The Lonely Silver Rain

The Lonely Silver Rain

John D. MacDonald

Travis McGee Book 21 The Lonely Silver Rain

John D. MacDonald For Jean and Walter Shine

Every extreme attitude is a flight from the self-the passionate state of mind is an expression of inner dissatisfaction.

- Eric Hoffer

Without a family, man, alone in the world, trembles with the cold.

- Andre Maurois

One

ONCE UPON a time I was very lucky and located a sixty-five-foot hijacked motor sailer in a matter of days, after the authorities had been looking for months. When I heard through the grapevine that Billy Ingraham wanted to see me, it was easy to guess he hoped I could work the same miracle with his stolen Sundowner, a custom cruiser he’d had built in a Jacksonville yard. It had been missing for three months.

When I heard he was looking for me, I phoned him and he said he would appreciate it if I could come right over. Billy had come down to the lower east coast early and put himself deeply in hock to buy hundreds of acres of flatland too sorry to even run beef on. After he put up the first shopping mall, he went even deeper into hock. He and Sadie were living aboard a junker with a trawler hull at Bahia Mar, living small while he made his big gambles. He was betting that the inland would have to build up to support the big beach population, and he. kept right on pyramiding his bet until all of a sudden it turned around, and he became F. William Ingraham, owner of shopping malls, automobile agencies, marinas, a yacht brokerage agency, and a director of one of the banks which had been tightening the screws on him a few years earlier.

He bought waterfront residential land and one day when the house they had planned together, he and Sadie, was half built, she was there one morning looking at tile samples for the master bathrooms when she gave the young subcontractor a strange look, dropped the tile she was looking at and toppled into the framed area where the shower was going to be. She was two and a half weeks in intensive care before everything finally stopped.

They’d been married twenty-eight years and had no kids. He sank into guilt, telling anybody who’d listen that if he hadn’t been so greedy he could have cashed in earlier and smaller, with more than enough to last them the rest of their lives, and she would have had a few years in the house she wanted so badly. Everybody who knew him tried to help, but we couldn’t do much. He went into that kind of decline which meant he was going to follow her to wherever she had gone as soon as he was able.

But a woman half his age named Millis Hoover pulled him out of it. It took her the best part of a year. She had been working for him. Sadie’s house had been finished and sold. And he had sold off everything else, paid his debts and resigned from all boards and committees, and put the money into insured municipal bond funds. He lost all interest in making money, in wheeling, dealing and guessing the future.

It was Millis who worked him around to buying a penthouse duplex in the new Dias del Sol condo, three twenty-story towers about eight miles north of Fort Lauderdale. It has indoor and outdoor pools, health clubs, a beach, boat slips on the Waterway, a security staff, a good restaurant, room service, maid service and a concierge to help with special problems. It cost him one point two five million to buy it and, with Millis’ help, to furnish it. One room was set up as a small office, because it was more efficient to have her working there. Then she moved in, because that was more convenient too. She nagged him into using the bodybuilding equipment, into sunning himself, into doing laps in the pool every day, into eating sensibly and even into giving up his smuggled Cuban cigars and his half bottle of bourbon a day.

After he began to take pride in how he looked and how he felt, he began to take more of an interest in how Millis looked and, in time, how Millis felt. And that did not surprise anyone who had been following the woman’s reconstruction of Billy Ingraham.

Anyway, I was given the expected security check in the small lobby of Tower Alpha at Dias del Sol at a little after ten in the morning on October 3, a Wednesday, and after Mr. Ingraham had confirmed to them that I was indeed expected, they aimed me toward the elevator at the end of the row.

Billy let me in. He has a big head, big thick features, a white brush cut and little brown eyes. He is instantly likable. In that sense, he has always reminded me of Meyer. Both of them treat you as if you are one of the high points of their day. Both of them listen. Both of them seem genuinely concerned about you.

“Hey Trav! You look like you been adrift on a raft. You look damn near scrawny. What’s going on? Where were you?”

“Bringing that old sloop of Hubie Harris’ back from Marigot Bay at St. Lucia.”

“Hope nothing happened to Hube.”

“Nothing permanent. He fell and broke up his knee. Those two kids of his, twelve and thirteen, wanted to try to bring it back by themselves, but he didn’t want them to try. I’m not much for sloops, or any kind of sailing, so the kids were useful. What took so long was dodging here and there, trying to stay away from a tropical storm that was trying to be a hurricane but couldn’t decide which way to travel. Got in and they told me you wanted to talk.”

“Come on upstairs and we’ll have some coffee.” We went up an open iron circular staircase and through a doorway that opened onto a wide patio garden overlooking the sea. The view was spectacular. I could see the deeper blue of the Stream way out. A tanker, deeply laden, was riding the Stream north, and closer, this side of the Stream, a pair of container ships were working south. Small boats danced in the glare and dazzle of the morning sun.

Millis was grubbing at a flower bed. She wore a wide straw hat, a black string bikini and red sandals. She was sitting on her heels. She turned and stood up and dropped her cotton gloves and grubbing tool by the flowers and came toward us, cool and elegant and remote inside her coffee-cream tan, her slenderness, looking out at us through the guarded green lenses of her tilted eyes, smiling a three-millimeter smile.

“Travis, you know my wife, Millis? You know we got married last June?”

“William darling, Mr. McGee was at the wedding!”

“Oh, hell. Sure. I’m sorry. I wasn’t tracking real good that day.”

We sat on white iron chairs at a round white table and Millis brought us coffee and went back to her flower chores. “I guess you heard about our new boat getting stole.”

“I heard it was taken, but I didn’t hear any details.”

He got up and went away and came back in a few minutes with some eight-by-ten color shots of the Sundowner, some of them taken from a helicopter.

“Very pretty,” I said, studying them.

“A real gem. Fifty-four feet. Big diesels. Solid as a rock. What scalds me, Trav, was the timing of it. We wanted to take our honeymoon trip in it right after the wedding, but there’d been a delay in getting it outfitted just the way we wanted it. Well, sir, by the fourth of July I had it all equipped and provisioned, and ready for a test run. We went north up the coast, with me running it fast and running it slow, checking out the radar, Loran, recording fathometer, digital log, ship-to-shore, Hewlett-Packard 41-C with the Nav-Pac for this area. We checked out the stereo system, television reception, AC and DC, the generators, autopilot, battery feed, navigational lights, cold locker, stove, every damn thing. It all worked fine, but you know me, Trav. I’ve owned enough boats for enough years to know that when you really go cruising, the things you need most are the things that quit first. She was all provisioned too, even to two cases of that Perrier champagne Millis likes.

“The sea held calm and a little after noon I came to a little inlet I’ve been through before, but the chart showed just enough water for me to ease through on a high tide and we were a couple of hours shy of the high, so I moved around to the lee of a big sandbar island, worked in close, threw the hook and let it slide on back to deeper water. We were planning to take our trip up the Waterway to New England, and start in a day or two, and I felt we had the right boat for it and I felt good about making that trip. I’d always wanted to do that. We had lunch and some of that. good wine out in the hot sunshine and the summer breeze. I dropped off and when I woke up Millis had swum and waded over to the sandbar island.”

He stopped and looked to see where she was. She was over at the far corner of the big terrace, working the flower beds. The breeze was from the sea, so his chance of being overheard was very slight. But he lowered his voice so that I had to lean toward him to hear. “After the way Sadie was,” he said, “I have one hell of a time getting used to Millis’ ways. She was over there shelling, naked as an egg. She’s big on nature things, Trav. Jogging and roughage and workouts and so on. The few houses I could see were far away and there were a couple of boats way out, so I climbed down to the rear platform there and eased into the water in my trunks and went ashore to where she was shelling, knowing she would have something to say about people being too modest for their own good. But damn it, Trav, being outdoors naked makes me walk kind of hunched over. I keep waiting for a wasp to come along, or an airgun pellet or a thorn bush. And I don’t like being naked in the water either. Crabs, stingrays, jellyfish.

“She showed me the stuff she’d been picking up. She had some little purple shells and she wanted me to help find her enough more so she could string a necklace. So all of a sudden I heard the Sundowner kick over. She caught right away. The way I figured it, the damn bastards had come out of that inlet in an outboard skiff, seen us hunting shells, seen my cruiser, then circled out around so they could come up on it on the blind side, where they boarded her, snuck forward and cut the anchor line, then started her up. They didn’t start her from the fly bridge where I could have seen them, but from the pilothouse. All I ever saw was the beat-up old aluminum boat they had in taw, with the motor tilted up. It had a milky look the way old aluminum gets in salt water. He took off, swinging way out and heading, north, keeping it slow and steady so as not to swamp his skiff. Know what the insurance son of a bitch said to me? He said leaving the keys in the panel was contributory negligence. My God, it was sitting there in front of us! What kind of idiot would have locked it up?”

Billy and Millis swam to the beach on the narrow spit that lies east of the Waterway. He parked her in some scraggly brush, walked down to where some people were picnicking, told his sad story and traded his gold seal ring for a red and white poolside cover-up for Millis. Her gold bracelet guaranteed the taxi ride back to the Dias del Sol, where the resident manager let them into their penthouse.

“I’m still damned mad,” Billy said. “Millis and me, we put a lot of thought and love into that boat, getting it just like we wanted it. Shit, I can afford more boats, but it won’t be the same. And I was humiliated, standing there watching some young punk go grinning off with the boat, cash, wine, food, credit cards, car keys and boat keys and house keys, and some of the finest boat rods made. Nobody has done a damn thing. And I’ve been told you can do things when the law gives up.”

“I’ve been known to strike out.”

“You want to take a shot at it? You get thirty big ones cash in hand the day I set foot on her again.”

“Lots of pleasure boats have been disappearing these last few years, Billy. And very few have ever been recovered. I don’t work on a fee basis. Anything I can recover, I keep half, or half the value.”

His thick gray eyebrows went halfway up his red forehead. “Isn’t that a little heavy, McGee? I put seven hundred and twenty into that sucker.”

“It isn’t heavy because I’m talking about the value of what I recover. That sucker isn’t a seven-hundred-and-twenty-thousand-dollar boat anymore, not after three months. Also, stolen cruisers usually end up in the drug business, where people don’t play pat ball. Also, I swallow my own expenses, win or lose. And it gives me a lot of incentive to look for something that’s half mine. I find it in fair shape and it will pay for another piece of the retirement I keep taking now and then. Or, look at it this way. Let’s say the odds against any recovery are about five hundred to one. A flat fee would start me out pretty listless.”

“If you get it back, how do we put a value on it?”

“Get it surveyed as is by a licensed marine appraiser.”

He frowned, and then stuck his beefy paw out. We shook hands and he said, “Done. Tell you a secret. I’d almost give you full value just to get one back at the scum that took it away and left me nothing but a hundred-and-ninety-dollar Danforth anchor and ten feet of rubber-coated chain.”

Millis had finished gardening. She hosed off her tools and shut them up in a little blue locker and then came and sat with us. “Billy told me you did find a boat for someone, Mr. McGee.”

“Years ago,” I told her. “Five at least. It belonged to one of the Cuban buddies of Batista who got out just before Castro removed his head. And he bought a house, a motor sailer and the good life with money he’d squirreled away in Chase Manhattan while he was still a Cuban politico. Those particular immigrants aren’t my favorite people. Anyway, he used a Cuban crew, and the wrong batch of Cubans took it right out of its slip at a Miami yacht club and sailed it away. There was joy and rejoicing in the Cuban community.”

“How did you get it back?” she asked.

The question was mild, but it had a contentious sound. Just a little too much emphasis on the “you.” How could you do anything so difficult? And a faint expression of disdain, a challenge in her flat stare. New wife in the long, dogged process of detaching her husband from all prior friendships.

“Somebody told me where I could find the Alicienie. She’d been renamed the Priscidla. Two months after Calderone got her back, she blew up one night twenty miles off Key West with him aboard.”

“Somebody just happened to tell you where to find it?” She wore an expression of vivid disbelief. “Why would anyone do that?”

“If you’ve got about a day and a half to spare, Millis, we could sit around and I could try to explain what I’ve learned about Cuban refugee politics in Miami.”

“I’m sure you have better things to do.”

“I’d guess we both do.”

“What’s with you two?” Billy asked angrily. “How did you both get off on the wrong foot so fast?”

She stood up. “Sorry, Billy. I guess I’m just fascinated by people who can accomplish impossible things.” She headed for the doorway into the apartment and turned and said, “What does dente mean, Mr. McGee?”

“Temptation,” I told her. She nodded, without surprise, as if she had known the meaning of the game and wondered if I did. I saw something in the back of her eyes, something that moved and challenged, creating awareness. We were in a silent communication inaccessible to the husband sittinng heavily beside me.

When she was gone, Billy said, “Sorry about that. She always tries to keep me from being taken by some con artist. She thinks I’m too trusting. Hell, I’ve followed my instinct all my life and it hasn’t hurt me more than three or four times. You’re giving me a proposition where I can’t lose. I pay you nothing, or I buy my boat back for half its market value.”

Two

ON THAT Wednesday afternoon I drove on up to where the cruiser had been stolen. The town beside the inlet and on the far side of the bridge over the Waterway was named Citrina. New condos and malls were being built at all four corners of it, and parking was a serious problem. The police chief was a happy fat man with several fingers missing from each hand.

I gave him one of my Casualty-Indemnity cards and said it looked as if we were going to have to pay off on the Sundowner that got stolen out there at the inlet last fourth of July, and I didn’t want to take up his time but just needed to find out if they’d made any progress at all since we last checked with him. Because if there was any progress at all that meant a chance of recovery, and-winking at him-the longer we hold the money, the more money the money makes.

He beamed and told me I was in a rotten line of work, and he lumbered over and got the folder and brought it back.

“Nothing to add,” he said. “We got the same two missing persons as before, with no way of knowing if they’d anything to do with it. They were going together and they could have just run off elsewhere.” He laid the two glossies in front of me. Even in black and white I could tell that the boy was a buck-tooth redhead. He had a long neck, a prominent Adam’s apple and a squint. The girl was cuddly blonde, with an imitation show biz smirk and some acne pits. They were posed pictures.

“High school yearbook,” he said, “from two years back. Howard Cannon and Karen McBride. He’s a bad kid, comes from trashy stock-drunks and wife beaters. Lots of trouble with the law. She’s a dentist’s daughter. Her people tried hard to break it up. Too hard. Sometimes you let it go on, and it wears itself out. They sent her off to an aunt in Wisconsin and she hitched all the way back. I’ve distributed copies to all the interested parties. Got some extras here if you want a set. Physical description and history on the back of each one. Nobody has heard from either of them. Friends or families. Got everybody alerted to get in touch first thing if they hear anything.”

“Is it likely they could have done it?”

“Possible. Howie did fool things on impulse. He was with the McBride girl that day. His tin skiff is missing. They had the feeling the whole world was against them. Howie’s spent most of his life on the water. He worked at Tyler Marina and she wouldn’t let them send her off to school, and she worked at the K-Mart. Maybe he just swung around close to look at that new boat. Climbed aboard and found it was empty. Saw the keys, checked the fuel, talked her into it. Tied the skiff off, cut the anchor line and left. Could have been that way. Could just as easy been some other way too.

“They probably went right on over to the islands,” I said. “Safer for dockage and fuel over there.”

“Owner left over nine hundred dollars aboard, and it was all provisioned for a long cruise. Nice honeymoon for those kids. Find themselves some little cove down in the Exumas. All fine until the day you have to pay for your fun.”

Meyer came over to my houseboat, the Busted Flush, that warm October evening to find out how things had gone with old Billy. We sat in the lounge and I told him, and spread the photographs of the boat and the suspects out on the tabletop.

“I think I was working my way around to changing my mind and telling Billy it would be a waste of time, but that bride of his rubbed me the wrong way. So I am stuck with taking some kind of a shot at it. Chances vary from very slim to none. Where did he find that Millis?”

“She was working for him.”

“I know that. She went to work for him, what was it, two years or three years before Sadie died.”

“From what you say about the way he looks and acts, Travis, she’s good for him. So why care about her prior activities?”

“Something just a little out of focus there, Meyer. She’s a beautiful woman. She’s living well. But she has her guard up.”

He examined the color shots of the Sundowner. “Distinctive. Certainly no mistaking it for a production boat. Beamy. Lots of range. Displacement hull?”

“Yes. Twelve knots top cruising. Fifteen-hundred-mile range.”

“Probably been repainted by now. Not too useful for the drug trade. Too small to lay around offshore as a mother ship, and too slow to make night runs to the beaches. All in all, a little too conspicuous to be useful.”

I opened a pair of beers and took them back to the table.

“Humpf!” said Meyer.

It is his declaration of surprise and satisfaction. It is what he would have said were he to have discovered the theory of relativity.

“What’s with the humpf?”

“I was looking for a recognition factor which would probably remain the same. Take a look.” He held up the photo taken from about two hundred feet above the vessel, running at cruising speed across a calm blue sea. He held it so the bow was at the top of the picture, the wake at the bottom.

For a moment I didn’t see it, and then it jumped out at me. The bow made a pointed hat. The life rings on the aft corners of the superstructure made the eyes. The half circle of padded bench around the aft of the cockpit made the clownish grin. “A face!” I said. “A damned face!”

“Which can be looked for from the air.” Which was worth a humpf from Meyer. His little blue eyes were bright with satisfaction. Meager as it was, it was still more of a starting point than I’d had before. The profile of a boat can be easily altered by someone intending to deceive. But that someone would not be thinking about how it looks from directly overhead.

So I locked away the photography, and we went out to eat. Meyer waited while I locked my old houseboat and activated my inconspicuous little security devices which would let me know when I returned if there was a stranger aboard, or if a stranger had been aboard while I was gone. In the old days Meyer seemed mildly amused by all this caution. But in recent years he has seen things in a different light, and now uses similar precautions, even though the chance of harm coming to that hairy econornist is considerably less than of it coming to me.

Once you have made enough people sufficiently unhappy with your activities and the effect on their lives and fortunes, it is wise to live as though there is a small deadly snake in every shower stall, cyanide in the tastiest cookie. You can solve the problem by becoming a drifter, changing your base at random intervals. But my home is aboard the Busted Flush at Slip F-18, Bahia Mar Marina in Fort Lauderdale, and there I intend to stay until finally no one is able to either drink the water or breathe the air.

It was a pleasant night, so we walked the long mile to Benjamin’s and had the good Irish stew at a table in the back. As we were finishing, two of Meyer’s newest friends moved in on us. Denise and Frieda, visitors from England. He had met them on the beach that morning when one of them had asked him to identify something horrid which had washed up on the sand. Meyer is always being asked questions by strangers. He looks reliable. It was a sea slug. Both women were celebrating simultaneous divorces, and it was easy to see they would look splendid in beachwear. I managed to detach myself, and walked back to the marina alone.

When I opened the little panel in the port bulkhead outside the lounge, the fail-safe bulbs were all glowing, telling me everything was secure. I turned the system off and reactivated it once I was inside. I got out the photographs and sat and studied them.

It struck me that the young man and woman in the pictures-Cannon and McBride-looked dead. When you look at pictures of people you know are dead, there is something different about the eyes. As if they anticipated their particular fate. It is a visceral recognition. These two young lovers had that look. I told myself I was getting too fanciful, and went to bed.

It had been an oddly aimless year for me. Old friends had died in faraway places. In the spring of the year there had been some weeks shared with a lonely woman. We liked each other. We laughed at the same things. The sex was good. Nothing electric. More like cozy. Lois came down to manage a new health spa, one of a chain. What we tried to do, out of mutual loneliness, was make more out of the relationship than it could support. Then it becomes pretend, and you are both saying things cribbed from halfforgotten books and plays. So the structure slowly topples over, like vanilla ice cream piled too high. At the end of it there was an obscure impulse to shake hands.

