The Lonely Silver Rain

“Please watch the road, Browder. This is a very narrow road. Those oil trucks are doing eighty-five.”

“Would you say that would be in character?”

“Yes. I noticed some broken mangrove. He probably hid the money ashore. Sealed it in a plastic bag and tied it to a mangrove knee. The way the boat was moored, you could jump into the shallows and wade into the mangroves.”

“Okay, so he faked the redhead out of position, cold-cocked him, then turned and busted the skull on the blonde girl, knocking her back onto the bunk. Then he tied up the redhead the way you found him, and then he went in and had his fun and games with the little lady from Peru until he heard the redhead start bellowing. He knew the blonde girl was dead. He cut the throat of the little brunette. Why shouldn’t he? He thought they were just three pieces of garbage, a half step ahead of the law. The redhead had closed off Ruffi’s source, and Ruffi didn’t think he should be walking around talking about how cute he had been.

“So he came out and sat down beside the redhead and put a clothespin on his nose and then clamped a hand over his mouth. When the redhead began to pass out, Ruffi would let him breathe again, and each time he would ask where the redhead had hidden the product and hidden the money. He let the redhead know both the women were dead. When he had answers he liked, he went looking, and when he found the goods and knew the answers had been on target, he went back and took those fifties and made a roll that would just fit into the redhead’s mouth, pried his jaws open, jammed the bills in and hammered them home. Then he probably sat and watched the redhead asphyxiate. It would have taken a while because he could probably suck in a little, bit of air around the wad of money. And while he was on the way to dying, Ruffi was probably telling him what a horse’s ass he had been. Then he picked up his goods and his money and got into his boat or airplane and left the area in a hurry. From Ruffi’s point of view, a reasonable solution. Brujo had no good way to contact him and probably wouldn’t try. Ruffi took his goods to market before the murder story broke, and there was no way to connect him to it anyway.”

“Write me into your scenario, friend. Where do I fit? Where did Billy Ingraham fit?”

“Young Ruffi is not dumb. When he found out he had killed the niece of a very heavy dealer in Lima, he knew it would be as if somebody had killed one of his sisters. The pressure would never quit. Sooner or later, unless they had a story they could buy, they would backtrack all the way to Ruffino Marino Junior. You know what I think? I think he went to his old man and confessed. The old man has more brains than Ruffi. And he couldn’t throw his kid to the dogs, or even admit his kid had been dealing. So the alternate theory was that Billy Ingraham had told you to get his boat back and punish whoever had taken it. And you got to it four days before you notified the Coast Guard. They sold that story to the people in Lima, named names. They promised to take you out. At first it was going to be quick and dirty. But then somebody, maybe the senior Marino, decided that might cause too much investigation. When you escaped the bomb, they decided on accidental. After all, if the right newspaper clippings were mailed to Peru, it would end right there no matter how you and Ingraham died. Honor would be served, and all that shit. But the Ingraham accident was messed up, and by a freak of chance, Jornalero knew the new Mrs. Ingraham. The world can be a small place. You and Millis Ingraham convinced Jornalero you were not guilty and Ingraham wasn’t guilty. But when Jornalero tried to get the thing stopped right there, they wouldn’t listen. They told him they were going to do it their way. Reason? Pressure from Ruffino Marino Senior. To hide the participation of his dear boy. To stifle any further investigation. Mail your ears to Peru, and everybody can breathe deep and slow.”

“Look out!”

“Jesus Christ, McGee! I saw him. I wasn’t going to run into him.”

A pair of toucans flew over the road twenty feet high and a hundred feet ahead of us. They fly with their bills hanging down. They make little irregular swoops as they fly. They do not look as if they really enjoyed getting around that way. Their breast is of the interior colors of their favorite diet, papaya.

“So what makes you so happy Browder?”

“The Old-timers against the New Boys. It is going to be tough to split them up because they are both antsy about the Canadians moving into the Miami area. Canadian mobs. But this whole thing about the girl from Peru offended the New Boys. Latin heritage and all. So when they find out she was raped and killed by the son of one of the Old-timers, and the Old-timers have been trying to throw you to the Peruvians to get the pressure off and save their kinfolk, it isn’t going to sit too well. Shake the tree and things fall down.”

And so we went skimming up the rough and narrow highway to Cancun, passing the trucks and buses at a hundred and twenty kilometers an hour, the hot wind whipping at us. Browder hummed happily over the sounds of wind and engine and from time to time he would laugh.

“If they found out you’re in drug enforcement, what would happen?”

“It would depend on how much they think I know. Maybe only a good thumping by persons unknown. Or maybe I would drive into a canal.”

“Rough way to live, isn’t it?”

“I came looking for it. We’ve got a fifteen-year-old daughter-no, she’s, sixteen now-she OD’d on some kind of a crazy mix of speed and horse two years ago. The high school was full of it. She passed out and in the hospital she stopped breathing, but they got her going again, except she’s a vegetable. She used to be a pretty girl. Our marriage wasn’t solid enough to handle that. So I’m undercover and my ex-wife teaches in night school so she can spend more time with Nan. What I want to do, one way or another, is nail some of the sanctimonious bastards who control the drug trade without ever getting their hands dirty. When you make any kind of a case against one of them and by some miracle get a conviction, the appeal procedures take five to seven years, and if guilty is still the verdict, they spend ten months in a federal country club. The ones we haul in are the people who bring the product in and handle it and peddle it. They get the long sentences and they can be replaced overnight. What I want to see is a nice drug war. Like six or eight years ago. Car bombs, fire bombs, bodies in the trunks of Cadillacs. Important bodies.”

“What’s going to happen with me, Browder?”

“As soon as I can spread the word, they will be off your case.”

“How soon will that be?”

“I’m working on how I should do it.”

“Don’t let me spoil your concentration.”

The jungle grew deep on both sides of the road, grew tall right up to the edges of the two traffic lanes, a green blur as we sped past. From time to time we came to a tall stick with something on top of it, a marker for the path that would lead back to one of the jungle huts of the descendants of the Maya. On top of the stick would be a piece of plastic, a tire, a celluloid doll or a beer can. Buzzards circled aloft, dipping down to chomp the slain creatures on the concrete.

Browder was a fast driver and not a good driver. He would get too close to a slow-moving vehicle before edging out to take a look down the highway. When he passed he cut in quickly even with nothing approaching and nothing bullying him from behind. The expert driver moves out into the passing lane when he is at least fifteen car lengths from the vehicle he is passing. Then he can move back without haste if it is not a good time to pass. Once by, he makes his angle of return to his lane as long and gradual as is consistent with what is ahead of and behind him. The good driver takes his foot off the gas when there is anything ahead he does not understand. We came to a place where big green branches had been cut and put in the oncoming lane. it was a warning. There was a disabled VW camper with branches in the road behind it as well, a hundred yards, and more from the camper. Browder didn’t slow. As we approached at high speed he saw a tanker truck beginning to turn out to pass the camper. It was coming toward us. Browder accelerated and got as far to the right as he could. We brushed the jungle as we sped by the big high bumper of the tanker truck. Browder yelled curses. “Goddamn maniac truck driver!” he hollered.

I said, “You are a rotten driver.” This is like telling someone he has no sense of humor, or that he’s a poor judge of character.

“I am an excellent driver!” he said. “Excellent! What’s wrong with you?”

“I know. You’ve never had a serious accident.”

“Never!”

“Then you are a very lucky man. You are a rotten driver. You are a hazard on the road. You go too fast for conditions. You don’t know how to pass. You don’t slow down when you should. You want everybody to get out of your way.”

