Island of the Sequined Love Nun

42 Bedfellows

Just before dawn, Tuck crawled through the bottom of the shower like a homesick cockroach, scuttled out of the bathroom under the mosquito netting and into bed. There were things to do, big things, important things, maybe even dangerous things, but he had no idea what they were and he was too tired and too drunk to figure them out now. He had tried, he had really tried to convince the Shark men that the doctor and his wife were doing horrible things to them, but the islanders always came back with the same answer: “It is what Vincent wants. Vincent will take care of us.”

To hell with them, Tuck thought. Dumb bastards deserve what happens to them.

He rolled over and pushed the coconut-headed dummy aside. The dummy pushed back.

Tuck leaped out of bed, tripped in the mosquito netting, and scooted on his butt like a man backing away from a snake.

And the dummy sat up.

Tuck couldn’t see the face in the predawn light filtering into the bungalow, just a silhouette behind the mosquito netting, a shadow. And the shadow wore a captain’s hat.

“Don’t think I don’t know what you’re thinking because I’ll give you six to five I do.” The accent was somewhere out of a Bowery Boys movie, and Tuck recognized the voice. He’d heard it in his head, he’d heard it in the voice of a talking bat, and he’d heard it twice from a young flyer.

“You do?”

“Yeah, you’re thinking, ‘Hey, I never wanted to find a guy in my bed, but if you got to find a guy in your bed, this is the guy I’d want it

to be,’ right?”

“That’s not what I was thinking.”

“Then you shoulda taken odds, ya mook.”

“Who are you?”

The flyer threw back the mosquito netting and tossed something across the room. Tuck flinched as it landed with a thump on the floor next to him.

“Pick it up.”

Tuck could just see an object shining by his knee. He picked up what felt like a cigarette lighter.

“Read what it says,” the shadow said.

“I can’t. It’s dark.”

Tuck could see the flyer shaking his head dolefully.

“You know, I saw a guy in the war that got his head shot off about the hat line. Docs did some hammering on some stainless steel and riveted it on his noggin and saved his life, but the guy didn’t do nothing from that day forward but walk around in a circle yanking his hamster and singing just the ‘row’ part of ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat.’ They had to tape oven mitts on him to keep him from rubbing himself raw. Now, I’m not saying that the guy didn’t know how to have a good time, but he wasn’t much for conversation, if you know what I mean.”

“That was a beautiful story,” Tuck said. “Why?”

“Because the steelhead hamster-pulling ‘row’ guy was a genius compared to you. Light the fuckin’ lighter, ya mook.”

“Oh,” Tuck said and he flipped open the lighter and sparked it. By the firelight he could read the engraving: VINCENT BENNIDETTI, CAPTAIN U.S.A.F.

Tuck looked back at the flyer, who was still caged in shadow, even though the rest of the room had started to lighten. “You’re Vincent?”

The shadow gave a slight bow. “Not exactly in the flesh, but at your fuckin’ service.”

“You’re Malink’s Vincent?”

“The same. I gave the chief the original of that lighter.”

“You could have just said so. You didn’t have to be so dramatic.” Tuck was glad he was a little drunk. He didn’t feel frightened. As strange as it all was, he felt safe. This guy—this thing, this spirit—had more or less saved his life at least twice, maybe three times.

“I got responsibilities, kid, and so do you.”

“Responsibilities?” Now Tuck was frightened. It was a conditioned response.

“Yeah, so when you get up later today, don’t go storming into the doc’s office demanding the facts. Just go swimming. Cool off.”

“Go swimming?”

“Yeah, go to the far side of the reef and swim away from the direction of the village about five hundred yards. Keep an eye out for sharks outside of the reef.”

“Why?”

“A guy appears out of nowhere in the middle of the night saying all kinds of mystical shit and you ask why?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Because I said so,” Vincent said.

“My dad always said that. Are you the ghost of my dad?”

The shade slapped his forehead. “Repeat after me—and don’t be getting any on you, now—one and two and three and ‘Row, row, row, row, row…’” He started to fade away with the chant.

“Wait,” Tuck said. “I need to know more than that.”

“Stay on the sly, kid. You don’t know as much as you think you do.”

“But…”

“You owe me.”

Two armed ninjas followed Tuck to the water. He watched them, looking for signs of microwave poisoning from the radar blasts, but he wasn’t sure exactly what the signs would be. Would they plump noticeably, perhaps explode without fork holes to release the inner pressure? That would be cool. Maybe they’d fall asleep on the beach and wake up a hundred times larger, yearning to do battle with Godzilla while tiny people whose words didn’t match their mouth movements scrambled in the flaming rubble be-low? (It happened all the time in Japanese movies, didn’t it?) Too good for them.

He pulled on his fins and bowed to them as he backed into the water. “May your nads shrivel like raisins,” he said with a smile.

They bowed back, more out of reflex than respect.

The far side of the reef and five hundred yards down: The ninjas were going to have a fit. He’d never gone to the ocean side of the reef. Inside was a warm clear aquamarine where you could always see the bottom and the fish seemed, if not friendly, at least not dan

gerous. But the ocean side, past the surf, was a dark cobalt blue, as deep and liquid as a clear night sky. The colorful reef fish must look like M&Ms to the hunters of the deep blue, Tuck thought. The outer edge of the reef is the candy dish of monsters.

He kicked slowly out to the reef, letting the light surge lift and drop him as he watched the multicolored links in the food chain dart around the bottom. A trigger fish, painted in tans and blues that seemed more at home in the desert, was crunching the legs off of a crab while smaller fish darted in to steal the floating crumbs. He pulled up and looked at the only visible break in the reef, a deep blue channel, and headed toward it. He’d have to go out to the ocean side and swim the five hundred yards there, otherwise the breaking surf would dash him against the coral when he tried to swim over the reef.

He put his face in the water and kicked out of the channel until the bottom disappeared, then, once past the surf line, turned and swam parallel to the reef. It was like swimming in space at the edge of a canyon. He could see the reef sloping down a hundred and fifty feet to disappear into a blue blur. He tried to keep his bearing on the reef, let his eye bounce from coral fan to anemone to nudibranch to eel, like visual stepping-stones, because to his left there was no reference, nothing but empty blue, and when he looked there he felt like a child watching for a strange face at the window, so convinced and terrified it would come that any shape, any movement, any play of light becomes a horror. He saw a flash out the side of his mask and whipped around in time to see a harmless green parrot fish munching coral. He sucked a mouthful of water into his submerged snorkel and choked.

He hovered in a dead man’s float for a full minute before he could breathe normally and start kicking his way up the reef again, this time resolved to faith. Whatever, whoever Vincent was, he had saved Tuck’s life, and he knew things. He wouldn’t have gone to the trouble to have Tuck eaten by barracudas.

Tuck ticked off his stepping-stones, trying to gauge how far he had come. He would have to go out farther to see past the rising surf and use the shore as a reference, and besides, what was above the water’s surface was irrelevant. This was a foreign world, and he was an uninvited guest.

Then another flash, but this time he fought the panic. Sunlight on something metal about thirty feet down the slope of the reef. Something waving in the surge near the flash. He rested a second,

gathered his breath, and dove, swooping down to grab the object just as he recognized what it was: a set of military dog tags on a beaded metal chain. He shot to the surface and hovered as he caught his breath and read: SOMMERS, JAMES W. James Sommers was a Presbyterian, according to the dog tag. Somehow Tuck didn’t think that a thousand-yard swim was worth finding a pair of dog tags. But there was the swath of fabric still down there. Tuck hadn’t gotten a good look at it.

He tucked the tags into the inside pocket of his trunks and dove again. He kicked down to the swath of cloth, holding his nose and blowing to equalize the pressure on his ears, even as the air in his lungs tried to pull him to the surface, away from his prize. It was some kind of printed cotton. He grasped at it and a piece came away in his hand. He pulled again, but the cloth was wedged into a crevice in the reef. He yanked and the cloth came away, revealing something white. Out of breath, he shot to the surface and examined the cloth. Flying piggies. Oh, good. He’d risked his life for Presbyterian dog tags and a flying piggies print.

One more dive and he saw what it was that had wedged into the crevice: a human pelvic bone. Whatever else had been here had been carried away, but this bone had wedged and been picked clean. Someone wearing flying piggies boxers had become part of the food chain.

The swim back to the channel seemed longer and slower, but this time Tuck forgot his fear of what might lurk behind the vasty blue. The real danger lay back on shore.

And how does one, over dinner, proffer the opinion that one’s employers are murdering organ thieves? “Stay on the sly,” Vincent had said. And so far he seemed to know what he was talking about.

43 Boiling the Puppets

“Oh, come in, Mr. Case. Sebastian is out on the lanai.” She wore a white raw silk pant suit, cut loose in the legs and low at the neck, a rope of pearls with matching earrings. Her hair was tied back with a white satin bow and she moved before him like the ghost of good housekeeping. “How do you feel about Pacific lobster?”

“I like it,” Tuck said, looking for some sign from her that she knew that he knew. There was no acknowledgment of her appearance in his room last night or that she had any suspicion of him at all. Tuck said, “I feel like I’m taking advantage coming to dinner empty-handed. I ought to have you and the doc over to my place some evening.”

“Oh, do you cook too, Mr. Case?”

“A few things. My specialty is blackened Pez.”

“A Cajun dish?”

“I learned to make it in Texas, actually.”

“A Tex-Mex specialty, then.”

“Well, a fifth of tequila does make it taste a little better.”

She laughed, a polite hostess laugh, and said, “Can I get you something to drink?”

“You mean a drink or some liquid?”

“I’m sorry. It does seem constraining, I’m sure, but you understand, you might have to fly.”

She had a large glass of white wine on the counter where she had been working. Tuck looked at it and said, “But performing major surgery under the influence is no problem, right?” That was subtle, Tuck thought. Very smooth. I am a dead man.

Her eyes narrowed, but the polite smile never left her lips. “Sebastian,” she called, “you’d better come in, dear. I think Mr. Case has something he wants to discuss with us.”

Sebastian Curtis came through the french doors looking tall and dignified, his gray hair brushed back, his tan face striking against the gray. To Tuck he looked like any number of executives one might see at a yacht club, a retired male model perhaps, a Shakespearean actor finally finished with the young prince and lover roles, seasoned and ready to play Caesar, Lear, or more appropriately, Prospero, the banished wizard of The Tempest.

Tuck, still in his borrowed clothes, baggy and rolled at the cuffs, felt like a beggar. He fought to hold on to his righteous indignation, which was an unfamiliar emotion to him anyway.

Sebastian Curtis said, “Mr. Case. Nice to see you. Beth and I were just talking about how pleased we are with your work. I’m sure these impromptu flights are difficult.”

“Mr. Case was just suggesting that we keep an eye on our alcohol consumption,” Beth Curtis said. “Just in case we might have to perform an emergency surgery.”

The jovial manner dropped from the doctor like a veil. “And just what kind of surgery might you be referring to?”

Tuck looked at the floor. He should have thought this through a little more. He fingered the dog tags in his pocket. The plan was to throw them on the table and demand an explanation. What had happened to the skel-eton, the owner of the tags? And for that matter, what would happen to Tucker Case if he threw this in their faces? Mary Jean used to say, “In ne-gotiations, always leave yourself a way out. You can always come back later.”

Go slow, Tuck told himself. He said, “Doc, I’m concerned about the flights. I should know what we’re carrying in case we’re detained by the authorities. What’s in the cooler?”

“But I told you, you’re carrying research samples.”

“What kind of samples?” It was time to play a card. “I’m not flying again until I know.”

Sebastian Curtis shot a glance at his wife, then looked back to Tucker. “Perhaps we should sit down and have a talk.” He pulled a chair out for Tucker. “Please.” Tuck sat. The doctor repeated the gesture for his wife and then sat down next to her, across the table from Tuck.

“I’ve been on Alualu for twenty-eight years, Mr. Case.”

“What does that have to do…?”

Curtis held up a hand. “Hear me out. If you want answers, you have to take them in the context that I give them.”

“Okay.”

“My family didn’t have the money for medical school, so I took a scholarship from the Methodist Missions, on the condition that I work for them when I graduated and go where they sent me. They sent me here. I was full of myself and full of the Spirit of the Lord. I was going to bring God and healing to the heathens of the Pacific. There hadn’t been a Christian missionary on the island since World War II, and I was warned that there might be a residual Catholic influence, but the Methodists have liberal ideas about spreading the Word of God. A Methodist missionary works with the culture he finds. But I didn’t find a Catholic population here. What I found was a population that worshipped the memory of an American pilot and his bomber.”

“A cargo cult,” Tuck said, hoping to move things along.

“Then you know about them. Yes, a cargo cult. The strongest I’d ever heard of. Fortunately for me, it wasn’t based on the hatred of whites like the cargo cults in New Guinea. They loved Americans and everything that came from America. They took my medicine, the tools I brought, food, reading material, everything I offered them, except, of course, the Word of God. And I was good to them. The natives on this island are the health-iest in the Pacific. Partly because they are so isolated that communicable diseases don’t reach them, but I take some credit for it as well.”

“So that’s why you don’t let them have any contact with the ship when it arrives?”

“No, well, that is one of the reasons, but mainly I wanted to keep them away from the ship’s store.”

“Why?”

“Because the store offered them things that I couldn’t or wouldn’t give them, and the store only accepted money. Money was becoming an icon in their religion. I heard drums in the village one night and went into the village to find all the women crouched around a fire holding wooden bowls with a few coins in the bottom. They were oiled and waving their heads as if in a trance, and as the drummers played, the men, wearing masks fashioned to look like the faces on American currency, moved around be-hind the women, copulating with them and chanting. It was a fertility ce-remony to make the money in the bowls multiply so they could buy things from the ship’s store.”

“Well, it does sound better than getting a job,” Tuck said.

Curtis didn’t see the humor. “By forbidding them to have contact with the ship, I thought I could kill the cargo cult, but it didn’t work. I would talk of Jesus, and the miracles that he performed, and how he would save them, and they would ask me if I had seen him. Because they had seen their savior. Their pilot had saved them from the Japanese. Jesus had just told them that they had to give up their customs and taboos. Christianity couldn’t compete. But I still tried. I gave them the best care I could. But after five years, the Methodist Missions sent a group of officials to check on my progress. They cut my funding and wanted to send me home, but I decided to stay and try to do the best I could without their support.”

“He was afraid to leave,” Beth Curtis said.

Sebastian Curtis looked as if he was going to strike his wife. “That’s not true, Beth.”

“Sure it is. You hadn’t been off this island in years. You forgot how to live with real people.”

“They are real people.”

As amusing as it was to watch the perfect couple illusion go up in flames before his eyes, Tuck put out the fire. “A Learjet and millions in electronics. Looks like you did pretty good with no funding, Doc.”

“I’m sorry.” And he looked as if he was. “I tried to make it on what the islanders could raise by selling copra, but it wasn’t enough. I lost one of my patients, a little boy, because I didn’t have the funds to fly him to a hospital that could give him the care he needed. I tried harder to convert the natives, thinking I might get another mission to sponsor us, but how can you compete with a Messiah people have actually spoken to?”

Tuck didn’t answer. Having spoken to the “Messiah” himself, he was convinced already.

Sebastian Curtis drained his glass of wine and continued. “I sent letters to churches, foundations, and corporations all over the world. Then one day a plane landed out on the airstrip and some Japanese businessmen got out. They wouldn’t fund the clinic out of charity, but if I could get every able-bodied islander to give blood every two weeks, then they would help. And every two weeks the plane came and picked up three hundred pints of blood. I got twenty-five American dollars for every pint.”

“How’d you talk the natives into it? I’ve given blood. It’s not that pleasant.”

“They were coming on a plane, remember? Airplanes are a big part of these people’s religion.”

“If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, huh?”

“They always brought something on the plane for the natives. Rice, machetes, cooking pots. I got all the medicines I needed and I was able to get the materials to build most of this compound.”

Beth Curtis stood up. “Oh, as much as I love hearing this story, I think we should eat. Excuse me.” She went to the kitchen area, where a large pot was boiling on the stove, reached into a wooden crate on the floor, and came up with a large live lobster in each hand. The giant sea bugs waved their legs and antennae around looking for purchase. Beth Curtis held them over the pot, puppeting them. “Oh, Steve, you got us a room with a hot tub. How wonderful,” she made the left lobster say.

“Yes, I’m very romantic,” she said in a deeper voice, bouncing the bug with the words. “Let’s go in now. I’m a little tense.”

“Oh, you’re wonderful.” Then she dropped the lobsters into the boiling water.

A high-pitched squeal came from the pot and Beth Curtis went to the crate for another victim.

“Beth, please,” the doctor said.

“I’m just trying to lighten things up a little, ’Bastian. Be still.”

She held the second lobster over the pot, then looked at Tucker as she began her narration. “This is the crazed doctor talking. There’s always a crazed megalomaniacal doctor. It’s traditional.”

Sebastian Curtis stood up. “Stop it, Beth!”

She affected a German accent. “You see, Mr. Bond, a man spends too much time on an island alone, he changes. He loses his faith. He begins to think of ways to improve his lot. My associates in Japan came to me with a proposal. They would send me to a seminar in San Francisco to brush up on organ transplant surgery. I would no longer be selling blood for pocket change. They would send me specific orders for kidneys, and I could deliver them within hours for a cool half-million apiece. A dying man will pay a lot for a healthy kidney. In San Francisco I met a woman, a beautiful wo-man.” Beth came out of character for a moment, grinned, and bowed quickly, then went back to terrorizing the lobster. “I brought her here, and it was she who devised the plan to get the natives to comply with having their organs removed. Not only beautiful, but a genius as well, and she had a degree as a surgical nurse. She used her abundant charms on the natives”—she held the lobster where it could

have a good view of her cleavage—“and the savages were more than happy to donate a kidney. Meanwhile, I have become rich beyond my wildest dreams, and as for you, Mr. Bond, now it’s time for you to die.” She dropped the lobster into the pot and began to shake with a diabolical laugh. She stopped laughing abruptly and said, “They should be ready in about ten minutes. Salad, Mr. Case?”

Tuck couldn’t think. Somewhere in that little puppet show of the damned was a confession to cutting out people’s organs and selling them like so much meat, and the doctor’s wife not only didn’t seem to have any regrets about it, she was absolutely gleeful. Sebastian Curtis, on the other hand, had his head down on the table, and when he did look up, he couldn’t make eye contact with Tuck. A minute passed in uncomfortable silence. Beth Curtis seemed to be waiting for someone to shout “Encore!” while the good doctor gathered his wits.

“What I’d like you to understand, Mr. Case, is that I—we—couldn’t have taken care of these people without the funds we’ve received for what we do. They would have no modern medical care at all.”

Tuck was thinking again, trying to measure what he could say and what he wasn’t willing to reveal. He couldn’t let them know that he knew any-thing at all about the Shark People, and, as Vincent had implied, he’d better find out more before he threw down the dog tags and Pardee’s notebook. The doc was obviously stretched pretty tight by the situation, and Mrs. Curtis—well, Mrs. Curtis was just fucking scary. Play it chilly. They’d brought him here because they thought he was as twisted as they were. No sense in ruining his image.

“I understand.” Tuck said. “I wish you’d been a little more up front about it, but I think I get all the secrecy now. But what I want to know is: Why can’t I drink if you guys do? I mean, if you guys can perform major surgery when you’re half in the bag, then I can fly a plane.”

Beth said, “We wanted to help you with your substance abuse problem. We thought that if you weren’t exposed to other drinkers that you’d relapse when you went back home.”

“Very thoughtful of you,” Tuck said. “But when exactly am I supposed to go home?”

“When we’re finished,” she said.

The doctor nodded. “Yes, we were going to tell you, but we wanted you to become used to the routine. We wanted to see if you

could handle the job first. We’re going to do the operations until we have a hundred million, then we will invest it on behalf of the islanders. The proceeds will assure we can continue our work and that the Shark People will be taken care of as long as they are here.”

Tuck laughed. “Right. You’re not taking anything for yourself. This is all a mercy mission.”

“No, we may leave, but there’ll be enough to keep someone running this clinic and shipping in food and supplies forever. And then there’s your bonus.”

“Go,” Tuck said. “Go ahead.”

“The plane.”

Tuck raised an eyebrow. “The plane?”

“If you stay until we finish our work, we will sign the plane over to you, plus your salary and any other bonuses you’ve accumulated. You can go anywhere in the world you want, start a charter business if you want, or just sell it and live comfortably for the rest of your life.”

Tuck shook his head. Of all the weirdness that had gone on so far, this seemed like the weirdest, if only because the doctor seemed so earnest. It might have had something to do with the fact that it was one of those things that a guy hopes all his life he is going to hear, but convinces himself that it’s never going to happen. These people were going to give him his own Learjet.

He didn’t want to do it, he fought not to do it, he strained, but nevertheless, Tuck couldn’t stop himself from asking. “Why?”

“Because we can’t do it without you, and this is something that you can’t get any other way. And because we’d rather keep you than have to find another pilot and lose the time.”

“What if I say no?”

“Then, you understand, we’d have to ask you to leave and you would keep the money that you’ve already earned.”

“And I can just go?”

“Of course. As you know, you are not our first pilot. He decided to move on. But then again, we didn’t make him this offer.”

“What was your first pilot’s name?”

The doctor shot a look at his wife. She said, “Giordano, he was Italian. Why?”

“The aviation community is pretty small. I thought I might know him.”

“Do you?” she said and there was too much sincerity in the question for Tuck to believe that she didn’t know the answer.

“No.”

Sebastian Curtis cleared his throat and forced a smile. “So what do you think? How would you like to own your own Learjet, Mr. Case?”

Tuck sat staring at the open wine bottle, measuring what he could say, what answer they not only wanted to hear, but had to hear if he was going to leave the island alive. He extended his hand for the doctor to shake. “I think you’ve got yourself a pilot. Let’s drink to the deal.”

An electronic bell trilled from the bedroom and the doctor and his wife exchanged glances. “I’ll take care of it,” Beth Curtis said. She stood and put her napkin on the table.

“Excuse me, Mr. Case, but we have a patient in the clinic who requires my attention.” Then the whiplash mood swing from officious to acid. “She presses that buzzer so much you’d think it was attached to her clit.”

Sebastian Curtis looked at Tuck and shrugged apologetically.

44 Revealed: The Perfect Couple

Back at his bungalow, an argument went on in the still-sober brain of Tucker Case.

I am scum. I should have told them to shove it.

But they might have killed you.

Yeah, but I would have at least had my integrity.

Your what? Get real.

But I’m scum.

Big deal. You’ve been scum before. You’ve never owned a Learjet before.

You actually think they’ll give me the jet?

It could happen. Stranger things have happened.

But I should do something about this.

Why? You’ve never done anything before.

Well, maybe it’s time.

No way. Take the jet.

I’m scum.

Well, yes, you are. But you’re rich scum.

I can live with that.

The dog tags and Jefferson Pardee’s notebook lay on the coffee table, threatening to set off another fusillade of doubt and condemnation. Tuck lay back on the rattan couch and turned on the television to escape the noise in his mind. Skinny Asian guys were beating the snot out of each other in a kickboxing match from the Philippines. The Malaysian channel was showing how to fillet a schnauzer. The cooking show reminded him of surgery, and surgery reminded him that there was a beautiful island girl lying in the clinic, recovering from an unnecessary major surgery that he could have prevented. Definitely kickboxing.

He was just getting into the rhythm of the violence when the bat came through the window and made an awkward swinging landing on one of the bungalow’s open rafters. Tuck lost his breath for a minute, thinking there might just be a wild animal in his house. Then he saw the sunglasses.

Roberto steadied himself into a slightly swinging upside-down hang.

Tuck sighed. “Please just be a bat in sunglasses tonight. Please.”

Thankfully, the bat said nothing. The sunglasses were sliding off his nose.

“How do you fly in those things?” Tuck said, thinking out loud.

“They’re aviators.”

“Of course,” Tuck said. The bat had indeed changed from rhinestone glasses to aviators, but once you accept a talking bat, the leap to a talking bat with an eyewear wardrobe is a short one.

Roberto dropped from the rafter and took wing just before he hit the floor. Two beats of his wings and he was on the coffee table, as awkward in his spiderlike crawl as he was graceful in the air. With his wing claw, he raked at Jefferson Pardee’s notebook until it was open to the middle, then he launched himself and flew out the window.

Tuck picked up the notebook and read what Pardee had written. Tuck had missed this page when he had looked at the notebook before. This page had been stuck to the one before it; the bat’s clawing had revealed it. It was a list of leads that Pardee had made for the story he had been working on. The second item read: “What happened to the first pilot, James Sommers? Call immigration in Yap and Guam.” Tuck flipped through the notebook to see if he had missed something else. Had Pardee found out? Of course he had. He’d found out and he’d followed Sommers to the last place anyone had seen him. But where was Pardee? His notebook hadn’t come to the island without him.

