Miami Noir

Blown away by Anthony Dale Gagliano

Homestead

The roof was halfway peeled off the house; the Volkswagen was in the swimming pool; and for the past two nights I had fallen asleep watching the stars fade away into my dreams. Now, two days after the storm, I had taken to sleeping with my rifle because the looters were out, and night was their favorite time. The only good thing was that it was my wife’s car at the bottom of the pool and not mine. She had left me a few weeks before the storm, and I was still feeling a little bitter about it. The bad thing was that she had driven away with my car because it could hold more stuff, so it wasn’t exactly a total victory on my part.

The day after the hurricane, the sky was clear but the world I saw was broken, right down to the streets. I got lost every time I took a walk. Finally, I got my flashlight and dug out an old compass I had kept from the army. I took a bearing on the emptiness of the front door and started rambling around the neighborhood, looking to see what was left. People were creeping around like zombies and digging through the ruins of their houses. I passed an old man bent over like a prospector on a nameless street. He straightened up and looked at me.

“You got a cigarette?” he asked.

“I’m trying to scout some out,” I told him. “There a store around here somewheres?”

He pointed to the north. “I think over that way. See that flagpole? It used to be right by there. Maybe it still is.”

I looked out across the damage and the distance. The flagpole looked a long way off. In Miami you drive every place, and I wasn’t used to walking.

“What brand you smoke?” I asked.

He looked bewildered by the question. “I don’t know. I don’t smoke.” I noticed then that he was wearing underwear — a pair of polka dot boxers and a white tank top that was never going to be white again.

“I know what you mean,” I said. “I’m not much of a smoker myself.”

I started walking, sometimes right through people’s houses, not to be mean or anything but because the houses were all in pieces spread out like a puzzle. It was hard to tell where a thing began or ended. I could see that my place had done better than most. At least my furniture was still inside. I just hoped it was still there when I got back.

I smelled a barbecue and came up on a group of people sitting in a ring of sofas like they were inside a living room. Some people were laughing. They looked like a big family, except that some of them were black and some of them were white and some of them were speaking in Spanish. A black man was standing over a barbecue made out of a pair of steel drums with a grate over them. He held a pair of tongs and was turning pieces of meat and chicken over with them. He looked at me, and I looked at him. Then he waved me over. The fire and the heat made him look like a Vulcan. It was the best food I ever had.

I finally found the store. Where, I don’t know. It was a 7-Eleven. The windows were shattered and people were climbing in and out of the place, carrying armloads of cans and boxes of cereal and cases of beer. I had never done anything like this before and for a moment I just stood there looking. Finally, I stepped over the jagged sill and into the store, feeling like I was crossing some kind of line, which I was, except it was a little hard to see exactly what kind of line it was. At least I wasn’t a cannibal, I told myself. So far, I had only made it down to shoplifting.

I was behind the counter looking for smokes when the squad car pulled up, lights blazing like wild Indians. Everybody started to run like roaches. The cop came in through the window with his hand on his gun. I stood up. I put my hands up. He was a black kid — not much more than a rookie, I thought — and everything about him said soldier. He pointed his eyes and his gun at me at the same time, shook his head, and holstered the automatic.

“Turn around and put your hands behind your back,” he said calmly. His voice was edgeless, as though he had said, Give me a cup of coffee

“Officer—” I started to say.

“I know,” he said. “Don’t tell me. I got no choice. This shit has been going on all day and the captain wants to make a statement. Sorry, man.”

I rotated and he bound my hands with a plastic tie. It was like an episode of Cops

“I’ve never been arrested before,” I said, more to myself than to the officer.

“Don’t worry about it. You’ll be out in the morning, maybe even later today.”

The cop seemed tired, though not physically; his movements were crisp and professional. He was tired in another way. I could feel it coming off him. He reminded me of a teacher who had made it to the end of a long day at a bad school. He walked beside me without holding my arm, as though we were a couple of buddies heading to the bar for a beer or two. Sometimes he even walked a little bit ahead of me, as though he had forgotten that he had a prisoner. I guess I didn’t seem that dangerous.

Right before we got to the cop car, he bent over and picked up a photograph that had blown in from another life. He stared at it for a moment, then held it up so I could see. It was the picture of a young woman, very pretty in a Nebraska sort of way: big smile, corn hair, gray eyes — innocent. I looked at the picture of the girl for a moment and nodded. Then, very gently, almost reverently, he placed the picture back on the ground on the exact spot where he had found it, as though it belonged there. Neither of us said anything. I felt a strange, indefinite sadness rise in me all the way up to my neck until I felt as though I were wearing a heavy curtain over my shoulders.

“You find stuff like that everywhere,” the cop said. To me he sounded like a tour guide in a ruined temple who knew the tale of ancient disaster so well that he had learned to tell it without words.

“I wonder where it came from,” I said.

“Somewhere,” the cop replied aimlessly.

He opened the door of the patrol car and gently pushed my head down as I crouched. I was glad there were no cameras around. We drove slowly, both of us looking from side to side.

“You live around here?” the cop asked.

I told him my address. He said he knew where it was. Then he asked me what I did for a living.

“I’m an English teacher,” I told him. “Edgewater High. Richard McManus.”

He looked at me through the rearview mirror. “That’s where I went,” he said. “I thought you looked familiar.”

“Were you one of my students?”

“No, my sister was though. Maybe you remember her? Her name was Taisha Duncan.”

The rolodex that is every teacher’s brain rolled, and a face appeared from a few years back.

“Sure, I remember her,” I said. “Nice kid. Very good writer. Said she wanted to be a reporter someday. I wrote some letters of recommendation for her. Last I heard, she had gotten a scholarship to Georgetown, I think it was.”

“That’s right; that was her. Hey, you know, I think she kind of had a crush on you.”

“That’s because I’m so debonair. Where we going, officer? I think the station’s on the other side of the canal we just passed.”

“You in a hurry to get to jail, Mr. McManus?”

“Not really,” I said. “But these plastic cuffs are cutting into my hands.”

He was silent for a few moments, then stopped the car suddenly and got out. I didn’t know what to expect, and it seemed to me, judging from the landscape, that I wasn’t going to know what to expect for a long time. I had a morbid vision of being thrown to the ground and kicked repeatedly in the stomach. There was fear and a weird kind of excitement that I didn’t understand.

The cop came around and opened the door. “Come on out,” he said. “This is bullshit.”

I got my legs over, stuck them through the door, and stood up. He told me to turn around and then, much to my surprise, he undid the plastic ties and threw them over his shoulder. He smiled at me as I rubbed my wrists.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“What were you doing in that 7-Eleven?”

“I wanted to buy some cigarettes.”

“This might be the omen to quit you been waiting for,” he said. “You want to take a ride with me? You know, just drive around, check things out, look for adventure.”

I must have appeared dumbfounded. He laughed.

“Sure,” I said lamely. “Why not?”

“You want to drive?” he asked.

“I think that might be against regulations,” I offered.

“The whole fucking world is against regulations. Look at this place. He spread his arms and peered around. I looked with him. He had a point. God had poured the city of Homestead into a blender and dumped the contents onto what was left of the street, and in that world nothing was impossible. In that world English teachers could be shoplifters and shoplifters could drive police cars.

“Okay,” I said. “What the hell.”

We drove around for about an hour, talking about everything and nothing. The young cop’s name was Robert Paulson, and he told me he had been in the Gulf War over in Iraq. I asked him what it was like.

“Not much,” he said. “We sat in the desert, doing squat for six months. Then we rolled. There was a lot of smoke and fire, but it was all over quick. I never even fired my gun. We were lucky; nobody I knew got killed or anything. You had to be careful of mines though.”

“You been out long?” I asked.

“It’s, Have you been out long? You’re not forgetting your stuff, are you, Mr. McManus?”

“Well?”

“A few months. Not long. It seems long though. It’s funny: You come back from a war and something like this hurricane happens. Shit,” he said. “This place looks worse than Iraq.”

“Maybe I should be getting back now,” I said. “It’s getting late.”

“Okay, but we got to make a stop first.”

“Where to?”

“My old place. I’ll tell you how to get there. Are you cool with that? It won’t take long.”

“What happens if another cop sees me driving you around?” I asked.

“Man, don’t you know? You’re undercover.” He laughed and slapped me on the shoulder.

We drove west for a few miles. The sun that had seemed so high earlier in the day was plummeting now, dragging the day down with it behind a row of broken trees. With all the lights in the neighborhood out, the coming darkness affected me in some primeval part of myself, and for a moment something akin to panic began to overtake me. I wanted to go home. Even my house with its gone wife, its ripped-off roof, and its drowned car was better than the sprawling mess the world had become. I began to talk to dispel my nervousness.

“How’s Taisha doing? She must be in college now.”

For a moment the cop said nothing, and I wondered if he had heard me.

“Taisha’s dead, man. Didn’t you know?”

“Dead? What are you talking about?” I couldn’t turn to look at him. I had to keep my eyes on the darkened road.

“Drunk driver. You know how it is. About a year after she graduated from Edgewater. It was up near Gainesville, near her aunt’s house. Maybe that’s why you didn’t hear about it.”

“Jesus,” I said. “A young kid like that. I can’t believe it.”

“Maybe you heard about it but forgot. You must have had a lot of kids in your class over the years.”

He was right. They came and they went. Some students you would remember for better or worse for the rest of your life, while others left barely a trace of memory behind them when the semester was over.

“No, I remember Taisha,” I said, wishing in a way that I was lying. I didn’t want that sweet young face floating around in my head with night coming on, not in this shattered world.

“Turn here,” the cop said. “I recognize that tree.” He pointed to an uprooted banyan tree lying on its side.

“Where are we?” I asked. “What is this place?”

“My old crib. Go on down this way. I’ll tell you where to stop.”

I soon saw that we had entered a cul-de-sac. The houses were small wrecks of wood and lopsided roofs. At the end of the street I saw the silhouettes of a man and a woman sitting on the front steps of their house. I drove slowly. When my beams from the headlights hit them, they stood up and went into the house, shutting the door behind them. They had moved so quickly, I thought they might be looters. I glanced at the cop. He was looking straight ahead.

“Stop in front of the house,” the cop said. “That’s where I used to live.”

“You know those people?” I asked.

“That’s my wife, or rather she used to be my wife.”

“Who’s the guy?” I asked.

“A friend of mine, used to be. Since I got back, everything is used to be, seems like. I asked him to keep an eye on Doris when I was over in Kuwait. Sources say he got a little bit too dedicated to the mission. You know what I’m saying?”

I looked at him. He was still staring straight ahead. He was locked in position. There was a sphinxlike quality to his profile that I didn’t like.

“We had better leave,” I said. I put the car in reverse and turned around to see where I was going. That’s when I saw the pump action shotgun lying on the backseat, or rather, I saw its shadow. I didn’t like the look of it. Without warning the cop reached over, grabbed the steering wheel, and with his other hand shifted the car back into park. We jerked to a stop. We stared at each other. The next thing I knew, I was looking at his gun, its small triangular sight lined up quite nicely with the middle of my nose.

“That’s my house,” he said.

I got as close to the driver’s side door as a person could get without actually merging my atoms with the metal and pulled my hands way back behind my head like an extra set of ears.

“I can walk home from here,” I said. “I could use the exercise.”

“Not yet, professor. I want you to do me a favor.”

“Look,” I said. “Just put the gun down so we can talk for a minute, okay?”

He set the gun on his lap with the barrel still pointed in my general direction and his finger still on the trigger. I think he was afraid I might try to take it away from him. Little did he know how much like distant Pluto that thought was from my mind.

“I like you,” he said seriously. “But don’t try and do anything stupid.”

“If you take a look at where I am, I think you’ll see that it’s a little too late for that particular bit of advice, but thanks anyway.”

He smiled, but the gun stayed where it was. “You’re all right,” he said. “I wish you had been my teacher. I had some bitch named Ms. Duncan.”

“Listen to me,” I said. “You need to get the hell out of here. We both do. There’s nothing here for you. I know it’s easy for me to say, and I know how I would feel if I were in your place, but I’m telling you, I can read your mind like a fucking book and it’s crazy. This too shall pass, but if you go in there tonight, I’m telling you, you will regret it. Let her go. She isn’t worth it and neither is he. You know I’m right.”

“I know you’re right, but that’s my house; that’s my wife.”

“Let the lawyers handle it. Fuck them both. Let’s get out of here.”

“I bet you were a pretty good teacher,” he said.

“Maybe I was — once. I don’t know anymore. I don’t know anything anymore. I just know we need to get the hell out of here before I have a heart attack.”

“I’ve been driving around all day, looking at everything,” he said in a voice that was half anguish, half wonderment. “Everything’s gone, teach. It’s all gone. I can’t do it no more. Go to work, act normal, do my job knowin’ that they’re in there together in my house. Where’s the respect in that?”

I didn’t know what to say, so I said: “You’re a cop. Think about that. Respect that, Officer Paulson.”

“I tried, but it’s not enough. Stay here. I’ll be right back. Got to get a few of my things. Don’t go driving off now.”

“Why don’t you leave the gun with me?” I said.

“You think that’s a good idea?”

“I know it’s a good idea,” I told him.

“All right.” He handed me the automatic. I set it down on the floor between my feet. Officer Paulson got out of the car, straightened himself, and stared at the house for a long moment. Then leaned down, looked at me through the passenger’s side window, and smiled.

“I appreciate you driving around with me. It’s been a real crazy day, hasn’t it?”

“I think so. Go ahead and hurry up. Don’t be in there too long, you understand me? I don’t want to have to come in there and drag you out.”

“You sound like my pops.”

“Stay cool.” I gave him the peace sign, wondering if it still meant the same thing.