So I had a few thousand stashed in my bulkhead bank forward, and the only recent expense of any moment was when I pulled out all the old music equipment, the tuner, amplifier, tape deck, turntable and speakers, and replaced it all with mostly Pioneer and Sony. The state of the art had left me far behind, and last summer I kept myself busy putting the best parts of the record collection onto cassettes, and the best parts of the reelto-reel tapes onto cassettes as well. I set up a filing system. I was like a combination accountant, librarian and music director. I kept the editing function going for sixteen hours a day, and when everything was all neatened up and labeled, I found myself so sick of the sound of music I didn’t want to hear any at all, even from a boat moored three slips away. I knew I would get back into it later, carefully. After I’d given the records and the reel-to-reel tapes away to the local jazz appreciation society, along with the equipment I’d discarded, I had twice the fidelity in half the space, very clean sound, crisp as bread sticks. And tired ears.

The only other expense was another Syd Solomon painting. I drove up to a gallery in Boca Raton where he was having a show and picked out a strong little one, twelve inches by sixteen inches, all storm fury and tidal race. He’d put a lot of energy into a small painting. If you want to screw paintings to the bulkheads of boats, you have to pick little ones.

I couldn’t think of anything else I wanted to buy. The Flush was running well. My old blue Rolls pickup, Miss Agnes, was docile and obedient. And there was still a few thousand down below in the waterproof box.

The search for the Sundowner didn’t promise to elevate anyone’s blood pressure. Except maybe Millis‘. I knew that if the vessel was in the hands of the drug smugglers, I wanted no part of trying to yank it away from them. Maybe it could have been done six or seven years ago when there was still an innocence about it and the big money item was cannabis. That’s when preppies and dropouts and commercial fishermen were going into business in competition with unaffiliated batches of Jamaicans, Colombianos, Cubans and poachers from the Everglades. It was a wild time, often turning ugly, but then the professionals came in and organized it. Those who wanted to stay in business for themselves were dropped into the Atlantic and the Caribbean wearing anchor chain, or they were given to the customs agents and Coast Guard as free gifts, along with their boats and gear. Once the import business was organized, the shoreside distribution was revised, along with the cash flow. The big money product became cocaine. Pot was too bulky. They pushed cocaine nationwide, and controlled the supply to keep the price up. A lot of it could be brought in by mules who could pass customs looking innocent. The Navy, Coast Guard and special agents made the small boat runs too risky for amateurs. The fun lads went under, and tlae business fell into the hands of fellows from the several Mafia families who, having always tried to keep Miami as a neutral zone, teamed up to run the money machine smartly and efficiently, corrupting and paying off enough customs agents of the DEA to reduce losses to an acceptable percentage.

Bringing Hubie’s sloop back from Marigot Bay had been a good interlude for me. When we were pounding along on a good reach in hot sunshine, I spent a lot of hours working with the set of exercises Lois had taught me. She said that when you drive along the streets of Beijing in the morning, you see a lot of Chinese standing all `alone, doing the same stretching exercises. It is called Tai Chi Chuan, and looks like a kind of imitation combat in slow motion, with no opponent. At first I felt like an idiot. “At your age,” Lois said, “it is very important to stay flexible and limber. Each time you make the same move, you force yourself to bend a little further, reach further.”

“At my age?” I had said.

“When there is a tendency to accept constricted movements of the joints.”

“And how many push-ups can you do?”

“The question is irrelevant.”

And so the post-Lois, post-sailing McGee was down very close to two hundred pounds, with a new layer of deep-water tan, and a match in slow-motion combat for any hundred-and-twelve-pound Chinese person.

On Thursday morning I found the Mick in his office in the back corner of a leased hangar, at the public-use airport at Southdale. He waved me into a ratty old wicker chair while he continued to poke two fingers at the keyboard of an Apple 11e computer, copying data from a yellow pad, grunting with annoyance whenever he made a mistake and had to correct it on the screen. He put the data on disk and then printed it and checked the printout against his yellow sheet. He then activated his modem and sent the data out over the phone. He leaned back in his squeaky chair, waiting. He punched a couple of the keys. Suddenly the printer chattered into life, ran off what looked like a full page of information and stopped.

He sighed, tore it off and studied it and flipped it aside. “Dad bang business is getting more frigging complicated all the time.”

“What was that all about?”

“It’s a couple of programs called DataPlan and OpsPlan. I got three birds I can get into the air and I have to file plans and routes for the next three days, charter work and package delivery. Key West to Marco to Fernandina Beach to Venice to Georgetown to Abaco to Great Exuma to Clearwater to Staniel Cay… to hell and gone, Trav. And you miss filing or change a flight plan without enough notice or run an hour early or late and they are all over you like bug worms, laying on the damn fines and penalties, and taking every removable panel off the aircraft, poking around for Lady Caine. Anyway, this gadget makes it easier than it was last year to run my little operation, but I had to pay a little old gal to set in here with me for a couple of weeks teaching me how to run it. I’d like to sell out. There’s two different sets of people after me to do just that. But what the hell would I do with my time? Set on a porch? I hate golf and I hate TV and sunshine gives me the brown spots. What do you want from me this time?”

“You still do the aerial photography?”

“Indeed I do. And I still use that little old Aeronca Champ to do it.”

“That old rag-wing still able to get it up?”

“And it’ll keep on long after both of us are gone, if somebody loves her enough to get the parts made when they fail.”

“Here’s what I’m looking for. Confidentially.” I slid the photograph across the desk, positioned so he would make out the face Meyer had found.

He stared at me, jaw sagging. “McGee, am I hearing you? You are looking for a damn boat? In Florida?”

“And wherever else you can fly that thing.”

“You want to pay for a special mission?”

“Not if I can help it. There’s no client picking up the tab. It’s all me. I’d like you to work it in with your other business. Just take pictures whenever you come to a big bunch of boats at a club or marina on city docks or wherever. And when you see the lone cruiser running a waterway or outside, see if it has a face.”

“Face? Oh hell yes! I see it. But do you have any idea at all how many boats I fly over, me and my pilots, every day?”

“Just mail me the film. Here’s mailers all stamped and addressed. I’ll get prints made. Black and white. Fine grain.”

“I’ll work with wide angle, covers a bigger area. So get enlargements like maybe eight by ten. I got a Nikon C3 with a motor drive rigged to shoot straight down through a hole in the floor, with a long cord on the trigger. But I don’t take the Champ to the islands. You said confidential, and I don’t make that one by myself often. If I can get away I like to use the Champ, low and slow. Now I’m ready to ask the big question.”

“Thought you might be. What if you find it?” I asked.

“Like finding the head of a pin in seven haystacks. But what if I do?”

“Your piece of the action could be twenty to thirty thousand.”

“What if I don’t find it?”

“You’re out a little film and a little air time, and we’ll sit around and cry a little.”

“Remind me never to ask you what you do for a living, McGee.”

“It strikes me that all marinas look a lot alike from the air, so if…”

“I am a professional, friend. I list every shot in order and the list will be in with the exposed film every time.”

A thin woman in a red and white Jogging suit came into the office, clipboard in haьd. “Everything is ready, Mick, except no passengers yet.”

He cursed and then looked at the wall clock. “Give them another ten minutes, Carleen, then go ahead and take off. The other stuff had to be in Key West by eleven-thirty. Carleen, this is a friend of mine named Travis McGee. Trav, this is Carleen Hooper, my best pilot, aside from me of course.”

“Of course,” she said, smiling as we shook hands. She went on out to wait for the passengers. Nьck said she was a fool for work, and had three little kids to support. “She used to do aerobatics in a Mooney 231 with her husband in a twin version. He bought the farm and she doesn’t want to do high-risk flying while her kids are little.”

I hung around a little while to give him the usual chance to grouse about how too many regulations are ruining flying for the little guys, and too little regulation is ruining the cash flow for the big guys.

Three

ON TUESDAY, the ninth of October, I got three rolls of film from the Mick. I took them to a big commercial lab and had over ninety eight-by-ten glossy prints in hand by five o’clock when they closed.

As soon as I was back aboard the Flush, by referring to the exposure notes Mick had enclosed, I was able to write the location where each picture had been taken on the back of the picture. The dimensions of the task became evident. The big marinas looked like so much uncooked rice scattered across a black maze. Under the magnifying glass the rice became the shiny toys of the yachtsmen, chrome and brass, varnish and plastic, cleats and davits, and aerials, canvas and teak.

It was going to take too much of the rest of my life to peer at each craft looking for the smiling face. Florida was too full of boats. I locked up and took the glass and the sheaf of prints down to Meyer’s boat, the Thorstein Voblen. It is bigger and roomier, brighter and more open than the atuQ little cruiser he had before, the John Maynard Keynes. But already the hairy economist was beginning to wall himself in with books, pamphlets, charts, research papers and water glasses filled with sharp pencils.

He organized the search. It involved a screen, a plane projector and a drink while my waited for darkness. Each print required four projections, as the device could handle only a four-by-five area of the print comfortably. For each print he devised a template. Once we had identified a production boat we knew was fifty-four feet long, Meyer would then cut a U-shaped piece of cardboard to size. It was quick and easy work matching the template to the few fifty-four-footers in each segment of each print. Because the pictures had been taken at varying altitudes, from three hundred to five hundred feet, the template had to be recut for each print. As Meyer remarked, had we been searching for anything in the twenty-two-to-forty-two-foot range, we would have been wedged far up the creek. There were just too many of them. As we got used to looking, the templates became less necessary. Our eyes had adjusted whe realitive sizes of the usual mix of pleasure boats, and we could immediately spot the marina areas where the larger ones were docked.

We came across several which could have been the Sundowner, but each close comparison with the color shot showed some basic structural differences unlikely to have been altered. We became instant experts at looking down on boats from aloft. We looked at them in marinas, in flotillas, in single-file parade on the waterways, tied up to backyard docks and out trolling the deeps.

It was a little after midnight when we finished the last print. Meyer turned off the projector. My eyes felt sandy and tired. Earlier on, Meyer had set out a package of his notorious chili to thaw. We divided it and I went sleepily back to the Flush to take a precautionary pair of antacid tablets before climbing into my lonely acre of bed in the master stateroom.

On Saturday I got four more rolls, too late to get them developed and printed before Monday, the fifteenth. The Monday-night session went a lot faster. Recognition of the right size and shape was more instantaneous. But it was dull work. I began to have the impression we were looking at the same half dozen prints over and over. We yawned a lot. The thought of jackpot can keep the adrenaline flowing, but when it seems indefinitely delayed, the brain sags.

And so, one week later, on the twenty-second, when the jackpot showed up in the second print of some seventy we were prepared to examine, it jolted us. “Hey!” we said. “How about that!” we said. “What do you know!” we said. It had all begun to seem so highly improbable, our elation was inappropriately large and lasting. I had scribbled the information from Mick’s record on the back of the print. It said “west end Big Pine Key Sunday Oct 14.” Meyer adjusted the focus to the sharpest image we could get. There were twentytwo boats in what seemed to be a shaggy little commercial marina on the Florida Bay side, not far from the south bridge. Several with outriggers looked like charter fishermen. The Sundowner was the biggest moored there. It smiled up at us.

I couldn’t take my information to Billy because all we knew was that it had been there eight days ago.

On Tuesday morning at first light I was heading down toward the Keys, driving a battered old white Chevy pickup with big noisy beach-buggy tires and a Florida tag so old you could just about make out the green number on white from three feet away. But the sticker was up to date. I wore old khakis bleached by sun and salt, a faded red baseball cap which says, above the visor, Bay City Bandits. I wore an old pair of ratty gray New Balance running shoes, without socks. I wore aviator-style sunglasses. I wore a fishing knife in a sheath on my right hip. I wore a yellow windbreaker against the morning chill, and peeled it off as the sun came up.

I had borrowed the pickup from Sam Dandie.

He lives aboard the Merla S. at Bahia Mar with one or another of his nieces. They like to come visit, he says solemnly, nodding. He invented the Dandie Flotation Gauge when he was thirty-eight, and hasn’t worked since. He gives generously to his nieces. Borrowing his pickup is a trade-off. He enjoys driving Miss Agnes. He keeps trying to buy her. No way. I loan it to him and he takes a niece off to Disney World for a couple of days of fun and frolic. He takes one of those bungalows where you have everything sent in, if you wish. He has yet to see Epcot.

I reviewed my preparations as I drove. I had a grungy old cooler with ice and two six-packs of Bud. I had my old plug-casting bass rod, and my good spinner, heavy-duty graphite loaded with ten-pound test. I had the big black tackle box full of plugs, spinning lures, leader material, swivels, hooks and miscellany. And down in the bottom of it, under the last tray, lay the flat and deadly 9mm automatic pistol with the staggered box magazine holding fourteen rounds, wrapped in a piece of oily flannel. No extra rounds. If fourteen won’t do it, then it can’t be done.

Except for the weapon, I could see no reason in the world why if I said I worked in construction I wouldn’t get instant belief.

It took a little while at Big Pine to orient myself. Things look different from on high. It turned out to be called the Starfish Marina. Beer, bait, boats, slips for rent, charter service, guides. The parking area was beside the marina building, a cement-block structure. I could see the slip where the Sundowner had been. It was gone, as I had expected. Luck comes floating by a morsel at a time.

The interior was cleaner and brighter than I expected. There were floor racks of fish-oriented merchandise, a display case of reels, a wall rack of rods, a couple of coolers and along one wall a line of bait bins with a constant flow of running water through them. A heavy man in a stained canvas apron was skimming off some dead bait fish which floated on top of the water in one of the middle bins, using a small dip net, and dropping them in a bucket.

“Make good chum,” I said.

He turned and eyed me. “That’s what they generally get used for.”

“I meant that there kind, with the big eyes. They seem to cut up greasier than the others.” He finished and dropped the dip net into the bucket and stood up. “What can I do for you?”

“Has a fella name of Al been here looking for me?”

“Who are you?”

“My name is McGee.”

“Far as I know nobody has been looking for you.”

“He’ll probably turn up. We would want to rent a boat. If he shows up. A green skiff like one of those out there would be fine. And twenty horse with a spare tank. Nothing fancy.”

“Do you want to rent one or don’t you?”

“Only if he shows up. Last time we were here we did good.”

“I don’t remember you being here.”

“We didn’t start right from this marina last time. It was one down the line. But we worked our way up this direction. Got some nice trouts off the grass out there.”

“If he shows up, how long do you want the boat for?”

“We’d come in right at dusk. What would that be worth?”

“If you start in the next half hour, call it thirty dollars plus the gas.”

“Little heavy, isn’t it?”

“Going rate. Leave your car here, you don’t have to make a deposit.”

“It’s the white pickup next to the power pole out there.”

He glanced out the window and nodded. He went over to the cash register to get his cigarettes. As he lit one I said, “You own this place?”

“Me and the bank.”

“You got the kind of work I’d like to do.”

“What do you do, McGee?”

“Construction. But it isn’t like it used to be. Nobody gives a shit anymore. Slap it together and sell it off and hope the sucker don’t fall down before you get paid off.”

“True, friend. True. I got a shipment of six reels in a couple weeks ago. Priced to sell at thirty-nine ninety-five each. Four of them defective. So I pay UPS to ship them back and I’ll wait maybe two, three months for replacements or money back. I call up, I get to talk to a machine.”

“Well, there’s still some damn good merchandise being made in this world.”

“Like what?”

“When me and Al went fishing last time, let me see, that would be on Sunday, a week ago last Sunday, when we went by here a couple times I noticed you had a big custom cruiser in here. Looked rich and sassy and really put together. I’d guess at least fifty feet, maybe more. Right out there it was, at that last slip.”

“Good boat, but she wasn’t kept up.”

“Shame to let something like that go downhill. What was the name of it?”

“Lazidays. Registered out of Biloxi. Come across from Yucatan. A smart-ass redhead kid running it. Couple of girls aboard.” He opened a blue notebook. “Kid’s name was John Rogers. Came in Saturday night, took off Monday early. It was fifty-four feet. And it was a hog pen. When I saw how they were keeping her, I made them pay cash in advance.”

“They came across from where?”

“Mexico, Yucatan. The redhead didn’t tell me that. One of the girls, the blonde one, told me. She came in to buy beer and wanted to know if I’d take pesos. I said maybe, because my youngest, she likes coins. So I bought four different coins for a dollar. She kept scratching her legs and she said the bugs were terrible in Chetumal and I said where’s that, and she waved west and said over in Yucatan there.”

“‘I guess these days they check those boats out pretty good, the ones coming in from the west or the southwest.”

He shrugged. “Sometimes yes, sometimes no. They’re spread thin. Those from around here got into it, some are in the U.S. prison and same can’t stop smiling. I wouldn’t have the nerve for it. They even use satellites. So these days it’s by airplane or real fast boats running at night. And it’s none of my business if a boat I rent dock space to got checked or not.”

“Mine either,” I said. “What you get for this here Mirralure?”

“Four and quarter plus tax.”

“Guess I’ll take it. Big snook up in Chokoloskee Bay chewed mine raggedy.”

“Hard to make them hit a plug.”

“I put a little strip of white fish belly on the back-end gang hook and then work it like a wounded minnow. The ones that take it seem to usually be the big ones. Permit take this?”

“Permit’ll hit anything at all or nothing at all, depending.”

“Never have fastened on to one of those.”

“You do, it’s something to remember. Best to get a guide for them.”

“Too rich for my blood, friend.‘’ I walked over and looked out the door. ”Wish Al would show up. “

“Want to use the phone, see what time he left?” It seemed reasonable, so I telephoned Meyer collect aboard the Veblen and when he answered, I said, “Al! Al, what the hell are you doing home? I’ve been waiting here at the Starfish Marina for you. You forget?”

“No, I didn’t forget, McGee. I tried to get hold of you before you left but you’d already gone. I’ve got the flu.”

“Couldn’t you have phoned here?”

“I forgot the name of it. I remember where it is, but I couldn’t remember the name.”

“Thanks a lot, old buddy!” I, said, and hung up on him.

I explained. The proprietor commiserated with me. I thanked him for his help, started out and turned back and said, “Did that Lazidays boat head back to Mexico?”

“I don’t know and don’t care. Why should you, McGee?”

He had the frosty look of sudden suspicion. I’d mentioned it once too often. I shrugged and came back to the register. “I don’t know why I care. When I saw that thang tied up here, Al got pissed at me because I kept on coming by here to take just one more look at it. It was like seeing the boat you dreamed about your whole life. If I ever made it big-too late for any chance of that now-that’s just what I’d buy myself. Matter of fact I told Al to meet me here because I thought I might get another look at her. So I guess I must have asked where she went so maybe I could get another look, if you knew where she went.”

“You wouldn’t like it so good you get a close look, believe me.” His tone was casual, the flash of suspicion gone. “I don’t know where they went. The redhead come in and bought a largescale chart of this here end of Florida Bay. He topped off his tanks and took on provisions. See that gas station diagonal across the road to the left? He made some phone calls from that booth there out by the walk just beyond the station. He could have made the calls right on the phone here that you used. Anybody buys that much diesel, they get to use the phone if they pay the longdistance. I wanted a pay phone in here, but they have some damn reason they won’t put it in. Going east, maybe he didn’t want to run outside. But he has enough boat and the weather is holding. I don’t know where he went.”

