Christopher Moore - Island of the Sequined Love Nun

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

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

“Just back off, Odd Job!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why not? It’s your island.”

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

“Yeah, I kinda figured that.”

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

“Funding for what, Doc?”

“Research.”

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

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