After he stopped being very, very angry he said, “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Absolutely. And I don’t want to be found dead in this comedy outfit.”

“Want to drive?”

“Soon as you can find a place to get off the road and I can get these boots off.”

“And then I’ll tell you what’s wrong with your driving, McGee.”

Always eager to learn.“

Thirteen

SATURDAY WAS a big departure day at the Canctin airport. Eastern, American, AeroMexico, Mexicana, charter services, everybody was leaving in the middle of the day. Once again Browder bought a couple of top slots on the wait list. The line heading toward the departure tax counter was three or four people wide and sixty yards long. People sighed, kicked their luggage along the tile floor and told each other to have the six hundred pesos ready for the departure tax.

I had discarded the hat, which had cost me thirty-three dollars. I had put it on the head of a twelve-year-old Mexican, to his infinite delight. The imitation-lizard boots I left under the bed, after I had bought sandals at a hotel shop. I kept the eye patch in my pocket, but I don’t know why. I thought if I saw Nancy Sheppard again by the pool, I would present her with the damn ugly thing. Anyway, I was a lot less conspicuous. Which was, as it turned out, a good thing.

The line seemed endless. When I stood tall I could see that after the payment of departure tax, the carryons went through a security X ray, and once cleared you carried them on into some sort of big lounge with plastic chairs to await the announcement of your flight.

No matter how many times you vow you will never stand in line again for anything, you get trapped. The lighting inside the big terminal was dim. The brighter light was at the check-in counters and outside the glass doors over on the other side of the big room we were in.

I was a half step ahead of Browder. He was close and to my left. Beyond him were a man and a woman, short and smiling, wearing identical yellow shirts which said “I Love Cancun,” They were kicking a duffel bag and an imitation Gucci suitcase ahead of them.

Browder lurched against me and clutched at my left arm. I thought he had tripped over his carryon. As I turned to steady him, his grasp loosened and he slipped away from me, and fell loosely, facedown, limbs sprawling. He had bought a pale gray guayabera shirt that morning in the hotel shop where I bought the sandals. It was nailed to the left side of his back, fairly low but angled upward; by something that had a narrow three-inch handle wrapped in black electrician’s tape. There was a spreading red stain around the point of entry. His carryon was gone. I could not see anyone leaving in a hurry. The people behind him looked absolutely normal and quite horrified.

A woman screamed. I put my fingertips on the absolute silence of his throat. He seemed to settle more closely to the floor. “Who did it?” I asked the people who’d been behind us.

“Who did it? Who knows? Somebody hurrying. I didn’t look.”

There were sharp whistles and the security guards came on the run. The people closest to it had moved back away from the body. Then the line continued. It merely curved around the fallen man, everybody on their way to pay their six hundred pesos, catch their flight. They kicked their luggage along. I wore my carryon with my elbow clamped down on it. I edged into the moving line a little ahead of where I had been. “Wasn’t that man with you?” a woman asked me. “No. We were just chatting.”

“What happened back there?” a man asked. “Somebody fainted. Some man,” the woman said.

I had made my choice just quickly enough: I looked back. The police were stopping people, hauling them back to the scene of the crime and trying to interrogate them. It was obvious that El Brujo, a very serious man, had decided to cut the loss he had suffered. Or one of his people, Martin or the man with the weapon, had decided that the money would be worth some risk. Browder had come to make the buy, so he would be the one with the money, too bulky to wear in a money belt. I could feel the book through the canvas of my carryon. They would expect Browder to have the money. Even though I did not think they would risk a second chance as soon as they discovered they were wrong, I was anxious to get past Security and into the departure lounge.

Browder had made his own life decisions. He had taken his own risks. He had bought his own ticket. Nothing would be gained by my hanging around. And if I did, I might be invited to join Browder. I had not liked the man, even though I respected his dedication and his courage. In spite of all my rationalizations, in spite of all my very good reasons for melting into the crowd and fading away, I still felt chickenshit about it. It didn’t help at all to realize that I was doing exactly what Browder would have done had the narrow blade punched into my heart with equal professionalism of thrust and angle. Staying would have done absolutely no good at all. But it would have felt better than leaving. Once through Security I found an empty chair that backed up to a wall. There I pretended to read the book I had picked up at the hotel newsstand. I had gotten to the part where a buried cat came back to life, but couldn’t walk well.

Two official-looking men came in and stood looking carefully around at the people waiting. I tried to make myself a size smaller. They gave it a good long look and went out. My flight was called. I had no boarding pass and so I was stopped at the glass doorway. There were about a dozen of us.

A flight attendant came out to the head of the ladderway from inside the aircraft and held up four fingers. The man at the doorway waved and she went back. “Broo-dare? Broo-dare?” he called out, looking inquisitively at us. No luck. Broodare was not answering any more calls. Not on this earth.

“McGay?” he said. “McGay?”

I showed him my ticket and he gave me a boarding pass. I got on and the attendant said, “Thirty-one C, sir.”

Three abreast. I was on the aisle, next to a bald priest who was next to a fat brassy blonde in the window seat. I kept willing the airplane off the ground. I kept trying to make myself a few pounds lighter. After an interminable time we trundled out to the runway, lumbered down to the end, turned, came back and suddenly broke free, rising and turning, looking down to see the white lines of beaches, jumbles of concrete, blue sea, green jungle, cars and buses crawling.

It was full dark by the time I boarded my houseboat. I checked my security system and then felt for the lock with the key. I unlocked it and then when I put my hand on the latch, I yanked it back quickly. I thought I had put my hand over some sort of large bristly bug on the latch. I moved to the side so my shadow wouldn’t be on the latch. And I saw that it was a stick figure of a cat made of pipe cleaners. This one was blue and it was taped to the latch. I pulled it free when I went in, and I put it with the other one I had found. There was an innocence about the cats, but at the same time a sinister flavor. They did not represent somebody having fun. Communication is a process of interpreting symbols. Words are symbols. Gestures and gifts and touchings are symbols. In any life we misinterpret more than we should, perhaps because our deepest intentions are at odds with the messages we project. The cats bothered me because they touched a memory I could not completely unearth. I could see an edge of it, but I could not make out the whole. It was a fossil, deep in my geology, a stratum long covered.

I had no wish to turn on lights. I was thirsty. I found the water jug in the refrigerator and drank directly from the jug, deep and long. Then I stripped off what was left of my clown suit with the pearl buttons and the oversized zippers. The shirt smelled of airplane, of people jammed into an airless intimacy for too long-tobacco smoke, perfume, beer, engine oil and sweat.

I stretched out on my double-king bed, hands laced behind my head, looking up at the dark overhead. Somebody came burbling into their slip, and the Busted Flush heaved a little, sighed a little, as the slow bow wave carne by. A line creaked, and something in the galley tinkled. I felt grainy and spent. Tongue tip found the edge of a questionable tooth. A cramp began to knot my right calf and so with thumb and forefinger I pinched my nose shut with considerable force and held the pressure until the cramp faded away. A Chinese solution. Acupressure, just as steady pressure at the right point on the inside of the wrist, three finger widths from the heel of the hand, will inhibit nausea.

Another surge moved the Flush. In the sense of movement a boat is a living thing. It is a companion in the night. Each boat has its own manner and character. The Flush is an amiable, stubborn old brute. Like a fat dog, she can be made to run, but not for very long, and then will pretend more exhaustion than she feels.

My mind wheeled in concentric circles until, with nowhere else to go, it lit on Browder. I got up and turned a light on to find the phone number I had scribbled. I dialed it. A voice answered as before, repeating the last four digits of the number. A male voice with a robotic tinniness to it, like a talking toy.