I stopped at the next Key on the way back toward Miami, and bought the same Coast and Geodetic Survey chart. I sat in the pickup in the shade of a fairly big tree. There are no forest giants in the middle Keys. The hurricanes whip them to death. This one was thriving, awaiting the next big whirly. It had probably survived a couple when it was a sapling, able and willing to bend to the ground. I remembered Lois’ message about staying limber. I sat and studied the bewilderment of islands and shoals north of the middle Keys. I phoned the Mick from a booth so hot I had to handle the phone in gingerly fashion. His machine told me to leave a message. My message involved where he could put his machine. I crossed the highway and got some fast food and a little further along the road I heard the three o’clock news. Nothing was happening except that a lot of little people were getting killed in a lot of little wars, and there was an out-of-season tropical disturbance forming beyond the Windwards.

I drove right to Mick’s hangar at Southdale. Carleen Hooper was sitting beside the Mick’s desk. She had on a pale green jogging outfit. Her blonde hair was short and tousled, her face sallow and lined, with big dark smudges under her eyes. She smiled at me and said, “McGee, I approve of your suggestion about the answering machine.”

“Didn’t think you’d be listening to it, Mrs. Hooper.”

“Carlie, please. Mick should be here any minute. And I’ve got this big damned form to fill out for the FAA. This afternoon I am right in the groove, coming down from Orlando, assigned to twelve thousand, which is just above some clouds forming. I am skimming the top and all of a sudden this little ultralight pops right in front of me.

“What’s he doing at twelve thousand anyway? I would call it two hundred feet. So I am at about two forty knots, which is about three hundred and fifty feet per second. I was just about to go onto autopilot, and if I had, he would have been dead. I had time for just one little twitch which lifted the right wing over him and I had a glance at his face. I think I took seven years off his life, and he took a least a week off mine. I came back around to get a number but those little suckers don’t have to have one. It had an MX on the rudder surface. I was tempted to buzz him a couple of times for luck, but with my luck it would have ripped his wings off. He was heading on down pretty good anyway. He waved at me. Isn’t that nice? Excuse me, I’ve got to get this dumb thing filled out. The way I see it, they should have an operational ceiling of one thousand feet and they shouldn’t be allowed to operate those things within twenty-five miles of any airport. They look like big dumb mosquitoes.”

I told her the fellow was lucky somebody with wonderful reflexes was flying her airplane. I roamed around, looking at the souvenirs the Mick has fastened to the two wooden walls of his office. The other two are glass from one yard on up so he can watch what’s going on on the hangar floor. One picture was of the Mick standing on the hardpan in flying gear, helmet in hand, in front of what looked to be a World War II Navy torpedo bomber. It was dated February 10, 1942. The Mick looked about fifteen years old.

When he came in, I took him out into a corner of the hangar far from the two mechanics just finishing up their day, and I told him what I wanted. I showed him the chart. I’d marked the area I wanted covered.

“Okay,” he said. “Lower level. Color. Check the hidey-holes. This is Tuesday. I can’t do it before Saturday. It will take the whole day. I’ll use the Champ and figure on two gas stops. How does four hundred sound? That’s a special rate.”

“Plus gas?”

“You called it.”

“Damn it, Mick, they left the marina Monday morning, the fifteenth. Saturday is twelve days later. Any way anybody could do that tomorrow? Carlie? Somebody?”

“Big rush?”

“I’ve got a feeling in the lower spine. Lumbar four and five. That’s the hunch area. Like they brought something across, and that’s a transfer point. Or they’re picking something up.”

“Let me take another look at that schedule.” He was able to rework his little air force schedule so that he could do a half day tomorrow, in the morning, early.

He went into the back corner of the hangar to check his little yellow chum, his Aeronca 7AC Champion, about twenty-one feet of high-wing monoplane with a single wooden propeller, weighing 740 pounds empiy, with room for two passengers, thirteen gallons of gas and 40 pounds of baggage, maximum speed at sea level: eighty-two knots.

“Take me along?” I asked him.

He looked me over and shook his head sadly. “You and me add up to three people, McGee, and I never stress my little friend here, the Champ. One time I put her right above stall speed heading into a steady forty-mile breeze, and she backed up at about five or six miles an hour. I could look down and make out the countryside going by the wrong way. Strange feeling. Tell you what. I can put a Polaroid back on the Nikon, and if the air is calm, I can keep peeling and reloading. Some wind and I’ll be too dad bam busy. You could come by like maybe one in the afternoon.”

Four

BECAUSE I MIGHT have to take a run down the Keys again, I was once again costumed and equipped to match Sam Dandie’s old Chevy pickup. I got to the hangar at quarter to one, and as I parked, the Mick came trotting heavily out, grinning broadly. “McGee, I just didn’t dare tell you how bad I need that twenty to thirty big ones you mentioned. Superstition, I guess. Take a look.”

He had four shots of it on thick Polaroid film, taken from a lower altitude than I had become accustomed to. Overhead, and one from a lot lower but behind the stern, so crisp I could read the name, and the third of the port side. The fourth was from a few hundred feet up, showing the vessel snugged up against mangrove.

“I think she’s empty,” he said.

“How so?”

“After I took this shot, this one where I was high over it, I came down and took this one from directly overhead, expecting people to run out on deck like they always do when they hear that little Continental coughing and sputtering like it’s about to quit-and never does. When nobody came out, and I couldn’t see any other boats around, I buzzed it from off the port side. I came across this piece of water here and pulled up. I got the camera fixed in place. Missed the first two shots. Water in one, mangrove in the other. Hit it clean the third time. I got the stern shot just right the first time. Couldn’t get a bow shot on account of the way the mangrove curves around up here, see? After all that, nobody came on deck, and it was by then nine in the morning, and I came right back to the barn from there. She’s empty but I don’t think she’s been stripped. See here? There’s a good dinghy, and this up here is a rod with a star-drag reel somebody left on the side deck. So it can’t have been empty too long. They strip an abandoned boat fast down in those waters.”

“What’s this here?”

“Somebody cut mangrove branches to hide her. But she’s big. They didn’t cut enough, and they’ve been cut long enough the leaves all curled up.”

“Exactly where is she?”

“She’s ten to twelve miles north-northwest of where I picked her up in the other picture at Big Pine Key. She’s in a jumble of little islands to the north of Big Torch Key, sitting in a bay in this horseshoe-shaped island.” He marked an X on my chart. “Look, in this shot you can see the channel coming in. Very tight. She’s out of sight from the water in any direction. You’d have to feel your way into the bay to find her. You going to advise the owner?”

“After I take a look at her.”

“Taking the law with you?”

“I think I’ll take that look first.”

“I don’t want to see those funds slip away, friend.”

“You won’t, Mick.”

At first light on Thursday morning I headed out from a place named Faulkner’s Fish Camp on Ramrod Key in a wooden skiff with a twenty-horse motor, beer cooler, fly dope, tackle, tackle box, ten-power binoculars and a bait pail full of apprehensive shrimp. I pushed it as fast as the rig would go, and when I got to the area I got lost three or four times among the wrong islands before, at high noon, I found the channel into the little bay protected on one side by the horseshoe island and on the other by a long narrow mangrove island. There was a gentle breeze from the north, just enough to riffle the surface of the bay. She was there, and the closer I got to her, the more disreputable she looked-like an elegant lady who had stepped into the wrong bar on New Year’s Eve.

A lot of her varnish had been sprayed lavatory green and it had begun to flake off. I headed slowly for the stern. I could guess that under the new board, stained driftwood gray, screwed to the stern with LAZIDAYS painted thereon, I could find the thick golden word SUNDOWNER. A sudden shift of the breeze changed the look of the vessel and the shape of the day. It brought that thick ripe sweet stink of death and decay. I killed the motor and curved the skiff away from the stink, and as I did so, I noticed three buzzards in a dead mangrove which stood taller than the rest. Black sentinels defeated by the geography of a cruiser. They were never going to flap down to the cockpit deck, waddle down the steps to the feast. You seldom see them out on the islands, except after a red tide has washed the big dead fish onto the mud beaches. I have a friend who disbelieved the experts who say birds have no sense of smell, and, so one summer out in the ranchlands northeast of Sarasota, he tested them. Before dawn he would put dead meat under a white wooden box, and spread several identical boxes around the area. with nothing under them. The buzzards would circle above them for a time, and then would always come down to clumsy landings around the baited box, ignoring the others.

And then he realized that maybe it wasn’t a keen sense of smell but instead remarkable eyesight. The carrion flies always arrive first. They have a shiny metallic-looking blue-green abdomen, and maybe the buzzards can spot the glintings from a thousand feet on high. Nature has many little tricks which reinforce the interdependence of the species.

It is one thing to look at a mistreated boat and another to look at a tomb. The silence of the bay seemed more intense. And I could see the glint of the carrion flies.

When you have time to think, use it. I wanted to go below and take a look. If somebody had killed people aboard, then trained investigators might find some useful clue. And if trained people were looking for clues, it would not be wise to leave any of my own. I had the illogical and uncomfortable feeling that at any moment a small boat would come in through the channel. I tied the skiff to the starboard corner of the stern, after I had sniffed a little bit of gasoline to deaden my sense of smell. I used the small rag to squeeze some gasoline from the spare tank into a little bottle from my tackle box which had held a remaining trace of reel oil. I wrapped the bottle in the gassy rag and put it in my shirt pocket. I checked the bottoms of the old gray running shoes. The last traces of tread were long gone. I found stiff old cotton fish gloves in the tackle box, kneaded them soft and put them on. I took the pistol from the bottom of the tackle box and shoved it inside the waistband of my khaki pants. Double-check. My skiff was out of sight to anyone coming into the bay through the only navigable opening. Nothing could fall out of my pockets. I took the sunglasses off and placed them carefully on the rear ledge near the outboard motor. Then I clambered up quickly and levered myself over the transom and stepped down onto the red waterproof padding of the semicircular transom bench and from there to the deck, avoiding some broken glass and a dried puddle of something or other. I stopped there to use the little bottle and rag to kill my sense of smell again. Flies buzzed by me, coming and going. They had a traffic pattern. Down into the shadows of the main lounge through the open hatchway and back out again. One blundered into the side of my face as it went by.

Okay, MeGee. If a fly can go down there, so can you. I turned and waved to the buzzards and went below, picking each step with care, pausing on the second one until my eyes adjusted to the shadows.

Someone had done horrid work. I looked at Howard Cannon first. He was the nearest. He was spread-eagled on his back on the floor, with a line from one wrist to the leg of a table that was screwed to the deck, and from the other wrist to the divider between two low lockers. I sat on my heels to get a closer look at what he had in his mouth. Somebody had pried his angular jaw open and inserted a thick roll of bills, of currency, between those buck teeth and then, from the look of the protruding inch of money they had hammered it into place with the heel of a hand. There was a shiny blue plastic clothespin on his nose. His eyes were muddy slits of white with no iris showing. His face had a blue cyanotic look. I shut my eyes for a moment, breathing through my mouth, hoping no fly would get into one of the deep inhalations. There were some loose bills beside his head, a couple stuck in the blood that had run from the corner of his mouth. I carefully picked up two of the others. Both fifties. They looked perfectly good. Splendid money. Until I noticed that they had the same serial number. And I bent closer to one stuck in the dried blood and saw that it too had the same number. One could reasonably assume there had been some disagreement about the money. Howard Cannon a/k/a John Rogers had lost his argument. And his life. And Karen McBride’s life as well. She lay facedown and forlorn on a couch, wearing only a polka-dot sun top. Her dead head lolled over the side of the couch, a tangle of blonde hair hanging. Her left arm hung down, the back of her hand resting against the deck. The flies seemed more interested in her than in her friend. I couldn’t make out how she had been killed. I didn’t want to touch her. Under the unkempt hair the skull looked misshapen to me, but I could not be sure. There was a dark matted area which could have been blood.

Only the more venturesome flies had gone beyond the main lounge into the forward cabin area. The slender naked girl who lay on her back on the bed had probably been beautiful in life. Dark hair. Clean features. But now the shape of the skull showed, the shape of the bones. She was dwindled the way a total loss of blood can cause. Her slender throat had been sliced from ear to ear, and the knife lay beside her head in the dark mat of blood, a kitchen knife from the galley. The insides of her thighs showed large blue bruised areas and I could guess she had been badly used before someone did her the favor of sending her on her way across the river.

I went back and gave Howard a gentle nudge in the hip area with the rubber toe of my shoe. The body was slack. I know that after death rigor sets in and later the body returns to a slackness of gas and rot, but I had no idea how long that would take. The interior of the Sundowner was stifling, a heat that made my shirt and pants cling to me, dark with sweat. The heat would hasten the process. I had a moment of dizziness and once again sniffed the gas. I looked around and realized that person or persons unknown had conducted a search. Drawers dumped, panels hacked open, engine hatches open, food spilled, the contents of lockers yanked out and spread around.

Maybe I could have found the Sundowner sooner. And if I had, maybe I too could be wearing a bright plastic clothespin and a mouthful of money.

I was not going to learn any more standing there. And almost without conscious transition, I was back in the skiff, sunglasses in place, chugging away from the Sundowner. I put the weapon back in the bottom of the tackle box. Out of some idiot impulse I poured what was left of the gas in the little bottle back into the spare tank. Mr. Neat. In spite of the sun’s heat and the warmth of the breeze I felt cold. I stopped the motor in the middle of the bay and vomited over the side. I sucked a piece of ice from the cooler. I wanted to think some deep solemn thoughts about living and dying. But not here, where I felt exposed. I gave the thoughtful, patient buzzards a final wave of farewell and exited the bay, slowly and carefully. But there was no vessel and no aircraft in sight which could have spotted me leaving.

I made very good time returning to Faulkner’s and turning the skiff in. There was some mild curiosity about a customer coming back early with no fish. But I said I hadn’t felt too good out there, and when I began to feel worse, I thought I better come on in. It wasn’t enough of an incident to make me memorable, I hoped.

I cruised ten miles toward home in the pickup before I found a phone booth in the shade, with a door that I could close instead of one of those stupid open shell-shaped things.

The voice on the other end said that it was indeed the Coast Guard I was speaking to, in person of one rating named Bliss.

“I want to report a…”

“I must have your name first, sir.”

“Look, what I want to do is report…”

“I must have your name and the location from which you are calling before you report the matter to which you refer, sir.”

“Now goddamn it, Bliss…”

“Those are the regulations, sir.”

“My name is Adam Smith and…”

“Will you spell that, sir.”

I spelled it. “I am calling from Delancy’s Grill in Homestead.” And I spelled all that too.

“What is the nature of the matter you wish to report, sir?”

“Take this down, Bliss. Take it down carefully because I am not going to spell it. Get your people to take one of the big choppers that have pontoons, and take along three body bags and somebody who knows how to act at the scene of a crime, and tell them to search the small island area ten to twelve miles north-northwest of Big Pine Key, and they’ll spot a fifty-four-foot cruiser parked against the mangrove shore of a crescent-shaped island.”

“Is it… ”

“Shut up, Bliss. Just write or tape or whatever you do. The cruiser was stolen last July fourth up on the east coast near Citrina. Its legal owner is William Ingraham. You people have this on record because you’ve looked for it.”

“But, sir, we…”

“Aboard that cruiser, renamed the Lazidays, they will find the murdered bodies of Howard Cannon of Citrina and Karen McBride, also of Citrina, and also the body of an unidentified young female.”

“Jesus Chr…”

“They’ve been dead a while and it is hot out there, so get on it, Bliss. The island is a crescent pointed north and south, with the open side toward the west. You can tell it by the buzzards sitting in the tree nearby.”

“But…”

“If they want to go out and tow that vessel in, they’ll have to bring it out on a good high tide, right at the crest.”

I hung up on him before his voice changed all the way to soprano.

After I gathered my wits I went back into the 7-Eleven and got another handful of change. Billy Ingraham was home. I told him I had located the Sundowner. I told him I had put the Coast Guard on it and he was to sit tight until he heard from them.

“Where is it? I can leave in ten minutes and…”

“Billy, don’t make me sorry I told you. There are three dead bodies aboard her. The two kids from Citrina that were the suspects, and another girl.”

“Good God!”

“They’ve been dead a while. It’s one hell of a mess. They were killed in ugly ways, Billy. It’s something to do with dope peddling or smuggling or counterfeiting. Listen carefully. I want to be out of this as of right now.”

“How bad is my boat?”

“It would break your heart.”

“Tell me.”

“Okay, structurally she is probably okay. But it will need complete outfitting, above and below. New rugs, upholstery, paint, cabinetwork. I don’t know if they can ever get the stink out. New paint and varnish. The heads were clogged. People have been crapping in the bilge. Billy, believe me, you don’t want to see her. Lay back, and when they contact you, have her taken to the yard that built her for a complete overhaul, and then I think you ought to sell her after she’s clean for whatever you can get.”

“Let me be the judge of…”

“You be the judge. Okay. But one thing has to be clear, Billy. You never asked me to find her. I never looked for her. I never found her. Clear?”

“But why?”

“There has to be some very rough people involved in whatever was going on. And one team knocked off three people on the other team. I don’t want anybody to get any idea that it could have been me.”

“Oh.”

“As far as you know, you may have asked me to look for her but I wasn’t interested. I said the odds were too long.”

“I didn’t know you could get so nervous, Trav.”

“Billy, I can get very nervous, and this is one of the times.”

I knew when I reached the Mick I wouldn’t have as much trouble making him see the point, and I didn’t.

“Three deads,” he said, and I heard him whistle softly.

“I am making a little bonfire of the photographs, and if you’ve got anything around there, you better roast a marshmallow too.”

“Very good thinking. Let me see. Why were you trying to get in touch with me?”

“I changed my mind. Forgot what it was.”

“What’s your name again?”

“McGee. Travis McGee.”

“Never heard of you, pal.”

I made my final call from the outskirts of Fort Lauderdale to the newsroom at the Miami Herald. I told the woman who answered that the Coast Guard had recovered a stolen yacht down in the Keys with the bodies of three young people aboard, and hung up in the middle of the first question she asked. Calling her was easier than calling the Coast Guard. The Guard seems intent on making communication impossible.

I did not feel the inner knots unwind until I had returned the pickup to Sam Dandie, stowed my gear, bundled my sweaty khakis into the laundry sack, taken a long shower in my stall aboard the Busted Flush, big enough for a bridge game, dressed in cool whites and fixed myself a hearty flagon of Boodles over ice. I took the drink topside and sat on the sun deck and watched the lazy life of the marina and the homebound bustle of traffic over an the avenue.

Then I let myself think about being young and dying. One of the basic ingredients of good and bad poetry, good and bad drama the world over. The end of all as life is ere begun. A waste of the firm, springy, young flesh, of all the spices and juices. Tens of thousands of the young kill themselves every year. A pity. I wondered if it could be some kind of Darwinian design, getting rid of the ones unsuited for the rest of the ride. But that would leave out the earthquakes, the floods, the little and big wars, the famines and the deadly diseases that knock off the millions without regard to age or merit: No matter how many dead ones you see, indifference is never achieved except by the butchers. The dead young women had rocked me. A cruel waste. The dentist’s daughter and somebody else’s daughter. Grownups had helped each of them learn to walk, and had cried out their pleasure when the toddler, face screwed up in anxiety, had come tottering into the waiting arms. Somebody had proudly repeated their first words, read their first school papers, bought their first party dresses. And some people somewhere would have a wrenching, stinging, insatiable sense of loss.

I saw Meyer coming along the dock area and so I got up and walked back to the stern rail of the sun deck and asked him to come aboard. He said he would, as soon as he delivered one fine slab of dolphin to Slip E-10, to the Petersens aboard the Rubiyacht. I told him to step below and fix a drink and bring it up. The long twilight is a fine time of day in October.

