Island of the Sequined Love Nun

mom. Like the time, drunk and full of himself, he'd hit on Mary Jean Dobbins.
    To hell with solid food. Gin-in large quantities over a tall column of ice-that's the rub. Tonic to chase away the blues of bad dreams and men lost at sea.
    Tuck looked around the room. It was a small hospital ward. Only four beds, but amazingly clean considering where it was. And there was some pretty serious-looking equipment against the walls: technical stuff on casters, stuff you might use in complicated surgery or to set the timing on a Toyota. He was sure Jake Skye would know what it was. He thought about the Learjet, then felt himself starting to doze.
    Sleep came with the face of a cannibal, leg-jerk dreams, and finally settled in on the oiled breasts of a brown girl brushing against his face and smelling of coconut and flowers. There was a scratch and scuttle on the tin roof, followed by the bark of a fruit bat. Tuck didn't hear it.

    The pig thief had been caught and Jefferson Pardee had to find a new lead story. He sat at his desk poring over the notes he'd written on a yellow legal pad, hoping that something would jump out at him. In fact, there wasn't a lot of jumping material there. The notes read: "They caught the pig thief. Now what?"
    You could run down the leads, pound the pavement, check all your facts with two sources, then structure your meticulously gathered information into the inverted pyramid form and what you got was: The pig's owner had gotten drunk and beat up his wife, so she sold his pig to someone on the outer islands and bought a used stun gun from an ensign with the Navy Cat team. The next time her husband got rough, a group of Japanese tourists found him by the side of the road, sizzling in the dirt like a strip of frying bacon. Mistaking him for a street performer, the tourists clapped joyously, took pictures of each other standing beside the electrocuted man, and gave his wife five dollars. The whole intrigue had been exposed when police found the pig-stealing wife in front of the Continental Hotel charging tourists a dollar apiece to watch her zap her husband's twitching supine body. The stun gun was confiscated, no charges were pressed, and the wife beater was pronounced unharmed by a Peace Corps volunteer, although he did need to be reminded several times of his name, where he lived, and how many children he had.
    The mystery was solved and the Truk Star had no lead story. Jefferson Pardee was miserable. He was actually going to have to go out and find a story or, as he had done so many times before, make one up. The Micro Spirit was in port. Maybe he'd go down to the dock and see if he could stir up some news out of the crew. He slid his press card into the band of his Australian bush hat and waddled out the door and down the dusty street to the pier where rock-hard, rope-muscled islanders were loading fifty-five-gallon drums into cargo nets and hoisting them into the holds of the Micro Spirit.
    The Micro Spirit and the Micro Trader were sister ships: small freighters that cruised the Micronesian crescent carrying cargo and passengers to the outer islands. There were no cabins other than those of the captain and crew. Passengers traveled and slept on the deck.
    Pardee waved to the first mate, a heavily tattooed Tongan who stood at the rail chewing betel nut and spitting gooey red comets over the side.
    "Ahoy!" Pardee called. "Permission to come aboard."
    The mate shook his head. "Not until we finish loading this jet fuel. I'll come down. How you doing, Scoop?"
    Pardee had convinced the crew of the Micro Spirit to call him "Scoop" one drunken night in the Yumi Bar. He watched the mate vault over the railing at the bow and monkey down a mooring line to the dock with no more effort than if he was walking down stairs. Watching him made Pardee sad that he was a fat man.
    The mate strolled up to Pardee and pumped his hand. "Good to see you."
    "Likewise," Pardee said. "Where you guys in from?"
    "We bring chiefs in from Wolei for a conference. Pick up some tuna and copra. Same, same."
    Pardee looked back at the sailors loading the barrels. "Did you say jet fuel? I thought the Mobil tankers handled all the fuel for Continental." Continental was the only major airline that flew Micronesia.
    "Mobil tankers won't go to Alualu. No lagoon, no harbor. We going to Ulithi, then take this fuel special order to the doctor on Alualu."
    Pardee took a moment to digest the information. "I thought the Micro Trader did Yap