Tuck went through the notebook three more times. There were some foreign names and phone numbers. Something that looked like a packing list for a trip. Some notes on the background of Sebastian Curtis. Notes to check up on Japanese with guns. The word “Learjet” underlined three times. And nothing else. There didn’t seem to be any organizational form to the notes. Just random facts, names, places, and dates. Dates? Tuck went through it once more. On the third page in, all by itself, was printed: “Alualu, Sept. 9.”

Tuck ran to the nightstand drawer, where the Curtises had left him a calendar. He counted back the days to the ninth and tried to put events to days. The ship had arrived on the ninth, and the morning of the tenth he had made his first flight. Jefferson Pardee could be lying in the clinic right now, wondering where in the hell his kidney was. If he was, Tuck needed to see him.

Tuck looked in the closet for something dark to wear. This was going to be different than sneaking out to the village. There were no buildings between the guards’ quarters and the clinic, no trees, nothing but seventy-five yards of open compound. Darkness would be his only cover.

It was a tropical-weight wet suit—two-mil neoprene—and it was two sizes two big, but it was the only thing in the closet that wasn’t khaki or white. In the 80-degree heat and 90-percent humidity, Tuck was reeling from the heat before he got the hood on. He stepped into the shower and soaked himself with cold water, then peeled the hood over his head and made his escape through the shower floor, dropping onto the wet gravel below.

In the movies the spies—the Navy SEALS, the Special Forces, the demolition experts—always sneak through the night in their wet suits. Why, Tuck wondered, don’t they squish and slosh and make squeaking raspberry noises when they creep? Must be special training. You never hear James Bond say, “Frankly, Q, I’ll trade the laser-guided cufflink missiles for a wet suit that doesn’t make me feel like a bloody bag of catsick.” Which is how Tuck felt as he sloshed around the side of the clinic and peeked across the compound at the guard on duty, who seemed to be looking right at him.

Tuck pulled back around the corner. He needed a diversion if he was going to make it to the clinic door unseen. The moon was bright, the sky clear, and the compound of white coral gravel reflected enough light to read by.

He heard the guard shout, and he was sure he’d been spotted. He flattened against the wall and held his breath. Then there were more Japa-nese from across the compound, but no footsteps. He ventured a peek. The guard was gesturing toward the sky and brushing his head. Two other guards had joined him and were laughing at the guard on duty. He seemed to get angrier, cursing at the sky and wiping his hand on his uniform. The other guards led him inside to calm him down and clean him up.

Tuck heard a bark from the sky and looked up to see the silhouette of a huge bat against the moon. Roberto had delivered a guano air strike. Tuck had his diversion.

He slipped around the front of the building, grabbed the doorknob, and turned. It was unlocked. Given Beth Curtis’s irritation at being buzzed and the amount of wine she’d consumed, Tuck had guessed that she’d get tired locking and unlocking the door. What did Mary Jean always say? “Ladies, if you do your job and assume that everyone else is incompetent, you will seldom be disappointed.” Amen, Tuck thought.

He squished into the outer room of the clinic, which was dark except for the red-eyed stare of a half-dozen machines and the dancing glow of a computer screen running a screen saver. He’d try to get into that later, but now he was interested in what, or who, lay in the small hospital ward, two rooms back.

He sloshed into the examination/operating room by the light of more LED eyes and pushed through the curtain to the four-bed ward. Only one bed held a patient—or what looked like a patient. The only light was a green glow from a heart monitor that blipped away silently, the sound turned off. Whoever was in the bed was certainly large enough to be Jeffer-son Pardee. There were a couple of IVs hanging above the patient. Probably painkillers after such major surgery, Tuck thought.

He moved closer and ventured a whisper. “Pst, Pardee.”

The lump under the covers moved and moaned in a distinctly unmasculine voice. “Pardee, it’s Tucker Case. Remember?”

The sheet was thrown back and Tuck saw a thin male face in the green glow. “Kimi?”

“Hi, Tucker.” Kimi looked down at the other person under the covers. “You remember Tucker? He all better now.”

The pretty island girl said, “I take care of you when you sick. You stink very much.”

Tuck backed off a step. “Kimi, what are you doing here?”

“Well, she like pretty thing, and I like pretty thing. She tired of having many means and so am I. We have a lot in common.”

“He the best,” Sepie added with an adoring smile at Kimi.

Kimi handed the smile off to Tuck. “Once you be a woman, you know how to make a woman happy.”

Tuck was getting over the initial surprise and began to smell the smoke of his beautiful island girl fantasy as it caught fire and burned to ash. He hadn’t realized how much time he’d spent thinking about

this girl. She, after all, was the one who had revived his manhood. Sort of.

“You right,” Kimi said. “Women are better. I am lesbian now.”

“You shouldn’t be doing this. This girl just had major surgery.”

“Oh, we not doing nothing but kissing. She very hurt. But this make it better.” Kimi held his arm up, displaying an IV line. “You want to try? Put in you arm and push button. It make you feel very very nice.”

“That’s for her, Kimi. You shouldn’t be using it.”

“We share,” Sepie said.

“Yes, we share,” Kimi said.

“I’m very happy for you. How in the hell did you get in here?”

“Like you get out. I swim around mimes and come here to see Sepie. No problem.”

“You don’t want to let them catch you. You’ve got to go. Now.”

“One more push.” Sepie held the button, ready to administer another dose of morphine to Kimi.

Tuck grabbed it from her hand. “No. Go now. How did you know about the mines?”

“I have other friend. Sarapul. I teach him how to be a navigator. He know a lot of things too. He a cannibal.”

“You’re a cannibal lesbian?”

“Just learning. How come you have rubber suit? You kinky?”

“Sneaky. Look, Kimi, have you seen a fat white guy, an American?”

“No, but Sarapul see him. He see the guards take him from the beach. He not here?”

“No. I found his notebook. I met him on Truk.”

“Sarapul say he see the guards bring him to the Sorcerer. He say it very funny, the white man wear pigs with wings.”

Tuck felt his face go numb. All that was left of Pardee was a pelvic bone wedged in the reef, stripped of flesh and wrapped in flying piggy shorts. Oh, there might be the odd kidney left alive in someone in Japan, a kidney that he had delivered. Had the fat man died on the operating table during the operation, the surgery too much for his heart? Or was he put under and never meant to wake up?

Tuck suddenly felt that getting into the doctor’s computer was more important than ever. He grabbed Kimi’s arm and pulled the IV needle out of his vein. The navigator didn’t resist, and he didn’t seem to feel it.

“Kimi, see if you can get that back in Sepie’s arm and come with me.”

“Okay boss.”

Tuck looked down at the girl, who had evidently picked up on the panic in his voice. Her eyes were wide, despite the morphine glaze. “Don’t buzz the doctor until after we’re gone. This button will let you have only so much morphine, and Kimi’s used some of yours. But if it hurts, you still have to wait, okay?”

She nodded. Kimi crawled out of the bed and nearly fell. Tuck caught him by the arm and steadied him.

“I am chosen,” Sepie said. “When Vincent comes, he will give me many pretty things.”

Tuck brushed back her hair with his fingers. “Yes, he will. You sleep now. And thank you for taking care of me when I was sick.”

Kimi kissed the girl and after a minute Tuck pulled him away and led him through the operating room to the office section of the clinic. In the glow of the computer screen, Tuck said, “Kimi, the doctor and his wife are killing people.”

“No, they not. They sent by Vincent. Sepie say Vincent come from Heaven to bring people many good things. They very poor.”

“No, Kimi, they are bad people. Like Malcolme. They are taking advantage of Sepie’s people. They are just pretending to be working for a god.”

“How you know? You no believe in God.”

Tuck took the boy by the shoulders. He was no longer angry or even irritated, he was afraid, and for the first time ever, not just for himself. “Kimi, can you swim back around the mines?”

“I think.”

“You’ve got to go to the other side of the island and you can’t come back. If the guards find you I’m pretty sure you’ll be killed.”

“You just want Sepie for yourself. She tell me you follow her.”

“I’ll check on her and I’ll meet you at the drinking circle tomorrow night—tell you how she’s doing. I won’t touch her, I promise. Okay?”

“Okay.” Kimi leaned against the wall by the door.

Tuck studied him for a moment to try and determine just how fucked up he was. It wasn’t a difficult swim. Tuck had done it stone drunk, but he’d been wearing fins and a mask and snorkel. “You’re sure you can swim?”

Kimi nodded and Tuck cracked the door. The moon had moved across the sky throwing the front of the clinic in shadow. The guard

across the compound was reading a magazine by flashlight. “When you get outside, go left and get behind the building.” The navigator stepped out, slid down the side of the building and around the corner. Tuck heard him trip and fall and swear softly in Filipino.

“Shit,” Tuck said to himself. He glanced at the computer. It would have to wait. He slid out the door, palming it shut behind him, then followed the navigator around the building. He heard the guard shout from across the compound, and for once in his life, Tuck made a definitive decision. He grabbed the navigator under the arms and ran.

45 Confessions Over Tee

Tucker Case dreamed of machine-gun fire and jerked as the bullets ripped into his back. He tossed forward into the dirt, mouth filling with sand, smothering him as the life drained out of a thousand ragged wounds, and still the guns kept firing, the rhythmic reports pounding like a violet storm of timpanis, like a persistent fist on a rickety door.

“Just let me die!” Tuck screamed, most of the sound caught by his pillow.

It was a persistent fist on a rickety door. “Mr. Case, rise and shine,” said a cheery Sebastian Curtis. “Ten minutes to tee time.”

Tuck rolled into the mosquito netting, became entangled, and ripped it from the ceiling. He was still wearing his wet suit and the fragile netting clung to it like cobwebs. He arrived at the door looking like a tattered ghost fresh out of Davy Jones’s locker.

“What? I can’t fly. I can’t even fucking walk. Go away.” Tuck was not a morning person.

Sebastian Curtis stood in the doorway beaming. “It’s Wednesday,” he said. “I thought you might want to play a few holes.”

Tuck looked at the doctor through bloodshot eyes and several layers of torn mosquito netting. Behind Curtis stood one of the guards, sans machine gun, with a golf bag slung over his shoulder. “Golf?” Tuck said. “You want to play golf?”

“It’s a different game here on Alualu, Mr. Case. Quite challenging. But then, you’ve been practicing, haven’t you?”

“Look, Doc, I didn’t sleep well last night…”

“Could be the wet suit, if you don’t mind my saying. Here in the tropics, you want fabrics that breathe. Cotton is best.”

Tuck was beginning to come around, and as he did, he found he was focusing an intense hatred on the doctor. “I guess we know who got laid last night.”

Curtis looked down and smiled coyly. He was actually embarrassed. Tuck couldn’t quite put it together. The doc didn’t seem to have any problem with killing people or taking their organs—or both—but he was blushing at the mention of sex with his wife. Tuck glared at him.

Curtis said, “You’d better change. The first tee is out in front of the hangar. I’ll go down and practice a few drives while you get dressed.”

“You do that,” Tuck said. He slammed the door.

Twenty minutes later Tuck, his hair still wet from the shower, joined Curtis and the guard in front of the hangar. He was feeling the weight of three nights with almost no sleep, and his back ached from dragging Kimi across the compound, then towing him in the water to the far side of the minefield. The guard had never caught up to them, but he had come to the edge of the water and shouted, waving his machine gun until Tuck and Kimi were out of sight.

“We’ll have to share a set of clubs,” Curtis said. “But perhaps now that you’ve decided to stay, we can order you a set.”

“Swell,” Tuck said. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought the guard might be the same one that had chased them to the beach. Tuck sneered at him and he looked away. Yep, he was the one.

“This is Mato. He’ll be caddying for us today.”

The guard bowed slightly. Tuck saluted him with a middle finger. If the doctor saw the gesture, he didn’t comment. He was lining the ball up on a small square of Astro Turf with a rubberized pad on the bottom. “We have to hit off of this. At least until someone invents a gravel wedge.” He laughed at his own joke.

Tuck forced a smile.

“The Shark People covered this entire island with gravel hundreds of years ago. Keeps the topsoil from being washed away in typhoons. This first hole is a dogleg to the left. The pin is behind the staff’s quarters about a hundred yards.”

“Doc, now that we’ve come clean, why don’t we call them the guards?”

“Very well, Mr. Case. Would you like honors?”

“Call me Tuck. No, you go ahead.”

Curtis hit a long bad hook that arced around the guards’ quar ters and landed out of sight in a stand of palm trees behind the building.

“I have to admit that I may have a bit of an advantage. I’ve laid out the course to accommodate my stroke. Most of the holes are doglegs to the left.”

Tuck nodded as if he understood what Curtis was talking about, then took the driver from the doctor and hit his own shot, a grounder that skipped across the gravel to stop fifty yards in front of them. “Oh, bad luck. Would you like to take a McGuffin?”

“Blow me, Doc,” Tuck said as he walked away toward his ball.

“I guess not, then.”

The pins were bamboo shafts driven into the compound, the holes were lined with old Coke cans with the tops cut off. The best part about it was that Tuck was able to deliver several vicious high-velocity putts into the shins of Mato, who was tending the pins. The worst part was that now that Curtis considered Tuck a confidant, he decided to open up.

“Beth is quite a woman, isn’t she? Did I tell you how we met?”

“Yeah.”

“I was at a transplant symposium in San Francisco. Beth is quite the

nurse, the best I’ve ever seen in an operating room, but she wasn’t working

as a nurse when I met her.” “Oh, good,” Tuck said. Curtis seemed to be waiting for Tucker to ask. Tucker was waiting for

the guard to rat him out for sneaking out of the compound last night. “She was a dancer in North Beach. An exotic dancer.” “No shit.” Tuck said. “Are you shocked?” Curtis obviously wanted him to be shocked. “No.” “She was incredible. The most incredible woman I had ever seen. She

still is.” “But then, you’ve been a missionary on a remote island for twenty-eight

years,” Tuck said. Curtis picked his club for the next shot: the seven iron. “What’s this?” “Looks like blood and feathers,” Tuck said. Curtis handed the club to Mato for him to clean it. “Beth did a dance with surgical tubing and a stethoscope that took my breath away.”

“Pretty common,” Tuck said. “Choke you with the surgical tubing and use the stethoscope to make sure you haven’t done the twitching fish.”

“Really?” Curtis said. “You’ve seen a woman do that?”

Tuck put on his earnest young man face. “Seen? You didn’t notice the ligature marks on my neck when you examined me?”

“Oh, I see,” Curtis said. “Still, I, at least, had never seen anything like it. She…” Curtis couldn’t seem to return to his story. “The wet suit this morning. Was that a sexual thing? I mean, most people would find it uncomfortable.”

“No, I’m just trying to lose a little weight.”

Curtis looked serious now. “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea. You’re still very thin from your ordeal in getting here.”

“I’d like to get down to about eight pounds,” Tuck said. “There’s a big Gandhi revival thing going on back in the States. Guys who look like they’re starving have to beat the babes off with a stick. Started with female fashion models, but now it’s moved to the men.”

Curtis look embarrassed. “I guess I’m a bit out of touch. Beth tries to keep up with what’s going on in the States, but it, well, seems irrelevant out here. I guess I’ll be glad when this is all over and we can leave the island.”

“Then why don’t you just leave? You’re a physician. You could open up a practice in the States and pull down a fortune without all this.”

Curtis glanced at the guard, then looked back to Tuck. “A fortune maybe, but not a fortune like we’re accumulating now. I’m too old to start over at the bottom.”

“You’ve got twenty-eight years’ experience. You said yourself that the people you take care of are the healthiest in the Pacific. You wouldn’t be starting over.”

“Yes, I would. Mr. Case—Tuck—I’m a doctor, but I’m not a very good one.”

Tuck had met a number of doctors in his life, but he had never met one who could bear to admit that he was incompetent at anything. It was a running joke among flight instructors that doctors made the worst students. “They think they’re gods. It’s our job to teach them that they’re mortal. Only pilots are gods.”

This guy seemed so pathetic that Tuck had to remind himself that the good doctor was at least a double murderer. He watched

Curtis hit a nice hundred-yard bloodstained seven iron to within ten feet of the pin, which was set up on a small patch of grass near the beach.

Tuck chased down his own skidding thwack of a nine iron that had landed between the roots of a walking tree, an arboreal oddity that sat atop a three-foot teepee of tangled roots and gave the impression that it might move off on its own power at any moment. Tuck was hoping that it would.

The caddie followed Tuck, and when they were out of earshot of the doctor, he turned to face the stoic Japanese. “You can’t tell him, can you?”

The guard pretended not to understand, but Tuck saw that he was getting it, even if only by inflection. “You can’t tell him and you can’t fucking shoot me, can you? You killed the last pilot and that got you in a world of trouble, didn’t it? That’s why you guys follow me like a bunch of baby ducks, isn’t it?” Tuck was guessing, but it was the only logical explanation.

Mato glanced toward the doctor.

“No,” Tuck said. “He doesn’t know that I know. And we’re not going to tell him, are we? Just shake your head if you’re getting this.”

The guard shook his head.

“Okay, then, here’s the deal. I’ll let you guys look like you’re doing your job, but when I wave you off, you’re gone. You hear me? I want you guys off my ass. You tell your buddies, okay?”

The guard nodded.

“Can you speak any English at all?”

“Hai. A rittle.”

“You guys killed the pilot, didn’t you?”

“He tly to take prane.” Mato looked as if the words were painful for him to form.

Tuck nodded, feeling heat rise in his face. He wanted to smash the guard’s face, knock him to the ground, and kick him into a glob of goo. “And you killed Pardee, the fat American man.”

Mato shook his head. “No. We don’t.”

“Bullshit!”

“No, we…we…” He was searching for the English word.

“What?”

“We take him, but not shoot.”

“Take him where? To the clinic?”

The guard shook his head violently. Not saying no, but trying to say that he couldn’t say.

“What happened to the fat man?”

“He die. Hospital. We put him water.”

“You took his body to the edge of the reef, where the sharks would find it?”

The guard nodded.

“And the pilot? You put him in the same place?”

Again the nod.

“What’s going on. Are you going to hit or not?”

Tuck and the guard looked up like two boys caught trading curses in the schoolyard. Curtis had come back down the fairway to within fifty feet of them.

Tuck pointed to his ball. “Kato here won’t let me move that out for a shot. I’ll take the penalty stroke, Doc. But hell, we don’t have mutant trees like that in Texas. It’s unnatural.”

Curtis looked sideways at Tuck’s ball, then at Mato. “He can move it. No penalty. You’re a guest here, Mr. Case. We can let you bend a few rules.” Curtis did not smile. Suddenly he seemed very serious about his golf.

“We’re partners now, Doc,” Tuck said. “Call me Tuck.”

46 Beans and Succubus

Tuck’s other partner showed up at his bungalow that evening as he was sitting down to a plate of pork and beans. She didn’t knock, or call out, or even clear her throat politely to let him know she was there. One minute Tuck was studying a gelatinous white cube of unidentifiable carbon-based life-form awash in a lumpy puddle of boiled legumes and tomato sauce, and the next the door opened and she was standing there wearing nothing but a red scarf and sequined high heels. Tuck dropped his spoon. Two partially used beans dribbled out of his open mouth, tracing contrails of sauce down the front of his shirt.

She executed a single flamenco heel stomp and Tuck watched the impact move up her body and settle comfortably in her breasts. She threw her arms wide, struck a pose, and said, “The Sky Priestess has arrived.”

“Yes, she has,” Tuck said with the glassy-eyed stupifaction of a newly converted Moonie. He’d seen something like her before, either on the hood of a Rolls-Royce or on a bowling trophy, but in the flesh the image was much more immediate, awe-inspiring even.

She pirouetted and the tails of the scarf trailed around her like affectionate smoke. “What do you think?”

“Uh-huh,” Tuck said, nodding.

“Come here.”

Tuck stood and moved toward her in the mindless shuffle step of a zombie compelled by the promise of living flesh. His brain stopped work-ing, his entire life energy shifted to another part of his body, and it led him across the room to within an inch of her. It wasn’t the first time this had happened to him, but before he had

always retained the power of speech and most of his motor functions.

“What’s wrong with you?” she said. “Bolts in your neck too tight?”

“My entire body has an erection.”

She took him by the front of the shirt and backed him across the room to the bed, then pushed him down and pulled his pants down to his knees. She vaulted onto him in a straddle and he reached up for her breasts. She caught his wrists.

“No. You’ll fuck up my makeup.”

And he noticed—like an accident victim might notice a butterfly in the grille of the bus that is running over him—that her nipples had been rouged to an unnatural pink.

He tried to sit up and she shoved him back down, then took him in her hand, nicking him with a red fingernail, making him wince, and guided him inside of her. He reached for her hips to drive her down and got his hands slapped for the effort.

And she fucked him—precise and mechanical as a machine, a single pounding motion repeated and lubricated and repeated again—until her breath rasped in her throat like hissing hydraulics and she arched her back and stalled, and misfired, then dieseled for a stroke or two, and she climbed off. Somewhere in all that he had come and she had looked at him once.

He lay there looking at the remnants of torn mosquito netting over the bed, breathing hard, feeling a little dizzy, and wondering what had just happened. She went to the bathroom, then returned a few seconds later and threw him a towel, which she had obviously used herself.

“We’re flying in three or four hours. Be ready.”

“Okay.” Was he supposed to say something? Didn’t this signify some sort of change that should be acknowledged?

“I want you to watch me, but you can’t let them see you. Wait a few minutes and go out by the hanger where you can see the airstrip. It’s a great show. Theater makes it all possible, you know. Ask the Catholics. They survived the Middle Ages by putting on performances in a language that no one understood on grand stages that were built by the pennies of the poor. That’s the problem with religion today. No theater.”

This must be her version of cuddling. “Performance?”

“The appearance of the Sky Priestess,” she said as if she was talking to a piece of toast. She walked to the door, then paused and

looked over her shoulder. Almost as an afterthought she said, “Tucker,” and when he looked up she blew him a kiss. Then she was out the door and he heard her shout, “Cue the music!”

A big band sound blasted across the island, sending a shiver rattling through Tuck’s body as if a chill ghost from the forties had jitterbugged over his spine.

47 Grand Theft Aircraft

The Shark men were breaking into their second jug of tuba when the music started. They all looked to Malink. Why hadn’t he told them there was going to be an appearance of the Sky Priestess?

Malink thought fast, then grinned as if he had known this was coming all along. “I wanted it to be a surprise,” he said. Why hadn’t this been an-nounced by the Sorcerer? Was he still angry because Malink had not pro-duced the girl-man on demand? Was Vincent himself angry at Malink for something? Certainly Malink’s people would be angry at him for not giving them the time to prepare the drums and the bamboo rifles of Vincent’s army—and the women, oh, the women would be shitting coconuts over not having time to oil their skins and paint their faces and put on their ce-remonial grass skirts.

As Malink trudged to the airstrip he tried to formulate some explanation that would work with everyone. As if it wasn’t difficult enough being chief with no coffee to drink in the morning—he’d had a headache for two weeks from caffeine withdrawal—now his role as religious leader was giving him problems. Leading a religion is tough work when your gods start stirring for real and messing up your prophecies. And what if he did come up with an explanation, only to have the Priestess of the Sky say something that contradicted him? She was supposed to be Vincent’s voice, but that voice had been angry lately, so he didn’t dare ask her for help as he had in the past. Not in front of his people.

He came out of the jungle just in time to see the flash of the explosions. The Sky Priestess walked out of the smoke and even from

a hundred yards away, Malink could tell by her step that she was pleased. Malink breathed a sigh of relief. She was carrying magazines for them. If his people were happy with what she said, then he could use the old “will of Vincent” argument for not preparing them.

He could have never guessed the real reason the Sorcerer had not forewarned him of the appearance of the Sky Priestess. At the time when he normally called the warning, the Sorcerer had been watching through the window as the Sky Priestess pumped away on Tucker Case.

Tuck waited five minutes before he pulled up his pants and slid out the door of his bungalow, nearly running into Sebastian Curtis. The doctor, normally cool, was soaked with sweat and looked past Tuck to the clinic. “Mr. Case. I thought you’d be preparing the plane. Beth did tell you that you have a flight?”

Tuck fought the urge to bolt. He hadn’t had enough time to build up any remorse about having sex with the doctor’s wife, and he didn’t excel at remorse in the first place. “I was on my way to do the preflight. It doesn’t take long.”

The doctor didn’t make eye contact. “You’ll forgive me if I seem distracted. I have to perform major surgery in a few minutes. You should go watch Beth’s little show.”

“What’s all the music and explosions?”

“It’s how we retrieve our donors. Beth will explain her theory of religion and theater to you, I’m sure. Excuse me.” He pushed past Tucker and looked at his shoes as he walked toward the clinic.

“Aren’t you going to watch?” Tuck said.

“Thank you, but I find it nauseating.”

“Oh,” Tuck said. “Then I’ll go check out the Lear. Great game today, Doc.”

“Yes,” Curtis said. He resumed his stiff-armed walk to the clinic, his fists balled so hard at his sides that Tuck could see them shaking.