He smiled and began walking toward the house. When he got to the porch with its roof hanging down like a eye, he turned and waved at me. I waved back. I watched him knock politely on the door, and I watched the door open slowly. I could see the muted glow of a lit candle through the broken window. The tail end of a white curtain licked out at the breeze.

For about two minutes it was all quiet, and then the shouting started. Before I knew it, I was out of the car. I was halfway to the house when I remembered the gun on the floorboard and ran back to get it — why, I don’t know, since I’ve never shot one in my life.

I was running toward the house when the front door opened and a man came dashing out, a young guy not much older than the cop. He was wearing a black Miami Heat T-shirt and a pair of camouflage pants. I recognized him immediately. His named was Roger Starks. He had played point guard for the basketball team at the high school where I taught. He stopped when he saw me and his eyes focused on the gun. I reached back and stuck it in my pants. Starks turned to glance back at the house.

“Roger...” I started to say.

He began running back toward the house, but I caught up to him before he could pick up speed, grabbed him by the shoulders, and spun him around. He swung his right arm at me and pulled free.

“What the hell is going on?” I asked.

“He told me to go outside,” Roger said. “Said he wanted to talk to her.”

“It’s his wife; he’s got a right. Why don’t you get out of here? If it’s over, then it’s over. Don’t worry; I’ve got his gun.”

“No, man. No you don’t.”

We both jumped when we heard the gunshot. Then, stupidly, we were both running toward the house. The second shot came a few seconds later, like an afterthought to a bad idea. Roger and I slowed down and looked at one another. Roger ran ahead of me, but I knew there was no need to hurry. I stopped and looked around. Shadows had begun to come out of their houses.

“Somebody call the cops!” I shouted.

“Looks like they’re already here, bro!” someone shouted back.

A moment later I heard Roger wailing from inside the house. I walked up and sat down on the steps of the slanted porch and peered up at the stars in the night sky while the boy cried in the darkened house behind me. It came to me that as a boy I could name all the constellations, but now, as I looked up, it seemed to me I could barely remember a single one.

After a while, I went into the house and tried not to look at what I saw. Roger was kneeling on the floor, holding the limp body of the young woman in his arms. The cop was in a leather lounge chair with his feet up, his head over to one side, and there was a splash of blood on the wall across from him. A small silver-plated automatic lay on the floor beneath his outstretched hand. One of his pant legs was hiked up enough for me to see the empty leather ankle holster.

I went over to where Roger was and put my middle and index fingers on the girl’s carotid artery, but it was only a formality. There was no way she could have lived. Together, Roger and I put her on a waterlogged sofa, and I covered her with a comforter I took from one of the bedrooms. I walked over to the body of Officer Paulson and for some reason lay the palm of my hand across his forehead, as though he were a child with a high fever from which he would soon recover, who was napping now and would soon wake up.

I left Roger inside and went back out to the patrol car. It was country-dark and the gondola-shaped moon was the only light. Somehow, after many tries, I got the squad car’s radio working and told the story to a dispatcher. She asked me who I was and where the house was located, and I told her to hold on while I went back and asked Roger for the address.

It took a long time for the police to get there. I left out the part about me driving the patrol car, and instead told them that I had just happened by. They seemed to believe me, but even so, it was nearly dawn before they let me duck under the yellow tape surrounding the house and go on my way. I was more than a bit lost when I remembered the compass in my pocket. I took it out, lined up the needle with the North Pole, and started back toward Homestead.

One man’s ceiling by Tom Corcoran

Card Sound

I never knew why my stepmother called it the piano room. I never saw the piano or a picture of one and I never asked, so her explanation went with her when she died. The old pine floor measured ten-by-twelve between the front room and kitchen — fine for an upright but too tight for a baby grand. It could have been a dining room except for no table and no real upkeep for thirty years until this morning I’m talking about. Two days earlier I’d cleared it of old booze boxes full of crap like Saturday Evening Post magazines and mildewed utility bills from the ’80s. I knew the mound of trash would piss off the city’s garbage associates, so the next morning I stashed a twelve of malt liquor under the top layer and it all went away, no problem. Now, into my first renovation project, I was harmonizing with Garth Brooks, pouring Parisian Taupe flat interior enamel into a plastic paint tray, when someone double-knocked on the front screen door. At that moment the piano room dimmed — a cloud crossed the sun. I knew only two people who might show before 8:00 on a Saturday. I felt a balls-deep fear that both women had arrived at the same time. I hoped for the best and yelled out for my company to come on in.

“I ain’t one of your homies, Clance. You best come see who it is.”

This can’t be good, I thought. The last time I heard the voice of Detective Sergeant James Task he was the county prosecutor’s puppet. A starched white shirt and a ten-year-old’s haircut, dealing law jargon to a jury of my non-peers, knowing full-on that his technical words connoted expertise and truth. I was guilty as hell, but that didn’t mean he had to be so proficient, writing my upstate ticket to puff his tin-badge image. Four years later, I needed to kick myself for bad ears, for a lazy warning system. Not that my mental alarm could’ve ejected him from the porch, but his knock had been all cop and staccato and I might have offered a less jubilant invitation. I finished the pour and used a two-inch polyester brush to dab rim drips and squish paint out from behind the can label. I took my time, gathered a few yard smarts as I stood, muted my CD player, and ambled out to face the fucker.

Half the foyer back from the door, I waited for Task’s opener. He was shorter than I remembered, maybe 5’6″ or 5’7″, but built thick like a lifter. His forehead was an inch taller than it had been that day in court. His remaining hair was slicked back as if he had just showered and was a perfect shoe-brown, a screaming admission of a dye job.

“Clancy Whidden, smack in front of me,” he said. “’Sup, dawg? Same ol’ same?”

“You jump off by strokin’ me, take your salesman dance down the road.”

“I thought I was coming in clean.”

“I can do without that dumb-ass inside lingo the rest of my life.”

Task gave me a loser’s shrug. “I took a cram course last winter.”

“Selling door-to-door?”

“Being inside.”

“Start over,” I said.

“A few months earlier, I could’ve been your cellie.”

“I won’t buy that shit either.”

“Straight up,” he said. “I had an ugly accident on 836. You must’ve heard about it.”

I hadn’t heard and I wasn’t interested. My paint was drying in the pan and I hadn’t even dipped the roller. “I broke my newspaper habit while I was reading ceilings,” I said.

“My brake foot slipped, the lady ahead of me spun and got upside down in her Saturn. I bolted and made it about four miles, then they wedged me to the shoulder. I didn’t think I was toasted but I blew a 1.8. They smeared me all over the TV. Perp-walkin’ with hat-hair and blood streaming out my ears.”

“I broke that television habit too,” I said. “I couldn’t buy a chair in the prison rec room and now I can’t afford cable.”

“Anyway, four months,” he said, “I did it holding my breath.”

“So that means you went...”

He looked away and shook his head. “They offered, but I couldn’t go that low. Rob a bank, do your time, you stop being a bank robber. But protective custody...”

“Right,” I said. “You’re a weasel forever.”

“So I opted to mingle with the population. It was known that I’d nixed PC, so I got slack, but I kept that grommet tight as a lug nut. I still walk like a duck.”

“No slash scars on your belly?”

He stared cold for a flash, then shook his head.

“And you’re here because...”

Task stuck an index finger into his ear, gave it a twist, pulled it out, and inspected for goo. “I need help on a wash job.”

“Not my expertise. Never was, never will be.”

“Money’s money,” he said. “You went up on a money crime, that sales-tax beef.”

“Because you never proved what I sold was stolen.”

“We had a semi-trailer full of Korean DVD players and a storage shed — two hundred toasters with Washington Mutual logos. The state attorney opted to streamline and go the tax route. His decision, believe me — I had no input. What were those toasters, for people who opened new accounts?”

I shrugged, shook my head. I didn’t know, never thought of it. “None of that means I can launder a damn thing, Task. Cars are cars, you don’t get a brake mechanic to replace your headliner.”

He peered through the screen, toward the room to my right. “That living room suite, you’re doing something.”

“Nothing that’ll pull me away from blue sky.”

“Can we at least talk?”

He’d parked a dark red four-door at the curb, a Town Car with its own long history. I weighed the chance that the state would put a badge in the joint for four months to build his undercover cred. It might, I decided, but not a small man like Task. Still, the dude had seriously screwed my life, kept me from attending my stepmother’s funeral.

“Some other year,” I said. “These days I’m on a problem-avoidance kick.”

“No way I’m here to create—”

“You just standing there is shit I didn’t have ten minutes ago.”

He tried to look righteous, like I should take him at his word. “No peril to your renovated moral code, you follow me? Nothing illegal on your end.”

I looked up the wall, decided the foyer would be my next project. “So, I like make your coffee?”

“Be my introduction.”

“And if you go south, I take your strain?”

“That direction isn’t built into this trip.”

The foyer ceiling would get priority attention. Maybe a crown molding. Not too fancy but a class touch. “I got work to do, Task. My paint’s drying in the pan.”

“I smell that fresh latex,” he said. “How long you got left on probation?”

“Fuckhead keeps bumping me. No reasons, no end in sight.”

He said, “They got a name for it, those lame-duck POs. They laugh and talk about Perpetual Pro. After I tell you how come, you’re two-thirds the way to getting off.”

“This is just wonderful.”

“More judges are sentencing full boogie, going stingy on probation,” said Task. “Even with overcrowding, it’s the wave of the future. Maybe the prisons-for-profit have judges in their pockets, I don’t know. Anyway, the caseload’s dropping, and Miami-Dade is cutting back. The longer a PO keeps your case active, the better his job security. You, my man, are the key to that asshole’s free checking and health insurance. He keeps the ring in your nose, his kids see the orthodontist. We live in a great country, don’t we?”

“I’m not feeling that two-thirds vibe.”

Task looked away. “They scarfed my badge but I still got numbers to call.”

“I’m into gaming it my way.”

“You got a point.” He peered again through the screening. “This furniture showroom paradise...”

“Triple paradise compared to thirty-eight—”

“—months, one week, and two days,” said Task. “Surrounded by tender loving curly-cues of razor wire which day and night makes for a sparkly view.”

“You did your research. You want to know how many hours that last day?”

“You didn’t take a full sentence to the door. Who’d you rat?”

I shook my head. “Reduced. I fixed and maintained the central air handler.”

Again, into his ear and out, and the finger’s close inspection. “My numbers to call, I got more than just one.”

“I don’t hold a grudge, Task, especially since you told the court I was nonviolent and cooperative. But you slap a PV on me, you best be looking for another side.”

“If you had to sit the rest of your — what, thirty-four more — sentence plus twelve months on the violation—”

“Eighteen.”

“Still, it wouldn’t be any more than... You’d hit the door in four years. Sell all this furniture, you might cover your property taxes, still have a roof when you walk free.”

I thought about the question with no answer: Why me

My curiosity took over. I let myself look convinced of his goodwill, and my face gave me away.

“You’ve never been a stupid man,” he said.

“There’s only one thing I need to know. What ballpark we playing in?”

“We’re talking five-seventy-five.”

“Shit,” I said, “in this town? You could stash that roll under the mattress. Why stick out your neck for bird feed?”

“The people I’m working with, they don’t want to jump with both feet, you know what I mean?”

“They’re testing you.”

“That’s good logic but it ain’t the case. What we need to flip is no fat fortune, but one man’s floor is another man’s ceiling. Isn’t that how it goes?”

No, I thought. “Close enough,” I said. “Hand me your shirt and pants.”

Task froze. “I wouldn’t bring a weapon into your home, Clancy.”

“You tell that one lie, Task, I go to prison.”

He didn’t turn to check for neighborhood onlookers. Without hesitation he peeled down to a pair of boxers. Not the least bit self-conscious. That’s when I knew he’d done time. At least that part wasn’t bullshit.

“You can watch and talk,” I said. “When I’m done painting, you’re done talking.”

You learn the ropes by bouncing off. So I set myself up as the fall guy knowing he’d knock me down and curious how he’d do it. I would hear him out and keep clean; nobody ever said that being polite was a conspiracy. If his chatter gave me the heebie-jeebies, I’d boot him. Meanwhile, I showed him his choice of chairs. Task picked the one farthest from me.

“This living room,” he said, “reminds me of the house I grew up in.”

“Where was that?”

“Over the bridge in South Beach,” he said. “After the days of high deco fashion and before all this tits-and-bling showed up.”

“The in-between was a geriatric skid row,” I said.

“But growing up, you didn’t know the whole world didn’t wear purple wigs and play canasta. You got a bunch of fresh furniture in here, Clancy. Where you working, Rooms To Go Out The Door?”

Bastard had done his research.

My mother died a month before I got out. I inherited her house with the living room done up in 1975 porch furniture, so I decided to hit my problem head-on. I found a gig in a Dixie Highway furniture store owned by an old Miami family. I refurbished repos and returns and I repaired broken stuff. I explained to Task that the family loved the volume of ciggie-burned and butt-busted pieces I pushed back to the sales floor, even if a few had to go out as scratch-and-dent specials. What didn’t pass boss lady’s inspection went to trash. If I wanted to take home rejects, they were mine to carry. At first I didn’t go for it, but Mrs. Minton saw through my reluctance. She printed out a release form with blank spots for me to describe the furniture, write the date, and a place for her to sign off. That way, nobody could come back later and say I stole anything. So far I had toted home four chairs, an end table, and a fancy-ass coffee table — none of which matched — and a VHS tape rack to hold paperback books.

Inside, marking time and living without a toilet seat, you learn to stifle emotions, look oblivious while your mind strips gears and spins dirt. Task rattled off opinions: Hispanics, profitable opportunities, cops he knew who were worse than the criminals they caught. I couldn’t tell if cunning or fake enthusiasm or rookie hots were driving his pitch.