When he was in the neighboring deck chair I said, “May I tell you about my day?”

“Please do.”

And that was another way of unwinding.

Five

THE WEATHER held fine for the tag end of October and on further into November than we have any right to expect down here on the Gold Coast. The story of the murders and recovery of the Sundowner was a mini-sensation which died quickly. Buried in the gaudy news report was speculation about the identity of the anonymous tipster who had phoned the Coast Guard with such knowing details about the identity of the vessel and the bodies aboard it. It was assumed that he had something to do with the murders and that it was related to the drug trade. There have been so many drug murders and so many deaths of the young in southeast Florida that nothing much new can be said.

There was another little flurry when the third victim was identified as Gigliermina Reyes y Fonseca, of Lima, Peru, daughter of a Peruvian diplomat. She had been traveling in Mexico with a companion and had been reported missing a month before the body was found.

On November 7, a Wednesday, Billy Ingraham called and said he had something far me, and I could come and get it anytime before Saturday. I drove up there the next morning and went up to the penthouse duplex at the top of Tower Alpha at Dias del Sol. Billy’s tan had faded a little. He looked heavier and he seemed abrupt, almost surly. He led me into a little study on the lower floor of the duplex. He didn’t ask me to sit down. He handed two thick manila envelopes to me. “What’s this, Billy?”

“Your money, MCGee.”

“How much?”

“Why don’t you count it and find out?”

“What the hell is going on?”

“I’m paying you in cash. Isn’t that the way you people like to get it?”

I sat down without invitation and tossed the two envelopes onto his desk. I began to realize what had happened. “Billy, I told you not to go look at the boat. But you did, didn’t you?”

He perched a hip on a corner of his desk and looked dolefully down at me. “After the authorities were through with her, the yard sent a couple of men down. They got her cleaned up some and operating and brought her around to Jacksonville. Millis and me, we don’t want that cruiser anymore. It’s finished for us.”

“Going to get another one?”

“I don’t know. Maybe not. It’s a lot of work and responsibility. Millis, she wants to spend the winter in the South of France.”

“Why treat me so hardnose, Billy?”

“I don’t know. Shit. You’re part of the whole picture somehow. And that goddamn dentist calling me up and crying over the phone, and why did I leave the keys in the boat, his daughter would still be alive, and that damn insurance outfit saying take seventeen thousand three hundred or nothing at all, and people asking me how it felt to own a boat people got killed on. McGee, I just don’t feel like being sweet and nice to anybody at all.”

“How much is in the envelopes?”

“One ninety-three five.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t you want to ask any questions?”

“Why should I? You’re not the kind that screws friends.”

“You got a right to know. It took eighty-eight thousand to get her back in decent shape to peddle. Part of that eighty-eight was the little piddle the insurance gave me. The yard says they can get four hundred and seventy-five for her. She nets out in recovery condition at three eighty-seven and you get half of that. Here’s how I make out, if you care.”

“I care.”

“I had seven twenty in her that I put in. I put in a net seventy thousand seven hundred to get her in shape to sell. That makes seven ninety and seven hundred. Out of that I get back a hundred and ninety-three five hundred. In other words, McGee., I take a bath for five ninety-seven two.”

“A boat is said to be a hole in the water into which the owner pours money.”

He smiled for the first time, but it was a tired smile. “Bet your buns,” he said. “The deal with you wasn’t the best one I’ve ever made. I can’t tell you how many times Millis has told me that. It never occurred to me that three damn kids could do eighty-eight thousand dollars’ damage to a boat just living in it.”

“And dying in it.”

“Yes. That too.” He sighed. “And I didn’t know a custom boat would drop so much on the market. We designed it to suit us. People who can afford it, sooner get one built for their own tastes and lifestyle. And word got around it’s the murder boat. That hurts chances of selling it. Superstition of the sea or something.”

“Billy, you’re breaking my heart. Want to renegotiate?”

“And you would, wouldn’t you?”

“Just say the word.”

He stood up and laughed and belted me on the arm hard enough to numb my fingertips. “Shit, McGee, I’ve got more money than Carter had pills. I just like. to moan and groan. A deal is a deal. Don’t insult me.”

I got up and said, “Has anybody been by to find out who located your boat for you?”

“Three dapper little guys in three-piece suits about a week ago. Only one of them could speak English, and not a lot of it either. I told them the Coast Guard found my boat. They were some kind of Latins. They said somebody told the Coast Guard where to look. I said that was interesting, but I didn’t know anything about it. They said that the person who tipped the Coast Guard knew whose boat it was. I said that was interesting too, and maybe it was my insurance company.”

“Nice going. Thanks.”

Millis sauntered in. She was wearing some kind of black silky jogging suit, and she smelled expensive. “Travis McGee! How good to see you!” she cried, and she did it so well I could almost believe her. “How clever you were to find the Sundowner for us.”

“Just dumb luck,” I said.

“I guess more luck for you than for us,” she said. “Can you stay for lunch? Please?”

“Thanks, but I’ve got to get back.”

Billy took me to the door. He said they were flying up to New York on Saturday because there were two shows Millis wanted to see, and also a friend of hers was having a show of his paintings in one of the galleries and they’d been invited to the opening. I told him I hoped he’d have a fine time. He said he hoped so too, but he didn’t look as if he believed it.

I decided to give Mick the twenty rather than be picky and cut him to ten percent after expenses. I phoned him on Thursday to be sure he’d be in and then drove over with it. I gave it to him the same way I got it, half hundreds and half fifties in a manila envelope. He undid the clasp and peered in and then he beamed at me, and for an instant I saw how he must have looked as a little kid when he heard he was going to go to the movies.

“Hoo weee!” he said. “Makes my teeth hurt.”

“Some well-dressed little Latin types came to my client to find out who found the boat.”

“Nobody has come to me.”

“They might.”

“What boat is that?”

“I can’t remember either.”

“Wonder who wasted those kids,” he said, frowning.

“What kids?”

“Okay, okay, okay,” he said. “You get real cautious, don’t you?”

“And I’m walking around, talking and everything.”

That was the end of it, I thought. Before you tiptoe down the hall, you close all the doors, very carefully. And you don’t make any noise until you are out of the neighborhood. Violent people tend to have dim little minds and a tendency to discount all explanations. They would rather hit than listen. The dim little minds have a short attention span, fortunately, and so when jingle-bell time came close, I had made some progress in forgetting the whole thing. There was the occasional unexpected glimpse of the roll of bills in the redhead’s jaws, or of the flies crawling across the buttock mounds of the dentist’s daughter, or of the kitchen filet knife with the red handle with finger grooves to make it more comfortable in the hand.

And then one day there was a card in my box to pick up a package at the window. It was booksized, book-shaped, book-heft, and had a department store label, a hand-lettered address. I guessed the card would be inside. I was in a hurry, so I tossed it on the front seat of my blue Rolls pickup and headed over the bridge into town. A still, murky day with an eye-shadow sky and the stink of inversion. I needed an odd lot of boat items, some line, some triple-O steel wool, some brass grommets that would work with my grommeting tool, some paint thinner and a couple of small bronze cleats I had decided I needed to make certain lines aboard the Flush easier to manage. There is an open mall on the right a couple of blocks past U.S. 1, with a marine supply and hardware store at the far left end of it. Even though I had a batch of other errands, I succumbed to my tendency to browse the hardware. I average three implausible gadgets per trip. Meyer predicts the Flush will eventually sink from the sheer weight of gadgetry.

As I was paying for my toys at checkout, there was a hard distant thudding sound, followed by some faint sounds in a higher register. I had once heard a head-on collision, and it had sounded much the same.

As I was driving out of the mall parking area, heading for the next errand, I heard the sirens coming.

That evening, three days before Christmas, I heard on the local news and weather that a bomb had exploded behind that shopping mall at a few minutes past ten, killing instantly one Emiliano Lopez, age fourteen, and one Horatio Sanchez, age thirteen. The explosion had blown a hole in the cinderblock wall that formed the back wall of the stock room of a dress shop in the middle of the mall, and done minor damage to a truck parked at a nearby loading dock. The explosion had been so violent only minute traces of the bomb had been found. Chemical analysis indicated an advanced type of plastic explosive, and the authorities said it was reasonable to assume it had a sophisticated arming mechanism. The dead youths had long records of juvenile offenses. As yet there seemed to be no motive.

In the pantheon there must be one god especially assigned to those of us who are amiable, stupid and lucky. I went out to the parking area at a half run and found my present was missing. And I had forgotten that in contemporary Fort Lauderdale one must always lock one’s car.

The street children had opened my package. It should have worked perfectly. I should have been blown to bloody mush. One big white flash in the brain, and nothingness from then on-unless, of course, John Tinker Meadows is correct in his television promises of golden streets and eternal life to come.

When I went back into the lounge, I fixed fresh drinks for myself and for Annabelle Everett. I had known her as Annabelle Harris when she had worked for Billy Ingraham back when Billy had his fingers in lots of pies. She’d married Stu Everett, a local TV weatherman, and gone with him when he’d moved to a bigger job in a bigger city, and she had come back without him when she caught him with the girl who did the eleven o’clock sports.

Annabelle is a tall, broad-shouldered blonde with an off-center way of looking at the world. “What was that all about?” she demanded. “You look kinda funny.”

“I thought I’d left something in the car.”

“I turned off your little box, friend. They got from the news into weather, and I seriously doubt I will ever be interested in the weather again. Or sports. You can turn it back on if you are seriously concerned.”

“No. No, thanks.”

About five minutes later she said, “Hey, it would be nice to have somebody to talk to.”

“What? Oh, I’m sorry, Annabelle. I was thinking.”

“I wondered about that. Your forehead was all knotted up and you were sighing. I had to believe you were probably thinking. Want me to go so you can think a lot?”

“No, don’t go. I was glad I ran into you. I didn’t know you were back.”

“I didn’t expect to be back, but like I told you, things happen. Things happen to people every day. I didn’t ever think very much was going to happen to me, but there you go. Married and divorced-well, almost divorced-in fourteen months. We should never have left here. Did you know I was born here?”

“Never knew it.”

“The bad thing about that situation in Philadelphia, that sports girl is a little thing with hips out to here and a tiny mustache. I mean it hurts your pride along with everything else. Stu was okay until he started getting fan mail. He never got any down here because he had the wrong haircut. In Philadelphia they fixed him up. The mail started coming in. He grinned into every mirror he saw, and he kept doing that thing with his eyebrows. And taking an interest in sports. He always hated sports. He throws like a girl.”

She got up and went into the galley and peered into the convection oven. “We got time for one more drink,” she said.

“Smells great.”

“Chicken Annabelle is always great, friend. You know why I said I’d come here and fix it?”

“Why?”

“Because you are just about the only one-you and Meyer too-who tried to tell me Stu is a silly shit. Why didn’t I listen? The other guys I know here, since I’ve been back just over a month, they seem to think I’m some kind of practice target. They think they can take their shot and they can’t miss. I guess the idea is that a married girl gets it so steady she gets used to it, and she misses it so bad all you got to do is get a hand on her and she gives up, and rolls onto her back. And that is a lot of crap. Right now I feel about screwing the way I feel about the weather.”

“And sports.”

“Right there! Stu and the Little Mustache can read his fan mail out laud.”

As I handed her her drink I said, “I did have an ulterior motive in asking you aboard tonight.”

“Oh my God, Travis! Not you too! I am twenty-nine and a half years old, and already I need a lift. I wear soft contacts and I can’t carry a tune. My feet hurt and I feel about as sexy as Phyllis Schlafly. What is it with you guys?”

“We just can’t help ourselves, ma’am.”

“I guess I just don’t realize how terrific I am. Anyway, what’s the ulterior motive?”

“I’ve gotten very curious about Millis Hoover, also known as Mrs. Billy Ingraham. And I remember you worked with her when you worked for Billy.”

“And there, friend Travis, you have your true barracuda. How is Billy? He was damn good to me.”

“Right now he and Millis are in the South of France, and I don’t think he is having the best time in the world. Last fourth of July some kids stole his new cruiser.”

“Somebody wrote me something about that. Nothing but the best for Millis. She took aim at it and she got it all.”

“They found the cruiser with three dead young people aboard it, down in the Keys. It was in bad shape.”

“Why are you curious about Millis?”

“I saw her a couple of times when she worked for Billy. But not to talk to. I saw her twice up in that penthouse condo they have north of here. The first time she was cold as the well digger’s proverbial. The last time she was real huggy.”

“Then she either wanted something from you, or planned on getting something from Billy for being nice to you. Everything comes with price tags.”

“Tell me about her.”

“Not that I know a hell of a lot. Let me serve that chicken first, okay?”

And it was good. She didn’t get back to Millis until the bird had been reduced to bones and there were but two more glasses of Mondavi Fume Blanc left in the bottle.

She looked across at me through candlelight and said, “Old Millis. If I could trade bodies, I’d pick hers. Absolutely flawless. All silk and ivory. And those strange tilty eyes of green. Perfect features. And tough clean through, Travis. There is not an ounce of mercy in there anywhere. I’ll tell you something I probably shouldn’t. I found out by accident, and I never let on I knew. But she wangled old Billy into the sack long before Sadie died. A very hot, very heavy affair. That’s one of the reasons he took Sadie’s death so hard. Pure guilt. I’d guess from what I remember of the books that Billy would net out about ten to twelve million. Millis likes nice things. Millis lives for nice things.”

“Background?”

“I do not know one damn thing for certain. This is all guesswork. And it was well over five years ago. She hadn’t been working in the office very long. Several times men stopped in the office to see her. One at a time. It made her very angry. I had the feeling they were making demands and she was turning them down.”

“What kind of men?”

“My old granddad would call them city slickers. Very tan men with hard eyes and Dior shirts and Gucci shoes. Men with fifty-dollar haircuts, imported convertibles, strong aftershave, gold chains and diamond rings. Men who stay in suites and know the number to call to have girls sent up. Maybe they were mob people, labor leaders, or maybe they were important lawyers. She used to get outside phone calls too. They made her furious.”

“You mentioned guesswork, Annabelle.”

“Okay. From her clothes and her habits it was easy to guess that she had been making more at her previous job than she was making for working for Billy. I think she was involved in something that paid good money but didn’t have much of a future. So she got out of it maybe because she was scared or tired or something. They wanted her back, and kept after her for a little while. But she refused. Her office skills were rusty, but she got them back fast. And then she started looking around and saw Billy. A new career.”

“Had she been living in Lauderdale before she went to work for Ingraham?”

“Oh, no. Miami.”

About an hour later I drove her home. She had started yawning. We had agreed it had been a good evening, and we ought to try it again. “Next time I’ll cook Duck Annabelle,” she said drowsily. “Love this weird old truck of yours.”

She was way down the beach in one of the prehistoric condos, renting a one-bedroom job that came cheap because it was on the sixth floor and the elevators had been out of service for a year.

The roof leaked badly, but that was up on the tenth floor. There were no corridor lights, so she had to carry a flashlight in her purse. The Condominium Association had run out of funds when the big stuff started breaking. The pool was full of bushes, and the landscaping was returning to its original condition of pepper bushes and palmetto. Only a third of the units were occupied. Nobody knew who owned the empty ones, the city, the county, the banks or the estates of deceased retireds who’d moved into the Plaza del Rio long ago. She was anxious to get a job and move out before she got mugged in the stairwell. It was such a sad and sorry place I was tempted to ask her to move aboard the Flush until she got her life rearranged, but I was not ready for complications. She was pleasant and she was fun and she was a handsome woman, and she needed help but she wouldn’t accept any.

I walked her up to her door, kissed the tip of her nose and felt my way back out into the night. The book bomb kept going off in the back of my mind, ripping Horatio and Emiliano to bits. That night I dreamed I was looking through a huge hole in a cement-block wall, staring in at racks and racks of bright dresses. I heard a ticking and looked down and saw the package addressed to me, right in front of my bare toes.

Six

IF SOMEONE makes a careful and sophisticated and almost foolproof attempt to kill you and they miss, it is, as Meyer announced on Sunday, two days before Christmas, a reasonable assumption they will try again.

“Also,” he said, “one can expect the next attempt to be as subtle and as deadly as the first. You do realize, Travis, that the theft of a gift book and an explosion behind a mall may not be linked.”

“But I should live as though they were.”

“Precisely. Now let’s see if we can come up with a list of people that anxious to send you to that big marina in the sky.”

We discussed it for an hour and a half, and to my surprise we could come up with but six names, and they went way back, most of them. The seventh was not a name. The seventh, in Meyer’s professorial script, read: “Someone who thinks you killed the three young people aboard the Sundowner.”

“Let’s break that last one down,” Meyer said. “I say we rule out the dentist. If he thought you murdered his little girl, he might come after you with a gun. But with a certain hesitation. And from what you say, the Cannon clan would not care that much who did in their son Howard. So we have the girl from Peru. I happen to have the clipping right here. Gigliermina Reyes y Fonseca. A diplomat’s daughter. Both those G’s are pronounced as hard G’s, as in ‘begin.’”

“Thank you.”

“But the contemporary nickname is usually with soft G’s. Gigi. You’re welcome.”

“There were the three little men in business suits who came to Billy to find out who found his boat. Latins. Two didn’t have any English, apparently. Why would they want to know?”

Meyer went into meditation for several minutes. He finally said, “We can play with another variation, Travis. Boat owner hires man to get boat back any way he can, and punish those who took it. You will say that it would be out of character for Billy Ingraham to give that kind of an order, and out of character for you to follow through if he did. Yet, in certain circles, that would be standard operating procedure. It might be difficult for them to imagine any other response to theft.”

“Then Billy would be a target too.”

“If they assume you were following his orders. You would be a hireling, a secondary target.”

“Aren’t we getting pretty fancy?”

“In testing any hypothesis, one useful method is to carry it to the ultimate limits of absurdity and find out if it still hangs together. This scenario assumes that Gigliermina was well connected with powerful people in Peru, and they are not concerned with degrees of intention or degrees of guilt. The girl is dead and vengeance requires that anyone who had anything to do with her death be killed.”

“By a diplomat?!”

“By someone anxious to do him big favors.”

“Okay. But back up a little, Meyer, damn it. Somebody did kill the three of them. See how absurd this is, for example. They came back from Yucatan with cocaine. Free-lance. He had some kind of contact, and he phoned from the gas station across the road from the Starfish Marina. He set up a meet, and somebody came with the money to buy it. Cannon or the NicBride girl noticed that it was funny money, and that turned it into a bad scene.”

“But from your description, Travis, it looked more as if the three aboard were trying to buy something with that money. It was discovered and they rammed it into his mouth. If the people who came aboard wanted to buy something with counterfeit, and it was discovered, they would have kept the counterfeit and whatever they came to buy. The ugly gesture said, ‘Don’t try to cheat us with counterfeit!’”

“It looked like very good quality.”

“And probably could be passed one at a time with no trouble, but not in a batch.”

“So maybe Cannon didn’t notice it was counterfeit. Maybe he got paid already for what he brought in, and somebody hijacked them for the money, searched for it, made them tell where they had hidden it aboard, found it and found out it was no good.”

Meyer shook his head sadly, a black bear who couldn’t get at the honeycomb. “We’re getting too far down too many roads, friend McGee. We need more bits and pieces.”

“While they adjust their sights?”

Meyer looked grim, aimed a finger at me and said, “Bang, you’re dead.”

“That’s very funny! That’s truly hilarious. Maybe you’d write it down so I won’t ever forget it.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, looking dismayed. “That was out of character. Just an impulse. Everybody steps out of character now and then.”

“You seldom do.”

“I am as surprised as you are.”

