Island of the Sequined Love Nun

enjoyed a brief romance, which was put on hold when Tuck's father sent him off to college in Texas so he could learn to make decisions and someday take over the family business. His motivation excised by the job guarantee, Tuck made passing grades until his college career was cut short by an emergency call from his mother. "Come home. Your father's dead."
    Tuck made the drive in two days, stopping only for gas, to use the bathroom, and to call Zoophilia, who informed him that his mother had married his father's brother and his uncle had taken over Denmark Silverware. Tuck screeched into Elsinore in a blind rage and ran over Zoophilia's father as he was leaving Tuck's mother's house.
    The death was declared an accident, but during the investigation a policeman informed Tuck that although he had no proof, he suspected that the riding accident that killed Tuck's father might not have been an accident, especially since Tuck's father had been allergic to horses. Tuck was sure that his uncle had set the whole thing up, but he couldn't bring himself to confront his mother or her new husband.
    In the meantime, Zoophilia, stricken with grief over her father's death, overdosed on Prozac and drowned in her hot tub, and her brother, who had been away at college also, returned promising to kill Tucker or at least sue him into oblivion for the deaths of his father and sister. While trying to come to a decision on a course of action, Tucker met a brace of Texas brunettes in a Pacific Beach bar who insisted he ride back with them to the Lone Star state.
    Disinherited, depressed, and clueless, Tucker took the ride as far as a small suburban airport outside of Houston, where the girls asked him if he'd ever been nude skydiving. At that point, not really caring if he lived or died, he crawled into the back of a Beechcraft with them.
    They left him scraped, bruised, and stranded on the tarmac in a jockstrap and a parachute harness, shivering with adrenaline. Jake Skye found him wandering around the hangars wearing the parachute canopy as a toga. It had been a tough year.
    "Let me guess," Jake said. "Margie and Randy Sue?"
    "Yeah," Tucker said. "How'd you know?"
    "They do it all the time. Daddies with money-Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Petroleum. Hope you didn't cut up that canopy. You can get a grand for it used."
    "They're gone, then?"
    "An hour ago. Said something about going to London. Where are your clothes?"
    "In their car."
    "Come with me."
    Jake gave Tucker a job washing airplanes, then taught him to fly a Cessna 172 and enrolled him in flight school. Tucker got his twin-engine hours in six months, helping Jake ferry Texas businessmen around the state in a leased Beech Duke. Jake turned the flying over to Tuck as soon as he passed his 135 commercial certification.
    "I can fly anything," Jake said, "but unless it's helicopters, I'd rather wrench. Only steady gig in choppers is flying oil rigs in the Gulf. Had too many friends tip off into the drink. You fly, I'll do the maintenance, we split the cash."
    Another six months and Jake was offered a job by the Mary Jean Cosmetics Corporation. Jake took the job on the condition that Tucker could copilot until he had his Lear hours (he described Tuck as a "little lost lamb" and the makeup magnate relented). Mary Jean did her own flying, but once Tucker was qualified, she turned the controls over to him full-time. "Some members of the board have pointed out that my time would be better spent taking care of business instead of flying. Besides, it's not ladylike. How'd you like a job?"
    Luck. The training he'd received would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and he'd gotten most of it for free. He had become a new person, and it had all started with a bizarre streak of bad luck followed by an opportunity and Jake Skye's intervention. Maybe it would work out for the better this time too. At least this time no one had been killed.

9 – Cult of the Autopilot: A
    History Lesson
    The pilot said, "The local time is 9:00 AM. The temperature is 90 degrees. Thank you for flying Continental and enjoy your stay in Truk." Then he laughed menacingly.
    Tuck stepped out of the plane and felt the palpable weight of the air in his lungs. It smelled green, fecund, as if vegetation was growing, dying, rotting, and giving off a gas too thick to breathe. He followed a line of passengers to the terminal, a long, low, cinderblock building-nothing more really than a tin roof on pillars-teeming with