I didn’t push him to explain his money-laundering scam. I just listened and rolled paint. Home Depot’s brochure said to start with a W-shaped pattern each time you wet the roller. Then you filled in bare spots and distributed color evenly in one area before moving along the wall. It worked, but I wondered if it didn’t use up more paint than necessary. Clever, those brochures.

“Best part of living in South Beach was Biscayne Bay,” said Task.

“You had a motorboat?”

“How’d you know?”

“My cousin had a little skiff we ran out of the Grove,” I said. “Over to Cape Florida, sometimes down to Soldier’s Key. Every decent weekend for years, even during high school when we couldn’t get jobs. Some days I’d go in with my mask and snorkel, and he’d tow me for miles. My private under-water cinema.”

“My buddy and me, we did the same exact thing. We had to run under causeways to reach the bay, keep away from rich dudes’ yachts and wakes, then weave through all those exiles hooking sponges from their ten-foot boats.”

I dipped my paint roller, let the excess drip away. “They came over from Havana in those small sailboats.”

“You didn’t get tired of being towed around, watching the bay-bottom movie?”

“Oh, we grew up,” I said. “We got to crashing parties in Stiltsville. Topless college girls wouldn’t care if we stared, and the boys would sell us beer. We’d get tanked on two or three Pabst Blue Ribbons.”

“Shit,” said Task, “one time we took extra gas and went all the way to the bottom of the bay. We had to duck a squall up a tidal creek down below Turkey Point, and stupid me, during the rainstorm I stole a fifteen-horse Johnson off a piece-of-crap rowboat. I wrapped it in a foul-weather slicker and all the way back north, sunburned and stinking of raw gas, I waited for the Marine Patrol to bust us. I pictured them scouring marinas all over Dade, finding that damned motor, and hauling me off to jail. I scared myself so bad, I finally pushed it overboard by Virginia Key. That was my only crime until, you know...”

“Not even a candy bar into your shirt pocket?”

“Not even that, until the accident. I was what they called a good little boy.”

I knew where I wanted to take Task to hook up his deal. It was such a good idea, I got antsy, couldn’t even finish my first wall. I wrapped the brush in a plastic grocery bag, did the same with the roller, and capped the paint gallon.

“Your car but I’m driving,” I said.

“Now it’s time for me to pat you down.”

I tried to keep pity out of my voice. “Have at it, rookie.”

When I was playing Mister Bad Guy, a few old Miami racketeers — the retired elders of Dade action with no desire to die in prison — hung out at a low-rent country club for a while, then a hotel lounge on LeJeune. Their presence drew the wannabes, and each place gradually filled with snoopers, thug groupies, and dipsticks staging self-important sit-downs. To escape the idiots, the elders pooled loose cash and bought a two-bedroom in Kendall, decorated it with whatever anyone in the inner circle cared to donate. They called it “The Boys Club” and that’s about when I got to know them. Their days quickly fell into a sloth routine: Honduran cigars, Law & Order reruns, Kahlua in snifters, and getting tired of looking at each other. So they sold out and shifted their scene to Alabama Jack’s, a floating restaurant ten miles south of Florida City. I ran errands for them, got a few free meals, and endured their endless bullshit sessions.

While I was doing my gray-bar penance, two thoughts buoyed my mind. The first was skin-specific. Depending on a given day’s toss between nostalgia and resentment, any one of four women could’ve provided elevation. The second was culinary. I promised myself a fat fish sandwich and a bowl of lima bean soup at Alabama Jack’s. Sure as hell, my first time back I reconnected with the crusty crew. Once they knew I was ninety-percent clean and totally clammed up, they let me sit in, even fixed me up to buy a motorboat which I keep in Key Largo. I knew I could take James Task to the master dock jockeys and they would decide how to handle him. I could play spectator and try to guess the ending.

A three-vehicle convoy passed us, blew dust into our grille. A Cadillac SUV, whatever they’re called, an S-series Benz sedan, and a Lincoln Navigator. High-cotton members of the Ocean Reef Club in a hurry for their midday toddies.

“First pedal on the right,” said Task. “Step on the fuck, why don’t you?”

What did he expect? I was doing sixty-five in a fifty-five. The washboard road made it feel like ninety. “These are the Everglades, the real-life boonies, Task. This is your chance to commune with the quiet pace of undisturbed nature. You come down here to speed up your life, you’re wasting resources.”

“Middle of fuckin’ nowhere,” he said. “This two-lane got a name?”

“Card Sound Road.”

“You’re lugging it. You’ll clog my plugs.”

“Not until after your heart attack for worrying about your ignition. I hope you brought a package of cash.”

“If I didn’t, it’s less than an hour away — by the way most people drive.”

“Where we’re going, Task, I can’t float a balloon so you can say maybe. Do we need to go back a few miles?”

“Keep going. On second thought, pull over along here, let me drain the barracuda.”

“You don’t want to do that. Swamp skeeters are drawn to pecker temperature. We got all of six minutes to a flush toilet.”

“I wish to hell you’d goose the throttle.”

“Maybe not.” I lifted the gas pedal as we passed a ramshackle camp with BUY BLUE CRABS and JESUS SAVES signs tacked to spindly roadside posts. I tapped the brake pedal, slowed for a left bend in the road. Before our eyes was a scene you could sell to all-night TV. Two black and gold Florida Highway Patrol Camaros with their roof racks flashing had all three speeders pulled to the shoulder. I didn’t say a fucking word.

A half mile later Task said, “That’s either a bad sign or I’m glad I’m with you.”

“Both because I know the turf?”

“You’re not as dumb as you look, Whidden.”

A server near the door recognized me. She feigned exhaustion, teased her sweat-damp hair, and pointed to a round table near the waterside railing. Rigoberto and Duane. A third-generation Cuban-American and a fifth-generation peckerwood. Rigo was the old-timer; he was wearing a NASCAR T-shirt. Duane, in a fatigued guayabera sports shirt, was closer to my age. He’d started as an errand boy just like me.

We did the introduction, got invited to sit. Task said, “Pleased to meet you,” and Rigo and Duane sized him for a cop, trusted that I’d brought him for a reason. We were invited to share their brunch of conch fritters and the sliced pineapple that Rigo brought from his home garden in Coral Gables. I ordered a Bloody Mary and Task got a Captain Morgan on the rocks and Rigo joked to lighten things up. The gang had razzed me about getting rid of my stepmother’s doilies and trivets. Rigo asked if I’d had my yard sale yet, marked down the afghans and tea sets, held out for high dollar on her five-foot silk palm tree. Duane changed the subject, which I appreciated, and mentioned that a bonefish guide friend of his — he pointed to a large man at the bar — had released four tarpon that morning. The angler had tipped him a day’s pay.

Task gazed down to the southwest. “This is Card Sound?”

“Barnes Sound,” said Duane.

“We came down a road called...”

Rigo jacked his thumb to the northeast. “Card’s up there.”

Task looked in that direction. “Okay, then where’s the Gulf of Mexico?”

Rigo pointed back the other way. “Down past Blackwater Sound and Florida Bay.”

“A boy could get lost around here,” said Task.

“Plenty have,” drawled Duane.

Uh-oh, I thought.

Rigo focused the conversation. He pointed at a lumpy scar on Task’s forearm. “The chief make you lose that tattoo?”

“Family thing,” said Task. He tried to mask his disappointment in having been spotted as a cop.

“Your mother told you she’d die on purpose if you didn’t take it off?”

“Almost her exact words.”

“Just like mine,” said Rigo, “bless her soul.”

“But it’s good that it’s gone.” Task rubbed his scar. “It was a fuckin’ skull, dumb to start with.”

“Where you stay now? Whatcha into?” said Rigo.

“West Palm. Fab, Tide, and borax.”

“Ah, yes, the laundry. Into that long?”

“For a while it was a storefront, payday loans and check advances. We’d loan against car titles, that kind of crap.”

“You quit that? Sounds like cash flow to me.”

“We got asked nicely to close up shop. One of the polite requests you don’t ignore.”

“Let me guess,” said Rigo. “Not the mob.”

“Right you are,” said Task. “A legit company, branches all over the southeast. But they had muscle on their team, that’s for sure.”

“So now you’re into what, cleaning counterfeits, washing profits for importers?”

“No counterfeits, but everything else,” said Task. “As long as they print C-notes, somebody’ll build a stash of dirty ones.”

Rigo cut a slice of pineapple into one-inch sections, then used the knife to stick a piece into his mouth. “Discounting’s a growing industry.”

“Numbskulls coming in, their rookie mistakes, makes it tight at the top.”

“I hear they got a joint-ops group all over that shit.”

Task faked a chuckle. “That group is turning up five-year-old rocks. They ’bout as tuned-in as polka dot pants.”

“You know that for a fact?”

“We keep an eye out,” said Task. “That’s how it is.”

“So we need to get down to the gritty,” said Rigo. He looked at Duane and me. “You two wanted to sit at the next table, correct?”

The two of us left behind our near-empties, took new seats. Duane ordered fresh drinks for both tables and two more baskets of fritters.

“You’re a lot calmer since you went away.”

“I know. I’m four years older,” I said. “I didn’t think I’d changed so you’d notice.”

“You were so wired up, we called you the electric fence. How’s that Wellcraft you bought?”

“I don’t know. It sits lopsided, heavy to starboard. The gas gauge tells lies, so when you see it’s half-full you know it’s full empty. And with that seventy-five Mercury, if you go for optimum cruising tilt, the turbulence kills your water pressure.”

“Cavitation,” said Duane.

“So I change the tilt, ride ass high, the bow thumps. If I ride ass low, the water pressure lifts, but I get less RPM for more throttle.”

“Using ninety-three octane for your mix?”

“Always.”

“Mount that motor an inch lower on the transom.”

“I will do that.”

“He’s got you in a twist.”

“Do tell,” I said.

“Ex-cops don’t know how to cut pie. He’d rather shoot his knee than give you a percentage, so you didn’t get pushed here by money. Where’s he coming from?”

“Claims he’s got juice in the probation system. He can make it either better or worse for me. I don’t need to fucking go backward.”

“That’s a good one. Be better if you could hold him to it. Telling lies, he’s had years of training.”

“What if his deal takes a shit?”

Duane looked down the canal as if the resident cormorant was an essential factor in his dockside existence. “If it goes good, you get a snack from Rigoberto.”

I waited for the rest.

“Something goes sideways...” He turned to look me in the eye. “You’ll be glad your mother died first.”

Change the subject. “How did The Club happen to migrate to Alabama Jack’s?”

“My doing. I’ve always come here. I grew up a half mile up the road.”

I asked tactfully, “In a stilt home?”

Duane shook his head. “A lopsided shack that started as a house trailer which became a houseboat which survived I can’t count how many storms and got attached to the canal’s edge. We were scroungy-ass poor but never hungry except one summer when I didn’t have a boat motor. I had to troll out of a fucking canoe. That was the summer me and my sisters almost starved.”

“Mister James Task over there bragged to me two hours ago about coming down Biscayne Bay from Miami Beach in the 1970s and boosting a fifteen-horse Johnson off what he called a piece-of-crap rowboat.”

“Boys will be boys,” said Duane. “You come in your pickup?”

“I drove his Town Car.”

“What color is it?” He turned, gave a slight wave, caught the attention of our server.

“Dark maroon,” I said.

Duane’s cell phone rang. He unclipped it from his belt, raised his bifocals to read the caller ID, scowled, stood, and walked fifteen feet from the table. His conversation lasted no more than ten seconds.

I wondered what had happened to our server. I watched her take a walk-around phone from the fishing guide at the bar and hang it back on the wall.

Across the table, Rigo and Task looked up when Duane took his seat.

“Kids,” said Duane.

Rigo nodded and asked us to rejoin him and Task.

“I’ve been explaining the new realities of yacht restoration,” said Rigo. “How someone finds a stripped and abandoned boat, reports it to the Marine Patrol, then tries to claim salvage rights. When that fails, which is no surprise, the finder buys it from the insurance company and hires an outfitter to make the yacht presentable again.”

“It’s a great concept,” said Task. “You got the original claim, the stripped stuff in a storage locker, the cost of the lawyers, and the hull. Then the resale including finder’s fees and brokerage fees, you got cash flow at every stage.”

Duane looked up at a twirling fan. “The rebuilder has to reapply for a boat title, so every time it gets stolen, rebuilt, and resold, it’s officially a different boat. The state of Florida will catch on someday, but they haven’t done it yet.”

Task picked his ear and did a wax check. “I love it,” he said, “and so will my people.”

The fishing guide from the bar appeared at our table. “Who wants to go sightseeing?” he said. “A pickup truck just sailed into Elliott Key.”

“A refugee raft?” I said.

“Eighteen Cubans running a bus diesel with a prop on the driveshaft. God knows how they made it across. You want to ride up with me to look?”

“Shit yes, Bear,” said Rigo. “This is current-day history in action. We’ll all go along if there’s room.”

Captain Bear shook his head. “Room for three but not four.”

Duane said, “I’ll stay behind.”

“I want you along,” said Rigo. “We got something in motion. We need to talk with Mr. Task.”

“I’ll sit at the bar,” I said. “I can watch golf and daydream about painting walls.”

They left and I took Captain Bear’s vacated stool, a mere ten feet from the TV, and nursed my third Bloody Mary. Ten minutes into my wait, the server I knew handed me a bar napkin. The note read: NO PASSENGER SIDE AIR BAG. 75 BIGS AND TASER IN CAVITY. PIG STICKER IN DRIVER’S SIDE VISOR

Forty minutes later, I heard Bear’s skiff maneuver to the dock. Rigo and Captain Bear returned to our table by the railing, and Duane motioned for me to follow him outside. We walked down the dock toward the Hewes that Bear chartered. Over the railing the dredged canal bottom reflected early-afternoon sun. It looked like a painter’s dreamscape of aquatic pastels, except it was real and just the ditch.

