54

Selling Tucker

The Sky Priestess threw the straw hat across the room, then tore at the high-buttoned collar of the white dress. She was losing him. She hated that more than anything: losing control. She ripped the dress down the front and wrestled out of it.

She stormed across the room, the dress still trailing from one foot, and pulled a bottle of vodka from the freezer. She poured herself a tumbler and drank half of it off while still holding the bottle, then refilled the glass while her temples throbbed with the cold. She carried the bottle and glass to a chair in front of the television, sat down, and turned it on. Nothing but static and snow. Sebastian was using the satellite dish. She threw the vodka bottle at the screen, but missed and it bounced off the case, taking a small chip out of the plastic.

"Fuck!" She keyed the intercom next to her chair. "'Bastian! Dammit!"

"Yes, my sweet." His voice was calm and oily.

"What the fuck are you doing? I want to watch TV."

"I'm just finishing up, sweetheart."

"We need to talk." She tossed back another slug of vodka.

"Yes, we do. I'll be up in a moment."

"Bring some vodka from your house."

"As you wish."

Ten minutes later the Sorcerer walked into her bungalow, the picture of the patrician physician. He handed her the vodka and sat down across from her. "Pour me one, would you, darling?"

Before she could catch herself, she'd gotten up and fetched him a glass from the kitchen. She handed it to him along with the bottle.

"Your dress is torn, dear."

"No shit."

"I like the look," the Sorcerer said, "although I'd have preferred to tear it off you myself."

"Not now. I think we have trouble."

The Sorcerer smiled. "We did, but as of tonight at midnight, our troubles are over. How was your walk this morning, by the way?"

"I took Case to see the shark hunt. I thought it would keep him from getting island fever, something different to break the boredom."

"As opposed to fucking him."

She wasn't going to show any surprise, not after he'd laid a trap like that. "No, in addition to fucking him. It was a mistake."

"The shark hunt or the fucking?"

She bristled, "The shark hunt. The fucking was fine. He saw the boy whose corneas we harvested."

"So."

"He freaked. I shouldn't have let him connect the people with the procedure."

"But I thought you could handle him."

He was enjoying this entirely too much for her taste. "Don't be smug, 'Bastian. What are you going to do, lock him in the back room of the clinic? We need him."

"No, we don't. I've hired a new pilot. A Japanese."

"I thought we'd agreed that..."

"It hasn't worked using Americans, has it? He starts tonight."

"How?"

"You're going to go pick him up. The corporation assures me that he's the best, and he won't ask questions."

"I'm going to pick him up?"

"We have a heart-lung order. You and Mr. Case need to deliver it."

"I can't do it, 'Bastian. I can't do a performance and a heart-lung tonight. I'm too jangled."

"You don't have to do either, dear. We don't have to do the surgery. We'll make less money on it, but we only have to deliver the donor."

"But what about doing the choosing?"

"You've done that already. You chose when you went to bed with our intrepid Mr. Case. The heart-lung donor is Tucker Case."

Tuck needed a drink. He looked around the bungalow, hoping that someone had left a stray bottle of vanilla extract or aftershave that might go well with a slice of mango. Mangoes he had, but anything containing ethyl alco-hol was not to be found. It would be hours before darkness could cover his escape to the drinking circle, where he intended to get gloriously hammered if he could look any of the Shark People in the eye and keep his stomach. Sorry, you guys. Just had to take the edge off of the guilt of blinding a child to get my own airplane.

He tried to distract himself by reading, but the moral certainties of the literary spy guys only served to make him feel worse. Television was no help either. Some sort of Balinese shadow puppet show and Filipino news special on how swell it was to make American semiconductors for three bucks a day. He punched the remote to off and tossed it across the room.

Frustration leaped out in a string of curses, followed by "All right, Mr. Ghost Pilot, where in the hell are you now?"

And there was a knock on the door.

"Kidding," Tuck said. "I was kidding."

"Tucker, can I come in?" Beth Curtis said.

"It's open." It was always open. There was no lock on it.

He looked away as she entered, afraid that, like the face of the Medusa, she might turn him to stone - or at least that part of him unaffected by conscience. She came up behind him and began kneading the muscles in his shoulders. He did not look back at her and still had no idea if she might be naked or wearing a clown suit.

"You're upset. I understand. But it's not what you think."

"There's not a lot of room for misinterpretation."

"Isn't there? What if I told you that that boy was blind from birth. His corneas were healthy, but he was born with atrophied optic nerves."

