“I’ll check on her and I’ll meet you at the drinking circle tomorrow night—tell you how she’s doing. I won’t touch her, I promise. Okay?”
“Okay.” Kimi leaned against the wall by the door.
Tuck studied him for a moment to try and determine just how fucked up he was. It wasn’t a difficult swim. Tuck had done it stone drunk, but he’d been wearing fins and a mask and snorkel. “You’re sure you can swim?”
Kimi nodded and Tuck cracked the door. The moon had moved across the sky throwing the front of the clinic in shadow. The guard
across the compound was reading a magazine by flashlight. “When you get outside, go left and get behind the building.” The navigator stepped out, slid down the side of the building and around the corner. Tuck heard him trip and fall and swear softly in Filipino.
“Shit,” Tuck said to himself. He glanced at the computer. It would have to wait. He slid out the door, palming it shut behind him, then followed the navigator around the building. He heard the guard shout from across the compound, and for once in his life, Tuck made a definitive decision. He grabbed the navigator under the arms and ran.
45
Confessions Over Tee
Tucker Case dreamed of machine-gun fire and jerked as the bullets ripped into his back. He tossed forward into the dirt, mouth filling with sand, smothering him as the life drained out of a thousand ragged wounds, and still the guns kept firing, the rhythmic reports pounding like a violet storm of timpanis, like a persistent fist on a rickety door.
“Just let me die!” Tuck screamed, most of the sound caught by his pillow.
It was a persistent fist on a rickety door. “Mr. Case, rise and shine,” said a cheery Sebastian Curtis. “Ten minutes to tee time.”
Tuck rolled into the mosquito netting, became entangled, and ripped it from the ceiling. He was still wearing his wet suit and the fragile netting clung to it like cobwebs. He arrived at the door looking like a tattered ghost fresh out of Davy Jones’s locker.
“What? I can’t fly. I can’t even fucking walk. Go away.” Tuck was not a morning person.
Sebastian Curtis stood in the doorway beaming. “It’s Wednesday,” he said. “I thought you might want to play a few holes.”
Tuck looked at the doctor through bloodshot eyes and several layers of torn mosquito netting. Behind Curtis stood one of the guards, sans machine gun, with a golf bag slung over his shoulder. “Golf?” Tuck said. “You want to play golf?”
“It’s a different game here on Alualu, Mr. Case. Quite challenging. But then, you’ve been practicing, haven’t you?”
“Look, Doc, I didn’t sleep well last night…”
“Could be the wet suit, if you don’t mind my saying. Here in the tropics, you want fabrics that breathe. Cotton is best.”
Tuck was beginning to come around, and as he did, he found he was focusing an intense hatred on the doctor. “I guess we know who got laid last night.”
Curtis looked down and smiled coyly. He was actually embarrassed. Tuck couldn’t quite put it together. The doc didn’t seem to have any problem with killing people or taking their organs—or both—but he was blushing at the mention of sex with his wife. Tuck glared at him.
Curtis said, “You’d better change. The first tee is out in front of the hangar. I’ll go down and practice a few drives while you get dressed.”
“You do that,” Tuck said. He slammed the door.
Twenty minutes later Tuck, his hair still wet from the shower, joined Curtis and the guard in front of the hangar. He was feeling the weight of three nights with almost no sleep, and his back ached from dragging Kimi across the compound, then towing him in the water to the far side of the minefield. The guard had never caught up to them, but he had come to the edge of the water and shouted, waving his machine gun until Tuck and Kimi were out of sight.
“We’ll have to share a set of clubs,” Curtis said. “But perhaps now that you’ve decided to stay, we can order you a set.”
“Swell,” Tuck said. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought the guard might be the same one that had chased them to the beach. Tuck sneered at him and he looked away. Yep, he was the one.
“This is Mato. He’ll be caddying for us today.”
The guard bowed slightly. Tuck saluted him with a middle finger. If the doctor saw the gesture, he didn’t comment. He was lining the ball up on a small square of Astro Turf with a rubberized pad on the bottom. “We have to hit off of this. At least until someone invents a gravel wedge.” He laughed at his own joke.
Tuck forced a smile.
“The Shark People covered this entire island with gravel hundreds of years ago. Keeps the topsoil from being washed away in typhoons. This first hole is a dogleg to the left. The pin is behind the staff’s quarters about a hundred yards.”
“Doc, now that we’ve come clean, why don’t we call them the guards?”
“Very well, Mr. Case. Would you like honors?”
“Call me Tuck. No, you go ahead.”
Curtis hit a long bad hook that arced around the guards’ quar ters and landed out of sight in a stand of palm trees behind the building.
“I have to admit that I may have a bit of an advantage. I’ve laid out the course to accommodate my stroke. Most of the holes are doglegs to the left.”
Tuck nodded as if he understood what Curtis was talking about, then took the driver from the doctor and hit his own shot, a grounder that skipped across the gravel to stop fifty yards in front of them. “Oh, bad luck. Would you like to take a McGuffin?”
“Blow me, Doc,” Tuck said as he walked away toward his ball.
“I guess not, then.”
The pins were bamboo shafts driven into the compound, the holes were lined with old Coke cans with the tops cut off. The best part about it was that Tuck was able to deliver several vicious high-velocity putts into the shins of Mato, who was tending the pins. The worst part was that now that Curtis considered Tuck a confidant, he decided to open up.
“Beth is quite a woman, isn’t she? Did I tell you how we met?”
“Yeah.”
“I was at a transplant symposium in San Francisco. Beth is quite the
nurse, the best I’ve ever seen in an operating room, but she wasn’t working
as a nurse when I met her.” “Oh, good,” Tuck said. Curtis seemed to be waiting for Tucker to ask. Tucker was waiting for
the guard to rat him out for sneaking out of the compound last night. “She was a dancer in North Beach. An exotic dancer.” “No shit.” Tuck said. “Are you shocked?” Curtis obviously wanted him to be shocked. “No.” “She was incredible. The most incredible woman I had ever seen. She
still is.” “But then, you’ve been a missionary on a remote island for twenty-eight
years,” Tuck said. Curtis picked his club for the next shot: the seven iron. “What’s this?” “Looks like blood and feathers,” Tuck said. Curtis handed the club to Mato for him to clean it. “Beth did a dance with surgical tubing and a stethoscope that took my breath away.”
“Pretty common,” Tuck said. “Choke you with the surgical tubing and use the stethoscope to make sure you haven’t done the twitching fish.”
“Really?” Curtis said. “You’ve seen a woman do that?”
Tuck put on his earnest young man face. “Seen? You didn’t notice the ligature marks on my neck when you examined me?”
“Oh, I see,” Curtis said. “Still, I, at least, had never seen anything like it. She…” Curtis couldn’t seem to return to his story. “The wet suit this morning. Was that a sexual thing? I mean, most people would find it uncomfortable.”
“No, I’m just trying to lose a little weight.”
Curtis looked serious now. “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea. You’re still very thin from your ordeal in getting here.”
“I’d like to get down to about eight pounds,” Tuck said. “There’s a big Gandhi revival thing going on back in the States. Guys who look like they’re starving have to beat the babes off with a stick. Started with female fashion models, but now it’s moved to the men.”