“Strange sky this afternoon,” I said.

“You’re in South Florida, Clancy Whidden. After enough time ain’t nothing strange here.”

“Where’s our man Task?”

“He got side-tracted,” said Duane. “Stupid asshole was running solo. He had the cojones to ask for security cash.”

“Not too damned smart,” I said.

“True, and you should be offended. He didn’t think much of your smarts, either. He volunteered to... What’d he say? Remove you from the equation.”

“Not a surprise,” I said.

“Rigo thinks you should be compensated for Task’s rudeness.” Duane reached into the Hewes skiff, grabbed two cans of Budweiser, and handed me one. “Don’t pop it open just yet,” he said. “There’s ten grand in there. Where are you going to leave that Town Car, and don’t tell me the airport?”

“I’ll park it behind a bar in South Miami. They’ll think for a week that some drunk forgot where he left it.”

“That’s plenty of time. You didn’t drive the Turnpike, right?”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “No toll booth photos.”

“That’s a healthy chunk of change, Clancy. How will you spend yours?”

“A Yamaha piano. I can’t decide between baby grand or upright. I’ll stash the rest and trickle-spend. You?”

“That’s a coincidence — Yamaha. I’m going to order a 225 four-stroke for my workboat. Replace that Johnson someone stole a lifetime ago.”

“You think he did it?”

“I figure a five-year gap between our ages, maybe six.” Duane popped open his beer. “I’d sure like to know who it was, but it wasn’t him.”

Solomon & Lord drop anchor by Paul Levine

Florida Straits

What aren’t you telling me?” Victoria Lord demanded.

Jeez. Her grand jury tone.

“Nothing to tell,” Steve Solomon said. “I’m going deep-sea fishing.”

“You? The guy who got seasick in a paddle boat at Disney World?”

“That boat was defective. I’m gonna sue.” Steve hauled an Igloo cooler onto the kitchen counter. “You may not know it, but I come from a long line of anglers.”

“A long line of liars, you mean.”

The partners of Solomon & Lord, Attorneys-at-Law, stood in the kitchen of Steve’s bungalow on Kumquat Avenue in Coconut Grove. The place was a square stucco pillbox the color of a rotting avocado, but it had withstood hurricanes, termites, and countless keg parties.

Unshaven and hair mussed, wearing cargo shorts and a T-shirt, Steve looked like a beach bum. Lips glossed and cheekbones highlighted, wearing a glen-plaid suit with an ivory silk blouse, Victoria looked sexy, smart, and successful.

“C’mon, Steve. What are you really up to?” Her voice drizzled with suspicion like mango glaze over sautéed snapper.

Steve wanted to tell his lover and law partner the truth. Or at least, the partial truth. But he knew how Ms. Propriety would react: “You can’t do that. It’s unethical.”

And if he told her the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? “You’ll be disbarred! Jailed. Maybe even killed.”

No, he’d have to fly solo. Or swim solo, as the case may be.

Steve pulled two six-packs of Heineken out of the refrigerator and tossed them into the cooler. “Okay, it’s really a business meeting.”

Victoria cocked her head and pursed her lips in cross-exam mode. “Which is it, Pinocchio? Fishing or business? Were you lying then or are you lying now?”

For a tall, lanky blonde with a dazzling smile, she could fire accusations the way Dan Marino once threw the football.

“I’m going fishing with Manuel Cruz.”

“What? I thought you were going to sue him.”

“Which is what makes it business. Cruz wants to make an offer before we file suit. I suggested we go fishing, keep it relaxed. He loved the idea and invited me on his boat.”

So far, Steve hadn’t told an outright fib and it was almost 8 a.m. Not quite a personal best, but still, he was proud of himself.

For the last five years, Manuel Cruz worked as controller of Toraño Chevrolet in Hialeah, where he managed to steal three million dollars before anyone noticed. Teresa Toraño, a Cuban exiliada in her seventies, was nearly bankrupt, and Steve was determined to get her money back, but it wouldn’t be easy. All the computer records had been erased, leaving no electronic trail. Cruz had no visible assets other than his sportfishing boat. The guy didn’t even own a house. And the juiciest piece of evidence — Cruz fled Cuba years ago after embezzling money from a government food program — wasn’t even admissible.

“Just you and Cruz, alone at sea,” she said. “Sounds dangerous.”

“I’m not afraid of him.”

“It’s not you I’m worried about.”

Victoria punched the record button on her pocket Dictaphone. “Memo to the Toraño file. Make certain our malpractice premiums are paid.”

“You and your damned Dictaphone,” Steve complained. “Drives me nuts.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. It’s so...”

“Organized?”

“Anal.”

Victoria pulled her Mini Cooper into the Matheson Hammock Marina, swerving to avoid a land crab clip-clopping across the asphalt. The sun was already baking the pavement, the air sponge-thick with humidity. Just above a stand of sea lavender trees, a pair of turkey buzzards flew surveillance.

Victoria sneaked a look at Steve as he hauled the cooler out of the car’s tiny trunk. Dark, unruly hair, a slight, sly grin as if he were one joke ahead of the rest of the world. The deep brown eyes, usually filled with mischief, were hidden behind dark Ray-Bans.

Damnit, why won’t he level with me?

Why did he always take the serpentine path instead of the expressway? Why did he always treat laws and rules, cases and precedents, as mere suggestions?

Because he has more fun making it up as he goes along.

Steve drove her crazy with his courtroom antics and his high-wire ethics. If he believed in a client, there was nothing he wouldn’t do to win. Which was exactly what frightened her now.

Just what would Steve do for Teresa Toraño?

They headed toward the dock, the morning sun beating down so ferociously Victoria felt her blouse sticking to her shoulder blades. The only sounds were the groans of boats in their moorings and the caws of gulls overhead. The air smelled of the marshy hammock, salt and iodine and fermenting seaweed. The fronds of thatch palms hung limp in the still air.

“Gimme a kiss. I gotta go,” Steve said, as they stepped onto the concrete dock. In front of them were expensive toys, gleaming white in the morning sun. Rows of powerful sportfishermen, large as houses. Dozens of sleek sailing craft, ketches and sloops and schooners.

“Sure, Mr. Romance.” She kissed him lightly on the lips. Something seemed off-kilter, but what? And what was that pressing against her through his shorts? Hadn’t last night been enough? Twice before SportsCenter, once after Letterman

She sneaked a hand into his pocket and came out with a pair of handcuffs. “What’s this, the latest in fishing tackle?”

“Ah. Well. Er...” Gasping like a beached grouper. “You know that store, Only Sexy Things?” He grabbed the handcuffs and slipped them back into his pocket. “Thought I’d spice up the bedroom.”

“Stick to cinnamon incense. Last chance, loverboy. What’s going on?”

“You’re fucking late, hombre!” Manuel Cruz yelled from the fly bridge of a power boat tied up at the dock. He was a muscular man in his late thirties, wearing canvas shorts and a white shirt with epaulets. A Marlins cap was pulled low over his eyes, and his sunglasses hung on a chain.

The boat was a sportfisherman in the sixty-foot range, all polished teak and gleaming chrome. A fly bridge, a glass-enclosed salon, and a pair of fighting chairs in the cockpit for serious deep-sea fishing. The name on the stern read: Wet Dream

Men, Victoria thought. Men were so one-dimensional.

Buenos días, Ms. Lord.”

She gave him a nod and a tight smile.

“Let’s go, Solomon,” Cruz urged. “Fish are hungry.”

Steve hoisted the cooler onto the deck. “Toss the lines for us, hon?”

She leveled a gaze at him. “Sure, hon.”

Victoria untied the bow line from its cleat and threw it up on the boat. She moved quickly to the stern, untied the line, propped a hand on a piling crusted with bird dung, and leapt aboard.

“Vic! Whadaya think you’re you doing?”

“Going fishing.”

“Get back on the dock.”

She smiled and pointed toward the growing body of water that separated them from land.

“You’re not dressed for fishing,” Steve told her.

“I’m dressed for your bail hearing.” She kicked off her velvet-toed pumps and peeled off her panty hose, distracting Steve with her muscular calves, honed on the tennis courts of La Gorce Country Club. “Now, what’s with the handcuffs?”

Steve lowered his voice so she could barely hear him above the roaring diesels. “You remember Solomon’s Law number one?”

Oh, that. Steve’s personal code for rule breaking.

“How could I forget? If the law doesn’t work... work the law

“In the matter of Manuel Cruz, the law isn’t working.”

“What’s that?” Cruz asked, eying the cooler on the deck.

“Brought beer and bait,” Steve said.

“What for? I got a case of La Tropical and a hundred pounds of shiners and wiggles.”

All three of them stood on the fly bridge. Twin diesels throbbing, the Wet Dream cruised down Hawk Channel inside the barrier reefs. The water was green felt, smooth as a billiard table, the boat riding on a plane at thirty knots.

Cruz ran a hand over the polished-teak steering wheel. “I come to this country with nothing but the clothes on my back and look at me now.”

“Very impressive,” Steve said, thinking it would be even more impressive if Cruz hadn’t stolen the money to buy the damn boat.

Cruz winked at Victoria, his smile more of a leer. “You two want to fool around, I got clean sheets in the master stateroom.”

“Sounds lovely,” Victoria cooed. “Want to fool around, Steve?” Her smile was as sweet as fresh-squeezed guarapo, but Steve caught the sarcastic tone.

“Maybe after we catch something,” he said pointedly.

“Heads and A/C work, faucets don’t,” Cruz said. “Watertank’s fouled.”

Steve studied the man, standing legs spread at the wheel, a macho pose. A green tattoo of a scorpion crawled up one ankle. On the other ankle, in a leather sheaf, was a foot-long Marine combat knife. It looked like the weapon Sylvester Stallone used in those Rambo movies. Out here, it could be used to cut lines or clean fish.

Or gut a lawyer planning to do him harm.

They had just passed Sombrero Light when Cruz said, “So here’s my offer, hombre. The Toraño bitch gives me a release with a promise never to sue. And vice versa. I won’t sue her ass.”

“I don’t like the way you talk about my client,” Steve said.

“Tough shit. I don’t like Fidel Castro, but what am I gonna do about it?”

“Your offer stinks like week-old snapper.”

“You sue me, what do you get? A piece of paper you can wipe your ass with. I got nothing in my own name, including the boat.”

Steve looked right and left to get his bearings. Off to port, in the direction of the reef, he spotted the fins of two sharks heading toward strands of yellow sargasso weed, home to countless fish. Red coral just below the surface cast a rusty glow on the shallow water. To the starboard was the archipelago of the Florida Keys. From here, the island chain was strung out like an emerald necklace.

“Let Vic take the wheel a minute,” Steve said. “I want you to see something.”

Cruz allowed as how even a woman lawyer could keep a boat on 180 degrees, due south, and followed Steve down the ladder to the cockpit. Just off the stern, the props dug at the water like a plow digging at a field. Steve opened the cooler, reached underneath the ice, and pulled out a two-foot-long greenish-blue fish, frozen solid. A horse-eyed jack.

“Great bait, huh?” Steve held the fish by its tail and let it swing free. It had a fine heft, like a small sledgehammer.

“Already told you, I got shiners and wiggles.”

“Then I better use this for something else.” Steve swung the frozen fish at Cruz’s head. The man stutter-stepped sideways and the blow glanced off his shoulder and sideswiped an ear. Steve swung again and Cruz ducked, the fish flying free and shattering the glass door of the salon. Cruz reached for his knife in the ankle sheath and Steve barreled into him, knocking them both to the deck.

On the fly bridge, Victoria screamed, “Stop! Both of you!”

The two men rolled over each other, scraping elbows and knees on the planked deck. Cruz was heavier, and his breath smelled of tobacco. Steve was wiry and quicker, but ended up underneath when they skidded to a stop. Cruz grabbed Steve’s T-shirt at the neck and slammed his head into the deck. Once, twice, three times. Thwomp, thwomp, thwomp.

Steve balled a fist and landed a short right that caught Cruz squarely on the Adam’s apple. The man gagged, clutched his throat, and fell backward. Steve squirmed out from under, but Cruz tripped him. Steve tumbled into the gunwale, smacking his head, sparks flashing behind his eyes. He had the sensation of being dragged across a hard floor. On his back, he opened his eyes and saw something glistening in the sun.

The knife blade!

Cruz was on his knees, knife in hand. “Pendejo! I oughta make chum out of you.”

“No!” Victoria’s voice, closer than it should have been.

Steve heard the clunk, saw Cruz topple over, felt him bounce off his own chest. Straddling both of them was Victoria, a three-foot steel tarpon gaff in her right hand.

“Omigod,” she said. “I didn’t kill him, did I?”

“Not unless a dead man grunts and farts at the same time,” Steve said, listening to sounds coming from both ends of the semiconscious man.

He shoved Cruz off and stood up, wrapping his arms around Victoria, who was trembling. “You were terrific, Vic. We work great together.”

“Really? What did you do?”

“Come on. Help me get him up the ladder.” Steve pulled the handcuffs from his pocket. “I want him on the bridge.”

“What now? What insanity now?”

“Relax, Vic. In a few hours, Cruz will be dying to give back Teresa’s money.”

Steve had played fast and loose with the rules before, Victoria thought, but nothing like this.

This is scary. And in the eyes of the law, she was dirty too.

This could mean trading the couture outfits and Italian footwear for orange jumpsuits and shower shoes.

With one wrist handcuffed to the rail at the rear of the bridge, Cruz had been berating Steve for the past twenty minutes.

“Know what, Solomon? She hits harder than you do.”

“Mr. Cruz,” Victoria said, “if you begin to feel dizzy or nauseous, let me know. Head trauma can be very dangerous.”