"I feel much better, thanks. Kid wasn't using his eyes, so we ripped them out."

He felt her nails dig into his trapezius muscles. "Ripped out is hardly appropriate. It's a very delicate operation. And because we did it, another child is able to see. You seem to be missing that aspect of what we're doing here. Every time we deliver a kidney, we're saving a life."

She was right. He hadn't thought about that. "I just fly the plane," he said.

"And take the money. You could have this same job back in the States. You could be flying the organs of accident victims on Life Flight jets and accomplishing the same thing, except you wouldn't be making enough to pay the taxes on what you make here, right?"

No, not exactly, he thought. Back in the States, he couldn't fly anything but a hang glider without his license. "I guess so," he said. "But you could have told me what you were doing."

"And have you thinking about the little blind kid at five hundred miles per hour. I don't think so." She bent over and kissed his earlobe lightly. "I'm not a monster, Tuck. I was a little girl once, with a mother and a father and a cat named Cupcake. I don't blind little kids."

Finally he turned in the chair to face her and was grateful to see that she was wearing one of her conservative Donna Reed dresses. "What happened to you, Beth? How in the hell do you get from 'Here, Cupcake' to the Murdering Bitch Goddess of the Shark People?" He immediately regretted saying it. Not because it wasn't true, but because he'd given away the fact that he knew it was. He braced himself for the rage.

She moved to the couch and sat down across from him. Then she curled into a ball, her face against the cushions, and covered her eyes. He said nothing. He just watched as her body quaked with silent sobs. He hoped this wasn't an act. He hoped that she was so offended that she would take his murder accusation for hyperbole.

Five full minutes passed before she looked up. Her eyes were red and she'd managed to smear mascara across one cheek. "It's your fault," she said.

Tuck nodded and tried not to let a smile cross his lips. She was playing another part, and she didn't do the victim nearly as well as she did the seduction queen. He said, "I'm sorry, Beth. I was out of line."

She seemed surprised and broke character. Evidently, he'd stepped on her line, the one she'd been thinking of while pretending to cry. A second for composure and she was back at it. "It's your fault. I only wanted to have a friend, not a lover. All men are that way."

"Then you must not have gotten the newsletter: 'Men Are Pigs.' Next issue is 'Water Is Wet.' Don't miss it."

She fell out of character again. "What are you saying?"

"You might have been a victim once, but now that's just a distant memory you use to rationalize what you do now. You use men because you can. I can't figure out what happened in San Francisco, though. A woman who looks like you should have been able to find an easier way to fuck her way to a fortune. The doc must have been a cakewalk for you."

"And you weren't?"

Tuck felt as if someone had injected him with a truth serum that was lighting up his mind, and not with revelations about Beth Curtis. The light was shining on him.

"Yeah, I guess I was a cakewalk. So what? Did you think for a minute that you might try not to go to bed with me?

"Other than when I found out that you'd almost torn your balls off, not for a minute." She was gritting her teeth.

"And how big a task do you think you took on? It's not like you were corrupting me or anything. I've been on the other end of the game for years. I know you, Beth. I am you."

"You don't know anything." She was visibly trying not to scream, but Tuck could see the blood rising in her face.

He pushed on. "Freud says I'm this way because I was never hugged as a child. What's your excuse?"

"Don't be smug. I could have you right now if I wanted." As if to prove her point, she placed her feet at either end of the coffee table and began to pull up her dress. She wore white stockings and nothing else underneath.

"Not interested," Tuck said. "Been there, done that."

"You're so transparent," she said. She crawled over the table and did a languid cat stretch as she ran her hands up the inside of his thighs. By the time her hands got to his belt buckle, she was face-to-face with him, almost touching noses. Tuck could smell the alcohol on her breath. She flicked her tongue on his lips. He just looked in her eyes, as cold and blue as crystal, like his own. She wasn't fooling anyone, and in realizing that, Tuck realized that he also had never fooled anybody. Every Mary Jean lady, every bar bimbo, every secretary, flight attendant, or girl at the grocery store had seen him coming and let him come.

Beth unzipped his pants and took him in her hand, her face still only a millimeter from his, their eyes locked. "Your armor seems to have a weak spot, tough guy."

"Nope," Tuck said.

She slid down to the floor and took him into her mouth. Tuck suppressed a gasp. He watched her head moving on him. To keep himself from touching her he grabbed the arms of the chair and the wicker creaked as if it was being punished.

