Christopher Moore - Island of the Sequined Love Nun

“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.”

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.