I said, “Scott Ellis Browder was knifed to death in the Cancian airport at one-fifteen today.” There was no answer. I wondered if anybody had heard me. And then a voice said, in a low heavy tone full of exhaustion and despair, “Oh shit!” And the connection was broken.

I wondered what Browder’s real name had been. I wondered what agency he was on loan from. I would have given odds of seven to three that when he died, it would have been on the highway, passing something at the wrong time and place.

I was trying to make myself get up, take a shower, brush teeth, when I fell asleep. When I woke up a little before four in the morning, a stiff wind was whining through the boat basin and the Flush was making small erratic motions as it snubbed against the lines. And I was frozen. One of those wintertime slabs of Siberia had come sliding down into South Florida, freezing the citrus and strawberries, puckering the tourist skin, whitecapping the bays and emptying the beaches.

I got an extra blanket, got shivering into the bed and pulled the covers over me. The cold had awakened me from a dream. I had been in a poker game at an oval table, with the center green-shaded light hung so low I could not make out the faces of the men at the table. They all wore dark clothing. The game was three-card draw, jacks to open. They were red Bicycle cards. Every time I picked up my five cards, I found the faces absolutely blank. Just white paper. I wanted to complain about this, but for some reason I was reluctant. I threw each hand in, blank faces up, hoping they would notice. All the rest of the cards were normal. I could see that each time a winner exposed his hand. There was a lot of betting, all in silence. A lot of money. And then I picked up one hand and found they were real cards. I did not sort them. I never sort poker hands or bridge hands. The act gives too much away to an observant opponent. I had three kings of clubs and two jacks of diamonds. In the dream I did not think this odd. They were waiting for me to bet when the cold woke me up. In the dream I had been shivering with the tension of having a good hand. The shivering was real.

It was the coldest morning I could remember in Fort Lauderdale. I dug out my old black leather jacket, rock-climbing trousers and watch cap. The tops of my ears felt good tucked into the watch cap. People were standing around in wonder looking at the frost on the bushes, and huffing so they could see their breath before the wind whipped it away. And the wind had also whipped all the urban smutch out to sea, all the stink of diesel, gasoline, chemicals and garbage fires, leaving a sky so blue it was like the sky of childhood.

Ever since I had awakened I had a picture that flashed into my mind and winked out, over and over, a slide projector inside my head with but one slide. It showed Browder with his right cheek against the tile, his mouth and eyes half open. It showed the pattern of his hair in the left sideburn and at the nape of his neck. It showed the shape of his ear, and it showed my hand reaching into the frame to rest my fingertips against the left side of his throat. It is a very quick way. It snaps a man from life into death. When the heart is stopped with such brutal precision, blood flow ceases and the brain stops making its electrical images and all the muscles go slack. So he was Browder walking and three seconds later he was dead meat on the floor and somebody, in a hurry, was leaving the terminal with his carryon.

If I were king of the country I would decree that on a certain date, three months hence, all green money in denominations of twenty dollars and up would become valueless. Everyone possessing that money could, during the three months, bring it in and exchange it for orange-colored money. One exchange per person. Bring in all your cash, and if you have more than one thousand dollars, fill out a form explaining where you got it and how long you’d had it. There’s untold billions of sleazy money out there. Untold billions that would never be turned in because possession of it cannot be explained. Bureaucracy gone quite mad, of course. But then we would be starting over, and because the gangster types would be afraid it could happen again, they would be wary about too much accumulation. By simple bookkeeping you could compute the unreturned green money and figure it as a deduction from the federal deficit, as though it had been a contribution to the government. Which, of course, it would be-as any piece of currency is a claim against the government, against society.

I tried this on Meyer at Sunday breakfast. He peered across the table at me as if he thought I had lost my wits. As an economist, he was appalled. “Please stick with what you know. Please,” he said.

“If Archimedes had stuck with what…”

“McGee, listen. It is the anticipation of the declining value of money that triggers inflation. If the public anticipated that money would be worth nothing in three months, they would spend it. And they would make it come true. Too much money after too few goods.”

“But…”

“Please. Your motives are pure. Your monetary knowledge is infantile. Don’t spoil my hash browns. If you want to be serious about it, I will loan you some texts.”

“I just stopped being serious.”

“Good. Now let’s get back to what you were talking about before. You have a target. The young Marino. Or his father. Or both. They are public people. I read about them from time to time, mostly about the young ones. Four children?”

“Two boys and two girls. Ruffi is the eldest.”

“So you can reach them, approach them, what ever. Luckily, before anybody reaches you again. But is that what Browder would have done? If we are going to make moral judgments, take what we conceive to be moral actions, then we should set in motion what Browder hoped to set in motion.”

“I don’t know how he was going to do it.”

“You mean you don’t know what particular pipeline he was going to use. But is it important to know that? I would think that your Mr. Jornalero would get the information to the right people. If Browder’s guess was right, you can then lay back until the fireworks are over, and if young Marino survives it, you have your target. But after the fireworks, if indeed they happen, no one will be coming after you anymore. So you could quit right there.”

“If I should happen to want to.”

“But you won’t?”

“No. If I read about that boat in the paper, maybe I could quit. But I was there. I saw them. I didn’t know them, but I think I owe them. If they were garbage, they were young garbage. Whoever did it, it ought to be hung around his neck like a sign. Unclean. He ought to have to carry a little bell to warn people he’s coming.”

“The white knight rides again.”

“With rusty armor, bent lance and swaybacked steed. Why not? Billy was a friend. I had good luck and the two little thieves had bad luck. So I’ll follow your suggestion. I thank you for it. Browder thanks you. I’ll buy the breakfast.”

“I think you should. Anyone who can carry that much money into Mexico and bring it all back out can always buy my breakfast.”

“When I counted it, I was down two thousand. Browder took out expenses, I think.”

“Strange man. He didn’t sound persuasive. He didn’t look persuasive. But he was.”

In the afternoon I tried to get in touch with Jornalero. There was no listing for a home phone. I phoned Millis. Her voice was subdued and listless.

“How are you making it?” I asked her.

“It isn’t easy. And the cold in the night killed my whole garden. Everything is black and sagging and ugly. Like some kind of message. All of a sudden this place seems huge. I want to get out of it and yet I don’t.”

“How do you mean?”

“Frank keeps asking me to come in and sign things but I make excuses and he has to bring the papers here, and bring a notary and witnesses along. It’s a terrible nuisance for him.”

“He’ll bill you for it.”

“Of course. McGee, I kind of thought I’d hear from you sooner than this.”

“I was out of town.”

“Oh?”

“I was out of the country.”

“Really? All I wanted, I wanted a chance to tell you that I tried to feel guilty and ashamed of us, but I couldn’t manage that either. And then I’ve been worried about somebody trying to hurt you again.”

“I had to do some scrambling about four days or so after I last saw you. But they didn’t try hard enough.”

“I hate to even think about it. Can you come see me today?”

“I called you to ask if you have any phone number for Jornalero. For his home?”

“Let me go look. I doubt it.”

She took so long I got tired of waiting and switched the speaker phone on. I was pouring myself a cup of coffee I didn’t need when she came back on the line. She told me I sounded as if I was in the bottom of a well. I told her that was because I have a cheap speaker phone. She said she found Jornalero’s home address, but no phone number. He lived at 22 Sailfish Lagoon, Miami. As, I remembered, did the elder Marino. “Are you going to stop by, Travis?”

“Let me have a rain check, Millis. I’ve got some people coming over.”

“Sure you have. Okay. Forget I asked.”

“Maybe after they leave. I’ll phone first.”

