Island of the Sequined Love Nun

23 Deus Ex Machina

The Sky Priestess first appeared in 1944 on the nose of a B-26 bomber. Conjured out of cans of enamel by a young aviator named Jack Moses, she lay cool and naked across the aluminum skin, a red pump dangling from a dainty toe, a smile that promised pleasure that no mortal woman could offer. As soon as Moses laid the final brushstroke on her black-seamed stocking, he knew there was something special about this one, something electric and alive that would break his heart when they flew her off to the Pacific. He caught a kiss in his palm and placed it gently on her bottom, then backed down the ladder to survey his work.

He stood on the tarmac for perhaps half an hour, just looking at her, charmed, wishing that he could take her home, or to a museum, or lift her off the skin of the bomber and put her on the ceiling of a cathedral.

Jack Moses didn’t notice the major standing at his side until the older man spoke.

“She’s something,” the major said. And although he wasn’t sure why, he removed his hat.

“Ain’t she,” Moses said. “She’s off to Tinian tomorrow. Wish I was going with her.”

The major reached out and squeezed Moses’s shoulder; he was a little short of breath and the Sky Priestess had set off a stag film in his head. “Put some clothes on her, son. We can’t have muffin showing up on a newsreel.”

“Yes, sir. I don’t have to put a top on her, do I?”

The major smiled. “Son, you put a top on her, I’ll have you court-marshaled.”

“Yes, sir.”

Moses saluted the major and scampered back up the ladder with his brushes and his red enamel and painted a serpentine scarf between her legs.

A week later, as a young pilot named Vincent Bennidetti was leading his crew across the runway to take the Sky Priestess on her first mission, he turned to his navigator and said, “I’d give a year’s pay to be that scarf.”

A half century away, Beth Curtis pinned a big red bow into her hair, then, one at a time, worked sheer black-seamed stockings up her legs. She stood in front of the mirror and tied the red scarf around her waist, letting the ends trail long between her legs. She stepped into the red pumps, did a quick turnaround in the mirror, and emerged from her bungalow to the sound of the Shark People’s drums welcoming her, the Sky Priestess.

Vincent Bennidetti and his crew flew the Sky Priestess on twelve missions and sank six Japanese ships before a fusillade from a Japanese destroyer punctured her wing tanks and took out her right engine. But even as they were limping back toward Tinian, trailing smoke and fuel, the crew of the Sky Priestess knew she watched over them. They were, after all, charmed. For the price of a blown kiss or a pat on the bottom, the Sky Priestess had ushered them into battle like a vicious guardian angel, shielding them even as the other bombers in their squadron flamed into the sea around them. She had shown them where to drop their bombs, then led them through the smoke and the flak back to Valhalla. Home. Safe.

The copilot chattered over the intercom to the navigator, airspeed, fuel consumption, and now descent rate. If they lost any more airspeed, the B-26 would stall, so Captain Vinnie was bringing her down into sweet, thick lower air at the rate of a hundred feet per minute. But the lower they flew, the faster the fuel would burn.

“I’m going to level her off at two thousand,” Captain Vinnie said.

The navigator did some quick calculations and came back with: “At two thousand we’ll be short of base by three hundred miles,

Captain. I recommend we level at three thousand for a safer bailout.”

“Oh ye of little fucking faith,” Vincent said. “Check your charts for somewhere we can ditch her.”

The navigator checked their position on the charts. There was a flyspeck atoll named Alualu about forty nautical miles to the south. And it showed that it was now in American hands. He relayed the information to the captain.

“The chart shows an uncompleted airstrip. We must have chased the Japs out before they finished it.”

“Give me a course.”

“Sir, there might not be anything there.”

“Ya fuckin’ mook, look out the window. You see anything but water?”

The navigator gave him the course.

Vincent patted the throttles and said, “Come on, sweetheart. You get us there safe and I’ll build you a shrine.”

Sarapul was heading for the beach and the men’s drinking circle when he heard the drums welcoming the Sky Priestess. That white bitch was stealing his fire again. He’d been thinking all afternoon about what he would say at the drinking circle: how the Shark People needed to return to the old ways and how he had just the ritual to get everyone started. Nothing like a little cannibalism to get people thinking right. But now that was all ruined. Everyone would be out on the airstrip, drumming and chanting and marching around like a bunch of idiots, and when the Sky Priestess finally left and the men finally did show up at the drinking circle, all they would talk about was the wonderful words of Vincent. Sarapul wouldn’t be able to get a word in edgewise. He took the path that led away from the village and made his way toward the runway. After all, the Sky Priestess might pass out some good cargo and he didn’t want to miss out on his share.

Sarapul had been permanently banished from the village of the Shark People ever since one of the chief’s grandchildren had mysteriously disap-peared and was later found in the jungle with Sarapul, who was building a child-sized earthen oven (an oom) and gathering various fragrant fire woods. Oh, the men tolerated him at the nightly drinking circle, and he was allowed to share in the village’s take of shark meat, and the members of his clan saw to it that

he got part of the wonderful cargo passed out by the Sorcerer and the Sky Priestess, but he was forbidden to enter the village when women and chil-dren were present. He lived alone in his little hut on the far side of the island and was regarded by the Shark People as little more than a monster to frighten children into behaving: “You stay inside the reef or old Sarapul will catch you and eat you.” Actually, scaring children was the only real joy Sarapul had left in life.

As he emerged from the jungle, the old cannibal saw the torches where the Shark People waited in a semicircle around a raised platform. He stopped in a grove of betel nut palms, sat on the ground, and watched. He heard a click from the PA speakers mounted on the gate across the runway and the Shark People stopped drumming. Two of the Japanese guards ap-peared out of the compound and Sarapul felt the hair rise on his neck as they rolled back the gate and fifty years of residual hatred rose in his throat like acid. The Japanese had killed his wife and children, and if there was any single reason to return to the old ways of the warrior, it was to take revenge on the guards.

Music blared out of the PA speakers: Glenn Miller’s “String of Pearls.” The Shark People turned toward the gate and dropped to their knees. Pillars of red smoke rose from either side of the gate and wafted across the runway like sulfurous serpents. The distant whine of airplane propellers replaced the big band sound from the PA and grew into a roar that ended with a flash and explosion that sent a mushroom cloud of smoke a hundred feet into the night sky.

And half-naked, the Sky Priestess walked out of the smoke into the moonlight.

Chief Malink turned to his friend Favo and said, “Excellent boom.”

“Very excellent boom,” Favo said.

“There it is,” the copilot said.

The B-26 was sputtering on her last few drops of fuel. Vincent nosed her over and started his descent. “There’s a strip cut right across the center of the island. Let’s hope we didn’t bomb the shit out of it when the Japs had it.”

His last few words seemed unusually loud as the engine cut out.

“No go-around, boys. We’re going down. Rig for a rough one and be ready for extreme dampness if we come in short.”

Vincent could see patches of dirt on the airstrip, as well as fingers of vines and undergrowth from the jungle trying to reclaim the clearing.

“You going in gear up?” the copilot asked, thinking that they might have a better chance of survival going over a bomb crater if they skidded in on the plane’s belly.

“Gear down,” Bennidetti said, making it a command. “We might be able to land her gear up, but she’d never take off again.”

“Gear down and locked,” the copilot said.

They glided in about ten feet over the reef. A dozen Shark men who were standing on the reef dove underwater as the airplane passed over them as silent and ominous as a manta ray. Bennidetti flared the B-26 to drop the rear gear first and they bounced over a patch of ferns and began the rocket slide down the coral gravel airstrip. Without the engines to reverse thrust, Vincent had only the wheel brakes to stop the bomber. He applied them gingerly at first, then, realizing that the runway was obscured by vines that might be covering a bomb crater, laid into them, causing the wheels to plow furrows into the gravel and filling the still air with a thick white cloud of dust.

“We still burning?” Vincent asked the copilot over the rumble.

The copilot looked out the window. “Can’t see anything but a little black smoke.”

The bomber rolled to a stop and a cheer went up from the crew.

“Everybody out. Now,” Vincent ordered. “We still might have fire.

They stumbled over each other to get out of the plane into the dust cloud. Bennidetti led them away at a run. They were a hundred yards from the plane before anyone looked back.

“She looks okay, Captain. No fire.”

That set off a round of cheering and backslapping and when they turned around again they saw group of native children approaching them from the jungle led by a proud ten-year-old boy carrying a spear.

“Let me handle this,” Vincent told the crew as he dug into his flight suit pocket for a Hershey bar.

“Hey, squirts, how you doing?”

The boy with the spear stood his ground, keeping his eye trained on the downed bomber while the other children lost their nerve and backed away like scolded puppies.

“We’re Americans,” Vincent said. “Friendly. We are bringing you many good things.” He held the chocolate bar out to the spear boy, who didn’t move or take his eyes off of the airplane.

Vincent tried again. “Here, kid. This stuff tastes good. Chocolate.” He smacked his lips and mimed eating the candy bar. “You savvy American, kid?”

“No,” the boy said. “I no speak American. I speak English.”

Vincent laughed. “Well, I’m from New York, kid. We don’t speak much English there. Go tell your chief that Captain Vincent is here with presents for him from a faraway and most magical place.”

“Who she?” the kid asked, pointing to the image of the Sky Priestess. “She your queen?”

“She works for me, kid. That’s the Sky Priestess. She’s bringing presents for your chief.”

“You are chief?”

Vincent knew he had to be careful here. He’d heard of island chiefs refusing to deal with anyone but Roosevelt because he was the only American equal to their status.

“I’m higher than chief,” Vincent said. “I’m Captain Vinnie Fuckin’ Bennidetti, Bad-ass of Brooklyn, High Emperor of the Allied Forces, Pilot of the Magic Sky Priestess, Swinging Dick of the Free Fuckin’ World, and Protector of the Innocent. Now take me to your chief, squirt, before I have the Sky Priestess burn you to fucking ashes.”

“Christ, Cap’n!” the bombardier said.

Vincent shot him a grin over his shoulder.

The kid bowed his head. “Christ, Cap’n. I am Malink, chief of the Shark People.”

The Sky Priestess came out of the smoke and took her place in the middle of the semicircle of Shark People. Women kept their eyes to the ground even as they pushed their children forward, hoping that they would be the next to be chosen. The Sky Priestess threw the tails of her scarf over her shoulder and the music from the PA system stopped abruptly. The Shark People fell to their knees and waited for her words, the words of Vincent. It had been months since anyone had been chosen.

Malink rose and approached the Sky Priestess with a coconut shell cup of the special tuba they had made for her. He was as

stunned by her now as when he had first seen her painted on the side of

Vincent’s plane.

She drained the cup and handed it back to the chief, who bowed over it.

“Still tastes like shit,” she said.

“Tastes like shit!” the Shark People chanted.

Beth Curtis turned her head to suppress a smile and a belch. When she turned back to Malink, her eyes were fury.

“Who speaks for Vincent?”

“The Priestess of the Sky,” Malink answered.

“Who brings the words and cargo from Vincent?”

“The Priestess of the Sky,” Malink repeated.

“And who takes the chosen to Vincent?”

“The Priestess of the Sky,” Malink said again, backing away a step. He’d never seen her so angry.

“And who else, Malink?”

“No one else.”

“Damn straight no one else!” She spat so violently she nearly disengaged the bow from her hair. “You told the Sorcerer that Vincent came to you in a dream. This is not true.”

The Shark People gasped. Despite what the Sky Priestess and the Sorcerer thought, Malink had told none of his people about the dream. But Malink was confused. He had dreamed of Vincent. “Vincent said that the pilot is coming. That he is still alive.”

“Vincent speaks only through me.”

“But—”

“No coffee or sugar for a month,” the Sky Priestess said. She pulled her scarf from her shoulders and the music began again. The Shark People watched as she walked away. There was an explosion across the runway and the Sky Priestess disappeared into the smoke.

24 Valhalla: From the Runyonese

Vincent Bennidetti was sitting at an oversized table dealing five-card draw to five other guys and relating the story of the crash landing of the Sky Priestess in hopes that the tale would distract his opponents from his creative shuffling.

“So the squirt says to me, he says, ‘I’m Malink, chief of the Shark People,’ and he puffs up his little chest like I’m supposed to be impressed and drop down and kiss his ring, except he ain’t wearing any ring; in fact, he ain’t wearing nothing but a loincloth and a little hat made of palm leaves, so I says, ‘Honored and charmed I’m sure, Chief.’ And I gives him a grade A Hershey bar as a peace offering to assure that the kid doesn’t get any ideas about ventilating me with his spear. Although I have a roscoe handy in my flight suit, in Manhattan it is considered very bad luck indeed to shoot a kid unless he deserves it, so I am trying to take the diplomatic route.

“So the squirt chief takes the sweet and slaps a lip over a morsel and his little mug splits in a grin so big that I’m figuring I know now how his tribe gets named Shark People. And before I know it the kid yells something to his pals and they vamoose to the jungle while I watch the squirt’s spear and he keeps a peeper peeled at the Sky Priestess like any minute she’s gonna jump off the plane and do the bump and grind across the airstrip.

“Now we are sure that Sky Priestess is not burning or blowing up, Sparky goes back in and sings Mayday on the radio until I am thinking that even Marconi is sorry he ever invented the machine (another distinguished Italian genius, if I may point out, and it would be impolite for anyone, at this juncture, to mention Mussolini, as I will have to delay the game whilst I pop him in the beezer,

thank you), and finally HQ comes back on and requests more than somewhat sternly that we cease broadcasting our position, as they will send someone as soon as they can unless the Japs find us first, in which case it has been an honor serving with us.

“Call and raise a buck.

“So the squirt asks me do I kill Japs? And I tell him that I am killing so many Japs I have to come rest on his island for a few days to give the Japs a chance to send in reinforcements for me to kill, when out of the jungle comes a whole platoon of native guys, mostly real old guys, carrying baskets of fruit and coconuts and dried fish which they are laying at my feet after doing enough bowing and chanting to fill a year of encores on Broadway.

“And the kid says, ‘You more powerful than Father Rodriquez. Japs kill him.’ From which I figure where the kid learns to speak English and why I am seeing no young guys, because it is well known that the Japs have killed any missionaries they find and have taken most of the able-bodied native guys which they do not kill off to build airstrips and boat landing ramps and other Jap military stuff.

“‘Yeah,’ I tells the kid, ‘too bad about Father Rodriquez, and all the other guys that don’t make it, but Vincent and the Sky Priestess is here now and you got nothing to worry about.’ Then I inquire as to if there are any available dolls on the island and the kid jabbers something to one of the old guys, who wobbles off and comes back about ten minutes later with a line of young native dolls who are wearing skirts on their bottom but are nothing but bounce and bosoms on the top, except for the odd garnish of flowers here and there for fragrance and color.

“I swear on my mother’s grave (should she pass away before I get home) that I am looking at more brown curves than I have seen since I fly over the Mississippi at ten Gs, and they are by no means an unpleasant sight, but as soon as I pick out one of the young dolls and give her my best Tyrone Power wink, she starts bawling like I have broken her heart and runs into the jungle followed, posthaste, by the other lovelies until the airstrip is, once again, strictly stag.

“‘What goes?’ I ask the kid. And he explains that because I am a god the dames are most frightened that I will destroy them. Then the squirt starts bawling himself, and I am beginning to feel very low indeed, as I can see that the little guy has taken my god action and it is six to five that he thinks he is on the destruction express along with the dames, and some explanation and consolation are

then needed to caulk the kid’s waterworks and generally ease his mind.

“So I sits down with the kid under the wing of the Sky Priestess and by and by along comes an old native guy with a jug of the local hooch, of which I am somewhat dubious and which tastes like matchheads mixed with dishwater but smooths out considerably after the first four or five belts, and soon the mood becomes most festive and a good time is had by all (except for Sparky, who is bending over the runway looking at everything he drinks for the second time).

“Now all of this time I am thinking that the kid is running a game on me about being chief until he explains that the Japs killed his father and his older brother as examples and he is next in line, so he is chief whether he likes it or not. And now he is worried that his people will not have enough to eat, as the Japs have taken most of the fruit and coconuts and destroyed all the canoes and cargo, like rice, which the late Father Rodriquez brings in, and my heart is breaking for the kid, who should be playing stickball and stealing candy and other assorted kid activities instead of worrying about a whole population of citizens. So I look at my guys eating all the food the kid gives us, and my heart is feeling very heavy indeed, so I tell him not to worry, as Vincent and the Sky Priestess will see that his people get everything they need and I gives the kid a pack of Luckys and my Zippo to seal the promise. Then, as soon as Sparky finishes doing the rainbow yawn, I tells him to get on the radio to a friend of mine who is in the quartermaster corps, and I gives him a list of things to place on the PT boat which is coming to get us.

“So as the evening wears on, the kid is telling me stories of how the island was made by a dame from Yap who rides on a turtle with a basketful of dirt which she dumps in the ocean, making the island, which must have been quite some basket, and she tells all the children she is having on the island (although the kid says nothing about her having an old man) that she isn’t going to give them a good reef for fishing, so they are going to be eating sharks. And although the people of all the other islands are afraid of sharks, here the sharks are afraid of the people. ‘They will be called the Shark People,’ the dame with the dirt says.

“And I says, ‘Yeah, I know that dame.’ That, in fact, I take her to the races one day and she is such good luck that I win the trifecta for five Gs. And I can see the kid is most impressed, even though he wouldn’t know a G from a G-string. So I begins to lay it on a bit

thick and by the time we have consumed all of the local bug juice and most of the fruit and fish, the kid is convinced that if I am not the Second Coming, I am at least pinch-hitting that day.

“By now I am feeling I am in serious need of female company and I mention this to the kid, who says maybe there is something he can do, as there is one doll in the village whose job it is to change the oil of the unmar-ried native guys (I am at once reminded of a costume optional dancer named Chintzy Bilouski, who performs a similar service for myself and many other unmarried male citizens in the Broadway district) and it seems that this native doll has been short of work of late, as all of the young un-married guys are either killed or taken away. And the kid says he will ap-proach this doll on my behalf if I promise that she will not burst into flames or be otherwise harmed and as long as I keep it quiet. As these are similar terms I agree to with Chintzy Bilouski (and a sawbuck cheaper, in fact), I tell the kid to lead the way, which he does. And soon we are in a big grass house by the beach, which he calls the bachelors’ house, and which is clearly intended to house many citizens, but is currently only the home of one doll, who is by no means hard on the peepers and who proceeds immedi-ately to catch up on any work she has been missing in a most enthusiastic and friendly manner, if you know what I mean.

“So, to make a long story short, the guys and I spend three more days telling stories to the kid and drinking bug juice and creeping to the bachel-ors’ house until the PT boat shows with some mechanics and welders and all the supplies I have requested from my pal the quartermaster. And the islanders all line up while I pass out many machetes and knives and chocolate bars and various other luxuries from Uncle Sam. And that night they throw a big party in my honor with much drinking and dancing and a swell time is had by one and all. But as we are ready to leave, the kid chief comes up all leaky-eyed, asking why am I leaving and will I come back and what will his people do without me. So I promise him I will be back soon with many wonderful things and to save me a spot in the bach-elors’ house, but until then, every time he sees a plane, he and his people will know that me and the Sky Priestess are looking out for them.

“Then when we are back at base I am working something with the colonel to run a recon mission to inspect the airstrip for emergency use. No bombs. I am thinking we will fill the Sky Priestess up with medicine and supplies for the Shark kid and his people as soon as permission comes through. And I’m fully intending to come

through, as I gives the kid my word and he believes it, but how am I to know that on our very next bombing run a squadron of Zeros will surprise us and fill the Sky Priestess with all manner of cannon and machine gun slugs, sending us down in a ball of flames and killing me and everyone aboard quite dead.”

The guy with the beard cleared his throat and said, “That was a swell story the first dozen times we heard it, Vinnie, but are you going to talk or play cards?”

“Bite me, Jewboy, it ain’t like we haven’t had to fight the yawns through your loaves and fishes epic a hundred fuckin’ times.” Then Vincent flashed him a feral grin. “And since it is now your bet, I will advise you to fold, as I am now holding a hand that is so hot it is about to burst into flames like the proverbial bush.”

The guy with the beard held up a punctured palm to silence Vincent. “You’re holding a pair of eights, Vinnie.”

“I hate fuckin’ playing with you,” Vincent said.

25 We Ask the Gods for Answers and They Give us Questions

Tucker Case heard the beating of wings above his head and suddenly there was a familiar little face in front of him. Roberto was hanging upside down from the harness ropes around Tuck’s chest. He never thought he’d be glad to see the little vermin.

“Roberto! Buddy!” Tuck smiled at the bat.

Roberto squeaked and bent forward to lick Tucker’s face.

Tucker sputtered. He could smell papaya on the bat’s breath.

“How about climbing up there and gnawing through these ropes, little guy?”

Roberto looked at him quizzically, then laid a big lick on him, right across the lips.

“Ack! Bat spit!”

Tuck heard a weak voice from above. “He no gnaw rope. His teeth too little,” Kimi said.

Roberto took flight and landed on Kimi’s head and began licking and clawing him ecstatically.

Kimi was suspended about two feet above Tucker and about five feet away. It hurt his neck, but he could see the navigator dangling if he stretched. “You’re alive!” Tucker said. “I thought you were dead.”

“I am bery thirsty. Why you put us in tree?”

“I didn’t. It was an old island guy. I think he’s going to eat us.”

“No, no, no. No cannibal in these islands for many years.”

“Good. You tell him that when he comes back.”

Kimi struggled against his bonds and set himself spinning. “These ropes hurt on my arms. Someone put us in crab harness.”

“I figured that out,” Tuck said. He craned his neck and eyed Kimi’s harness. “Maybe I can swing to you and catch on to your harness.

If I can get hold of it, I might be able to untie you.”

“Good plan,” Kimi said.

“Yankee know-how, kid.”