"That's a pretty convincing argument," said the male voice. Tuck looked up to see Vincent sitting on the couch where Beth had been a minute ago.

"Jesus!" Tuck said. Beth let out a muffled moan and dug her nails into his ass.

"Wrong!" Vincent said. "But never play cards with that guy." The flyer was smoking a cigarette, but Tuck couldn't smell it. "Oh, don't worry. She can't hear me. Can't see me either, not that she's looking or anything."

Tuck just shook his head and pushed up on the arms of the chair. Beth took his movement for enthusiasm and paused to look up at him. Tuck met her gaze with eyes the size of golf balls. She smiled, her lipstick a bit worse for the wear, a string of saliva trailed from her lips. "Just enjoy. You lost. Losers flourish here." She licked her lips and returned to her task.

"Dame makes a point," Vincent said. "I give you three to one she brings you around to her way of thinking. Whatta ya say?"

"No." Tuck waved the flyer off and shut his eyes.

"Oh, yes," Beth said, as if speaking into the microphone.

Vincent flicked his cigarette butt out the window. "I'm not distracting you, am I? I just dropped in to take up on the dame's side, as she is unable to speak for herself at present."

Tuck was experiencing the worst case of bed spins he'd ever had - in a chair. Sexual vertigo.

"Of course," Vincent continued, "this is kinda turning into a religious experience for you, ain't it? Go with what you know, right? You let her run the show, you got no decisions to make and no worries ever after. Not a worry in the world. You got my word on that. Although, if it was me, I'd check out her story just to be safe. Look in the doc's computer maybe."

Beth was working her mouth and hands like she was pumping water on an inner fire that was consuming her with each second that passed. Tuck heard his own breath rise to a pant and the wicker chair crackle and creak and skid on the wooden floor. He was helping her now, wanting her to quench that flame and that was all there was.

"You think about it," Vincent said. "You'll do the right thing. You owe me, remember." He faded and disappeared.

"What does that mean?" Tuck said, then he moaned, arched his back, and came so hard he thought he would pass out, but she kept on and on until he couldn't stand the intensity and had to push her away. She landed on the floor at his feet and looked up like an angry she-cat.

"You're mine," she said. She was still breathing hard and her dress was still up around her waist. "We're friends."

It came out like a command, but Tuck heard a note of desperation below the panting and the ire, and he felt a wrenching pain in his chest like nothing he'd ever felt before. "I know you, Beth. I am you," he said. But not anymore, he thought. He said, "Yes, we're friends."

She smiled like a little girl who'd been given a pony for her birthday. "I knew it," she said. She climbed to her feet and smoothed down her skirt, then bent and kissed him on the eyebrow. He tried to smile.

She said, "I'll see you in a few hours. We're flying out at nine. I have to go see to Sebastian."

Tuck zipped up his pants. "And get ready for your performance?" he said.

"No, this isn't a medical flight. Just supplies."

Tuck nodded. "Beth, was that little boy blind from birth?"

"Of course," she said, looking offended. She was more convincing as the Sky Priestess.

"You go see to Sebastian," Tuck said.

After she had left, Tuck looked at the ceiling and said, "Vincent, just in case you're listening, I'm not buying your bullshit. If you want to help me, fine. But if not, stay out of my way."

55

Pay No Attention to That Man Behind the Computer

Tuck went into the bathroom and washed his face, then combed his hair. He studied his face in the mirror, looking for that scary glint that he'd seen in Beth Curtis's eyes. He wasn't her. He wasn't as smart as she was, but he wasn't as crazy either. He cringed with the realization that he had spent most of his adult life being a jerk or a patsy and sometimes both simultan-eously. And it was no small irony to have had an epiphany during a blow job. Vincent, whatever he was, had been playing some kind of game from the beginning, mixing lies and truth, helping him only to get him into trouble. There was no grand bailout coming, and if he was going to find out what was really being planned for him, he had to get into the computer.

The best time to sneak into the clinic was right now, in broad daylight. He hadn't seen any of the guards all day and Beth was "seeing to Sebastian." If he got caught, he'd simply say he was trying to get the weather for to-night's flight. If the doc could e-mail and fax all over the world, then surely he would have access to weather services. It didn't matter; he didn't think he'd have a hard time convincing the doc that he was just being stupid. His entire life had set up the cover.