“What about my head?” Steve demanded.

“It’s impervious to trauma. Or reason.”

The Wet Dream was planing across the tops of small whitecaps when Steve said: “Take the wheel, Vic. Keep it on two-zero-two.”

“Please,” she said, irritated.

“What?”

“‘Keep it on two-zero-two, please.’”

“A captain doesn’t say ‘please.’”

“Maybe not Captain Bligh.” Victoria slid behind the wheel, thinking perhaps she’d hit the wrong man with the gaff. She still didn’t know where they were headed, and Steve’s behavior was becoming increasingly bizarre. He had the beginning of a lump on his head, and blood trickled from his skinned elbows and knees.

“Kidnapping,” Cruz said. “Assault. Boat theft. You two are gonna be busy little shysters.”

“Shut up,” Steve said. “Under the law of the sea, I’m master of this craft.”

“What law? You stole my fucking boat.”

Once past Key West, they entered the Florida Straits, the water growing deeper, the color turning from light green to aquamarine to cobalt blue. No reefs here, and a five-foot chop slapped at the hull of the boat. The wavecaps sparkled, as if studded with diamonds in the late-afternoon sun.

“Gonna tell you a story, Cruz,” Steve said, “and when I’m done, you’re gonna cry and beg forgiveness and give back all the money you stole.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Story starts forty-some years ago in Havana. A beautiful lady named Teresa Toraño lost her husband who was brave enough to oppose Fidel Castro.”

“Tough shit,” Cruz said. “Happened to a lot of people.”

“Teresa came to Miami with nothing. Worked minimum wage, mopped floors in a car dealership, ended up owning Toraño Chevrolet.”

“My papi always told me hard work pays off,” Cruz said, smirking. “Too bad he never got out of the cane fields.”

“A few years ago, she hires a new controller. A fellow exiliado. This guy’s got a fancy computer system that will revolutionize their books. It also lets him steal three million bucks before anybody knows what hit them. Now the banks have pulled Teresa’s line of credit, and she could go under.”

“I’m not crying, Solomon.”

“Not done yet. See, this lady is damn important to me. If it hadn’t been for Teresa giving me work my first year out of school, I’d have gone broke.”

Lo único que logró fue posponer lo inevitable,” Cruz said. “She only postponed the inevitable.”

Victoria knew there was more to it than just a financial relationship. Teresa had virtually adopted Steve and his nephew Bobby, and the Solomon boys loved her in return. After Victoria entered the picture, she was added to the extended Toraño family. Each year at Christmas, they all gathered at Teresa’s estate in Coral Gables for her homemade crema de vie, an anise drink so rich it made eggnog seem like diet soda. All of which meant that Steve would do anything for Teresa. One of Steve’s self-proclaimed laws expressed the principle: “I won’t break the law, breach legal ethics, or risk jail time... unless it’s for someone I love.”

Now that Victoria thought about it, the question wasn’t: Just what would Steve do for Teresa Toraño? It was: What wouldn’t he do?

“That sleazy accountant,” Steve said. “In Cuba, he kept the books for the student worker program, the students who cut sugar cane. Ran the whole food services division. But he had a nasty habit of cutting the pineapple juice with water and selling the meat off the back of trucks. The kids went hungry and he got fat. When the authorities found out, he stole a boat and got the hell out of the worker’s paradise.”

“Old news, hombre.”

“Vic, still on two-zero-two?” Steve asked.

“I know how to read a compass,” she said sharply.

“Where you taking me?” Cruz demanded.

“Jeez, how’d you ever get from Havana to Key West?” Steve said.

“Everybody in Havana knows the heading to the States. You want Key West, you keep it at twenty-two degrees.”

“A bit east of due north. So what’s two-zero-two?” said Steve.

“A little west of due south.”

“Keep going, Cruz. I think you’re catching the drift, no pun intended.”

Steve waited a moment for the bulb to pop on. When it didn’t, he continued, “202 minus 22 is 180. What happens when you make a 180-degree turn, philosophically or geographically speaking?”

“Fuck!” Cruz jerked the handcuff so hard the rail shuddered. “We’re going to Havana!”

“Bingo. We’re repatriating you.”

“You crazy? Cuban patrol boats will sink us. You remember that tugboat, Trece de Marzo? Forty people dead.”

“The Marzo was trying to leave the island. We’re coming in, and we’re bringing a fugitive to justice. They should give us a reward, or at least a bottle of Club Havana rum.”

“They’ll kill me.”

“Not without a trial. A speedy trial. Of course, if you tell us where you’ve stashed Teresa’s money, we’ll turn this tub around.”

“Damnit, Steve,” Victoria said. “We have to talk.” Steve put the boat on auto — 202 degrees — and took Victoria down to the salon.

“We could be jailed,” she said. “Or killed. Right now, the best case scenario would be disbarment.”

“That’s why I didn’t want you along.”

Steve walked to the galley sink and turned on the faucet, intending to rinse the dried blood from a scraped elbow. The plumbing rattled and thumped, but nothing came out. He opened the ice maker. Empty too.

“Cruz is a lousy host,” Steve said.

“Are you listening to me? Let’s go back to Miami. I’ll see if we can talk Cruz out of filing charges.”

They both heard the sound, but it took a second to identify it. A scream from the bridge. “Sol-o-mon!”

Followed a second later by machine-gun fire.

Steve and Victoria ran back up the ladder to the bridge. Cruz was tugging against the rail, his wrist bleeding where the handcuff sawed into his skin. Three hundred yards off their starboard, a Cuban patrol boat fired a short burst from a machine gun mounted on its bow. Dead ahead, the silhouette of the Cuban island rose from the sea, misty in the late-afternoon light.

“Warning shots,” Steve said. “Everybody relax.”

Steve eased back on the throttles, tooted the horn, and waved both arms at the approaching boat. “C’mon Cruz. It’s now or never. When they pull alongside, I’m handing you over.”

“Do what you got to do, asshole.”

“Steve, turn the boat around,” Victoria ordered. “Now!”

The patrol boat slowed. Two men in uniform at the machine gun, a third man holding a bullhorn.

“I’m not fucking with you, Cruz,” Steve said. “You’ve got thirty seconds. Where’s Teresa’s money?”

Chingate!” Cruz snarled.

Señores del barco de pesca!” The tinny sound of the bullhorn carried across the water.

“Last chance,” Steve said.

Se han adentrado en las aguas territoriales de la República de Cuba

“Steve, we’re in Cuban waters,” Victoria said.

“I know. I passed Spanish 101.”

Den la vuelta y salgan inmediatamente de aquí, o los vamos a abordar

“They’re going to board us if we don’t turn around,” she said.

“I kind of figured that out too.” Steve turned to Cruz. “Absolutely, positively last chance, pal. I’m handing you over.”

“I’m betting you don’t,” Cruz said.

The patrol boat was fifty yards away. One of the men in uniform pointed an AK-47 their way.

“Steve...?” Victoria’s voice was a plea.

This wasn’t the way he’d planned it. By this time, Cruz should have been spouting numbers and accounts from banks in the Caymans or Switzerland or the Isle of Man. But the bastard was toughing it out. Calling Steve’s bluff.

Is that what it was? An empty threat?

Steve wanted to hand Cruz over, wanted him to rot in a Cuban prison.

But damnit, I’m a lawyer, not a vigilante.

He wished he could turn his conscience on and off with the flick of a switch. He wished he could end a man’s life with cold calculations and no remorse. But the rats gnawing on Cruz at Isla de Pinos would also visit the house on Kumquat Avenue in Steve’s nightmares.

“Take the wheel, Vic.” Filled with self-loathing, wishing he could be someone he was not. “Twenty-two degrees. Key West.”

“Say ‘please,’” Cruz laughed, mocking him.

Just before midnight, the lights of Key West off the port, the Wet Dream cruised north through Hawk Channel, headed toward Miami. The sky was clear and sparkled with stars. The wind whipped across the bridge, bringing a night chill. Victoria slipped into her glen-plaid jacket. Hair messed, clothes rumpled, emotionally drained, she was trying to figure out how to salvage the situation.

I came aboard to save Steve from himself and I’m doing a lousy job.

Steve stood at the wheel, draining a La Tropical beer, maybe listening, maybe not, as Cruz berated him.

“You fucking loser,” Cruz said. “Every minute I’m tied up is gonna cost you.” Cruz rubbed his arm where the cuff was biting into his wrist. “I got nerve damage. Gonna add that to my lawsuit. When this is over, you’ll wish the Cubans had taken you prisoner.”

“Steve, I need a moment with you,” Victoria said.

Steve put the boat on auto — Cruz complaining that it was a damn reckless way to cruise at night — then headed down the ladder, joining Victoria in the salon.

“You can’t keep him locked up,” she said.

“I need more time.”

“For what?”

“To think.” He walked to the galley sink and turned the faucet, intending to splash cold water on his face. Same rattle, same thump. “Damn, I forgot. Cruz put all that money into his boat and still can’t get the water to work.”

“What?”

“A fancy boat like this and you can’t wash your hands.”

“No. What you said before. ‘Cruz put all that money into his boat.’”

“It’s just a figure of speech.”

“Think about it, Steve. He doesn’t own a house. He leases a car. No brokerage accounts, no bank accounts. Everything he has, he puts into his boat. If he ever has to leave town quickly...”

“Like he left Cuba,” Steve said, picking up the beat. “With nothing but the clothes on his back.”

“This time it would be different because...”

“The money’s here! On the boat.”

In sync now, she thought. A man and a woman running stride for stride.

“Vic, why don’t you go back up to the bridge and make sure we don’t crash into any cruise ships?”

“And what are you doing?”

“I’m gonna fix the plumbing.”

Steve opened the hatch in the salon floor and climbed down a ladder to the engine compartment, wincing at the noise from the twin diesels. He found the black water tank first, tucked up under the bow. Sewage and waste water. Nothing unusual about it, and Cruz wouldn’t want to dirty his hands with that, anyway. Then Steve found the freshwater tank, a custom job built into one of the bulkheads. Made of fiberglass, it looked capable of holding five hundred gallons or more. The boat had desalinization equipment, so why did Cruz need such a big tank?

A big tank that wasn’t working.

Steve grabbed a flashlight mounted on a pole and took a closer look. He peered into an inspection port and could see the tank was three-quarters full. On top of the tank was a metal plate with a built-in handle. He turned the plate counter-clockwise and removed it. Then he aimed the flashlight into the opening.

Water. Well, what did you expect?

He grabbed a mop that was attached by velcro to a stringer and poked the handle into the tank. The end of the handle clanked off the walls.

Clank. Clank. Clank. Thud.

Thud? What the hell?

Steve pushed the mop handle around the bottom of the tank as if he were stirring a giant vat of paella. It snagged on something soft. He worked the handle under the object and lifted.

Something as long as a man’s body but much thinner.

Thin enough to fit into the opening of the custom-built tank. The object was a transparent plasticized pouch, and when the end peeked out of the opening, Steve saw Ben Franklin’s tight-lipped face. A hundred-dollar bill. Stacked on others. Dozens of stacks. As he pulled the pouch out of the tank, he saw even more. Hundreds of stacks, thousands of bills.

Damn heavy, Steve thought, lugging the pouch up the ladder from the engine compartment. Then he dragged the load out the salon door and into the cockpit.

“Now you’ve done it.” Cruz sounded almost mournful. He stood on the bridge, aiming a double-barrel shotgun at Steve. The rail where he had been cuffed hung loose. “I didn’t want this. But it’s your own damn fault.”

“I’m sorry, Steve,” Victoria said. “When I came up here, he’d gotten out.”

“It’s okay,” Steve said. He dragged the pouch to the starboard gunwale.

“Stop right there!” Cruz ordered. “Step away from the money.”

“Nope. Don’t think so.”

Cruz pumped the shotgun, an unmistakable click-clack that Steve felt in the pit of his stomach. “I’ll blow your head off.”

“And leave blood and bone and tissue embedded in the planking? Nah. You may kill us, but you won’t do it on your boat.” Steve hoisted the pouch onto the rail. “If I can’t take this to Teresa, I’m sure as hell not gonna let you have it. Your treasure, pal, is strictly Sierra Madre.”

The shotgun blast roared over Steve’s head, and he flinched. The pouch balanced on the rail, halfway between the deck and the deep blue sea.

“Put the money down, asshole.”

“Okay, okay.” Steve shoved the pouch over the rail and it splashed into the water. “It’s down.”

“Asshole!” Cruz grabbed both throttles, slowed the boat, and swung her around. He turned a spotlight on the water.

Nothing but a black sea and foamy whitecaps.

He swung the spotlight left and right. Still nothing, until... the beam picked up the pouch floating with the current. Cruz eased the boat close to the pouch at idle speed, slipped the engine out of gear, then dashed down the ladder. Grabbing a tarpon gaff, he moved quickly to the gunwale. Shotgun in one hand, gaff in the other, he motioned toward Steve. “Back up. All the way to the chair.”

“Do what he says, Steve!” Victoria called from the bridge.

“Only because you say so.” Steve moved toward one of the fighting chairs.

Cruz leaned over the side and snagged the pouch with the gaff. He struggled to lift it with one arm, still aiming the shotgun at Steve.

Suddenly, the boat shot forward, and Cruz tumbled into the water, the shotgun blasting into space as it fell onto the deck. On the bridge, Victoria had one hand on the throttles, the other on the wheel.

Coño “ Cruz shouted from the darkness.

“Do sharks feed at night?” Steve leaned over the side. “Or should I just drop some wiggles on your head and find out?”

“Get me out of here!” His voice more fearful than demanding.

“Nah.”

“No me jodas!”

“I’m not fucking with you. Just don’t feel like giving you a lift.”