The guards were gathered at the edge of the hangar. Mato looked up quickly and made eye contact long enough for Tuck to see that he was nervous. Tuck wished he had asked him if the other guards spoke English.

“Konichi-wa, motherfuckers,” Tuck said, covering his linguistic bases.

None of the guards responded. Except for Mato, their eyes were trained on Beth Curtis dancing across the airstrip to Benny Goodman’s “Sing, Sing, Sing.” One of the guards hit a button by the hangar and the music stopped as Beth Curtis stepped onto a small wooden platform on the far side of the runway. With the speakers silenced, Tuck could hear the drums of the Shark People. Some were marching around in formation holding lengths of bamboo painted red as rifles. Beth Curtis raised her hands, a copy of People in each, and the drums stopped.

Tuck couldn’t hear what she was saying, but she was waving her arms around like a soapbox preacher, and the crowd of natives moved, and flinched, and hung on her every word. She paused at one point and handed the magazines down to Malink, who backed away from the platform with his head bowed.

Tuck didn’t find anything about her performance nauseating, but it was nothing if not strange. Why all the pomp and circumstance? You have six guys with machine guns, you can pretty much go rip a kidney out anytime you want to.

He needed to think, and he didn’t particularly want to see whom she would pick. Whoever it was, their face would be in his head all the way to Japan and back. He went into the hangar, lowered the door on the Lear, climbed into the dark plane, and lay down in the aisle between the seats. He couldn’t hear the sound of the Sky Priestess or the natives oohing and ahhhing, and here among the steel and glass and plastic and upholstery, it felt like home. Here he could hear the sound of his own mind; here in his very own Learjet, the weirdness was all outside. But for the lack of a key he would have taken the plane right then.

The guard kicked Tuck in the thigh much harder than was needed to wake him. Tuck looked up to see the face of the guard who had beaten him on the beach. He had a scar that ran up his forehead tracing a bare streak into his scalp and Tuck had started to think of him as Stripe, the evil little monster from the movie Gremlins. Tuck’s anger was immediate and white-hot. Only the Uzi stopped him from getting his ass kicked again.

The guard dangled the key to the Lear’s main power cutoff. It was time to go. Tuck limped to the cockpit and strapped himself into the pilot’s seat. Stripe inserted the power key into the instrument

console, twisted it, and stepped back to watch as Tuck started the power-up procedure.

The other ninjas pulled the Lear out of the hangar by a large T-bar attached to the front wheel. When the plane was safely out of the hangar, Tuck started to spool up the jets. Stripe remained with the Uzi at port arms.

Tuck made a big show of going though the checklist, testing switches and gauges. He frowned and clicked the radar switch a couple of times. He looked back at Stripe. “Go check the nose. Something’s not right.”

The guard shook his head. Tuck mimed his instructions again and Stripe nodded, then he motioned through the window for another of the guards to join them on board. Evidently, they weren’t going to leave him un-guarded in the plane with the power key in. Stripe turned over the guard duty to the other ninja and appeared at the front of the plane. Tuck mo-tioned for him to get closer to the nose. Stripe did. Tuck turned on the radar. “And a lovely brain tumor for you, you son of a bitch.” Stripe seemed to actually feel the microwave energy and he jumped back from the plane. Tuck grinned and gave him the okay sign. “I hope your tiny little balls are boiling,” he said aloud. The guard behind him didn’t seem to understand what Tuck was saying, but he nudged him with the barrel of his Uzi and pointed. Beth Curtis, in her dark Armani, was coming across the compound with briefcase and cooler in hand.

She stepped into the plane and nodded to the guard. Instead of leaving, he took a seat back in the passenger compartment. Beth strapped herself into the copilot’s seat.

“We taking him in for shore leave?” Tuck said.

“No. He’s just along for the ride tonight.”

“Oh, right.” Tuck powered up the jets and eased the Lear out of the compound onto the runway.

Beth Curtis was silent until they were at altitude, cruising toward Japan. Tuck did not engage the autopilot, but steered the Lear gradually, perhaps a degree a minute, to the west.

“So what did you think?”

“Pretty impressive, but I don’t get it. Why the whole show to bring in someone for surgery? Why not just send the guards?”

“We’re not taking their kidneys, Tucker. They’re giving them.”

Tuck didn’t want to give away what he had learned from Malink and Sepie about the “chosen.” He said, “Giving them to who? A naked white woman?”

She laughed, reached into her briefcase, and brought out an eight-by-ten color photograph. “To the Sky Priestess.” She held the photograph where Tuck could see it. He had to steer manually. If he hit the autopilot now, the plane would turn back toward Japan, the only preset in the nav computer. The photograph was in color but old. A flyer stood by the side of a B-26 bomber. On the side of the bomber was the painting of a voluptuous naked woman and the legend SKY PRIESTESS. It could have been a painting of Beth Curtis as she had looked when she arrived at Tuck’s bungalow. He recog-nized the flyer as well. It was the ghost flyer he’d been seeing all along. He felt his face flush, but he tried to stay cool. “So who’s that?”

“The flyer was a guy named Vincent Bennidetti,” Beth said. “The plane was named the Sky Priestess. All the bombers had nose art like that in World War II. We found the picture in the library in San Francisco.”

“So what’s that got to do with our operation? You’re dressing up like the picture on an airplane.”

“No, I am the Sky Priestess.”

“I’m sorry, Beth. I still don’t get it.”

“This is the pilot that the Shark People worship. The cargo cult that ’Bastian told you about.”

Tuck nodded and tried to look surprised, but he was watching his course without seeming to do so. If he had figured it right, they would be over Guam in fifteen minutes and the American military would force them down. The Air Force was very cranky about private jets flying though their airspace.

“The natives on Alualu worship this Vincent guy,” Beth said. “I speak for Vincent. They come to me when we play the music and I give them everything. In return, I choose one of them for the honor of the mark of Vincent, which, of course, is the scar they get from the operation.”

“Like I said, you’ve got armed guards. Why not just take what you want?”

She looked shocked that he would ask. “And get out of show business?” Then she smiled and reached over and gave his crotch a squeeze.

“When I met Sebastian in San Francisco, he was drunk and throwing money around. One minute he was so dignified and erudite, the next he was like a little native child. He told me about the cargo cult and I came up with the idea of not just doing this to support the clinic, but to get really filthy rich. We had to keep the

people happy if we were going to do this in big numbers.”

“So you thought all of this up?”

“It’s the reason I’m here.”

“But Sebastian said you were a”—Tuck caught himself before he said “stripper”—“surgical nurse.”

“I was. So what? Did I get any respect for that? Did I get any power? No. To the doctors I was just a piece of ass who could handle surgical instru-ments and close a patient when they needed to get to the golf course. Did Sebastian tell you I used to strip?”

“He mentioned something about it in passing.”

“Well, I did. And I was good.”

“I can imagine,” Tuck said. A few more minutes and they should be joined by an F-16.

She smiled. “Fuck nursing. I was just a piece of meat to the men I worked with, so I decided to go with it. I was pushing thirty and all single women my age were walking around with a desperate look in their eye and a bio-logical clock ticking so loud you thought it was the crocodile from Peter Pan. If I was going to be treated like meat, I was going to make money at it. And I did. Not enough, but a lot more than I would have made nursing.”

“Do tell,” Tuck said. He couldn’t remember ever saying “Do tell,” and it sounded a little strange hearing it.

She looked out the window as if she had fallen into some reverie. Then, without looking back, she said, “What’s that island?”

Tuck tensed. “I couldn’t say.”

She sighed. “Islands are amazing.”

“I always say that.”

She seemed to come out of her trance and looked at the instrument board. Tuck acted as if he was concentrating on flying the plane. He glanced at Beth Curtis. Her mouth had tightened into a line.

She reached into the briefcase and came out with the Walther automatic.

“What’s that for?” Tuck said.

“Get back on course.”

“I am on course.”

“Now!”

“But I am on course. Look.” He pointed to the nav computer, which still showed the coordinates of the airstrip in Japan, although it wasn’t engaged with the autopilot.

“No, you’re not.” She pointed to the compass. “You’re at least ninety degrees off course. Turn the plane to Japan now or I’ll shoot you.”

Tuck was tired of it. “Right. And you’ll fly the plane? There’s a difference between being able to read a compass and making a landing.”

“I didn’t say I would kill you. I’m good with this. You’ll still be able to fly with one testicle. Now that would be a shame for both of us. Please turn the plane.”

Tuck engaged the autopilot and let the Lear bring itself around to the course to Japan.

“Sebastian said you might try something like that,” she said. “I told him I could handle you. I can, can’t I? Handle you, I mean.”

Tuck was quiet for a minute, berating himself for overestimating the efficiency of the military. Then finally he said, “You are a nefarious, diabolical, and evil bitch.”

“And?”

“That’s all.”

“I’m impressed. ‘Nefarious’ has more than two syllables. I am a good influence on you.”

“Fuck you.”

“You will,” she said.

48 Too Many Guns

Back at the drinking circle, Malink opened a copy of People reverentially and read by kerosene lamp while the other men huddled to get a look at the pictures.

“Cher is worst-dressed,” Malink announced.

“Too skinny,” said Favo. “I like Lady Di.”

Malink cringed. In the picture Lady Di was wearing a string of pearls, obviously the reason for Favo’s preference. Malink turned the page.

“Celestine Raptors of Madison County is number one movie in country,” Malink read.

“I want to see a movie,” Favo said. “You must tell the Sky Priestess to tell Vincent to bring a movie.”

“Many movies,” said Abo. “And many delicious light and healthy snacks with NutraSweet registered trademark,” he added in English. “Vincent will bring many snacks.”

Malink was turning to the moving story of a two-thousand-pound man who, after being forklifted out of his house, had dieted down to a svelte fourteen hundred when the sound of a machine gun rattled across the is-land. Malink put down the magazine and held up his hand to quiet the men. They waited and there was another burst of gunfire. A few seconds later they heard shouting and looked down the beach to see Sarapul running as fast as his spindly old legs would carry him.

“Come help!” he shouted. “They shot the navigator!”

The Uzi was pressed so hard into Tuck’s side that he felt as if his ribs were going to separate any second. The guard crouched behind him in the cockpit hatchway, while out on the tarmac Beth Curtis exchanged the cooler for another manila envelope. She seemed to be in a much better mood when she climbed back into the copilot’s seat.

“Home, James.”

Tuck tossed his head toward the back of the plane where the guard was taking his seat. “I guess you weren’t taking any chances about me taking off while you were out of the plane.”

“Do I look stupid?” she said. A smile there, no hint of a challenge.

“No, I guess not.” Tuck pushed up the throttles and taxied the Lear back out to the runway.

Again Beth Curtis reached over and gave him a light squeeze to the crotch. She put on her headset so she could talk to him over the roar of the engines as they took off. “Look, I know this is hard for you. Trust is some-thing you build, and you haven’t known me long enough to learn to do that.”

Tuck thought, It would help if you weren’t changing personalities every five minutes.

“Trust me, Tucker. What we are doing is not hurting the people of Alualu. There are people in India who are selling off their organs for less than the price of a used Toyota pickup. With what we make, we can be sure that these people are always taken care of, and we can take care of ourselves in the meantime.”

“If people are selling their organs on the cheap, then how are you—we—making so much money?”

“Because we can do it to order. Transplant isn’t just a matter of blood type, you know. Sure, in a pinch—and usually it is a pinch—you can go on just blood type, but there are four other factors in tissue typing. If they match, along with blood type, then you have a better chance of the body not rejecting the organ. Sebastian has a database of the tissue types of every native on the island. When there’s a need for an exact match, the order comes in over the satellite and we run it through the database. If we have it, the Sky Priestess calls the chosen.”

“Don’t the people have to be the same race?”

“It helps, but it seems that the people of Alualu have a very similar genetic pattern to the Japanese.”

“They don’t look Japanese. How do you know this?”

“Actually, it was figured out by an anthropologist who came to the island long before I did. He was studying the language and genetics of the islanders to determine where they migrated from. Turns out there are both linguistic and genetic links to Japan. They’ve been diluted by interbreeding with natives from New Guinea, but it’s still very close.”

“So you guys opened up Kidneys ’R’ Us and started making a mint.”

“Except for the scar, their lives don’t change, Tucker. We’ve never lost a patient to a botched operation or infection.”

But bullets, Tuck thought, are another matter. Still, there was nothing he could do to stop them, and if he had to do nothing, a great salary and his own jet were pretty good compensation. He’d spent most of his life not doing anything. Was it so bad to be paid for what you’re good at?

He said, “So it doesn’t hurt them? In the long run, I mean.”

“Their other kidney steps up production and they never notice the difference.”

“I still don’t get the Sky Priestess thing.”

She sighed. “Control the religion and you control the people. Sebastian tried to bring Christianity to the Shark People—and the Catholics before him—but you can’t compete with a god people have actually seen. The answer? Become that god.”

“But I thought Vincent was the god.”

“He is, but he will bring wonderful cargo in the Sky Priestess. Besides, it breaks the boredom. Boredom can be a lethal thing on a small island. You know about that already.”

Tuck nodded. It wasn’t so bad now. The fear of being murdered had gone a long way toward breaking his boredom.

Beth Curtis leaned over and kissed him lightly on the temple. “You and I can fight the boredom together. That’s one of the reasons I chose you.”

“You chose me?” In spite of himself, he was thinking about her naked body grinding away above him.

“Of course I chose you. I’m the Sky Priestess, aren’t I?”

“I’m not so sure it was you,” Tuck said, thinking about the ghost pilot.

She pushed away and looked at him as if he had lost his mind.

49 The Bedside Manner of Cannibals

Tuck slept through most of the day, then woke up with a pot of coffee over a spy novel. He looked at the words and his eyes moved down the pages for half an hour, but when he put it down he had no idea what he had read. His mind was torn by the thought of Beth Curtis showing up at his door. Whenever a guard crunched across the gravel compound, Tuck would go to the window to see if it was her. She wouldn’t come here during the day, would she?

He had promised Kimi that he would check on Sepie and meet him at the drinking circle, but now he was already a day late on the promise. What would happen if Beth Curtis came to his bungalow while he was out? She couldn’t tell the doc, could she? What would her excuse be for coming here? Still, Tuck was beginning to think that the doc wasn’t really the one running the show. He was merely skilled labor, and so, probably, was Tucker himself.

Tuck looked at the pages of the spy novel, watched a little Malaysian television (today they were throwing spears at coconuts on top of a pole while the Asian stock market’s tickers scrolled at the bottom of the screen in thin-colored bands), and waited for nightfall. When he could no longer see the guard’s face across the compound, he made a great show of yawning and stretching in front of the window, then turned out the lights, built the dummy in his bed, and slipped out through the bottom of the shower.

He took his usual path behind the clinic, then inched his way up on the far side and peeked around the front. Not ten feet away a guard stood by the door. He ducked quickly around the corner. There was no way into the clinic tonight. He could wait or even try to intimidate the guard, now that he knew they were afraid to shoot

him. Of course, he wasn’t sure they knew they were afraid to shoot him. What if Mato was the only one?

He slid back down the side of the building and through the coconut grove to the beach. The swim had become like walking to the mailbox, and he was past the minefield in less than five minutes. As he rounded the curve of the beach, he saw a light and figures moving around it. The Shark men had brought a kerosene lamp to the drinking circle. How civilized.

Some of the men acknowledged his presence as he moved into the circle, but the old chief only stared into the sand between his feet. There was a stack of magazines at his side.

“What’s going on, guys?”

A panic made its way around the circle to land on Abo, who looked up and said, “Your friend is shot by the guards.”

Tuck waited, but Abo looked away. Tuck jumped in front of Malink. “Chief, is he telling the truth? Did they shoot Kimi? Is he dead?”

“Not dead,” Malink said, shaking his head. “Hurt very bad.”

“Take me to him.”

“He is at Sarapul’s house.”

“Right. I’ll look it up in the guidebook later. Now take me to him.”

Old Malink shook his head. “He going to die.”

“Where is he shot?”

“In the water by the minefield.”

“No, numbnuts. Where on his body?”

Malink held his hand to his side. “I say, ‘Take him to the Sorcerer,’ but Sarapul say, ‘The Sorcerer shoot him.’” Malink then looked Tuck in the eye for the first time. His big brown face was a study in trouble. “Vincent send you. What do I do?”

Tuck could sense a profound embarrassment in the old man. He had just admitted in front of the men in his tribe that he didn’t have a clue. The loss of face was gnawing at him like a hungry sand crab.

Tuck said, “Vincent is pleased with your decision, Malink. Now I must see Kimi.”

One of the young Vincents stood up. Feeling very brave, he said, “I will take you.”

Tuck grabbed his shoulder. “You’re a good man. Lead on.”

The young Vincent seemed to forget to breathe for a moment, as if Tuck had touched him on the shoulders with a sword and welcomed him to a seat at the Round Table, then he came to his

senses and took off into the jungle. Tuck followed close behind, nearly clotheslining himself a couple of times on branches that the young Vincent ran right under. The coral gravel on the path tore at Tuck’s feet as he ran.

When they emerged from the jungle, Tuck could see a light coming out of Sarapul’s hut, which Tuck recognized from his day in the cannibal tree. He turned to young Vincent, who was terrified. He had charged the dragon, but had made the mistake of stopping to think about it.

“Kimi’s with the cannibal?”

Young Vincent nodded rapidly while bouncing from foot to foot, looking like he would wet himself any second.

“Go on,” Tuck said. “Go tell Malink to come here. And have a drink. You’re wigging out.”

Vincent nodded and ran off.

Tuck approached the door slowly, creeping up until he could see the old man crouched over Kimi, trying to pour something into his mouth from a coconut cup.

“Hey,” Tuck said, “how’s he doing?”

Sarapul looked around and gestured for Tuck to enter the house. Tuck had to bend to get through the low door, but once inside the ceiling opened to a fifteen-foot peak. Tuck knelt by Kimi. The navigator’s eyes were closed, and even in the orange light of Sarapul’s oil lamp, he looked pale. He was uncovered and a bandage was wrapped around his middle.

“Did you do this?” Tuck asked Sarapul.

The old cannibal nodded. “They shoot him in water. I pull him in.”

“How many times?”

Sarapu held up a long bent finger.

“Both sides? Did it go through?” Tuck gestured with his fingers on either side of his hip.

“Yes,” Sarapul said.

“Let me see.”

The old cannibal nodded and unwrapped Kimi’s bandage. Tuck rolled the navigator gently on his side. Kimi groaned, but didn’t wake. The bullet had hit him about two inches above the hip and about an inch in. It had passed right though, going in the size of a pencil and exiting the size of a quarter. Tuck was amazed that he hadn’t bled to death. The old cannibal had done a good job.

“Don’t take him to the Sorcerer,” Sarapul said. “The Sorcerer will kill him. He is the only navigator.” The old cannibal was pleading while trying to remain fierce. A sob betrayed him. “He is my friend.”

Tuck studied the wound to give the old cannibal a chance to gather himself. He couldn’t remember any vital organs being in that area. But the wounds would have to be stiched shut. Tuck wasn’t sure he had the stomach for it, but Sarapul was right. He couldn’t take Kimi to Curtis.

“Do you guys have anything you use to kill pain?”

The cannibal looked at him quizzically. Tuck pinched him and he yelped. “Pain. Do you have anything to stop pain?”

“Yes. Don’t do that anymore.”

“No, for Kimi.”

Sarapul nodded and went out into the dark. He returned a few seconds later with a glass jug half-full of milky liquid. He handed it to Tuck. “Kava,” he said. “It make you no ouch.”

Tuck uncapped the bottle and a smell like cooking cabbage assaulted his nostrils. He held his breath and took a big slug of the stuff, suppressed a gag, and swallowed. His mouth was immediately numb. “Wow, this ought to do it. I need a needle and some thread and some hot water. And some alcohol or peroxide if you have it.”

Sarapul nodded. “I put Neosporin on him.”

“You know about that? Why am I doing this?”

Sarapul shrugged and left the house. Evidently, he didn’t keep anything inside but his skinny old ass.

Kimi moaned and Tuck rolled him over. The navigator’s eyes fluttered open.

“Boss, that dog fucker shot me.”

“Curtis? The older white guy?”

“No. Japanese dog fucker.” Kimi drew his finger across his scalp in a line and Tuck knew exactly who he meant.

“What were you doing, Kimi? I told you that I’d check on Sepie and meet you.” Tuck felt a pleasant numbness moving into his limbs. This kava stuff would definitely do the trick.

“You didn’t come. I worry for her.”

“I had to fly.”

“Sarapul say those people very bad. You should come live here, boss.”

“Be quiet. Drink this.” He held the jug to Kimi’s lips and tipped it up. The navigator took a sip and Tuck let him rest before administering another dose.

“That stuff nasty,” Kimi said.

“I’m going to stitch you up.”

The navigator’s eyes went wide. He took the jug from Tuck and gulped from it until Tuck ripped it out of his hands. “It won’t be that bad.”

“Not for you.”

Tuck grinned. “Haven’t you heard? I’ve been sent here by Vincent.”

“That what Sarapul say. He say he don’t believe in Vincent until we come, but now he do.”

“Really?”

Sarapul came through the door with an armload of supplies. “I don’t say that. This dog fucker lies.”

Tuck shook his head. “You guys were made for each other.”

Sarapul set down a sewing kit and a bottle of peroxide, then crouched over the navigator and looked up at Tuck. “Can you fix him?”

Tuck grinned and grabbed the old cannibal by the cheek. “Yum,” Tuck said.

“Sorry,” Sarapul said.

“I’ll fix him,” Tuck said. Silently he asked for help from Vincent.

“I can’t feel my arms,” Kimi said. “My legs, where are my legs? I’m dying.”

Sarapul looked at Tuck. “Good,” he said. “More kava.”

Tuck picked up the jug, now only a quarter full. “This is great stuff.”

“I’m dying,” Kimi said.

Tuck rolled the navigator over on his side. “Kimi, did I tell you I saw Roberto?”

“See, I didn’t eat him,” Sarapul said.

“Where?” Kimi asked.

“He came to my house. He talked to me.”

“You lie. He only speak Filipino.”

“He learned English. Can you feel that?”

“Feel what? I am dying?”

“Good,” Tuck said and he laid his first stitch.

“What Roberto say? He mad at me?”

“No, he said you’re dying.”

“I’m dying, I’m dying,” Kimi wailed.

“Just kidding. He didn’t say that. He said you’re probably dying.” Tuck kept Kimi talking, and before long the navigator was so convinced of his approaching death he didn’t notice that Tucker Case, self-taught incompetent, had completely stitched and dressed his wounds.

50 Don Quixote at the Miniature Golf Course

He was sleeping, dreaming of flying, but not in a plane. He was soaring over the warm Pacific above a pod of hump-back whales. He swooped in close to the waves and one of the whales breached, winked at him with a football-sized eye, and said, “You da man.” Then the whale smiled and blew the dream all to hell, for while Tuck knew himself to indeed “be da man” and while he didn’t mind being told so, he also knew that whales couldn’t smile and that bit of illogic above all the others broke the dream’s back. He woke up. There was music playing in his bungalow.

“Dance with me, Tucker,” she said. “Dance with me in the moonlight.”

The smooth muted horns of “Moonlight Serenade” filled the room from a portable boom box on his coffee table. Beth Curtis, wearing a sequined evening gown and high-heeled sandals, danced an imaginary partner around the room. “Oh, dance with me, Tucker. Please.”

She glided over to the bed and held her hand out to him. He gave her the coconut man’s head, rolled over, and ducked under the sheet. “Go away. I’m tired and you’re insane.”

She sat on the bed with a bounce. “You old stick in the mud.” A pouty voice now. “You never want to have any romance.”

Tuck feigned sleep. Pretty well, he thought.

“I brought champagne and candles. And I made cookies.”

This is me sleeping, Tuck thought. This is exactly how I behave when I sleep.

“I twisted up a joint of skunky green bud the size of your dick.”

“I hope you got help carrying it,” he said, still under the covers.

“I rolled it on the inside of my thigh the way the women in Cuba roll cigars.”

“Don’t tell me how you licked the paper.”

She slapped him on the bottom. “Come on, dance with me.”

He rolled over and pulled the sheet off his face. “You’re not going to go away, are you?”

“Not until you dance with me and have some champagne.”

Tuck looked at his watch. “It’s five in the morning.”

“Haven’t you ever danced till dawn?”

“Not vertically.”

“Oh, you nasty boy.” Coy now, as if anything short of being caught at genocide could make her blush. The song changed to something slow and oily that Tuck didn’t recognize.

“This is such a good song. Let’s dance.” She swooned. She actually swooned. Swooning, Tuck noticed, looked very much like an asthma attack wheezed in slow motion. A rooster crowed, and seven thousand six hundred and fifty-two roosters responded in turn.

“Beth, it’s morning. Please go home.”

“Then you’re not going to dance with me?”

“No.”