On Christmas morning, in a hotel suite in Cannes, R. William Ingraham died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage. It was in the morning Lauderdale newspaper on Wednesday the twenty-sixth. The story covered his many accomplishments in altering the local landscape, and the awards and honors given him. They had contacted a few politicians on the state level, and the tenor of their response was that Ingraham had been a good citizen, civic-minded and responsible. and his death was a loss to all Floridians. The page one article said that the grieving widow, Millis Hoover Ingraham, was bringing the body home for burial.

I knew that Frank Payne, who is my lawyer whose services I seldom require, had been Ingraham’s attorney for many years and would probably, along with the bank, be handling Billy’s estate. So I went to see him that afternoon in his bank building offices. He was in a new firm. Those fellows group and regroup as often as square dancers. This one was Marhead, Carp, Payne and Guyler. I sat for fifteen minutes wondering how good the legs were on the receptionist. Her desk had what is called a privacy screen. Frank’s secretary came and got me and took me back to a corner office that looked like a small library in a British club. Frank shook hands and patted his growing gut apologetically, saying he was about to join a health club. He always says that. I suggested Loie‘ outfit. He asked me if I had come to change my will, and I said that it was still okay as is, but I would like to talk about Billy Ingraham’s estate.

We sat down across the desk from each other and he said it was a tragic thing that Billy had to lose out on a lot of good years remaining, and he said the estate was in very clean condition because Billy had done a lot of neatening up after he sold out his business interests, getting rid of little cats and dogs, small partnerships, shelters, tag ends of land. Everything that could be put into a discretionary trust had been put into it, so there would be very little to go through probate. Mostly the cars and his collection of western art. “Millis the sole heir?”

“Looking to marry her, Trav?”

“Or get a job in a sideshow handling snakes? Sure. I don’t really have to know how she’s going to be fixed, Frank. I would guess she gets the bulk, less a few bequests to causes here and there. What I want to know about is insurance.”

“Why?”

“Because if there are any policies on him that pay off double in the case of accidental death, there’s a chance of collecting.”

“Accidental! Look, the man was overweight and out of condition. He had high blood pressure. He had a lot of stress all his life. And he died in bed.”

“Is murder an accidental death?”

“Are you nuts, McGee? Have you been watching TV?”

“You know about the Sundowner of course.”

“I know all about it. I know how much of a bath he took. I know you found it for him. Don’t look surprised. That’s confidential information, lawyer and client. And I know what you were paid. A nice windfall. I hope you’re going to declare it. That’s my legal advice.”

“I always declare everything that will show up in somebody else’s tax records. You taught me that a long time ago.”

“What’s this murder nonsense?”

“Again, legal confidentiality, Frank please.”

“You’ve got it.”

“Those two little kids who got killed by a bomb last Saturday. The bomb came to me in the mail. I forgot to lock the truck. I was parked in that mall lot. The package looked like a book. When I got home, it was missing. Those kids had petty theft records.”

He stared at me, biting his lip, then said, “And you haven’t gone to the police?”

“You know all the good reasons I have to keep a low profile with the local law. Maybe the theft of the gift and the explosion are unrelated.”

“Who wants you dead?”

“Maybe somebody who thinks I punished those kids for stealing the boat. And they might think Billy hired me to do just that. I don’t know who. If I don’t know who wanted to bomb me, then I don’t know who killed the little boys, do I? What would I go to the police with?”

“Okay. But it sounds like a very outside chance.”

“Can you get an autopsy?”

“Millis told me on the phone the body is being embalmed there. If they did an autopsy there, she would have mentioned it. Jesus, Trav, what basis have I got for ordering an autopsy? You know what would happen. Everybody would think it was Millis I was suspicious of. Somehow I don’t want her mad at me.”

“What’s the timing?”

“Let me see here. She flies in late with the body on Friday, gets in at eleven-twenty at Miami. Decker and Sons will have a hearse there to bring it up to the funeral home. Services Sunday morning, the thirtieth, at United Baptist, and burial at noon out at Elysian Fields, next to Sadie.”

“How about unofficial? It would just be the skull.”

He thought it over. He shook his head. “I just can’t do that and I’ll tell you why. Suppose we do come up with evidence of a different cause of death? Even though it’s way out of our jurisdiction I would have to advise the local law and I guess they would advise the French authorities. I never had one like this before. I think it can be done officially, but very quietly. I am going to have to use up some tickets I’ve got out all over town. Judge, assistant state’s attorney, doctor, Floyd Decker. Jesus, I hate to waste all that clout, McGee.”

“So they bury old Billy and we can sit around and wonder.”

“Well, I’m going to have to make out an affidavit saying he came to me before they left for France and told me that if he died over there I was to make absolutely certain it was a natural death. So I’m doing my duty to a client. And maybe Billy told you to check up on me and make sure I do as he asked.”

“Easy enough.”

He sighed. “I’ve done dumber things, but I can’t remember when.”

The call came from Frank Payne at quarter to three on Sunday morning, the next-to-the-last day of the year, waking me from some kind of turbulent dream which faded before I could retain any part of it.

His voice was guarded. “I’m at Decker’s. We’re in real trouble, pal.”

“What do you mean?”

“Leaving out all the medical gibberish, somebody knocked him out somehow. Probably too late to find out if it was a drug. Maybe it was just a good whack on the skull with a sock full of sand. They then stuck something thin and sharp and curved right into the inside corner of his left eye. Something like a length of piano wire sharpened at one end, stiff wire. So they got it in there and turned it a little bit each time they jabbed. It was curved, so it created massive hemorrhaging just as if a major artery in the brain had ruptured. No bleeding to speak of at the point of the puncture wound.”

“So why are we in trouble?”

“We didn’t think it through. There has to be an official report. The finding has to be verified by other medical authorities. We have to move into a full-scale autopsy with laboratory samples of the organs and so on and so on. There has to be a grand jury verdict of death at the hands of person or persons unknown, and everything will have to be turned over-copies at least-to the Surety or whatever they call it in France. And-because Billy was prominent, everybody around here is going to want a piece of the action so they can get their name in the paper. Trav, the wire services and the networks are going to pick this up, and it is all going to point right at Millis, especially if they can find any trace of a strong sedative when they do the full-scale autopsy. The funeral is, let’s say, indefinitely delayed. What they are going to do tomorrow at the church is have a memorial service. This is a real mess. Thanks a lot, McGee.”

“Does it make the estate any bigger?”

“Maybe by a hundred and fifty thou, which is like saying the swimming pool is bigger if you pee in it.”

“Millis know yet?”

“Not yet. I might go over to St. Kitts for a week. Get some rest.”

“You need it, Frank.”

“I’ll take the wife and kiddies, and my spinning rod.”

“I want you to think about something.”

“Such as?”

“Millis is a bright, bright woman.”

“Granted.”

“She is careful with money.”

“I’ll buy that too.”

“It costs a lot less to bring home an urn full of ashes, and if you killed somebody, it’s a lot safer.” The silence was so long I thought he had hung up. “Frank?”

“I’m right here. I don’t do the courtroom scene but Roger Carp does. I think he could get a lot of mileage out of what you just said. If she still wants us in her corner.”

I was at the ten-thirty service at United Baptist. The big church was about half full. Had he still been in business, it would have been full. Commerce creates social obligations. Besides, it was the next-to-the-last day of the year.

I was early and I stood outside until Millis arrived. She’d taken the dark blue Continental out of storage and the man driving it seemed to be wearing the uniform of the security troops at Dias del Sol. One of Decker’s pale young men went out and escorted her in, holding her in gingerly fashion by the elbow. She wore a tailored black suit, a small hat with a short black veil, no lipstick.

The Rev. Dr. Barnell Innerlake conducted the service. He seemed hesitant, as though working from a revised script. He recounted Billy’s humble beginnings and his good works after God blessed his energies with some cash money.

So I was standing near the door of the big Continental when the guard held it open for the widow. She started to duck into the car and then stopped and faced me. I saw the green tilted glint through the veil.

“You heard?” she asked in a rusty voice.

She was too tough to play games with. “Yes, I heard.”

“Come out to the penthouse, please.”

“Right away?”

She looked at a diamond watch. “Noon?”

“Fine.”

Away she went, small against the back-seat upholstery.

Seven

THE YOUNG security types in the small foyer of Tower Alpha at Dias del Sol wore black armbands, and I guessed it was one of the services that went with a duplex penthouse. Or, I suppose, it could have been an expression of a genuine grief. Billy was a likable man, easy to work for and generous.

Millis opened the door as soon as I pressed the bell. She had changed to baggy white cotton slacks and an orange cotton shirt with long full sleeves. She had tied her hair back with a piece of orange yarn. She was barefoot.

She murmured a greeting, bolted the door and led the way back through the long living room with the wide glass expanse overlooking the sea, a room done in quiet blues and grays. I followed her down a short broad corridor into a small room which was evidently her dressing room.

There was a dressing table with a tapestried bench and a mirror encircled by frosted bulbs. There was a French desk in dark wood with a maroon leather desk set. There was a love seat and two chairs, two walls of sliding doors which evidently concealed her wardrobe and an arched entrance into a much larger room with a queensize pedestal bed.

She gestured vaguely toward the love seat. I lowered myself into it carefully. It looked fragile. There were no windows. The room was shadowed. The only light was that which shone through the arched entrance from the bedroom.

She turned the desk chair around and sat, hunching her shoulders and squeezing her eyes shut in a strange grimace.

“This isn’t easy for me,” she said.

“I’m sorry about Billy.”

“He was fond of you. And I resented that, because I didn’t want anybody to have any part of him, any part of his attention.”

“I didn’t know you cared. That much.”

Her wistful smile was upside down. “Neither did I. I didn’t at first. I thought I was going to marry Billy because I was looking for a safe haven. I thought I was going to marry him because it would mean an end to scuffling. But in the end I married him because I loved him. He made me feel loved. Nobody else ever did that. Wanted and loved.”

“He was very proud of you.”

She frowned. “So I had to keep living up to what he thought I was. Can that make you a better person, McGee?”

“Could happen. If you get into the habit.”

“I guess. Maybe. Anyway I’ve been awake since Frank Payne phoned me at five and told me somebody had killed Billy. I’ve been awake and thinking. There’s a pattern to this. It’s a very ugly pattern. Plus too many guesses.”

“I’m not following you.”

“I don’t expect you to. Not without knowing more. So I have to tell you more. I don’t like telling this to anybody. Did you ever hear of Enelio Fortez?”

It took a deep dip into memory. “Is he the one… about eight years ago… they found pieces of him all over Greater Miami?”

“Pieces of Nelly as reminders to the others to be careful. They planted the pieces near drug distribution centers. I’d been his live-in chum for three years when they killed him. Nelly got too greedy. It happens to people. He thought he could get away with it, but he couldn’t. He just wasn’t bright enough. I moved in with him just before I turned twenty. A big fun life. Lots of money, clothes, champagne, flights to Vegas and the islands. A very nice apartment. I heard later that some of them wanted to waste me too, just in case I’d been part of it. But a man named Arturo Jornalero said he would vouch for me. And I moved in with Art. Not full-time, like Nelly. Art has a wife and kids. But he’s more important than Nelly could ever have became. He’s right near the top, and it is a seventy-billion-dollar-a-year business. So at twenty-two I’d moved a couple of steps up the ladder. And when I was twenty-five I woke up. I saw some lines here by any eyes and some lines across my throat, and I knew that when I stopped being some kind of rarity that Art could show off to his buddies, I would be out on my keister with maybe a little gift of money to ease the transition. After I walked out and after Arturo located me, he sent some of his guys to talk me back home, but I wasn’t having any. After a couple of phone calls he gave up. I had answered an ad in the local paper, and I wanted somebody who couldn’t toss me out whenever he felt like it, so I took dead aim at my new boss, Billy Ingraham. I wanted a longer future than I was going to get in Miami. I have to tell you all this so you’ll understand the rest of it.”

“I wondered about you, Millis. You seemed a little out of focus.”

“You’ve got a good eye. You made me nervous. Anyway, right after the identity of the girl from Peru broke in the news, Arturo got in touch with me. He said it was very important, and it had nothing to do with our previous friendship. That’s what he called it. Friendship. So I sneaked off to a motel room and met him there.

“He told me that he was facing a very heavy situation. He said that the girl, Gigi, who got her throat cut, was the niece of the top man in the drug business in Peru, in Lima. This man, Isidro Reyes, is the brother of Gigi’s father, the diplomat. It is a big powerful family, and apparently this Gigliermina was the darling, the apple of everybody’s eye, and engaged to a young lawyer from another strong family down there. Everybody down there was enraged, and word had come through that they wanted everybody involved in that killing to be punished. Arturo said he had been keeping track of me, for old times’ sake, and he said it was strange that our lives should cross again in this manner, but he had to find out if somehow Billy had gotten those kids killed in the process of getting his stolen boat back,

“We talked a long time. I told him about you and how you had found the Sundowner using aerial photography, and how you had phoned the Coast Guard and Billy the day you located the boat with the bodies aboard. He wanted to know if I was sure you hadn’t found it several days earlier and then maybe got impatient when nobody else came across it and reported it. I said I was positive it had not happened that way. And I said Billy would never have told you to get the boat back no matter who you had to kill. And I said that the counterfeit money didn’t make any sense in any scenario where you killed them. He thanked me for my time and said I’d been a big help. We shook hands and then we realized how funny that was and we laughed and I kissed him, and that was that. Now Billy is dead. Murdered. And I can’t think of anyone who’d want him dead except some crazies in Peru who got the whole thing wrong.”

So I told her all about my gift book, and the blood of children sprinkled to a height of fifteen feet on the back wall of the storage room of a dress shop named the Little Boutique. She looked at me in total consternation. “I know Artura believed me. We had good communication. He’d gotten over being hurt and angry. I know he believed me. He said it was going to make it more difficult. Usually nobody would be interested in some bloody little mess down in the Keys. Somebody delivered too little or asked too much, or somebody else stepped into the picture at the wrong time. Nobody would care. But this time the wrong person died and so they would have to unravel it. It begins to sound like what I was thinking early this morning, McGee. They can’t find out what happened, so they’re killing people who could have done it, just to have something to show.”

“There’s another way to guess it.”

“How?”

“They found out who really did it and they would rather not touch them.”

She agreed, saying that could be possible. I then asked her if it would be a good idea to see if I could find Arturo Jornalero, and she turned and reached into a desk drawer and handed me his business card. Jornalero Management Associates. She said it was in a fairly new office building, the top two floors, two blocks south of the Miami Herald building on Biscayne, and half a block west, on the right-hand side of the street. No name on the building, just the huge gold numerals 202 over the entrance.

She wrote a note I could send in to him which might make it possible for me to see him. She sealed the envelope, handed it to me and I put it away.

She hunched her shoulders and said, “I feel as if I were falling and failing into some dark cold place, over and over, down through the dark.”

She put her hand out to me, and when I took it, she led me into her bedroom. A very feminine room. Through a half-open door I could see into another bedroom, and an the far wall I saw the vital leaping curve of a stuffed game fish on a plaque. She turned by the bed and hugged me, her forehead against my chest. “Could you just hold me?” she asked. “Just hold me and if you don’t mind maybe I’ll cry a little.”

So we stretched out on her queen-size bed, and I held her close and she cried. There wasn’t much to her-just a slenderness, a vulnerability. The vulnerability was what had been missing before.

When the crying had ended, she said, “This is the first I’ve been able to cry for him. I wondered if I would, when I would. I guess I’ve never been able to feel very strongly about anyone, except Billy.”

Her voice broke on his name, and the tears were not ended. When they finished for the second time, I thought she had gone to sleep. A narrow segment of jalousied window was open. I could hear the Atlantic swells curling and thudding on the beach far below. I could hear faint music from somewhere. Her head rested on my left arm. Her hair was fragrant. My right hand lay against the small of her back. A round hard knee pressed against my left thigh.

I wondered how I had gotten into this. I had not been with a woman since a few weeks before I had flown out to bring Hubie’s sloop home. I could feel her warm and steady breathing. I thought about the time I had broken three ribs, and how it felt to breathe. I thought about icicles, hailstorms, broken glass. But nothing I thought of stopped my right hand from stretching the fingers wide and exerting a small pressure against her back. The knee pressure fell away and she came closer. I hoped she was still asleep and had not noticed a thing. But her breathing changed, and she pushed her hips so close she could not fail to notice what all thought of ice and pain had failed to quell.

She sat up abruptly and unbuttoned her blouse and took it off. She kept her eyes shut as though unwilling to watch what she was doing. She made a mouth, as the French say, a mouth of resignation and self-contempt. She knelt, put her thumbs inside the waist elastic of the baggy white slacks and peeled them down, rolled back and kicked them off. She had worn nothing under either the blouse or the slacks. Her body was elegant, sleek as fire-warm silk and ivory, with a deceptive flavor of immaturity about it, the nipples small and pink, the pubic hair a soft sooty smudge.

I would say that there was not a hell of a lot of tenderness going on. We were daytime thieves, rifling a strange bedroom, looking for the treasure as quickly and quietly as possible, hearts racing, hands trembling, small cries muffled. Found it all too quickly.

She came out of the bathroom in a long ivorycolored robe. I was dressed, and standing by the window looking down at the sea. I turned and we looked at each other, partners in a small crime. “That’s not me,” she said.

“Or me either. Wrong time, wrong place.” I put my hands on her shoulders and bent and kissed her lightly on the lips. They were cool and slack. “Who can tell what anybody is like? Living and dying, loving and dying. We share the planet with some tiny critters which make love one time and then die. Nine months after earthquakes and floods and the dropping of bombs, lots of babies are born.”

“It was my fault,” she said. “It wasn’t intentional.”

“Who knows from intentional? I gave it a chance to happen to prove that it couldn’t. But it did. And I’m ashamed.”

“Don’t be. Don’t be.”

As I drove away from the glossy abode of the Widow Ingraham, I appealed to Billy Ingraham to please understand. And I told him we were both ashamed.

She had good reason to want to be held. And maybe one of the obscure reasons for what had happened was that she had confessed a somewhat grubby past to a stranger. The aftershock of confession is lessened if the stranger becomes a lover. Such confessions are more easily rationalized.

I knew I would not seek Meyer’s judgment on the whole scene, and I realized that I want him to have a better opinion of McGee than I seem to have lately. The world was a bewilderment and I was having image problems. And so was Millis.

Eight

I HAD phoned ahead to be certain Mr. Jornalero was in. I did not make an appointment. I waited fifteen minutes after I sent the note in by way of the receptionist. The other five chairs were empty. There was a small table with a pile of architecture magazines. No windows. Indirect fluorescence. Handsome color prints of various structures on the walls. Small banks. Drive-ins. Office buildings. Each had a trim logo of the JMA initials in the bottom right corner. Elevator music was piped in. From time to time one of the phones on the receptionist’s desk would ring or buzz and she would murmur into it, push buttons and hang up.

A phone buzzed. She answered it and told me how to find Mr. Jornalero’s office. Through that door, second door on your left.

There was no desk in his office. Some leather furniture, bookshelves, a small conference table, windows with a view of a nearby windowless building and a small slice of the bay and the candy towers of the Beach.

He met me at the door and shook hands and ushered me over to a couple of leather chairs facing each other across a low coffee table. He was a big man, probably in his early fifties. Thick dark hair tinged with gray. Pale face, heavy features, a broad big-boned body with a look of sedentary softness in spite of some expensive custom tailoring. The patterned yellow silk tie had the Countess Mara logo. Yellow gold ring on his little finger with an emerald almost too big to be true. The flavor was of money and power and importance. And an unexpected friendliness.