No one was coming over. Sometimes I lie well, with hearty conviction. I probably hadn’t lied well to Millis because I didn’t want to get involved with her, but I couldn’t help wondering if just a little bit of involvement would hurt anything.

So of course, to punish bad lying, some people came over. Two people, two men in their thirties, conservative tweed jackets, neckties, a look of desks and offices. Wisner and Torbell. Employed by the DEA. Polite, impassive, with the cop air of habitual disbelief. Nothing the world had told them had been totally true, and would never be true, here or in the hereafter.

“Browder gave us a pre-operational report by phone. We’d like to check it out with you, Mr. McGee,” Wisner said.

Fourteen

IN THE lounge I got Wisner into the big chair and Torbell onto the curved yellow couch. I brought the desk chair closer and sat in it, thus making myself a foot taller than they were. If you suspect someone wishes to give you a hard time, never arrange yourself so that he or she can look down at you.

They refused a drink. Torbell cleared his throat and took out a small notebook. He leafed back and forth through the pages, wearing a frown of self-importance which made a little knot between his brows.

I let them have their silence. Bo they gave up finally and Torbell said, “May we assume that you phoned in the report of his death?”

“You may so assume.”

“You took fifty thousand dollars down there with you?”

“I did.”

“And brought it back?”

“I brought forty-eight back. Browder took out expenses, I think.”

“Where did you get the money?”

“That’s irrelevant.”

“We have the power to make arrests.”

I held both fists out toward him. “Be my guest.”

Wisner took his turn, saying, “Your attitude isn’t getting us anywhere.”

“Our attitudes, let’s say.”

“All right. Did you go down with Browder to buy cocaine?”

“No.”

“Then for God’s sake, man, why were you carrying all that money around?”

“Browder carried it into Mexico. I asked him at one point why his employers couldn’t provide the money. He said the government was cutting back on expenses.”

“Why did you provide it?”

“There was a Jack Benny skit years ago where a robber jumped out at him with a gun and said, ‘Your money or your life!’ And it was the long, long silence that got laughs.”

“Are you saying Browder threatened you?”

“I’m saying there have been two unsuccessful attempts on my life lately and Browder heard about them from the other end. He also heard, from the other end, that the orders to kill Billy Ingraham came from Miami. Browder seemed to think that if I sat still, they’d finally get to me.”

“Was this Ingraham a smuggler?”

“Why don’t you people do some homework before you come out of the office to hassle somebody? Ingraham was a retired millionaire developer killed in Cannes in a hotel last month by somebody shoving a wire into his brain.”

Wisner and Torbell looked at each other and Torbell said, “I think I read about that. He was the one owned the yacht three people were killed on.”

“And I’m the one who found the yacht with the bodies aboard and notified the Coast Guard. I had a deal with Billy to try to find it. And I did. And one of the bodies was of a young Peruvian girl from an important family. Her uncle is in the drug business. He demanded that the Miami group find out who killed his niece. They decided it was easier to nominate Billy and me than look for the right one. I’d found out the cruiser had come across from the Yucatan. So Browder found a way to make contact over there, and I could provide the money to make it look real, and he had me rigged out to impersonate a dead smuggler named Bucky, the Estanciero.”

“Who?”

“Forget it. Forget the whole thing.”

Torbell’s face got red. “It took a long time to plant Browder on the inside, to plant him at a level where he could provide us now and then with some very useful information on delivery systems. It’s a giant step backward to have him taken out.”

“He wouldn’t think so.”

“What do you mean?” Wisner asked.

“He implied that all he was doing was help nail the replaceables. He was more interested in the men behind the scenes.”

“I know he was,” Torbell said. “The impossible dream. The men who run things never put anything on paper. They never say anything usable on a telephone. They deal strictly in cash, and by the time it is in hand, it has a history that is squeaky-clean. It has been through the big laundremat.

I almost said, “Run by Jornalero,” but stopped in time. That would have led to the unlikely connection between Jornalero and Billy Ingraham, something that would have creased their bureaucratic brows with new suspicions.

Torbell perused his notebook again. He verified the date we had flown to Cancun. I took him through the travelogue, step by step. I was pleasantly surprised to find they knew about El Brujo. I told them I did not know exactly how Browder had made contact with him, and I could not remember the name of the man we met who drove us down the coast road to see the wizard.

I told them that a man had been flying into the airstrip at Tulum and buying from Brujo and flying back to a ranch strip in Florida. But each flight was more dangerous than the last, so he had brought in the kids who had stolen Ingraham’s boat, and they took a shipment back in the boat in August. They came back in September and paid Brujo seventy-five thousand in counterfeit money. Brujo said he would not deal with the Florida people until somebody reimbursed him for his loss. He said he was dealing with Canadians, who were taking all he could offer.

“Browder told me it was his guess that the man who had been flying the product out of Yucatan to Florida arranged to pick up the shipment in the Keys from the kids. When he got there he learned they had paid off Brujo in counterfeit, thus cutting off the source. So he killed them and took back his seventy-five thousand along with the shipment.”

“Who was this person?”

I had been turning the dilemma over and over in my mind, knowing they would come to that key question sooner or later. I became ever more convinced that this pair would blow it. Better they should be back in the office reading the computer screens.

“We never did get his name. I don’t think Brujo knew it. We got a description. He was a thin man, prematurely bald, deeply tanned, wearing glasses with gold rims.”

Torbell wrote this neatly in his little book. Wisner asked, “Who killed Browder?”

“The light was strange in there. We were far from the windows and doors. The line was dense, jam-packed, and it was so long that people kept edging through it from both directions, because it was blocking the way to the airline check-in stations. It was very quick. Nobody noticed who did it.”

“And they took his carryon bag?”

“He had the strap over his right shoulder. I think they hit him and slipped it off in the same motion. They thought they had a clean fifty thousand. He was the one trying to make the buy, so he was the one logically to rob. The bulk is too big for a money belt.”

“One of Brujo’s people?”

“Sure. Who else knew? But my guess would be it was an independent action, not directed by El Brujo. Whoever did it had all the necessary skills.”

So then, of course, being bureaucrats, they took me through it again, in greater detail. They were not in operations. They were in reports. When they left, they did not thank me. After all, they were making me do my duty as a lawabiding citizen. They said they might be back if they thought of something else to ask.

Funny how your body keeps tricking your brain. Mine seems to do it far oftener than I would care to admit. I began to think there probably was a lot more about Jornalero that Millis knew and had not had a chance to tell me. And the more I could learn about Jornalero, the more useful he would be.

And maybe the thing to do-without getting involved with her, of course-was to give her a ring and sort of drop on by and chat. It could be important, I thought, to tell her she might also be in danger. But she wouldn’t buy that and neither could I. Arturo Jornalero would provide a certain amount of insulation, and even had she never known him, Latino pundonor would not countenance the vengeance slaying of women. I decided to stop giving myself vapid excuses for seeing her.

It was a chill and early dusk when I walked into the foyer of Tower Alpha, Dias del Sol, and said, “Hi, guys,” to the security personnel on duty. Their response was bleak. I understood. They were entitled to their own fantasies. So I rode to the top. Were I to guess the amount of time we spent in discussing the life and times of Arturo Jornalero, I would say it was probably eleven or twelve minutes.

The first reprise was as hasty and hungry as the time before. But the next was slower, longer and far more inventive. She had pink night lights which showed her lovely face pulled tight with straining; teeth set in the plump lower lip. She was as quick, sleek and graceful in movement as a dolphin.

She fell gasping beside me, hanging on to keep from falling off the planet. She burrowed her head into my neck and when her heart and her breathing had slowed, she said, “I made some phone calls Friday.”

“What about?”

“To my friendly travel agent.”

