Island of the Sequined Love Nun

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 alcohol 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