“Millis and I were good friends for a long time,” he said. “We’ve been out of touch lately. If there’s any way I can help you…”

“She told me about your coming to see her back in October. She told you I located Billy Ingraham’s boat. She said you were upset because the girl from Peru was important.”

“Forgive me, Mr. MeGee, if I seem a little disorganized. This is the third day of the new year. I’ve been out of the office for several days. I’ve been listening to problems since seven this morning and it is difficult to shift gears. I didn’t realize why your name sounded familiar.”

“You know about Millis’ husband.”

“Yes, of course. Stories like that get a lot of coverage. How is she handling it?”

“Well enough.”

“The news stories imply she is under suspicion. That’s nonsense, of course. From talking to her I know how fond she was of Mr. Ingraham.”

“Billy’s murder seems to have something to do with the girl from Peru.”

He stared at me. “I don’t see the connection.”

“Did she. convince you that Billy and I had nothing to do with what happened aboard the Sundowner?”

“Yes. Of course. As I told her, it seemed a strange and horrible way for our lives to overlap again. Yes, she convinced me.”

“When I went aboard the flies were working. I had to sniff at a gasoline rag to be able to stay below long enough to see what happened.”

“I told you, Mr. McGee, she convinced me.”

“On Saturday, three days before Christmas, a bomb went off behind a Lauderdale shopping center and killed two kids. Did you read about it?”

“Yes, I remember reading about it.”

“The bomb that went off was, I think, a gift package I had gotten through the mail and hadn’t opened. I went shopping there and didn’t lock the car, and it is a good guess those kids swiped it and took it around behind the center to open it. The experts say it was a sophisticated bomb.”

Arturo Jornalero frowned down at his right thumbnail. Then he took a delicate nibble at the edge of the nail, got up quickly and wandered over to the window, stood looking out, his hands locked behind him.

Without turning, he said, “Let us imagine that the young son of a dear friend or a valued business associate went down to Peru on vacation, and let us say he went up to Cuzco and was slain by thieves on a dark street at night. The bereaved father might come to me and I might make contact with business associates in Peru, and they might arrange to have the guilty punished without waiting for any slow process of law. It would be a matter of friendship and honor.”

“Wouldn’t they feel some kind of obligation to get the guilty parties?”

He came slowly back to the chair, settled into it and sighed audibly. “That does bother me, Mr. McGee. When the girl was identified, there was… considerable communication between Miami and Lima. The immediate suspicion was that whoever had tipped off the Coast Guard as to where to find the vessel could have been the one who killed the three of them. People have killed for a lot less money than you got for finding that boat. I told my associates that I knew Mr. Ingraham’s wife and that I would look into it. I had a private meeting with her. After that I had someone look into your lifestyle and reputation, and also the character and reputation of your pilot friend out at Southdale Airport. I then reported to my associates that it was highly unlikely that you had anything to do with the trouble, or that Mr. Ingraham was involved in any way, except that it had happened aboard his boat, which had been stolen up at Citrina last July. I told them I thought the murders had been the result of a deal going bad.”

“I was very nearly blown to bits and Billy was killed in Cannes with a wire shoved into his head. There was somebody you didn’t convince.”

“I haven’t been keeping track. I am going to look into it.”

There was enough of an edge behind his quiet and pleasant voice to make me guess he was going to make some people unhappy.

“What kind of business are you in, Mr. Jornalero?”

“We’re an international management and consulting corporation. When, during consultation, we find an enterprise that pleases us, we try to buy into it. So, over the years, we’ve come up with a strange mix. We own pieces of motion picture distribution and production companies in South America and the Orient. We own portions of factoring companies and financial houses in the Bahamas, Cartagena, Bolivia, South Africa. We have a contracting branch and an architectural service here, and an employment agency and a large interest in a pipeline, and some small coastal freighters. When management is good, we believe in retaining it rather than get into the details of operation ourselves.”

“And you’re involved in a company in Lima?”

“Several, as a matter of fact. And some of those companies own pieces of companies in other countries, in partnership with us. It gets complex.”

“I suppose you’d be in a pretty good position to invest at all times, because you have to handle such a big cash flow coming in from the drug business.”

He stared at me, jaw sagging, and then he laughed and thumped himself on the thigh with a big white fist. “Millis has a very active and dramatic imagination. I must confess that while we were… together, I did tell her some melodramatic stories about my life. I am an ordinary businessman, and when a woman demands glamor and mystery, one tries to satisfy her. I can assure you, Mr. McGee, I have never seen a kilo of cocaine much less arranged for its purchase and sale. I have seen some foolish people at social gatherings snuffing it up their nostrils, an ugly and demeaning performance. You are the victim of a cliche, that any successful Latin businessman has to be involved somehow in drugs. We have a good cash flow because we arrange it that way. We get a good return from our investments and it is corporate policy to be ready at any time for the unexpected chance. Many good deals have fallen through because neither money nor credit was quickly available. Right now, this week, through our banking connection in Hong Kong we are buying some bonded warehouse facilities in Panama.”

“Okay, then. If you are so completely aboveboard, what’s all this about bypassing the police to do somebody a favor?”

“Do you know the word pundonor? It means a point of honor. The girl was sexually abused before they cut her throat. This is very distressing to her family. They are rich and powerful and very, very angry. And they know that convicted murderers can spend years and years in airconditioned cells eating good food and watching television waiting for the execution that never happens. Personal vengeance is primitive. But in such a case it is satisfying.”

“What about the counterfeit money?”

“As I told you and told them, I think it was a deal that fell through.”

“Can you tell them again? Can you get to anybody who might know somebody who mailed me a bomb and tell them to get the word down the line to lay off? It makes me very nervous to be stalked by professionals.”

“I think something can be done about it.”

“I appreciate that, and I appreciate your giving me so much time.”

“Tell Millis that if there is anything at all I can do, she need only ask.”

After I parked my blue pickup and walked back to the Flush, I opened the little panel to see if I’d had visitors while I was away. I was so used to finding nothing wrong that I stood staring stupidly at the unlikely object which had been placed inside the recessed area where the lighted bulbs were. It was a stick figure of a cat made of red pipe cleaners, with whiskers made of nylon fishline. The bulbs were all lighted. I’d had no visitors who broke in, at least. If it was a message, the meaning eluded me.

And when I showed it to Meyer ten minutes later, it did not mean anything to him either, nor had I expected it to.

It was a clear day, chilly in the shade, hot in the bright sunlight, even at quarter to four. Meyer lay supine on a sun cot on my sun deck, his heavy chest pelt glistening with sweat from the exercises I’d talked him into. Meyer equates exercise with obligatory games and all the other enforced boredoms of childhood. But he is never in as bad shape as I expect him to be. I have accused him of secret calisthenics and he looks at me as if I had accused him of watching General Hospital or Dallas. He says his semifitness, a rubbery condition at best, is an inherited characteristic.

I sat in the lotus position on a beach towel on the deck, my back to the late sun as I replaced a broken eyelet on a boat rod, winding the waxed linen around and around and around.

“Jornalero could have been half right,” he said from under the straw hat that shaded his face.

“Half right about what?”

“He wouldn’t have to have any direct connection with the trade. He’s perfectly set up to be a laundryman. If he could absorb two hundred million a year, spread it around the world and bring it back in as wages and bonuses and dividends and fees, he might earn three percent on the transactions, which would be six million.”

“Somebody would have to trust him with the money.”

“So he would know where it came from. Which, in a sense, would make him a part of the whole mess, wouldn’t it?”

“He’s very impressive. I’d trust him with money”

“From what he said, do you have any clue as to what could have happened?”

“I think he thought somebody got impatient. They got too eager to show some results and make the people in Peru happy. And it made him angry.

“That would fit,” Meyer said. “From October into late December, with nothing happening. So they make some moves just to be doing something, whether it makes any sense or not.”

“Maybe he can fix it. But I’m not going to unwrap any gifts.”

“Why should they send gifts when they can put a man with a rifle and a scope sight on any of those roofs over there?”

I looked over my shoulder at the roofs on the high buildings beyond the boat basin. When you aim down at a forty-five-degree angle, you cut the estimate of distance in half. That keeps it from throwing too high. The effect of gravity on the slug is diminished by the angle. I felt a circle of ice as big as a silver dollar three inches below the nape of my neck.

My little chore was done anyway. I had tied off the heavy thread. All that remained was the shellac, and I could do that below. I gathered up the towel and the spool of thread, the knife and the broken eyelet. When I turned to face the distant buildings, the circle of ice slid around my body as I turned, and ended up on the left side of my chest. I forced a yawn, and for an instant the ice was in the back of my throat, then reappeared on my chest.

“Sun’s about gone,” I said.

“If you say so,” said Meyer.

I went below. He went back to his beamy cruiser to await the arrival from the airport of one of his female executive friends, a California lady who owns vineyards and sends him the occasional case of rare vintage wine. According to Meyer, whenever he takes her over to the islands, they sit around and discuss economic trends and international trade. And drink wine. Whatever happens, I do know that each one of his lady executive friends believes in her heart that she is the great love of Meyer’s whole life. It shows when they say good-by. And in Meyer’s special way, perhaps it is true. They all are. Not that there have ever been that many of them. Six perhaps. Or seven.

And that evening when I wasn’t thinking about dying, I nearly did. Again.

Nine

I HAD planned to stay aboard that Thursday night. Christmas and New Year’s Eve had been duds. I had long ago given up expecting too much of them. But this time it was even less than usual. The little toss with Millis had made me feel listless and grubby. I had been reading Lewis Thomas and for the first time he depressed me, even when he said that the glue that seems to hold mankind in some kind of lasting stasis is everyone’s desire to be useful. Maybe I had a desire to be useful which had no outlet.

For once there was such a fat sum in the hidey-hole that the next segment of my retirement stretched into the misty future. But I couldn’t think of any way I wanted to spend it. Maybe get on an airplane and fly to Peru. Airplanes made me think of the Mick, and reminded me that I hadn’t warned him of the remote chance of something unpleasant happening to him too. For once he answered instead of his machine.

After I finished telling him why it might be well for him to keep his back against the wall, he told me I wasn’t making very much sense. I told him that a lot of things weren’t making good sense lately, but that’s the way the world was at the moment. All over the planet, I told him, people were -trying to make sense out of chaos.

“What are you drinking?” he asked me.

“At the moment, coffee.”

“Keep right on with it, pal,” he said, and hung up.

Ten seconds later came the muted bong as somebody trod on the mat at the head of my stubby gangplank to the aft deck, and moments later a fast rapping on the door to the lounge, and a voice calling, “Hey, Trav! Hey, McGee!”

It was Annabelle Everett, with a wide happy smile and a bottle of chilled domestic champagne, to tell me she had, that morning, gone to work in a travel agency, loved the people she was working with, had found the computer easy to operate and was going to move in with one of the girls who worked there because the one who had quit, whose job she had taken, was getting married and moving out to Texas. Annabelle was on a high. I got out the ice bucket and opened the champagne and put on some music. She had gotten all her morale back in one fell swoop. So she wanted to celebrate with one person who had tried to tell her that marrying Stu the weatherman was not a really outstanding idea.

The champagne was slightly acidic, and later on at the steak house the steaks were stringy, the drinks watery, but nothing could quell her spirits. I drove her back to her sixth-floor walk-up apartment in that dying condominium, the Plaza del Rio, walked up with her and went in on invitation. She was beginning to unravel at the edges. Her eyes began wobbling. I insisted we have one more little drink. She had some cheap scotch and I made hers stiff. Then I took my time drinking my weak one. When I had finished I took our glasses out into the small kitchen and rinsed them and put them upside down on the drainboard.

I checked the bedroom and found a king-size bed. I turned it down, went out and gathered her up and carried her in and put her on the bed. I felt very prim and sanctimonious. And then I realized that, after all, she had been celebrating, and she had made it clear what she wanted the end of the evening to be. I shook her to make certain she couldn’t wake up, and then I stripped her and left her clothes in what would look like hasty disarray, some on the floor, some on a chair. I covered her up, then rumpled up the bed, both on her side and on what was intended to be mine.

I found a lipstick and wrote on her bathroom mirror: ‘Thanks for everything, Trav.’ I left a night light on and let myself out, making certain the door locked when I closed. it. After all, a girl needs her pride.

I was so pleased with myself I almost missed the slight movement of a shadow in the condo parking area. The parking area had not been lighted at night for a long time. What light there was came from the high white glare of a fast-food enterprise a half block away. Half the area was in blackness, and in the other half, where I had parked, the distant light made long black shadows on the broken asphalt, shadows of the cars and the overgrown bushes. There were maybe twenty cars in the lot, and they were parked fairly close together in that part of the lot closest to the entrance.

I backed up and waited for a car to start up, or for the sound of someone breaking into a car. Caution is a habit, dearly acquired. Caution must be accompanied, whenever required, by the necessary flow of adrenaline, to make the machinery work all the better. I was in the best shape of the past two years. I am gifted from birth with a lot of quick. The hand-eye coordination is better than most. The four inches over six feet provides leverage. Looking slow and lazy helps also.

When nothing happened, I eased along the side of the building, staying in blackness, feeling ahead with each foot before putting my weight on it. The shadow could have been a neighborhood dog, angling across the area. When I reached the rear corner of the building, I waited again. There was a faint light from the other direction, and if I went further I would step out into it. My night vision was improving the longer I waited. I could see the outline of my Rolls pickup. And as I watched it, the outline changed. A man was on the far side of it, moving from the cab toward the tailgate, moving from my left to my right. I saw a faint red arc as he lifted a cigarette into view above the truck bed, moved it to his mouth and lowered it again, then turned and walked back. When his silhouette disappeared behind the cab, I ran silently toward the dark shadow of the nearest car, bending low, running at half speed. It was three cars from my own. The only way I could avoid the light was to work my way under the cars. I stretched out on my back and, eased under two cars, pulling myself along by finding handholds on the undersides of the cars.

I crouched quietly in the shadow of the car parked next to mine.

“Son of a bitch’ll probably stay up there with her and screw her all night.”

The voice was startlingly close. A bad-tempered voice, muttering. And too close. I did not understand it until I felt the car I was touching move slightly. The voice was sitting in the car. I made myself smaller against the side of the car.

“Shut your face, Sully.” a thinner, higher voice said. It was inside the car also. It had the flavor of command.

There was a scrape of leather on hardpan, and then a third voice, and I guessed it was Cigarette moving over from my truck to the far side of the sedan. “What’s with the conversation, guys?” His voice was soft and guarded.

“Sully’s getting tired of waiting.”

“So am I,” Cigarette said. “Want we should go up there and take him?”

“Forget it,” said the voice of command. “Too much can go wrong.”

Sully said, “We were lucky nothing went wrong already, the way you followed so close.”

“Knock it off, both of you. Cappy wants it done soon as we can. An accident. Shut up and wait.” I spent ten silent minutes wondering what the hell I was going to do next. Three of them, planning to give me a fatal accident. Let me count the ways. I had not spotted anyone following me. I am always on the watch for a tail. So the man was good. Maybe he had the car rigged for two sets of headlights. That would do it, at night.

Sully made my mind up for me. “I’m going to get out and move around some.”

“Go ahead.”

He got out my side. It was a four-door sedan, and he opened the back door as I squirmed back away from him. If he headed toward the rear of the car, I was fine for the moment. But he came toward me and his knee hit my shoulder. As he grunted with surprise, I lunged up and grabbed him by the clothing and yanked him down, turning him as I brought him down, turning him away from the car, using leverage to drop him on his back. His head made a melony sound against the hardpan and he went loose. Somebody yelled, and as I got up, I drove my shoulder into the reopening door of the car, hammering it shut. But it didn’t slam. It bounced off something, and a man screamed so loudly I guessed that he had his hand on the doorframe to pull himself up out of the seat. I scooted around the back end of the sedan, looking hard and fast for Cigarette. Nowhere in sight. I froze and then, as I heard a grunt of effort behind me, I dropped with the top of my left shoulder ablaze, swung my legs around and kicked his legs out from under him. As he went down I saw the glint of the blade in his hand. I bounded up before he did, and kicked him in the face with the side of my shoe as he started up. He rolled all the way over and ended up on his hands and knees, and so I kicked him again. Hands can be fragile. Broken hands hurt like sin. He ended up on his back, knife tinkling away under one of the cars. I didn’t want to stay for names and serial numbers. I didn’t know how badly I was bleeding. I piled into the pickup, started it in a hurry and backed out in a big swing, turning my lights on as I started forward. The one I had thumped first came wobbling out from beyond the other car. He came right out in front of the pickup, then tried to turn and run, but he entangled his feet and fell. I swerved away from the major portion of him, but my right front wheel went over both his knees, making a sickening celery sound, accompanied by a high gargling scream.

I kept checking myself on the fast ride back, listening to see if I felt faint or dizzy. My shirt was sopping wet in the shoulder area. I got aboard without incident, peeled the shirt off as soon as I was aboard and buttoned up.

Then I checked myself with mirrors. It was such a tiny gouge I almost felt let down. I had ducked almost all the way beneath the thrust. It had sliced the very top ridge of the muscle, torn some nerves, opened some blood vessels, but could almost be covered by a Band-Aid. I held cold-water pads on it until the bleeding stopped, and then used a mild antiseptic and pulled the edges together with narrow strips of tape. It was awkward having to work using the mirror, and the final product looked clumsy, but it was a lot better than where he had wanted to plant the blade-right to the hilt, six inches lower. And how had they planned to make that look like an accident? Maybe they had planned an accident so totally messy nobody would notice a knife wound.

I stretched out and unwound with a flagon of Boodles and ice. I had ruined one hand, one set of knees and the lower half of a face. Three men, one of whom was named Sully, taking orders from someone named Cappy. Reasonably competent professionals waiting for me in the dark, to inflict an accidental death. Maybe Jornalero had not moved quickly enough. Or had not believed me. At least I could give Jornalero a name now. And I could watch him closely to see what happened when I gave him the name.

On Friday morning Jornalero saw me immediately. He said it was a beautiful morning. No dispute. Bright and cool. He said he had been up very early for a sunrise sail on his catamaran. He said that his resolution for the new year was to do more sailing and get in better shape. I said my resolution was to keep breathing.

“Is there any reason to think you might not, Mr. McGee?”

I told him my three reasons. I could not give good descriptions of the men, but I had noticed that it was a recent dark-colored, four-door Pontiac, license USL 901. And the three men discussed giving me an accidental death on the orders of one Cappy. The only other name I had was Sully, who would probably never walk really well again. The expression on his face showed dismay and concern.

“I don’t understand this at all,” he said. “I was told there could have been a misunderstanding and I said that it would be wise to correct it, and I was told that it would be corrected right away. Would you please go back out to reception while I make a few phone calls.”

It was a long fifteen minutes before he sent for me. He seemed depressed: “Sit down, Mr. McGee. Certain people found your performance last night impressive. I must say that I do too.”

“I made a call last night to a friend to see if it was police business, but there was no sheet on it, so I guess they didn’t check into a Lauderdale hospital.”

“They managed to drive to… a different city. They’re receiving medical attention.”

“Why the foul-up?”

“I’m very sorry, but I have been told not to discuss this with you any further.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“They want to settle for you. And close the books.”

“Look, does anybody disagree that Billy didn’t order the killings and I didn’t do them?”

“I think it’s understood.”

“Then why, damn it?”

“Let’s just say it cleans up a certain situation.”

“There are men doing life in the slam because somebody wanted to clean up a certain situation.”

“Precisely.”

“And you are not kidding me?”

“I am telling you more than I should. I will even suggest to you that you take the money you received for recovering that yacht, and go away for a year or two.”