As Tuck started to swing his arms and legs, he felt the harness tighten around his chest. Soon he was swinging in a wide elliptical pattern that brought him within a foot of Kimi, but the harness was so tight he could barely breathe. Weakened from lack of food and water, he gave up. “I can’t breathe,” he gasped.

“That good plan, though,” Kimi said. “Now I have Roberto bring that knife over by door of house and I cut the ropes. Okay?”

“Roberto can fetch?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you say so?”

“I want to see Yankee know-how.”

Sarapul tried to run back to his hut, but the pain in his ancient knees wouldn’t allow him to move faster than a slow amble. If only he could ab-sorb the power of an enemy or two, perhaps the pain would subside and his strength would return along with his courage. It was courage he needed now. Instead, he had questions.

Why, if Malink dreamed a message from Vincent, did the white bitch say that he did not? And if Vincent had sent a pilot, why did the Sky Priestess not know about him? And if Vincent had not sent a pilot, who is hanging in the breadfruit tree?

In the old days Sarapul would have asked the turtle, his clan animal, for an answer to his questions. Then he would have watched the waves and listened to the wind for an answer, perhaps he would have gone to a sor-cerer for an interpretation. But he was too deaf and blind to see a sign now. And the only sorcerer left was the white man who lived behind the big fence and gave medicine to the Shark People: Vincent’s Sorcerer. Sarapul didn’t believe in Vincent any more than he believed in the god Father Rodriquez had worn around his neck on a chain.

Father Rodriquez had said that the old ways—the taboos and the totem animals—were lies and that the skinny white god on the cross was the only real god. Sarapul was prepared to believe him, especially when he offered everyone a piece of the body of Christ. But Christ tasted like dried pounded taro and Father Rodriquez lost

the old cannibal as a convert when he said that you would be thrown into fire forever if you ate anyone besides the stale starchy god on the cross.

Then the Japanese came and cut off Father Rodriquez’s head and threw his god on a chain into the sea. Sarapul knew for sure then that the Father had been lying all along. The Japanese raped and killed his wife and made his two sons work building the airstrip until they became sick and died. He asked the Turtle why his family had been taken away, and when the sign came in the form of a cloud shaped like an eel, the sorcerer said that it had happened because the Shark People had broken the taboos, had eaten their totem animals and taken fish from the forbidden reef: They were being punished.

The next night Sarapul killed a Japanese soldier and built an oom to bake him in, but none of the Shark People would help him. Some were afraid of the god of Father Rodriquez and the rest were afraid of the Japanese. They took the body and fed it to the sharks who lived at the edge of the reef.

In the morning the Japanese lined up the old sorcerer and a dozen children and machine-gunned them. And Sarapul lost his mind.

Then the American planes came, dropping their bombs and fire from the sky for two days, and when the explosions stopped and the smoke cleared, the Japanese left, taking with them all the coconuts and breadfruit on the island. A week later Vincent arrived in the Sky Priestess.

Sarapul still had the machete that the flyer had given him. It was more than he had ever gotten from Father Rodriquez’s god, but the cannibal did not believe that Vincent was a god. Even if Vincent had scared away the Japanese and brought the food that saved the Shark People, Sarapul had angered the old gods before and he would not do it again.

When the white Sorcerer arrived, he too talked of the god on the cross and although the Shark People took the food and medicine he gave them and even attended his services, they would not forsake Vincent, their savior. The god on the cross had let them down before. Eventually, the white Sorcerer turned to Vincent too. But Sarapul clung to the old ways, even when the Sky Priestess returned with her red scarf and explosions. It was all just entertainment: Christ was just a cracker, Vincent was just a flyer, and he, Sarapul, was a cannibal.

Still, he did not blame Malink for banishing him or for clinging to Vincent’s promises. Vincent was the god of Malink’s childhood, and Malink clung to him in the same way that Sarapul clung to the old ways. Faith grew stronger when planted in a child. Sarapul knew that. He was mad, but he was not stupid.

Until now he had never put an ounce of faith in Vincent, but this dream of Malink’s vexed him. He would have to figure things out before he ate the man in his breadfruit tree. He had to talk to Malink now.

The cannibal took the path that led into the village. He crept between the houses where the sweet rasp of snoring children wafted through the woven grass walls like the sizzle of frying pork, through the smoke of dying cook fires, past the bachelors’ house, the men’s house, and finally to the beach, where the men sat in a circle, drinking and talking softly, the moon spraying their shoulders with a cold blue light.

The men continued to talk as Sarapul joined the circle, politely ignoring the creak and crackle of his old joints as he sat in the sand. Some of the younger men, those who had grown up with the disciplinary specter of the cannibal, subtly changed position so they could reach their knives quickly. Malink greeted Sarapul with a nod, then filled the coconut shell cup from the big glass jug and handed it to him.

“No coffee or sugar for a month,” Malink said. “Vincent is angry.”

Sarapul drained the cup and handed it back. “How about cigarettes?”

“The Sorcerer says that cigarettes are bad.”

“Vincent smoked cigarettes,” Sarapul pointed out. “He gave you the lighter.”

The young men fidgeted at the firsthand reference to Vincent. It disturbed them when the old men spoke of Vincent as if he was a person. Malink reached inside the long flat basket where he kept the lighter along with his other personal belongings. He touched the Zippo that Vincent had given him.

“Cigarettes aren’t good for us,” he repeated.

“Then they should give us cigarettes for punishment,” Sarapul insisted.

Malink pulled a copy of People magazine from his basket, drawing everyone’s attention away from the cannibal. The old chief tore a small square from the masthead page and handed it to Abo, a

muscular young man who tended the tobacco patch for the Shark People.

“Roll one,” Malink said. Abo began filling the paper with tobacco from his basket.

Malink opened the magazine on the sand in front of him and squinted at the pages in the moonlight. Everyone in the circle leaned forward to look at the pictures.

“Oprah’s skinny again,” Malink pronounced.

Sarapul scoffed and the men angrily looked up, the young ones looking away quickly when they saw who had made the noise. Abo finished rolling the cigarette and held it out to Malink. The chief gestured to Sarapul and Abo gave the smoke to the old cannibal. Their hands brushed lightly in the exchange and Sarapul held the young man’s gaze as he licked his finger as if tasting a sweet sauce. Abo shuddered and backed to the outside of the circle.

Malink lit the cigarette with the sacred Zippo, then he returned to his magazine. “There will be no more People for a while, not with the Sky Priestess mad at us.”

A communal moan rose up from the men and the drinking cup was filled and passed.

“We are cut off,” Malink added.

Sarapul shrugged. “All the people in this book, they shit. It does not matter. They die. It does not matter. If we put them all in a big boat and sank it, you would not even know for six months when the Sky Priestess gives you her old copy, and it still would not matter. This is stupid.”

“But look!” Malink pointed to a picture of a man with unnaturally large ears, “This man is a king and he wishes to be a tampon. It is quoted.”

Sarapul scrunched up his face, his wrinkles folding over each other like venetian blinds, while he tried to figure out what, exactly, a tampon was. Finally he said, “I was a tampon once, back in the old days, before you were born. All warriors became tampons. It was better then.”

“You have never been a tampon,” Malink stated, although he couldn’t be sure. “Only a king may be a tampon. And now, without People, we will never know if this man who would be a tampon succeeded. It has been a dark day.”

The cup had come around again to Sarapul and he drained it before answering. “Tell me of this dream you had.”

“I should not speak of it.” Malink pretended to be engaged in the magazine.

Sarapul pushed on. “The Sky Priestess said that Vincent spoke to you of a pilot. Is that true?”

Malink nodded. “It is true. But it is only a dream or the Sorcerer would have known.”

Sarapul was torn now. This was his chance to discredit the Sorcerer and his white bitch, but if he told Malink about the man in the tree, then he would lose his chance to taste the long pig again. Then again, he found them first, and he was willing to share the meat. “What if your dream was true?”

“It was just a dream. Vincent speaks to us only through the Sky Priestess now. She has spoken.”

“Vincent smoked and she says smoking is bad. Vincent was an enemy of the Japanese and now she has Japanese guards inside the fence. She lies.”

Some of the men moved away from the circle. It was one thing to drink with a cannibal, but it was quite another to tolerate a heretic. (Of the twenty men in the circle, three of the elders were named John, four who had been born during Father Rodriquez’s tenure were named Jesus [Hey-zeus], and three of the younger men were named Vincent.) They were a group that honored the gods, whoever the gods might be that week.

“The Sky Priestess does not lie,” Malink said calmly. “She speaks for Vincent.”

Sarapul pinched the flame of his cigarette with his ashy fingers, then popped the stub into his mouth and began to chew as he grinned. “Your dream was true, Malink. I have seen the pilot. He is on Alualu and he is alive.”

“You are old and you drink too much.”

“I’ll show you.” Sarapul leaped to his feet to show that he was not drunk, and in doing so scared the hell out of the younger men. “Come with me,” he said.

26 Swing Time

Kimi had freed his hands and feet with the knife, only to find that he could not reach the rope suspending him from the middle of his back. Now he was forced to follow Tuck’s plan of swinging like a human pendulum until he could grab the pilot’s rope and cut him down. Roberto hung upside down from a nearby branch, wondering why his friends were behaving like fighting spiders.

Tucker found he could only hold his head up for a few seconds at a time before dizziness set in, so he watched the navigator’s swinging shadow to gauge his distance. “One more time, Kimi. Then grab the rope.” It bothered him some that when he was cut loose he would fall six feet and land face-first in the coral gravel, but he was learning to take things as they came and figured he would deal with that on the way down.

“I hear someone,” Kimi said. On the apex of his arc, he grabbed for Tuck’s rope, missed, and accidentally raked the knife across the pilot’s scalp.

“Ouch! Shit, Kimi. Watch what you’re doing.” Tuck braced himself for the next attack, which never came. He looked up to see that Kimi’s arc had been stopped in mid-swing. A rotund gray-haired native had caught the navigator around the waist and was prying the knife out of his hand.

Tuck felt the hope drain out of him. The leathery old cannibal stood amid a group of twenty men. All of them seemed to be waiting for the fat guy to say something. It was time for a last-ditch effort.

“Look, you motherfuckers, people are expecting me. I’m supposed to be flying medical supplies for a big-time doctor, so if you

fuck with me you’re all going to die of the tropical creeping crud and I won’t give you so much as a fucking aspirin.”

The native released Kimi into the hands of two younger men and regarded Tuck. “You pilot?” He said in English.

“Damn right I am. And I’m sick and infected and stuff, so if you eat me you’re going to die like a gut-shot dog—and in addition I would like to add that I don’t taste anything like Spam.” Tuck was breathless from the diatribe and he was starting to black out from trying to hold his head back.

The native said something in his own language, which Tuck took to be “Cut him down,” because a second later he found himself falling into the arms of four strong islanders who lowered him to the ground.

Tucker’s arms and legs burned as the blood rushed back into them. Above him he saw a circle of moonlit brown faces. He managed to grab enough breath to squeak, “Soon as I’m on my feet, your asses are mine. You all might as well just go practice falling down for a while so you’ll be used to it. Just order the body bags now ’cause when I’m done, you’re going to look like piles of chocolate pudding. They’ll be cleaning you up with shovels—you…” Tuck’s breath caught in his throat and he passed out.

Malink looked at his old friend Favo and smiled. “Excellent threat,” he said.

“Most excellent threat,” Favo said.

Sarapul pushed his way through the kneeling men. “He’s dead. Let’s eat him.”

“He no like that,” Kimi said. “Not even for free.”

The Sorcerer heard the lab door open and turned from his microscope just

in time to catch her as she ran into his arms.

“Did you see, ’Bastian? Was I great or what?”

He held her for a second, smelling the perfume in her hair. “You were great,” he said. When he released her, there were two pink spots on his lab coat from the rouge she had rubbed on her nipples.

She skipped around the lab like a little girl. “Malink was shaking in his shoes,” she said. Well, not in his shoes, but you know what I mean.” She stopped and looked into the microscope. “What’s this?”

He watched a delicate line of muscle run down the back of her thigh and postulated what kind of genetics went into preserving a

body like that on Chee-tos and vodka. He thought a lot about genetics lately. “I’m doing the last of the tissue typing. I should be finished in a couple of days.”

She said, “Did you like ‘String of Pearls’ better than ‘In the Mood’?”

High Priestess of the nonsequiter, Sebastian thought. “It was perfect. You were perfect.”

She moved away from the microscope and paced around the table, frowning now, as if she was working on an equation in her head. “I’ve been thinking about ‘Pennsylvania 6-5000,’ putting the ninjas in top hats and tails in kind of a chorus line. You know, they could carry me across the runway and pause and shout the chorus. There’s no singing on the re-cording; they would just have to shout. I mean, if we have to have them around, they might as well do something.” She stopped pacing and turned to him. “What do you think?”

It took Sebastian a second to realize that she was serious. “I’m not sure that would be a good idea. The Shark People are suspicious of the nin—, the guards. I wish Akiro would have listened to me and found some non-Japanese. This business with Malink’s dream is a sign that our credibility is slipping.”

“That’s what I’m saying. If we show that they’re under the control of the Sky Priestess—”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea, Beth.”

She dismissed the thought with a wave. “Fine. We can talk about it later.”

Sebastian wanted to stop himself before he ruined her ebullient mood, but he pressed on despite himself. “Don’t you think that no coffee or sugar for a month was a little harsh?”

“You really don’t get it, do you? I’ll give it all back after a week, ’Bastian, and they’ll love me for it. Generosity of the gods: The Sky Priestess taketh away and the Sky Priestess giveth back. It’s how these things work. You put a few people on a boat, then you drown every living creature on the planet—the people on the boat are pretty goddamn grateful.” She flipped the end of her red scarf over her shoulder.

“I wish you wouldn’t talk like that.”

“You make the rules and you play the game, ’Bastian. What’s wrong with that?”

He turned from her and pretended to go through some notes. “I guess you’re right,” he said, but he felt acid rising from his stomach. She was calling it a game.

She came up behind him, pushed her breasts into his back, and reached around inside his lab coat. “Poor baby. You still feel like you did the right thing by burning your Beatles records.”

“Beth, please.”

She unzipped his khakis and snaked her hand in his fly. “Deep down, you feel like John Lennon got what he deserved, don’t you, sweetheart? Saying he was more popular than Jesus. That loony-toon Chapman was the instrument of God, wasn’t he?”

He whirled on her and grabbed her shoulders. “Yes, dammit.” His face had gone hot. He could feel the veins pulse in his forehead, in his crotch. “That’s enough, Beth.”

“No, it’s not.” She ripped open the front of his trousers and fell back on the lab table, pulling him on top of her. “Come on, show me the wrath of the Sorcerer.”

27 Girl Talk

Sepie washed the pilot’s hair in a bowl with pounded coconut and brackish water. She had been taking care of the unconscious white man for two days and it was starting to get tedious. She was mispel of the bachelors’ house, and washing and ministering to a sick and stinky white man was not in her job description. This was women’s work.

There are legends in the islands, and some of the old men swear they are true, that the women who service the bachelors’ houses, the mispels, were taken to the secret island of Maluuk, known only to the high navigators, where they were trained in the art of pleasuring a man.

After months of training, a mispel was required to pass a test before she was allowed to return to her home island to take over the duty of tending to the sexual needs of the men of the bachelors’ house. The test? She was sent into the ocean with a ripe brown coconut clutched between her thighs, and there she floated, in heavy surf, for the entire circuit of the tides. Should the coconut pop loose or the mispel touch it with her hands, she failed the test (although there was some leeway in the event of shark attack). It is said that the inner thighs of the mispels of old were as strong as net cable. The second part of the test required the girl to find a delicate dragonfly orchid with a straight stem, and while her teachers looked on, she would lower herself over the flower until it disappeared inside of her, then rise again after a few minutes, leaving the stem unbent and the petals unbruised. The mispel held a position of honor, respected and revered among the is-landers. She was not required to do housekeeping, cooking, or weaving, and while the other women

toiled in taro fields from the time they could walk, a mispel was allowed to nap in the shade, conserving her energy for her nocturnal duties. A mispel often ended her tour of duty by marrying a man of high status. No stigma followed her into married life, and she would be sought out to the end of her days by the other women for advice on handling men.

Sepie, however, had not been chosen because of any special skill, nor had she passed through any vigorous concubinal boot camp. Sepie had been marked for mispel from the moment of her menses, when she emerged from the women’s house with her lavalava tied a bit too high and showing a bit too much cappuccino thigh, her skin rubbed with copra until she glistened all over, and her breasts shining like polished wooden tea cups. She had painted her lips with the juice of crushed berries and peppered her long black hair with scores of sweet jasmine blossoms. She giggled coquettishly in the presence of all the men, danced dangerously close to the taboo of speaking to them in public, risked beatings by refusing to fall to her knees when her male cousins passed, and went about her chores with a wiggly energy that had caused more than one of the distracted village boys to fall out of a breadfruit tree during harvest. (She broke ankles as well as hearts.) Sepie was all titter and tease, a lazy girl who excelled at leisure, a natural at invoking and denying desire, a wet dream deferred. At fifteen she took up residence in the bachelors’ house and had lived there for four years.

When Malink and the men brought the flyer and the man in the dress to her, she knew she was in for some trouble.

“Take care of them,” Malink said. “Feed them. Help to make them strong.”

Sepie kept her head bowed while Malink spoke, but when he finished she took his hand and led him into the bachelors’ house, gesturing to the other men to lay the flyer and his friend on the ground outside. The men smiled among themselves, thinking that old Malink was going inside to receive a special favor from the mispel. What, in fact, he was receiving was an ass chewing.

“Why don’t you take them to your house, Malink? I don’t want them here.”

“It’s a secret. If my wife and daughters find out they are here, then everyone will know.”

“I’m the only one who can keep a secret in the bachelors’ house. Take them to old Sarapul’s house. No one goes there.”

“He wants to eat them.” Malink couldn’t remember ever having to argue with a woman and he wasn’t at all prepared for it.

“You’re chief. Tell him not to. I will not cook for them. If I feed them, they will shit. I’m not going to clean it up.”

“Sepie, what will you do when you marry and have children? You will have to do these things then. I am asking you as your chief to do these things.”

“No,” Sepie said.

Malink sighed. “I am asking you to do these things because these men have been sent to us by Vincent.”

Sepie didn’t know what to say. She had heard the Sky Priestess chastise Malink in front of the people, but she had been more concerned with losing coffee and sugar for a month than with the actual offense. “You will tell the men to cook for them?”

“Yes.”

“And they will carry them to the beach and wash them if they shit?”

“I will tell them. Please, Sepie.”

No man had ever said “please” to her before, let alone the chief. It was not a courtesy that women deserved. For the first time she realized how desperate Malink really was. “And you will tell Abo to wash his dick when it is his turn.”

“What does that have to do with this?”

“He is stinky.”

“I will tell him.”

“And you will tell Favo to quit making me put beads in his ass.”

“Favo does that?”

“He said he learned it from the Japanese.”

“Really? Favo?”

“Yes.”

“But he’s old, and he has a wife and many grandchildren.”

“He says it makes his spear stronger.”

“He does? I mean, does it work?” Malink had momentarily forgotten why he was here.

“I don’t like it. It is evil and unclean.”

“You’re talking about my old friend Favo, right? He’s the one you’re talking about?”

“I told him only bachelors were suppose to stay here, but he says his wife doesn’t understand him. His hands are like the skin of a shark.”

“What kind of beads?”

“Tell him,” Sepie said.

“Okay,” Malink said in English. Then to himself he said: “Old Favo.” He shook his head as he walked out of the bachelors’ house. “Beads.”

Sepie watched him go, wishing that she had asked for more favors.

Outside the men were grinning when Malink stepped into the moonlight. He hitched up his loincloth and averted his eyes from theirs.

“Take them inside. You must cook and clean for them. Don’t let the woman do it. It is too important for her.”

As the men carried Tuck and Kimi into the bachelors’ house, Favo ambled up to Malink. “How was it?”

Malink looked at his old friend and noticed for the first time that Favo wore a long string of ivory beads around his neck. “I have to go home now,” Malink said.

Sepie was, once again, swabbing up the wooden floor where the pilot had urinated on himself, when she heard the other one speak for the first time. The men had propped the Filipino up in the corner, where he had sat drinking the coconut milk and fish broth that she had been pouring into the pilot, but except for a few grunts when he made his way outside to urinate, the man in the dress had been quiet for two days. Sepie had learned to ignore him. He didn’t smell as bad as the pilot, and she sort of liked his flowered dress. She’d said a prayer to Vincent for a dress just like it.

“Where is Roberto?” the Filipino said.

Sepie jumped. It didn’t surprise her so much that he had spoken, but that he had spoken in her language. Although the words were clipped, the way someone from Iffallik or Satawan might speak.

“He’s right here,” she said. “Your friend stinks. You should take him outside and wash him in the sea.”

“That’s not Roberto. That’s Tucker. Roberto is shorter.” Kimi crawled over to Tuck and laid his hand on the flyer’s forehead. “He has bad fever. You have medicine?”

“Aspirin,” Sepie said. Malink had given her a bottle of the tablets to crush into the flyer’s broth, but after he gagged on the first dose she had stopped giving it to him.

“He is more sick than aspirin. He needs a doctor. You have a doctor?”

“We have the Sorcerer. He does our medicine. He was a doctor before the Sky Priestess came.”

Kimi looked at her. “What island is this?”

“Alualu.”

“Ha! We have to get doctor for Tucker. He owes me five hundred dollars.”

Sepie’s eyes went wide. No wonder he wears such a fine dress. Five hundred dollars! She said, “The chief says I have to be secret about this man. Everyone knows he is here. The boys get drunk and talk. But I can’t get the doctor.”

“Why are you taking care of him? You are just a girl.”

“I am not just a girl. I am mispel.”

Kimi scoffed. “There are no mispels anymore.”

Sepie threw down the rag she was using to wipe the floor. “What do you know? You are a man in a dress, and I don’t believe you have five hundred dollars.”

