Malink looked up from his breakfast, a banana leaf full of fish and rice, to see Abo coming down the coral path toward his house. Malink’s wife and daughters shuffled to the cookhouse at the sight of the fierce one.

“Good morning, Chief,” Abo said.

“Food?” Malink answered, gesturing with his breakfast.

Abo had already eaten, but it would have been rude not to accept. “Yes.”

Malink’s wife poked her head out of the cookhouse and saw the chief

nod. In a second she was giving her own breakfast to Abo, who neither thanked her or acknowledged her presence. “The pilot is sick,” Abo said. “Very bad fever. Sepie and the girl-man say that he will die soon without the Sorcerer’s help.”

Malink suddenly lost his appetite. He set his breakfast on the ground and one of his daughters appeared out of nowhere to take it to the cookhouse, where the women shared what was left.

“And what do you think?” Malink asked.

“I think he is dying. He smells of sickness. Like when Tamu was bitten by the shark and his leg turned black.”

Malink rubbed his temples. How to handle this? The Sky Priestess was angry with him for even dreaming of the pilot. What would happen if he suddenly showed up with him?

“What about the girl-man?”

“He is not sick, but he has gone crazy. He runs around the village looking for Sarapul.”

Malink nodded. “Catch him and tie him up. Make a litter and take the pilot to the betel nut trees by the runway. Leave him there.”

“Leave him there?”

“Yes, quickly. And bring the litter back with you. Make it look as if he walked to the runway. Send a boy to me when it is done. Go now.”

Abo put down his food and ran off down the path.

Malink went into his house and pulled the ammo box out of the rafters. Inside, next to the portable phone, he found the Zippo that Vincent had given him. He clicked it open, lit it, and sat it on the floor while it burned. “Vincent,” he said, “It’s your friend Malink here. Please tell the Sky Priestess that this is not my fault. Tell her that you have sent the pilot. Please tell her for your friend Malink so she will not be angry. Amen.”

His prayer finished, Malink snapped the lighter shut, put it away, then took the portable phone and went outside to wait for the boy to tell him everything was in place.

Tucker Case rolled through a fever dream where he was tossed in great elastic waves of bat-winged demons—crushed, smothered, bitten, and scratched—and there, amid the chaos, a pink fabric softener sheet passed by the corner of his eye, confirming that he had been stuffed into a dryer in the laundromat of Hell. He tumbled toward the pink, ascended out of the clawing mass, and awoke gasping, with no idea where he was.

The pink was a dress on a heart-faced woman who said, “Good morning, Mr. Case. Welcome back to the world.”

A man’s voice: “After your message and the typhoon, we thought for sure you’d been lost at sea.” He was a white blur with a head, then a lab coat wrapped around a tall, smiling middle-aged man, gray and balding, a stethoscope around his neck.

The doctor had his arm around the heart-faced woman. She too was smiling, with the aspect of an angel, the vessel of human kindness. Together they looked as if they had walked off of fifties television.

The man said, “I’m Dr. Sebastian Curtis, Mr. Case. This is my wife, Beth.”

Tuck tried to speak, but emitted only a rasping squeak. The woman lifted a plastic cup of water to his lips and he drank. He eyed the IV bag running into his arm.

“Glucose and antibiotics,” the doctor said. “You’ve got some badly infected wounds. The islanders found you washed up on the reef.”

Tucker did a quick inventory of his limbs by feel, then looked at them lest he had lost a leg that was still giving off phantom feel

ing. He raised his head to look at his crotch, which was sending pulses of pain up through his abdomen.

The woman gently pushed him down. “You’re going to be fine. They found you in time, but you’re going to need more rest. ’Bastian can give you something for the pain if you need it.”

She smiled beatifically at her husband, who patted Tuck’s arm. “Don’t be embarrassed, Mr. Case. Beth is a surgical nurse. I’m afraid the catheter will have to stay in for a few days.”

“There was another guy with me,” Tuck said. “A Filipino. He was piloting the boat.”

The doctor and his wife shot each other a glance and the “Ozzie and Harriet” calm shattered into panic, but only for a second, then they were back to their reassuring cooing. Tuck wasn’t even sure he had seen the break.

“I’m sorry, but the islanders didn’t find anyone else. He must have been lost in the storm.”

“But the tree. He was hung in the tree…”

Beth Curtis put her finger gently on his lips. “I’m sorry you lost your friend, Mr. Case, but you need to get some rest. I’ll bring you something to eat in a little while and we’ll see if you can hold down some solid food.”

She pulled her hand away and put her arm around her husband’s waist as he pushed a syringe of fluid into Tuck’s IV tube. “We’ll check on you shortly,” the doctor said.

Tucker watched them walk away and noticed that for all her “Little House on the Prairie” purity, Beth Curtis had a nice shape under that calico. Then he felt a little sleazy, as if he’d been caught horning on a friend’s mom. Like the time, drunk and full of himself, he’d hit on Mary Jean Dobbins.

To hell with solid food. Gin—in large quantities over a tall column of ice—that’s the rub. Tonic to chase away the blues of bad dreams and men lost at sea.

Tuck looked around the room. It was a small hospital ward. Only four beds, but amazingly clean considering where it was. And there was some pretty serious-looking equipment against the walls: technical stuff on casters, stuff you might use in complicated surgery or to set the timing on a Toyota. He was sure Jake Skye would know what it was. He thought about the Learjet, then felt himself starting to doze.

Sleep came with the face of a cannibal, leg-jerk dreams, and finally settled in on the oiled breasts of a brown girl brushing against

his face and smelling of coconut and flowers. There was a scratch and scuttle on the tin roof, followed by the bark of a fruit bat. Tuck didn’t hear it.

The pig thief had been caught and Jefferson Pardee had to find a new lead story. He sat at his desk pouring over the notes he’d written on a yellow legal pad, hoping that something would jump out at him. In fact, there wasn’t a lot of jumping material there. The notes read: “They caught the pig thief. Now what?”

You could run down the leads, pound the pavement, check all your facts with two sources, then structure your meticulously gathered information into the inverted pyramid form and what you got was: The pig’s owner had gotten drunk and beat up his wife, so she sold his pig to someone on the outer islands and bought a used stun gun from an ensign with the Navy Cat team. The next time her husband got rough, a group of Japanese tourists found him by the side of the road, sizzling in the dirt like a strip of frying bacon. Mistaking him for a street performer, the tourists clapped joyously, took pictures of each other standing beside the electrocuted man, and gave his wife five dollars. The whole intrigue had been exposed when police found the pig-stealing wife in front of the Continental Hotel charging tourists a dollar apiece to watch her zap her husband’s twitching supine body. The stun gun was confiscated, no charges were pressed, and the wife beater was pronounced unharmed by a Peace Corps volunteer, although he did need to be reminded several times of his name, where he lived, and how many children he had.

The mystery was solved and the Truk Star had no lead story. Jefferson Pardee was miserable. He was actually going to have to go out and find a story or, as he had done so many time before, make one up. The Micro Spirit was in port. Maybe he’d go down to the dock and see if he could stir up some news out of the crew. He slid his press card into the band of his Australian bush hat and waddled out the door and down the dusty street to the pier where rock-hard, rope-muscled islanders were loading fifty-five-gallon drums into cargo nets and hoisting them into the holds of the Micro Spirit.