“Going somewhere?”

“Maybe we are.”

“We?”

“Us. The two of us. Millis and Travis. The choice I like best, we fly to Los Angeles about February fifth-I think that’s the date-and we get on the Royal Viking Sky and take it all the way across the Pacific, to wonderful ports, and up through the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean to London, and we fly back to Miami on the Concorde.”

“We do all that? I hardly know you.”

“It can be our getting-acquainted cruise. It’s like eighty days, I think.”

“This is so sudden.”

She shook me. “Are you in there? Are you awake? Listening? A penthouse suite, man, and I buy all the goodies.”

“I’m not that kind,” I said.

She laughed and then said, “Seriously, do you ever think you’ve worn it all out around here?” It hit a little too close to home. Too many had gone away and too many had died. Without my realizing it, it had happened so slowly, I had moved a generation away from the beach people.

To them I had become a sun-brown roughlooking fellow of an indeterminate age who did not quite understand their dialect, did not share their habits-either sexual or pharmacological-who thought their music unmusical, their lyrics banal and repetitive, a square fellow who read books and wore yesterday’s clothes. But the worst realization was that they bored me. The laughing, clean-limbed lovely young girls were as bright, functional and vapid as cereal boxes. And their young men-all hair and lethargy-were so laid back as to have become immobile. Meyer was increasingly grumpy, and sometimes almost hostile. I couldn’t remember the last time I had tried to stop laughing and couldn’t. I could hang around while the rest of the old friends slid away. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had twenty people aboard the Flush at the same time. When the green ripper dropped around and took the Alabama Tiger off for permanent and much needed rest, the heirs had sold the ‘Bama Gal to a fellow who moved her around to Mobile. For a time ladies of an overwhelmingly female persuasion had stopped by to ask me where the hell the Tiger had gone. I told them he had died smiling, and they had toted him off to the family plot, and the longest floating house party in the world had at last ended. Always, they wept. The party was over.

The management had changed. Irv Delbert had departed. The city was changing. It was getting ugly and dirty and brutal. Locks and chains sold well. People full of speed and angel dust beat each other to death on the night beaches. There is a high in the life cycle of any city. I had seen it in Fort Lauderdale, and we had passed it and it was going to be a long downslope. I could ride it down or leave it and hope that memory would gradually replace the “now” with the “once upon a time.”

“Seriously, Millis, maybe I have.”

“Are you saying yes?”

“I’m saying let’s us take a little nap. Let’s sleep on it.

“The agent said those suites have their own little sun decks. Completely private.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It anchors in Cook’s Bay at Moorea. Billy told me that is the most beautiful place he ever saw in his whole life.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Frank’s tax man estimates that after estate taxes I’ll have an income of about seven hundred thousand, mostly tax-free-more if I sell this place, but I want to give that a lot more thought.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, and heard nothing of what she might have said after that.

On Monday I tried to see Mr. Jornalero at his office in Miami. He was in but did not wish to see me. I threatened to stay until he decided he could, but the tiny receptionist phoned down and two security men were sent up. I went peacefully. I drove out of my way and took a look at Sailfish Lagoon. It looked as if the same architect had designed Dias del Sol. But it had more of a fortress look than did Millis’ place. And there seemed to be some elegant private homes behind the high wall, near the yacht basin.

A man who wishes nothing further to do with you presents a problem. Though I had not seen the procedure, I could guess that Arturo, between his fortress and his office, traveled in a chauffeured limousine, and that when he walked to a nearby restaurant for a business lunch, there would be a muscled fellow a half step behind him, and maybe another a few steps ahead. Rich men walk carefully in Miami.

When I had worked out a plan, I hurried back to Bahia Mar and began working on overdue maintenance on my aging runabout, the Munequita, a two-ton T-Craft with a pair of one-hundred-and-twenty-horsepower stern-drive units. It shares the same slip with the houseboat. Usually I am very good about taking care of my gear, but it had been too long since I had given the Munequita the loving attention she needs. I had not noticed the five-inch rip in the custom tarp cover near the gunwale on the port side, amidships. It was damp and grungy under the tarp, with mildew thriving. The automatic bilge pump had tried to take care of the incoming rain until it killed the batteries. The tarp was faded, the paint was faded and the white letters of her name on the transom had turned to ivory.

We all do penance in our uAn strange ways. Mine was to risk getting killed while I paid my dues. By late Wednesday afternoon, the sixteenth, the batteries were up, bilge dry, mildew swabbed away, tanks topped, tarp, mended. I had taken her outside into a pretty good sea and punished my spine and kidneys jumping her head-on into the swells to knock a lot of the accumulated marine crud off the bottom. The Calmec autopilot was working again. The bilge pump was operational, the ice chest cleaned and stocked, the power lifts greased, the lights checked and replaced where necessary. She wasn’t at her best, but she was hell of a lot better than before. I wondered why I had spent all that time revamping a music system and indexing tapes when the Munequita needed help so badly. Meyer wandered over a couple of times to watch me at work. He wanted to know what I was doing about my personal problem, and I said I was working on it. He said it looked to him as though I was working on a boat. I didn’t explain, though I should have. It wasn’t fair to Meyer. But, then again, we had gotten into a game of surly. Old friends do that from time to time. To loosen the bonds, I guess.

At times it seems as if arranging to have no commitment of any kind to anyone would be a special freedom. But in fact the whole idea works in reverse. The most deadly commitment of all is to be committed only to one’s self. Some come to realize this after they are in the nursing home.

With an hour of daylight left, and the day growing chillier, I headed down toward Miami, traveling inside. Black leather jacket and watch cap, and the winds of passage strumming the canvas overhead, an NPR station on the FM, speaking mildly of the news of the day on All Things Considered, without hype or fury. The little doll growled along, at the lowest speed that would keep her on plane, white wake hissing behind her. There was comfort in being able to enjoy the boat. I had driven myself hard to got her back in shape. I had sore muscles, barked knuckles, a torn thumbnail and tired knees. Penance. Memory of the rumbling voice of the grandpa long ago: ‘Anything you can’t take care of, kid, you don’t deserve to own. A dog, a gun, a reel, a bike or a woman. You learn how to do it and you do it, because if you don’t you hate yourself.’

An out-of-date morality. Anything you don’t take care of, you replace. of course, the ERA wouldn’t cottan to Grandpa’s including a woman in his list of ownership items. Grandma seemed a happy woman, however.

It was long past full dark when I came to the marina I had stopped at in other years. I lugged down until I had minimum headway, folded the top down, stood up with the portable spotlight and picked up the private channel markers as I made my way in. The place had expanded. I went to the gas dock and when a man sauntered out to take a line, I asked him if Wendy was around. He said she had sold the place almost two years ago, and it was now owned by Sea and Marine Ventures. They had a slip, though. I tied up, locked up, walked two blocks for pizza and beer, came back and stretched out on one of the narrow bunks in the bow and set my wrist alarm for five-thirty.

Fifteen

ON THURSDAY morning at six-thirty I was making long slow lazy eights way out in the bay outside the sunlit structures of Sailfish Lagoon. By ten o’clock I gave up and dawdled back to the marina. The same little slip was still available, and there was a marine supplies store close at hand, so I bought various medicines and unguents, salves and brighteners for the little doll, and spent the rest of daylight improving her outward appearance, quitting at nightfall with sore arms and an easier conscience. About all that would remain to do would be to order a new custom tarp cover, and have her hauled for a bottom job.

