Scorpions to use this yard, because it was generally for businesses. It wasn’t an official port, but a lot of businesses shipped to the other islands from here. When Kemi had said ‘storage unit’, I’d anticipated them to be using one of the self-storage facilities. I almost hadn’t sent my guys this way last night, but had figured ‘why not’ when I had two come up empty nearby.
“Why are you staring at my ear like you want to kiss it?”
I reached over and flicked his ear instead. Then I faced forward again. The night vision binoculars were on the grass in front of me. Both of us were lying on our stomachs on a small uphill. Directly in front of us was the broken lamplight pole, a concrete sidewalk, and a green trash can. The ocean crashed softly to our left, trying to lure me into the waves like the call of awahinehi?u i?a, or a mermaid. I wanted nothing more than to grab my board and head into the sea.
“We need to change some things, brother.”
Tangaloa put his binoculars down, turning his head to look at me. “Did you have something specific in mind?”
That was the problem. I didn’t. I just knew that I neededsomethingto change. Ever since Jameson had called, I’d been feeling on edge, like I was walking on a tightrope over a volcano poised to erupt.
My phone vibrated in my pocket. I pulled it out to see it was a message from Aftermath asking if there was any activity on our end yet. I answered back that the three Bloody Scorpions guarding one of the trucks were still present, but nothing new.