“It was a nice dress before the typhoon,” Kimi said. “Wash-and-wear. No dry cleaning.”

Sepie nodded as if she knew what he was talking about. “It is a very pretty dress. I like it.”

“You do?” Kimi picked at the crushed pleats around his legs. “It’s just an old thing I picked up in Manila. It was on sale. You really like it?”

Sepie didn’t understand. Among her people, if you admired someone’s else possession, manners bound them to give it to you. How could this silly man speak her language and still not know her customs. And he wasn’t even looking at her that way all men looked at her.

“What island do you come from?”

“Satawan,” Kimi said. “I am a navigator.”

Sepie scoffed. “There are no more navigators.”

Just then the doorway darkened and they looked up to see Abo, the fierce one, entering the bachelors’ house. He was lean and heavily muscled and he wore a permanent scowl on his face. The sides of his head were shaved and tattooed with images of hammerhead sharks. He wore his hair tied into a warrior’s topknot that had gone out of fashion a hundred years ago.

“Has the pilot awakened?” he growled.

Sepie looked down and smiled coyly. Abo was the one boy in the bachelors’ house who didn’t seem to accept the communal nature of her position. He was always jealous, enraged, or brooding, but he

brought her many presents, sometimes even copies of People that he stole from the men’s drinking circle. Sepie thought she might marry him someday.

“He is too sick for this,” Kimi said. “We need to take him to the doctor.”

“Malink says he must stay here until he is well.”

“He is dying.” Kimi said.

Abo looked at Sepie for confirmation.

“Well, he smells dead,” she said. The sooner they sent the pilot to the

Sorcerer, the sooner she could get back to spending her days swimming and preening. “Malink will be angry if he dies,” she added for good measure.

Abo nodded. “I will tell him.” He pointed to Kimi. “You come with me.” Kimi got up to leave, then turned back to Sepie when he reached the

doorway. “If Roberto comes, tell him I’ll be right back.” Sepie shrugged. “Who is Roberto?” “He’s a fruit bat. From Guam. You can tell by his accent.” “Oh, him. I think Sarapul ate him,” Sepie said casually.” Kimi turned and ran screaming into the village.

Malink looked up from his breakfast, a banana leaf full of fish and rice, to see Abo coming down the coral path toward his house. Malink’s wife and daughters shuffled to the cookhouse at the sight of the fierce one.

“Good morning, Chief,” Abo said.

“Food?” Malink answered, gesturing with his breakfast.

Abo had already eaten, but it would have been rude not to accept. “Yes.”

Malink’s wife poked her head out of the cookhouse and saw the chief

nod. In a second she was giving her own breakfast to Abo, who neither thanked her or acknowledged her presence. “The pilot is sick,” Abo said. “Very bad fever. Sepie and the girl-man say that he will die soon without the Sorcerer’s help.”

Malink suddenly lost his appetite. He set his breakfast on the ground and one of his daughters appeared out of nowhere to take it to the cookhouse, where the women shared what was left.

“And what do you think?” Malink asked.

“I think he is dying. He smells of sickness. Like when Tamu was bitten by the shark and his leg turned black.”

Malink rubbed his temples. How to handle this? The Sky Priestess was angry with him for even dreaming of the pilot. What would happen if he suddenly showed up with him?

“What about the girl-man?”

“He is not sick, but he has gone crazy. He runs around the village looking for Sarapul.”

Malink nodded. “Catch him and tie him up. Make a litter and take the pilot to the betel nut trees by the runway. Leave him there.”

“Leave him there?”

“Yes, quickly. And bring the litter back with you. Make it look as if he walked to the runway. Send a boy to me when it is done. Go now.”

Abo put down his food and ran off down the path.

Malink went into his house and pulled the ammo box out of the rafters. Inside, next to the portable phone, he found the Zippo that Vincent had given him. He clicked it open, lit it, and sat it on the floor while it burned. “Vincent,” he said, “It’s your friend Malink here. Please tell the Sky Priestess that this is not my fault. Tell her that you have sent the pilot. Please tell her for your friend Malink so she will not be angry. Amen.”

His prayer finished, Malink snapped the lighter shut, put it away, then took the portable phone and went outside to wait for the boy to tell him everything was in place.

28 Choose Your Own Nightmare

Tucker Case rolled through a fever dream where he was tossed in great elastic waves of bat-winged demons—crushed, smothered, bitten, and scratched—and there, amid the chaos, a pink fabric softener sheet passed by the corner of his eye, confirming that he had been stuffed into a dryer in the laundromat of Hell. He tumbled toward the pink, ascended out of the clawing mass, and awoke gasping, with no idea where he was.

The pink was a dress on a heart-faced woman who said, “Good morning, Mr. Case. Welcome back to the world.”

A man’s voice: “After your message and the typhoon, we thought for sure you’d been lost at sea.” He was a white blur with a head, then a lab coat wrapped around a tall, smiling middle-aged man, gray and balding, a stethoscope around his neck.

The doctor had his arm around the heart-faced woman. She too was smiling, with the aspect of an angel, the vessel of human kindness. Together they looked as if they had walked off of fifties television.

The man said, “I’m Dr. Sebastian Curtis, Mr. Case. This is my wife, Beth.”

Tuck tried to speak, but emitted only a rasping squeak. The woman lifted a plastic cup of water to his lips and he drank. He eyed the IV bag running into his arm.

“Glucose and antibiotics,” the doctor said. “You’ve got some badly infected wounds. The islanders found you washed up on the reef.”

Tucker did a quick inventory of his limbs by feel, then looked at them lest he had lost a leg that was still giving off phantom feel

ing. He raised his head to look at his crotch, which was sending pulses of pain up through his abdomen.

The woman gently pushed him down. “You’re going to be fine. They found you in time, but you’re going to need more rest. ’Bastian can give you something for the pain if you need it.”

She smiled beatifically at her husband, who patted Tuck’s arm. “Don’t be embarrassed, Mr. Case. Beth is a surgical nurse. I’m afraid the catheter will have to stay in for a few days.”

“There was another guy with me,” Tuck said. “A Filipino. He was piloting the boat.”

The doctor and his wife shot each other a glance and the “Ozzie and Harriet” calm shattered into panic, but only for a second, then they were back to their reassuring cooing. Tuck wasn’t even sure he had seen the break.

“I’m sorry, but the islanders didn’t find anyone else. He must have been lost in the storm.”

“But the tree. He was hung in the tree…”

Beth Curtis put her finger gently on his lips. “I’m sorry you lost your friend, Mr. Case, but you need to get some rest. I’ll bring you something to eat in a little while and we’ll see if you can hold down some solid food.”

She pulled her hand away and put her arm around her husband’s waist as he pushed a syringe of fluid into Tuck’s IV tube. “We’ll check on you shortly,” the doctor said.

Tucker watched them walk away and noticed that for all her “Little House on the Prairie” purity, Beth Curtis had a nice shape under that calico. Then he felt a little sleazy, as if he’d been caught horning on a friend’s mom. Like the time, drunk and full of himself, he’d hit on Mary Jean Dobbins.

To hell with solid food. Gin—in large quantities over a tall column of ice—that’s the rub. Tonic to chase away the blues of bad dreams and men lost at sea.

Tuck looked around the room. It was a small hospital ward. Only four beds, but amazingly clean considering where it was. And there was some pretty serious-looking equipment against the walls: technical stuff on casters, stuff you might use in complicated surgery or to set the timing on a Toyota. He was sure Jake Skye would know what it was. He thought about the Learjet, then felt himself starting to doze.

Sleep came with the face of a cannibal, leg-jerk dreams, and finally settled in on the oiled breasts of a brown girl brushing against

his face and smelling of coconut and flowers. There was a scratch and scuttle on the tin roof, followed by the bark of a fruit bat. Tuck didn’t hear it.

The pig thief had been caught and Jefferson Pardee had to find a new lead story. He sat at his desk pouring over the notes he’d written on a yellow legal pad, hoping that something would jump out at him. In fact, there wasn’t a lot of jumping material there. The notes read: “They caught the pig thief. Now what?”

You could run down the leads, pound the pavement, check all your facts with two sources, then structure your meticulously gathered information into the inverted pyramid form and what you got was: The pig’s owner had gotten drunk and beat up his wife, so she sold his pig to someone on the outer islands and bought a used stun gun from an ensign with the Navy Cat team. The next time her husband got rough, a group of Japanese tourists found him by the side of the road, sizzling in the dirt like a strip of frying bacon. Mistaking him for a street performer, the tourists clapped joyously, took pictures of each other standing beside the electrocuted man, and gave his wife five dollars. The whole intrigue had been exposed when police found the pig-stealing wife in front of the Continental Hotel charging tourists a dollar apiece to watch her zap her husband’s twitching supine body. The stun gun was confiscated, no charges were pressed, and the wife beater was pronounced unharmed by a Peace Corps volunteer, although he did need to be reminded several times of his name, where he lived, and how many children he had.

The mystery was solved and the Truk Star had no lead story. Jefferson Pardee was miserable. He was actually going to have to go out and find a story or, as he had done so many time before, make one up. The Micro Spirit was in port. Maybe he’d go down to the dock and see if he could stir up some news out of the crew. He slid his press card into the band of his Australian bush hat and waddled out the door and down the dusty street to the pier where rock-hard, rope-muscled islanders were loading fifty-five-gallon drums into cargo nets and hoisting them into the holds of the Micro Spirit.

The Micro Spirit and the Micro Trader were sister ships: small freighters that cruised the Micronesian crescent carrying cargo and passengers to the outer islands. There were no cabins other than

those of the captain and crew. Passengers traveled and slept on the deck.

Pardee waved to the first mate, a heavily tattooed Tongan who stood at the rail chewing betel nut and spitting gooey red comets over the side.

“Ahoy!” Pardee called. “Permission to come aboard.”

The mate shook his head. “Not until we finish loading this jet fuel. I’ll come down. How you doing, Scoop?”

Pardee had convinced the crew of the Micro Spirit to call him “Scoop” one drunken night in the Yumi Bar. He watched the mate vault over the railing at the bow and monkey down a mooring line to the dock with no more effort than if he was walking down stairs. Watching him made Pardee sad that he was a fat man.

The mate strolled up to Pardee and pumped his hand. “Good to see you.”

“Likewise,” Pardee said. “Where you guys in from?”

“We bring chiefs in from Wolei for a conference. Pick up some tuna and copra. Same, same.”

Pardee looked back at the sailors loading the barrels. “Did you say jet fuel? I thought the Mobil tankers handled all the fuel for Continental.” Continental was the only major airline that flew Micronesia.

“Mobil tankers won’t go to Alualu. No lagoon, no harbor. We going to Ulithi, then take this fuel special order to the doctor on Alualu.”

Pardee took a moment to digest the information. “I thought the Micro Trader did Yap and Palau States. What are you going all the way over there for?”

“Like I say, special order. Moen has jet fuel, we here in Moen, doctor wants jet fuel soon, so we go. I like it. I never been Alualu and I know a girl on Ulithi.”

Pardee couldn’t help but smile. This was a story in itself. Not a big one, but when the Trader or the Spirit changed schedules it made the paper. But there was more of a story somewhere in those barrels of jet fuel, in the ru-mor of armed guards, and in the two pilots that had passed through Truk on the way to No One’s Island. The question for Pardee was: Did he want to track it down? Could he track it down?

“When do you sail?” he asked the mate.

“Tomorrow morning. We get drunk together tonight Yumi Bar. My boys carry you home if you want. Hey?” The mate laughed.

Pardee felt sick. That was what they knew him for, a fat, drunken white man who they could carry home and then tell stories about.

“I can’t drink tonight. I’m sailing with you in the morning. I’ve got to get ready.”

The mate removed the betel nut cud from his cheek and tossed it into the sea, where tiny yellow fish rose to nip at it. He eyed Pardee suspiciously. “You going to leave Truk?”

“It’s not that big a deal. I’ve gone off-island before for a story.”

“Not in ten years I sail the Spirit.”

“Do you have room for another passenger or not?”

“We always have room. You know you have to sleep on deck?”

Pardee was beginning to get irritated. He needed a beer. “I’ve done this before.”

The mate shook his head as if clearing his ears of water and laughed. “Okay, we sail six in morning. Be on dock at five.”

“When do you come back this way?”

“A month. You can fly from Yap if you don’t want to come back with us.”

“A month?” He’d have to get someone to run the paper while he was gone. Or maybe not. Would anyone even notice he was gone?

Pardee said, “I’ll see you in the morning. Don’t get too drunk.”

“You too,” the mate said.

Pardee made his way down the dock, feeling every bit of his two hundred and sixty pounds. By the time he made it back to the street, he was soaked with sweat and yearning for a dark air-conditioned bar. He shook off the craving and headed for the Catholic high school to ask the nuns if they had any bright students who might keep the paper running in his absence.

He was going to do it, dammit. He’d be on the dock at five if he had to stay up all night drinking to do it.

29 Safe in the Hands of Medicine

“How are you feeling today?” Sebastian Curtis pulled the sheet down to Tuck’s knees and lifted the pilot’s hospital gown. Tucker flinched when the doctor touched the catheter. “Better,” Tuck said. “That thing is itching, though.”

“It’s healing.” The doctor palpated the lymph nodes in Tucker’s crotch. His hands were cold and Tuck shivered at the touch. “The infection is subsiding. This happened to you in the plane crash?”

“I fell back on some levers while I was trying to get a passenger out of the plane.”

“The hooker?” The doctor didn’t look up from his work.

Tuck wanted to throw the sheets over his head and hide. Instead, he said, “I don’t suppose it would make a difference if I said I didn’t know she was a hooker.”

Sebastian Curtis looked up and smiled; his eyes were light gray flecked with orange. With his gray hair and tropical tan, he could have been a re-tired general, Rommel maybe. “I’m not really concerned with what the woman was doing there. What does concern me is that you had been drinking. We can’t have that here, Mr. Case. You may have to fly on a moment’s notice, so you won’t be able to drink or indulge in any other chemical diversions. I assume that won’t pose a problem.”

“No. None,” Tuck said, but he felt like he’d been hit with a bag of sand. He’d been craving a drink since he’d regained consciousness. “By the way, Doc, since we’re going to be doing business together, maybe you should call me Tucker.”

“Tucker it is,” Curtis said. “And you can call me Dr. Curtis.” He smiled again.

“Swell. And your wife’s name is?”

“Mrs. Curtis.”

“Of course.”

The doctor finished his examination and pulled the sheet back up to Tuck’s waist. “You should be on your feet in a few days. We’ll move you to your bungalow this afternoon. I think you’ll find everything you need there, but if you do need anything, please let us know.”

A gin and tonic, Tuck thought. “I’d like to find out what happened to the guy who was piloting my boat.”

“As I told you, the islanders found you and a few pieces of your boat.” There was a finality in his voice that made it clear that he didn’t want to talk about Kimi or the boat.

Tuck pressed on. Respect for authority had never been his long suit. “I guess I’ll ask around when I get out of here. Maybe he washed up on a different part of the island. I remember being hung in a tree with him by an old cannibal.”

Tuck saw a frown cross the doctor’s face like a fleeting shadow, then the professional smile was back. “Mr. Case, there haven’t been any cannibals in these islands for a hundred years. Besides, I will have to ask you to stay inside the compound while you are here. You’ll have access to beaches and there’s plenty of room to roam, but you won’t be having any contact with the islanders.”

“Why, I mean if they saved me?”

“The Shark People have a very closed society. We try not to intrude on that any more than is necessary for us to do our work.”

“The Shark People? Why the Shark People?”

“I’ll explain it all to you when you are feeling better. Right now you need to rest.” The doctor took a syringe from a metal drawer by the wall and filled it from a vial of clear fluid, then injected it into Tuck’s IV. “When do you think you’ll be ready to fly?”

Tuck felt as if a veil of gauze had been thrown over his mind. Everything in the room went soft and fuzzy. “Not real soon if you keep giving me that stuff. Wow, what was that? Hey, you’re a doctor. Do you think we taste like Spam?”

He was going to ask another question, but somehow it didn’t seem to matter anymore.

The Sorcerer stormed into the Sky Priestess’s bungalow, stripped off his lab coat, and threw it into the corner. He went to the open kitchen, ripped open the freezer, pulled out a frosty fifth of Absolut, and poured a triple shot into a water glass that froze and steamed like dry ice in the humidity. “Malink lied,” he said. Then he tossed back half the glass and grabbed his temples when the cold hit his brain.

The Sky Priestess looked up from her magazine. “A little stressed, darling?” She was lying out on the lanai, naked except for a wide-brimmed straw hat, her white skin shining in the sun like pearl.

The Sorcerer joined her and fell onto a chaise lounge, a hand still clamped on his temples. “Case says there was another man with him on the island. He said an old cannibal hung them in a tree.”

“I heard him,” the Sky Priestess said. “He’s delirious?”

“I don’t think so. I think Malink lied. That they found the boat pilot and didn’t tell us.”

She moved next to him on the chaise lounge and pried the glass of vodka out of his hand. “So send the ninjas on a search mission. You’re paying them. They might as well do something.”

“That’s not an option and you know it.”

“Well, then go yourself. Or call Malink on it. Tell him that you know there was another man and you want him brought here chop-chop.”

“I think we’re losing them, Beth. Malink wouldn’t have dared lie to me a month ago. It’s that dream. He dreams that Vincent is sending them a pilot, then you tell him it’s not true, then a pilot washes up on the reef.”

The Sky Priestess drained the glass of vodka and handed it back to him empty. “Yeah, nothing fucks up a good religion like the intervention of a real god.”

“I wish you wouldn’t talk that way.”

“So what are you going to do, after you get a refill, I mean?”

The Sorcerer looked up at her as if noticing her for the first time. “Beth, what are you doing out here? The Priestess of the Sky does not have a tan.”

She reached under the chaise lounge and came up with a plastic bottle of lotion. “SPF 90. Relax, ’Bastian, this stuff would keep me creamy white in a nuclear flare. You want to rub some on me?” She pushed her hat back on her head so he could see the predator seriousness in her eyes.

“Beth, please. I’m on the cusp of a crisis here.”

“It’s not a crisis. It’s obvious why the Shark People are getting restless.”

“It is?”

“No one has been chosen in over two months, ’Bastian.”

He shook his head. “Case isn’t ready to fly.”

“Well, get him ready.”

30 Fashion Statements

Kimi sat under a coconut palm outside of the bachelors’ house sulking. His flowered dress was gone and he wore a blue thu, the long saronglike loin-cloth worn by the Shark men. Gone too was his blond wig, his high heels, and his best friend, Roberto, who he had not seen since the cannibal tree. Now it looked as if he had no place to sleep. Sepie had thrown him out.

Sepie came out of the bachelors’ house wearing Kimi’s floral dress and glared at him. She paused on the coral pathway. “I am not a monkey,” she said. Then she picked up a stone from the path and hurled it at him, barely missing his head.

Kimi scuffled to the leeward side of the tree and peeked around. “I didn’t say you were a monkey. I said that if you didn’t shave your legs, you would soon look like a monkey.”

A rock whizzed by his face so close he could feel the wind of it. She was getting more accurate with each throw. “You know nothing,” she said. “You are just a girl-man.”

Kimi dug a stone from the sand at his feet and hurled it at her, but his heart wasn’t in it and it missed her by five feet. In English he said, “You just a poxy oar with a big mouth.” He hoped this verbal missile hit closer to home. They were the last words of Malcolme, Kimi’s pimp back in Ma-nila. In retrospect, Malcolme’s mistake had been one of memory. He had forgotten that the overly made-up little girl standing in front of him with a machete was, in fact, a wiry young man with the anger of hundreds of beatings burning in his memory.

“I no have the pox,” Kimi said to Malcolme, whose look of surprise remained fixed even as his head rolled into the corner of the

hotel room, where a rat darted out and gently licked his shortened neck.

“I no have the pox,” Sepie said in English, punctuating her statement with a thrown lump of coral.

“I know,” Kimi said. “I’m sorry I say that.” He skulked off down the beach.

Sepie stood outside the bachelors’ house watching him, totally disarmed. No man had ever apologized to her before.

Kimi hadn’t meant to hurt her feelings. Sometimes it takes a thick skin to trade beauty tips with a girlfriend. Sepie was naturally pretty, but she didn’t understand fashion. Why bother to put on a pretty dress if you’re going to have monkey legs and tufts of hair hanging out from under your arms making it look like bats hanging there?

Bats. Kimi missed Roberto.

The Shark men wouldn’t talk to him, the women ignored him, except for Sepie, who was angry at him now, and even Tucker had been taken away to the other side of the island. Kimi was lonely. And as he walked down the beach, past the children playing with a trained frigate bird, past the men lounging in the shade of an empty boathouse, his loneliness turned to anger. He turned up the beach and took a path into the village to look for a weapon. It was time to go see the old cannibal.

Outside each of the houses, near the cook sheds, stood an iron spike—a pick head that was driven into the ground and used to husk coconuts. Kimi stopped at one house and yanked on the spike, but it wouldn’t budge. He moved between the houses, vacant now in the early morning, the women working in the taro field, the men lounging in various patches of shade. He peeked into a cook shed, and there, by the pot that held the crust of this morning’s rice, he found a long chef’s knife. He looked around to make sure that no one was watching, then bolted into the shed and snatched the knife, fitting it into his thu so that only the handle protruded at the small of his back.

Ten minutes later he was hiding in a patch of giant ferns, watching the old cannibal roll coconut husk fibers into rope on his leathery old thighs. He sat with his back against a palm tree, his legs straight out in front of him, pulling the fibers that had been soaked and separated out of a basket and measuring by feel the right amount to

add to the coil of cord that was building on the ground beside him. From time to time he stopped and took a drink from a jar of milky liquid that Kimi was sure was alcoholic tuba. Good, he was drunk.

Kimi moved slowly around the house, staying in the undergrowth of ferns and elephant ears, careful not to kick up any of the coral gravel that rang like broken glass if you didn’t place your feet carefully.