On Friday I was on station at six, making my eights in the sunrise, binoculars handy. At twenty past six a triangular sail and a small jib went up in among a small forest of sticks, and soon a catamaran came out into the lagoon, heading for the bay. The sail was green and white. The figure aboard had on a dark red jogging suit and a white knit cap. I decided that it was not Arturo, but then when he came closer and I had him in good focus, I saw that it was. I abandoned my station and went off down the bay, heading south at a goodly pace, but keeping watch on Joawalero.

The morning breeze had freshened, and he began to zip right along. When he was far enough from his base, I swung around and came back at high speed and got between him and the lagoon. Apparently he did not notice me, or at least he did not notice the point of the maneuver. When I turned and came back out toward him, more slowly, he was moving well. He got on a long reach, and pulled his sail to the angle where one pontoon lifted out of the water, with Jornalero leaning far back for balance, hissing along at perhaps twenty to twenty-five miles an hour. It began to look trickier than I had expected.

I pushed both throttles and came up on the windward side of him. He jerked his head around and stared at me in astonishment and waved me off. The cat turned into the wind and the pontoon dropped back into the water. The empty sail flapped. I yelled over to him. “It’s me! McGee! Got to talk to you.”

“No!” he yelled, and came about and started off on another reach, not as productive a one, but one that would take him back into the lagoon. I caught up and moved in front of him so that he had to shear away. I bumped into a pontoon and nearly knocked him overboard. A moment later I had snagged a halyard with my boat hook. He was one very angry sailor.

“I’ve got nothing to say to you!”

“I don’t want you to talk, Mr. Jornalero. I want you to listen. Okay? Come aboard. I’ll take that thing in tow.”

He was a sensible man. It took him half a minute to realize he had very little choice. We were well out from shore. I gave him a hand. He stepped on the gunwale and hopped down to the deck lightly and handily.

He sat on the engine hatch and said, “So talk.” I moved out to a broader section of the bay, towing the cat, and then I killed the engines in the Munequita. There was lots of silence to talk into. The sail flapped idly on the cat.

“What I am going to say to you doesn’t mean anything and won’t mean anything unless you arrange to have somebody check it out. Do you know a wholesaler down in the Yucatan south of Cancun, down below Tulum? A man they call Brujo?”

“I’m listening. You’re talking.”

“Okay. I’ll assume you don’t, but I’ll assume that you can get in touch with some people who do know him or know about him and who can arrange to go see him about something. They are to ask him about a man who flew in from Florida in a light plane to the Tulum airstrip four times, and made buys from Brujo and flew the product back to a ranch strip. The surveillance was getting tighter, so that same man hired the kids who stole Billy Ingraham’s boat to come over and take it out by boat. He was there for the first buy, but sent them over by boat with the money for the second buy.”

His expression had changed, lips pursed had twisted into contemptuous disbelief. The sun was high enough to have lost all the orange look of sunrise light, and the bay had changed from gunmetal to blue. Boat traffic was increasing. I had swiveled the pilot seat around to face him.

“Something bothering you?”

“You’re talking.”

“They had worked out a way to bring it in by boat.”

“The people who stop boats know everyway there is.”

“Now we’re both talking. Okay, a discussion is better than a monologue.”

“McGee, there’s no point in talking to me about bringing in drugs. I don’t have anything to do with it.”

“Not since you used to recruit mules in Colombia?”

It jolted him. I could see his intent to deny, but he backed away from that. “Not many people know that or remember that. I worked my way up… and out. I head up my own corporation. it’s a legitimate business all the way.”

I smiled at him. “Want a beer, Arturo?”

“Before breakfast? Why not?”

I uncapped two from the cooler and handed him one. He took a long thirsty drink and wiped his mouth on the dark red sleeve.

I said, “They’d figured out a new way of bringing it in by boat.” I told him about the eye bolt in the keel, the length of cable and the adjustable fins on the aluminum case. He listened carefully.

“So? A thing like that, it gets around,” he said. “Others try it. Someone gets caught, and then it will no longer work. Towing a dead shark with the kilos sewn inside doesn’t work anymore. Filling the hollow radio aerial with it doesn’t work anymore. Dropping it in shallow water with an electronic beeper fastened to it doesn’t work anymore.” He stopped abruptly, took another swallow of beer and said, “I hear these things, but they have nothing to do with me. What’s the point in what you are telling me?”

“When the kids came back to make a buy on their own they had to wait around for product. They hooked up with Gigi Reyes and took her along willingly when they left. When they left they stiffed El Brujo with seventy-five thousand of funny money.”

“They were very lucky they didn’t die right there.”

“They were too dumb to know how lucky they were. They were being tricky. When they got back to the Keys they set up a meet with the fellow who had hired them, the fellow who had given up flying across the Gulf and the Caribbean. He met them in the Keys. They had hidden the product and the good money, which they hadn’t used, and tried to pry a piece of the action out of their employer. They showed him how smart they were. They showed him the rest of the funny money.”

“And so,” Jornalero said, faking a yawn, “he killed them as soon as he’d made them reveal the hiding place. They had cut off his source of supply. And he had no idea how stupid it was to kill the Reyes woman.”

“Right. And that angry man was-in here we insert a drum roll for suspense-that man was… Ruffino Marino, Junior.”

You often see people open their eyes wide, but it is rare to see the eyes bulge. It must have something to do with some sort of pressure in the brain. Arturo Jornalero’s eyes bulged. His mouth hung open. His big white hand collapsed the almost empty beer can. I watched him pull himself together, but it took time. Lots of thoughts were spinning through his mind.

And then another thought brought him up short. “Wait a minute! Nobody in their right mind would give their true name when making a buy. The money talks.”

“Mr. Jornalero, you wouldn’t get the people off my back. At first you thought you could and then you decided you couldn’t. I had a chance to find out what this whole scam was about. I sat and listened to Brujo say that it had been Ruffino Marino. How do I know how he knew the name? Maybe it was painted on the side of his little airplane. Maybe he gave it because he thought Brujo had seen his movie. Maybe he introduced himself because he is simply stupid. But that’s the man.”

Slowly and reluctantly; he bought it. He shook his head. “That explains it.”

“Explains what?”

“Never mind.”

“Is this going to get me off the hook? Hey!”

He raised his head and frowned at me as if he had forgotten I was there. “What? Oh, I think you can probably forget about the whole situation. Yes.” He got up and got the line and pulled his cat close and climbed down into it. He freed my line and tossed it back aboard, pulled his sail taut, worked the rudder and began to head without haste toward the lagoon. He didn’t turn or wave. I was out of sight and out of mind. He had a lot of other things to think about.

The breeze was from the mainland. The sea was flat. I took the Munequita outside and ran north up the coast at close to forty knots, promising myself as I have so many times before that the only sane way to get from Lauderdale to Miami and back is by water, and I would never drive again.

On that Friday afternoon I made my peace with Meyer and related all the action up to date, leaving out any mention of Millis. She was not a pertinent factor. He is a good listener. The questions were infrequent. We talked aboard the Flush. While we talked, we worked on a jug of wine, a Gallo red. Meyer wore a white turtleneck and his cold-weather overalls. He looked more dockhand than economist.

When the tale had been told, Meyer sighed, got up and went over and looked at my tapes, and selected one of his favorites, a CBS release, Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano, with Jean-Pierre Rampal on flute, Claude Bolling on piano, Marcel Sabiani on drums and Max Hediguer on string bass: Meyer likes the next-to-the-last number on side two called “Versatile,” where Rampal plays a bass flute. Meyer says you can hardly ever get to hear a bass flute solo anymore.

He slotted the tape, turned on the rig, adjusted the volume. Then he fiddled with the equalizer. He likes more treble emphasis than I do. I think he is beginning to lose the higher registers. They’re the ones which go first.