“All right, I guess we’ll skip the dancing, but I want you to know that I’m very disappointed.” She stood up, pulled the evening gown over her head, and dropped it to the floor. The sequins sizzled against the floor like a dying rattlesnake. She wore only stockings underneath.

Tuck said, “I don’t think this is such a good idea,” but there was no conviction in his voice and she pushed him back on the bed.

Tuck was staring up at the ceiling, his arm pinned under her neck, silently mouthing his mantra, “After this, I will not bone the crazy woman. After this, I will not bone the crazy woman. After…” Boy, how many times had he said that? Maybe things were getting better, though. In the past it had always been “I will not get drunk and bone the crazy woman.” He had been only sleepy this time.

He tried to worm his arm out from under her, then used the “old snuggle method.” He rolled into her for a hug and when she responded with a sleepy moan and tried to kiss him, the space under her neck opened up and he was free. It worked as well on murdering bitch goddesses as it did on Mary Jean ladies. Better even, Beth

didn’t wear near as much hair spray, which can slow a guy down. God, I’m good.

He rolled out of bed and crept into the bathroom. While he peed, he softly chanted, “Yo, after this, I will not bone the crazy woman.” It had taken on a rap cadence and he was feeling very hip along with the usual self-loathing. His scars made him think of Kimi’s wound, and suddenly he was angry. He padded naked back to the bed and jostled the sleeping icon. “Get up, Beth. Go home.”

And someone pounded on the door. “Mr. Case, tee time in five.”

Tuck clamped his hand over Beth’s mouth, lifted her by her head in a single sweeping move from the bed to the bathroom, where he released her and shut the door. Fred Astaire, had he been a terrorist, would have been proud of the move.

Tuck grabbed his pants off the floor, which is where he kept them, pulled them on, and answered the door. Sebastian Curtis had a driver slung over his shoulder. “You might want to put on a shirt, Mr. Case. You can get burned, even this early.”

“Right,” Tuck said. He was looking at the caddie. Today Stripe carried the clubs. The guard sneered at him. Tuck smiled back. Stripe, like Mato before him, was doing caddie duty unarmed. Time to play a little round for the navigator, he thought. He winked at Stripe.

“I’ll be right there.” Tuck closed the door and went to the bathroom to tell Beth to wait until he’d gone before coming out, but when he opened the door, she was gone.

“Did you know that over ninety percent of all the endangered species are on islands?” the doctor said.

“Nope,” Tuck said. He picked his ball up and put it on the rubberized mat, then turned to Stripe. “Dopey, give me a five iron.”

They were on the fourth hole and had crisscrossed the compound pretending to play golf for an hour. Tuck swung and skidded the ball fifty yards across the gravel. “Heads up, Bashful,” Tuck said as he threw the club back to Stripe.

“Islands are like evolutionary pressure cookers. New species pop up faster and go extinct more quickly. It works the same way with religions.”

“No kidding, Doc?” They still had fifty yards to get to where Sebastian’s first shot lay. Tuck had hit three times.

“The cargo cults have all the same events associated with the great reli-gions: a period of oppression, the rise of a Messiah, a new order, the promise of an endless time of peace and prosperity. But instead of devel-oping over centuries like Christianity or Buddhism, it happens in just a few years. It’s fascinating, like being able to see the hands of the clock move right before your eyes and be a part of it.”

“So you must totally get off when daylight savings time comes around.”

“It was just a metaphor, Mr. Case.”

“Call me Tuck.” They had reached Tuck’s ball and he placed it on the Astro Turf mat. “Sneezy, give me the driver.”

Sebastian cleared his throat. “That looks more like a nine iron to me. You’ve only got fifty yards to the pin.”

“Trust me, Doc. I need a driver for this one.”

Stripe snickered and handed him the driver. Tuck examined it, one of the large-headed alloy models that had become so popular in the States—all metal. Tuck grinned at Stripe. “So, Doc, I guess you shitcanned the Meth-odist thing to watch the clock spin.” Tuck lined up the shot and took a practice swing. The club whooshed through the air.

“Have you ever had faith in anything, Mr. Case?”

Tuck took another practice swing. “Me? Faith? Nope.”

“Not even your own abilities?”

“Nope.” Tuck made a show of lining up the shot again and making sure his hips were loose.

“Then you shouldn’t make jokes about it.”

“Right,” Tuck said. He tensed and put his entire weight behind the club, but instead of hitting the ball, he swung it around like a baseball bat, slamming the head into Stripe’s cheek, shattering the bone with a sickening thwack. The guard’s feet went out from under him and he landed with a crunch in the coral.

“Christ!” Sebastian yelled. He grabbed the club and wrenched it from Tuck’s grasp. “What in the hell are you doing?”

Tuck didn’t answer. He bent over the guard until he was only inches from his face and whispered, “Fore, motherfucker.”

A second later Tuck heard a mechanical click and the guard who had been tending the pin had an Uzi pressed to his ear.

Sebastian Curtis was bent over Stripe, pulling his eyes open to see if his pupils would contract. “Take Mr. Case to his bungalow

and stay with him. Send two men with a stretcher and find Beth. Tell her to—” Curtis suddenly realized that the guard was only getting about a third of what he said. “Bring my wife.”

“I’ll get back to you on that faith thing, Doc,” Tuck said.

51 Where Losers Flourish

The Sorcerer paced back and forth across the lanai. “I want to find another pilot, Beth. We can’t let him act that way and get away with it.”

The Sky Priestess yawned. She was draped across the wicker emperor’s chair, wearing a towel she’d wrapped above her breasts at the Sorcerer’s request. He said he needed to think. “Did you ask him why he did it?”

“Of course I asked him. He said he was trying to liven up the game.”

“Worked, didn’t it?”

“It’s not funny, Beth. We’re going to have trouble with him.”

The Sky Priestess stood up and put her arms around the Sorcerer. “You have to have a little faith in me,” she said. “I can handle Tucker Case.” She didn’t want to have this conversation. Not yet. She hadn’t told the Sorcerer about Tuck going off course. She had plans for the fair-haired pilot.

The Sorcerer pulled away from her and backed up to the rail. “What if I don’t like the way you handle him?”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

“You know what it means.”

She approached him again, this time untucking the towel so it dropped as she stepped into his arms. Her nipples just brushed the front of his shirt. “’Bastian, if what happened today proved anything, it proved that Tucker Case is a troglodyte. He’s no threat to you. I’m attracted to finesse, not force. Case reacts to force with force. That’s why he hit Yamata. You use a gentle touch with a guy like that and he’s helpless.”

Sebastian Curtis turned away from her. “I’m not taking the guards off his house, not for a while anyway.”

“You do what you think is best, but it’s not good policy to make an enemy of someone whose services you require. So what if he hates the ninjas? I hate the ninjas. You hate the ninjas. But we need them, and we need a pilot. We’re not likely to be as lucky next time.”

“Lucky? The man’s a reprobate.”

“Tucker Case is a loser. Losers flourish on islands, away from competition. You taught me that.” Flattery might work where seduction seemed to be failing.

“I did?”

She unzipped his pants. “Sure, that monologue about ninety percent of the endangered species living on islands. That’s because they would have died out years ago from real competition. Losers, like Tucker Case.”

“I was talking about unique ecosystems, like the Galápagos, where evolution is speeded up. The way the religions take hold.”

“Same difference.”

He yanked her hand out of his pants and pushed her away. “What’s that make us, Beth? What does that make me?”

The Sky Priestess was losing on all fronts. There was an element here that she was not in control of, an unknown variable that was affecting the Sorcerer’s mood. When sex and flattery don’t work, what next? Ah, team spirit. “It makes us the fittest, ’Bastian. It makes us superior.”

He looked at her quizzically.

Easy now, she thought. You’re getting him back. She walked slowly back to the emperor’s chair and sat down daintily, then threw a leg over either arm and leaned back spread-eagle. “A quiz, ’Bastian, a quiz on evolution: Why, after all these years, with all the fossil evidence, doesn’t anyone know for sure what happened to the dinosaurs? Don’t answer right away. Think.” She fiddled with her left nipple while she waited, and finally a smile came over his face. He really did have great teeth. She had to give him credit for keeping up his dental hygiene all these years on the island.

“No witnesses,” he said finally.

“We have a winner. But more precisely, no surviving witnesses. Losers can only flourish until a dominant species appears, even on an island.”

A shade of concern crossed his face. “But dinosaurs ruled the Earth for sixty million years. You can hardly call them losers.”

Could he be any more difficult? “Look, Darwin, there are absolutely no dinosaurs getting laid tonight. Pick your team.”

52 Don’t Know Much About History

Tuck twisted the guts out of the stick pen and pried off the end cap with a kitchen knife, making, in effect, a perfect compact blowgun. He found a piece of notebook paper in the nightstand and seated himself on the wicker couch so he had a good diagonal view of the guards posted outside his door. He tore off a small piece of the paper with his teeth, worked it into a sufficiently gooey ball, then fit it into the pen tube and blew. The spit wad sailed through the window and curved harmlessly away from the guards.

Too much moisture. He squeezed the next one between his fingers before loading, then let fly to strike the nearest guard in the neck. He brushed at his neck as if waving off an insect, but otherwise didn’t react.

More moisture.

Tuck had taught himself deadly accuracy with the spitball blowgun at a time when he was supposed to be learning algebra. In contradiction to what his teacher had told him, he had never needed to know algebra in later life, but mastery of the spitball was going to come in handy, although this skill had not ended up on his permanent record, as had, presumably, his failure of algebra.

The third wad struck the guard in the temple and stuck. He turned and cursed in Japanese. Tuck had prechewed a follow-up shot that took the guard in the neck. The guard gestured with his Uzi.

“Go ahead, fuckstick. Shoot me,” Tuck said, a gleam in his eye. “Explain to the doc how you shot his pilot over a spit wad.” He tore off another piece of paper with his teeth and chewed it while the guard glared.

The corrugated steel storm shutters above the windows were held open with a single wooden strut. The guard clipped the strut and the shutter fell with a clang.

Tuck moved to the next window down. He leaned out and fired. A splat in the forehead of guard number two, another strut knocked out, another clanging shutter.

One window to go, this one demanding a shot of almost twenty-five feet. Tuck popped his head out and blew. A spiderweb of spittle trailed behind the projectile as it traveled down the lanai. It struck the first guard on the front of his black shirt and he ran toward Tuck, leading with his Uzi. Tuck ducked back inside and the final shutter fell.

Tuck heard the guard at each shutter, latching it down.

Mission accomplished.

With the guards peeking in the window every two minutes, he would have never been able to pull off the coconut dummy switch. And even in the ambient moonlight, he’d have never made it to the bathroom unnoticed. Of course, he couldn’t have closed the windows. That would have been suspicious.

“Good night, guys. I’m turning in.” He stood, blowgun waiting, but the shutters remained latched. He quickly turned off the lights and crawled into bed, where he constructed the coconut man and waited until he heard the guards start to talk and smelled tobacco smoke from their cigarettes. Then he tiptoed to the bathroom and made his escape.

He half-expected the shower bottom to be nailed down. Beth Curtis had used it to escape only this morning. Maybe she hadn’t figured that he knew about it. No, she was nuts, but she wasn’t stupid. She knew he knew. She even knew that he knew she knew. So why hadn’t she told Sebastian? And she hadn’t said anything about their little detour to Guam either—or maybe she had. Sebastian hadn’t sent a big postflight check like before. Tuck made a mental note to ask the doc about the check the next time they were on the golf course.

For now he snatched up his flippers and mask and headed for the beach. Before entering the water, he pulled a bottle of pills from his pocket—anti-biotics left over from his dickrot—and made sure that the cap was on tight. This might be the only chance he’d have to get medicine to Kimi.

He swam around the minefield and went straight into the village and down the path toward Sarapul’s house. Women and children

were still sitting around outside their houses, the women weaving on small looms by kerosene lantern, the children playing quietly or finishing up dinners off banana leaf plates. Only the smallest children looked at Tuck as he passed. The women turned away, determined, it seemed, not to make eye contact with the strange American. Yet there was no alarm in their ac-tions and no fear, just a concerted effort to not notice him. Tuck thought, This must be what New York was like before the white man came. And with that in mind, he stared at a spot in the path exactly twelve feet in front of him and denied their existence right back. It was better this way. He never knew when he might have to fly one of their body parts to Japan.

He made his way quickly up the path and soon he could see a glow near Sarapul’s house. He broke into the clearing and saw the old cannibal and Kimi sitting around a fire, working on something. Sewing, it looked like.

“Kimi,” Tuck said, “you shouldn’t be up.”

Kimi looked up from his work. There was a huge piece of blue nylon draped over his and Sarapul’s laps. “I feel better. You fixed me, boss.”

Tuck handed him the pills. “Take two of these now and two a day until they’re gone.”

“Sarapul give me kava. It make the hurt stop.”

“These aren’t for the hurt. These are for infection. Take them, okay?”

“Okay, boss. You want to help?”

“What are you guys making?”

“I’ll show you.” Kimi started to rise and his face twisted with pain.

Sarapul pushed him back down. “I will show.” The old cannibal snatched up the kerosene lantern and gestured for Tuck to follow him into the jungle.

Tuck looked back at Kimi. “You take those pills. And don’t move around much, I’m not sure how well those stitches will hold. You had a big hole in you.”

“Okay, boss.”

Sarapul disappeared into the jungle. Tuck ran after him and almost ran him over coming out of a patch of small banana trees into an area that cleared into walking trees, mangroves, and palms. About fifty yards ahead, Sarapul stopped near the beach. He stood by what appeared to be a large fallen tree, but when Tuck got closer

he saw it was a long sailing canoe. Sarapul grinned up at Tuck, the light from the lamp making him appear like some demon from the dark island past. “The palu—the navigator—he make. I help.” Sarapul ran the light down the length of the canoe. Tuck could see that one of the tall gunwales was darkened and glazed with age, while the other had been hewn recently and was bright yellow. He could smell the fresh wood sap.

There was an outrigger the size of a normal canoe and a platform across the struts. As canoes went, it was a huge structure, and hewing the hull from a single piece of wood with hand tools had taken an incredible amount of work, not to mention skill.

“Kimi did this? This is gorgeous.”

Sarapul nodded, his eyes catching the fire of the lamp. “This boat broken since before the time of Vincent. Kimi is great navigator.”

“He is?” Tuck had his doubts, given the storm, but then again, as Kimi had said, they had survived a typhoon in a rowboat. And this craft was no accident; this was a piece of art. “So you guys are sewing a sail for this?”

“We finish soon. Then palu will teach me to sail. The Shark People will go to sea again.”

“Where’d you get the nylon for the sail? I can’t see Dr. Curtis thinking this is a good idea.”

Sarapul climbed into the canoe and dug under a stack of paddles and lines, each hand-braided from coconut fiber, until he came up with a tattered mass of nylon straps, Velcro, and plastic buckles with a few shreds of blue nylon hanging here and there.

“My pack. You guys used my pack?”

“And tent inside.”

“Do you have the stuff that was inside? There were some pills that can help Kimi.”

Sarapul nodded. He led Tuck back through the jungle to his house. Kimi had gone inside and was lying down.

“Boss, I don’t feel so good.”

“Hang on. I might have some more medicine.” Actually, Tuck had never been sure of all the things that Jake Skye had loaded into the pack.

Sarapul retrieved a palm frond basket from the rafters and handed it to Tucker. Tuck found the antibiotics he had been looking for, as well as painkillers and aspirin. Even what was left of his cash was in the basket. All the pills were still dry. Tuck doled out a dose

and handed them to the navigator. “Take these when you have pain, and

these take like the other ones, twice a day, okay?”

“You good doctor, boss.”

“You did a hell of a job on that boat.”

Kimi seemed distressed. “You not tell Sorcerer or Vincent’s white bitch.”

“No, I won’t tell them.”

Kimi seemed to breathe easier. “Roberto come today. He say you must see the canoe. But he say you should no tell the Sorcerer.”

“Roberto told you that.”

“He talk funny now,” Kimi said. “Like you, kinda. In American. He tell me Sepie is okay. She come home soon.”

“I couldn’t get in to see her. There was a guard on the clinic.”

“Dog fuckers,” Kimi said.

Then Tuck told the navigator about the golf game and watched as the old cannibal held him while he laughed, then curled with pain. “I better sleep now, boss. You come back. I take you sailing.”

“You got it.” Tuck backed out of the house and waited until Sarapul joined him with the lamp. “You know which pills to give him?”

Sarapul nodded. Tuck started down the path toward the village, but pulled up a minute later when he heard the cannibal running after him.

“Hey, pilot. Vincent send you to us, huh?”

“I don’t know.”

“You tell Vincent I wasn’t going to eat you. Okay?”

Tuck smiled. “I’ll try to smuggle you some Spam next time I come.”

Sarapul smiled back.

As he came up on the drinking circle, Tuck stopped and checked his watch. He didn’t want to be gone more than a couple of hours. There was little danger that he’d be called to fly, at least not without the warning appear-ance of the Sky Priestess, but Beth Curtis might show up at his bungalow at any time. Funny, he didn’t think of the Sky Priestess and Beth as the same person.

The Shark men were applying new coats of red paint to their bamboo rifles by the light of a kerosene lamp. They moved around on the logs and Tuck took a seat by Malink. Without a word, the

young man who was pouring handed Tuck the cup. He drained it and

handed it back.

“What’s the deal with the rifles?” Tuck asked Malink.

“Vincent’s army,” Malink said. “Vincent said we must always be ready to fight the enemies of the United States of America.”

“Oh,” Tuck said. “Why red?”

Malink looked at Tuck as if he was something he had stepped in. “It is the color of Vincent’s brother.”

“Yeah?” Tuck didn’t get it.

“Vincent’s brother, Santa Claus. Red is his color. You must know that.”

Tuck couldn’t help it. He let his mouth fall open. “Santa Claus is Vincent’s brother?”

“Yes, Santa Claus brings excellent cargo for everyone, but only once a year. He comes in a sleigh on the snow. You know, right?”

“Right. But I don’t get the connection.”

Malink looked as if it was all he could do not to tell Tuck how incredibly dense he really was. “Well, we have no snow, so Vincent will come in a plane. Not once a year. When Vincent come, he will bring cargo every day. More than he gives through the Sky Priestess. More than Santa Claus.”

“And Vincent told you this, that he was Santa’s brother?”

Malink nodded. “His skinny brother, he say. So we make rifles red.” Malink watched for signs that Tuck was getting it. Tuck wasn’t giving them. “Even Father Rodriguez know about Santa Claus,” Malink insisted.

“Okay,” Tuck said, “how about moving that cup around the circle a little faster, guys?”

“Vincent will bring us real rifles when he come. We must be always ready to fight,” Malink said.

“Who?” Tuck asked. “Have you guys ever been attacked?”

“Once,” Malink said. “When I was boy, some guys from New Guinea come in canoe. We no like those guys. We go in our canoes to kill them.”

“And what happened?”

“It got dark.”

“And?”

“We come home. Those guys from New Guinea pretty lucky no one know how to navigate in the dark.”

“No palu?” Tuck asked, using the native word for “navigator.”

“Japanese kill them. No palu left, except maybe one.”

“That’s why you didn’t turn Kimi over to the Sorcerer?”

Malink nodded and trouble crossed his brow. “I am thinking, if Vincent send you, how come the Sorcerer not know you here? And how you not know Santa Claus?”

Tuck noticed that the men had stopped painting their rifles and talking among themselves to listen to his answer. There was pressure here, beyond whether he’d be able to drink or not. He told them what they needed to hear. “Vincent called me from the land of armored possums to come to the island of the Shark People. I am a flyer, as Vincent was a flyer. He does not tell me everything, and he does not tell the Sorcerer everything. Vincent is sometimes mysterious, but we must trust his judgment.”

Malink smiled. “Let us drink to this flyer. Then we go to sleep.” To Tuck, Malink said: “Tomorrow is the hunt.”

53 How the Shark People Got Their Name

When the pounding came at his door just after dawn, Tuck prepared himself mentally to meet the smiling face of Sebastian Curtis, who would be overly cheerful at the prospect of trouncing the pilot at another round of gravel golf, but when he opened the door, there was Beth Curtis wearing a long-sleeved white cotton dress and a huge sun hat with a brim that fell over her face like a lampshade.

Tuck had on hand-me-down boxer shorts that showed more of his morning bulge than he was comfortable with. Strange, a month ago he was ready to sell his soul for this physiological phenomenon, and today it was an embarrassment.

“Good morning,” he said. “I was expecting the doc.”

“Oh, did you two have plans?”

“No, I just…never mind. Would you like to come in for some coffee?” He gestured to the small kitchen nook.

“Why don’t you make yourself a cup and bring it with you? I have something to show you.”

“Sure. Just give me a second.”

She waited by the door while he threw a pot of water on the stove, dressed quickly and combed his hair, then poured the water over some coffee grounds and stirred in some powdered milk. “I’m ready. What’s up?”

“I want to show you something on the other side of the island.”

“Outside of the compound?”

“Near the village. I think you’ll enjoy it.”

Tuck walked with her out into the morning sun, nursing his coffee as they went. There were no guards in sight anywhere. The wide

gate to the runway was open.

“Where’s the ninjas?”

“You call them that too? That’s funny.” She laughed, but because he couldn’t see her face under the hat, he couldn’t tell if there was any sincerity in it.

She put her hand on his arm and let him lead her across the runway like a Victorian lady under escort.

“Do you ever miss your family?” she asked as they walked.

Tuck was taken by surprise. “My family? No. We parted on less than favorable terms. I fell out of contact with them long before I came out here.”

“I’m sorry. Really. Is it difficult for you?”

Tuck thought she might be joking. “My mother and my uncle are my only real family. They married after my father was killed. I wasn’t pleased.”

“You’re kidding. I thought they only did that in West Virginia. Aren’t you from California?”

“She married my father’s brother, not her brother. Still, I don’t miss them.”

“What about your friends?”

Tuck thought for a second. Things had changed for him since he’d last seen Jake Skye. In a way he’d taken on some responsibility. He was acting on his own, without a net. He wished that he could tell Jake about it. “Yeah, I miss my friends sometimes.”

“Me too, Tucker. I’d like to be your friend.”

“You have Sebastian.”

“Yes, I do, don’t I.”

They walked in silence until they entered the village, which was deserted except for a few dogs and too many roosters. “Where is everybody?” Tuck reminded himself not to let it appear that any of this was familiar to him. “Is this where the natives live?”

“They’re all at the beach. Today is the day of the hunt.”

“The hunt?”

“You’ll see. It’s a surprise.”

As they passed the bachelors’ house, Tuck peeked through he door. He could see someone sleeping inside. Beth led the way to the beach and Tucker looked back. Sepie stood in the doorway wearing only a bandage around her ribs. She waved and Tuck risked a quick smile and turned away. They were going to give him away. One hint of recognition and he was screwed.

The women, children, and old men were all lined up on the beach. Tuck had never seen most of the women and children. There must have been three hundred people there. The only familiar face was Favo, the old man from the drinking circle, who showed no recognition when he looked at Tuck. The younger men were out in the water, standing knee deep on the reef in the light low-tide surf. Each of the men held a five-foot-long stick with a rope tied at one end. They wore long knives tucked into cords tied around their waists.

“Fishing?” Tuck asked.

“Just watch,” Beth said. “This is how the Shark People got their name.”

Tuck spotted Malink coming out of the jungle with four other men. Each carried a large plastic bucket.

“They make the buckets out of net floats from the huge factory ships,” Beth Curtis said. “The plastic is tougher than anything they can make.”

“What’s in them?” Tuck watched as each man swam out to the reef holding a bucket on his head.

“Pig and chicken blood.”

Two men helped Malink onto the reef and took his bucket from him. Malink looked out to sea and said something in his native language, then looked to the people on the beach as if to say, “Ready.”

The chief shouted a command to the men in the water and they dumped the buckets of blood. Soon they were all knee deep in crimson surf and the bloodstain swept out into the ocean in a great cloud.

“Isn’t that dangerous?” Tuck asked.

“Of course. It’s insane.”

Interesting choice of words. Tuck was surprised that no one seemed to notice or make a big deal of Beth’s presence. “Why aren’t they drumming and kowtowing to you?”

“They aren’t allowed to when I’m dressed like this. It’s a rule. I need my privacy at times.”

“Of course,” Tuck said.

A fin appeared in the water about twenty yards out from the reef. Someone shouted and Tuck recognized Abo from his warrior’s topknot. Malink nodded and Abo dove into the water and swam toward the shark. Before he was ten yards out, the fin turned toward him.

More fins appeared and as Malink nodded, more young men dove into the water with their sticks.

“Shit, this is suicide,” Tuck said. He watched as the first shark made a pass at Abo, who moved out of its way like a bullfighter.

“You’ve got to stop this.” Tuck couldn’t remember ever feeling such panic for another human being.

Beth Curtis squeezed his arm. “They know what they’re doing.”