Once he was behind the old man, he drew the knife from the small of his back and moved forward to kill that man who had eaten his friend.

From the window of his new quarters Tucker Case watched the Japanese guards move through the compound carrying palm fronds and broken branches, detritus of the typhoon, which they piled in an open space at the side of the hangar to dry in the sun. They were dressed like a police SWAT team, in black coveralls with baseball caps and paratrooper boots, and if he squinted, they looked like giant worker ants cleaning out the nest. From time to time one of the guards would look toward his bungalow, then quickly turn away when he saw Tucker standing in the window in his pajamas. He had given up waving to them after the first hour of being ignored.

He’d been in the one-room bungalow for four days now, but this was the first time he’d felt well enough to get up and move around, other than to use the bathroom, which to his surprise, had hot and cold running water, a flush toilet, and a shower stall made of galvanized metal. The walls were tightly woven grass between a sturdy frame of teak and mahogany logs; the floor was unfinished teak, sanded smooth and pink; and the furniture was wicker with brightly colored cushions. A ceiling fan spun languidly above a double bed that was draped with a canopy of mosquito netting. The windows looked out on the compound and hangar on one side and through a grove of palm trees to the ocean on the other. He could see sev-eral bungalows perched near the beach, a small dock, and the cinderblock hospital building, its tin roof arrayed with antennae, solar electric panels, and a massive satellite dish.

Tuck backed away from the window and sat down on the wicker couch. A few minutes on his feet and he felt exhausted. He was twenty pounds lighter than when he had left Houston and there wasn’t a six-inch patch of skin on his body that didn’t have some

kind of bandage on it. The doc had said that between the cuts on his arms, knees, and scalp, he had taken a hundred sutures. The first time he looked in the little mirror in his bathroom, he thought he was looking at a human version of the mangy feral dog he’d seen on Truk. His blue eyes lay like dull ice in sunken brown craters and his cheeks were drawn into his face like a mummified bog man’s. His hair had been bleached white by the sun and stuck out in straw-dry tufts between pink patches where the doctor had shaved his scalp to stitch him up. He took small comfort in the fact that there were no women around to see him. No real women, anyway. The doctor’s wife, who came several times a day to bring him food or to change his bandages, seemed robotic, like some Stepford/Barbie hybrid with the smooth sexless carriage of a mannequin and a personality pulled out of an Eisenhower-era soap commercial. She made the straight-laced cosmetic reps from his past seem like a tribe of pillbox nympho hose hunters.

There was a tap on the door and Beth Curtis breezed in carrying a wooden serving tray with plates of pancakes and fresh fruit. “Mr. Case, you’re up. Feeling better today?”

She set the tray down on the coffee table in front of him and stepped back. Today she was in pleated khaki pants and a white blouse with puffed shoulders. Her hair was tied back with a big white bow at the back of her neck. She might have just walked out of a Stewart Granger safari movie.

“Yes, better,” Tuck said, “But I wore myself out just walking to the window.”

“Your body is still fighting off the infection. The doctor will be by soon to give you some antibiotics. For now you need to eat.” She sat on the chair across from him.

Tuck cut a divot out of the stack of pancakes with a fork and speared it through a piece of papaya. After the first bite, he realized how hungry he really was and began wolfing down the pancakes.

Beth Curtis smiled. “Have you had a chance to look over the manuals for the airplane?”

Tuck nodded, his mouth still full. She’d left the operations manuals on his bed two days ago. He’d leafed through them enough to know that he could fly the thing. He swallowed and said, “I used to fly a Lear 25 for Mary Jean. This one is a little faster and has longer range, but basically it’s the same. Shouldn’t be a problem.”

“Oh, good,” she said, sporting one of her plastic smiles. “When will you be able to fly?”

Tucker put down his fork. “Mrs. Curtis, I don’t mean to be rude, but what in the hell is going on around here?”

“Regarding what, Mr. Case?”

“Well, first, regarding the man I came to this island with. I was sick, but I wasn’t hallucinating. We were strung up in a tree by an old native guy and cut down by a bunch of others. What happened to my friend?”

She shifted in her chair, and the wicker crackled like snapping rat bones. “My husband told you what the islanders told us, Mr. Case. The natives live on the other side of the island. They have their own society, their own chief, their own laws. We try to take care of their medical needs and bring a few souls into the fold, but they are a private people. I’ll ask them about your friend. If I find out anything, I’ll let you know.” She stood and straightened the front of her slacks.

“I’d appreciate that,” Tuck said. “I promised him I’d get him back to Yap and I owe him some money. The natives didn’t find my backpack, did they? My money was in it.”

She shook her head. “Just the clothes you had on. We burned them. Fortunately, you and Sebastian are about the same size. Now, if you’ll ex-cuse me, Mr. Case, I have some work to do. Sebastian will be along in a bit with your medicine. I’m glad you’re feeling better.” She turned and walked out the door into the blinding sunlight.

Tucker stood and watched her walk across the compound. The Japanese guards stopped their work and leered at her. She spun on them and waited, her hands on her hips, until one by one they lost their courage and returned to their work, not embarrassed but afraid, as if meeting her direct gaze might turn them to frost. Tuck sat down to his half-eaten pancakes and shivered, thinking it must be the fever.

A half hour later the doctor entered the bungalow. Tucker was spread out on the couch descending into a nap. They’d been doing this since they’d moved him to the bungalow, tag-teaming him, one showing up at least every hour to check on him, bring him food or medicine, change the sheets, take his temperature, help him to the bathroom, wipe his forehead. It looked like concerned care, but it felt like surveillance.

Sebastian Curtis took a capped syringe from his coat pocket as he crossed the room.

Tuck sighed. “Another one?”

“You must be feeling like a pin cushion by now, Mr. Case. I need you to roll over.”

Tuck rolled over and the doctor gave him the injection. “It’s either this or the IV. We’ve got this infection on the run, but we don’t want it to get a foothold again.”

Tuck rubbed his bottom and sat up. Before he could say anything, the doctor stuck a digital thermometer in his mouth.

“Beth tells me that you’re worried about your friend, the one you say came to the island with you?”

Tuck nodded.

“I’ll check into it, I promise you. In the meantime, if you’re feeling up to it, Beth and I would like you to join us for dinner. Get to know each other a little. Let you know what’s expected of you.” He pulled the thermometer out of Tuck’s mouth and checked it but made no comment. “You up for dinner tonight?”

“Sure,” Tuck said. “But…”

“Good. We’ll eat at seven. I’ll have Beth bring you down some clothes. I’m sorry about the hand-me-downs, but it’s the best we can do for now.” He started to leave.

“Doc?”

Sebastian turned. “Yes.”

“You’ve been out here, what, thirty years?”

The doctor stiffened. “Twenty-eight. Why?”

“Well, Mrs. Curtis doesn’t look…”

“Yes, Beth is quite a bit younger than I am. But we can talk about all that at dinner. You should probably rest now and let those antibiotics do their work. I need you healthy, Mr. Case. We have a round of golf to play.”

“Golf?”

“You do play, don’t you?”

Tuck took a second to catch up with the abrupt change of subject, then said, “You play golf here?”

“I am a physician, Mr. Case. Even in the Pacific we have Wednesdays.” Then he smiled and left the bungalow.

31 Revenge: Sweet and Low in Calories

Sarapul twisted the last of the fibers into his rope and drew his knife to trim the ragged end. It was a good knife, made in Germany, with a thin flexible blade that was perfect for filleting fish or cutting microthin slices from coconut stems to keep the tuba running. He’d had the knife for ten years and he kept it honed and polished on a piece of tanned pig hide. The blade flashed blue as he picked it up and he saw the face of vengeance re-flected in the metal.

Without turning, he said, “The young ones are going to kill you.”

Kimi stopped, his knife held ready to strike the old man in the neck. “You ate my friend.”

Sarapul gripped his knife blade down so he might turn and slash at the same time. There was no quickness in his bones, though. The Filipino would kill him before he got halfway around. “Your friend is with the white Sorcerer and Vincent’s bitch. Malink took him away.”

“Not that one. Roberto. The bat.”

“Bats are taboo. We don’t eat bats on Alualu.”

Kimi lowered his knife an inch. “You are not supposed to eat people either, but you do.”

“Not people I know. Come over here where I can see you. I am old and my neck won’t turn that far around.”

Kimi walked a crescent around the tree and crouched at ready in front of the old man.

Sarapul said, “You were going to kill me.”

“If you ate Roberto.”

“I like that. Nobody kills anybody anymore. Oh, the young ones are talking about killing you, but I think Malink will talk them out of it.”

Kimi cleared his throat. “Were you going to eat me when they killed me?”

“Someone brought that up at the drinking circle. I don’t remember who.”

“Then how do I know you did not eat Roberto?”

“Look at me, little one. I am a hundred years old maybe. Sometimes I go to the beach to pee and the tides change before my water comes. How would I catch a bat?”

Kimi sat down on the ground across from the old man and dropped his knife in the gravel. “Something happened to Roberto. He flew off.”

“Maybe he found a girl bat,” Sarapul said. “Maybe he will come back. You want a drink?” The old cannibal offered his jar of tuba to Kimi, who leaned forward and snatched it before retreating out of knife range.

Kimi took a sip and grimaced. “Why are they going to kill me?”

“They say you are a girl-man and that you make Sepie forget her duties as mispel. And they don’t like you. Don’t worry, no one kills anyone anymore. It is just drunk talk.”

Kimi hung his head. “Sepie sent me away from the bachelors’ house. She is mad at me. I have nowhere to go.”

Sarapul nodded in sympathy, but said nothing. He’d been exiled for so long that he’d gotten used to the alienation, but he remembered how he had felt when Malink had first banished him.

“You speak our language pretty good,” Sarapul said.

“My father was from Satawan. He was a great navigator. He taught me.”

“You’re a navigator?” In the old days the navigators stood above even the chiefs—and just below the gods. As a boy, Sarapul idolized the two navigators of Alualu. The long-dead dream of his boyhood surfaced and he remembered learning from them, watching them draw star charts in the sand and stand at the beach lecturing on tides and currents and winds. He had wanted to be a navigator, had begun the training, for in the rigid caste system of the Yapese islands it was the one way for a man to distin-guish himself. But one of the navigators had died of a fever and the other was killed in a fight before he could pass on his knowledge. The navigators and warriors were ghosts of the past. If this girl-man was a navigator, then the

bachelors were piss ants to talk of killing him. Sarpul felt infused with an energy he hadn’t felt in years.

“I can show you something,” Sarapul said. He tried to climb to his feet and fell back into a crouch. Kimi took him by a bony arm and helped him up. “Come,” Sarapul said.

The old man led Kimi down the path to the beach and stopped at the water’s edge. He began to sing, his voice like dried palm leaves rattling in the wind. He waved his arms in arcs, then threw them wide to the sky so that his chest looked as if it might crack open like a rotten breadfruit. And the wind came up.

He took handfuls of sand and cast them into the wind, then clapped his hands and resumed singing until the palms above them were waving in the wind. Then he stopped.

“Now we wait,” he said. He pointed out to sea. “Watch there.”

A column of fog rose off the ocean at the horizon and boiled black and silver into a huge thunderhead. Sarapul clapped his hands again and a lightning bolt ripped out of the cloud and across the sky like a jagged white fissure in blue glass. The thunderclap was instant, deafening, and crackled for a full ten seconds.

Sarapul turned to Kimi, who was staring at the thunderhead with his mouth open. “Can you do that?”

Kimi shook off his astonishment with a shiver. “No, I never learned that. My father said he could send the thunder, but I didn’t see him do it.”

Sarapul grinned. “Ever eat a guy?”

Kimi shook his head. “No.”

“Tastes like Spam,” Sarapul said.

“I heard that.”

“I can teach you to send the thunder. I don’t know the stars, though.”

“I know the stars,” Kimi said.

“Go get your things,” Sarapul said.

32 The Missionary Position

The guards came for Tucker at sunset, just as he was slipping into the cotton pants and shirt the doctor had left for him. The doctor’s clothes were at least three sizes too big for him, but with the bandages he had to put them over, that was a blessing. He still had his own sneakers, which he put on his bare feet. He asked the guards to wait and they stood just inside his door, as straight and silent as terra-cotta soldiers.

“So, you guys speak English?”

The guards didn’t answer. They watched him.

“Japanese, huh? I’ve never been to Japan. I hear a Big Mac goes for twelve bucks.”

He waited for some response and got none. The Japanese stood impassive, silent, small beads of sweat shining through their crew cuts.

“Sorry, guys, I’d love to hang around with you chatterboxes, but I’m due for dinner with the doc and his wife.”

Tuck limped to the guards and offered each an arm in escort. “Shall we go?”

The guards turned and led him across the compound to one of the bungalows on the beach. The guards stopped at the steps of the lanai and Tuck dug into his pants pockets. “Sorry guys, no cash. Have the concierge put a couple of yen on my bill.”

The doctor came through the french doors in a white ice cream suit, carrying a tall iced drink garnished with mango. “Mr. Case, you’re looking much better. How are you feeling?”

“Nothing wrong with me one of those won’t cure.”

Sebastian Curtis frowned. “I’m afraid not. You shouldn’t drink alcohol with the antibiotics I have you on.”

Tucker felt his guts twist. “Just one won’t hurt, will it?”

“I’m afraid so. But I’ll make you one without alcohol. Come in. Beth is making a wonderful grouper in ginger sauce.”

Tucker went though the french doors to find a bungalow decorated much like his own, only larger. There was an open kitchen nook where Beth Curtis was stirring something with a wooden spoon. She looked up and smiled. “Mr. Case, just in time. I need someone to taste this sauce.” She was wearing a cream-colored Joan Crawford number with middle line-backer shoulder pads and buff-colored high heels. The dress was straight out of the forties, but Tuck had been around Mary Jean long enough to know that Mrs. Curtis had dropped at least five hundred bucks on the shoes. Evidently, missionary work paid pretty well.

She held a hand under Tuck’s chin as she presented the spoon. The sauce was sweet citrus with a piquant bite to it. “It’s good,” he said. “Really good.”

“No fibbing, Mr. Case. You’re going to have to eat it.”

“No, I like it.”

“Well, good. Dinner will be ready in about a half hour. Now, why don’t you men take your drinks out on the lanai and let a girl do her magic.”

Sebastian handed Tuck an icy glass filled with an orange liquid and garnished with mango. “Shall we?” he said, leading Tuck back outside.

They stood at the railing, looking out at the moon reflecting in the ocean.

“Would you be more comfortable sitting, Mr. Case?” the doctor asked.

“No, I’m fine. And please call me Tuck. Anyone calls me Mr. Case more than three times, I start thinking I’m going to get audited.”

The doctor laughed, “We can’t have that. Not with the kind of money you’re going to be making. But legally, you know, it’s tax-free until you take it back into the United States.”

Tuck stared out at the ocean for a moment, wondering whether it was time to give this gift horse a dental exam. There was just too damn much money showing on this island.

The equipment, the plane, Beth Curtis’s clothes. After Jake Skye’s lecture, Tuck had imagined that he might encounter some sweaty

drug-smuggling doctor with a Walther in his belt and a coke whore wife, but these two could have just flown in from an upscale church social. Still, he knew they were lying to him. They had referred to the Japanese as their “staff,” but he’d seen one of them carrying an Uzi out behind the hangar. He was going to ask, he really was, but as he turned to face the doctor, he heard a soft bark at the end of the lanai and looked up to see a large fruit bat hanging from the edge of the tin roof. Roberto.

The doctor said, “Tucker, about the drinking.”

Tuck pulled his gaze away from the bat. The doctor had seen him. “What drinking?”

“You know that we saw the reports on your—how should I put it?”

“Crash.”

“Yes, on your crash. I’m afraid, as I told you, we can’t have you drinking while you’re working here. We may need you to fly on very short notice and we can’t risk that you might not be ready.”

“That was an isolated incident,” Tuck lied. “I really don’t drink much.”

“Just a momentary lapse of judgment, I understand. And it may seem a bit draconian, but as long as you don’t drink or go out of the compound, everything will be fine.”

“Sure, no problem.” Tuck was watching the bat over the doctor’s shoulder. Roberto had unfurled his wings and was turning in the sea breeze like an inverted weather vane. Tuck tried to wave him off behind the doctor’s back.

“I know this may all seem very limiting, but I’ve worked with the Shark People for a long time, and they’re very sensitive to contact with outsiders.”

“The Shark People? You said you’d explain that.”

“They hunt sharks. Most of the natives in Micronesia won’t eat shark. In fact, it’s taboo. But the reef fish here often have a high concentration of neurotoxin, so the natives developed shark as a food source. You would think that the sharks, being higher on the food chain, would have a higher concentration of the toxin, wouldn’t you?”

“You’d think,” Tuck said, having no idea whatsoever what the doctor was talking about.

“They don’t, though. It’s as if something in their system neutralizes the toxin. I’ve done a little research in my spare time.”

“I’ve seen a lot of shark shows on the Discovery Channel. They go on and on about how harmless sharks are. It’s bullshit. Half of these stitches you put in me are because of a shark attack.”

“Maybe they don’t have cable,” the doctor said.

Tuck turned to him, amazed. “A joke, Doc?”

The doctor looked a little embarrassed. “I’m going to go see how dinner is coming along. I’ll be right back.” He turned and went into the house.

Tucker bolted to the end of the lanai where Roberto was hanging. “Shoo. Go away.”

Roberto made a trilling noise and tried to catch Tuck’s drink with his wing claw.

“Okay, you can have the mango, but then you have to get out of here.” Tucker held out the piece of cut mango and the fruit bat took it in his wing claw and slurped it down.

“Now get out of here,” Tucker said. “Go find Kimi. Shoo, shoo.”

Roberto tilted his head and said, “Back off on these people, Tuck. You push them too hard, they’ll pull your plug. Just keep your eyes open.”

Tuck moved away from the bat with stiff jerking steps out of the line dance of the undead. The bat had said something. It was a tiny voice, high but raspy, the voice of a chain-smoking Topo Gigio, but it was clear. “You didn’t talk,” Tucker said.

“Okay,” said Roberto. “Thanks for the mango.”

Roberto took off, the beat of his wings like the shuffle of a deck of leather cards. Tuck backed though the french doors into a wicker emperor’s chair and sat down.

“Come sit,” Beth Curtis said as she carried a tray to the table. “Dinner’s ready.”

“What kind of drugs have you been giving me, Doc?”

“Broad-spectrum antibiotics and some Tylenol. Why?”

“Any chance they could cause hallucinations?”

“Not unless you were allergic, and we’d know that by now. Why?”

“Just wondering.”

Beth Curtis came to him and patted his shoulder. Her nails, he noticed, were perfect. “You had a fever when they brought you in. Sometimes that can give a person bad dreams. I think you’ll feel a lot better after a good meal.”

She helped him up and led him to the table, which was set with a white tablecloth and black linen napkins around a centerpiece of

orchid sprigs arranged in a crystal bowl. A whole grouper stared up between fanned slices of plantain on a serving tray, his eye a little dry but clear and accusing.

Tuck said, “If that thing starts talking, I want to be sedated—and right now.”

“Oh, Mr. Case.” Beth Curtis rolled her eyes and laughed as they sat down to dinner.

Tuck could almost feel his body absorbing the nourishment. He told them the story of his journey to the island, exaggerating the danger aspect and glossing over his injuries, Kimi, and his craving for alcohol. He didn’t mention Roberto at all. By the time Tucker was in the typhoon, the Curtises were well into their second bottle of white wine. Beth’s cheeks were flushed and her eyes sparkled with enthusiasm for Tuck’s every word.

Tuck really intended to ask about Kimi, their cryptic messages, the guards, the rules for his employment, and of course, where the hell all the money came from, but instead he found himself playing to Beth Curtis like a comedian on a roll and he left the bungalow at midnight quite taken with both himself and the doctor’s wife.

The Curtises stood arm in arm at the door as the guards escorted Tucker back to his quarters. Halfway across the compound, he did a giddy turn and waved to them, feeling as if he had been the one to consume two bottles of wine.

“What do you think?” the Sorcerer asked his wife.

“Not a problem,” she said, keeping a parade smile pointed Tuck’s way.

“I really expected him to be a little more resistant to our conditions.”

“As if he’s in a position to bargain. The man has nothing, is nothing. He shatters this little illusion we’ve given him and he has to face himself.”

“He looks at you like you’re some sort of beatific vestal virgin. I don’t like it.”

“I can handle that. You just get flyboy ready to do his job.”

“He’ll be able to fly within a week. He brought up his navigator again while we were outside.”

“If he’s here, you’d better find him.”

“I’ll speak to Malink tonight. The Micro Spirit is due in day after tomor-row. If we find the navigator, we can send him back on the ship.”

“Depending on what he’s seen,” she said.

“Yes, depending on what he knows.”

Tucker Case entered his bungalow feeling satisfied and full of himself. Someone had turned on the lights in his absence and turned down the bed. “What, no mint on the pillow?”

He changed into a pair of the doctor’s pajama bottoms and grabbed a paperback spy novel from a stack someone had left on the coffee table.

They had a TV. There had been a TV in the Curtises’ bungalow. He’d have to ask them to get him one. No, dammit, demand a television. What did Mary Jean always say? “You can sell all day, but if you don’t ask for the money, you haven’t made a sale.” Good food, good money, and a great aircraft to fly—he’d stumbled into the best gig on the planet. I am the Phoenix, rising from the ashes. I am the comeback kid. I am the entire 1980 gold-medal-winning U.S. Olympic hockey team. I am the fucking walrus, coo-coo ka-choo.

He went into the bathroom to brush his teeth, caught his reflection in the mirror. His mood went terminal. I am never going to get laid again as long as I live. I should have pressed them about Kimi. I didn’t even ask about what in the hell kind of cargo I’m going to be flying. I am a spineless worm. I’m scum. I’m the Hindenburg, I’m Michael Milken, Richard Nixon. I’m seeing ghosts and bats that talk and I’m stuck on an island where the only woman makes Mother Theresa look like a lap dancer in a leper colony. I am the man who put the F in failure, the P in pathetic, the G in gullible. I am the ringworm poster boy of Gangrene City. I’m an insane, unemployed bus driver for the death camp cartel.