Victoria raced down the ladder and joined Steve in the cockpit. “Testing, testing,” she said, punching a button on her pocket Dictaphone.

“What are you doing?” Steve said.

“Mr. Cruz!” Victoria called out. “We’ll bring you on board once you answer a few questions.”

Cruz was splashing just off the starboard side. “What fucking questions!”

“Do you admit stealing three million dollars from Teresa Toraño?” Victoria said.

Pink slivers of sky lit up the horizon and seabirds squawked overhead as Steve steered the boat into the channel at Matheson Hammock. He had one hand on the wheel and one draped on Victoria’s shoulder. A shivering Cruz, his arms and legs bound with quarter-inch line, was laced into a fighting chair in the cockpit. His taped confession would be in the hands of the state attorney by noon. The pouch of money lay at his feet, taunting him.

“What are you thinking about?” Victoria asked.

“I was just imagining the look on Teresa’s face when we give her the money.”

“She’ll be delighted. But it was never about the money, Steve.”

“Whadaya mean?”

“When you were a baby lawyer, Teresa believed in you and nobody else did. You needed to prove to her that she was right. And maybe you needed to prove it to yourself too.”

Steve shrugged. “If you say so.”

She wrapped both arms around his neck. “But remember this, Steve. You never have to prove anything to me.” They kissed, at first softly, and then deeper and slower. The kiss lasted a long time, and when they opened their eyes, the sun was peeking above the horizon in the eastern sky.

Victoria folded the contours of her body against him. “What’s that?”

“What?” he asked.

“Pressing against me. You have another pair of handcuffs in your pocket?”

“Nope.”

“Then what...?” She jammed a hand into one of his pockets. “Oh. That.”

Steve smiled. “Like I said, no cuffs.”

“It’s okay, sailor.” She brushed her lips against his cheek. “You won’t need them.”

The last of lord Jitters by David Beaty

South Miami

The hurricane brought Woody and Isolde Trimble home on the last flight from San Francisco before the authorities closed the Miami airport.

A Miami neighbor had phoned them at Woody’s mother’s house in Bolinas, north of San Francisco. They’d just pulled into her driveway after ten days of camping in the Trinities. Woody’s mother had recently died, and the camping trip was a vacation after all the sad cleaning and sorting they’d done at her house, preparing it for sale.

From the driveway, they heard telephones ringing in the empty rooms. Isolde ran into the house and answered in the kitchen. It was just after 9 p.m. A woman’s voice, hoarse and dramatic, said, “It’s coming.” Isolde, suspecting a joke, said, “Tell me about it.” Hurricane Ernestine, the woman said. One huge — pardon her French — fucking monster, coño, and what are you going to do about your hurricane shutters? It was their neighbor in Miami. She and her husband, the woman said, were leaving tonight, driving up to Disney World. Oh — and that fucking alligator had come back again.

The next morning at the San Francisco airport, the ticket agent warned the Trimbles that the Miami airport would be closing down soon. Their flight might be diverted. Woody told her they’d chance it. The agent asked if they’d ever experienced a hurricane.

Woody glanced at Isolde, who said that she hadn’t. Woody said that he had.

Isolde had a bad feeling about Hurricane Ernestine. Her marriage to Woody was new, but their house in Miami was old. They’d lived in it for five months. They had metal hurricane shutters for only the front and back porch windows. In June, Woody had stored water, hurricane supplies, and plywood sheets in the garage. Now they had to get back in time to cut the plywood sheets to size and bolt them over all the other windows.

Woody remembered his last hurricane, when he was a kid living in Coconut Grove. He remembered their shuttered house, the humidity, the god-awful noise outside; and, next day, the high water mark on the walls downstairs, the thin layer of stinking mud on the floor, and his twelve-year-old younger brother Chip hosing out the television set, singing “I’m All Shook Up.” Aha, umm, ooohhh yeah. Chip said he loved hurricanes.

Woody and Isolde first met at an exhibition of Brazilian art at the Bass Museum on Miami Beach. He was peering at a drawing by Mira Schendel when he noticed a tall, tanned, athletic-looking blond woman with gray eyes leaning toward the same drawing.

Woody knew as soon as he saw her that she was his woman, he was her man. Call it coupe de foudre, flash of lightning, pure insanity, Woody didn’t care. He wanted Isolde with a fierceness he’d never felt with any other woman. He looked around for rivals, thinking, Why not throw her over my shoulder and scamper into the night?

Isolde looked at him and saw a man with thinning blond hair, not tall, wearing gold-rimmed spectacles. He radiated confidence, a sense of fun. She heard something in his voice that disarmed her, and she trusted him. He’s an honest man, she thought.

By the time she began to focus on the meaning of Woody’s words, they were drinking Chardonnay in the museum courtyard, and she was wondering, Why is he talking about Byron and Don Juan? Is he an English professor?

But before she had a chance to verify this, she’d agreed to join him for sushi at a nearby restaurant. They were walking away from the museum, and he was describing a Thai restaurant in Coconut Grove, where — he mimed pulling something like string out of his mouth — he found the elastic waistband from a pair of women’s underpants in his Pad Thai. “Fruit of the Loom,” he told her. “Size ten.”

Over sushi and warm saki, she learned that Woody had been a graduate student of English, but now was regional manager for Cardiotron, a company that made cardiac CT scanners — very, very expensive machines. He sold them to hospitals and doctors’ groups in Brazil, Argentina, and other countries in South America. He spoke fluent Spanish and Portuguese. He said, “Our scanner gives you a real-time, beating, 3-D rendering of the human heart. Amazing! I love it.” Woody laughed and clinked his glass against Isolde’s. “Can you see it? My business is the human heart.”

Isolde told Woody that she was studying Early Childhood Education at Florida International University. She’d just moved to Miami. Before that, she’d spent seven years, the years since high school, working as crew on big, ocean-going sailing yachts, spending her summers in the Mediterranean, her winters in the Caribbean.

She’d grown up in Colorado, an only child. Both parents were dead. She’d always wanted to be a sailor. She asked Woody, You know that Mediterranean blue? Her favorite color since she was five. She’d wanted to live in that color.

Her favorite song was an oldie version of “Somewhere Beyond the Sea,” sung in French by Charles Trenet, who made love sound dreamy and poetic, but also sexy, in a genial way. When she heard it, she imagined love on a clear day, with no memories.

“So now,” Isolde said, touching the rim of her wine glass to Woody’s, “I’ve told you everything important there is to know about me.”

There was something important Woody didn’t tell Isolde until they were living together in a rented apartment in Coral Gables and were talking about marriage. He’d been married and divorced when he was a graduate student in English at the University of Georgia. Isolde, after a stunned silence, asked if they’d had children. Woody said no.

Isolde packed a suitcase and drove away in her white Volkswagen Jetta. Woody thought he’d lost her for good. She left a message on his office voice mail the next day. She said she felt confused and needed to be alone, so she’d driven to Key West.

She returned in two days. She’d cut her lovely blond hair and wore a Jenny Holzer T-shirt that said: When someone beats you with a flashlight you make the light shine in all directions. Woody kissed her, told her how worried he’d been, how he’d missed her.

He said, “Don’t you have anything you regret, too?”

Her face took on a complex, haunted look that frightened Woody. He thought, She wasn’t angry at For the first time, he tried to imagine Isolde’s seven years as a sailor.

The house was on a half-acre of unincorporated Dade County, west of Red Road, between Coral Gables and South Miami. It was a one-story, two-bedroom, two-bathroom bungalow with a tiled roof. The pool lay just beyond the back porch. A botanist who worked at Fairchild Gardens built the house in the 1930s. He planted gardenia bushes near the house, and lychee, orange, grapefruit, key lime, avocado, and mango trees in the yard. He also planted a calamondin tree from the Philippines, and, from Brazil, a jacaranda tree and a jaboticaba bush, which bore purplish-red, thick-skinned fruit the size of a cherry directly on its trunk and branches.

“I love this,” Isolde said to Woody. They were strolling around the yard. They’d been together a year and were getting married. It was April, the sun was shining, the jacaranda tree was a purple cloud of blossoms, and the real estate agent, who sensed that the house was selling itself, drifted away.

Isolde placed a hand on Woody’s shoulder in a beseeching gesture that startled and moved them both. She looked as if she were going to cry. “Oh, Woody. This is paradise. Can’t I have this? Please?”

Woody had never seen Isolde so unguarded, and he told her of course she could have it, he wanted her to have it. When they embraced, he felt Isolde’s hand move up to the back of his head, support a woman only offers a baby or a lover. Over her shoulder, Woody too had a vision of paradise, with green grass, flowering shrubs, fruit trees, birds arriving and departing, and their real estate agent furtively field-stripping a cigarette.

Everything fell into place. When they visited Woody’s mother in Bolinas, she and Isolde got on right away. “Such a beautiful girl,” Woody’s mother told him. “What an interesting life she’s had.” She smiled at Woody. “You’re going to learn a lot from Isolde.” Woody’s mother helped them buy their house. Knowing she didn’t have much time to live, she gave Woody a loan against his inheritance. Isolde came up with some money too, quite a lot of it, money she said her grandmother had left her. So they married and put a hefty down payment on the house.

Isolde loved their house, but the pool gave her the creeps. She’d refused to swim in it long before the alligator arrived. Woody insisted that they couldn’t have afforded the house if not for the corpse that had been found in the pool. News of the corpse had made the house a hard sell, even after the price was slashed. Maybe it wasn’t a coincidence that Isolde was inspecting the kitchen when the real estate agent told Woody the story in the garage.

The house had been owned by a gay couple. One of them, Howard, wound up dead and floating. The police suspected murder, but nothing could be proved. Isolde didn’t hear about Howard until after she moved in. A retired pediatrician from down the street told her. A pool’s a perfect place for murder, he said. If you’re going to do it, do it in a pool.

Isolde was furious. “You knew about this?” she said to Woody.

“You wanted the house so badly.”

“You never would have told me, would you?”

Woody apologized, saying that he’d been waiting for the right moment.

Soon after they married and moved into their house, Isolde’s mother, Thais McCracken, arrived. She was tall, bulky, gray-haired, silent. She wore bright muumuus and took over the back porch. She spent mornings on a rattan lounge chair studying the Miami Herald, drinking coffee, and chain smoking Marlboro Lights, and afternoons watching soap operas, chain smoking Marlboro Lights, and sipping from a tall, never-empty glass of gin and tonic. To Woody, she represented another secret chamber in Isolde’s heart. Mrs. McCracken seemed to regard him with grim amusement. He was delighted to drive her out to the airport to catch her flight back to Boulder.

On the way home, he said to Isolde, “Didn’t you tell me your mother was dead?”

Isolde said that she must have been talking about her stepmother.

In the late afternoon, their flight from San Francisco landed, nearly as scheduled, in Miami. The airport shops and restaurants had closed, and travelers clustered around television sets in the terminal waiting areas, watching an orange circle spin northwest over a map of the Bahamas and the Florida Straits.

Isolde and Woody retrieved their luggage and found a taxi. While they rode south through sunstruck, emptying streets, they held hands and made plans. Woody would put up the hurricane shutters; Isolde would drive to the supermarket and the gas station.

When the taxi turned into their driveway, Isolde gasped. “Oh my God.” Woody saw the doors of his house and garage wide open and his junkie brother Chip and another man putting metal shutters on the front porch windows.

The taxi stopped near the open garage. Woody apologized for his brother, saying that the last he’d heard, Chip was living in a halfway house over on Miami Beach. Isolde said, “He can go back there right now,” but Woody explained that Miami Beach had probably been evacuated.

“I can’t leave my little brother out in a hurricane.”

Isolde said, “Let them go to a public shelter. Please, Woody, tell Chip and his friend to go away. I hate junkies. I’ve told you that before. Send them away. They’ll be all right.”

Woody replied that Chip was his little brother and needed his help.

Isolde said that Woody just didn’t get it. Chip didn’t care about anyone. He cared about drugs. He’d send Woody naked into the hurricane in two seconds if he had to do that to get his hands on drugs. Chip was a junkie, not a brother.

By this time Chip had put down the metal shutter he’d been carrying and was ambling toward the taxi. He was skinny, sallow, balding, twenty-eight, with acne scars on his cheeks. Woody thought he looked like the actor who played Salieri in the film Amadeus. Chip wore dark prescription glasses and talked with a lighted cigarette stuck in the right corner of his mouth. In the past, he’d survived on menial jobs and handouts from their mother. Now he walked around to Woody’s side of the taxi and tapped on the window. Woody lowered it.

“Hey, bro,” Chip said, his cigarette bobbing. “Hey, Isolde.”

Woody let the silence hang on them. Finally, he told Chip, “I persuaded them to drop the lawsuit. It’s all coming out of your part of Mom’s estate, that and the value of the other things you sold, so you were only stealing from yourself.”

Right after their mother died, Chip insisted on flying out to Bolinas to “do his part” preparing her house for sale, while Woody went to Brazil on business. Chip sold her Leica cameras, her good rugs, and her silverware for cash to buy drugs. He also sold her sickroom medical equipment — oxygen tanks, hospital bed and bedside table, special toilet seat, even her walker — not knowing that it had been rented. Woody was their mother’s executor, so the medical equipment company had been hounding him for restitution.

“Thanks, bro,” Chip said. “I really mean it. I’m sorry for the trouble.”

Woody asked Chip who the other guy was.

Chip said, “A guy from the shelter. Would you believe he’s an English lord?”

Woody looked more closely at the man. “What are those scars?”

Chip glanced over his shoulder and said they were bullet wounds. Those were just entrance scars. “Wait till you see where they came out. He used to own a bar in Jamaica, shipped a lot of ganja, until some bad guys came into the bar and let loose with a couple of Mac-10s.”