The shark circled and made a second pass at Abo, but this time the young warrior didn’t move out of the way. He shoved his stick into the shark’s jaws as if it was a bit, then flipped himself on the shark’s back and wrapped the cord just behind the pectoral fins, then back to the other end of the stick so it wouldn’t come out. The water boiled around Abo as the shark thrashed, but Abo stayed on and, holding the stick like handlebars, he pulled back to keep the shark from diving and steered him into the shallow water of the reef, where the other men waited with their knives drawn.

A roar went up from the crowd on the beach as Abo turned the shark over to the slaughterers and held up his arms in triumph. The men on the reef slit the shark’s belly and cut off a huge hunk of the liver, which they handed to Abo. He bit into it, tearing out a ragged chunk and swallowing as blood ran down his chest.

Soon others were steering sharks onto the reef and the water beyond was alive with fins. The red cloud expanded as the sharks died and bled and more came to take their place. The gutted sharks were brought onto the beach, where the women continued the butchering, handing pieces of the raw flesh to the children as treats or prying out serrated teeth and giving them to little boys as trophies.

One of the men actually stood up on the back of a huge hammerhead that he was steering to the reef and nearly castrated himself on the dorsal fin as he fell. But the shark was held fast and died on the reef with the others.

In half an hour the shark hunt was over. The sea was red with blood for a thousand yards in all directions and the beach was littered with the corpses of a hundred sharks: black tips, white tips, hammerheads, blue, and mako. Some of the deadliest creatures had been taken like they were guppies in a net, and not one of the Shark People was hurt, although Tuck noticed that many were bleeding from abrasions on the inside of their thighs where they had rubbed against the sharks’ skin during their ride. The Shark People were ecstatic, and every one of them was drenched in blood.

Tuck was stunned. He’d never seen such courage or such slaughter before, and he was getting the willies thinking about all the time he had spent swimming in these waters at night.

Malink walked up the beach dragging a leopard shark by its gills. His Buddha belly was dripping in blood. He looked up at Tucker and risked a smile.

“That’s the chief,” Beth Curtis said. “He’s really too old for this, but he won’t stay on shore.”

“Do the sharks ever get any of them?”

“Sometimes. Usually just a bite. A lot of sutures, but no one’s been killed since I’ve been on the island.”

No one hunting sharks, anyway, Tuck thought. A little girl who had been helping her mother shyly peeked over the carcass of a big hammer-head, then ran up to Tucker and quickly touched him on the knee before retreating to the safety of her mother.

“That’s strange,” Beth Curtis said. “The women and girls won’t have anything to do with a white man. Even when they come to Sebastian, they talk to him through a brother or husband—and he speaks their language.”

Tuck didn’t answer. He was still looking at the little girl’s back. She had a massive pink scar that ran like a smile from her sternum, under her arm, to her backbone at exactly the place where the kidney would be. Tuck felt sick to his stomach.

“I think I’ve seen enough, Beth. Can we go?”

“Can’t deal with the sight of blood?”

“Something like that.”

As they walked back through the village, Tuck noticed a woman and a little boy sitting outside of one of the cookhouses. The mother was holding the boy and singing to him softly as she rocked him. Both of his eyes were bandaged with gauze pads. Tucker approached the woman and she pulled the child to her breast.

Beth Curtis caught Tuck’s arm and tried to pull him back. Tuck shook her off and went to the woman.

“What’s wrong with him?” Tuck asked.

The woman slid across the gravel, away from him.

“Tucker!” Beth Curtis said, “Leave her alone. You’re scaring her.”

“It’s okay,” Tuck whispered to the woman. “I’m the pilot. Vincent sent me.”

The woman seemed to calm down, and although her eyes went wide with wonder, she managed a small smile.

Tuck reached out and touched the child’s head. “What’s wrong with him?”

The woman held out the boy as if presenting him for baptism.

“He is chosen,” she said. She looked at the Sky Priestess for approval.

Tuck stood and backed away from her. He was afraid to look at Beth, afraid that he might strangle her on the spot. Instead, calmly, deliberately, although it took all his effort to keep from shaking, he said, “We’d better get back.” He led the way through the village and back to the compound.

54 Selling Tucker

The Sky Priestess threw the straw hat across the room, then tore at the high-buttoned collar of the white dress. She was losing him. She hated that more than anything: losing control. She ripped the dress down the front and wrestled out of it.

She stormed across the room, the dress still trailing from one foot, and pulled a bottle of vodka from the freezer. She poured herself a tumbler and drank half of it off while still holding the bottle, then refilled the glass while her temples throbbed with the cold. She carried the bottle and glass to a chair in front of the television, sat down, and turned it on. Nothing but static and snow. Sebastian was using the satellite dish. She threw the vodka bottle at the screen, but missed and it bounced off the case, taking a small chip out of the plastic.

“Fuck!” She keyed the intercom next to her chair. “’Bastian! Dammit!”

“Yes, my sweet.” His voice was calm and oily.

“What the fuck are you doing? I want to watch TV.”

“I’m just finishing up, sweetheart.”

“We need to talk.” She tossed back another slug of vodka.

“Yes, we do. I’ll be up in a moment.”

“Bring some vodka from your house.”

“As you wish.”

Ten minutes later the Sorcerer walked into her bungalow, the picture of the patrician physician. He handed her the vodka and sat down across from her. “Pour me one, would you, darling?”

Before she could catch herself, she’d gotten up and fetched him a glass from the kitchen. She handed it to him along with the bottle.

“Your dress is torn, dear.”

“No shit.”

“I like the look,” the Sorcerer said, “although I’d have preferred to tear it off you myself.”

“Not now. I think we have trouble.”

The Sorcerer smiled. “We did, but as of tonight at midnight, our troubles are over. How was your walk this morning, by the way?”

“I took Case to see the shark hunt. I thought it would keep him from getting island fever, something different to break the boredom.”

“As opposed to fucking him.”

She wasn’t going to show any surprise, not after he’d laid a trap like that. “No, in addition to fucking him. It was a mistake.”

“The shark hunt or the fucking?”

She bristled, “The shark hunt. The fucking was fine. He saw the boy whose corneas we harvested.”

“So.”

“He freaked. I shouldn’t have let him connect the people with the procedure.”

“But I thought you could handle him.”

He was enjoying this entirely too much for her taste. “Don’t be smug, ’Bastian. What are you going to do, lock him in the back room of the clinic? We need him.”

“No, we don’t. I’ve hired a new pilot. A Japanese.”

“I thought we’d agreed that…”

“It hasn’t worked using Americans, has it? He starts tonight.”

“How?”

“You’re going to go pick him up. The corporation assures me that he’s the best, and he won’t ask questions.”

“I’m going to pick him up?”

“We have a heart-lung order. You and Mr. Case need to deliver it.”

“I can’t do it, ’Bastian. I can’t do a performance and a heart-lung tonight. I’m too jangled.”

“You don’t have to do either, dear. We don’t have to do the surgery. We’ll make less money on it, but we only have to deliver the donor.”

“But what about doing the choosing?”

“You’ve done that already. You chose when you went to bed with our intrepid Mr. Case. The heart-lung donor is Tucker Case.”

Tuck needed a drink. He looked around the bungalow, hoping that someone had left a stray bottle of vanilla extract or aftershave that might go well with a slice of mango. Mangoes he had, but anything containing ethyl alco-hol was not to be found. It would be hours before darkness could cover his escape to the drinking circle, where he intended to get gloriously hammered if he could look any of the Shark People in the eye and keep his stomach. Sorry, you guys. Just had to take the edge off of the guilt of blinding a child to get my own airplane.

He tried to distract himself by reading, but the moral certainties of the literary spy guys only served to make him feel worse. Television was no help either. Some sort of Balinese shadow puppet show and Filipino news special on how swell it was to make American semiconductors for three bucks a day. He punched the remote to off and tossed it across the room.

Frustration leaped out in a string of curses, followed by “All right, Mr. Ghost Pilot, where in the hell are you now?”

And there was a knock on the door.

“Kidding,” Tuck said. “I was kidding.”

“Tucker, can I come in?” Beth Curtis said.

“It’s open.” It was always open. There was no lock on it.

He looked away as she entered, afraid that, like the face of the Medusa, she might turn him to stone—or at least that part of him unaffected by conscience. She came up behind him and began kneading the muscles in his shoulders. He did not look back at her and still had no idea if she might be naked or wearing a clown suit.

“You’re upset. I understand. But it’s not what you think.”

“There’s not a lot of room for misinterpretation.”

“Isn’t there? What if I told you that that boy was blind from birth. His corneas were healthy, but he was born with atrophied optic nerves.”

“I feel much better, thanks. Kid wasn’t using his eyes, so we ripped them out.”

He felt her nails dig into his trapezius muscles. “Ripped out is hardly appropriate. It’s a very delicate operation. And because we did it, another child is able to see. You seem to be missing that aspect of what we’re doing here. Every time we deliver a kidney, we’re saving a life.”

She was right. He hadn’t thought about that. “I just fly the plane,” he said.

“And take the money. You could have this same job back in the States. You could be flying the organs of accident victims on Life Flight jets and accomplishing the same thing, except you wouldn’t be making enough to pay the taxes on what you make here, right?”

No, not exactly, he thought. Back in the States, he couldn’t fly anything but a hang glider without his license. “I guess so,” he said. “But you could have told me what you were doing.”

“And have you thinking about the little blind kid at five hundred miles per hour. I don’t think so.” She bent over and kissed his earlobe lightly. “I’m not a monster, Tuck. I was a little girl once, with a mother and a father and a cat named Cupcake. I don’t blind little kids.”

Finally he turned in the chair to face her and was grateful to see that she was wearing one of her conservative Donna Reed dresses. “What happened to you, Beth? How in the hell do you get from ‘Here, Cupcake’ to the Murdering Bitch Goddess of the Shark People?” He immediately regretted saying it. Not because it wasn’t true, but because he’d given away the fact that he knew it was. He braced himself for the rage.

She moved to the couch and sat down across from him. Then she curled into a ball, her face against the cushions, and covered her eyes. He said nothing. He just watched as her body quaked with silent sobs. He hoped this wasn’t an act. He hoped that she was so offended that she would take his murder accusation for hyperbole.

Five full minutes passed before she looked up. Her eyes were red and she’d managed to smear mascara across one cheek. “It’s your fault,” she said.

Tuck nodded and tried not to let a smile cross his lips. She was playing another part, and she didn’t do the victim nearly as well as she did the seduction queen. He said, “I’m sorry, Beth. I was out of line.”

She seemed surprised and broke character. Evidently, he’d stepped on her line, the one she’d been thinking of while pretending to cry. A second for composure and she was back at it. “It’s your fault. I only wanted to have a friend, not a lover. All men are that way.”

“Then you must not have gotten the newsletter: ‘Men Are Pigs.’ Next issue is ‘Water Is Wet.’ Don’t miss it.”

She fell out of character again. “What are you saying?”

“You might have been a victim once, but now that’s just a distant memory you use to rationalize what you do now. You use men because you can. I can’t figure out what happened in San Francisco, though. A woman who looks like you should have been able to find an easier way to fuck her way to a fortune. The doc must have been a cakewalk for you.”

“And you weren’t?”

Tuck felt as if someone had injected him with a truth serum that was lighting up his mind, and not with revelations about Beth Curtis. The light was shining on him.

“Yeah, I guess I was a cakewalk. So what? Did you think for a minute that you might try not to go to bed with me?

“Other than when I found out that you’d almost torn your balls off, not for a minute.” She was gritting her teeth.

“And how big a task do you think you took on? It’s not like you were corrupting me or anything. I’ve been on the other end of the game for years. I know you, Beth. I am you.”

“You don’t know anything.” She was visibly trying not to scream, but Tuck could see the blood rising in her face.

He pushed on. “Freud says I’m this way because I was never hugged as a child. What’s your excuse?”

“Don’t be smug. I could have you right now if I wanted.” As if to prove her point, she placed her feet at either end of the coffee table and began to pull up her dress. She wore white stockings and nothing else underneath.

“Not interested,” Tuck said. “Been there, done that.”

“You’re so transparent,” she said. She crawled over the table and did a languid cat stretch as she ran her hands up the inside of his thighs. By the time her hands got to his belt buckle, she was face-to-face with him, almost touching noses. Tuck could smell the alcohol on her breath. She flicked her tongue on his lips. He just looked in her eyes, as cold and blue as crystal, like his own. She wasn’t fooling anyone, and in realizing that, Tuck realized that he also had never fooled anybody. Every Mary Jean lady, every bar bimbo, every secretary, flight attendant, or girl at the grocery store had seen him coming and let him come.

Beth unzipped his pants and took him in her hand, her face still only a millimeter from his, their eyes locked. “Your armor seems to have a weak spot, tough guy.”

“Nope,” Tuck said.

She slid down to the floor and took him into her mouth. Tuck suppressed a gasp. He watched her head moving on him. To keep himself from touching her he grabbed the arms of the chair and the wicker creaked as if it was being punished.

“That’s a pretty convincing argument,” said the male voice. Tuck looked up to see Vincent sitting on the couch where Beth had been a minute ago.

“Jesus!” Tuck said. Beth let out a muffled moan and dug her nails into his ass.

“Wrong!” Vincent said. “But never play cards with that guy.” The flyer was smoking a cigarette, but Tuck couldn’t smell it. “Oh, don’t worry. She can’t hear me. Can’t see me either, not that she’s looking or anything.”

Tuck just shook his head and pushed up on the arms of the chair. Beth took his movement for enthusiasm and paused to look up at him. Tuck met her gaze with eyes the size of golf balls. She smiled, her lipstick a bit worse for the wear, a string of saliva trailed from her lips. “Just enjoy. You lost. Losers flourish here.” She licked her lips and returned to her task.

“Dame makes a point,” Vincent said. “I give you three to one she brings you around to her way of thinking. Whatta ya say?”

“No.” Tuck waved the flyer off and shut his eyes.

“Oh, yes,” Beth said, as if speaking into the microphone.

Vincent flicked his cigarette butt out the window. “I’m not distracting you, am I? I just dropped in to take up on the dame’s side, as she is unable to speak for herself at present.”

Tuck was experiencing the worst case of bed spins he’d ever had—in a chair. Sexual vertigo.

“Of course,” Vincent continued, “this is kinda turning into a religious experience for you, ain’t it? Go with what you know, right? You let her run the show, you got no decisions to make and no worries ever after. Not a worry in the world. You got my word on that. Although, if it was me, I’d check out her story just to be safe. Look in the doc’s computer maybe.”

Beth was working her mouth and hands like she was pumping water on an inner fire that was consuming her with each second that passed. Tuck heard his own breath rise to a pant and the wicker chair crackle and creak and skid on the wooden floor. He was helping her now, wanting her to quench that flame and that was all there was.

“You think about it,” Vincent said. “You’ll do the right thing. You owe me, remember.” He faded and disappeared.

“What does that mean?” Tuck said, then he moaned, arched his back, and came so hard he thought he would pass out, but she kept on and on until he couldn’t stand the intensity and had to push her away. She landed on the floor at his feet and looked up like an angry she-cat.

“You’re mine,” she said. She was still breathing hard and her dress was still up around her waist. “We’re friends.”

It came out like a command, but Tuck heard a note of desperation below the panting and the ire, and he felt a wrenching pain in his chest like nothing he’d ever felt before. “I know you, Beth. I am you,” he said. But not anymore, he thought. He said, “Yes, we’re friends.”

She smiled like a little girl who’d been given a pony for her birthday. “I knew it,” she said. She climbed to her feet and smoothed down her skirt, then bent and kissed him on the eyebrow. He tried to smile.

She said, “I’ll see you in a few hours. We’re flying out at nine. I have to go see to Sebastian.”

Tuck zipped up his pants. “And get ready for your performance?” he said.

“No, this isn’t a medical flight. Just supplies.”

Tuck nodded. “Beth, was that little boy blind from birth?”

“Of course,” she said, looking offended. She was more convincing as the Sky Priestess.

“You go see to Sebastian,” Tuck said.

After she had left, Tuck looked at the ceiling and said, “Vincent, just in case you’re listening, I’m not buying your bullshit. If you want to help me, fine. But if not, stay out of my way.”

55 Pay No Attention to That Man Behind the Computer

Tuck went into the bathroom and washed his face, then combed his hair. He studied his face in the mirror, looking for that scary glint that he’d seen in Beth Curtis’s eyes. He wasn’t her. He wasn’t as smart as she was, but he wasn’t as crazy either. He cringed with the realization that he had spent most of his adult life being a jerk or a patsy and sometimes both simultan-eously. And it was no small irony to have had an epiphany during a blow job. Vincent, whatever he was, had been playing some kind of game from the beginning, mixing lies and truth, helping him only to get him into trouble. There was no grand bailout coming, and if he was going to find out what was really being planned for him, he had to get into the computer.

The best time to sneak into the clinic was right now, in broad daylight. He hadn’t seen any of the guards all day and Beth was “seeing to Sebastian.” If he got caught, he’d simply say he was trying to get the weather for to-night’s flight. If the doc could e-mail and fax all over the world, then surely he would have access to weather services. It didn’t matter; he didn’t think he’d have a hard time convincing the doc that he was just being stupid. His entire life had set up the cover.

He grabbed some paper and a pencil from the nightstand and stuffed them into his back pocket. While he was in there, he might as well see if he could pick up the coordinates for Okinawa. If he could sneak them into the nav computer on the Lear, he might just be able to get the military to force the jet down there. He didn’t have a chance in hell of getting there on his own navigational skills.

He stepped out on the lanai and gave a sidelong glance to the guards’ quarters to make sure no one was just inside the door watching his bungalow. Satisfied, he walked to the clinic and tried the door. It was unlocked.

He checked the compound again, saw nothing, and slipped into the clinic. He was immediately met by the sound of voices coming from the back room. Male voices, speaking Japanese. He tiptoed through the door that led into the operating room and opened it a crack. The door to the far side was open. He could see all the ninjas gathered around one of the hos-pital beds playing cards. It was visiting day for Stripe. He palmed the door shut and went to the computer.

There had been a time when Tuck was so ignorant of computers that he thought a mouse pad was Disney’s brand of sanitary napkin, but that was before he met Jake Skye. Jake had taught him how to access the weather maps, charts, and how to file his flight plans through the computer. In the process Tuck had also learned what Jake considered the most important computer skill, how to hack into someone else’s stuff.

The three CRTs were all on, two green over black and one color. Tuck focused on the color screen. It was friendlier and it was displaying a screen saver he recognized, a slide show of dolphins. He moved the mouse and the familiar Windows screen appeared. There was a cheer from the back room and Tuck nearly drove the mouse off the top of the desk. Must have been a good hand.

He expected to see obscure medical programs, something he’d never figure out, but it looked like the doc used the same stuff everyone in the States did. Tuck clicked on the database icon and the program jumped to fill the screen. He opened a file menu; there were only two. One was named SUPPLIES, the other TT. Tissue types? He clicked it. The ENTER PASSWORD field opened. “Shit.”

Jake had always told him that people used obvious passwords if you knew the people. Something they wouldn’t forget. Put yourself in their place, you’ll figure out their passwords, and don’t eliminate the possibility that it may be written on a Post-it note stuck to the computer. Tuck looked for Post-it notes, then open the desk drawers and riffled through the papers for anything that looked like a password. He pushed out the chair and looked under the desk. Bingo! There were two long numbers written on tape on the bottom of the desk drawer. He pulled the paper and pencil from his pocket and copied them down, then entered the first one in the password field.

was the response

Tuck typed in the second number.

Look for the obvious. Tuck typed SKY PRIESTESS.

The guards were laughing in the other room. Tuck typed in VINCENT.

DOCTOR.

It would be something that the doc would be sitting here thinking about. It would be on his mind.

Tuck typed BETH.

BETHS TITS.

Wait a minute. This was the doc thinking. He typed BETHS BREASTS.

The file scrolled open, filling the screen with a list of names down the left side followed by rows and columns of letters and numbers. All of the names Tuck could see were native. Across the top were five columns that must be the tissue types and blood types, next to those, kidney, liver, heart, lung, cornea, and pancreas. Christ, it was an inventory sheet. And the heart, lung, liver, and pancreas categories convinced him once and for all that there was no benevolent intention behind the Curtises’ plan. They were going to the meat market with the Shark People until the village was empty.

Tuck typed in SEPIE in the FIND field. An X had been placed in all the organ categories except kidney. There he found an H and a date. H? Har-vested. The date was the day they harvested it.

He typed in PARDEE, JEFFERSON. No “x’s” in any of the columns, but two H’s under heart and lungs. Of course the other organs weren’t marked. They’d been donated to the sharks and were no longer available. There was nothing under SOMMERS, JAMES. That too made sense. How would they get the organs to Japan without a pilot. Tuck wished he’d gotten the little blind boy’s name. He couldn’t take the time to scroll though all three hundred or so names looking for missing corneas. He typed in CASE, TUCKER. There were H’s marked under the heart and lung category. The harvest date was today.

“You fuckers,” he said. There was a shuffling in the back room and he stood so quickly the chair rolled back and banged into a cabinet on the other side of the office. The database was still up on

the screen. Tuck reached out and punched the button on the monitor. It

clicked off as Mato came through the door.

“What are you guys doing here?” Tuck said.

Mato pulled up. He seemed confused. He was supposed to be doing the yelling.

“We’re flying tonight,” Tuck said. “Do you guys have the plane fueled up?”

Mato shook his head. “Then get on it. I wondered where you were.”

Mato just looked at him.

“Go!” Tuck said. “Now!”

Mato started to slink toward the door, obviously not comfortable with leaving Tuck in the clinic. Another guard came into the office and when Mato looked up, Tuck snatched his paper and pencil from the desk. He dropped the pencil and when he bent to pick it up, he hit the main power switch on the computer. The computer would reboot when turned on and the doctor would only know that it had been turned off. He’d never suspect that someone had been into the donor files.

“Let’s go, you guys.”

Tuck pushed past Mato out the office door, shoving the paper in his pocket as he went.

Tuck made quite a show of the preflight on the Lear, demanding three times that the guard with access to the key to the main power cutoff turn it on so he could check out the plane. The guard wasn’t buying it. He walked away from Tuck snickering. Tuck checked under the instrument panel. Maybe there would be some obvious way to hot-wire the switch. He’d been lucky with the computer. The switch and all the wires leading into it were covered by a steel case. He couldn’t get into it with a blowtorch, and frankly, he had no idea which wires did what. It probably wasn’t even a simple switch, but a relay that lead to another switch. There’d be no way to wire around it.

He left the hangar and went back to his bungalow. Unless he found some way to get off the island, he was going to be short a couple of lungs and a heart come midnight. Beth would have at least one guard on the plane with her, probably two, given the circumstances. And he had no doubt that she’d shoot him in the crotch and

make him fly to Japan anyway. There had to be another way. Like a boat. Kimi’s boat. Didn’t these guys travel thousands of miles over the Pacific in canoes like that? What could the doc do? He’d been so careful about safeguarding the island that the guards didn’t even have a boat to chase him with.

Tuck put on his shorts and took his fins and mask to the bathroom. He knotted the ends of his trouser legs and started filling them with supplies. A shirt, a light jacket, some disinfectant, sunscreen, a short kitchen knife. He found a small jar of sugar in the kitchen, dumped the sugar into the sink, and filled the jar with matches and Band-Aids. When he was ready to seal it, he saw the slip of paper he’d written on in the office sticking from the pocket of the trousers and shoved it into the jar as an afterthought. He topped off the pants bag with a pair of sneakers, then pulled the webbed belt tight to cinch it all up. He could swim with the pants legs like water wings. The wet clothing would get heavy, but not until he hit the beach on the far side of the minefield. To Tuck’s way of thinking, once he was past the minefield he was halfway there. Then all he had to do was convince the old cannibal to give him the canoe, enough food and water to get somewhere, and Kimi to navigate. Where in the hell would they go? Yap? Guam?

One step at a time. First he had to get out of the compound. He checked the guards’ positions. Leaning out the window, he could see three—no, four—at the hangar. He waited. He’d never tried to make the swim while it was still light. They’d be able to see him in the water from as far away as the runway. He just had to hope that they didn’t look in that direction.

The guards were rolling barrels into the hangar to hand-pump the jet fuel into the Lear. Two on each barrel, four out in the compound, bingo. One guy had to be in the hangar cranking the pump. And Stripe was in the clinic. Showtime!

Tuck went into the bathroom, lifted the hatch, threw down the pants bag and his swimming stuff, and followed it through.

He weighed sneaking against running, stealth against speed, and decided to go like a newborn turtle for the water. The only people who might see him were the Doc and Beth, and they were probably in the process of pushing the twin beds together and doing the Ozzie and Harriet double-skin sweat slap—or whatever sort of weird shit they did. He hoped it was painful.