Tuck went to bed without brushing his teeth.

33 Chasing the Scoop

Natives slept side by side, crisscrossed, and piled on the deck of the Micro Spirit until—with a thu showing here, or a lavalava there, streams of primary color among all that gelatinous brown flesh—it looked as if someone had dropped a big box of candy in the hot sun and they had melted together and spilled their fillings. Amid the mess, Jefferson Pardee, rolled and pitched with the ship, finding three sleeping children lying on him when the ship moved to starboard, a rotund island grandmother washing against him when the ship listed to port. He’d been stepped on three times by ashy callused feet, once on the groin, and he was relatively sure he could feel lice crawling in his scalp.

Unable to sleep, he stood up and the mass moved amoebalike into the vacated deck space. A three-quarter moon shone high and bright, and Pardee could see well enough to make his way through to the railing, only stepping on one woman and evoking colorful island curses from two men. Once at the rail, the warm wind washed away the cloying smell of sweat and the rancid nut smell of copra coming from the holds. The moon’s re-flection lay in the black sea like a tossing pool of mercury. A pod of dolphins rode the ship’s bow wave like gray ghosts.

He took several deep breaths, relieved himself over the side, then dug a bent cigarette out of his shirt pocket. He lit it with a disposable lighter and exhaled a contrail of smoke with a long sigh. Thirty years in the tropics had given him a high tolerance for discomfort and inconvenience, but the break in routine was maddening. Back on Truck, he’d be toweling off the smell of stale beer and the residue of an oily tumble with a dollar whore, preparing to pass out with a

volume of Mencken under his little air conditioner. No thought of the day to come or the one just passed, for one was like the next and they were all the same. Just cool cloudy sleep that made him feel, if only for a minute, like that young Midwestern boy on an adventure, exhausted from passion and fear, rather than a fat old man worn down by ennui.

And here, in the salt and the moonlight, on the trail of a story or maybe just a rumor, he felt the fungus growing in his lungs, the pain in his lower back, the weight of ten thousand beers and half a million cigarettes and thirty years of fish fried in coconut oil pressing on his heart, and none of it—none of it—was so heavy as the possibility of dashed hopes. Why had he opened himself up to a future and failure, when he had been failing just fine already?

“You can’t sleep?” the mate said.

Pardee hadn’t heard the wiry sailor move to the rail. He was drinking a Bud tallboy, against regulations, and Pardee felt a craving twist like a worm in his chest at the sight of the can.

“You got another one of those?”

The mate reached into the deep front pocket of his shorts, pulled out another beer, and handed it to Pardee. It was warm, but Pardee popped the top and drank off half of it in one gulp.

“How long before we make Alualu?” Pardee asked.

“Three, maybe four hour. Sunrise. We drop you on north side of island, you swim in.”

“What?” Pardee looked down to the black waves, then back at the mate.

“The doctor no let anyone go on the island except to bring cargo. You have to swim in on other side of island. Maybe half mile, maybe less.”

“How will I get back to the ship?”

“Captain say he will swing back around the island when we leave. Captain say he wait half an hour. You swim back out. We pick you up.”

“Can’t you send a boat?”

“No boat. No break in reef except on south side where we unload. We have many fuel barrel and crates. You will have seven, maybe eight hour.”

Pardee had seen the Spirit arrive in Truk lagoon a thousand times; the ship was always surrounded by outboards and canoes filled with excited natives. “Maybe I can get one of the Shark People to ferry me.” He did not want to get in that water, and he certainly

didn’t want to swim half a mile to shore, wasn’t sure he could.

“Shark People no have boat. They no leave island.”

“No boats?” Pardee was amazed. Living in these islands without a boat was akin to living in Los Angeles without a car. It wasn’t done; it couldn’t be done.

The mate patted Pardee’s big shoulder. “You be fine. I have mask and fins for you.”

“What about sharks?”

“Sharks afraid around there. On most island people afraid of shark. On Alualu shark afraid of people.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“No.”

“Oh, good. Do you have another beer?”

Three hours later the rising sun lay like a silver tray on the horizon and Jefferson Pardee was having swim fins duct-taped to his feet by the first mate. The deck bustled with excited natives eating rice balls and taro paste, smoking cigarettes, shitting over the railings, and milling around the ship’s store, trying to buy Cokes and Planter’s cheese balls, Australian corned beef, and, of course, Spam. A small crowd had gathered around to watch the white man prepare for his swim. Pardee stood in his boxer shorts, maggot white except for his forearms and face, which looked like they’d been dipped in red barn paint. The mate stuffed Pardee’s clothes and notebook into a garbage bag and handed it to him, then slathered the journalist with waterproof sunscreen, a task on par with basting a hippo. Pardee snarled at a group of giggling children and they ran off down the deck screaming.

Pardee heard the ship’s big screws grind to a halt and the mate unhooked a chain gate set in the railing. “Jump,” he said.

Pardee looked at the crystal water forty feet below. “You’re out of your fucking mind. Don’t you have a ladder?”

“You can’t climb ladder with fins.”

“I’ll take the fins off until I get in the water.”

“No. Straps broken. You have to jump.”

Pardee shook his head and the flesh on his shoulders and back followed suit. “It’s not gonna happen.”

Suddenly the children Pardee had frightened came running around the bridge like a squealing pack of piglets. Two little boys broke formation and ran toward the journalist, who looked around just as he felt four tiny brown hands impact with his back.

Pardee saw sky, then water, then sky, then the island of Alualu laying on the sea like a bad green toupee, then the impact with the water took his breath, ripped the mask from his face, and forced streams of brine into his sinuses strong enough to bring blood.

Before he could even find the surface, he heard the ship’s screws begin to grind as the Micro Spirit steamed away.

Two excited boys shook Malink awake. “The ship is here and the Sorcerer is coming!” The old chief sat up on his grass sleeping mat and wiped the sleep from his eyes. He slept on the porch of his house, part of the stone foundation that had been there for eight hundred years. He stood on creaking morning legs and went to the bunch of red bananas that hung from the porch roof. He tore off two bananas and gave them to the boys.

“Where did you see the Sorcerer?”

“He comes across Vincent’s airstrip.”

“Good boys. You go eat breakfast now.”

Malink went to a stand of ferns behind his house, pulled aside his thu, and waited to relieve himself. This took longer every day it seemed. The Sorcerer had told Malink that he had angered the prostate monster and the only way to appease him was to quit drinking coffee and tuba and to eat the bitter root of the saw palmetto. Malink had tried these things for almost two full days before giving up, but it was too hard to wake up without coffee, too hard to go to sleep without tuba, saw palmetto made his stomach hurt, and he seemed to have a headache all the time. The prostate monster would just have to remain angry. Sometimes the Sorcerer was wrong.

He finished and straightened his thu, passed a thundering cannonade of gas, then went back to the sitting spot on the porch to get his cigarettes. The women had made a fire to boil water for coffee; the smoke from the burning coconut husks wafted out of the corrugated tin cookhouse and hung like blue fog under the canopy of breadfruit, mahogany, and palm trees.

Malink lit a cigarette and looked up to see the Sorcerer coming down the coral path, his white lab coat stark against the browns and greens of the village.

“Saswitch” (good morning), Malink said. The Sorcerer spoke their lan-guage.

“Saswitch, Malink,” the Sorcerer said. At the sound of his voice Malink’s wife and daughters ran out of the cookhouse and disappeared

down the paths of the village.

“Coffee?” Malink asked in English.

“No, Malink, there is no time today.”

Malink frowned. It was rude for anyone to turn down an offer of food or drink, even the Sorcerer. “We have little Tang. You want Tang? Spacemen drink it.”

The Sorcerer shook his head. “Malink, there was another man here with the pilot you found. I need to find him.”

Malink looked at the ground. “I no see any other man.” The Sorcerer didn’t seem angry, but just the same, Malink didn’t like lying to him. He didn’t want to anger Vincent.

“I won’t punish anyone if something happened to him, if he was hurt or drowned, but I need to know where he is. Vincent has asked me to find him, Malink.”

Malink could feel the Sorcerer staring a hole in the top of his head. “Maybe I see another man. I will ask at the men’s house today. What he look like?”

“You know what he looks like. I need to find him now. The Sky Priestess will give back the coffee and sugar if we can find him today.”

Malink stood. “Come, we find him.” He led the Sorcerer through the village, which appeared deserted except for a few chickens and dogs, but Malink could see eyes peeking out from the doorways. How would he ex-plain this when they asked why the Sorcerer had come? They passed out of the village, went past the abandoned church, the graveyard, where great slabs of coral rock kept the bodies from floating up through the soil during the rainy season, and down the overgrown path to Sarapul’s little house.

The old cannibal was sitting in his doorway sharpening his machete.

Malink turned to the Sorcerer and whispered, “He rude sometime. He very old. Don’t be mad.”

The Sorcerer nodded.

“Saswitch, Sarapul. The Sorcerer has come to see you.”

Sarapul looked up and glared at them. He had red chicken feathers stuck in his hair, two severed chicken feet hung from a cord above his head. “All the sorcerers are dead,” Sarapul said. “He is just a white doctor.”

Malink looked at the Sorcerer apologetically, then turned back to Sarapul. “He wants to see the man you found with the pilot.”

Sarapul ran his thumb over the edge of his machete. “I don’t know what happened to him. Maybe he went swimming and a shark got him. Maybe someone eat him.”

Sebastian Curtis stepped forward. “He won’t be hurt,” he said. “We are going to send him out on the ship.”

“I want to go to the ship,” Sarapul said. “I want to buy things. Why can’t we go to the ship?”

“That’s not the issue here, old man. Vincent wants this man found. If he’s dead, I need to know.”

“Vincent is dead.”

The Sorcerer crouched down until he was eye-to-eye with the old cannibal. “You’ve seen the guards at the compound, Sarapul. If the man isn’t at the gate in an hour, I’m going to have the guards tear the island apart until they find him.”

Sarapul grinned. “The Japanese? Good. You send them here.” He swung his machete in front of the sorcerer’s face. “I have a present for them.”

Curtis stood. “An hour.” He turned and walked away.

Malink ambled along behind him. “Maybe he is right. Maybe the man drown or something.”

“Find him, Malink. I meant it about the guards. I want this man in an hour.”

“He is gone,” Sarapul said. “You can come out.”

Kimi dropped out of the rafters of Sarapul’s little house. “What is he talking about—guards?”

“Ha!” Sarapul said. “He knows nothing. He didn’t even know I had this.” Sarapul reached down and pulled out a headless chicken he had been sitting on. “He is no sorcerer.”

“He said there were guards.” Kimi said.

Sarapul laid his chicken on the ground. “If you are afraid, you should go.”

“I have to find Roberto.”

“Then let them send the guards,” Sarapul said, brandishing his machete. “They can die just like this chicken.”

Kimi stepped back from the old cannibal, who was on the verge of foaming at the mouth. “We friends, right?”

“Build a fire,” Sarapul said. “I want to eat my chicken.”

34 Water Hazard

Jefferson Pardee was trying desperately not to look like a sea turtle. He’d managed to find the surface, catch his breath, and put his mask on. Blood from his nose was now swishing around inside it like brandy in a snifter. After locating the floating garbage bag that contained his clothes and propping it under his chest as a life preserver, his main focus was not to look like a turtle. To a shark living in the warm Pacific waters off Alualu, sea turtles were food. Not that there was any real danger of a shark making that particular mistake. Even a mentally challenged shark would figure out that sea turtles did not wear boxer shorts printed in flying piggies, and no turtles did not wear boxer shorts printed in flying piggies, and no turtle would be yattering streams of obscenities between chain-smoker gasps of breath. Still, a couple of harmless white-tipped reef sharks smelled blood in the water and cruised by to check out the source, only to retreat, regret-ting that in one hundred and twenty million years on the planet they had never evolved the equipment to laugh.

The surf was calm and the tide low, and considering Pardee’s buoyancy, the swim should have been easy. But when Pardee saw the two black shadows cruise by below him, his heart started playing a sternum-rattling drum solo that kept up until he barked his knees on the reef. An antler of coral caught the plastic bag, stopping Pardee’s progress long enough for him to notice that here on the reef the water was only two feet deep. He flipped over on his back, then sat on the coral, not really caring that it was cutting into his bottom. Waves lapped around him as he fought to catch his breath. He lifted his mask and let the blood run down his face and over his chest to expand into a rusty stain in the water. Tiny blue and yellow reef fish

rose around him looking for food and nipping at his skin, tickling him like teasing children.

He looked toward the beach, perhaps two hundred yards away. Inside the reef the danger of sharks was minimal—minimal enough that he would sit here and rest for a while. He watched the waves breaking softly around him, lapping against his back, and realized, with horror, that he was going to have to do this again in a few hours, against the waves and probably the tide. He’d have to find someone with a boat; that was all there was to it.

Ten minutes passed before his heart slowed down and he was able to steel his courage enough to swim the final leg. He picked out a stand of coconut palms above a small beach and slid across the reef toward the is-land. He kicked slowly, scanning the water around him for any sign of sharks. Except for a moment of temporary terror when a manta ray with a seven-foot wingspan flew out of the blue and passed below him, the swim to the beach was safe and easy. If manta rays are going to be harmless, they should look more harmless, Pardee thought. Fuckers look like aquatic Draculas.

He sat in the wash at the water’s edge and was tearing the tape that held the fins on his feet when he heard a sharp mechanical click behind him. He turned to see two men in black pointing Uzis at his head. Pardee grinned. “Konichi-wa,” he said. “You guys have a dry cigarette? I seem to have torn my garbage bag.”

A seven iron, Tuck, thought. After all these years I need a seven iron.

Tucker Case did not play golf. He’d tried it once, and although he’d en-joyed the drinking and driving the little electric car into the lake, he just didn’t get the appeal. It seemed—and he’d examined the game closely be-cause his father had loved it—an awful lot like a bunch of rich white guys in goofy clothing walking around on an absurdly large lawn hitting ab-surdly small white balls with crooked sticks. If the greens were at opposite ends of the same fairway and foursomes had to play against each other, defending their own green while assaulting the opponents’ and risking getting hit with a ball or a club at close quarters, well, then you’d have a game. If the game was scored on how quickly one got through the eighteen holes instead of the fewest strokes and they dropped small-block Chevys into the little carts, why, then you’d have yourself a game. (Maybe

put those little Ben-Hur food processors on the wheels and make it legal to hamstring competitors.) But traditional golf, as it was, had always left Tuck cold. Strange, then, that he absolutely yearned for a seven iron, or maybe a shotgun.

Tuck had been up since before dawn, awakened rudely and kept awake by what seemed like eight million roosters. It was now ten o’clock and they were still going strong. What joy to feel the thwack of a seven iron on red feathers, the satisfying impact of balanced metal on poultry (suddenly si-lenced and somewhat tenderized for your trouble). He saw himself wading into a bucket of roosters, swinging his seven iron madly (but always keeping his head down and his left arm straight), dealing death and de-struction like the Colonel’s own avenging angel. Welcome to Tucker Case’s chicken death camp, my little feathered friends. Now, kindly prepare to have your nuggets knocked off.

Tucker Case was not a morning person.

He decided that he’d give them five more minutes to shut up, then he was going to get dressed and go borrow a seven iron from the doc. Five minutes later he was preparing to leave when Beth Curtis knocked and opened his door without waiting for an answer. She was wearing disposable surgical blues and a hairnet; she wore no makeup and the vapid housewife smile was gone from her eyes.

“Mr. Case, we need you to be ready to fly in two hours. Can you do it?”

“Uh, sure. I guess. Where are we going?”

“Japan. The navigational settings should already be programmed into the plane’s computer. I need you to have your preflight finished and the Lear fueled and on the runway, ready to go.”

Tucker felt as if he was talking to a different person than the one he had seen for the last week. There was no hint of the soft femininity, just hard business.

“I haven’t had time to go over the controls for the Lear.”

“You took the job, didn’t you? Can you fly it?”

Tuck nodded.

“Then be ready in two hours.” She turned and marched toward the hospital building. Tuck started to follow her, then noticed movement through the trees, down by the beach: men unloading fuel drums from a longboat onto the pier. He could see a white freighter anchored outside the reef.

“Mrs. Curtis!” he called.

She turned and regarded him like an annoying insect. “Yes, Mr. Case.”

“That ship. You didn’t tell me there was a ship.”

“It doesn’t concern you. They are simply delivering some supplies. Now please, prepare the plane.”

“But if they’re delivering supplies, why do we need to…?”

“Mr. Case,” she barked, “do your job. The doctor needs me.” She threw open the hospital door and stepped inside.

“Ask him if I can borrow his seven iron,” Tuck said weakly.

Tuck shuffled back toward his bungalow. Just a few seconds in the sun had given him a headache and he felt as if he would pass out any second. He was going to fly again. He was sick and dizzy and suffered from talking bat hallucinations and he was going to get to do the only thing he had ever been any good at. It scared the hell out of him.

It had been fifty years since men with guns had entered the village of the Shark People. As the four guards went from house to house, Malink walked the paths of the village, his cordless phone in hand so the people could see that he had things under control. He’d been calling the Sorcerer since the four Japanese had arrived in the village, but he’d only gotten the answering machine. He had told everyone to go inside their houses and not to resist the guards, and even now the village seem deserted, except for the sobs of a few frightened children. He could hear the guards kicking their way through the coconut husks that had been piled in the cookhouses for fuel.

Suddenly Favo was at his side. Favo, who had seen the coming of the Japanese during the war, had seen the killing. “Why does Vincent allow this?”

Malink really didn’t have an answer. He had lit the Zippo and asked Vincent that very morning. “It is the will of the Sorcerer, so it must be the will of Vincent. They want the girl-man.”

“We should fight,” Favo said. “We should kill the guards.”

“Spears against machine guns, Favo? Should the children grow up without fathers like we did? No, they will find the girl-man and they will go away.”

“The girl-man has gone to live with Sarapul. Did you tell them?”

“I told them. I took the Sorcerer there.”

The guards came out of the old church and crunched in single file down the path toward Favo and Malink. The old men stood their ground, making the guards walk into a stand of ferns to get around them. They made no eye contact and said nothing. Favo hurled a curse at them, but it had been too long since he had spoken Japanese and it was not a language suited for swearing. He ended up telling them that their truck tires smelled of sardines, which elicited no response whatsoever.

“Excellent curse,” Malink said, trying to raise his friend’s spirits.

“It needs work. English is the best for swearing.”

“They have machine guns, Favo.”

“Fuckin’ mooks,” Favo said.

“Amen,” Malink said, crossing himself in the sign of the B-26 bomber.

The two old men fell in behind the guards, following them from house to house, waiting outside on the path so the villagers could see them when they were roused out of their houses.

For the guards’ part, it was a wholly unsatisfying endeavor. They had been looking forward to kicking in some doors, only to find that the Shark People had no doors. There were no beds to throw over, no back rooms to burst into, no closets, no place, in fact, where a man could hide and not be exposed by the most perfunctory inspection. And the doctor had told them that no one was to be hurt. They did not want to make a mistake. For all the appearance of military efficiency, they were screwups to a man. One, a former security guard at a nuclear power plant, had been fired for taking drugs; two were brothers who had been dismissed from the Tokyo police department for accepting Yakuza bribes; the fourth, from Okinawa, had been a jujitsu instructor who had beaten a German tourist to death in a bar over a gross miscarriage of karaoke. The man who had recruited them, put them in the black uniforms, and trained them made it clear that this was their last chance. They had two choices: succeed and become rich or die. They took their jobs very seriously.

“He might be in the trees,” Favo said in Japanese. “Look in the trees!”

The guards scanned the trees as they marched, which caused them to bump into each other and stumble. Above them there was a fluttering of wings. A glout of bat guano splatted across the Okinawan’s forehead. He threw the bolt on his Uzi and the air was filled with the staccato roar of nine millimeters ripping through the foliage. When at last the clip was empty, palm fronds settled to the ground

around them. Frightened children screamed in their mothers’ arms, and Favo, who was lying next to his friend with his arms thrown over his head, snickered like an asthmatic hyena.

The guards scuffled for a moment, not sure whether to disarm their companion or shove their clips home and begin the massacre. Above the crying, the scuffle, the snickering, and the tintinnabulation of residual gunfire, a girl giggled. The guards looked up. Sepie stood in the doorway of the bachelors’ house, naked but for a pair of panties she’d recently ac-quired from a transvestite navigator. “Hey, sailors,” she said, trying out a phrase she’d also acquired from Kimi, “you want a date?” The guards didn’t understand the words, but they got the message.

“Go inside, girl,” Malink scolded. Women, even the mispel, were not permitted to show their thighs in public. Not even when swimming, not when bathing, not when crapping on the beach, not ever.

“Go back inside,” Favo said. “When they go away, you will be beaten.”

“I have been beaten before,” Sepie said. “Now I will be rich.”

“Tell her,” Favo said to Malink.

Malink shrugged. His authority as chief worked only as long as his people willingly obeyed him. The key to retaining their respect was to find out what they wanted to do, then tell them to do it. He levied the most severe punishment he knew. “Sepie, you may not touch the sea for ten days.”

She turned and wiggled her bottom at him, then disappeared into the bachelors’ house. The stunned guards ceased their scuffle and moved tentatively toward the doorway, looking to each other for permission.

“This is your fault,” Malink said to Favo. “You shouldn’t have started giving her things.”

“I didn’t give her things,” Favo said.

“You gave her things for”—and here Malink paused, trying to catch himself before losing a friend—“for doing favors for you.”

35 Free Press, My Ass

Jefferson Pardee sat on a metal office chair in the corner of a windowless cinder-block room. The guard stood by the metal door, his machine gun trained on Pardee’s hairy chest. The reporter was trying to affect an attitude of innocence tempered with a little righteous indignation, but, in fact, he was terrified. He could feel his heartbeat climbing into his throat and sweat rolled down his back in icy streams. He’d given up on trying to talk to the guards; they either didn’t speak English or were pretending they didn’t.