Isolde and Woody stood blinking in the heavy sunshine as the taxi reversed down the drive. Woody asked Chip how he’d gotten into the house; the alarm was on.

Chip said, “I cut the phone wires at the main box and disabled the alarm.”

“You cut my phone wires?”

Chip said the first thing a hurricane did was blow down phone wires, everybody knew that. “And I was in a real sweat to put up your hurricane shutters.” Chip added, “Got your cell phone?”

Without thinking, Woody handed it over. Chip slipped the cell phone into his shirt pocket.

Woody waited, then said, “I thought you were going to use the phone.”

“Yeah.” Chip nodded, his eyes sliding around the yard.

“Don’t let me stop you.”

Chip laughed. “Like, half a mo, bro.”

“Make the call.”

“I’m taking it for a walk in the yard, okay? Gotta speak to this guy.”

“I want it back.”

“In just a minute, okay?” Chip, looking amazed and a little hurt, spread his hands and, turning to Isolde for support, said, “I hope you can find something in the medicine cabinet to calm him down.” Isolde looked steadily back at Chip and said nothing.

Woody asked how Chip had gotten over here. Chip said, “We found a bike.”

Woody laughed, said, “The two of you on a bicycle?”

“No, no,” Chip replied. “We, you know, found a bike.”

Woody said, “You stole a motorcycle?”

Chip grinned boyishly, then said, “Did you know you’ve got an alligator in your pool?”

“Karma,” Isolde said. The English lord with the bullet scars had come around the corner of the house and was moving, slightly bent over, toward them. He was a slim, good-looking man in his early thirties, with curly brown hair and the bluest eyes Woody had ever seen in man or woman. Woody thought he looked remarkably like the Byron of Count D’Orsay’s 1823 Genoa sketch, which made the poet appear thin, almost convalescent. In another life Woody had written his Master’s thesis on Don Juan.

This lord was shirtless, wore dirty khaki shorts and orange flip-flops, and had a thin gold ring in his left earlobe. His four bullet scars formed an irregular diagonal from right shoulder down to left waistline. He moved with a tentative air, and, smiling as he came up, he told Woody that it was awfully kind of them to take him in at such short notice.

Chip introduced Isolde and Woody to Peregrine Balfe, Lord Balfe.

“Please call me Perry,” the Englishman said. He nodded, friendly, but didn’t offer to shake hands. Perry said that he hoped Woody didn’t mind that they’d begun putting up the shutters. It seemed the right thing to do.

Woody said he was glad they’d begun.

Isolde, without a word, turned and walked into the house.

“Long flight?” Chip asked, watching Isolde.

“Bumpy landing,” Woody said. Chip glanced at Perry, then wandered into the yard, opened the cell phone, dialed, and began to talk. Perry was immediately at Woody’s side, obliging, cheery, picking up their suitcases with a grunt. Perry looked much too weak to carry both, but he insisted. Woody led the way indoors.

Isolde passed them, saying that she had to get to the supermarket before it closed.

The house, partially shuttered now, was dark and humid. The television muttered in the living room. They paused to check on Hurricane Ernestine. A weatherman pointed at the bright orange circle and said it would intensify and come ashore in the middle of the night. Woody led Perry into the master bedroom, where he put the suitcases down and then, turning away, leaned a hand against the wall for support.

“Those suitcases were monsters,” Woody said, fascinated by the bullet scars on Perry’s back. They were bigger than on the front: like smooth, fleshy flowers, almost.

“Light as a feather.” Straightening up, Perry looked around the bedroom with an expression of unbelief. “Right,” he said. Woody assumed he was speaking to himself.

In the living room, they paused again at the television as a man dressed in yellow foul-weather gear, standing under a torrential downpour, shouted, “It’s raining in the Bahamas!” Woody led Perry out the back door and onto the pool deck.

Perry said, “Chip told me you keep the alligator as a pet.” It was about ten feet long and lay motionless on the bottom of the pool. They stared at it. Perry asked how long it could stay down there. Woody shrugged and said he didn’t know, exactly.

Perry said, “So it isn’t a pet?”

“God, no,” Woody said. “It’s a pest. We think it’s male, because in May and June, mating season, it came and went and upset the neighborhood. Every time the Fish and Game wardens arrived to pick it up, it disappeared. They swore that somebody was tipping it off. It went away for a long while, and we thought, phew. But it came back last week.”

Perry said, “Does it have a name?”

“Mrs. McCracken.”

Perry’s laugh turned into a fit of coughing. Woody stared at him and said, “You know her?” Perry, smiling, said the name had a good, bone-crunching sound to it.

Woody said, “Tell me about your bar in Jamaica.”

Perry said, “In Negril. Perry’s, it was called. Not very original. Maybe I should have called it The Green Parrot.”

Woody said, “Everyone came to Perry’s?”

“That’s it,” Perry said. “Everyone came to Perry’s.”

Woody said, “I wonder if my wife ever went there.”

Perry frowned, thinking hard. He said, “You’re referring to Isolde?”

Woody thought, Who else would I be referring to? He said, “She used to spend winters sailing in the Caribbean. Maybe she came to Perry’s too.”

“Might have,” Perry said. “She very well might have. So many people did.”

Woody said, “My brother says you’re a lord. Is that true?”

Perry said that it was.

Ancestral acres? Woody asked. Marble halls?

Perry said, “Sadly, none of that. My grandfather was given — some say purchased — a peerage. He was a surgeon, rather famous in his day. He pioneered the use of rubber gloves during surgery, and said such memorable things as, ‘Every surgical incision is an adventure in bacteriology.’”

“That’s food for thought,” Woody said.

“I remember it,” Perry said, “every time I cut my thumb.”

Woody said, “You ever been married?”

Perry nodded. “I was, some time ago. Actually, I think I still am, in a way.”

Isolde was in shock from seeing her house wide open and Chip and Perry wandering around. Now, pushing an empty cart into the supermarket, she felt grateful for the cool air that soothed her sweating skin. She saw the coiling checkout lines, the aisles dense with shoppers, and she sensed their fear. Dizzy, thinking, This is all too much for me, she fought down the urge to turn and run. Where could she go? She’d worked so hard to create a new life with Woody. She ordered herself to concentrate on the task at hand.

The supermarket was about to close. The aisles were full, the shelves empty. The ululations of the disappointed rose into the fluorescent light. Isolde saw how fragile and transitory her life was. Her carefully constructed happiness was toppling. She hurried around, crossing unobtainable items off her list: water, Sprite, Coca-Cola, ginger ale, canned soup, canned tuna, sardines, salmon, Spam, baked beans, bread, crackers, Oreo cookies, nuts, potato chips, canned milk, long-life milk, powdered milk, peanut butter, jelly, batteries, toilet paper, paper towels, Chlorox, ice. Her cart was empty. Still, she had the stockpile of water and supplies at home. But with four people that wouldn’t last long.

Then she had an idea. Their stove was fueled from a propane tank. She’d cook pasta and vegetables. That might last until stores reopened. She found lots of pasta. She tossed boxes of it into her cart, then hurried into the fresh produce section. The fruit was gone, but Isolde filled her cart with onions, peppers, garlic, tomatoes, mushrooms, carrots, celery, fresh herbs.

Near her, the double doors leading to the back of the supermarket swung open and twelve policemen in riot gear, lace-up black boots, black bulletproof vests, carrying shotguns and batons, filed into the produce section and spread out across the back of the store. They took up positions at the ends of the aisles against the back wall and muttered into microphones on their left shoulders.

A voice blared over the public address system: “Attention all shoppers, this store is shutting down NOW. All shoppers must report to the CASHIERS. I repeat, all shoppers must report to the CASHIERS. This store is shutting down NOW.”

The policemen yelled, “Let’s GO! Let’s MOVE it!”

Isolde froze. The supermarket, she’d often thought, was her last refuge. Now she thought, There’s no place safe for me. The nearest policeman, a giant block of a man with a thick black mustache, swiveled his body toward her, shotgun held ready across his chest. He yelled, “C’mon! MOVE it!” He stepped closer.

Isolde was shaking. Her voice came out in a bleat. “I need food.”

“Whatever’s in your cart,” the policeman said, “that’s it. Take it to the cashier.”

Isolde pushed her shopping cart to the front of the supermarket. She was weeping. The policeman, shotgun at the ready, kept pace behind her. Policemen with guns herded shoppers toward the cashiers. Isolde wept as the startled checkout girl rang up her pasta and vegetables, she wept as an old man pushed her cart of groceries out to the parking lot. He loaded the grocery bags into her car, and Isolde blindly pressed money into his hand and got behind the wheel. Leave, she told herself. Drive north. Outrun the storm.

She knew Perry Balfe’s crooked heart well. She saw how he’d deteriorated, how junk had taken over. And now Woody, the man she loved and wanted to build a life with, to have children with, a man who truly loved her, Woody would learn she’d been married to, had probably loved, Perry Balfe, con man, dope runner, junkie, child murderer.

In her heart, Isolde had known this day would come. She’d always expected Perry to reappear. The deeper her love for Woody, the sunnier her new life, the more certain Isolde became that it couldn’t last. She didn’t deserve it. She’d forfeited the right to happiness. She’d sent up clouds of prayers, and now they were falling like dead letters around her feet. Soon she’d have to explain herself.

By “explaining herself,” Isolde imagined telling Woody something like, “Woody, my love, it’s this: I met Perry and we got married and had a baby girl, Fiona, and one day when Fiona was almost two years old, she was playing with, of all things, a pair of rabbit-ear television antennae, and her daddy, who was supposed to be watching her for just five minutes while Mommy takes a shower, decided to shoot up. While Daddy’s nodding off in a chair, Fiona sticks the broken end of one of the antennae into an electric outlet, so when Mommy comes back and sees... what she sees, she goes clean off her rocker.”

She’d practiced telling Woody this every day since she fell in love with him. When she ran away to Key West, it wasn’t because she was shocked to learn he’d been married. It was because she saw that either she told him the truth about herself, or she was lost. But she worried that if she told Woody the truth, she might, probably would, lose him. How could Woody love her, once he found out about Fiona? How could Isolde find words to explain, to make acceptable, her desolation and her nervous breakdown? How could Woody believe she would ever be a fit mother again?

She felt that by not telling Woody, she was continually denying Fiona, who had the right to a public place in Isolde’s heart. But no amount of practice made it easier for her to say to him, My baby died. After she got married, she thought, I’ll wait until I get my degree in Early Childhood Education. It might help convince Woody that I’ll make a good mother. Every day brought a moment when Isolde yearned to tell Woody. And every day, for fear of losing him, she decided to wait for a better moment.

Now, in the Publix parking lot, Isolde dried her eyes and turned the ignition. She checked the fuel gauge. Half a tank. Not enough. She needed a full tank of gas. A Texaco station was just around the corner. That would be her final stop.

Woody, Chip, and Perry began putting up the remainder of the metal shutters on the front and back porches. These faced south and north, respectively, and had tall jalousie windows on three sides. The three men set to work exchanging hearty remarks such as, “That’s it! Great! Okay. We’ll soon get this sucker done,” but the afternoon was hot and windless, the sun oppressive. Chip and Perry soon tired. They paused, smoked cigarettes, scratched themselves, wandered into the yard to stare at the road.

Woody finished the metal shutters by himself, while the others set up the wooden saw horses and carried out the plywood from the garage. Woody had five big sheets, which, cut in half, would cover ten windows.

“Men,” he said, “here’s the plan. We cut the plywood with this electric saw. With this,” he held up an electric drill, “we drill holes in the four corners of each sheet. We hold the plywood sheet up over the window and mark the holes on the wall. Then we drill half-inch holes in the masonry and insert expansion anchors. We bolt the plywood over the windows with these three-eighth-inch lag bolts and then we tighten them with this—” Woody held up a wrench and saw that neither Chip nor Perry was paying attention.

Woody tested the electric saw and the other two flinched. They laid the first plywood sheet onto the wooden horses and Woody began to saw it in half.

When Isolde came back, everybody helped her unload the supplies and carry them into the kitchen. Chip and Perry drifted into the yard and exercised the cell phone.

A little while later, Woody went into the kitchen to drink water. Isolde was filling every container she could find at the tap. She embraced him, saying, “You don’t know how much I love you.”

“As much as I love you, I hope.”

“More. Much more.”

Woody pointed toward the yard. “Our junkies be waiting for The Man.”

Isolde said, “Not in my house.” Then, realizing that she wanted Perry happy, not strung out, for the next few days, she said, “Maybe we’d better let them.”

“We don’t want them freaking out during the hurricane.”

Isolde said, “They can smoke and whatever in the guest room.” Woody nodded and drank three glasses of tap water.

On his way outside, Woody paused at his desk in the living room and stared at a partially opened drawer. He’d shut it three weeks before. He pulled the drawer out farther. Inside were four unused checkbooks. Woody picked them up, telling himself, Think like Chip. He opened the fourth checkbook. The last check was missing.

Woody put back the checkbooks, closed the drawer, and went outside, calling for Chip and Perry. They came running around the corner like little boys and halted in front of him, winded and laughing. He asked them what was so funny.

Chip said, “We just made sure that Mrs. McCracken’s still alive.”

“Oh shit,” Woody said. “The alligator’s out of the pool?” Chip and Perry looked at Woody and broke into fresh fits of laughter and coughing and shook their heads, and then lit fresh cigarettes. “You bozos,” Woody said. “That alligator’s no fucking joke.” He reminded them that they had a lot of hurricane shutters to put up.

But the three of them lacked coordination. They messed up the first two windows, drilling extra holes in the plywood and in the stucco before they managed to bolt the plywood to the wall. Chip and Perry were weak, clumsy, unfocused, and they stank. They gave off a sharp, sweet, rotten odor, a mixture of stale sweat, tobacco, and God only knows what else that startled Woody every time he got close.