He broke into a dead run across the gravel, feeling the coral dig at his feet and the ferns whip at his ankles but keeping his focus on

the beach. As he passed the clinic, he thought he saw some movement out of the corner of his eye, but he didn’t turn. He was Carl Lewis, Michael Johnson, and Edwin Moses (except he was white and slow), a single head turn could cause him to lose his stride and the race—and boy, does that beach seem farther when you’re running than when you’re sneaking. He almost tumbled when he hit the sand, but managed a controlled forward stumble that put him face-first in four inches of water. The baby turtle had made it to the water, but now he faced a whole new set of dangers at sea, not the least of which was trying to swim with a pair of stuffed khakis around his neck.

He kicked a few feet out into the water, put on his fins and mask, and began the swim.

He’d been furious from the moment he heard the pilot’s voice in the clinic and he had fought the cloud of painkillers and the pressure in his head to get to him. Yamata watched the pilot stumble into the water before he tried shouting for the others. The shout came out little more than a grunt through his wired jaw, and his crushed sinuses allowed little sound to pass through his nose. His gun was in the guards’ quarters, the others were at the hangar, and his hated enemy was escaping. He decided to go for his gun. The others might want to take the pilot alive.

56 Escape

Kimi was trying to call up thunder and was having no luck at all. He’d been chanting and waving his arms for half an hour and there still wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

“You’re not holding your arms right,” Sarapul said. He was lying under a palm tree, chewing a betel nut and offering constructive criticism to the navigator. Sepie lay nearby watching.

“I am too,” Kimi said. “I’m holding them the same way you do.”

“Maybe it doesn’t work for Filipinos.”

“It’s because I’m shot,” Kimi said. “If I wasn’t shot, I could do this.”

Sarapul scanned the horizon. Not even a bird. “That’s it. It’s because you’re shot.” He spit out a red stream of betel nut juice. “And you’re not holding your arms right.”

Kimi resumed chanting and waving his arms.

“Hey!” Sarapul said.

“What? Did you hear thunder? I knew I could do it.”

“No. Be quiet. Someone is calling you.”

Kimi listened. Someone was calling him, and they were getting closer. He limped down the beach toward the voice and saw Tucker Case coming around the island.

“Hey, boss, what you doin’ out here during the day? The Sorcerer gonna be plenty mad at you.”

Tuck was out of breath. “He is mad. I need your boat, Kimi. And I need you to navigate for me.”

“Not his ship,” Sarapul said. “My ship.”

“The doc is going to kill me if I don’t get off the island. Can I use your boat?”

The old cannibal was silent for a moment, thinking. “Where you go?”

“I don’t know. Guam, Yap, anywhere.”

“Can I come?”

“Yes, yes, if I can use your boat.”

“Okay, we leave five days. Right, Kimi?”

Kimi looked at Tuck. “It not be good sailing for five days.”

“I have to go now, Kimi.”

“Can Sepie come?”

Sepie stepped back, surprised. “You want to take me? Women don’t sail.”

“You come,” Kimi said. “Okay, boss?” he said to Tuck.

Tuck nodded. “Whatever. Sepie, go tell Malink that I need everyone to bring drinking coconuts. Many drinking coconuts with the husks taken off. Bananas, mangoes, papaya, and dried fish if he has any.”

“There is plenty shark meat,” Sepie said.

“I need it now, Sepie. Go. Tell Malink that Vincent demands it.”

Sarapul began to chop at the underbrush in front of the sailing canoe to clear a path to the water. “Put down palm leaf to slide ship on,” he told Tuck. Tuck began to gather long palm fronds and lay them down in a path to the water.

“Kimi, can you go get the things from my pack? There’s things we can use.”

“What about Roberto?”

“Call for him, but go get the stuff. The money too.”

“Okay, boss.”

Ten minutes later Tuck looked up to see Malink leading a line of Shark People through the jungle. All were carrying baskets of food and husked green coconuts.

“You are leaving?”

“Yes, I have to go, Chief.”

“You are taking our ship and our navigator.”

“And our mispel,” Abo added from behind Malink.

“I have to go, Malink. The Sorcerer and the Sky Priestess are going to kill me.”

“But Vincent send you. How they hurt you?”

“They don’t really believe in Vincent. They use him to get you to give up the chosen, Malink. They’re going to start killing off your people

too.”

“They no kill the Chosen. Chosen are for Vincent.”

“No. I told you before. They take out your organs and sell them to be put inside of other people.”

Malink scoffed. “You can no put one man kidney in other man.”

“It was in People magazine. Didn’t you see it? Demi Moore, Melanie Griffith, Mariel Hemingway, all of them? You didn’t read about it?”

Recognition lit up Malink’s face. “Boob job!”

“Yes,” Tuck said. “Where do you think they get those boobs?”

“Oh, no.”

“Yes.”

“He speaks the truth,” Malink said to the islanders. “It was in People. Put the food in the boat.”

He took Tuck aside. “You will come back?”

“I’ll try.”

“And bring our navigator.”

“I’ll try, Malink. I really will.”

“You try.”

“Tide,” Kimi called. “We go now.”

The center of the canoe was filled with coconuts, fruit, and bundles of dried shark meat wrapped in banana leaves. Kimi directed the men to get on either side of the canoe and push it over the mat of palm fronds to the water. When it was afloat, Tuck lifted Sepie in, then climbed in himself. Kimi, standing on the outrigger platform, started to hoist the sail. It was the shape of a tortilla chip stood on end with a bite taken out at the top. Tuck recognized the pieces of his pack sewn into the nylon patchwork.

“Where is Sarapul?” Kimi said.

“Here!” The old cannibal was running out of the jungle, seeming stronger now than Tuck had ever seen him. He had gone back for his spear, a long shaft of mahogany with a wickedly barbed metal tip. Tuck caught the old man by the forearm and pulled him out of the surf and into the canoe.

The canoe was already fifty yards from the shore. Sarapul took the long oar at the rear and steered it toward the channel as Kimi stood on the outrigger platform and manipulated the sail.

The Shark People stood on the beach looking stunned. A few waved. Malink looked forlorn, Abo heartbroken.

“Thanks,” Tuck shouted over the wave. “Thank you, Malink.”

“You will come back.” Malink said. It was not a question.

Tuck turned to look out to sea, then looked back to see the Shark People wading into the water after them. Behind them he saw a dark figure come out of the jungle.

There was no warning shot or demand to halt. Stripe came out onto the beach and opened up with the Uzi. Tuck pushed Sepie’s head down under the edge of the gunwale just as a line of bullets stitched and splintered the wood. Kimi screamed and Tuck looked up to see a row of red geysers open in his back. He clung to one of the lines for a second, then fell into the sea.

Another scream, this one from Sarapul, the hideous screech of a raging lynx, and the old man went over the side. The gunfire stopped and Tuck risked popping his head up to look back to the beach. Stripe was slamming a new clip into the Uzi as he waded after the canoe. The Shark People had fled from the water and disappeared into the jungle or were cowering on the beach, unable to move.

With the sail loose, the canoe had swung around and was being carried by the tide toward the reef. They would miss the channel by only a few feet, but they would miss it and run aground on the reef. Tuck reached up to grab the steering oar just as Stripe let off another burst from the Uzi. At a hundred yards he was spraying a wide pattern, but Tuck heard a couple of bullets thunk into the side of the canoe.

The normally crystal water near the shore was clouded with the sand and silt thrown up by the Shark People’s retreat, so Stripe did not see the dark shape moving through the water toward him. He wanted a shot. He set the Uzi to semiautomatic and unfolded the stock to take careful aim.

Tuck was standing now, leaning hard on the steering oar to bring the canoe around and through the channel. The outrigger scraped over the reef as the canoe approached broadside.

Stripe lined up the sights between Tuck’s shoulder blades, held his breath, let it out, then squeezed the trigger.

Sarapul came out of the water like an angry marlin, spear-first. The metal point entered just under Stripe’s chin and exited his skull at the crown, dragging brain and bone on its evil barb. As Stripe fell back, he emptied the clip into the sky.

The canoe slipped through the channel into the open ocean. Out on the horizon, a small cloud appeared and dropped a mercurial lightning bolt into the sea, followed a few seconds later by Kimi’s thunder.

57 West with the Bat

The Sorcerer stood on the beach over the supine body of Yamata. The spear was still sticking out of the guard’s skull like a gruesome note spindle waiting for a canceled receipt from the Reaper.

“How did this happen?” the Sorcerer asked.

Malink looked at his feet. The Sorcerer seemed more surprised than angry. A day had passed since Sarapul had killed Stripe, and Malink had waited in fear for the time when the Sorcerer would come looking for him. The other guards had torn the village apart looking for Tuck, and Malink had confessed that the pilot had left the island in an old canoe, but he had claimed ignorance of the whereabouts of the guard. Sarapul had been right. They should have pushed the body out to the edge of the reef for the sharks to eat. Actually, that had been Sarapul’s second suggestion for the disposal of the body.

“It look like accident,” Malink said. “Maybe he running and fall on his spear.”

“I want the man who did this, Malink,” the Sorcerer said.

“He is dead.”

“The Filipino did this?”

Malink nodded. The other guards had found Kimi’s body in the village, where the Shark People had been preparing it for burial.

“I don’t think so. The Filipino took four bullets in the back. Whoever did this was very strong. Now you must tell me the truth or Vincent will be angry.”

Malink was not afraid of Vincent’s wrath. He only now realized that all the wrath his people had ever felt from Vincent had come

by way of the Sorcerer and the Sky Priestess. He was afraid of the Sky Priestess.

“The American do this before he leave in the canoe. The guard shoot the girl-man and the American kill the guard.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about this before?”

“I am afraid Vincent will be angry.”

“Where did they get a canoe? None of the Shark People know how to build a canoe.”

“It was the girl-man. He know how. He build with Sarapul.”

The Sorcerer balled his fists. “And Sarapul is gone too.”

Malink nodded. “He sail away.”

“Do you know where they were going?”

Malink shook his head. “No. Sarapul is banished. We no talk with him.”

“Where’s the guard’s weapon?”

Malink shrugged.

The Sorcerer turned his back and began walking up the beach. “Have your people bury this man, Malink. Don’t let the other guards see him. And be ready. The Sky Priestess will visit you soon.”

Sarapul crawled out from some nearby ferns and stood at Malink’s side, watching the Sorcerer walk away. “We should have eaten this guy,” he said, kicking Yamata’s body.

“This is very bad,” Malink said.

“He killed my friend.” Sarapul kicked the body again.

“The Sky Priestess will be very angry.” Malink was, once again, feeling the weight of his position.

The old cannibal shrugged. “Can I have my spear back?”

Tuck knew that there was a way to use the hands of a watch in conjunction with the movement of the sun to determine direction, but since he wore a digital watch, it wouldn’t have done him any good even if he knew the method, which he didn’t. He guessed that Guam lay to the west, so he steered for the setting sun, spent the night guessing, and corrected his course to put the sun behind them at sunrise.

He did know how to sail. It was required knowledge for a kid growing up in a wealthy family near San Diego, but celestial navigation was a complete mystery. Sepie was no help at all. Even if she knew anything, she hadn’t said a word since Kimi had been shot.

Tuck forced her to drink the water from a couple of green coconuts, but other than that, she had lain in the bow motionless for twenty-four hours.

He was now looking at his second sunset at sea. He corrected his course and realized that they must have been traveling north most of the day. How far, he couldn’t guess. He steered southwest until the sun lay on the water like a glowing platter, hoping to correct some of the damage.

He really wished that Sepie would come around. He needed some sleep, and he needed some relief from his own thoughts. Thoughts of the Sky Priestess, of the Sorcerer, and of his dead friend Kimi. Despite the navigat-or’s surly manner, he had been a good kid. Tuck, who had been brought up in relative luxury, couldn’t imagine having endured the life that Kimi had lived. And the navigator had never given up. He had lived and died with courage. And he would still be alive if he hadn’t met Tucker Case.

“Fuck!” Tuck said to no one. He wiped his eyes on his sleeve and squinted at the gunmetal waves.

There was a flapping noise up by the mast and Tuck adjusted the steering oar to catch the wind. The sail filled again, but the flapping continued for a second before it stopped.

Roberto caught the shroud line that was secured to the outrigger and did an upside-down swinging landing that left him looking to the back of the canoe.

Tuck couldn’t have been happier if it had been an angel hanging from his shroud line.

“Roberto?”

“Yes,” the bat said. He was speaking in his own voice, not Vincent’s. The accent Filipino, not Manhattan.

Tuck almost burst out laughing. His mood swings were so rapid and wide now that he was afraid his sanity might be falling through the chasm. “I didn’t recognize you without your glasses.”

“I no like the light,” Roberto said.

Tuck looked to Sepie, still lying in the bow. “Look, Sepie, it’s Roberto.” The girl did not stir.

“You are very sad about Kimi,” Roberto said.

“Yes,” Tuck said, “I am sad.”

“He tell you he was great navigator and you no believe him.”

Tuck looked away. Something about bats increases shame by a factor of ten.

“You are going the wrong way,” the bat said. “Go that way.”

He pointed with a wing claw. The wind caught his wing and nearly spun him off the shroud line. He braced himself with the other wing claw and pointed again. “I mean that way.”

“You’re shitting me,” Tuck said.

“That way.”

“That’s north. I’m going to Guam. West.”

“That’s west. I am born on Guam.”

“You’re a bat.”

“You ever see a lost bat?”

“No, but I’ve never seen a talking bat either.”

“See?” Roberto said, as if he had made his point. “That way.”

After all the evidence is in—after you’ve run all the facts by everything you know—and you’re still lost, you have to do some things on faith. Tuck steered in the direction Roberto was pointing.

A few minutes later he looked up to see Vincent sitting on the pile of coconuts in the center of the canoe. “Good call, listening to the bat,” Vincent said. “I just wanted you to know that the Shark People are going to build some ladders.”

“Well, that’s a useful bit of information,” Tuck said.

“It will be,” Vincent said. Then he disappeared.

58 Malink’s Song

“They’re flying the new pilot in tomorrow,” said Sebastian Curtis. “I told them that Tucker wouldn’t fly, so he had to be eliminated. They weren’t happy about losing the heart and lungs.”

Beth Curtis sat at her vanity, putting on her eye makeup for the appear-ance of the Sky Priestess. The red scarf was draped over the back of the chair. “Did you check the database? Maybe we can send another set of or-gans back with them. I can pick the chosen tonight and keep them in the clinic until tomorrow morning.”

“The customer already died,” Curtis said.

“Well, I guess he really was sick, then.” She laughed, a girlish laugh full of music.

Sebastian loved her laugh. He smiled over her shoulder into the mirror. “I’m glad you’re not concerned about Tucker Case. I understand, Beth. Really. I was just jealous.”

“Tucker who? Oh, you mean Tucker dead-at-sea Case? ’Bastian, dear, I did what I did for us. I thought it would keep him under control. Write it off as one of life’s little missteps. Besides, if he’s not dead now, he will be in a day or so.”

“He made it here on the open ocean. Through a typhoon.”

“And with the navigator. Remember, I’ve seen him fly. He’s dead. That old cannibal is probably munching on his bones right now.” She checked her lipstick and winked at him in the mirror. “Showtime, darling.”

Malink trudged through the jungle, his shoulders aching from the basket of food he was carrying. Each day he had been taking food to Sarapul’s hiding place. It was not that he didn’t trust his people, but he did not want to burden any of them with such a weighty secret. The last of them to see the cannibal saw him covered with blood, gasping in the sand. Malink had told them that Sarapul was dead and that Malink had given his body to the sharks. A chief had to carry many secrets, and sometimes he had to lie to his people to spare them pain.

After the third day, Malink was ready to let the cannibal go back to his house on the far side of the island. The guards were no longer searching, and the Sorcerer had stopped asking questions. Perhaps things would go back to the way they were. But maybe that wasn’t right either. Malink didn’t want to, but he believed the pilot. The Sky Priestess and the Sorcerer were going to hurt his people. He was too old for this. He was too old to fight. And how do you fight machine guns with spears and machetes?

He paused by a giant mahogany tree and put the basket down while he caught his breath. He saw smoke drifting in streams over the ferns and looked in the direction it was coming from. Someone was there, obscured by a tall stand of taro leaves as big as elephant ears.

There was a rustling there. Malink crouched.

“You’re not scared, are you, squirt?”

Malink recognized the voice from his childhood and he wasn’t scared. But he knew he didn’t have to say so. “I am not a squirt. I am old man now.”

Vincent swaggered out of the taro. His flight suit and bomber jacket looked exactly as Malink remembered. “You’re always gonna be a squirt, kid. You still got that lighter I gave you?”

Malink nodded.

“That was my lucky Zippo, kid. I shoulda hung on to it. Fuck it. Spilt milk.” Vincent waved his cigarette in dismissal. “Look, I need you to build some ladders. You know what a ladder is, right?”

“Yes,” Malink said.

“Of course you do, smart kid like you. So I am needing you to build, oh, say six ladders, thirty feet long, strong and light. Use bamboo. Are you getting this, kid?”

Malink nodded. He was grinning from ear to ear. Vincent was speaking to him again.

“You’re talkin’ my ear off, kid. So, anyway, I need you to build these ladders, see, as I am having big plans for you and the Shark People. Large plans, kid. Hugely large. I’m talking about substantial fuckin’ plans I am having. Okay?”

Malink nodded.

“Good, build the ladders and stand by for further orders.” The flyer began to back away into the taro patch.

“You said you would come back,” Malink said. “You said you would come back and bring cargo.”

“You don’t look like you been shorted on the feedbag, kid. You got your cargo in spades.”

“You said you would come back.”

Vincent threw up his hands. “So what the fuck’s this? Western Union? Don’t go screwy on me, kid. I need you.” The pilot started to fade, going as translucent as his cigarette smoke.

Malink stepped forward. “The Sky Priestess will tell us orders?”

“The Sky Priestess took a powder fifty years ago, kid. This dame doing the bump and grind on my runway is paste.”

“Paste?”

“She’s a fake, squirt. A boneable feast to be sure, but she’s running a game on you.”

“She is not Sky Priestess?”

“No, but don’t piss her off.” With that the pilot faded to nothing.

Malink leaned back against the mahogany tree and looked up through the canopy to the sky. His skin tingled and his breath was coming easy and deep. The ache in his knees was gone. He was light and strong and full, and every birdcall or rustle of leaves or distant crash of a wave seemed part of a great and wonderful song.

59 Call in the Cavalry

They had missed Guam and Saipan (passing at night) and all the Northern Mariana Islands (drifting in fog) and Johnston Island and all ships at sea (no reason, they just missed). The sunscreen had run out on the seventh day. The drinking coconuts ran out on the fourteenth.

They still had some shark meat that had been smoked and dried, but Tuck couldn’t choke down a bite of it without water. They had had nothing to drink for a full day.

They were at sea for three days before Sepie came out of her catatonia, and after a day of sobbing, she started to talk.

“I miss him,” she said. “He listen to me. He like me even when I am being mean.”

“Me too. I treated him badly sometimes too. He was a good guy. A good friend.”

“He love you very much,” Sepie said. She was crying again.

Tuck looked down, shielding his face so she couldn’t see his eyes. “I’m sorry, Sepie. I know you loved him. I didn’t mean to put him in danger. I didn’t mean to put you in danger.”

She crawled to his end of the canoe and into his arms. He held her there for a long time, rocking her until she stopped crying. He said, “You’ll be okay.”

“Kimi say he would sail me to America someday. You will take me?”

“Sure. You’ll like it there.”

“Tell me,” she said.

She grilled Tuck about all things American, making him explain everything from television to tampons. Tuck learned about men,

about how simple they were, about how easily they could be manipulated, about how good they could make a woman feel when they were nice, and how much they could hurt a woman by dying. Telling the things that they knew made them each feel smart, and sharing the duties of sailing the boat made them feel safe. It was easier to live in the little world inside the canoe rather than face the vast emptiness of the open ocean. Sepie took to curling into Tuck’s chest and sleeping while he steered. Twice Tuck fell asleep in her arms and no one steered the boat for hours. Tuck didn’t let it bother him. He had accepted that they were going to die. It seemed so easy now that he wondered why he’d made such an effort to escape it on the island.

Roberto hadn’t spoken since the first night. He hung from the lines and pointed with a wing claw when Tuck called to him. When Tuck was still reckoning, he reckoned that they were traveling at an average speed of five knots. At five knots, twenty-four hours a day, for fourteen days, he reckoned that they had traveled well over two thousand miles. Tuck reckoned that they were now sailing though downtown Sacramento. His reckoning wasn’t any better than his navigation.

On the fifteenth day Roberto took flight and Tuck watched him until he was nothing but a dot on the horizon, then nothing at all. Tuck didn’t blame him. He accepted his own death, but he didn’t want to watch Sepie go before him. At sunset he tied off the steering oar, took Sepie in his arms, and lay down in the bottom of the boat to wait.

Sometime later—he couldn’t tell how long, but it was still dark—he woke with a parched scream when a tube of mascara dropped out of the sky and hit him in the chest. Sepie sat up and snatched the tube from the bottom of the boat.

“To make you pretty,” she said. Her voice cracked on “pretty.”

Tuck was too disoriented to recognize what she was holding. He took it from her and squinted at it. “It’s mascara.”

“Roberto,” Sepie said.

Tuck looked around in the sky, but didn’t see the bat. It was beginning to get light. “You brought us mascara? We’re dying of thirst and you brought us mascara?”

“Kimi teach him,” Sepie said.

Tuck didn’t think he had the energy left for outrage, but it was coming nonetheless. “You…”

Sepie put a finger to his lips. “Listen.”

Tuck listened. He heard nothing. “What?”

“Surf.”

Tuck listened. He heard it. He also heard something else, a rhythmic stirring in the water much closer to the canoe. He looked in the direction of the noise and saw something moving over the water toward them.

“Aloha!” came out of the dark, followed by a middle-aged white man in an ocean kayak. “I guess I’m not the only one who likes to get out early,” he said.

In their first hour at the Waikiki Beach Hyatt Regency, Sepie flushed the toilet seventy-eight times and consumed two hundred and forty dollars’ worth of product from the minibar (five Pepsis and a box of Raisinets).

“You poop in here and it just goes away?”

“Yes.”

“In this big bowl?” She pointed.

“Yes.”

“You poop?”

“Yes.”

“And you push this?”

“Yes.”

“And it goes away?”

“That’s right.”

“Where?”

“To the next room.” Plumbing. They hadn’t talked about plumbing.

“And they push this and it goes away?”

“Look, Sepie, there’s a TV in here. You push this and it changes the picture.”

Tuck couldn’t be sure because they’d never had sex and because she’d told him about how she could fool a man, but he thought she might have come right then.

He made her promise not to leave the room and left her there flushing and clicking while he went to the police.

The desk sergeant at the Honolulu police department listened patiently and politely and with appropriate concern right up until Tuck said, “I know I look a little ratty, but I’ve been at sea in an open boat for two weeks.” At which point the sergeant held up his hand signifying it was his turn to talk.

“You’ve been at sea for two weeks?”

“Yes. I escaped by boat.”

“So how long ago did these alleged murders happen?”

“I don’t know exactly. One about a month ago, one longer.”

“And you’re just getting around to reporting them now?”

I told you. I was trapped on Alualu. I escaped in a sailing canoe.”

“Then,” the sergeant said, “Alualu is not a street in Honolulu.”

“No. It’s an island in Micronesia.”

“I can’t help you, sir. That’s out of our jurisdiction.”

“Well, who can help me?”

“Try the FBI.”

So Tuck, on the cab ride to the FBI offices, changed his strategy. He’d wait until he got past the front line of defense before spilling his guts. The receptionist was a petite Asian woman of forty who spoke English so precisely that Tuck knew it had to be her second language.

“I’m sure I can help you if you will just tell me what it is that you’d like to report.”

“I can’t. I have to talk to an agent. I won’t be comfortable unless I talk to a real agent.”

She looked offended and her speech became even crisper. “Perhaps you can tell me the nature of the crime.”

Tuck thought for a moment. What did the FBI always handle on television? Al Capone, Klansmen, bank robberies, and…“Kidnapping,” he said. “There’s been a kidnapping.”

“And who has been kidnapped? Have you filed a missing persons report with the local police?”

Tuck shook his head and stood his ground. “I’ll tell an agent.”

The receptionist picked up the phone and punched a number. She turned away from him and covered her mouth with her hand as she spoke into the mouthpiece. She hung up and said, “There’s an agent on his way.”

“Thanks,” Tuck said.

A few minutes later a door opened and a dark-haired guy who looked like a mobile mannequin from a Brooks Brothers window

display entered the reception room and extended his hand to Tuck. “Mr. Case, I’m Special Agent Tom Myers. Would you step into my office, please?”

Tuck shook his hand and followed him though the door and down a hallway of identical ten-by-twelve offices with identical metal desks that displayed identical photos of identical families in identical dime-store frames. Myers motioned for Tuck to sit and took the seat behind the desk.

“Now, Rose tells me that you want to report a kidnapping?” Special Agent Myers unbuttoned the top button of his shirt.