He heard the throw of the heavy bolt on the door and expected the other guard to return, but instead a woman wearing surgical garb entered the room. Her eyes were the same color as the surgical blues and even in the oppressive heat she looked chilly.

“At last,” Pardee said. “There’s been some kind of mistake here.” He offered his hand, trying not to show how unsteady he was, and the guard threatened him with the Uzi. “I’m Jefferson Pardee from the Truk Star.”

She nodded to the guard and he left the room. Her voice was friendly, but she wasn’t smiling.

“I’m Beth Curtis. My husband runs the mission clinic on this island.” She didn’t offer her hand. “I’m sorry you’ve been treated this way, Mr. Pardee, but this island is under quarantine. We’ve tried to limit the contact with the outside until we have a better handle on this epidemic.”

“What epidemic? I haven’t heard anything about this?”

“Encephalitis. It’s a rare strain, airborne and very contagious. We don’t let anyone off island who’s been exposed.”

Jefferson Pardee exhaled a deep sigh of relief. So this was the big story. Of course he’d promise not to say a word, but Time magazine would kill for this. He’d leave out the part about being taken prisoner in his flying piggy boxers. “And the guards?”

“World Health Organization. They’ve also given us an aircraft and lab equipment, as I’m sure you’ve seen.”

He’d seen an awful lot of lab equipment as he was led through the little hospital, but the aircraft was still a rumor. He decided to go for the facts. “You have a new Learjet, is that correct?”

“Yes.” She seemed genuinely taken aback by his comment. “How did you know?”

“I have my sources,” Pardee said, wishing he wore glasses so he could take them off in a meaningful way.

“I’m sure you do. Information is like a virus sometimes, and the only way to find a cure is to trace it to the source. Who told you about the jet?”

Pardee wasn’t giving anything for free. “How long have you known about the encephalitis?”

For the first time Pardee noticed that Beth Curtis had been holding her right hand behind her back the entire time they had been talking. He noticed because when the hand appeared, it was holding a syringe. “Mr. Pardee, this syringe contains a vaccine that my husband and I have developed with the help of the World Health Organization. Because you took it on yourself to sneak onto Alualu, you have exposed yourself to a deadly virus that at-tacks the nervous system. The vaccine seems to work even after exposure to the disease, but only if administered in the first few hours. I want to give you this vaccine, I really do. But if you insist on drawing out this little game of liar’s poker, then I can’t guarantee that you won’t contract the disease and die a horrible and painful death. So, that said, who told you about the jet?”

Pardee felt the sweat rising again. She hadn’t raised her voice, there wasn’t even a detectable note of anger there, but he felt as if she was holding a knife to his throat. Okay, to hell with the adventurous journalist. He could still get a byline based on what she’d already told him. “I talked to a pilot who passed through Truk a few months ago.”

“A few months ago? Not more recently?”

“No. He said he was going to fly a jet for some missionaries on Alualu. I came out to check it out.”

“And that was all you heard? Just that we had a jet?”

“Yes, it’s pretty unusual for a missionary clinic to have money for a jet, wouldn’t you say?”

She smiled. “I guess it is. So how did you plan to get off the island after you got your story?”

“The Micro Spirit was going to pick me up on the other side of the island. That’s it. I was just curious. It’s an occupational hazard.”

“Who knows you’re here, besides the crew of the Spirit?”

Pardee considered her question; what would be the best answer. Surely she wouldn’t let him die of some dreaded disease, but how stupid would he have been to come out here without telling anyone? “The people who work for me at the Star and a friend of mine at AP who I called for some background before I left.”

“Oh, that’s good,” she said, still smiling. Pardee couldn’t help but feel pleased with himself. It had been a long time since he’d gotten any approval—or attention for that matter—from a beautiful woman.

She uncapped the syringe. “Now, before I give you the vaccine, a few medical questions, okay?”

“Sure. Shoot.”

“You smoke and drink to excess, correct?”

“I indulge from time to time. Another occupational hazard.”

“I see,” she said. “And have you ever had a test for HIV?”

“A month ago. Clean as a whistle.” This was true. He’d been motivated to take the test by a creepy rash on his stomach that turned out to be caused by skin-burrowing mites. The medic with the Navy CAT team had given him an ointment that cleared it up in a few days.

“Have you ever had hepatitis, cancer, or kidney disease?”

“Nope.”

“How about your family? Anyone with a history of kidney disease or cancer?”

“Not last time I heard. I haven’t talked with my family in twenty-five years.”

She seemed especially pleased at that. “And you’re not married? No children?”

“No.”

“Very good,” she said. She plunged the needle into his shoulder and pushed the plunger.

“Ouch. Hey, you could have warned me. Aren’t you supposed to swab that with alcohol first or something?”

She stepped to the door and smiled again. “I don’t think infec tion is going to be a problem, Mr. Pardee. Now don’t panic, but in a minute or so you are going to go to sleep. I can’t believe you bought that bit about the encephalitis. People get stupid living in the tropics, don’t you think?”

She went out of focus and the lines of the room started to heave as if the entire structure was breathing. “What was in…?” His tongue was too heavy; the words wouldn’t come.

“You don’t have a staff and you didn’t call anyone at AP, Mr. Pardee. That was a stupid lie. We’ll have to put ‘self-importance’ down under cause of death.”

Pardee tried to stand, but his legs wouldn’t obey him. He slid off the chair and his legs splayed straight out in front of him.

Beth Curtis bent over him, pushed her lips into a pout, and baby-talked. “Oh, are his wittle wegs all wobbly?” She stood up straight and put her hands on her hips. To Pardee her face floated like the moon through clouds.

She said, “You’re probably thinking that I’m being unusually cruel to tease a dying man, but you see, you’re not dying right now. Soon, but not right now.”

Pardee tried to form a question, but the room seemed to go liquid and crash over him like a black wave.

Sebastian Curtis walked down the dock to where the crew of the Micro Spirit was unloading fuel drums from a longboat. He was wearing his white lab coat over Bermuda shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, a stethoscope hung from his neck like a medallion of power.

The Micro Spirit’s first mate, who was drinking a Coke while supervising the unloading, jumped up on the dock to meet the doctor. “Good morning.”

“Good morning,” Curtis said. “Are you in charge here?”

“I’m the first mate.”

Curtis regarded the tattooed Tongan. “Mr. Pardee will be staying with us for a while. He’s asked me to tell you not to wait for him.”

“That don’t bother you?” the mate asked. It seemed strange to him after the effort Pardee had made to sneak onto the island.

“No, of course not. In fact, we’ve offered to fly Mr. Pardee to Hawaii when he finishes his work.”

The mate had never heard Pardee’s name in the same sentence as the word “work.” It didn’t sound right. Still, he had his job to do

and the doctor was paying double freight for these barrels. He said, “Is he going to pay his fare?”

Curtis smiled and pulled a wad of bills out of the pocket of his shorts. “Of course. He asked me to give you the money. How much is it?”

“From Truk, one way, is three hundred.”

The doctor counted out a stack of twenties and held it out to the mate. “Here’s six hundred. Mr. Pardee asked me to pay the round-trip fare, since that’s what he originally contracted for.”

The mate stared at the stack of bills. He had known Jefferson Pardee for ten years and had never even known the man to buy a beer; now he was just giving him three hundred extra dollars? Three hundred dollars that the company and the captain didn’t know about. “Okay,” he said. He snatched the money out of the doctor’s hand and shoved it into his pocket before the crew could see.

He would get the whole crew drunk and they would toast the generosity of Jefferson Pardee.

36 Return to the Sky

The Lear 45 was a working corporate issue, the seats upholstered in muted blues and grays, facing each other over small worktables. For some reason Tucker had expected something more unusual: bright carnival colors with a monkey in a flight attendant outfit perhaps; a stark metal interior stripped for cargo; maybe stainless steel over enamel with a lot of complicated medical gizmos. Nope, this was the standard, run-of-the-mill station wagon model of your basic four-million-dollar jet.

He slid into the pilot’s seat and a rage of adrenaline coursed through him, as if his body was reliving the crash of the pink Gulfstream. He fought the urge to bolt, let the adrenaline jag settle to a low-grade nausea, then started his preflight checklist. Everything looked normal; the instruments and controls were in place. He snapped on the power for the gauges and nothing happened: no lights, no LEDs, nothing.

He felt the plane move as someone came up the retractable steps and suddenly one of the guards reached around him and inserted a cylindrical key into a socket on the instrument board. The guard turned the key several times and the cockpit whirred to life.

“This thing has a main power cutoff?” Tuck said to the guard.

The guard removed the key and walked off the plane without saying a word.

“Nice chatting with you,” Tuck said. He’d never seen a plane with an ignition key and he was sure that this one was not factory-issue. Why? Who would steal a jet airplane? Who could? I could, that’s who. The doctor had installed the key to keep him from re

peating his performance in Seattle. The missionary bastard didn’t trust him.

Tuck checked the navigation computer. It was, as Beth Curtis had told him, set for an airfield in southern Japan. He watched as the LEDs on the nav computer came on, indicating that it was acquiring the satellites it needed to locate his position. When three were lit, his longitude and latitude flashed on the screen; when a fourth satellite was acquired, he had his current altitude: eight feet above sea level. He thought of Kimi navigating by the stars and felt a twinge of guilt for not trying harder to find him. He resolved to look for the navigator personally when he got back to Alualu.

He ran through the checklist and threw the autostart switches for the engines. As the twin jets spooled up, Tuck felt his anxiety float away like an exorcised ghost. This is where he was supposed to be. This is what he did. For the first time in weeks he felt like his head was clear.

He pushed the controls through their full range of motion and checked out the window to make sure that the flaps and ailerons were moving as well. Beth Curtis was coming across the compound toward the plane. At least he thought it was Beth Curtis. She wore a sharp, dark business suit with nylons and high heels. Her hair was pulled back into a severe bun and she wore wire-frame aviator sunglasses. She carried a small plastic cooler in one hand and an aluminum briefcase in the other. She looked like one of Mary Jean’s corporate killer attorneys. Her third identity in as many days.

She walked into the plane and the guard pushed the hatch shut behind her. She stashed the cooler and briefcase in the overhead, then climbed into the cockpit and strapped herself in the copilot’s seat.

“Any problems?” she said.

“You look nice today, Mrs. Curtis.”

“Thank you, Mr. Case. Are we ready?”

“Tuck. You can call me Tuck. I need you to look out the window and tell me if the flaps and ailerons move when I move the controls.”

“They look fine. Shall we go?”

Tuck released the ground brakes and taxied out onto the runway. “I need to pick up some sunglasses while we’re in Japan.”

“I’ll get you some. You won’t be leaving the plane.”

“I won’t?”

“We’ll only be on the ground for a few minutes, then we’ll be coming back.”

“Look, Mrs. Curtis, I know you think that because of the circumstances that brought me here that I’m a total fuckup, but I am really good at what I do. You don’t have to treat me like a child.”

She looked at him and took off her sunglasses. Tuck wished he had sunglasses so he could whip them off like that.

She said, “Mr. Case, I’m putting my life in your hands right now. How much more confidence would you like?”

Tuck didn’t really know how to answer. “I guess you’re right. Sorry. You could be a little less mysterious about what’s going on here. I know that we’re not flying supplies, not with this plane and the kind of money you’re paying me.”

“If you really want to know, I can tell you. But if I tell you, I’ll have to kill you.”

Tuck looked from the instruments to catch her expression. She was grinning, a deep silly grin that crinkled the corners of her eyes.

He looked at the instruments. “I’m going to take off now. Okay?”

“And I haven’t even shown you the best way to fight boredom on our little island.”

Tuck concentrated on the gauges and the runway. He said, “What church do you and your husband work for?”

“Methodist.”

“You’ll have to tell me about it.”

“What’s there to tell? Methodists rock!” she said, then she giggled like a little girl as Tuck pulled the plane into the sky.

Malink joined the drinking circle late, hoping that everyone would be drunk enough to forget what had gone on that day. He’d spent most of the after-noon at Favo’s house, afraid even to face his wife and daughters, but when the sun was well boiled in the sea, he knew he had to join the other men or face the consequences of tuba-poisoned theories and rumors aspiring to truth. He sneaked into an open spot in the circle and sat on the sand, even though several younger men moved so he could sit on a log with his back to the tree. He threw an open pack of Benson & Hedges into the center of the circle and Favo divided up the smokes among the men. Some lit up, others broke them into sections to chew with betel nut, and a few tucked them behind their ears for later. The distraction was

short-lived and one of the Johns, an elder, said, “So why did Vincent send the Japanese into our houses?”

Malink waved him off as he drank from the coconut shell cup and made a great show of enjoying his first drink before handing the cup to Abo, who was pouring. Then he stalled another few seconds by lighting a Benson & Hedges with the Zippo, making sure everyone saw it and remembered, then after a long drag he said, “I’m fucked if I know.” He said this in English—English being the best language for swearing.

“It is not good,” said John.

“They came to the bachelors’ house,” said Abo, who, as usual, was angry. “They looked at our mispel’s thighs.”

“We should kill them,” said one of the younger men who had been named for Vincent.

“And eat them!” someone added—and it was as if the air had been pulled on the circle before it could inflate to well-rounded violent mob.

Everyone turned to see Sarapul walking out of the shadows. For once, Malink was glad to see him. The old cannibal seemed to have a spring in his step, seemed younger, stronger.

“I need an ax,” Sarapul said. The men who owned axes all stared into the sand or examined their fingernails.

“What for?” Malink asked.

“I can’t tell you. It’s a secret.”

“You’re not going to start headhunting, are you?” Malink said. “We’ve put up with your talk of eating people, but I draw the line at headhunting. No headhunting while I’m chief.”

Everybody grunted in agreement and Malink was glad to have been able to assert his authority in a way that no one could dispute. An anthropologist had once come to the island and given him a book about headhunters. Malink felt very cosmopolitan discussing the topic.

Sarapul looked confused. He’d never read the headhunting book, had never read any book, but he did have a Classic Comics version of The Count of Monte Cristo, which a sailor had given him in the days before the Shark People were forbidden to meet visiting ships. He’d made Kimi read it to him every night. Sarapul liked the thread of revenge and murder that ran through the story.

Sarapul said, “What is this headhunting? I just want to cut a tree.”

“Cutting trees is taboo,” said one of the younger men.

“I will get special dispensation,” Sarapul said, using a term he had learned from Father Rodriquez.

Malink shook his head. “We don’t have that anymore. We only had that when we were Catholics.”

“I need an ax,” Sarapul said, as if he might do better if he started over. “And I need permission from the great Chief Malink to cut a tree.”

Malink scratched a mosquito bite and looked at his feet. It was true that he could give permission to break a taboo, and Sarapul had distracted the circle before they ganged up on him. “You may cut one tree, on your side of the island, and you must show it to me before you cut it. Now, who has an ax?”

Everyone knew who owned axes, but nobody volunteered. Malink chose one of the young Vincents. “You, go get your ax.” Then to Sarapul he said: “Why do you need to cut a tree?”

Sarapul considered holding out, but decided that a credible lie would be better. “My house is falling down from the girl-man climbing in the rafters.”

It was the wrong answer to give in front of a group of men whose houses had been rifled only hours ago. Malink cradled his head in his hands.

The toughest part of the landing for Tuck was restraining himself from leaping out of the seat and demanding high-fives from the woman. It was perfect. He was back. Never mind the ghosts, the talking bats, the three-hour flight with a woman who could have been the model for the new Multiple Personality Barbie. She’s elegant, she’s fashionable, and she’s the reason that Ken has no genitals! Have fun, but remember to hide the sharp stuff!

Never mind all that. He was a pilot.

They were somewhere in southern Japan, a small jetport, probably private, with no tower and only a few hangars. Tuck had gotten them there by following the nav computer, which, he found in midflight, had only two coordinates programmed into it: Alualu and this airfield.

“What happens if we have a problem and have to divert?” he asked Beth.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. She had spent most of the flight grilling him about the navigational instruments, as if she wanted to

know enough to be able to check the course herself. He complied, feeling insulted by the whole conversation.

Another Lear was spooling up on the tarmac and Beth Curtis instructed him to taxi to it. As the jet bumped to a stop and he prepared to shut down, she pulled her briefcase and cooler out of the overhead and turned to him. “Stay here. We’ll take off in a few minutes.”

“What about loading supplies?”

“Mr. Case, please just prepare the plane for departure. I won’t be long.”

Two men in blue coveralls crossed the tarmac from the other jet and lowered the hatch for her. Tuck watched out the window as she met a third Japanese man in a white lab coat. She handed him the cooler and a folder from the briefcase, then traded bows with him and quickstepped back to the Lear. One of the men in blue coveralls followed her into the plane with a cardboard box, which he strapped into one of the passenger seats.

“Domo,” Beth Curtis said.

He bowed quickly, left the plane, and sealed the hatch. She stashed the briefcase in the overhead again climbed into the copilot’s seat.

“Let’s go.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. Let’s go.”

“We should top off the fuel tanks while we’re here.”

“I understand why you might be a little nervous about that, Mr. Case, but we have plenty of fuel to make it back.”

“One box. That’s all we’re picking up?”

“One box.”

“What’s in it?”

“It’s a case of ’78 Bordeaux. Sebastian loves it. Let’s go.”

“But I have to use the bathroom. I thought…”

“Hold it,” Beth Curtis said.

“Bitch.”

“Exactly. Now don’t you need to do your checklist thingy?”

37 Bombs and Bribes

The itching started a week after the first flight. It began on his scalp and a few days later, as the wounds on his arms, legs, and genitals healed, Tucker would have stripped off his skin to escape it. If there had been some other distraction, something to do besides sit in his bungalow waiting to be called for a flight, it might have been bearable, but now the doctor came only once a day to check on him, and he hadn’t seen Beth Curtis since they landed. He read spy novels, listened to the country western radio station out of Guam until he thought that if he heard one more wailing steel guitar, he’d rip the rest of his hair out. Sometimes he lay under the mosquito net-ting, acutely aware of his comatose member, and tried to think of all the women he had had, one by one, then all the women he had ever wanted, including actresses, models, and famous figures from history (the Marilyn Monroe/Cleopatra double-team-in-warm-pudding scenario kept him dis-tracted for almost an hour). Twice a day he cooked himself a meal. The doctor had set him up with a double hot plate and a pantry full of canned goods, and occasionally one of the guards dropped off a parcel of fruit or fresh fish. Mostly, though, he itched.

Tuck tried to engage Sebastian Curtis in conversation, but there were few subjects about which the missionary was not evasive, and most re-minded him that he had left some pressing task at the clinic. Questions about Kimi, the guards, the lack of cargo, his personal history, his wife, the natives of the island, or communication with the outside world evoked half-answers and downright silence.

He asked the doctor for some cortisone, for a television, for access to a computer so he could send a message back to Jake Skye,

and while the doctor didn’t say no outright, Tuck was left empty-handed except for a suggestion that he ought to go swimming and a reminder of how much money he was making for reading spy novels and scratching at scabs. Tuck wanted a steak, a woman (although he still wasn’t sure he could do anything but talk to her), and a chilled bottle of vodka. The doctor gave him some fins, a mask and snorkel, and a bottle of waterproof sunscreen.

When, one morning, Tuck spent an empty hour trying to will his member to life by mentally wrapping his fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Nelson, in Saran Wrap, only to find his fantasy foiled by her insistence that he had no lead in his Number 2 pencil, he grabbed the snorkeling gear and made his way to the beach.

Two of the guards followed at a distance. They were always there. When he looked out the window, if he tried to take a walk, if he wanted to check on the Lear, they clung to him like stereo shadows. They stood over him as he sat in the sand, pulling the fins on.

“Why don’t you guys go put on some trunks and join me? Those jumpsuits have to be pretty uncomfortable.” It wasn’t the first time he’d tried to talk to them, and it wasn’t the first time he’d been ignored. They just stood there, as silent as meditating monks. Tuck hadn’t been able to discern if they understood a word of English.

“Okay, then, I’m going to do the Cousteau thing, but later let’s get together for some raw fish and karaoke?” He gave them a wink.

No reaction.

“Then let’s play some cards and talk about how you guys recite haiku while blowing each other every night?” Tuck thought that might do it, but still there was no reaction.

As he started toward the water, Tuck said, “I heard the Japanese flag was modeled after a used sanitary napkin. Is that true?” He looked over his shoulder for a response and his fin caught and bent double on a rock. An instant later he was facedown on the beach, sputtering to get the sand out of his mouth, and the guards were laughing.

“Asshole,” he heard one say, and he was on his feet and looming over the Japanese like a giant rabid duck.

“Just back off, Odd Job!”

The guard who had spoken stood his ground, but his companion backed away looking lost without his Uzi.

“What’s the matter, no submachine gun? You chickenshits so busy crawling up my back that you forgot your toys?” Tuck poked the guard in the chest to punctuate his point.

The guard grabbed Tuck’s finger and bent it back, then swept the pilot’s feet out from under him and drew a Glock nine-millimeter pistol from a holster at the small of his back and pressed the barrel to Tucker’s forehead hard enough to dent the skin. The other guard barked something in Japanese, then stepped forward and kicked Tuck in the stomach. Tucker rolled into a ball in the sand, instinctively throwing one arm over his face and clenching the other at his side to protect his kidneys as he waited for the next blow. It didn’t come. When he looked up, the guards were walking back to the compound.

Getting them to leave him alone had been the desired result, but the process was a little rougher than he’d expected. Tuck wiggled his finger to make sure it wasn’t broken and examined the boot toe print under his rib cage. Then the anger unlocked his imagination and plans for revenge began. The easiest thing to do would be to tell the doctor, but Tuck, like all men, had been conditioned against two responses: You don’t cry and you don’t rat. No, it would have to be something subtle, elegant, painful, and most of all, humiliating.

