Christopher Moore - Island of the Sequined Love Nun

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…”

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.”

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?”