“You allowed to do that?” Tuck asked.

“Casual Fridays,” the special agent said.

“Oh,” Tuck said. “Yes. Kidnapping, multiple murder, and the theft and sale of human organs for transplant.”

Myers showed no reaction. “Go on.”

And Tuck did. He began with the offer of the job on Alualu and ended with his arrival in Hawaii, leaving out the crash of Mary Jean’s jet, the subsequent loss of his pilot’s license and pending criminal charges, anything to do with cargo cults, cannibals, transvestites, ghost pilots, talking bats, and genital injuries. As he wrapped up, he thought the edited version sounded pretty credible.

Special Agent Myers had not changed position or expression once in the half hour that Tuck had talked. Tuck thought he saw him blink once, though. Special Agent Myers leaned back in his chair (casual Fridays) and templed his fingers. “Let me ask you something,” he said.

“Sure,” Tuck said.

“Are you the Tucker Case that got drunk and crashed the pink jet in Seattle a few months ago?”

Tuck could have slapped him. “Yes, but that doesn’t have anything to do with this.”

“I think it does, Mr. Case. I think it affects the credibility of what is already an incredible story. I think you should leave my office and go about the business of putting your life in order.”

“I’m telling you the truth,” Tuck said. He was fighting panic. He worked to stay calm. “Why would I make up a story like that? As you pointed out, I’ve got enough on my plate just rebuilding my life. I’m not so stupid that I’d add charges for filing a false crime report to all the others. If you have to take me into custody, do it. But do something about what’s going on out on that island or a lot more people are going to die.”

“Even if I believed your story, what would you like me to do?”

And there Tuck lost it.” ‘Special agent.’ Does that mean that you had to take the little bus to the academy?”

“I was at the top of my class.” A rise.

“Then act like it.”

“What do you want, Mr. Case?”

Tuck jumped up and leaned over the desk. Special Agent Myers rolled back in his chair.

“I want you to stop them. I want covert action and deadly technology. I want Navy SEALS and snipers and spies and laser-guided smart stealth gizmos out the ying-yang. I want surgical strikes and satellite views and a steaming shitload of every sort of Tom Clancy geegaw you got. I want fucking Jack Ryan, James Bond, and a half-dozen Van Damme motherfuck-ers who can jump through their own asses and rip your heart out while it’s still beating. I want action, Special Agent Myers. This is evil shit.”

“Sit down, Mr. Case.”

Tuck sat down. His energy was gone. “Look, I’m giving myself up. Arrest me, throw me in jail, beat me with a rubber hose, do whatever you want to do, but stop what’s going on out there.”

Special Agent Myers smiled. “I don’t believe a word you’ve told me, but even if I did, even if you had evidence of what you’re claiming, I still couldn’t do anything. The FBI can only act on domestic matters.”

“Then tell someone who handles international matters.”

“The CIA only handles matters that affect national security, and frankly, I wouldn’t embarrass myself by calling them.”

“Fuck it, then. Take me away.” Tuck held out his arms to receive handcuffs.

“Go back to your hotel and get some rest, Mr. Case. There are no outstanding warrants for your arrest.”

“There aren’t?” Tuck felt as if he’d been gut-punched.

“I checked the computer before I brought you in here.” Myers stood. “I’ll show you out.”

After another cab ride and another truncated telling of his story, Tuck was also shown out of the Japanese embassy. He found a pay phone and soon he had been hung up on by both the American Medical Association and the Council of Methodist Missionaries. He found Sepie curled up on the king-size bed, the television still blaring in the bathroom, three minibottles of vodka empty on the floor. Tuck considered raiding the minibar himself, but when he opened it, he

opted for a grapefruit juice instead of gin. Getting hammered wasn’t going to take the edge off this time, and at this rate, the money he’d left on deposit at the desk in lieu of a credit card—the money that Sarapul had found in Tuck’s pack—would run out in two days.

He sat down on the bed and stroked Sepie’s hair. She had put on mascara while he was out and had made a mess of it. Funny, she’d walked into the hotel wearing one of Tuck’s shirts—the first time she’d worn a top in her life—looking very much the little girl and now she had on makeup and was passed out drunk. Tuck had a feeling that coming to America was not going to be easy on either of them. He kissed her on the forehead and she moaned and rolled over. “Perfume tomorrow,” she said. “You get me some, okay?”

“Okay,” Tuck said. “A woman who smells good is a woman who feels good.” The phrase rattled off the walls of his brain. He snatched up the phone and punched up information. When the operator came on, he said, “Houston, area code 713…”

60 Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch

Mary Jean sat behind a desk fashioned entirely of rose quartz veined with fool’s gold and stared out the window at the Houston skyline. A brown haze had risen to the level of her fiftieth-floor office as the exhaust of a million cars huddled against the stratosphere and curled around the city like a huge rusty cat looking for a place to nap. It just made her made as a cowpoke wearing bob-wire pants, but not mad enough, of course, to sell her shares of GM and Exxon. Blue chips was blue chips, after all, and the great state of Texas ran on oil.

The intercom beeped and Mary Jean keyed her speakerphone, not because she needed her hands free to work, but because the phone receiver either got caught in her hairdo or her clip-ons rattled against it making all sorts of distracting racket. There’d been a time, before Prozac, when she’d thought for six months that the FBI was tapping her phone line, only to find out it was a pair of twenty-carat ruby cluster earrings banging against the earpiece.

“Yes, Melanie.”

“Tucker Case on the phone, Mary Jean. He’s been calling all day. I’ve tried to put him off, but he says that people are going to die if you don’t talk to him.”

“Does he sound drunk?”

“No, Ma’am. He sounds serious.”

Mary Jean took a deep breath and looked up at the Monet hanging on the far wall. Twenty million dollars, depreciated as office furnishings, ap-preciated to twice its value and donated to a museum as a donation write-off at full value, with no capital gains, and there

it would hang until the day of her death when it would go to the museum.

And it also matched the couch.

“Put him through,” she said.

“Mary Jean, it’s Tucker.”

“I was just thinking of you. How are you, sweetie?”

“Mary Jean, I’m stone sober and I need you to listen.”

“Go on, Tucker. I got more ears than a cornfield in June.”

“First, I know that there were never any criminal charges filed, and I don’t blame you for trying to get me out of the way. But I could really use some help.”

Mary Jean blanched. “Can you hold one second, darlin? Thanks.” She pushed the hold button and then the intercom. “Melanie, dear, would you mind bringing me a couple of number five Valiums and a little glass of juice? Thank you.” She clicked back to Tuck. “Go on, honey.”

And Tuck did, for fifteen minutes, and when he finished, Mary Jean said, “Well, that’s just not right. That’s just terrible.”

“Yes, it is, Mary Jean.”

“We just can’t have that,” she said. “You give Melanie your number there. I’ll see what I can do.”

“Mary Jean, I really appreciate this. If I could go to anyone else, I would.”

“And hurt my feelings? No, you wouldn’t. Tucker Case, I’ve been selling the power to change yourself for forty years. Now, if I don’t believe in the power of redemption, then I’m guilty of false advertising, aren’t I? You sit tight, now. Bye.”

She clicked the intercom. “Melanie, get me Jake Skye on the line, please. Thank you, dear.”

61 Roundhouse Aloha

Tuck stood at the arrival gate amid a group of Hawaiian college students wearing grass skirts and sarongs and festooned with leis they were draping on tourists as they came out of the tunnel from the 747. Tuck spotted Jake Skye well before he came out of the tunnel. He was a head taller than most of the tourists and one of the few who had a tan. Tuck waved to him and Jake tossed his head to show he’d seen him. He came out grinning with his hand extended.

Tuck smiled and hit Jake with a roundhouse to the jaw that knocked him back into a group of pseudo hula girls. Jake apologized to the girls and rubbed his jaw as he turned to Tuck.

“We done?”

“I guess so,” Tucker said. He knew that Jake would never apologize for selling him out.

Jake fell in beside Tuck and they walked through the terminal. “I didn’t see that coming. You’ve changed, buddy.”

“I guess so,” said Tuck. “Thanks for coming.”

“I’m just here to take you home.” Jake pulled two airline ticket folders out of his shirt pocket. “Mary Jean says you can bring your new girlfriend.”

“I’m not going home, Jake.”

“You’re not?”

“No. I need your help, but I’m not going back to Houston.”

“There’s a stop in San Francisco. You can get off there.”

“No. I’ve got some things I need to do.”

“Buy me a drink.” Jake turned and walked into an open cocktail lounge where a twenty-foot waterfall fell over black lava rock among

a forest of bromeliads and orchids. “Cool airport,” Jake said, pulling a stool up to the bar. “You ever think about living in the tropics?”

Tuck whipped around on his stool and Jake held up his hands in surrender.

“Just kidding. Okay, what’s the story?”

This time Tuck told the story leaving out none of the details, and to his credit, Jake did not call him crazy at the end. “So what do you think you can do?”

“Well, first, I thought you could hack the doctor’s computer and erase the database. It might slow up the process if he has to do all the tissue types again.”

Jake was shaking his head, “Can’t do it, buddy. Even if I wanted to.”

“Why not? I’ve got the password.”

Jake drained off the last of his third Mai Tai. “He’s on a satellite uplink net. The connection only goes two ways if he wants it to. I won’t be able to get in. Besides, it’s not in the mission parameters. I’m supposed to come here, get you, and take you home. Period.”

Tuck dug a slip of paper from his back pocket and unfolded it. “I’ve got these. Maybe they can help.”

Jake was still shaking his head, but he stopped when he saw the numbers written on the paper. “Where did you get those numbers?”

“They were on the bottom of a desk drawer in Curtis’s clinic.”

“They’re not computer codes, Tuck. You see those letters at the end? BSI? You know what that is?”

Tuck shook his head.

“Banc Suisse Italiano. Those are Swiss bank account numbers.” Jake tried to snatch the paper and Tuck pulled it out of his reach.

“You willing to expand the mission parameters?” Tuck said.

Jake was staring at the paper in Tuck’s hand. “How much?”

“Half.”

Jake scratched his three-day growth of beard. “And they were getting how much per kidney?”

“Half a mil.”

Jake cringed, then relaxed and put his hand on Tuck’s shoulder. “What did you have in mind, partner?”

“I want to get the Shark People off the island.”

“How many? Three hundred and change? Hire a ship.”

“I want to go sooner. I want to fly them off.”

Jake smiled. The wheels were working now. “It’s going to take a big plane: 747 or L-1011. That island got enough runway for something

that size?”

“Can we get something that size?”

“Not legally,” Jake said.

“I’m not worried about legally. I’m worried about logistically.”

Jake stood up. “I’m not flying it. I get you a plane, I get half. Deal?”

“I’ll give you one of the account numbers as soon as we get the plane. You take your chances whether there’s money in it or not. If I don’t make it, and the money’s in my account, you’re screwed.”

Jake considered it, then nodded. “I can live with that. Let’s go watch the big planes take off.”

Tuck was amazed at the way Jake’s mind worked. The second he’d accepted that they were going to steal a 747, it became a problem, and when it came to solving problems, Jake was the best. They stood on an open walkway that overlooked the tarmac, watching the 747s taxiing into the terminal.

“The best thing,” Jake said, “about stealing a 747 is that no one assumes that anyone is crazy enough to try it.”

“I thought people tried to steal them all the time. It’s a league sport in the Middle East, isn’t it?”

“They hijack, they don’t steal. With hijacking, you have to take a pilot with you.” Jake pointed to a row of planes docked at the terminal by rolling walkways. “These guys? Out of the question,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because they’ve just come in and they’re low on fuel or they’re being fueled to take off again, and most of the time, if you can get in them, there’s a crew on board.” He pointed to some jets parked near hangars at the far side of the airfield. “Those are our babies. They’ve got fuel, but they’re waiting for a crew and passengers. After midnight nothing goes out of this airport except FedEx. The advantage of a vacation destination. Nobody wants to fly in our out at night.”

The planes were a good half a mile away. “That’s a long way to go across an airfield without the tower seeing us and calling security. And we have to drive a ramp over to it to get inside.”

“No, we don’t. There’s an emergency escape hatch for the pilots in the roof over the cockpit.”

“That’s four stories up. How are you going to get up to it?”

“Down to it,” Jake said.

“Down?”

“The problem is how to get the hatch unlatched. They only open from the inside.”

“I’m still a little unclear on the ‘down’ part of the plan,” Tuck said. At some point he was going to be on top of a 747 and heights made him nervous.

“Let me worry about that,” Jake said. Then he snapped his fingers as if conjuring the answer to his problem out of thin air. “I’ve got the answer right here in front of me. What was I thinking? I’m working with the master.”

Tuck looked around, thinking that Jake was talking about someone else. “Are you talking about me? I don’t know how to do anything.”

“But you’re wrong, Tuck, you’re wrong. For this part of the plan we need the cooperation of a flight attendant. Come on, let’s get my bag. I’ve got an extra change of clothes you can wear.”

“What’s wrong with these clothes?” Tuck asked. He was still wearing the oversized and now distressed hand-me-downs of Sebastian Curtis.

“Like you have to ask.”

Jake spent an hour studying flight schedules and talking to counter people at the different airlines. Tuck took the opportunity to call the hotel to check on Sepie. She answered on the second ring. “Hello. How much is washer-dryer combination?”

“What?”

“Maytag washer-dryer combination with minibasket and wrinkle guard. How much?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a grand. Are you okay?”

She’d put the phone down and he heard her shouting at the TV, “Is a grand! Is a grand! You fuckin’ mook! Oh, no.” She picked up the phone again. “You wrong. Is eleven nine nine suggested retail. You lose.”

“You’re watching ‘The Price Is Right’?”

“They give you things if you know how much. Is very hard.”

“Do you need anything?” Tuck asked. “I can call room service from here and have them bring you some food.”

“Perfume and lipstick,” Sepie said.

“That’ll have to wait. I’ll be back soon, okay?”

“Okay. Tuck?”

“What, Sepie?”

“What is washer-dryer combination?”

“I’ll explain later. I have to go now.”

She hung up on him. Evidently, her fascination with plumbing and television didn’t extend to the telephone. He found Jake talking to a girl at the United counter who was obviously taken with the grungy pilot’s charm. He saw Tuck and said good-bye.

“I’ve found our plane and the crew assignments. We have a ten-minute window to get to Gate 38 so you can work your magic.”

The plan was for Tuck to spot a flight attendant coming off the plane, get to know her, and convince her to go back into the jet and throw the latch on the emergency hatch before the plane was cleaned and moved away from the terminal. They waited at the tunnel into Gate 38. The passengers had long since deplaned, as had the pilots.

“Remember, you want to go ugly,” Jake said.

“I know,” Tuck said. He’d changed into Jake’s clothes, which fit him, at least, even if he looked like a guitar player for a Seattle grunge band.

“And old if you can get it.”

“I know,” Tuck said.

“You want a woman who looks like she couldn’t get laid in a men’s colony.”

“I know,” Tuck said. “Would you back off? I haven’t done this in a while.”

“Like riding a bicycle, buddy.”

The first flight attendant out of the tunnel was a pretty blond woman, about twenty-five. “Pass,” Jake said.

The next was a man, and the next a tall black woman who could have been a runway model.

“They’re killing us here,” Jake said. “How would you feel about going for the guy? He’s our best chance so far.”

“Fuck off, Jake.”

“Just an idea.”

They waited for five more minutes before a tired-looking woman in her fifties came down the tunnel pulling her flight bag behind her.

“Go to it, stud,” Jake said. He gave Tucker a little shove.

Tuck shoved back without taking his eyes off the woman. “I can’t do this, Jake.”

“What?” Jake Skye grabbed Tuck’s wrist and pretended to be taking his pulse.

Tuck pulled away from him. “I can’t do this.”

“Don’t pull this shit on me, buddy. She’s getting away. This is what you do.”

“Not anymore, I don’t.”

“Well, I sure as hell do.” Jake pulled off the flannel shirt he was wearing open over his black T-shirt and threw it to Tuck. “Go back to your hotel and wait for me to call. What room are you in?”

“Twelve-thirty.”

Jake pushed the T-shirt sleeves up just enough for his biceps to show and took off down the concourse after the middle-aged flight attendant.

Tuck went outside and found the shuttle to the Hyatt Regency. During the ride back to the hotel, he realized that he had no idea how to explain a washer-dryer combination to someone who had never worn shoes or a shirt until two days ago. He decided to go with magic.

62 Like Clockwork Spies

Malink found the old cannibal in a small clearing in the jungle, urinating on a young banana tree. “I brought you food.” Malink dropped the basket and sat down under a tree. Sarapul seemed to be taking a long time at his task.

“Sometimes it’s hard,” Malink said.

“Sometimes I can’t go at all,” Sarapul said. “It hurts.” He shuddered and turned around with a grin, smoothing down his thu. “But not today.” He sat down next to Malink and reached into the basket for a hunk of fish.

“I heard the music last night,” Sarapul said. “The white bitch comes more often now.” He offered Malink a piece of fish and the chief took it.

“There are three chosen in only ten days. I think they won’t come back sometimes. Vincent says that she is not the Sky Priestess. The pilot said she will kill us.”

“Then we must fight.”

“Knives against guns? You remember the war.”

“I remember. Come.” He got up and led Malink through the underbrush to a hollow log. He reached in and pulled out a long bundle wrapped in oiled sharkskin. “A man must take the strength of his enemies. If he cannot eat him and take his strength, he must take his weapon.”

Sarapul unwrapped the bundle to reveal a World War II vintage Japanese bolt-action rifle. He had obviously been visiting this spot because the rifle was covered with a thin coat of fish oil and gleamed like new. “I cut off his head and took his gun.”

Malink remembered the wrath of the Japanese on his people after the solider disappeared. “You did that? You were the one?”

“It was a long time ago,” Sarapul said. He reached into the bundle again and pulled out three shining cartridges. “But I saved these.”

“They have machine guns,” Malink said.

“She doesn’t.”

The call came a little after midnight. Tuck had slept since he got to the hotel, stuffing toilet paper in his ears to block out the noise of the television and Sepie talking back to it.

“Take a cab to general aviation at the airport,” Jake said. “The hangar you want says Island Adventures on the side. I’ll be waiting.”

Tuck climbed out of bed and turned off the television.

“Hey,” Sepie said. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor about a foot from the screen. Tuck crouched and took her face in his hands. “Tomorrow at six you take the tickets and go downstairs. Tell the man at the desk you want to go to the airport. The bus will take you.”

“I know this,” she said.

“Just listen. A tall man with long hair will be there.”

“Right. Jake,” Sepie said. “I know this.”

“If he’s not there, go to one of the men in the blue hats and tell him you need help getting on your plane. He’ll help you. When you get to Houston, go into the airport and call this number. Tell the woman who answers that I told you to call. She’ll help you.”

“And you will come and get me soon, right?”

“I’ll try.”

“What about Roberto?”

They hadn’t seen the fruit bat since the mascara bombing. “Roberto will be fine. He’ll live here, but I have to go.” He kissed her on the forehead and before he could pull away she wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him on the lips so hard he thought he might have cut his lip.

“You come get me.”

“I will.”

He stood and went out the door. A few seconds later he heard Sepie call to him from down the hall. “Hey!”

Tuck turned.

“How come you don’t try to sex me?”

“I will.”

“Okay,” she said, and she went back into the room.

Jake was waiting for him at the Island Adventures hangar. A Hughes 500 helicopter with its doors removed sat on a pad by the hangar. “I rented it for an hour. I fuck it up and we owe Mary Jean five grand for the deposit.”

Tuck looked at the helicopter sitting on the pad like a huge black dragonfly and he began to get a very bad feeling. “You don’t want me to do what I think you want me to do, do you?”

“I’ll put the skid right over the hatch. You just step out of one aircraft onto another. No problem. It can’t be half as bad as what I had to do to get the hatch left open.”

Tuck began to protest, but Jake was already walking to the helicopter. Tuck climbed into the helicopter and slipped on the headset. Jake threw the switches and the turbine began to whine. In a few seconds the blades slowly began to rotate.

Tuck keyed the intercom mike on his headset so Jake could hear him over the blades. “You’ll never get past the tower.”

“I’ve done it before,” Jake said. “I had to repo a Jet Ranger for a guy once.”

“They’ll never clear you.”

“There’s no traffic. Besides, you think they’re going to clear you? It’s Captain Midnight’s rock ‘n’ roll express from here on out, big guy.”

Jake pulled the collective lever by the side of his seat and the helicopter lifted into the air. Within seconds, Tuck heard the tower jabbering over the radio, warning the Hughes 500 to wait for clearance. Jake brought the helicopter up just high enough to clear the top of the hangar and flew in a low wide circle around the airport, then began his own jabber.

“Honolulu Tower, this is Helicopter One, approaching from the west on Runway Two. I have a problem with my tail rotor. Requesting emergency landing.”

The tower came back: “Helicopter One, didn’t you just take off without clearance?”

“Negative, Tower. I’m in from Maui. Request emergency clearance.”

Of course, Tuck thought. Jake flew the circle below the radar and without the running lights. They have no idea whether this is the same helicopter that just took off.

Jake sent the helicopter into a horizontal spin that moved it closer to the planes by the hangars with every rotation, just as it moved Tuck closer to throwing up. Jake stopped the spin for a second and nodded toward a United 747. “That’s your baby. Get out of your harness and get ready. They won’t know you’re there. Get inside and wait two hours before you start your taxi. I don’t want them to connect the helicopter with the jet. By the way, how’re you going to get your natives on board?”

“They’ve got ladders,” Tuck said. “I hope.” Tuck hung his headset behind the seat and unsnapped his harness just as Jake resumed his spin. Tuck grabbed on to the seat to keep from being thrown out the open door. What looked like an out-of-control aircraft was, in fact, a pretty elementary move called a pedal turn. Tuck found no comfort in that knowledge as he watched the tarmac spin below.

Jake pulled the helicopter up just in time to miss the tail of the 747, then leveled it off and crept forward along the length of the huge aircraft. The tail would obscure the view from the tower. “You ready?” he shouted.

Tuck shook his head violently. He could see the line of the hatch he was supposed to go through. He stepped out on the skid. Jake brought the helicopter down and the skid touched the top of the jet. “Now!”

Tuck stepped off onto the plane and ducked instinctively below the blades. He looked back at Jake, shrugged, and shouted, “That was easy.”

“I told you,” Jake shouted. He pulled the helicopter into the sky and started his spin toward the Island Adventures pad.

Tuck got on his knees, dug his fingers into the seal around the hatch, and pulled it open. He jumped into the dark plane, sealed the hatch behind him, then sat in the pilot’s seat and began to study the controls. He clicked on the nav computer and punched in the longitude and latitude for Alualu, which he knew by heart, then pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and put in the coordinates for his second destination. He put on a headset and turned on the radios. The frequency was already set for the Honolulu tower. Jake was receiving the official FAA ass-chewing of the century, but there wasn’t a word about anyone dropping to the top of a United jet. He had just taken off the headset to settle down for the wait when he heard a scratching sound outside the escape hatch. He opened it and Roberto plopped inside.

63 No Frills

The Sky Priestess was drunk. She and the Sorcerer had made two million dollars in the last ten days and she couldn’t even buy a pair of shoes. The new pilot, Nomura, was a heavily tattooed, taciturn prick who spoke marginal English and looked at her like he’d rape her in a second, not for the pleasure of the violence, but to put her in her place. Since his arrival, even the ninjas had started to get cocky, joking in Japanese and laughing raucously when her back was turned. Even the Shark People seemed to be losing their fear of her. The last time she had appeared to them the children were left in the village. So the Sky Priestess was watching television in a torn T-shirt and some sweatpants and she was drunk.

The intercom beeped and she let it. If it hadn’t run on batteries, she would have unplugged it. Instead, she threw it through the french doors, where it beeped the beach for two more minutes, then stopped. The next time she saw it Sebastian was standing in the door holding it like a prosecutor exhibiting a murder weapon to the jury.

“I suppose you think this is funny.”

“Not particularly. Now if it had hit you in the head, that would be funny.”

“We have an order, Beth. A Kidney.”

“Oh, good. I’m in great shape to assist a surgery. Let’s do both kidneys. Give the buyer a bonus. What do you say?” She sloshed her tumbler of vodka.

Sebastian picked up the empty Absolut bottle from the end table. “This isn’t going to work, Beth. You can’t appear as the Sky Priestess like that.” He seemed more afraid than angry.

“You are absolutely correct, ’Bastian. The goddess has taken the night off.”

Sebastian paced back and forth in front of her, rubbing his chin. “We could stall. We could put you on some oxygen and amphetamines and you could be ready in an hour.”

She laughed. “And ruin this buzz? I don’t think so. Tell them to find another source for this one.”

He shook his head. “I don’t think I can do that. Nomura’s been on the phone with them. He told them we could deliver in six hours.”

She hissed. “Nomura’s a fucking grunt. He does what we say. This is our operation.”