He grabbed some paper and a pencil from the nightstand and stuffed them into his back pocket. While he was in there, he might as well see if he could pick up the coordinates for Okinawa. If he could sneak them into the nav computer on the Lear, he might just be able to get the military to force the jet down there. He didn't have a chance in hell of getting there on his own navigational skills.

He stepped out on the lanai and gave a sidelong glance to the guards' quarters to make sure no one was just inside the door watching his bungalow. Satisfied, he walked to the clinic and tried the door. It was unlocked.

He checked the compound again, saw nothing, and slipped into the clinic. He was immediately met by the sound of voices coming from the back room. Male voices, speaking Japanese. He tiptoed through the door that led into the operating room and opened it a crack. The door to the far side was open. He could see all the ninjas gathered around one of the hos-pital beds playing cards. It was visiting day for Stripe. He palmed the door shut and went to the computer.

There had been a time when Tuck was so ignorant of computers that he thought a mouse pad was Disney's brand of sanitary napkin, but that was before he met Jake Skye. Jake had taught him how to access the weather maps, charts, and how to file his flight plans through the computer. In the process Tuck had also learned what Jake considered the most important computer skill, how to hack into someone else's stuff.

The three CRTs were all on, two green over black and one color. Tuck focused on the color screen. It was friendlier and it was displaying a screen saver he recognized, a slide show of dolphins. He moved the mouse and the familiar Windows screen appeared. There was a cheer from the back room and Tuck nearly drove the mouse off the top of the desk. Must have been a good hand.

He expected to see obscure medical programs, something he'd never figure out, but it looked like the doc used the same stuff everyone in the States did. Tuck clicked on the database icon and the program jumped to fill the screen. He opened a file menu; there were only two. One was named SUPPLIES, the other TT. Tissue types? He clicked it. The ENTER PASSWORD field opened. "Shit."

Jake had always told him that people used obvious passwords if you knew the people. Something they wouldn't forget. Put yourself in their place, you'll figure out their passwords, and don't eliminate the possibility that it may be written on a Post-it note stuck to the computer. Tuck looked for Post-it notes, then open the desk drawers and riffled through the papers for anything that looked like a password. He pushed out the chair and looked under the desk. Bingo! There were two long numbers written on tape on the bottom of the desk drawer. He pulled the paper and pencil from his pocket and copied them down, then entered the first one in the password field.

was the response

Tuck typed in the second number.


Look for the obvious. Tuck typed SKY PRIESTESS.


The guards were laughing in the other room. Tuck typed in VINCENT.


DOCTOR.


It would be something that the doc would be sitting here thinking about. It would be on his mind.

Tuck typed BETH.


BETHS TITS.

Wait a minute. This was the doc thinking. He typed BETHS BREASTS.

The file scrolled open, filling the screen with a list of names down the left side followed by rows and columns of letters and numbers. All of the names Tuck could see were native. Across the top were five columns that must be the tissue types and blood types, next to those, kidney, liver, heart, lung, cornea, and pancreas. Christ, it was an inventory sheet. And the heart, lung, liver, and pancreas categories convinced him once and for all that there was no benevolent intention behind the Curtises' plan. They were going to the meat market with the Shark People until the village was empty.

Tuck typed in SEPIE in the FIND field. An X had been placed in all the organ categories except kidney. There he found an H and a date. H? Har-vested. The date was the day they harvested it.

He typed in PARDEE, JEFFERSON. No "x's" in any of the columns, but two H's under heart and lungs. Of course the other organs weren't marked. They'd been donated to the sharks and were no longer available. There was nothing under SOMMERS, JAMES. That too made sense. How would they get the organs to Japan without a pilot. Tuck wished he'd gotten the little blind boy's name. He couldn't take the time to scroll though all three hundred or so names looking for missing corneas. He typed in CASE, TUCKER. There were H's marked under the heart and lung category. The harvest date was today.

"You fuckers," he said. There was a shuffling in the back room and he stood so quickly the chair rolled back and banged into a cabinet on the other side of the office. The database was still up on

the screen. Tuck reached out and punched the button on the monitor. It

clicked off as Mato came through the door.

"What are you guys doing here?" Tuck said.

Mato pulled up. He seemed confused. He was supposed to be doing the yelling.

"We're flying tonight," Tuck said. "Do you guys have the plane fueled up?"

Mato shook his head. "Then get on it. I wondered where you were."

Mato just looked at him.

"Go!" Tuck said. "Now!"