“Can you introduce me to somebody I can talk to about this mess?”

“Out of the question. Sorry I can’t be of any more help.” He stood up. My signal to go.

“I have the funny feeling, Arturo, you would have helped if you could.”

“Sometimes there are no choices,” he said.

I kept hearing him say that as I drove through heavy traffic out of the city and north on the Interstate. I could eliminate my choices one by one. Go to the authorities? And what seems to be the trouble, sir? Well, some people want to kill me. Why is that? Because I located a boat with dead people on it. Did you kill them? No, sir. Oh, I see. They think you did? No, they know I didn’t. Then why do they want to kill you? I think because they have to kill somebody-just to show they’re on the job. Okay, who are these people? I haven’t any idea. How do you know they want to kill you? They keep trying. I see. Mr. McGee, I am going to arrange an appointment for you with a man whose job it is to listen to people’s troubles and problems.

Or I could undo the umbilical cords that affix the Busted Flush to the slip, and head down around the peninsula and somewhere up the other side. Find a place where I could anchor out, and use the dinghy for shoreside supplies, live small and careful. And longer.

Or close up the Flush and fly to Cairns up there at the top end of Australia. Summer there, and the fishing is good. Walk over to the aquarium at feeding time and study the dwarf crocodiles and think about Jornalero’s associates. Sample the brawny Australian beach lassies who can windsurf all day without tiring a single muscle.

Hang around and let them keep trying.

When I walked out to the Flush I found a man sitting on the finger pier, legs dangling, staring at the Flush and tapping cigar ashes into the water. He looked fat, but from the way he carne to his feet, all in one motion, I knew he was in better shape than he looked. He wore a blue work shirt and khaki pants, a Greek seaman’s cap and thick leather sandals. He was short and broad with a square jaw, no neck, a deep red sunburn, small brown eyes, deep-set, white eyebrows and lashes.

I was a good ten inches taller than he. He tilted his head and looked up at me and said, barely moving his lips, “Three four nine one two three eight. In ten minutes. Now point to something over near the motel.”

I did as asked. He thanked me, touched his cap and went trudging away. I called that number ten minutes later.

“Hello?”

“This is McGee.”

“Trav, how the hell are you? Tommy T. told me to look you up when I got here.”

“How is old Tom?”

“He’s fine. You going to be aboard about eight? I want to just stop on by and say hello.”

“I’ll be right here.”

“Great! See you.” Whoever he was, he was careful.

Even though my security system indicated nobody had been aboard, I checked the whole houseboat carefully. And when I was through I put on snorkel and fins and took the big underwater light and checked the hull and all the adjacent pilings. I came up shivering and took a hot shower. And then there was nothing to do but cook something and wait for the man in the Greek hat.

Ten

I LEFT one dim fantail light on. He tapped at the door at three minutes past eight. Same careful fellow. Or maybe not careful enough. I opened the door and he said, “My name is Browder.”

“McGee,” I said, and stuck my hand out. He took it and I pulled him in and held tight as Meyer slid in behind him, closed the door with one hand and jabbed him once in the back with the barrel of my Colt Diamondback and then moved back away from him to what I had told Meyer is a safe and appropriate distance.

“Browder, the man behind you is not very familiar with firearms. The revolver is cocked. There is a shell in the chamber. His finger is on the trigger. If you do anything quick and funny, it might twitch.”

“Nothing quick. Nothing funny. Believe me.” After I had tied him to a stanchion with a length of braided nylon line, Meyer was able to take a deep breath again. I emptied his pockets and put everything on the table. He had a silver money clip in the shape of a dollar sign, worn from long use, with four hundred and twenty dollars in it. He had some crumpled ones and some change in the same pocket as a Swiss Army knife with a cracked red handle. I patted him down and found an ankle holster with a little two-shot derringer in it, two rounds of.22 Magnum hollowpoints. He stood as patiently as a horse being groomed.

“Going to do it with the derringer?” I asked him.

“It wouldn’t look like an accident, would it?”

“Why does it have to be an accident anyway?”

“I’ll give you a number and you dial it and let me say something into it. They will get a voiceprint, okay? Then they’ll clear me.”

I had to retie him where the phone would reach. He said the phone was manned twenty-four hours a day. I wasn’t familiar with the area code. It was answered on the second ring by a male voice repeating the last four digits of the number I’d dialed. I held the phone to Browder’s face and he said, “Okay Browder for clearance. Give them a description.”

“Hold,” the voice said.

We all waited for a long ninety seconds and then the voice said, “Browder, Scott Ellis. Five foot seven, one hundred and seventy-five pounds, age thirty-eight, brown eyes, ruddy complexion, S-shaped scar inside of left forearm, first joint of little finger of left hand missing, hairy mole right shoulder, faded blue tattoo right forearm of anchor and five stars in a circle around it. Browder is on detached duty with the Drug Enforcement Administration.”

I said thank you to a dead line and untied him. “You don’t want to check the hairy mole?” he asked.

“No, thanks.”

“It isn’t all that hairy anyway.”

“Just for luck, I’ll hang on to the derringer, though.”

“Don’t let me leave without it.”

“Mr. Scott Browder, this is Meyer.”

They nodded at each other. He massaged his wrists and said, “I could guess you’d be careful. What I hoped was no whop on the skull first. Hits on the head make me throw up. After the bomb thing they really wondered if they should go after somebody with all that amount of luck.”

“Sit down. Drink.”

“Thanks. Scotch, no ice, little bit of water. You can guess why I wouldn’t carry an official ID.”

“Infiltration?” I asked.

“After Operation Southern Comfort a lot of our guys were made, so I’m one of the new batch.”

“Operation what?”

He looked disappointed. “It was big, like five tons of coke by plane, with a relay strip in the Bahamas. Anyway I’m involved with the peopl who never see it or touch it or have a direct contact with anybody who does see it and touch it. I’m after the arrangers. Not like Jornalero. He just does money for them. Long ago he used to hire the mules for the Colombianos. He worked his way up and, because he’s smart, mostly out of it. They could get him for currency violations if they thought they could make it stick. But he covers his tracks good.”

“Can you tell me who wants me killed?” I asked, giving him his drink.

He sipped it, nodded approval and said, “What would you do if I gave you names?”

“Pay visits.”

He looked at me with disapproval. “McGee I am not going to tell you how much I know about you. You are big and you are lucky and you have some good moves. If I wanted to get you killed quick, I’d give you some names. How can I impress you? We are talking about very big money and very smart people. Listen and believe. It would be like sending a twelve-year-old girl on a naked reverse against the Raiders. It is a class you will never be in.”

“Who is Cappy?”

“Short for the Capataz. That isn’t his name. It means the Foreman. He’s way down the list. He’s enforcement. You scrambled three of his people. Rick Sullivan is having his knees rebuilt. Louis LaLieu will spend a year with his dental surgeon. Dean Matan has four broken bones and some ripped tendons in his left hand. And Cappy is annoyed.”

“Who did it to Billy?”

“I don’t know and I don’t think Cappy knows, and I would guess that the man in Marseille Cappy contacted for a favor wouldn’t know either exactly who did it. Just like nobody really knows who put your bomb together or who mailed it. Incidentally, word went back to Marseille that the wire job was sloppy. They wanted it done so that it wouldn’t be picked up in an autopsy. They should have used a big injection of insulin.”

“A bomb isn’t exactly accidental-looking.”

“After that missed, they decided on accidents. Too many killings and you have a lot of official attention, and that is bad for business. The people in Peru would understand the accidents were arranged.”

“What was my accident going to be?”

“I couldn’t say exactly, but I think you were supposed to walk out into heavy traffic. Those three were standby talent, strictly second-class, McGee.”

Meyer asked his first question. “Mr. Browder, if Mr. McGee stays here, what are his chances of staying alive?”

Browder looked at Meyer with more interest. “Slim to none.”

“And why is that so important to somebody?”

“Friend Meyer, you ask the hard ones, don’t you? Something is stirring. What you’ve got in the Miami-Atlanta area is a loose amalgamation of two groups. They work very cozy together. It’s in their interest. Let’s call one the Old-timers. Some syndicate families, gambling interests, vice, narcotics. But not down on the nitty-gritty level. Making policy, suggesting arrangements, selecting the right people. Let’s call the other group the New Boys. Rednecks, Cubans, Jamaicans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Guatemalans, Peruvians, Bolivians. Smuggling narcotics, peddling weapons, murder and arson for hire. And again you have a top layer of policy people, negotiators. For a while the Old-timers and the New Boys were killing each other off. Wiser heads prevailed. They have the same problems of product and cash flow. So they have been working together. Now there is trouble in paradise. It has something to do with you, McGee, and with Ingraham and his wife and Jornalero and that stolen boat and Gigi Reyes. I’ve discussed matters with my associates and my superiors, and the general feeling is that if we can find the right buttons and push them, there is going to be a full-scale war again. Crazy Marielenos running around in panel trucks full of automatic weapons and grenades. And some fruit may drop off the tree. We may get enough to build some tight cases.

“Lately, it’s getting a little better. When we can’t build a solid criminal prosecution, we can bring a civil action and tell the clown to either show up on the stand and explain his income taxes for the past fifteen years, and how come he could buy a two-million-dollar home on the beach, or we take the house off his hands. It stings them pretty good. But I like the tight cases better.”

“Which side wants me dead?”

“The Old-timers, mostly.”

“What can I do?”

“I don’t know yet, McGee. First I want to know every detail about the boat. How you looked, where you located it. What you did aboard. The whole thing.”

He made me go over the part about the boat coming over from Yucatan twice. And he wanted every detail about the interior of the Sundowner, known then as the Lazidays. The exact position and condition of each body. The placement of the roll of fifties, and the spare fifties around the head of Howard Cannon. The shape and placement of the bruises on the thighs of the Peruvian girl. The clothing on the others. I closed my eyes and rebuilt the scene. It came back so vividly I could hear the lazy buzzing of the carrion flies, feel the sodden weight of my sweat-soaked clothes.

“I got to think,” Browder said.

He was a pacer. He frowned and paced and, with fresh drink in hand, made little grunts, mumbles and hand gestures.

He stopped in front of me and pointed down at me. “You! Have you got any cowboy clothes? Hat, shirts, boots?”

“Nothing.”

“Buy them tomorrow morning. Get high heels on the boots and a big high crown on the hat. I want you seven and a half feet tall. I want you looked at. I’ll bring the eye patch. He’s dead, but they won’t know that in the Yucatan, will they?”

“Is that a question?”

“Hell no. Shut up. Let me think.” And he went back to pacing.

Finally he dropped into a chair and clapped his thick hands together. “It’s a chance, but maybe the only chance you got, McGee. Bring money. A good chunk of it. Can you bring fifty big ones?”

“To where, for what?”

“You and me, we’re going on a buying trip.”

“I thought you were up there on the policy level, Browder.”

“Hell no. I’m third or fourth string. If I want to go buying and have a source, why should they stop me? They let people turn a dime. They don’t want them to get greedy and foolish. I had been working on the idea they came over from Veracruz or Tampico. If it was from Chetumal, and they made a buy, I know the name. It had to be through him or somebody close to him. I know the name but I don’t know how to make the contact. We can’t roam around asking. I think I know who can tell me how to make the contact. What you do, McGee, you stay low. Buy the cowhand clothes. Wait for a call from me day after tomorrow. I think we’ll be taking the Monday or Tuesday afternoon flight on AeroMexico to Cancun.”

“I can hardly wait,” I said.

“Save the funny routines. This can get us both shot.”

“If you take more than five thousand out of the country, they…”

“Fifty big ones makes a pack of hundreds this thick.” He held up a hand, thumb and finger about two and a half inches apart “Got a passport?… Good. I’ll take the money in. Pack a carryon with what you’ll need for three or four days. I don’t know this minute if it’s on or off. Maybe they think so much of me they don’t want me to go out on a buy because I could get picked up coming back. On the other hand, if I’m coming up with the money and they’re getting their percentage when they buy back from me for the wholesale market, what is there to lose? I’ll let you know.”

“If it happens,” I asked, “who am I supposed to be?”

“I never heard his real name. They called him Bucky. Didn’t look much like you. He had a round pink face. But tall. Real tall. He lost an eye in a bar. He walked into a dart game. Drunk. He didn’t say much. He smiled a lot. He could do a pretty good John Wayne imitation. He did a lot of field work, so all the sources knew what he looked like. Word gets around. They called him the Estanciero. It means the Rancher. Bucky was never on a ranch in his life except the night he got killed. It was a routine landing on a ranch strip in Pasco County and Bucky was there with a van to off-load the product and take it up north somewhere. Birmingham, I think. Some locals tried to hijack the load but they got cut down. Two of them got it. One of the others fired from long range, in the dark, probably just aiming in the general direction of the airplane, and took Bucky right in the throat. So one of the two people off the plane took the truck north, after the two of them had loaded Bucky and the two dead hotshots into the cabin. The pilot took it fifty miles out over the Gulf, put it on automatic pilot and heaved them out. What happened hasn’t exactly been advertised. I know because it is part of my job to find out things like that, and the pilot likes brandy.”

He looked at his watch and stood up. “Got to go. Look, I don’t want to make you nervous. There’s very little rough stuff going on these days. I’ll be in touch.”

After he had been gone ten minutes I said to Meyer, “If he is after my fifty thousand, that’s the most elaborate con I ever ran into.”

“I think he’s real,” Meyer said. “Is that the right word?”

“Probably not. The man is basically unreal. But he’s what he says he is.”

“You’re saying I should do it? I should go with him?”

“Do you think that’s the kind of decision I should make for you?”

“Why do you keep answering a question with a question?”

“Doesn’t everyone?”

“Okay, Meyer. Seriously. Life is full of signs and portents. Something hides in the shadows and keeps trying to tell you things you should know. But the language is never clear. You aimed a finger at me a while back and said, ‘Bang, you’re dead.’ It is so unlike you to do a kid thing like that, I get the feeling something was trying to talk to me through you.”

“It was just a dumb impulse.”

“I guess the whole situation is making me too jumpy.”

“And if you stay right here and make no moves at all, you’re going to get jumpier.”

“Probably.”

“But be very, very careful, Travis.”

Eleven

BROWDER AND I bought tickets, open return, at the AeroMexico counter at Miami International on Monday afternoon. If was still the busy season for Cancun, but there were a lot more coming back than going by this seventh day of the new year. We were put on standby, but after we were bused over to a newer building, Browder quietly bought us the top slots on the standby list.

The old fat jet was jam-packed. There was a holiday flavor, an anticipation of vacation aboard. There were a couple of tour groups, shouting back and forth to each other. It reminded me of the time Meyer and I had flown down to the Yucatan, the time when we found the man we had looked for over a long time. At that time we were hunting, and this time I was the hunted. That time I was with Meyer, and this time with a man I did not know. Reason said he could be trusted. But the phone identification could have been rigged. This time I would not return with a prize as rare as the one I had brought back to Lauderdale the last time. I told myself to. relax and roll with it. But I could not shuck the moody, twitchy feeling. Besides, I felt like a clown, even after I had stowed the tall pale nineteen-gallon hat in the overhead compartment. Browder had brought the eye patch, one of those small black shiny ones with a black elastic band that was a little too tight, so that the edge of the patch pressed against the bones around the socket of my right eye. My shirt had pale shiny buttons, my pants were too tight in the crotch and the high boots of imitation lizard hurt my feet.

When I had asked Browder in the airport what was going on, he told me we’d talk later. He approved of the way I looked. He was not impressed with how much the boots hurt. I towered over him in the terminal. He leaned back and looked up at me like a pedestrian checking the stop light. In past years I had exaggerated my height as a method of disguise. But this time it bothered me more. I was a figure of fun. My clothes were too new. And I wondered if anybody wanted to do harm to the Estanciero.

One of the overworked flight attendants, charged with serving a hot meal on the short flight, smiled at me and said, “Hello there! We haven’t seen you in a long time, Bucky.”

“Nice to be aboard, ma’am,” I said. The recognition made me more uncomfortable. She paused and looked back at me, with a small frown. And that didn’t help either.

Also I felt uneasy when I thought of the fifty thousand. I had handed it in a rubber-banded block in a brown paper bag to Browder. He had taken it into a stall in the men’s room. When he came out he led me into a quiet corner of the terminal and showed me his hard-cover Spanish/ English dictionary. He had divided the cash into three packets and placed them inside the hollowed-out book. He kept the book closed with a red rubber band.

“Won’t they look in that?”

“They don’t hassle the tourist business. And if they do check us and if they look, and if they find it, the going mordida is five hundred bucks. You and I are going through the clearance separate. Don’t sweat it. It’ll be fine.”

Several other big passenger aircraft had landed at Cancun ahead of us, and a couple more came in right after we did. The modern airport is, for practical purposes, divided in half: The departure area with ticket counters, departure tax counters and security inspection is three times as large as the arrival lounge. Not a lounge. Long, long slow lines piled up at high counters where bored and indifferent little bureaucrats, male and female, glanced at passports and stamped tourist permits which had been filled out on the flights. I was able to stroll right on out of the customs area into the outer area of the arrival section without interception. The customs counters were unmanned. But several attentive men stood back by a wall, and every now and then one of them would step out and flag down a passenger and check his luggage.

Beyond the glass wall was total chaos. Passengers were finding their tour group, and the place to stand for their hotel buses. Avis, Hertz and Budget were doing big business. I looked back through the glass wall and saw Browder in there, working his way through the crowd toward the doorway. People charged into me, then backed off and stared up at me in obvious astonishment. I saw a whole pack of chubby people of indeterminate age, all wearing name tags with tridents on them, and I realized they were all destined for Club Med. They had that look, a batch of lonesome loners who had decided to try to take a big chance in the sunshine.

“Let’s go,” Browder said, pushing at me. I do not like being pushed at. He went ahead in a half trot and I followed along, walking carefully on sore feet. He stood in the Budget line and, after he spent five minutes at the counter, we went out to the far curb, walking between a couple of the tour buses parked in a long line at the first curb. It was bright and hot in Cancian. The buses stood there snoring and stinking, big beasts drowsing in the heat. The drivers sat high behind the wheels, wiry little brown men with that same look of apathy and cynicism you see on the faces of big-city cabdrivers.

It was ten minutes before our rental car arrived, a dark blue Renault 12 with eighteen thousand kilometers on the meter, a mini-station wagon with four doors. Browder got behind the wheel. If I could have fitted there, I couldn’t have worked the pedals with those boots on. I tossed the big hat in back and took off the eye patch.

“You gotta wear that at all times!” Browder said.

“And off come the boots too, friend. You just drive the ear.”

“You getting smart-ass on me?”

I knelt on the seat and reached back and slipped the dictionary out of his carryon and put it in mine as he turned and watched me.

“If two of us are going to run this,” he said, “we are going to run it into a tree.”

“Get out of the crush here and park a minute.” He drove out of the airport proper and turned onto the long wide road that led out to the main highway that runs from Puerto Juarez all the way down to Chetumal, the capital city of Quintana Roo (pronounced “row” as in “row your boat”). He pulled way over to the side and turned the engine off. No air conditioning, and the dark car was like a convection oven when the windows were open and it was moving, and like a barbecue pit when it was standing still.

“Now what?” he asked.

“We are a long way from anything,” I told him. “Up ahead turn left and we’re fifteen or twenty minutes from Cancun. Turn right and you’ve got a batch of sixty miles of nothing. So who are we seeing, where is he and how do you get in touch?”

“It will unfold as we go along. Okay?”

“Not okay.”