“I’m not so sure, Beth. I really don’t want to tell him no. Please take a shower and make some coffee. I’ll be back in a minute with an oxygen cylinder.”

“No, ’Bastian,” she whined. “I don’t want to spend six hours in a plane with that asshole.”

“You won’t have to, Beth. They’ve requested that we send him alone this time.”

She sat up. “Alone? Who’s going to watch him?” Suddenly she felt very sober.

“No one needs to watch him, Beth. He works for them, remember? You were right. We shouldn’t have gotten a pilot from them.”

An hour and forty minutes after he dropped through the hatch, Tuck started the procedure to power up the 747. He’d never actually flown anything this big—or anything nearly this big—but he had done twenty hours in a simulator in Dallas and only crashed twice. All planes fly the same, he told himself and he started the first engine. Once it had spooled up, he had the power to start the other three. He put on the headset and looked out the side window to make sure he had room to turn the plane and taxi it to the runway. As soon as it started moving, the tower began to chatter, trying first to get him to identify himself, then to stop. Roberto, who was hanging from the straps on the flight officer’s seat beside Tuck, barked twice and let loose a high-pitched squeal.

“You’re cookin’ with gas, buddy,” came over the radio. Jake was close enough to see the big jet.

“Where are you, Jake?”

“Out of the way, buddy, but thanks for using my name on the radio. Just thought you ought to know that you’re going to need fifty-one hundred feet of runway to get that thing off the ground at your destination—and that’s with full flaps, so save your fuel now. You’d better tell them what you’re doing unless you’ve got collision insurance on that thing.”

Tuck keyed the mike button on the steering yoke. “Honolulu Tower, this is United Flight One requesting immediate clearance for emergency takeoff on Runway Two.”

“There’s no such thing as an emergency takeoff,” the controller said. Tuck could tell he was close to losing it.

“Well, Tower, I’m taking off on Two, and if you’ve got anything headed that way, I’d say you’ve got an emergency on your hands, wouldn’t you?”

The tower guy was almost screaming now. “Negative on the clearance! Clearance denied, United jet. Return to the terminal. We have no flight plan for a United Flight One.”

“Tower, United Flight One requesting you chill and be a professional about this. Clear to ten thousand. I am starting my takeoff.”

“Negative, negative. Identify yourself…”

“This is Captain Roberto T. Fruitbat signing off, Honolulu Tower.” Tuck clicked off the radio, pushed the throttles up, and watched the jet exhaust pressure gauges. When they got to 80 percent of maximum thrust, he re-leased the ground brakes and one hundred and seventy thousand pounds of aircraft rolled down the runway and swept into the sky.

At ten thousand feet he began his turn toward Alualu.

The fighters joined him a hundred miles north of Guam. Evidently, they had found out that United did not employ a Captain Fruitbat. One of the F-18 fighters came in close and Tuck waved to him. The pilot signaled for Tuck to put on his headset. Why not?

Tuck assumed they would be broadcasting across a number of frequencies. “Yo, good morning, gents,” Tuck said.

“United 747, change your course and land at Guam Airport or we will force you down.”

Tuck looked out the window at the sidewinder air to air missiles hanging menacingly under the wings of the fighter. “And how, exactly, do you propose to do that, gentlemen?”

“Repeat, change your course and land in Guam immediately or we will force you down.”

“That would be fine,” Tuck said. “Go ahead, force me and my hundred and fifteen passengers down.” Tuck let off the mike button and turned to Roberto. “Okay, you go in the back and pretend to be a hundred and fifteen people.”

As Tuck had calculated, the fighters backed off while they waited for instructions. They were not about to shoot down an American passenger jet without very specific orders, whether it was stolen or not. He believed his biggest advantage was that the FAA and United would insist that no one could steal a 747. That sort of thing just didn’t happen. Nice of them to give him an escort, though. He punched some buttons and the nav computer told him he was only half an hour from Alualu. He started his descent.

He checked the position of the fighters and hit the mike button. “This is the UFO calling the F-18s.”

“Go ahead, United.”

“Are you guys both listening?”

“Go ahead.”

Tuck affected a singsong teasing tone: “Neener, neener, neener, you can’t get me.” Then he locked the microphone in the on position and began singing an off-key version of “Fly Me to the Moon.”

Malink, I hope you built those ladders, he thought.

Malink had been awakened early by the Sorcerer’s jet taking off and he was on his way to the beach for his morning bowel movement when Vincent appeared to him.

“Morning, squirt,” the flyer said.

Malink stopped on the path and fought to catch his breath. “Vincent. I build the ladders.”

“You did good, kid. Now get everyone together—and I mean everyone—and tell them to go to the airstrip. Take the ladders. I’m sending a plane for you.”

Malink shook his head. “You send cargo?”

Vincent laughed. “No, kid, I’m taking the Shark People to the cargo. You’ll need the ladders to get on the plane. Don’t be afraid. Just get everyone.”

“The Sky Priestess has three who have been chosen. One has just come back to the village.”

Vincent looked at his feet. “I’m sorry, kid. You’ll have to leave them. Go now. You don’t have very long. I’ll see you again.” And he disappeared.

64 Deliverance

Beth and Sebastian Curtis were cleaning the operating room and sterilizing

instruments when they first heard the jet.

“That sounds low,” Sebastian said casually.

Then the fighters, running ahead of the 747, passed over the island.

“What in the hell was that?” Beth said. She dropped a pan of instruments and headed for the door.

“Probably just military exercises, Beth,” Sebastian called after her. “It’s nothing to be concerned about.” He was glad to have help cleaning up and didn’t want to lose it. Usually, at this point, she was on the plane heading for Japan.

“’Bastian, come here!” she called. “Something’s up!”

Sebastian shoved the last of the surgical draperies into a canvas bag and hurried outside. The sound of jet engines seemed to be everywhere.

Outside he found Beth staring at some coconut palms. The guards were standing outside their quarters, looking in the same direction. “Look.” Beth pointed to the north.

“What? I don’t see…” Then he saw movement behind the palms and a 747 coming toward the island at entirely too low an angle.

“It’s landing,” Beth said.

Sebastian’s gaze was caught by more movement in his peripheral vision. He looked across the runway. The Shark People were coming out of the jungle. All of the Shark People.

From the 747 the airstrip looked smaller than he had remembered. To conserve runway Tuck wanted to touch down as close to the near end as possible. He pulled full flaps and checked his descent rate. The Shark People were moving toward the plane in a wave. Some of the men carried long ladders.

As all sixteen tires hit the runway, Tuck slammed the levers that reversed the engines and they screamed in protest. Immediately, he hit the ground brakes and watched the brake temperature gauge zoom into the red as the jet screamed toward the ocean at the far end of the runway at a hundred and fifty miles per hour.

“Did you see the ladders?” Roberto said, but this time it was Vincent’s voice coming from the bat. “Ya fuckin’ mook, I told you they were makin’ ladders.”

“You must come,” Malink said. He crouched at the edge of the jungle where the old cannibal was hiding. “Vincent said all of our people must go.”

Sarapul watched as the huge jet slowly turned at the end of the runway. “No. I am too old. This is my home. They don’t want me where you are going.”

“We don’t know where we are going.”

“Your people didn’t want me here. Would they want me in this new place? I will stay.”

Malink looked to the runway. “I have to go now.”

Sarapul waved him off with a bony hand. “Go. You go.” He turned and walked into the jungle.

Malink ran into the open and began shouting orders to the men with the ladders. The Shark People poured onto the runway and surrounded the jet like termites serving their swollen queen.

Beth Curtis saw the first of the doors on the 747 open and immediately recognized Tuck. A tall ladder was thrown against the plane and the Shark People started climbing.

“He’s taking them away!” she screamed.

Sebastian Curtis stood stupefied.

Beth shouted to the guards, “Stop them, you idiots!”

The guards had been spellbound by the landing of the jet as well, but her harpylike scream brought them to action. They were in and out of their quarters in seconds, running toward the airstrip with their Uzis. Beth Curtis ran behind them, screeching like a tortured siren.

All six doors of the 747 were open now, and the Shark People were streaming up the ladders, mothers carrying children, the strongest men helping the old.

The other guards piled up behind Mato while he unlocked the gate. He fumbled with the key, then finally sent it home and pulled the chain from around the bars.

Beth Curtis hit the chain-link and curled her fingers though it like claws as she watched her fortune piling into the plane. “Shoot!” she screamed. “Shoot that son of a bitch!”

The guards had no idea who she meant, but they understood the command to shoot. The first one through the gate pulled up and pointed his Uzi at the crowd of natives waiting to get up the ladder. There was a fat one who seemed to be giving orders. He aimed for the center of his back.

A bullet took the guard high in the chest, knocking him back off his feet. His Uzi clattered on the runway. The other guards pulled up, looking for the source of the shot..

“Kill them all, you fucking cowards!” Beth Curtis yelled. “Shoot!”

The guards crouched to make themselves into smaller targets as they scanned the edge of the jungle for movement.

There was a roar and the guards looked up to see two fighter jets coming in low over the runway. Their decision was made. They ran for the cover of the compound as Beth Curtis screamed at their backs.

She ran out to the dead guard, picked up his Uzi, and pointed it at the

747. A gunshot came from the jungle and a bullet ricocheted off the concrete next to her. She turned the Uzi toward the trees and pulled the trigger. It roared for three seconds, the recoil pulling her sideways as the bullets chopped a pattern in the vegetation like a remotecontrol Cuisinart. She brought the gun back around on the plane and pulled the trigger, but the clip was empty.

She threw the gun to the ground and stood shaking as the last of the ladders was thrown away from the plane and the doors were pulled shut.

65 Down to the Promised Land

Malink joined Tuck on the flight deck and tried to work the flight officer’s harness around his belly as Tuck released the ground brakes and the jet started rolling. The two fighters did another pass overhead, one of the pilots warning Tuck not to attempt to take off.

“You forced me down,” Tuck said into the headset mike. “What more do you guys want?”

He rammed the throttles to maximum. They either had enough runway or they didn’t. What was certain was that he wouldn’t know in time to stop. They were going into the ocean or into the sky and that was that.

The flaps were down for maximum lift, which would use three times as much fuel as a regular takeoff, but that was a problem to deal with once they were in the air. He looked at the ocean ahead, then at the airspeed indicator, then at the ocean ahead—back and forth, waiting, waiting, waiting for the airspeed indicator to reach the point where the plane would lift. He was twenty knots short of takeoff speed when the end of the runway disappeared from view and he started his pull up.

The rear wheels of the great plane grazed the water as it lifted into the air. Tuck heard what he hoped was a cheer coming from the back of the plane, but there was a distinct possibility that he was hearing collective screams of terror. He had just lifted off with three hundred and thirty-two people who had never flown before. Tuck thought of Sepie, who would have started her first plane ride two hours ago.

“Where are we going?” Malink asked.

He was trying to compose himself, but when Tuck looked at him, he saw that the old chief’s eyes were as wide as saucers.

“A place called Costa Rica,” Tuck said. “You ever heard of it?”

Malink shook his head. “Vincent tells you to take us there.”

“No, it was my idea, actually.”

“There is plenty cargo on Costa Rica?”

Couldn’t say, Malink, but the climate is nice and there’s no extradition.”

“That is good?” Malink said, as if he had the slightest idea what extradition was.

Tuck admired the old chief. He was here because his god told him to be here. He had just made a decision that would change the history of an entire population, and he had done it on faith.

Tuck set the autopilot and crawled out of the pilot’s seat. “I’m going back to make sure everyone is strapped in. Don’t touch anything.”

Malink’s eyes went wide again. “Who is flying the plane?”

Tuck winked. “I think you know.” He turned and headed down the steps to check on his passengers.

Pushed to his limit and no little bit frightened, Sebastian Curtis sneaked up on his wife, who was in full tantrum, and injected her in the thigh with a syringe full of Valium. She turned and gave him a good shot to the jaw before she started to calm down. He caught her by the shoulders and backed her into the office chair in front of the computer.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “Nomura is on his way back with the Lear. We’ll be long gone before anyone can get here.”

“How did he do it?” Beth’s voice was weak now, trailing off at the end.

“I don’t know. I’m surprised he’s even alive. We’ll be fine. We have plenty of money. Not as much as we’d hoped, but if we’re careful…”

“He turned them against me,” she said. “My people…” She didn’t finish.

Sebastian stroked her hair. The clinic door opened and Mato came inside carrying his Uzi. “Phone,” he said.

“No,” Sebastian said. “I’ve already called Japan. The Lear is on its way. Now give us some privacy.”

Mato threw the bolt on the Uzi and said something in Japanese. Sebastian didn’t move. Mato dug the barrel of the gun into the doctor’s ribs. “Phone,” he said.

Sebastian picked up the receiver that was connected to the satellite and handed it over.

“Out,” Mato said.

Sebastian helped Beth to her feet. “Come on. We have to do as he says.”

Beth let him lift her to her feet, then she pointed a finger at Mato. “You can kiss your Christmas bonus good-bye, ninja boy. That’s it.”

Sebastian dragged her through the door and helped her across the com-pound to her bungalow. Inside he lay her on the bed. Getting her out of the surgical greens was like trying to undress a rag doll. She babbled inco-herently the whole time, but did not fight him. When he turned to leave the room, two of the guards were standing in the doorway grinning. One of them motioned for him to leave the room. The other stared hungrily at Beth.

“No,” Sebastian said. He stepped into the doorway and pushed aside the barrels of their weapons. They stepped back in unison and raised the Uzis. Sebastian stepped toward them. They took another step back. He was a full foot taller than either of them.

“Get out,” he said and he took another step. They stepped back. “Out. Get out. Or do you want to lose all your fingers?” He’d found the magic words. The people they worked for were notorious for taking the finger joints of those who disobeyed. The guards looked at each other, then backed out the door that led into the compound. One of them hurled a curse in Japanese as he went. Behind them Sebastian saw Mato coming out of the clinic. He marched right for Beth’s bungalow, almost stomping the ground as he walked, his jaw clenched and his weapon held before him. Sebastian closed the door, locked it, and ran to the bedroom.

“Come on, Beth. Get up. We’ve got to get out of here.” She was still conscious, but had no coordination. He picked her up and threw her over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, then went out the french doors onto the lanai and down the steps to the beach.

The warm water seemed to revive her somewhat and he managed to get her to kick as together they made the swim around the minefield.

The fighters veered off after an hour and the 747 was picked up by a B-52 that stayed on them until they were in fighter range of the Americas, where they were joined by two F-16s. Out of Panama, Tuck guessed. What exactly did they think they were going to accomplish? A 747 wasn’t the kind of plane you ditch in the jungle and make your escape. In fact, Tuck didn’t think that any plane was that kind of plane. He certainly wasn’t going to ditch in the jungle or in the water for that matter. Despite his misgivings, they were going to make it to Costa Rica with plenty of fuel. They were well below the plane’s passenger capacity and they carried almost no baggage and no commissary supplies. The only worry he had now was what would happen to him when they got on the ground. It was true, Costa Rica had no extradition treaty with the United States, but what he had done was an act of international terrorism. He might have done better to head back to Hawaii and take his chances with the FBI rather than risk rotting away in a Central American jail. Still, something told him that this was where he should be going. He didn’t know why, really, he had picked Costa Rica, any more than he knew why he had stolen a plane and gone back to Alualu in the first place.

As he started his descent for Palmar Airport on the coast, the B-52 veered off to the north and was soon out of sight. Tuck had turned the radio off hours ago, tired of hearing the same threats and commands from the milit-ary pilots. As much as he hated the idea of giving the authorities a warning, however, he turned on the radio to advise the tower at Palmar that he was coming in. A midair collision might be even worse than a Costa Rican jail. Especially with three hundred and thirty-two lives riding his soul to hell.

He called to the tower, then took off the headset and sat back and relaxed, convinced that for once in his life he had done the right thing. Somehow he would see to it that Sepie got half the money from the Swiss bank ac-counts. He envisioned her in a big house with one bedroom and seventy-two bathrooms with a television in every one. She’d be fine.

Malink, who had gone to the back to reassure his people, came up the steps and climbed into the flight officer’s chair. “We are going down?” he said.

“You’ll like it,” Tuck said. “The weather here is the same as Alualu. There are beaches and jungles just like home.”

They could see the coast now, extending into the distance to the north and south, the rainforest running from beaches to mountains. “This island much bigger than Alualu.”

“It’s not an island.” Tuck realized that Malink had never walked more than a mile without having to turn. “Your people will be fine.”

“Are there sharks here?”

“A lot of sharks,” Tuck said.

Malink nodded “My people will be fine.” He was quiet for a minute, then said, “Will you come with us?”

“I don’t think so, Chief. I’m going to be in a lot of trouble when we land.”

“But didn’t Vincent tell you to do this?”

“Sort of. Why?”

Malink sat back with a self-satisfied smile. “You’ll be fine.”

An alarm went off in the cockpit and Tuck scanned the instruments to see what had gone wrong. The red air collision warning lights were flashing. Tuck scanned the sky for another plane, then, seeing nothing, put on the headset to see if the Palmar tower could tell him what was going on.

Before he could key the mike someone said, “Darlin’, I’ll be whitewashed if stink don’t follow you like a manure wagon in summer.” A familiar, melodic Texas drawl, probably the sweetest sound he had ever heard.

“Mary Jean,” Tuck said. “Where are you?”

“Out your window at eleven o’clock.”

Tuck looked up and saw a brand-new pink Gulfstream running parallel to them.

“If you’d a been wearing your headset, you would have known I was here fifteen minutes ago.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Jake called me from Hawaii and told me what you was doing. We cooked up a little plan. I’m gonna get your tail out of the fire one last time, Tucker Case, but you owe me.”

“Boy, have I heard that before.”

“Do you remember the corporate address in Houston? The number?”

“Sure.”

“Well, you dial that up as a frequency and I’ll give you the skinny. It’s unladylike to broadcast your personal matters over the same frequency the tower’s using.”

They were lying in the jungle near the runway when the Learjet landed. Sebastian left Beth sleeping under some banana leaves and crawled to where he could see. The jet taxied to the gate and stopped with the engines still running. The guards came out of different buildings and converged on the plane. They’d stacked duffel bags near the gate.

“What’s going on?” Beth crawled up behind him. The effects of the Valium were obviously wearing off.

“I think they’re leaving.”

“Not without us, they’re not. I am the Sky Priestess and I won’t allow it.” She started to get up and Sebastian pulled her back down.

“They were coming to kill us, Beth. You were out.”

“Right. If you ever drug me again—”

“You’re insane,” he said.

She reared back to slap him and he caught her hand. “Keep it up, Beth. I’m telling you that if they find us, they’ll kill us. Do you understand that?”

“They’re grunts. I won’t…”

Suddenly there was a huge explosion from across the runway and they turned to see a mushroom of fire rising from where the clinic used to be.

The guards had loaded onto the jet and Nomura was taxiing to the end of the runway.

The guards’ quarters went off next, then the hangar, the barrels of jet fuel throwing a column of flame five hundred feet in the air.

“Where did they get explosives?” Beth said. “Did you know they had explosives?”

“They’re destroying the evidence,” Sebastian said. “Orders from Japan, I’m sure.”

The Learjet started its run for takeoff as Sebastian’s bungalow went off like a fragmentation grenade, followed by Tuck’s old quarters and Beth’s bungalow. Fire rained down across the island.

“My shoes! All of my shoes were in there. You bastards.” Beth pulled away from Sebastian and ran out on the runway just as the Learjet passed.

“You rotten bastards!”

The Sky Priestess stood in the middle of the runway and screamed herself mute as the Lear disappeared into the clouds.

66 If They’d Only Had Her at the Alamo

Mary Jean brought the pink Gulfstream in right on the tail of the 747. Tuck kept the speed over eighty in the taxi, turning it away from the terminal, where police jeeps and a hundred men in riot gear waited. He also noticed a half-dozen TV news trucks there as well.

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Costa Rica, the new home of the Shark People. The temperature outside is 85 degrees and it’s clear that things are going to get ugly. I hope everybody’s ready.”

The police jeeps were speeding across the tarmac toward the two jets. Mary Jean turned the Gulfstream so that it was facing back toward the runway.

Tuck turned to Malink. “Where’s Roberto?”

Malink pointed up. Roberto hung from the handle of the emergency hatch. There was a spring-loaded spool of steel cable attached to the ceiling next to the hatch. “Mary Jean, you ready?”

“Sweetheart, we’d better git while the gitten’s good. We stirred a hornet’s nest out here.”

Tuck grabbed Roberto and stuffed him inside his shirt. “Stay,” he said. Then he opened the hatch and looked back at Malink. “I have to go now.”

Malink took Tuck in his big arms and squeezed until the bat screamed. “You will come back.”

“If you say so, Chief.” Tuck flipped the intercom switch and picked up the headset. “Go!” he said and climbed up into the hatch.

The six doors on the 747 all sprung open at once and the yellow emergency slides inflated and extended to the ground as if the jet was a huge insect suddenly growing legs. The Shark People piled

down the emergency slides and Mary Jean spooled up the Gulfstream for takeoff.

Tuck climbed onto the roof and reached back into the hatch for the loop of nylon webbing that attached to the spool of cable. The police jeeps were pulling up on the sides of the two jets; men with rifles stood in the back trying to figure out what they should be shooting at. The Shark People crowded in between the jets, making a human corridor. Tuck took a deep breath and leaped off the top of the jumbo jet. The spring-loaded coil of cable did exactly what Boeing had designed it to do: It lowered the pilot safely to the ground from four stories up. Once on the ground, Tuck ran under the cover of the Shark People and leaped into the open door of the Gulfstream. “Go!” he yelled.

The Shark People scrambled away and Mary Jean released the ground brakes. The jet shot forward. Tuck slammed the door and got to the cockpit just as a jeep swerved out of the jet’s path and flipped over.

“Don’t try to play chicken with me, snotnose,” Mary Jean said grimly. “I knew James Dean his own self.”

“Think they’ll let you get this thing in the air?”

“I’d like to see ’em try to stop me.”

The police jeeps seemed to part for the jet as it headed back to the runway. For all the guns there, no one seemed interested in firing a shot. Tuck looked back and saw the Shark People waving as Mary Jean made her takeoff run.

When they were airborne, she said, “Tucker Case, when you make a turnaround, boy, you don’t do it half-twiddle, do you?”

Tuck laughed. “Did you really know James Dean?”

“Sounded good, didn’t it?” She turned to him. Not surprisingly, her makeup was done perfectly to complement her outfit and the Gulfstream’s headset. She let out a little yelp. “Tucker, there’s a varmint in your shirt.”

“That’s Roberto,” Tuck said. “He no like the light.”

“Darlin’, if I had a face like that, I’d gravitate toward dim and unlit territories myself. Remind me to give your friend a sample of our new depilatory.”

“What was that all about back there?” Tuck asked.

“Heroics, son. I told you on the phone, I believe in redemption and I thought it was time I practiced what I preached. Were they really selling those poor heathens’ organs?”

“Beg your pardon, Mary Jean, I really do appreciate the rescue, but don’t bullshit me. Any one of those cops could have shot out the tires of this plane and we’d still be on the ground.”

She smiled, a knowing smile with a hint of mischief, the Mona Lisa in a big blond wig. “Media event, son. You’d be surprised how far a little palm grease goes in the Third World. Why, I couldn’t buy the media coverage my company’s going to get on this with a year’s profits. And of course you’re going to reimburse me for the bribes. Jake says you’ll be able to. The tax boys frown on taking bribes. as a deduction. Although we could take it as advertising expense. Never mind, you don’t owe me nothing.”

“So that’s the only reason you did it, the media coverage?”

“I was shabby to you, Tucker. Not that you didn’t deserve it, but I wasn’t feeling so good about myself for doing it. I aways kinda looked at you like my wayward little lamb. Course, I’m from cattle folk.”

Tuck smiled. “Whatever. Where are we going?”

“Little place of mine in the Cayman Islands. Jake’s going to meet us there with your little friend.”

67 The Cannibal Tree Revisited

The Sky Priestess awoke with a terrible pain in her head. She couldn’t feel her arms or legs, and something was cutting her between her breasts. She and the Sorcerer had been living in the deserted village for two weeks. The last thing she could remember was the Sorcerer going into the dark for more firewood and hearing a thud. When he didn’t answer her call, she had gone to look for him.

She opened her eyes and blinked to clear her vision. The world seemed to be spinning and for a second all she could see was a green blur that was the jungle. Then things popped into focus. She was slowly turning at the end of a coconut fiber rope, suspended six feet above the ground. The harness was digging in between her breasts and cutting off the circulation to her limbs. She lifted her head and saw an ancient native tending a long earthen oven that was spouting smoke from either end. The Sorcerer’s clothes were piled nearby.

The old native looked up and ambled over to her on spindly legs. There were chicken feathers stuck in his hair and his eyes had a rheumy yellow cast to them.

He grinned at her with teeth that looked as if they had been filed to points, then reached up and pinched her cheek. “Yum,” he said.