Mato started to slink toward the door, obviously not comfortable with leaving Tuck in the clinic. Another guard came into the office and when Mato looked up, Tuck snatched his paper and pencil from the desk. He dropped the pencil and when he bent to pick it up, he hit the main power switch on the computer. The computer would reboot when turned on and the doctor would only know that it had been turned off. He'd never suspect that someone had been into the donor files.

"Let's go, you guys."

Tuck pushed past Mato out the office door, shoving the paper in his pocket as he went.

Tuck made quite a show of the preflight on the Lear, demanding three times that the guard with access to the key to the main power cutoff turn it on so he could check out the plane. The guard wasn't buying it. He walked away from Tuck snickering. Tuck checked under the instrument panel. Maybe there would be some obvious way to hot-wire the switch. He'd been lucky with the computer. The switch and all the wires leading into it were covered by a steel case. He couldn't get into it with a blowtorch, and frankly, he had no idea which wires did what. It probably wasn't even a simple switch, but a relay that lead to another switch. There'd be no way to wire around it.

He left the hangar and went back to his bungalow. Unless he found some way to get off the island, he was going to be short a couple of lungs and a heart come midnight. Beth would have at least one guard on the plane with her, probably two, given the circumstances. And he had no doubt that she'd shoot him in the crotch and

make him fly to Japan anyway. There had to be another way. Like a boat. Kimi's boat. Didn't these guys travel thousands of miles over the Pacific in canoes like that? What could the doc do? He'd been so careful about safeguarding the island that the guards didn't even have a boat to chase him with.

Tuck put on his shorts and took his fins and mask to the bathroom. He knotted the ends of his trouser legs and started filling them with supplies. A shirt, a light jacket, some disinfectant, sunscreen, a short kitchen knife. He found a small jar of sugar in the kitchen, dumped the sugar into the sink, and filled the jar with matches and Band-Aids. When he was ready to seal it, he saw the slip of paper he'd written on in the office sticking from the pocket of the trousers and shoved it into the jar as an afterthought. He topped off the pants bag with a pair of sneakers, then pulled the webbed belt tight to cinch it all up. He could swim with the pants legs like water wings. The wet clothing would get heavy, but not until he hit the beach on the far side of the minefield. To Tuck's way of thinking, once he was past the minefield he was halfway there. Then all he had to do was convince the old cannibal to give him the canoe, enough food and water to get somewhere, and Kimi to navigate. Where in the hell would they go? Yap? Guam?

One step at a time. First he had to get out of the compound. He checked the guards' positions. Leaning out the window, he could see three - no, four - at the hangar. He waited. He'd never tried to make the swim while it was still light. They'd be able to see him in the water from as far away as the runway. He just had to hope that they didn't look in that direction.

The guards were rolling barrels into the hangar to hand-pump the jet fuel into the Lear. Two on each barrel, four out in the compound, bingo. One guy had to be in the hangar cranking the pump. And Stripe was in the clinic. Showtime!

Tuck went into the bathroom, lifted the hatch, threw down the pants bag and his swimming stuff, and followed it through.

He weighed sneaking against running, stealth against speed, and decided to go like a newborn turtle for the water. The only people who might see him were the Doc and Beth, and they were probably in the process of pushing the twin beds together and doing the Ozzie and Harriet double-skin sweat slap - or whatever sort of weird shit they did. He hoped it was painful.

He broke into a dead run across the gravel, feeling the coral dig at his feet and the ferns whip at his ankles but keeping his focus on

the beach. As he passed the clinic, he thought he saw some movement out of the corner of his eye, but he didn't turn. He was Carl Lewis, Michael Johnson, and Edwin Moses (except he was white and slow), a single head turn could cause him to lose his stride and the race - and boy, does that beach seem farther when you're running than when you're sneaking. He almost tumbled when he hit the sand, but managed a controlled forward stumble that put him face-first in four inches of water. The baby turtle had made it to the water, but now he faced a whole new set of dangers at sea, not the least of which was trying to swim with a pair of stuffed khakis around his neck.

He kicked a few feet out into the water, put on his fins and mask, and began the swim.

He'd been furious from the moment he heard the pilot's voice in the clinic and he had fought the cloud of painkillers and the pressure in his head to get to him. Yamata watched the pilot stumble into the water before he tried shouting for the others. The shout came out little more than a grunt through his wired jaw, and his crushed sinuses allowed little sound to pass through his nose. His gun was in the guards' quarters, the others were at the hangar, and his hated enemy was escaping. He decided to go for his gun. The others might want to take the pilot alive.