He sipped wine and listened to the music with his eyes closed, legs outstretched, ankles crossed. A potato-nose Buddha in meditation, totally at ease and complete within his hairy carapace. He listened all the way through the tape, and got up slowly and turned it off just as “Versatile” ended. He doesn’t care for the last number. Fidgety, he calls it. It is titled “Veloce.”

“It could work,” he said.

“What?”

“The families of the so-called Mafia are no longer rooted in the Sicilian tradition, where even though they were in dirty businesses, there was a sense of unity and honor and loyalty within the group. They aren’t families anymore. They have taken in too many outsiders. They’ve mongrelized the group with everything from Swenson to Pokulsnik to Moran. Honest Italian-Americans no longer have to resent the press coverage of their Sicilian brethren. But even back in the olden times, it never resembled the sentimental idiocy of The Godfather. These groups of gangsters, their only loyalty is to money. They’ve joined forces with the Latins and the rednecks because without contention and with control of the marketplace, the money is better. On the other hand, the Latins still have the sense of family and duty and honor that the Mafia had fifty years ago. The money is almost everything, but not quite. So I think Browder is right. This will cause a split. The way they are interlinked, too many people know too much. So it will tend to get bloody. Each side can turn loose the enforcers they’ve been using in solving normal business problems. Send them after bigger game. We can sit in the stands and cheer.”

“Maybe these people have gotten soft,” I said, “but if it gets bloody, they’ll bring in out-of-town talent.”

Meyer nodded. “Roofing contractors from Toledo.”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s what they used to call button men. Roofing workers they call them now.”

“How did you get to know that, Meyer?”

He smiled sleepily. “You think I’m some kind of recluse?”

The Miami Herald put it on page one on Monday morning: DRUG WAR BREAKS OUT. Most of the action had taken place on Sunday. One Walter Hanrahan, a prominent developer and land speculator in Boca Raton, had turned the key in his golf cart and blown himself and his son as high as the roof on the pro shop. Person or persons unknown had lobbed a grenade into Francisco Puchero’s convertible as he was driving along Collins Avenue in Miami Beach. It had blown his legs off and he had died en route to the emergency ward. Puchero had been prominent in community affairs: Firemen responded to an alarm regarding a Lincoln Continental on fire near a landfill in Homestead. When the fire had been doused, they found Manuel Samuro and Guillero “Pappy” Labrador wedged into the large trunk. The two men controlled the privately held corporation called Federated Trucking Express of Coral Gables. They each left a wife and three children. Samuro had recently received an award of merit from the Chamber of Commerce for his work in attracting new light industry to the area. Two masked gunmen had forced their way into a private club in Hollywood, Florida, had gone to an upstairs room where a poker game was in session and had killed five of the six players,. each with two or three shots to the head. They had left the money, several thousand dollars, an the table. It had happened at 1 a.m. on Saturday. The dead were Collins, Silvestre, Zabala, Shorter and Cawley. The survivor, Brett Slusarski, had two.22 caliber bullets in his brain and was not expected to live. All were prominent long-term residents of the Gold Coast, active in business and social life.

I had a sudden vision of Browder standing in one of the anterooms of hell, welcoming the newcomers aboard with merry smile and hearty handshake.

The thing that apparently sewed it all together for the Miami Herald newsroom was when three Cubans broke down the gate and the door to a warehouse in Miami Shores by driving a white Ford panel delivery truck through them at five o’clock Saturday afternoon, and then hopped out with automatic weapons, killed the three men working in the warehouse with about a hundred more rounds than necessary; and then fire bombed the warehouse and drove away. An unexpectedly efficient sprinkler system had contained the fire, and the authorities had recovered an estimated seven hundred kilos, or three quarters of a long ton, of pure cocaine. Ownership of the warehouse was being traced.

That brought the murders into a sharper focus, and explained the money being left on the table when the poker game was invaded. And it darkened considerably the public reputations, posthumously, of men who had given a great deal of time and thought over the years to presenting a picture of good characters and good works.

The violent deaths continued that week. The owner of a fleet of shrimp boats was killed when a car pulled up beside his on Alligator Alley and somebody shot him in the face. A man came screaming down out of the top floor of a highrise hotel on the Beach, the Contessa. He had owned twelve points in the hotel. A commodities broker was found hanging from a live oak tree in his backyard in Fort Lauderdale, with his hands tied behind him. His daughter found him. She was five years old.

And then on Thursday the name jumped out at me. Ruffino Marino. But it was the papa. He had employed additional bodyguards, stationing one in the sixteenth-floor foyer at Sailfish Lagoon, outside his apartment door, and the other down in the lobby by the elevator that served the sixteenth to twenty-second floors.

Somebody had gained entrance to the apartment above Marino’s, tied and gagged the occupants, waited until nightfall, climbed from the upper balcony down to Marino’s, forced the door, sliced the throat of the elder Marino as he slept, without disturbing Mrs. Marino in the nearby bed, climbed the rope back to the upper balcony, walked down the fire stairs to the parking-garage level and disappeared. Once in the clear they phoned the police so that the people they had bound and gagged could be released. Marino had been a prominent citizen, an investment adviser, with personal holdings in hotels, restaurants, beer franchises, magazine and book distribution, parking garages, linen service and liquor stores. The lengthy story about him said that he had been under investigation several times for possible racketeering, but no indictinent had ever been returned.

The lengthy newspaper account described in great detail the sophisticated security system with its computerized video and audio scanning, its perimeter sensors which could detect all prowlers. In fact, the account did so much marveling about how clever the murderers had been that it was quite clear the reporters believed that some of the fellows operating all that great equipment had been bribed to turn deaf and blind and dumb during the murder. And that, of course, is the vulnerable segment of all foolproof systems, the fools who take care of it.

The picture showed a broad-faced, bullnecked bald man with heavy black eyebrows and a toothy smile so broad it produced a squint. He wore a sport coat and a shirt with an open collar. A thick thatch of gray hair sprouted from the ‘tT of the open shirt, and a medal on a chain dangled against the hair below the wide throat the knife had sought and found in the darkness. The piece spoke of the widow, Rose Ellen Marino, and her work with handicapped children. The four children of the marriage were named, and only Ruffi Junior got any specific mention, as a producer and director of motion pictures and an investor in theatrical properties. It listed the powerboat races he had won.

The weekend papers had editorials about the bloodbath, as did the national news magazines. It had been correctly pegged as a war between the old-time underworld and the new drug barons, after several years of uneasy peace. One newspaper, USA Today,, was perceptive enough to note that the Canadian mobs were probably standing on the sidelines smiling. The editorials bemoaned the existence of the cocaine trade. The dollar value of the business was pegged at one hundred billion dollars, with an estimated one hundred metric tons coming in each year, with no more than six percent of it confiscated by the authorities. There had been seventeen violent deaths over a very few days, which became eighteen when Slusarski died without regaining consciousness. Had they known the connection, they could have counted up to twenty-five-a federal employee, two street urchins, two boat thieves, a Peruvian debutante and an old man in Cannes. It was the prominence and the civic reputation of so many of the suddenly and violently dead which led to so much coverage. The two standard shots were of the smoking remains of a golf cart, and of a side view of the Contessa Hotel, with a dotted line curving down from a high floor to a Germanic X on the pavement. Local television hit a new low in taste with the rernarkable question “And how did you feel, Karen, when you found your daddy hanging from that tree?”