Tuck almost skipped into the water, running on his newfound energy: adrenalized vengeance. He paddled around at the inside edge of the reef, watching anemones pulse in the current while small fish in improbable neon colors darted in and out of the coral. The ocean was as warm as bathwater, and after a few minutes with his face in the water, he felt de-tached from his body and the color and movement below became as meaningless as the patterns in a campfire. The only reminder that he was human was the sound of his breath rushing through the snorkel and the images of cold revenge in his mind.

He looked down the ragged curve of the reef and saw a large shadow moving across the bottom, but before fight-or-flight panic could even set in, he saw it was the shadow of a loggerhead turtle flying through the water like a saurian angel. The turtle circled him and cruised by close enough for Tuck to see the movement in the creature’s silver-dollar-sized eye as it studied him, and a message there: “You don’t belong here,” it said. And that part of Tuck that had recognized the saltwater as its mother re-belled and he felt alien and vulnerable and cold, and a little rude, as if he had been attending a black-tie dinner only to realize as dessert was served that he was wearing pajamas. It was time to go.

He lifted his head, took a bearing on the chain-link fence that ran to the edge of the beach, and started a slow crawl toward shore. As the water went shallow, he banged his knee on a submerged rock,

then stood and slogged through the lapping surf as his fins tried to drag him back off the beach. Once clear of the water, he fell in the sand and tore the fins off his feet. He threw them up the shore without looking and a half a breath later a deafening explosion lifted him up and he landed ten feet away, stunned and breathless, as damp sand and pieces of swim fin rained down upon him.

Tucker stormed through the clinic door trailing sand and water across the concrete floor. “Mines! You have fucking land mines on the fucking beach?”

Sebastian Curtis was seated at a computer terminal. He quickly clicked off the screen and swiveled in his chair. “I heard the explosion, but birds and turtles have set them off before. Was anyone hurt?”

“Other than I’m going to hear a high-pitched wail for the rest of my life and my sphincter won’t relax until I’m dead a couple of years, no, no one was hurt. What I want to know is why you have mines on the beach.”

“Calm down, Mr. Case. Please sit down.” The doctor gestured to a folding metal chair. “Please.” He looked sad, not at all confrontational, not like the kind of man who would mine a tropical beach. “I suppose there are some things you need to know. First, I have something for you.” He opened a drawer under the keyboard, withdrew a check, and handed it to Tuck.

Tucker’s rage dropped a level when he looked at the amount. “Ten grand? What’s this for?”

“Call it a first-flight bonus. Beth said you did very well.”

Tucker fingered the check, then brushed the sand off it and read it again. If he had any self-respect, he’d throw it in the doctor’s face. He didn’t, of course. “This is great, Doc. Ten grand for picking up a case of wine. I’m not even going to ask you what was in the cooler she gave that guy, but I was almost killed on the beach a few minutes ago.”

“I’m very sorry about that. There’s a lot of Japanese ordnance scattered around the island. The area at the edge of the fence used to be a minefield. The staff and the natives all know not to go there.”

“Well, you might have mentioned it to me.”

“I didn’t want to alarm you. I told a couple of members of the staff to keep an eye on you and steer you away from there. I’ll speak to them.”

“They’ve been spoken to. I spoke to them myself. And I’m a little tired of being watched by them.”

“It’s for your own safety, as I’m sure you can see now.”

“I’m not a child and I don’t expect to be treated like one. I want to go where I want, when I want, and I don’t want to be watched by a bunch of ninjas.”

The doctor sat bolt-upright in his chair. “Why do you refer to them as ninjas? Who told you to call the staff that?”

“Look at them. They’re Japanese, they wear all black, they know martial arts—hell, the only thing they’re missing are T-shirts that say, ‘Ask me about being a ninja.’ I call them that because that’s what they look like. They sure as hell aren’t medical staff.”

“No, they’re not,” Sebastian said, “but I’m afraid they are a necessary evil, and one that I can’t do much about.”

“Why not? It’s your island.”

“This island belongs to the Shark People. And even this clinic isn’t mine, Mr. Case. As I’m sure you’ve guessed, we are not financed by the Methodist Mission Fund.”

“Yeah, I kinda figured that.”

“We do have some very powerful corporate sponsors in Japan, and they have insisted that we keep a small contingent of security men on the island if we want to keep our funding.”

“Funding for what, Doc?”

“Research.”

Tuck laughed. “Right. This is the perfect environment for research. No sense using some sterile high-tech facility in Tokyo. Do your R and D out on the asshole of the Pacific. Come clean. What’s really going on?”

The doctor pointed to the check Tucker was holding. “If I tell you, Mr. Case, that’s the last one of those you will see. You make the choice. If you want to work here, you have to work in the dark. There is no compromise. It’s research, it’s secret, and the people who are paying for it want it to stay that way or they wouldn’t have hired the guards and they wouldn’t allow me to pay you so well.” He pushed back his gray hair and stared into Tucker’s eyes, not threatening, not challenging, but with the compassion of a physician concerned about the welfare of a patient. “Now, do you really want to know what we’re doing here?”

Tuck looked at the check, looked back at the doctor, then looked at the check. If it was good, it was the largest amount of money he’d

ever possessed at one time. He said, “I just want the guards to lighten up, give me some room to breathe.”

The doctor smiled. “I think we can do that. But I need your word that you won’t try to leave the compound.”

“To go where? I’ve seen this island from the air, remember? I can’t be missing much.”

“I’m only interested in your safety.”

“Right,” Tucker said, as sincerely as he could muster. “But I want a TV. I’m going nuts sitting around in that room. If I read one more spy novel, I’ll qualify for a Double-O number. You guys have a TV, so I know you have one of those satellite dishes hooked up. I want a TV.”

Again the doctor smiled. “You can have ours. I’m sure Beth won’t mind.”

“You gave him what?” The Sky Priestess looked up from a copy of Us magazine. She was draped in a white silk kimono that was untied and cascaded around her into a shimmering pool at the foot of her chair. Her hair was pinned up with ivory chopsticks inlaid with ebony dragons.

The Sorcerer stood in the door of her chambers. He’d felt rather proud of himself until the tone in her voice struck him like an ice pick in the neck.

“Your television. But it’s only temporary. I’ll have another one waiting for you at the airstrip on the next flight.”

“Which is when?”

“As soon as I can set up an order. I promise, Beth.”

“Which means that I also have to do a performance without my soaps. I depend on my soaps to practice my sense memories, Sebastian. How do you expect me to play a goddess if I can’t find my emotional moment?”

“Maybe, just this once, you could try emotions that don’t come by satellite feed.”

She dropped her magazine and bit her lip, looking off to the corner of the room as if considering it. “Fine. Give him the TV.”

“I gave him ten thousand dollars, as well.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What does he get if he blows himself up again, a night with the Sky Priestess?”

“If I can bargain him down to that,” the Sorcerer said. He turned and walked out of the room smiling to himself.

38 Native Customs

Tucker Case spent the next week watching the compound, trying to get a clue to what was going on. The doctor had brought the TV as he promised, and even loaned Tucker a seven iron, but since then Tuck had only seen him from a distance, making his way back and forth from the clinic to one of the small bungalows at the other side of the beach. The guards still watched him, following him at a distance when he went for a swim or a search-and-destroy mission for roosters, but there had been no sign of Beth Curtis.

If indeed the doctor was doing some sort of research, there was no hint as to what it involved. Tuck tried stopping by the clinic several times, only to find the door locked and no response when he knocked.

Boredom worked on Tuck, pressed down on him like a pile of wet blankets until he felt as if he would suffocate under the weight. In the past he had always fought boredom with alcohol and women, and the trouble that ensued from that combination filled the days. Here there was nothing but spy novels and bad Asian cooking shows (the doctor had refused to let him hook up to the satellite dish) and although he was pleased that he now knew nine different ways to prepare beagle, it wasn’t enough. He needed to get out of the compound, if for no other reason than because they told him he couldn’t.

Fortunately, over the years, Tuck had acquired an encyclopedic knowledge of women-in-prison movies, so he had at his disposal a plethora of escape strategies. Of course, many of them weren’t applicable. He immediately rejected the idea of seducing and shiving

the large lesbian matron, and faking menstrual cramps would only get him sent to the clinic with a Mydol IV, but strangely enough, as he was acting out the gratuitous shower scene, his plan burst forth: soap-slathered, silicone-enhanced, and in total defiance of time, gravity, and natural proportion…

The shower drain opened directly onto the coral gravel below.

He could see it down there, the ground, and a small hermit crab scuttling to escape the soapy water. He’d lost weight, but not enough to slide down the drain. The entire bottom of the shower was no more than a tray of gal-vanized metal. He bent, grasped the edge, and lifted. It didn’t come free, but it moved. A little time, a little patience, and he’d have it free. Planning and patience. Those were the keys to a successful escape.

So he could get out of the bungalow without being seen. The next obstacle would be the fence.

Tuck found out early on that the fence around the compound was electrified. He’d found a rooster stuck to the wires, doing a convulsive imitation of the funky chicken while its feathers smoldered and sparks shot from its grounded foot. Satisfying as the discovery was, Tuck realized that there would be no going over the fence, and the gate to the airfield was locked with a massive chain and padlock. The only way past the fence was around it, and the only place to get around it was at the beach. Sure, he could swim out and come in farther down the beach, but how far did the minefield extend? He began testing it by hitting rocks into the minefield with his seven iron under the auspices of practicing his swing. He managed to produce several impressive craters and scare the guards with the explosion before finding the edge of the minefield some fifty yards down the beach. He decided to risk it.

He picked up a coconut on his way back to the bungalow, then climbed into bed and waited for darkness to fall.

After the sun set and the three-quarter moon rose, Tuck waited for the guard to peek through the window, then as he heard him crunch away, began building the decoy (a trick he learned from Falling Fingers: Leper Bimbos Behind Bars II). Two pillows and a coconut head made for a reason-able likeness, especially when viewed by moonlight through mosquito netting. He slipped out of bed and crawled below window level to the bathroom, where he had left his mask, fins, and a candle.

He shoved a towel under the door to keep the light from leaking out, then lit the candle and began working the metal shower tray

out of its frame. After five minutes of tugging, stopping for a moment when he heard the guard’s boots crunching outside, he released the shower tray and leaned it up on its side.

Tuck blew out the candle and dropped to gravel four feet below, then reached back and pulled his fins and mask through the opening. The coral gravel felt like broken glass on his tender feet, but he decided to endure the pain rather than risk the noise of shoes. Tuck heard the guard coming again and dropped to the ground where he could look out under the bungalow into the courtyard.

The guard thumped up the steps, paused as he looked through the window, then, satisfied that Tucker was asleep, walked across the compound to the guards’ quarters and sat in a folding chair outside the door.

Tuck checked behind him, then scrambled out of the crawl space into the grove of coconut palms. He paused and caught his breath, then planned his path to the beach. He would have to cover fifty yards between his bungalow and the clinic, fifty yards that weren’t completely open but visible from where the guard sat. He could hop from tree to tree, but if the guard happened to be looking that way, he was done.

A lizard scampered up the tree he was leaning on and Tuck felt his heart stop. What was he thinking? There could be scorpions out here, sharks and barracudas and other creepy stuff in the dark ocean. And what happened when he got to the other side of the fence? More sand and scorpions and possibly hostile natives. He was waiting, thinking about how easy it would be to crawl back through the shower and go to bed, when a lighter flared across the compound and he saw the guard’s face illuminated orange, and Tuck bolted for the rear of the clinic building, hoping the lighter would blind the guard long enough for him to cover the fifty yards.

Halfway across, he dropped a fin, then fell to the ground beside it and looked up. The guard was smoking peacefully, watching blue streams of smoke rise in the moonlight.

Tuck grabbed the fin and crawled on his belly the final ten yards to the clinic, fighting the urge to cry out as the gravel dug into his elbows. A hermit crab scuttled over his back sending a bolt of the electric willies shooting up his spine to speed him to cover.

The guard didn’t look up. Tuck climbed to his feet, dusted himself off, and made his way to the beach.

A light breeze rattled the palm leaves and Tuck could hear the surf crashing out on the reef, but at the shore the waves lapped only

shin high. Tuck waded into the warm water carrying his fins. When he was waist deep, he crouched and slipped them on, then paddled out on his back, looking back toward shore.

There were lights on in both of the Curtises’ bungalows. He could see Beth Curtis moving past the windows. She appeared to be naked, but from this distance he couldn’t tell for sure. He tore himself away and swam out past the surf line to make his way down the beach.

It was an easy swim to the fence, the biggest challenge being to keep his mind off what might be lurking under the dark water. He swam another hundred yards down the beach, then started toward shore. When his hand brushed a rock, he reached down and pulled off his fins. He gritted his teeth as he put his feet down to stand, expecting the shooting pain of an urchin or a ray. He cursed himself for not bringing his sneakers.

As he slogged up the beach, Tuck heard a rustling in the trees and looked up to see a flash of color in the moonlight. He ran up the beach, dove behind a log at the high-tide line, and lay there watching as tiny crabs clicked and crawled around him.

She emerged from the trees only ten yards from where Tucker lay. She was wearing a purple lavalava, which she unwrapped and dropped on the sand.

Tuck stopped breathing. She walked by him, only a few feet away, her body oiled and shining in the moonlight, her long black hair playing behind her in the breeze. He risked lifting his head and watched her walk into the water up to her knees and begin washing, splashing water on her thighs and bottom.

From the time he had left Houston he had carried images in his head of what it would be like to live on a tropical island. Those images had been buried by cuts and scrapes, typhoons and humidity, sharks and ninjas and enigmatic missionaries. This was why he had come: a naked island girl washing her mocha thighs on a warm moonlit beach.

He felt a stirring under him and almost leaped to his feet, thinking he was lying on some sea creature. Then he realized that the stirring came from within. It had been so long since he’d felt signs of an erection that he didn’t recognize it at first. He almost burst out laughing. It still worked. He was still a man. Hell, he was more than just a man, he was Tucker Case, secret agent, and for the first time in months, he was packing wood.

The girl walked out of the water and Tuck ducked his head as she passed. He watched her wrap the lavalava around her hips and disappear into the trees. He waited until she was gone, then followed her, enjoying the tension in his trunks as he crept into the trees.

Malink looked up from pouring tuba for the men at the drinking circle to see Sepie coming down from the village. This was an outrage and an em-barrassment. No women were allowed near the drinking circle. It was a place for men.

“Go home, Sepie!” Malink barked. “You are not to be here.”

Sepie ignored him and kept coming, her hips swaying. Several of the young married men looked away, feeling regret that they wouldn’t be bedding down in the bachelors’ house tonight. “There’s a white man following me.”

Malink stood. “You talk nonsense. Now go home or you’ll have another week away from the ocean.” He noticed that the ends of her hair were wet and drops ran off her legs. She’d already broken her punishment for talking with the Japanese guards.

“Fine,” Sepie said. “I don’t care if a white man is sneaking around in the bushes. I just though you would want to know.”

She flipped her hair as she turned and made her way back up the beach. As she passed the tree that Tuck had ducked behind, she said in English, “The fat loud one is chief. You go talk to him. He tell you who I am.” And she walked on, head high, without looking back.

Tuck felt his face flush and his ego deflate along with the swelling in his pants. Busted. She’d known he was there all along. Some secret agent. He’d be lucky to get back into the compound without getting caught.

He watched the men on the beach passing around the communal cup. From the way they moved he could see that some of them were pretty drunk. He remembered the warning of Jefferson Pardee about not drinking with these latent warriors, but they looked harmless, even a little silly with their loincloths and shark tattoos. One young man reached to take the cup from the old guy who was pouring and fell on his face in the sand. That did it. Tuck stepped out from behind his tree and started toward the circle. Whatever was being poured from those jugs was probably not gin and tonic, but it would definitely get you fucked up, and getting fucked up sounded pretty good right now.

“Jambo,” Tuck said, using a greeting he’d heard in a Tarzan movie.

The whole group looked up. One man actually let out an abbreviated scream. The fat old guy stood up, a fire in his eyes that cooled as Tuck moved out of the shadows.

Mary Jean had always said, “Doesn’t matter if it’s a senator or a doorman. No one is immune to a warm smile and a firm handshake.”

Tuck held out his hand and smiled. “Tucker Case. Pleased to meet you.”

Malink allowed the white man to shake his hand. As the others looked on, still stunned, Malink said, “You are looking better than the last time I saw you. The Sorcerer made you well.”

Tuck’s eyes were trained on the three-gallon jugs of milky liquid at the center of the circle. “Yeah, I’m feeling on top of the world. You guys think you could spare a sip of that jungle juice?”

“Sit,” Malink said, and he waved the young men aside to make space for Tuck on one of the sitting logs. Tuck stepped in and sat as Favo handed him the coconut shell cup. Tuck downed the contents in one gulp and fought to keep from gagging. It tasted of sulfur, sugar, and a tint of ammo-nia, but the alcohol was there, and the familiar warmth was coursing through him before he’d even stopped shuddering from the taste.

“Good. Very good.” Tuck smiled and nodded around the circle. The Shark men smiled and nodded back.

Malink sat beside him. “We thought you died.”

“So did I. How about another belt?”

Malink looked embarrassed. “The cup must come around again.”

“Fine, fine. Drink up, boys,” Tuck said, smiling and nodding like a madman.

“How you come here?” Malink asked.

“A little stroll, a little swim. I wanted to get out and meet some people. You know, get to know the local customs. Gets pretty boring up at the clinic.”

Malink frowned. “You are the pilot. We see you fly the plane.”

“That’s me.”

“Vincent said you would come.”

“Who’s Vincent?”

The men, who had been whispering among themselves, fell si lent. The pouring and drinking stopped as they waited for Malink’s reply.

“Vincent is pilot too. He come long time ago, bringing cargo. He send the Sky Priestess until he come back. You see her with the Sorcerer. At hospital. She have yellow hair like yours.”

Tuck nodded, as if he had any idea what the chief was talking about. Right now he just wanted to see the cup finish its lap and get back to him. “Yeah, right. I’ve seen her. She’s the doctor’s wife.”

Abo, who was drunk and for once not angry, laughed and said, “She is nobody’s wife, you fuckin’ mook. She’s the Sky Priestess.”

Tuck froze. A plane crash and a talking bat rose like demons, ruining his oncoming buzz.

Malink looked apologetic. “He is young and drunk and stupid. You not fuckin’ mook.”

“Where’d you hear that?” Tuck asked. “Where’d you hear ‘fuckin’ mook’?”

“Vincent say that. We all say that.”

“Vincent? What’s Vincent look like?”

The young men looked to Favo and Malink. Favo spoke. “He is American. Have dark hair like us, but his nose point. Young. Maybe as old as you.”

“And he’s a pilot? What’s he wear?”

“He wear gray suit, sometimes a jacket with fur here.” Favo mimed a collar and lapels.

“A bomber jacket.”

Malink smiled. “Yes, Sky Priestess is bomber.”

Tuck snatched the cup from one of the Johns and drained it, then handed it back. “Sorry. Emergency.” He looked at Malink. “And this Vincent said I was coming?”

Malink nodded. “He tell me in a dream. Then Sarapul find you and your friend on the reef.”

“My friend? Is he around?”

“We no see him now. He go to live with Sarapul on other side of island.”

“Take me to him.”

“We drink tuba now. Go in morning?”

“I have to be back before morning. And you can’t tell anyone that I was here.”

“One more,” Malink said. “The tuba is good tonight.”

“Okay, one more,” Tuck said.

39 Showtime

The Sky Priestess rolled over in bed and slapped the beeping intercom as

if it was a mouthy stepchild. “I’m sleeping here,” she said.

“Get in character, Beth. We have an order, due in Japan in six hours.”

“Why don’t these fuckers ever call at a civilized hour?”

“We guarantee freshness. We have to deliver.”

“Don’t grow a sense of humor on me at this point, Sebastian. The shock might kill me. Who’s the chosen?”

“Sepie, female, nineteen, a hundred and ten pounds.”

“I know her,” the Sky Priestess said. “What about our pilot?”

“I’m putting two of the staff on him to make sure he stays in his bungalow.”

“He’s still going to hear it. Are you sure you don’t want to sedate him?”

“Use your head, Beth. He has to fly. We’ll do it with smaller explosions. Maybe he’ll sleep through it.”

She was wide awake now and starting to feel the excitement and anxiety of a performance. “I’ll be ready in twenty minutes. Have the ninjas start my music.”

Tuck had Favo in a headlock and was administering affectionate noogies to the old man’s scalp. “I love this fuckin’ guy. This fuckin’ guy is the best. I love all you fuckin’ guys.”

Malink had never seen noogies and wondered why this bizarre ritual had never showed up in the party scenes in People. He prided himself on understanding white people’s habits, but this was a new one. Favo didn’t seem to be enjoying the ritual nearly as much as Tuck was. The tuba had all been drunk. Maybe it was time to rescue his friend.

“Now we go find the girl-man,” Malink said.

Tuck looked up, still holding Favo, whose eyes were starting to bug out a little. “’Kay,” the pilot said.

Malink led them into the village, his bowlegged gait more wobbly than normal. A dozen Shark men and Tucker crashed and staggered behind him. As they passed by the bachelors’ house and onto the trail that led to Sarapul’s side of the island, the music started: big band sounds with easy liquid rhythms echoed through the jungle. The Shark men stopped in their tracks and when the music paused, just for a second, they shouted, “Pennsylvania 6-5000!” and the music began again.

“What’s that?” Tucker asked.

Women and children were stirring from their sleep, creeping off into the bushes to pee, rubbing sleepy eyes and stretching creaky backs. Malink said, “The Sky Priestess is coming.”

“Who?” Tuck finally released Favo, who he had been dragging by his head. The old man gasped, then grinned and sat splayed-legged on the trail.

“We have to go,” Malink said. “You should go back now.”

The music paused and Malink, along with the rest of the Shark People, shouted, “Pennsylvania 6-5000!”

