Christopher Moore - Island of the Sequined Love Nun

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.”

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.

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?