Island of the Sequined Love Nun

Case.
    I am scum. I should have told them to shove it.
    But they might have killed you.
    Yeah, but I would have at least had my integrity.
    Your what? Get real.
    But I'm scum.
    Big deal. You've been scum before. You've never owned a Learjet before.
    You actually think they'll give me the jet?
    It could happen. Stranger things have happened.
    But I should do something about this.
    Why? You've never done anything before.
    Well, maybe it's time.
    No way. Take the jet.
    I'm scum.
    Well, yes, you are. But you're rich scum.
    I can live with that.

    The dog tags and Jefferson Pardee's notebook lay on the coffee table, threatening to set off another fusillade of doubt and condemnation. Tuck lay back on the rattan couch and turned on the television to escape the noise in his mind. Skinny Asian guys were beating the snot out of each other in a kickboxing match from the Philippines The Malaysian channel was showing how to fillet a schnauzer. The cooking show reminded him of surgery, and surgery reminded him that there was a beautiful island girl Lying in the clinic, recovering from an unnecessary major surgery that he could have prevented. Definitely kickboxing.
    He was just getting into the rhythm of the violence when the bat came through the window and made an awkward swinging landing on one of the bungalow's open rafters. Tuck lost his breath for a minute, thinking there might just be a wild animal in his house. Then he saw the sunglasses.
    Roberto steadied himself into a slightly swinging upside-down hang.
    Tuck sighed. "Please just be a bat in sunglasses tonight. Please."
    Thankfully, the bat said nothing. The sunglasses were sliding off his nose.
    "How do you fly in those things?" Tuck said, thinking out loud.
    "They're aviators."
    "Of course," Tuck said. The bat had indeed changed from rhinestone glasses to aviators, but once you accept a talking bat, the leap to a talking bat with an eyewear wardrobe is a short one.
    Roberto dropped from the rafter and took wing just before he hit the floor. Two beats of his wings and he was on the coffee table, as awkward in his spiderlike crawl as he was graceful in the air. With his wing claw, he raked at Jefferson Pardee's notebook until it was open to the middle, then he launched himself and flew out the window.
    Tuck picked up the notebook and read what Pardee had written. Tuck had missed this page when he had looked at the notebook before. This page had been stuck to the one before it; the bat's clawing had revealed it. It was a list of leads that Pardee had made for the story he had been working on. The second item read; "What happened to the first pilot, James Sommers? Call immigration in Yap and Guam." Tuck flipped through the notebook to see if he had missed something else. Had Pardee found out? Of course he had. He'd found out and he'd followed Sommers to the last place anyone had seen him. But where was Pardee? His notebook hadn't come to the island without him.
    Tuck went through the notebook three more times. There were some foreign names and phone numbers. Something that looked like a packing list for a trip. Some notes on the background of Sebastian Curtis. Notes to check up on Japanese with guns. The word "Learjet" underlined three times. And nothing else. There didn't seem to be any organizational form to the notes. Just random facts, names, places, and dates. Dates? Tuck went through it once more. On the third page in, all by itself, was printed: "Alualu, Sept. 9."
    Tuck ran to the nightstand drawer, where the Curtises had left him a calendar. He counted back the days to the ninth and tried to put events to days. The ship had arrived on the ninth, and the morning of the tenth he had made his first flight. Jefferson Pardee could be Lying in the clinic right now, wondering where in the hell his kidney was. If he was, Tuck needed to see him.
    Tuck looked in the closet for something dark to wear. This was going to be different from sneaking out to the village. There were no buildings between the guards' quarters and the clinic, no trees, nothing but seventy-five yards of open compound. Darkness would be his only cover.

    It was a tropical-weight wet suit-two-mil neoprene-and it was two sizes two big, but it was the only thing in the closet that wasn't khaki or white. In the 80-degree heat and 90-percent humidity, Tuck was reeling from the heat before he got the hood on. He stepped into the shower and soaked himself with cold water, then peeled the hood over his head and