Deacon cleared his throat politely and brought out the bait bucket from between his knees. "We want you to look at this, Rok," he said, "but before you do, I must ask you to take an oath of silence before Lord Jesus, not to speak of what you see to anyone but us."

Rourke looked at Father Two Thumbs. "Really?"

"P-p-place your hand over your heart and swear in Jesus' name that you will not divulge what you see or what is spoken here."

Rourke knew better than to laugh. He did as he was told, said amen, and sat on the edge of his desk.

From the bucket Deacon took the four heavy packets and placed them on the desk. Tomas and Santos rose from the floor and stationed themselves at each doorway.

Rourke opened the first packet and stared. Then he riffled the notes in their banded stacks. He turned on the little desk lamp and riffled them again. Finally he teased open the flaps of the other open packets and let his fingers work gently through them.

"Garrrkk!" the parrot muttered to himself.

Boy kept his eyes on the monitor, waiting for the Australians, or the Czech, or the Greek to make a chess move.

Rourke cleared his throat, his fingers riffling through the money stacks like elongated bees. "What are you doing with this?"

They told him.

more excerpts

The South China Sea is a haven for pirates and the setting for this comical, action-filled novel of island fishermen who unearth illegal drug money and fight to keep it.

Deacon and his brothers use a drunken priest, a renegade American financier, and a Japanese hermit to protect their newfound wealth.

A weird assortment of friends and enemies, including a military helicopter crew who bombards victims with condom-filled waste, make this a memorable read.

I have been waiting for two years to write God's Money.

When one of the story's participants told me what had happened, and what was still happening with the cache of found money, I was ready to write a screenplay and a novel. The problem was that a number of—shall we call them interested parties?—were involved in recovering what they considered their millions of dollars.

Now, a few years later, many of them have given up, or written off their loss. But not all of them. For this reason I have tried to hide or camouflage as much of the setting, characters, and action as I could. Now that various statutes of limitation have expired, and certain salvage issues have been waived or satisfied, I believe it is safe to tell the tale, as Michener would say.

The research for the story has been fun, taking me back to my own Peace Corps days of fishing villages, cultural discoveries, and that potent rum, neat or with the freshest of fruit mixers. Ah, youth.

Tad Hutton