“Go now,” Malink ordered, once again the chief. “The Sky Priestess comes. We must get ready.” He turned and strode back into the village. The other Shark men scattered, leaving Tucker standing on the trail by himself.

Tuck heard the sound of large prop planes mixing with the big band music. The Shark People were draining out of the village onto the trails that led to the runway. Within seconds, the village was deserted. Tuck staggered back to the beach where he’d left his fins and mask. As he stepped over the logs of the drinking circle, there was an explosion and he thought for a moment that he’d found another land mine until he realized that the sound had come from the direction of the runway.

Not trusting himself to find the path through the village, Tucker decided to follow the beach back to the compound. After he’d gone a hundred yards or so, he saw something white lying on the beach

and bent to pick it up. A long spiral notebook. The moon was high in the sky and he could see a name printed on the cover in bold permanent marker: JEFFERSON PARDEE.

Beth Curtis, dressed in surgical greens, waved the guards away from Tuck’s door and knocked. She waited a few seconds and knocked again, then walked in. She could just make out a sleeping figure through the mosquito net.

“Case, get up. We’ve got to fly.”

The body did not stir. “Case?” She pulled aside the netting and poked the sleeping figure. A green coconut rolled out of the bed and thumped at her feet. “You sleep with a coconut? You pathetic bastard.”

She jumped back and a groggy Tucker Case groaned. “What?”

“Wake up. We fly in half an hour.”

Tuck rolled over and blinked through the hangover fog. The sun was coming up and the roosters were going off all over the island. The room was only half-lit.

“What time is it?”

“It’s time to go. Get the plane ready.” Beth Curtis walked out.

Tuck rolled out of bed, crawled to the bathroom, and emptied his stomach into the bowl with a trumpeting heave.

40 Unfriendly Skies

Tuck spooled up the jets as he watched the guards scramble around the Lear. Each time one walked past the nose, Tuck flipped on the radar and chuckled. The microwave energy wasn’t enough to boil the guards in their skins, which was Tuck’s fantasy, but he could be reasonably certain that they would never have any children and he might have planted the seeds of a few choice tumors. Once in Houston a maintenance man made the mistake of walking in front of Mary Jean’s jet with an armload of fluorescent bulbs meant for the hangar, and Jake Skye had shown Tucker a little trick.

“Watch this, Jake had said.” He flipped on the radar and the bulbs, bombarded by the microwaves from the radar, lit up in the maintenance man’s arms. The poor guy threw the bulbs in the air and ran off the field, leaving a pile of glass shards and white powder behind. It was the second-coolest thing Tucker had ever seen, the first being the time they had used the Gulfstream’s jets to sandblast the paint off a Porsche whose owner in-sisted on parking on the tarmac. Tuck was waiting for one of the guards to walk behind the jets when Beth Curtis came on board.

She wore her business suit and carried the briefcase and the cooler, but this time she sat in one of the passenger seats in the back and fell asleep before they took off. Tuck took the opportunity to suck some oxygen from the emergency supply to help cut through his hangover.

When they were five hundred miles out over the Pacific, Tuck peeked into the passenger compartment to make sure Beth Curtis was still sleeping. When he was sure she was still out, he checked

the fuel gauges, then pushed the yoke forward and dropped the Lear down to level off at a hundred feet.

Traveling at almost six hundred miles per hour at only a hundred feet off the water did exactly what Tuck had hoped it would. He was absolutely ecstatic with an adrenaline rush that chased his hangover back to the Dark Ages. He dropped another fifty feet and laughed out loud when some salt spray dashed the windscreen.

It was a clear sunny day with only a few wispy columnar clouds rising off the water. Tuck flew under and through them as if they were enemy ghosts. Then a speck appeared on the horizon. A second later Tuck recog-nized it as a ship and pulled the jet up to two hundred feet. Suddenly something rose off the ship’s deck. A helicopter, going out to spot and herd schools of tuna for the factory ship. Tuck pulled up on the yoke, but the helicopter rose directly into his path. There wasn’t even time to key the radio to warn the pilot. Tuck threw the Lear into a tight turn while pulling the jet up and whizzed by the helicopter close enough to see the pilot’s eyes go wide. He could just make out men shaking fists at him from the deck of the factory ship.

“Eee-haa!” he shouted (a bad habit he’d picked up in Texas cowboy bars, and if this wasn’t cowboy flying, what was?). He steered the jet back on course and leveled off at two hundred feet. He was still dangerously low and burning fuel four times faster than he would at altitude, but hell, a guy had to have some fun. He wasn’t paying for the fuel, and there hadn’t been much low-level flying when he’d worked for Mary Jean. People on the ground might have trouble remembering the numbers on the side of the plane to report to the FAA, but you don’t soon forget a pink jet flying close enough to the ground to cool your soup.

“What in the hell was that?” Beth Curtis appeared in the cockpit doorway. “Why are we so low?”

A wave of panic akin to being caught smoking in the boys’ room swept over Tuck, but he couldn’t think fast enough to come up with a viable lie. He said, “You haven’t surfed until you’ve surfed in a Learjet.”

Much to his amazement, Beth Curtis said, “Cool!” and strapped herself into the copilot’s seat.

Tuck grinned and eased the jet down to fifty feet. Beth Curtis clapped her hands like an excited child. “This is great!”

“We can’t do it for long. Burns too much fuel.”

“A little while longer, okay?”

Tuck smiled. “Maybe five more minutes. We can catch a tailwind at altitude that’ll save us some time and fuel.”

“Is this what you were doing the night you crashed?”

Tuck winced. “No.”

“Because I could understand if it was. What a rush!” She reached out and grabbed his shoulder affectionately. “I love this. How could you let me sleep through this?”

“We can surf some more on the way back,” Tuck said. And with that his resolve was gone. He’d planned to ask her about the music and explosions from last night. He’d planned to ask her about Jefferson Pardee’s notebook, which he carried in his back pocket, but he didn’t want to break this mood. It had been too long since he’d had any attention from a beautiful woman, and he gave himself to it like a jonesing junkie.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but you’ll have to wait here.” Beth Curtis retrieved her briefcase and cooler from the back of the plane and met the dark-suited Japanese on the tarmac. There was another Lear spooling up nearby and a couple of workmen in coveralls waited beside a large cardboard carton.

Tuck watched as Beth Curtis handed the cooler to one of the suits, who ran to the waiting Lear. Within seconds, the door was pulled shut and the other Lear was taxied out to the runway. Another one of the suits handed Beth a thick manila envelope, which she stashed in her briefcase. She turned and ran back into the plane. She stepped into the cockpit and put her briefcase behind the copilot’s seat. “I’ll be right back, ten minutes max. I’ve got to make sure these guys get my TV on board unbroken.”

“TV?”

“Thirty-two-inch Trinitron,” she said with a smile. “To replace the one that you’re using.”

“I want a thirty-two-inch Trinitron,” Tuck said to her back, but she was already out the door.

He looked out the window to make sure she was busy with the television, then pulled her briefcase from behind the seat and threw the latches. To his amazement, it was unlocked. He removed the manila envelope. Under it lay a small automatic pistol. He could take it, but then what? Hold it on Beth Curtis until she confessed to whatever she and the doctor were doing? And what was that? Research?

There was no law against that. He left the gun untouched and opened the envelope.

He wasn’t sure what he expected to find: research notes, bearer bonds, stock certificates, cash, something that would shed some light on all this clandestine behavior for sure. What he found was four issues of People magazine and four issues of Us. Beth Curtis was smuggling American cheese out of Japan and that was it.

He put the envelope back into the briefcase and slid it behind the seat, then pulled Jefferson Pardee’s notebook out of his pocket. Perhaps there was something inside that would tell him how the notebook had gotten to a beach some seven hundred miles from where its owner was supposed to be.

He flipped though the pages where Pardee had scribbled phone numbers, dates, and a few notes, but the only things he recognized were his own name, the names of Sebastian Curtis and his wife, and the word “Learjet,” followed by “Why? How? Who paid?” and “Find other pilot.” Pardee was obviously asking the same questions that were circling in Tuck’s mind, but what was this about another pilot? Had Pardee come to Alualu looking for the answers? And if he did, where was he now?

“What’s that?” Beth Curtis said as she came through the cockpit door.

Tuck flipped the notebook shut and stuffed it in his back pocket. “Some flight notes. I’m used to keeping a log for the FAA. I guess I brought this along out of habit.” In the midst of the lie, he almost panicked. If she asked where he had gotten the notebook in the first place, he was dead. Maybe better to confront her here in Japan anyway—while he knew where the gun was.

She said, “I didn’t realize there was any paperwork to flying a plane.”

“More than you’d think,” Tuck said. “I’m still getting used to how this plane handles. I’m just writing down things I need to remember, you know, climb rates and engine exhaust pressures, fuel consumption per hour at altitude, stuff like that.” Right, he thought. Baffle her with bullshit.

“Oh,” she said with what Tuck thought was indifference until she reached behind her seat and pulled out her briefcase.

He held his breath, waiting for the gun to appear. She took out an issue of People and opened it on her lap. She didn’t look away from the magazine until they were well over the Pacific, heading home.

“You know, we haven’t seen much of you lately. Maybe you should come up to the house and have dinner with Sebastian and me tonight.” She had slipped on her fifties housewife personality.

Tuck had been thinking about Pardee’s notebook and where he’d found it. He wanted to get back to the village tonight. If Pardee had come to Alualu, maybe the old chief knew something about it.

“I’m a little tired. We got a pretty early start. I think maybe I’ll just fix up something quick at my place and get to bed early.”

She yawned. “Maybe tomorrow night. Around seven. Maybe we can try out my new TV.”

“That’ll be fine.” Tuck said. “I have a few things I’d like to discuss with you and the doc anyway.”

“Good,” she said. “I think we should spend more time together. Now explain to me what all these gauges mean.”

41 What’s a Kidney?

Privacy is a rare commodity on a small island and secrets weigh heavy on their keepers. Malink was weary with the burden of too many secrets. If he could only go to the drinking circle and let his secrets out, let the coconut telegraph carry his secrets to the edges of the island and let him walk light. But that wasn’t going to happen. Secrets sought him out now, even from the old cannibal.

He stood with Sarapul and Kimi examining an eighty-four-foot breadfruit tree with a trunk you couldn’t get your arms around. Kimi held an ax on his shoulder, waiting for Malink’s judgment.

“Why so big?” Malink asked. “This tree will give much breadfruit.”

“This is the tree,” Sarapul said. “The navigator has chosen it.”

Kimi said, “We will plant ten trees to take its place, but this is the one.”

“Why do you need such a big tree?”

“I can’t tell you,” Sarapul said.

“You will tell me or you won’t cut the tree.”

“If I tell you, will you promise not to tell anyone else?”

Malink sighed. Yet another secret. “I will tell no one.”

“Come. We’ll show you.”

Sarapul led Malink and Kimi through the jungle to an overgrown spot piled with dried palm leaves. Malink leaned on a tree while the old cannibal pulled away the palm fronds to reveal the prow of a canoe. Not just any canoe. A forty-foot-long sailing canoe. Malink hadn’t seen one since he was a small boy.

“This is why we need the tree,” Sarapul said. “I have hidden it here for many years, but the hull is rotten and we need to fix it.”

Malink felt something stir in him at the sight of the big eye painted on the prow. Something that went back to a time before he could remember, when his people sailed thousands of miles by the eye of the canoe and the guidance of the great navigators. Lost arts made sad by this reminder. He shook his head. “No one knows how to build a sailing canoe anymore, Sarapul. You are so old you don’t remember what you’ve forgotten.”

“He can fix it,” Sarapul said, pointing to Kimi.

Kimi grinned. “My father taught me. He was a great navigator from Satawan.”

Malink raised a grizzled eyebrow. “That is where you learned our language?”

“I can fix it. And I can sail it.”

“He’s teaching me,” Sarapul said.

Malink felt the stirring inside him grow into excitement. There was something here he hadn’t felt since the arrival of Vincent. This was a secret that lifted him rather than weighing him down. But he was chief and dignity forbade him from shouting joy to the sky.

“You may cut the tree, but there is a condition.”

“You can’t tell anyone,” Sarapul said.

“I will not tell anyone. But when the canoe is fixed, you must teach one of the young ones to be a navigator.” He looked at Kimi. “Will you do that?”

Kimi nodded.

“You have your tree, old man,” Malink said. “I will tell no one.” He turned and walked and fell into a light bowlegged amble down the path.

Kimi called to him, “I hear my friend, the pilot, was in the village last night.”

Malink turned. The coconut telegraph evidently ran even to Sarapul’s little corner of the island. “He asked about you. He said he will come back.”

“Did he have a bat with him?”

“No bat,” Malink said. “Come tonight to the drinking circle. Maybe he will come.”

“I can’t,” Kimi said. “The boys from the bachelors’ house hate me.”

“They hate the girl-man,” Malink said, “not the navigator. You come.”

After a nutritious dinner of canned peaches and instant coffee, Tuck checked the position of the guards, turned out the lights, and built his coconut-headed surrogate under the mosquito netting. Only the second time and already it seemed routine. There was none of the nervousness or anxiety of the night before as he crawled below window level to the bathroom and pried up the metal shower tray.

He dropped through the opening and was reaching up to grab his mask and fins when he heard the knock on the front door and froze.

He heard the door open and Beth Curtis call, “Mr. Case, are you asleep already?”

He couldn’t let her see the dummy in his bed. “I’m in the bathroom. Just a second.”

He caught the edges of the shower opening and vaulted back into the bathroom. The metal tray fell back over the opening, sounding like the Tin Man trying to escape from a garbage can.

He heard Beth Curtis pad to the bathroom door. “Are you all right in there?”

“Fine,” Tuck said. “Just dropped the soap.” He snagged a bar of soap off the sink and placed it in the bottom of the shower tray, then threw open the bathroom door.

Beth Curtis stood there in a long red silk kimono that was open in a narrow canyon of white flesh to her navel. Whatever Tuck was going to say, he forgot.

“Sebastian wanted me to bring you this.” She held out a check. Tuck tore his eyes from her cleavage and took the check.

“Five thousand dollars. Mrs. Curtis, this is really more than I bargained for.”

“You deserve it. You were very sweet to take the time to explain all the instrumentation to me.” She leaned over and kissed him on the forehead, keeping the warm pressure of her lips there a little too long. Tuck imagined her tongue darting though his skull and licking his brain’s pleasure center. He could smell her perfume, something deep and musky, and his eyes locked on her breasts, which were completely exposed when she leaned forward. He felt as if he had been staring at an arc welder and that creamy powdered image would travel across his field of vision for hours. A chasm of silence opened up and wrenched his attention back into the room.

“This is very generous,” he said. “But it could have waited. It’s not like I have anywhere to spend it.”

“I know. I just wanted to thank you again. Personally, without Sebastian around. And I thought you might be able to explain some of the finer points of flying a jet. It’s all so exciting.”

Never a man of strong resolve, the combination of sight, scent, and flattery activated Tuck’s seduction autopilot. He glanced toward the bed and the switch clicked off. Sexual response was replaced by the dummy Tuck shaking its coconut head. He looked back at her and locked on her eyes—only her eyes. “Maybe tomorrow,” he said. “I’m really bushed. I was just going to catch a shower and go right to bed.”

For an instant her pouty smile disappeared and her lips seemed to tighten into a red line, then just as quickly the smile was back, and Tuck wasn’t sure he’d seen the change at all.

“Well, tomorrow, then,” she said, pulling the front of her kimono together as if she had only just noticed that it had fallen open. “We’ll see you at seven.” She turned at the door and threw Tuck a parade queen wave as she left, once again the darling of the Eisenhower era.

When she was safely out of the bungalow, Tuck ran to the bed and picked up the green coconut. “What in the hell was that about?”

The coconut didn’t answer. “Fine,” Tuck said, fitting the head back on the sleeping dummy. “I am not impressed. I am not shaken, nor am I stirred. Weirdness is my business.” Even as he said it, he dismissed the hallucination as his own good sense manifesting a warning, but the duel cravings for a drink and a woman yanked at his insides like dull fishhooks. He turned off the light and let the cravings lead him out the bathroom hatch to the moonlit sea.

Forty minutes later he took his place in the circle of the Shark men. Chief Malink stood and greeted Tuck with a jarring backslap. “Good to see you, my friend. How’s it hanging?”

“It hangs with magnificent splendor,” Tuck said, his programmed response to the truck drivers and cowboys who used that expression, although he wondered where Malink had heard it. “But I’m a little parched,” he said.

A fat young man named Vincent was pouring tonight and he handed Tucker the coconut cup with a smile. Tuck sipped at first, fighting that first gag, then gulped down the coconut liquor and gritted his teeth to keep it from coming back up.

The older men in the group seemed festive and yattered back and forth in their native language, but Tuck noticed that the younger men were sulking, digging their toes into the sand like pouting little boys.

“Why so glum, guys? Someone kill you dog?”

“No,” Malink said, not quite understanding the question. “We eat a turtle today.”

Having your dog killed must mean something different here than it means back in Texas, Tuck realized.

Malink sensed Tuck’s confusion. “They are sad because the Sky Priestess has chosen the mispel from their house and she will be gone many days now.”

“Mispel?”

“The girl you followed last night is mispel of the bachelors’ house.”

“Sorry to hear that, guys,” Tuck said, acting as if he had the slightest idea what a mispel or being chosen was. He figured that maybe it had something to do with PMS. Maybe when the women started getting cranky with the old Sky Priestess cramps, they just checked her into a special “chosen” hut until she mellowed out. He waited until the cup came around the circle before he brought it up again. “So she was chosen by the old Sky Priestess, huh? Tough luck there. Did you try giving her chocolate? That takes the edge off sometimes.”

“We give her special tuba when she comes,” Malink said.

“Tastes like shit!” several of the men chanted.

Abo, the fierce one, said, “I am chosen and now Sepie is chosen. I will marry her.”

Several of the other young men seemed less than pleased at Abo’s announcement.

“Come on, man,” Tuck said. “You might need a little attitude adjustment, but you’re not chosen.”

“I am,” Abo insisted. “Look.” He turned his back to the group and ran his finger across a long pink scar that ran diagonally across his ribs. “The Sky Priestess chose me for Vincent in the time of the ripe breadfruit.”

Tuck stared at the scar, stunned, hoping that what he was thinking was as far off as his PMS theory had been. “The Sky Priestess? That was the music last night, all the noise?”

“Yes,” Malink said, “Vincent brings her in his airplane. We never see it, but we hear it.”

“And when someone is chosen, then does the jet always fly the next day?”

Malink nodded. “No one was chosen for a long time until Vin cent sent you to fly the white airplane. We thought Vincent was angry with us.”

Tuck looked to Abo, who seemed satisfied that the chief was backing him up. “Where do you go when you are chosen?”

“You go to the white house where the Sorcerer lives. There are many machine.”

“And then what? What happens in the white house?”

“It is secret.”

Tuck was across the circle in Abo’s face. “What happens there?”

Abo seemed frightened and turned away. Tuck looked around at the other men. “Who else here has been chosen?”

The fat kid who had been pouring twisted so Tuck could see the scar on his back.

“What’s your name, kid?”

“Vincent.”

“I should have known. Vincent, what happens in the white house?”

Young Vincent shook his head. Tuck turned to Malink. “What happens?”

Malink shook his head. “I don’t know. I have not been chosen.”

A familiar voice called out of the dark, “They make them sleep.”

Everyone turned to see Kimi coming down the path from the village. The old cannibal creaked along behind him.

Abo barked a reproach to Kimi in his native tongue. Kimi barked back something in the same language. Tuck didn’t have to know the language to know that Kimi had told the fierce one to fuck off.

“Kimi, are you okay?” Tuck barely recognized the navigator. He was wearing the blue loincloth of the Shark men and he seemed to have put on some muscle. Tuck was genuinely delighted to see him. The navigator ran to him and threw his arms around the pilot. Tuck found himself returning the embrace.

Several of the young men had stood and were glaring at Kimi. One of the jugs of tuba had been kicked over, but no one seemed to notice the liquor running out on the sand.

“Kimi, do you know what’s going on here?”

“A pretty white woman with yellow hair. She come out of the fence and take the girl away. They will put her to sleep and when she wakes up she will have a cut here.” He drew his finger across the back of his ribs.

“No!” Abo screamed. He leaped over the crouching Malink to get to Kimi. Without thinking, Tuck swung around and caught Abo

under the jaw with a roundhouse punch. Abo’s feet flew out from under him and he landed on his back. Tuck rubbed his hand. Abo tried to struggle to his feet and Malink barked an order to two of the young Vincents. Re-luctantly, they restrained their friend. “Vincent has sent the pilot,” Malink reminded them.

Tuck turned back to Kimi. “What happens then?”

“You owe me five hundred dollars.”

“You’ll get it. What happens then?”

“The chosen has to stay in bed for many days. There are tube stuck in them and they are in much pain. Then they come back.”

“That’s it?”

“Yes,” Kimi said.

Malink stood now and addressed Kimi. “How do you know this?”

Kimi shrugged. “Sepie tells me.”

Malink turned to Abo, who had stopped struggling and now looked terrified. “She said she would not tell. The girl-man put a spell on her.”

Tuck stood rubbing his knuckles, watching this little tropical opera and feeling like someone had snapped on a light and found him french-kissing a maggoty corpse. The cooler, the surgical garb, the flights on short notice, the second jet waiting on the tarmac in Japan, the guards, the secrecy, the money. How had he been so fucking stupid?

Malink was hurling a string of native curses at Abo, who looked as if he would burst into tears any second.

“You dumb motherfuckers!” Tuck shouted.

Malink stopped talking.

“She’s selling your kidneys. The doc is taking out your kidneys and selling them in Japan.”

This revelation didn’t have quite the effect that Tuck thought it would. In fact, he seemed to be the only one concerned about it at all.

“Did you hear me?”

Malink looked a little embarrassed. “What is a kidney?”