What Chip and Perry did best was watch Woody work. This allowed them time to talk in their jittery way, chain smoke, scratch themselves, dial the cell phone, wander out to stare at the road, or fade inside the house. Woody finally suggested that only one of them at a time help him. Chip and Perry could trade off. They liked this idea.

Isolde was at the kitchen table, listening to the weather channel on the radio and filling their hurricane lamps with kerosene, when Perry came in. His beautiful blue eyes locked onto hers and he said, “Darling, I’ve been searching for you everywhere.”

She felt a thump of dread. Had she loved him? Not this Perry. This one was like a Martian to her, strange and dangerous. She said, “I’m sorry you were shot. I didn’t know about it until today.”

Perry said, “It was Hoyt and his posse. They shut me down.”

Isolde said again that she was sorry.

Perry said, “You disappeared.” Isolde said she’d wanted to. Perry said, “Your mother told me she didn’t know where you were.”

Isolde said, “That’s right.” Isolde picked up a wine bottle she’d filled with cool water.

Perry frowned at it as if he didn’t recognize it and said, “I lost everything.”

Isolde said, “So did I.” She carried the bottle of water past him and outside to Woody.

Woody took Chip aside and said that he was missing the last check from his checkbook. He told Chip to give it back. Chip said, “What?” He looked offended. He said, “What the fuck are you talking about?”

Woody said, “Don’t bullshit me.”

Perry came into the kitchen and said to Isolde, “Woody doesn’t know who I am, does he?”

Isolde, chopping tomatoes for the pasta sauce, said, “He knows you’re a junkie.” A voice on the radio was saying, “... now expected to come ashore between Palm Beach and the Florida Keys some time around 3 a.m.”

“I mean to say, you haven’t told him anything about us.”

“There’s nothing to tell,” Isolde said.

Perry looked delighted. He said, “How delicious.”

Isolde stepped to the door and shouted, “Woody! Perry’s going to put the patio furniture into the pool!”

“Okay, honey!” Woody shouted.

Isolde pointed the knife at Perry. She said, “Put it all in the shallow end.” Perry watched her chop tomatoes. She added, “That alligator hates junkies.”

“Jolly old Mrs. McCracken?”

Isolde glanced up. “What does my mother have to do with it?”

Woody noticed that just about every time Perry went into the house, Isolde came out to check on how he, Woody, was doing, or to bring him water, give him encouragement and a kiss and the latest hurricane news. Like figures in a Swiss clock, Woody thought. One goes in, the other comes out.

Isolde served up pasta with vegetable sauce and salad on plastic plates. Chip and Perry took folding chairs out to the pool deck and ate and smoked and scratched themselves. Isolde and Woody ate in the living room, watching the hurricane news.

Woody said to her, “You knew Perry before, didn’t you?”

She frowned down at her plate of pasta and nodded, and Woody waited. She was thinking, Now? Tell him now? But her nerve failed her. She panicked at the thought of telling him about Fiona. Isolde said, “He was famous in Jamaica.”

Woody said, “Was he a junkie then?”

She said, “He used a lot of drugs, but he was different then. Everyone liked him. His bar was a success. The drug thing didn’t seem so bad—” She paused, then said, “I guess it was bad. Really bad. But no one realized until it was too late.”

Woody said, “That’s all you have to tell me?”

Isolde felt herself beginning to shake. “I’ll try to remember more,” she said. She picked up their empty supper plates and carried them into the kitchen.

Woody went back to putting up the shutters. The sun had set, but there was light enough to see. It was very hot and humid. The others took turns helping him. Meanwhile, they cleared the yard of branches, coconuts, and other debris, brought plants and orchids into the garage, lowered patio furniture gingerly into the shallow end of the pool. Chip and Perry acted increasingly strung out and irritated. Woody tried to ignore them.

Perry and Chip came outside, and Isolde, who’d been helping Woody, went back into the kitchen. Chip lit up a cigarette. Perry signaled to Woody that he had something to say. Woody turned off the electric drill. Perry said, “You’ve got the words wrong, you know.”

Woody said, “Words?” He asked what words Perry was talking about. The words, Perry said with irritation, to the Rolling Stones song Woody was singing over and over and over.

“Song?” Woody said.

Chip said, “‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want.’”

Woody apologized. He’d been concentrating on what he was doing.

“Well, I can tell you,” Perry said, now very angry, “it’s not ‘I was standing in line with Mr. Jitters.’ The correct version is, ‘I was standing in line with Mr. Jimmy.’”

Woody said that he liked the other version. Perry said, “It’s wrong.” He’d gone red in the face. He said with shocking force, “And you’re a bloody awful singer.”

Chip said, “Hey, Perry, cool it.”

Woody raised the electric drill to about an inch from Perry’s heart and clicked it on and off, saying, “Fuck you. I’ll sing whatever I want. You keep singing ‘Danke shon, darling, danke shon/Thank you for all the joy and pain.’ Now that’s bloody awful.”

Woody and Perry stared at each other, until Chip pulled Perry away.

Lord Jitters, Woody thought. Fuck him.

It was almost dark when a battered white Lincoln turned into Woody’s driveway. The driver blew the horn. Chip trotted down the drive, followed by Perry. Two large black men climbed from the front seat of the Lincoln and stood behind their open doors, looking bored while Chip chattered away. Then Chip and one of the men walked into the street and out of sight, returning almost immediately. The black men got into their Lincoln, shut the doors, reversed down the drive, and were gone. Chip and Perry sauntered past Woody, who called after Chip, “Found my check yet?”

Some time later, Chip and Perry carried their two folding chairs and a jar lid ashtray back out onto the pool deck. Woody found them there, smoking and chatting, their air of tension gone. Perry was saying to Chip, “Oh, it was the usual, fraudulent trading, false pretences, fraud against a gaming casino, purchasing a Rolls-Royce with a worthless check. But I knew they were going to arrest me two days in advance. A detective came round and said that for fifty thousand pounds the case against me would be dropped. Because I believe in God and England, I told him to get stuffed. Then I packed my bag and hopped it to Brazil. I met Ronnie Biggs there—” He noticed Woody and paused.

Chip looked around, saw Woody, and jumped to his feet. He stepped over and dropped the cell phone into Woody’s shirt pocket with an air of irritation, saying, “Take it. I’ve been carrying that damn thing around all afternoon.”

“We’re almost done with the shutters,” Woody said. “Isolde’s pretty pooped.” He told them they could smoke in the guest room too, as long as they closed the door.

Perry thanked him, but said that the guest room was hot, so he’d smoke out here by the pool as long as he could. Woody could tell that Perry regretted his earlier outburst.

Isolde slipped into the master bedroom and opened her closet door. From the top shelf she brought down an old tin cash box. Inside were loose photos of her grandparents, father, mother. And five photos of Fiona: Isolde looked at them now, imagining herself coming from that shower wrapped in a towel and taking the rabbit-ear antennae out of Fiona’s hands, saying, “No, little darling, those are not for you,” and Fiona giving them up, grumbling a little... Isolde imagined this scene every day before she went to sleep, but sometimes it came to her when she was driving or in school or cooking. The scene was so real to her. Isolde kissed a photo of Fiona and said, “Sleep tight.”

Woody found Isolde lying on the bed. She’d been remembering when she met Perry, at his bar. Those amazing blue eyes, that English accent. She’d gone after him... Woody said he needed her help again outside. She told him she was too tired to move. He said that Chip and Perry were so relaxed now they were even less useful than when they’d been strung out. The good news was that only three shutters remained to be put up.

Isolde told Woody that they had to talk. Woody felt his heart skip. He said, “Talk now?” Isolde was silent, then told him it could wait until the storm was over. He saw ashes falling all around him like dead snow. She was going to leave him, just as his first wife had. Woody thought that when it came to the human heart, he was so blind, he was an idiot. He’d been astounded when his first wife left him for a middle-aged veterinarian.

The noise of the wind grew louder and rain gusted against the house, ceased, and gusted again. The weatherman said that the western edge of Hurricane Ernestine was coming ashore in the Miami area. Perry brought in the folding chairs from the pool deck and Woody closed all the doors. Isolde and Woody split a bottle of Cabernet and everybody watched a film on video, though Chip and Perry had to take regular cigarette breaks, going into the guest bedroom and shutting the door, so they missed a lot. The film was La Nuit de Varennes, with Hanna Schygulla and Marcello Mastroianni. The characters are passengers in a coach driving through the French countryside during the revolution. Mastroianni plays the aged Casanova. He’s wonderfully gallant with Hanna Schygulla, but thinks, Too late. He has difficulty peeing and remarks afterwards to Hanna Schygulla that “God punishes us where we have sinned the most.”

Suddenly, they heard an explosion nearby; the electricity went off. Isolde and Woody lit the lamps and passed one over to Chip and Perry, and for a moment the four of them sat in the flickering lamplight, unspeaking, Woody watching Perry, who was watching Isolde, who seemed to be listening to something special in the noise of the storm. Chip was wearing his dark glasses, so nobody could tell what he was looking at.

“I love boy-meets-girl stories,” Perry said to Woody. “How did you and Isolde meet?”

“It’s the old story.” Woody, scenting danger, got to his feet. He picked up their lamp, saying in a bad Bogart imitation, “Of all the rooms in all the museums in the world, she had to walk into the room where I was standing.”

“Waiting for me?” Isolde said, getting to her feet.

Woody nodded.

Chip slowly clapped his hands. It was, for Woody, an appalling sound. He noticed the dim smile on Perry’s face as he looked from Woody to Isolde. Woody imagined braining his brother with the empty Cabernet bottle. Chip finally stopped clapping and Woody held out his hand for Isolde and said that now they were both too tired for words and needed to say goodnight. He led Isolde into their bedroom and shut the door. They lay on their bed, holding hands.

The hurricane moved over them. Water and debris pelted the house. The noise was big, and it was everywhere. It sounded to Isolde as if they were caught inside the engine of an insane machine. Then she felt the pressure change and saw the doors creak and strain against their fastenings. The house was breathing like a giant lung.

Around 4:00 in the morning, as the eye of the hurricane was passing and the other side of the storm approaching, Isolde got up to use the bathroom and felt damp air blowing through the house. She walked onto the back porch and saw that the door to the patio was open. She walked outside. The wind was rising. It was dark, dank, humid; there was a strong smell of earth and brine. Perry had brought a folding chair out to the pool deck and was sitting alone, smoking. She touched his shoulder.

The fresh, moist air awoke Woody too. He sat up, looked around, then slipped out of bed. Wondering about Isolde, he walked onto the back porch. He heard voices outside, from the pool deck. Isolde was talking to Perry. Woody saw them and stepped back inside the dark open doorway, where he could listen and see, but not be seen.

Isolde was saying, “It’s no joke.” Her voice was raised against the noise of the wind. “You can’t stay out here. The hurricane’s coming back.”

Perry got up and moved closer to her. He said, “I love you.”

“I don’t love you,” she said.

Perry said, half-shouting, “Four bullets, Isolde. Not many people survive four bullets. What kept me alive in that Kingston hospital was the determination that we’d meet and I’d apologize for the terrible things that happened, and we’d live together again.”

“Perry, I divorced you.”

“I didn’t divorce you.”

“We are divorced. This is my life.”

“I got four bullets. You got our Miami bank account. That’s fair, is it?”

“I didn’t know you’d been shot,” Isolde said. “Anyway, it was a joint bank account.”

“For emergencies only.”

“I needed medical treatment, money to live on. I knew that money was all the settlement I’d get from you.”

“Half this house belongs to me,” Perry said. “Your paramour — husband, whatever you choose to call him — should know that. I will tell him.”

“If it makes you happy, tell him.”

“I’ll do it. And I’ll tell him that you are my wife.”

“That’s insane.”

“I’m perfectly sane!” Perry shouted into the wind. He reached out and took her arm. She tried to jerk away, but he held on and leaned in closer, raising his voice to be heard, saying, “Please listen, darling, you’ve got to listen,” but she wrinkled up her nose and shouted, “God, Perry, you stink, you’re disgusting!” and she pushed him hard toward the pool, saying, “Go take a bath.” Perry lost his balance, stepped back, and went feet first into the water, still holding onto her arm and pulling her into the pool with him.

Perry’s feet, descending, landed on the alligator’s back. The alligator had been asleep underwater and now it erupted off the bottom, all four hundred pounds of it, snapped its mouth shut around Perry’s right foot, rolled over, and dragged him back down to the bottom of the pool. Isolde was dragged down too, and then Perry’s hand, which had been gripping her forearm, was yanked away.

In its frenzy, the alligator tore off Perry’s right foot, then fastened its jaws around Perry’s left thigh and began twisting and banging its head with terrific force back and forth on the concrete pool bottom.

Isolde saw nothing, but as she was kicking upwards through the warm water, the alligator’s tail thumped her right leg, and she thought, Alligator, and then she was clawing to the surface and a hand grabbed her arm and pulled her up onto the deck. She saw Woody.

“Oh my God,” Isolde said, panting. “Oh my God.” She got up onto one knee and then Woody helped her to her feet. They looked at the water, which was covered with leaves and coconuts and other debris. Something was happening down there that was roiling the surface. The wind was strong now, the trees around them bending and lashing the sky. A powerful gust almost unbalanced both of them and sent them into the pool.

“Come inside!” Woody shouted. Isolde was moaning and trembling; she looked at him and then back at the pool, where the water was still heaving.

“That’s over with!” Woody shouted. He was filled with a fierce exultation, and he put his arm around Isolde and moved her toward their house.

A branch blew past them and clanged against the metal shutters of the porch. Over with? Isolde thought, as Woody pulled her inside. He slammed the door shut and slid the bolt home.

But Perry’s in the pool, she thought. He’d always be down there, and what did that leave them with now?