He studied me for a few moments. Sweat ran down his thick red cheek. “So I’ll hold your hand, McGee. We’ve got two singles at the Sheraton. We locate a pool attendant, a towel boy named Ricky, and we tell him that we’ve come to do some business with the banker. We give him a room number and sit tight. Somebody will get in touch.”

“Soon?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. We just wait and see.”

At the hotel restaurant near the pool, I excited so much awe and interest I doubt anyone noticed Browder. The employees wore little name plates above the shirt pocket. No trace of any Ricky, and Browder didn’t want to ask about him.

He was there in the morning, on Tuesday. He was a tall sallow Mexican lad who had dyed his hair yellow a couple of months back. It was half grown out, a startling sight indeed. He wore a gold snake bracelet around his wrist and a bangle in his ear.

Browder roamed until he could intercept Ricky out of earshot of the other employees and the tourists. He came back angry. “Christ, I don’t know. I told him, and I told him the room number. Son of a bitch is asleep on his feet. He yawned at me. He needs dental work. From now on one of us is in my roam at all times.”

It was a relief to spend a little time away from him. In spite of his objections, I discarded the hat and boots for the time being. At his urgent request I kept the eye patch on until I bought some swim trunks and used the pool. Water kept getting behind the patch. So I left it off while swimming, put it back on when I knew I’d be seeing him. When I was out, he had to stay in the room. Whoever was in the room could watch the junk television from the States on the satellite disk, if they so chose. It’s a funny thing about television and cigarettes. Hardly anybody I know anymore smokes cigarettes or watches the tube. One stunts the body and one stunts the mind.

I went and looked at the little Mayan ruin north of the hotel. The hotel itself is like a segment sliced out of a giant flat-topped Mayan pyramid. They are building condominiums nearby, the same size and shape. I wandered over and took a look at construction. Mexico is full of magic buildings. You never find anybody hard at work but the buildings go up.

Wednesday afternoon when I took my fast laps in the pool, there was more of an edge in the northeast breeze. I had tucked the hard eye patch on its black elastic cord into the locker-key pocket of my swim trunks. When I climbed out of the pool and tried to put it back on, it slipped out of my wet fingers and, propelled by the elastic, went skittering off behind me, across cement and tile, way over to a line of sun cots positioned five or six feet apart. It was under the second cot. I said, “Pardon me,” knelt and retrieved it and stood up to put it on.

“At least wipe it off,” said the woman on the sun cot, reaching out to me with a Kleenex.

I thanked her and wiped the plastic patch off and put it back on. She looked up at me with a skeptical frown. She wore a swimsuit but looked as if she could manage a bikini nicely. Brown hair, blue eyes, a three-day tourist burn.

“Why are you wearing that thing?” she asked.

“How do you mean?”

“You take it off to go in the pool and put it on when you come out.”

“What I’ve got is some kind of hypersensitivity to light.”

“I bet you have.”

“You sound as if you don’t believe me.”

“Maybe because it’s the wrong kind of patch. I had a friend who had to wear one of those. That’s what you wear when the eyeball is gone.”

“Mine is still right here.”

“I know. So, well, it made me wonder. We put out a lot of spy novels.”

“We?”

“I write copy for a publishing house in New York. And right now I’m just about as far away from it as I can afford to get. For ten whole days. But my mind is still in the shop, I guess. That patch is like a clue or a signal. I had to ask or worry about it forever.”

“Try to think of it as an election bet. Will that help?”

She frowned, sighed, checked the degree of burn on her shoulder. “I’ll have to make do with that, won’t I? Because you’re not going to tell me anything else.” She stuck her hand up and said, “Nancy Sheppard, New York.”

I took it and said, “Travis McGee, Florida. Happy to meet you. I might be having a drink later over at the…”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” she said. “I just wanted to know about the patch.” And she rolled facedown on her sun cot in total dismissal.

So the patch was on and I decided to keep it on at all times. If people from publishing houses could nail me that easily I was probably being stupid about the patch. And probably the boots and the hat. But everything hurt except the hat.

Nancy Sheppard’s observation had jolted me out of a curious listlessness I had felt ever since the awareness of being hunted for reasons no one would or could explain. As quarry, I was acting much like the persons I had hunted. Aware of pursuit, they do not become more sly. They become careless, random, disheartened. Easier to bring down. They seem to welcome the end of the play, just to find out what is going on. So I was being precisely that kind of a horse’s ass. Out of control.

I had been in control when I had gone hunting the Sundowner. I found it and then the world turned upside down. I had not reacted this way when I had been hunted other times in other places. But then I knew who was after me and why. For perhaps the first time in my life I appreciated the corrosive effects of total uncertainty. And it was something I could use, if I survived to use it. In Kafka’s story The Trial, the prisoner disintegrated because he could never find out what he was guilty of. So I vowed to tighten up. By being a fool, I was handicapping Browder.

Word came on Thursday afternoon. I was on room duty. I wrote it down. There was no point in going to find Browder. He came back a half hour later. He read my note.

“What kind of a voice?”

“Male. Heavy and deep and slow.”

“Accent?”

“Some, but not Mexican. More like German or Scandinavian. But slight.”

“Okay. That’s not our guy. So we’ve got to go to Tulum. Hand me the map.”

“Right down the road past the airport, say eighty-five miles from here, two hours to be safe.”

“You’ve been there before?”

“A while back.”

He looked at me and when I didn’t continue he shrugged and said, “Suit yourself. You have any Spanish?”

“Kitchen Spanish, without verbs. And not much of that. I’ve noticed you do a little better than that.”

“A little. So to make it by eleven we leave at nine.”

“Unless you want to get there earlier and look around.”

“I don’t want to do anything to make the birds fly.”

We parked at Tulum a little before eleven. The parking lot was across the road from the Mayan ruins. There were a dozen big tour buses and about fifty cars. Two sides of the parking lot were lined with ramshackle shops strung with bright flags and plastic gadgetry. The shops were selling clothing, jewelry, junk, fake Mayan carvings, T-shirts, souvenirs, tacos, enchiladas, beer, soft drinks, seashells and paper flowers. The shops and small restaurants extended down both sides of the approach to the ruins from the main highway.

We locked the little blue station wagon and walked diagonally across the lot and back along the way we had come, to the sign Browder had spotted on the way in. Restaurante Tia Juanita. It was dim inside, out of the white glare of sunlight. There were six crude wooden tables on a dirt floor, mismatched chairs, a counter along the back with a heavy woman behind it. The place smelled of fried grease, beer and urine. One table was occupied by two Mexican kids drinking Coca-Cola out of oversized bottles.

We took the table on the left just inside the door. An electric fan on the counter top turned back and forth, giving us a brief blast of warm moving air every twenty seconds. Browder went to the counter and brought back two bottles of Leon Negra dark beer. We were halfway through the beer when a man came in, paused to let his eyes adjust to the diminished light and then sat down with us. He was big and he looked fit. He had a full beard, ponytail, cotton pullover shirt with narrow red and white horizontal stripes, cutoff jeans and, as I noticed later, old army boots worn without laces or socks. He was a relic from the past, a time traveler from San Francisco in the sixties. Mexico is full of them. Aging hippies, last survivors, drifting down toward the Mayan ruins, burned-out cases, languid and ragged in the heat, traveling with dirty duffel bags, listlessly thumbing the sparse traffic.

He looked at me and said, “Heard of you. I thought it was going to be somebody after the good Oaxaca bush. Very heavy and clean. But you’d be looking for the white lady out of Belize.”

“And for that we’d see the Brujo?” Browder asked.

“He’s hard to see lately. He’s just set up a new market to handle all he brings in.”

“Out of Bogota to Belize, then by boat to Chetumal, sure. But where from here? I don’t get it, this new market. If it’s coming into the States, our people get it anyway.”

“Maybe the Brujo is a little pissed at your people. Maybe he’s got a Canadian outlet.”

“We’ve never given him a bad deal.”

“That isn’t what he says. And that isn’t what I know.”

“Who are you?” Browder asked.

“How much were you thinking to buy?”

“Enough.”

“You know what happens sometimes,” the man said. “Sometimes people who deal in it, they use a little. Then they begin to think they are smarter than anybody. So they try a little angle here, a little angle there, and then they crap in their own nest.”

“No chance of seeing the Brujo?”

“I don’t know. He might want to tell you some kind of a message. He’s still hot about it.”

“Tell me about it,” Browder said.

“That’s up to him. A man gets taken, he doesn’t want other people telling people about it.”

“How would we get to see him?”

“I can take a shot at it. But you could be wasting your time.”

“Now?”

“Let’s go. We’ll have to use my truck.”

We followed him to where he had parked an old red Ford pickup. The fenders were gone to provide space for the huge tires which lifted the chassis so high we had to climb up into it. Going through the crowd I attracted the same awed attention as before. Take my six four and add another twelve inches of heels plus hat and it made the children’s eyes bug. I realized what it would feel like to be in a carnival.

We went down an old road that followed the shore, down past a fish camp at Boca.de Paila, and at last the road petered out to a mere rocky trace which he crawled over in low gear, avoiding rocks big enough to hit the underside of the battered truck. He pulled into the dirt yard of a typical Mayan hut, though bigger than most, scattering turkeys, dogs and ducks. He told us to wait beside the truck. The hut was round, made of wattle and sticks plastered with a lime mix and heavily thatched with old brown palm fronds. The man brushed against copper bells strung by the entrance as he entered the dark interior. Dogs stretched out again in the shade. Turkeys and ducks were pecking around.

The man came out and said, “They sent somebody after him. They’ll come back with him or with a message from him.”

“Take long?”

“Ten, fifteen minutes.”

“Then he lives near?”

“I’ve never seen where he lives, friend.” He gestured. “Somewhere beyond all that jungle stuff.” Finally a man appeared in the doorway of the hut and beckoned to us. He stood there as we approached and then stepped aside to let us enter. He was Mayan, maybe fifty years old, with the broad impassive face of a Siberian peasant, and the great hooked nose of Egyptian wall paintings. His skin color was a deep golden brown. A young man in black shorts and a white shirt stood in the narrow rear doorway of the hut, holding an automatic weapon at ready, aimed at our ankles. He gave us his total attention all the time we were there.

The Brujo wore white trousers and a long white shirt with four pockets and with broad stripes of blue embroidery down the front of it. There were hammocks strung inside the hut, and several heavy wooden boxes.

He sat on a carved chest, and motioned us toward the boxes.

As I was wondering if he spoke English, he said, “When I get the seventy-five thousand American dollars you tricky bastards owe me, maybe we can start doing business again.”

Twelve

“WE HAVEN’T tricked anyone,” Browder said. “Believe me.”

“So why are you coming here with a man trying to look like the Estanciero? The real Estanciero, Bucky, had a girl’s face. Not this one here.”

“Now I can take this damn thing off,” I said, and removed the hat with the tall crown and huge brim so I could slip the eye patch off. I noticed out of the corner of my eye that the gun barrel in the doorway moved up to give me some individual attention, then sagged as I replaced the hat and put the patch in my pocket.

“Jesus Christ, McGee!” Browder said angrily

I looked at the impassive man sitting on the chest and said, “Sir, your honor, senor or El Brujo, or whatever…”

“Senor is fine.”

“Senor, I would be very grateful if you would tell me who cheated you and how. I do not deal drugs. I do not use drugs. I prevailed upon this fine fellow here, Mr. Scott Ellis Browder, to bring me along with him. He does deal drugs. I dressed up like Bucky at his request, so I would maybe be recognized as him, and that would make us more believable. We know something went wrong down here but we don’t know what. Back home in Florida, people are trying to kill me, and I don’t know why, but it has something to do with what happened down here, I think.”

“But my main mission is to make a buy,” Browder said hurriedly.

“For how much?”

“Fifty thousand dollars’ worth.”

“Where is the money?”

“In a lock box at the hotel,” I said.

El Brujo stared into my eyes. I tried to look earnest, troubled and sincere. “A man named Ruffino Marino has been buying from me for a year and a half. Italian-American,” he said.

Browder grunted with surprise and El Brujo stared at him and said, “You have a problem with that?”

“Big heavy man about sixty, with a limp?”

“No, indeed. A handsome young man about twenty-eight. Slender. Mustache.”

“Thank you. You have very good English, senor.”

“I have a degree in business administration from Stanford,” he said, so flatly I knew he was trying to hide his pride in it.

El Brujo turned back to me. “Marino flew the product out of the Tulum airstrip to an airstrip on a Florida ranch near Fort Myers. He made four trips. He complained about increasing surveillance. He flew over the last time in early August. He did not fly the product back. He brought here a young man with red hair. John Rogers. He said Rogers would take the product back by boat. I said it was more risky by water than by air. He said they had worked out something. John Rogers’ boat was docked at Cozumel. I sent a man up there to help him find safe anchorage down here. You have to know the waters, and know the reefs. The boat anchored in good protected water in the Bahia de la Ascension. Rogers had a young woman with him. I had to wait for more product to fill the order. We loaned them a jeep. Marino had flown back. Rogers and the woman explored the area. When I supplied the product, they left. They came back in September. Again I had to wait for product. They paid me and left. They left with a young woman who had been traveling here with relatives. Apparently she wanted to go with them and see the United States. I would have stopped them taking her had I known she was an important person. This was big police business, big rewards. She was a reckless young woman. The family in Lima had sent her traveling with relatives to get her mind off an unsuitable young man. She was to have been married to a lawyer. We heard here that she had been killed in the United States, in Florida. I receive the International Edition of the Miami Herald every afternoon. And I watch your television. I have a twelve-foot dish antenna. I was careless about the money. After all, it came from Marino, who had been doing business with me for over a year. I didn’t notice it was counterfeit until I was just about to send it by courier to my bank on Grand Cayman.” He took two fifties out of his pocket and held them out toward Browder, who jumped up and walked over and got them, the gun muzzle following him. He examined them and handed them to me. They looked crisp but felt damp. Same familiar serial number. F38865729D.

“If you get the paper,” I said, “then you know the redhead and his girl were killed too.”

“Of course. And Rogers wasn’t his name. All I know is that Marino owes me seventy-five thousand dollars. If you and your people want to do any business here for any kind of product, they have to clear that matter up first.” He frowned. “I can’t understand why it hasn’t been cleared up. I know the mathematics as well as they do. What costs you people seventy-five thousand, you wholesale for two hundred thousand. The wholesaler sells it to the distributor for four hundred thousand. The distributor sells it to the area dealers and they sell it to the street dealers and they sell it to the consumers after adulteration for a million dollars.”

“Maybe,” Browder said, “we’ve been pinching down on supply to hold the price.”

“Why would you come to me to make a buy knowing I was cheated?”

“I didn’t know you’d been cheated.”

“I’m not a fool! You don’t have any independent importers anymore.”

“Maybe Marino was the very last.”

“And so I am out of luck? Is that it?”

“That could be it, Mr. Brujo.”

“There will be no sales until I am reimbursed.”

“I’m in no position to decide that. I’m not high enough up the ladder. But I will go back and report. I have the feeling enough product is coming in from other directions. But it’s good policy to keep all the channels open.”

“Martin, you can drive these men back, please.” As we stood up, Browder said, “What was it they worked out to cut down the risk of taking it in by boat, sir?”

“Didn’t you look into that, Martin?” Brujo asked.

“Yes, sir. The product would go into one of those aluminum Haliburton cases with a good watertight seal, with enough lead to make negative buoyancy. The case had two eyes welded onto the two corners on one end, and there was a wire cable, thin, fastened to the eyes, making a Y like a ski towline. They had about fifty feet of cable and the other end was fastened to a large eye bolt screwed into the keel amidships. They kept the case on the transom. Oh, the case had two little fins welded or brazed onto the sides so that if they had to tow the case at cruising speed it would come up near the surface but wouldn’t broach. The fins were adjustable so they could take some practice runs with the case full to see how it behaved. If there was any chance of being boarded and searched, they would just shove the case overboard. If they traveled, it stayed below the surface. If they stopped, it hung straight down toward the bottom. After the danger was over, they could get up to speed, pick up the cable with a boat hook and bring the case back aboard. Unless someone sent a diver over to look at the hull, they were safe, and even then he might not see the cable.”

“Thanks for your time,” I said to El Brujo. After we had climbed into the red truck I asked Browder what brujo meant. Martin answered for him. “Wizard or magician. More like magician.”

“I wonder if he contributes to the alumni fund,” I said.

“Probably,” said Martin. “He uses his education. He has commercial ventures in Cancun, Merida, Valladolid, Chetumal and Villahermosa. He’s got a radio-telephone back in there somewhere. He’s a very serious man. It wasn’t smart to cheat him.” As we rode, I looked sidelong at Martin. There were flecks of gray in that beard. Deep wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. The hippie look was a perfect disguise for the environment in which he worked. He lacked the dazed vapid manner of the strung-out homeless ones, but I guessed that he could assume the role whenever it seemed useful.

I wondered how Martin felt about the business he was in. But I knew Browder wouldn’t like it if I asked him. And I probably wouldn’t understand the answer.

Browder held it all in until we were back inside the little blue Renault and heading north. Then he hit the top of the steering wheel with the heel of his hand. “Wowee!” yelled Browder. “Hey ho!” yelled Browder. “Gottum!” yelled Browder.

“Got who?”

“Whoever falls out of the tree when we shake it. Like this, McGee. Mr. Ruffino Marino, who lives in a million-dollar condo at Sailfish Lagoon, is a respected investment adviser. He fought his way up through one of the families. He invests mob money in restaurants and hotels and dry cleaning and car washes and liquor stores. And he probably has a little sitdown dinner once in a while with old friends and they make policy about who to be friends with and what to buy next. Ruffi Junior has always been a wild-ass kid. Not exactly a kid any longer, but his habits haven’t changed. Stock cars, speedboats, airplanes, actresses. So it was the kid had the deal with Brujo, and that is crazy because the last thing the old man would want for his sons and daughters would be anything illegal. He bought respectability and he wants to keep it. Nothing should mar the Marino name, so it is dead-ass certain he didn’t know about this until it had been going on for a while.”

“How would Ruffi Junior dispose of the product?”

“Use the Marino name to get to a wholesaler, and then sell it to him for a little bit under the going price to keep the man’s mouth shut. A personal deal. There could be other ways. I’m just brainstorming it. The thing to know is that the old man would blow a gasket if he knew any of his kids, especially the oldest son, was dealing.”

“Why would he deal?”

“I heard a rumor he wanted to be a movie star like Stallone. He financed a movie using a tax shelter plan and it was a bomb, a dead loss. He could make a million a year buying from Brujo. Maybe he wants to make another movie.”

“What about the dead people?”

“I can make up a scenario for you. Ruffi Junior is contacted by Howard Cannon by phone once he is back safe in the Keys with the product. So they arrange a pickup by Ruffi, by fast runabout or float plane, back there where you found the boat. I think Ruffi Junior would come alone. He doesn’t want to be very public about what he’s doing. So he goes down and boards the boat to pick up the product and give the redhead his cut.

“The redhead is proud of how cute he was. He’d probably bought that funny money for fifteen cents on the dollar. Eleven thousand two hundred fifty for seventy-five. But he probably bought a round hundred. He wants to buy into the action. He still has the seventy-five in good money Ruffi gave him. So he tells Ruffi what he did and shows him the rest of the funny money.

“Okay. So Ruffi is known for having a temper. He beat up on a girl once a couple of years ago. It was in the papers. But he got off. There he is looking in horror at that dumb turd redhead telling him how smart he is. Ruffi knows it is a stolen boat. He knows that he can never make the redhead understand what an idiot he’s been. Then maybe the redhead tells him he has the seventy-five thousand hidden, just in case Ruffi doesn’t want to deal him in. I think that’s in character. Do you?”