Island of the Sequined Love Nun

Chapter 46~48

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.

***