Island of the Sequined Love Nun

green bud the size of your dick."
    "I hope you got help carrying it," he said, still under the covers.
    "I rolled it on the inside of my thigh the way the women in Cuba roll cigars."
    "Don't tell me how you licked the paper."
    She slapped him on the bottom. "Come on, dance with me."
    He rolled over and pulled the sheet off his face. "You're not going to go away, are you?"
    "Not until you dance with me and have some champagne."
    Tuck looked at his watch. "It's five in the morning."
    "Haven't you ever danced till dawn?"
    "Not vertically."
    "Oh, you nasty boy." Coy now, as if anything short of being caught at genocide could make her blush. The song changed to something slow and oily that Tuck didn't recognize.
    "This is such a good song. Let's dance." She swooned. She actually swooned. Swooning, Tuck noticed, looked very much like an asthma attack wheezed in slow motion. A rooster crowed, and seven thousand six hundred and fifty-two roosters responded in turn.
    "Beth, it's morning. Please go home."
    "Then you're not going to dance with me?"
    "No."
    "All right, I guess we'll skip the dancing, but I want you to know that I'm very disappointed." She stood up, pulled the evening gown over her head, and dropped it to the floor. The sequins sizzled against the floor like a dying rattlesnake. She wore only stockings underneath.
    Tuck said, "I don't think this is such a good idea," but there was no conviction in his voice and she pushed him back on the bed.

    Tuck was staring up at the ceiling, his arm pinned under her neck, silently mouthing his mantra, "After this, I will not bone the crazy woman. After this, I will not bone the crazy woman. After…" Boy, how many times had he said that? Maybe things were getting better, though. In the past it had always been "I will not get drunk and bone the crazy woman." He had been only sleepy this time.
    He tried to worm his arm out from under her, then used the "old snuggle method." He rolled into her for a hug and when she responded with a sleepy moan and tried to kiss him, the space under her neck opened up and he was free. It worked as well on murdering bitch goddesses as it did on Mary Jean ladies. Better even, Beth didn't wear near as much hair spray, which can slow a guy down. God, I'm good.
    He rolled out of bed and crept into the bathroom. While he peed, he softly chanted, "Yo, after this, I will not bone the crazy woman." It had taken on a rap cadence and he was feeling very hip along with the usual selfloathing. His scars made him think of Kimi's wound, and suddenly he was angry. He padded naked back to the bed and jostled the sleeping icon. "Get up, Beth. Go home."
    And someone pounded on the door. "Mr. Case, tee time in five."
    Tuck clamped his hand over Beth's mouth, lifted her by her head in a single sweeping move from the bed to the bathroom, where he released her and shut the door. Fred Astaire, had he been a terrorist, would have been proud of the move.
    Tuck grabbed his pants off the floor, which is where he kept them, pulled them on, and answered the door. Sebastian Curtis had a driver slung over his shoulder. "You might want to put on a shirt, Mr. Case. You can get burned, even this early."
    "Right," Tuck said. He was looking at the caddie. Today Stripe carried the clubs. The guard sneered at him. Tuck smiled back. Stripe, like Mato before him, was doing caddie duty unarmed. Time to play a little round for the navigator, he thought. He winked at Stripe.
    "I'll be right there." Tuck closed the door and went to the bathroom to tell Beth to wait until he'd gone before coming out, but when he opened the door, she was gone.

    "Did you know that over ninety percent of all the endangered species are on islands?" the doctor said.
    "Nope," Tuck said. He picked his ball up and put it on the rubberized mat, then turned to Stripe. "Dopey, give me a five iron."
    They were on the fourth hole and had crisscrossed the compound pretending to play golf for an hour. Tuck swung and skidded the ball fifty yards across the gravel. "Heads up, Bashful," Tuck said as he threw the club back to Stripe.
    "Islands are like evolutionary pressure cookers. New species pop up faster and go extinct more quickly. It works the same way with religions."
    "No kidding, Doc?" They still had fifty yards to get to where Sebastian's first shot lay. Tuck had hit three times.
    "The cargo cults have all the same events associated with the great religions: a period of oppression, the rise of a Messiah, a new