Read Island of the Sequined Love Nun for Free Online Page B

down."
    "We'll manage." Tuck flipped the kid a dollar and left the room, proud to be an American.
    An unconscious island man marked the entrance to the lounge. Tuck stepped over him and pushed his way through the black glass door into a cool, dark, smoke-hazed room lit by a silent television tuned to nothing and a flickering neon BUDWEISER sign. A shadow stood behind the bar; two more sat in front of it. Tuck could see eyes in the dark-maybe people sitting at tables, maybe nocturnal vermin.
    A voice: "A fellow American here to buy a beer for his countryman."
    The voice had come from one of the shadows at the bar. Tuck squinted into the dark and saw a large white man, about fifty, in a sweat-stained dress shirt. He was smiling, a jowly yellow smile under drink-dulled eyes. Tuck smiled back. Anyone that didn't speak broken English was, at this point, his friend.
    "What are you drinkin', pardner?" Tuck always went Texan when he was being friendly.
    "What you drink here." He held up two fingers to the bartender, then held his hand out to shake. "Jefferson Pardee, editor in chief of the Truk Star."
    "Tucker Case." Tuck sat down on the stool next to the big man. The bartender placed two sweating Budweiser cans in front of them and waited.
    "Run a tab," Pardee said. Then to Tuck: "I assume you're a diver?"
    "Why would you assume that?"
    "It's the only reason Americans come here, other than Peace Corps or Navy CAT team members. And if you don't mind my saying, you don't look idealistic enough to be Peace Corps or stupid enough to be Navy."
    "I'm a pilot." It felt good saying it. He'd always liked saying it. He didn't realize how terrified he'd been that he'd never be able to say it again. "I'm supposed to meet someone from another island about a job."
    "Not a missionary air outfit, I hope."
    "It's for a missionary doctor. Why?"
    "Son, those people do a great job, but you can only get so much out of those old planes they fly. Fifty-year-old Beech 18s and DC3s. Sooner or later you're going into the drink. But I suppose if you're flying for God…"
    "I'll be flying a new Learjet."
    Pardee almost dropped his beer. "Bullshit."
    Tuck was tempted to pull out the letter and slam it on the bar, but thought better of it. "That's what they said."
    Pardee put a big hairy forearm on the bar and leaned into Tuck. He smelled like a hangover. "What island and what church?"
    "Alualu," Tuck said. "A Dr. Curtis."
    Pardee nodded and sat back on his stool. "No-man's Island."
    "What's that mean?"
    "It doesn't belong to anyone. Do you know anything about Micronesia?"
    "Just that you have gangs but no regular indoor plumbing."
    "Well, depending on how you look at it, Truk can be a hellhole. That's what happens when you give Coke cans to a coconut culture. But it's not all that way. There are two thousand islands in the Micronesian crescent, running almost ad the way from Hawaii to New Guinea. Magellan landed here first, on his first voyage around the world. The Spanish claimed them, then the Germans, then the Japanese. We took them from the Japanese during the war. There are seventy sunken Japanese ships in Truk's lagoon alone. That's why the divers come."
    "So what's this have to do with where I'm going?"
    "I'm getting to that. Until fifteen years ago, Micronesia was a U.S. protectorate, except for Alualu. Because it's at the westernmost tip of the crescent, we left it out of the surrender agreement with the Japanese. It kind of got lost in the shuffle. So Alualu was never an American territory, and when the Federated States of Micronesia declared independence, they didn't include Alualu."
    "So what's that mean?" Tuck was getting impatient. This was the longest lecture he'd endured since flight school.
    "In short, no mother government, no foreign aid, no nothing. Alualu belongs to whoever lives on it. It's off the shipping lanes, and it's a raised atoll, only one small island, not a group of islands around a lagoon, so there's not enough copra to make it