Island of the Sequined Love Nun

words were painful for him to form.
    Tuck nodded, feeling heat rise in his face. He wanted to smash the guard's face, knock him to the ground, and kick him into a glob of goo. "And you killed Pardee, the fat American man."
    Mato shook his head. "No. We don't."
    "Bullshit!"
    "No, we… we…" He was searching for the English word.
    "What?"
    "We take him, but not shoot."
    "Take him where? To the clinic?"
    The guard shook his head violently. Not saying no, but trying to say that he couldn't say.
    "What happened to the fat man?"
    "He die. Hospital. We put him water."
    "You took his body to the edge of the reef, where the sharks would find it?"
    The guard nodded.
    "And the pilot? You put him in the same place?"
    Again the nod.
    "What's going on? Are you going to hit or not?"
    Tuck and the guard looked up like two boys caught trading curses in the schoolyard. Curtis had come back down the fairway to within fifty feet of them.
    Tuck pointed to his ball. "Kato here won't let me move that out for a shot. I'll take the penalty stroke, Doc. But hell, we don't have mutant trees like that in Texas. It's unnatural."
    Curtis looked sideways at Tuck's ball, then at Mato. "He can move it. No penalty. You're a guest here, Mr. Case. We can let you bend a few rules." Curtis did not smile. Suddenly he seemed very serious about his golf.
    "We're partners now, Doc," Tuck said. "Call me Tuck."

46 – Beans and Succubus
    Tuck's other partner showed up at his bungalow that evening as he was sitting down to a plate of pork and beans. She didn't knock, or call out, or even clear her throat politely to let him know she was there. One minute Tuck was studying a gelatinous white cube of unidentifiable carbon-based life-form awash in a lumpy puddle of boiled legumes and tomato sauce, and the next the door opened and she was standing there wearing nothing but a red scarf and sequined high heels. Tuck dropped his spoon. Two partially used beans dribbled out of his open mouth, tracing contrails of sauce down the front of his shirt.
    She executed a single flamenco heel stomp and Tuck watched the impact move up her body and settle comfortably in her breasts. She threw her arms wide, struck a pose, and said, "The Sky Priestess has arrived."
    "Yes, she has," Tuck said with the glassy-eyed stupefaction of a newly converted Moonie. He'd seen something like her before, either on the hood of a Rolls-Royce or on a bowling trophy, but in the flesh the image was much more immediate, awe-inspiring even.
    She pirouetted and the tails of the scarf trailed around her like affectionate smoke. "What do you think?"
    "Uh-huh," Tuck said, nodding.
    "Come here."
    Tuck stood and moved toward her in the mindless shuffle step of a zombie compelled by the promise of living flesh. His brain stopped working, his entire life energy shifted to another part of his body, and it led him across the room to within an inch of her. It wasn't the first time this had happened to him, but before he had always retained the power of speech and most of his motor functions.
    "What's wrong with you?" she said. "Bolts in your neck too tight?"
    "My entire body has an erection."
    She took him by the front of the shirt and backed him across the room to the bed, then pushed him down and pulled his pants down to his knees. She vaulted onto him in a straddle and he reached up for her breasts. She caught his wrists.
    "No. You'll fuck up my makeup."
    And he noticed-like an accident victim might notice a butterfly in the grille of the bus that is running over him-that her nipples had been rouged to an unnatural pink.
    He tried to sit up and she shoved him back down, then took him in her hand, nicking him with a red fingernail, making him wince, and guided him inside of her. He reached for her hips to drive her down and got his hands slapped for the effort.
    And she fucked him-precise and mechanical as a machine, a single pounding motion repeated and lubricated and repeated again-until her breath rasped in her throat like hissing hydraulics and she arched her back and stalled, and misfired, then dieseled for a stroke or two, and she climbed off. Somewhere in all that he had come and she had looked at him once.
    He lay there looking at the remnants of torn mosquito netting over the bed, breathing hard, feeling a little dizzy, and wondering what had just happened. She went to the bathroom, then returned a few seconds later and threw him a towel, which she had obviously used herself.
    "We're flying in