"Roberto, do your business and let's get back to the hotel," Tuck called into the sky. The fruit bat barked and snagged an overhead limb as he passed, his momentum nearly sending him in a loop around it before he pendulumed and settled in upside-down attitude. The bat barked again, licked his little doggy chops, and folded his great wings around himself to ward off the coastal cold.

"Fine," Tuck said, "but you're not getting back into the room until you poop."

He'd inherited the bat from a Filipino navigator he'd met while flying a private jet for a doctor in Micronesia; a job he'd only taken because his U.S. pilot's license had been yanked for crashing the pink Mary Jean Cosmetic jet while initiating a young woman into the Mile-High Club. Drunk. After Micronesia he'd moved to the Caribbean with his fruit bat and his beautiful new island wife and started a charter business. Now, six years later, his beautiful island wife was running the charter business with a seven-foot Rastafarian and Tucker Case had nothing to his name but a fruit bat and temporary gig flying helicopters for the DEA, spotting marijuana patches in the Big Sur wilderness area. Which put him in Pine Cove, holed up in a cheap motel room, four days before Christmas, alone. Lonesome. Hosed.

Tuck had once been a ladies' man of the highest order — a Don Juan, a Casanova, a Kennedy sans cash — yet now he was in a town where he didn't know a soul and he hadn't even met a single woman to try to seduce. A few years of marriage had almost ruined him. He'd become accustomed to affectionate female company without a great deal of manipulation, subterfuge, and guile. He missed it. He didn't want to spend Christmas alone, dammit. Yet here he was.

And there she was. A damsel in distress. A woman, alone, out here in the night, crying — and from what Tuck could tell by the headlights of a nearby pickup truck, she had a nice shape. Great hair. Beautiful high cheekbones, streaked with tears and mud, but you know, exotic-looking. Tuck checked to see that Roberto was still safely hanging above, then straightened his bomber jacket and made his way across the street.