A guest column in The New York Times, reprinted in local papers, was by an ex-employee of the DEA. He said, in part, “It is valuable, small, easy to smuggle. As easy as diamonds, but unlike diamonds it is a fashionable consumable. It is psychologically habituating without being physiologically addictive. It is the smart party snort for the young, middle-class, half-successful, upwardly mobile professional, as well as for the career thief. It can provide a rush of extreme confidence accompanied by erotic fervor and torrents of oratory. It can also rot the nose and encourage suicidal driving habits. It is so expensive it has the cachet of conspicuous consumption at parties peopled by musicians, artists and writers, the sign of a gracious contemporary hostess.

“A vast and deadly infrastructure provides itfrom the plucking of the leaves of the highland bushes to the tiny gold straw that sucks a line into the delicate nostril of a mayor’s mistress in Oregon and makes her eyes sparkle: Within the present context, nothing can stop it. The losses of officialdom are within the limits, say, of spoilage in the vegetable business. It has been brought in by drone aircraft, radio-controlled. It has been brought in by one-man submarine. It has been shot ashore by slingshot from freighters docking at Tampa. Even were importation to be punished by death it would still go on, because the lifetime wages of a laborer can be carried in a single pocket.

‘The only possible solution to this deadly trade is to ignore it. Legalize it along with marijuana. Then the infrastructure will sag and collapse. It will no longer be fashionable. Street dealers will no longer hustle new customers on high school sidewalks. And men won’t die in the squalid massacres we have seen recently in southeast Florida.

“But maybe it is too late for legalization. The bureaucracy of detection and control has a huge national payroll. Florida’s economy is as dependent on Lady Caine as it is on cattle or fishing. Legalization will be fought bitterly by politicians who will say that to do so will imperil our children. Are they not now imperiled?”

Meyer brought that guest column to my attention. He is a newspaper freak. He has’to have an oversized postal drawer instead of a box.

The killings had stopped. On Saturday evening I went over to Meyer’s boat and told him I thought we ought to go to a special Mass at St. Matthew’s on Sunday, to pay our respects to the dear departed Ruffino Marino, a Knight of Malta.

Sixteen

A FRIEND Of a friend of an independent motion picture distributor in Miami found me a glossy eight-by-ten publicity shot of young Ruffino Marino in full living color. The typed data stuck to the back told me I was looking at Mark Hardin, the star of the newest release by Feature Masterworks, Inc., entitled Fate’s Holiday.

Ruffi looked directly into my eyes. He was handsomely tanned. He had a very large amount of shiny black hair that curled around his ears, hiding all but the lower lobes. He had long eyelashes, a smallish puffy mouth with the lips parted just enough to reveal the gleam of wet teeth, very white. Black hair was combed across the broad tanned forehead. He wore one eyebrow higher than the other. Sort of quizzical. He had a cute cleft in his chin. He wore a gold choker chain of a size useful for restraining Great Danes. He had long hollows in his cheeks and a fuzzy hollow in his throat. His eyes looked wet, like his teeth.

But the film star did not attend his daddy’s Mass. A lot of cops were there, and a lot of burly men in civilian clothes who kept whipping their heads from side to side, looking at everything. A lot of women in veils. A lot of important-looking couples arriving by private limo. Very, very few politicians. Very, very few public figures. Had he died of a coronary on the seventeenth hole at the club, all the politicians would have been there.

We had a third-floor front room in a hotel diagonally across the boulevard from St. Matthew’s. The day was clear and bright. We both had binoculars. We looked for people the same size as Ruffi. We looked for anybody scooting in, hiding his face. We watched them go in and we watched them come out, the family last of all. Ruffi hadn’t been able to make it.

On the way back in my blue pickup Meyer voiced the opinion that Ruffi might be way off to our right somewhere, wedged into a drum which had later been filled with wet cement, allowed to harden, and rolled off the deck of a coastal freighter. And perhaps a picture of him in the drum, prior to cementing him in, had been delivered in Lima.

“I’m sorry you had to say that, Meyer. I’ve been thinking it, but I hoped nobody would say it. I mean, it would be a nice thing to know, but damn little chance of getting to know it for sure. And unless I know it for sure, I am going to have to go around flinching at every little noise behind me.”

“No sources? Nobody to ask?”

“I thought of Willy Nucci, but last I heard he was retired. He sold the howl and he was going to travel, but he got sick, they say. I think hels still in Miami. Things change a lot faster than they used to. I don’t know who to ask anymore.”

“Maybe I can find out where Willy is.”

“You, Meyer? How!”

“Details of the sale. It had to be a big dollar value. Trace it through public records. Dade County Courthouse records. How long back?”

I had to think about that, and relate it to other things that had happened in my life. “Right about two years, maybe a little less.”

It took Meyer all of Monday and half of Tuesday to nail it down. He went there, back and forth, on a Trailways bus. Meyer likes riding buses. He says it is the ultimate privacy. Nobody ever talks to you. You sit high enough to look over the tops of the cars and the bridge railings and see the world. You can read and think. He says tourists on cruises get off their luxury vessels and clamber onto buses, paying large fees to stare at the foreitgn scenery while somebody yaps at them about what they are looking at over a PA system so dreadful they catch one word in three. He says he has seen things out of bus windows so absurd, so grotesque, so fantastic, that riding the bus is sometimes like gliding through someone else’s dream.

But he came back with the information that I could find Willy Nucci in #4 at 33 Northeast 7th Street. The compangy that had made the sale had been WiNu Enterprises, from whom Willy, as a private citizen, had purchased the first mortgage. The mortgage money was paid into Willy’s account al a branch of the Sun Banks. When cash withdrawals were made, a young woman with a limited power of attorney would bring Willy’s check to the branch bank and be given the cash.

On Wednesday the thirtieth, I picked up a rental Buick from my local Budget outlet and drove down. I felt better in the rental than in the blue truck. Miss Agnes was too conspicuous and too well known. I wondered if I should get rid of her. And also unload the Busted Flush and the Munequita. They were signs and symbols of my lingering adolescence. I could make do with rent-a-car, rent-a-boat, rent-a-girl, rent-a-life. Anything busts, mister, you get hold of us right away and we come over and replace whatever it is. You can buy full insurance coverage right here, so you’ll never have another worry. Lose a friend and you can replace him or her with a working model, same size, age, education and repartee. Lose or break yourself and we will replace you too, insert you right back into the same hole in reality from which you were ejected.

It was a smaller street than I expected, and it wandered aimlessly under old trees. Number thirty-three was old Moorish, a faded orange-yellow with vines crawling on it, looking for cracks. There was an ornamental iron fence around the small yard, and a walk that bisected the yard and went up three steps to two doors under an overhang. One and two “are on the left, three and four on the right. Beside the four was an arromw pointing up, and a button. I pushed the button.

A, woman’s voice came out of the little round speaker. “Whizzit?”

“McGee. Travis McGee to see Willy Nucci.”

“Sec.” In a little while the door buzzed and I went in and up narrow stairs. There was a window of fixed glass at the top of the stairs, looking east, looking across a broad reach of bay toward the concrete puzzle of Miami Beach. Down below was a walled garden, beautifully tended.

I tapped on the door and a big girl let me in. She was a standard-issue plastic pneumatic blonde with wide happy blue eyes, sun-streaked hair, snub nose, smiling mouth and a suggestion of overbite. She wore a white knee-length T-shirt, and across her substantial breasts were the big red letters M A S C 0 T.

“Aren’t you the big one!” she said. “Come on in.”

“We make some kind of matched set,” I said.

“Get off that already!” Willy said in a frail voice. He was grinning at me from a nest of bright pillows on an oversized couch. I hoped I hadn’t revealed the shock I felt upon seeing him. Willy has always been a small man, pale and scrawny. Now he looked about as big as a starving child. His hair was gone and the yellow skin was pulled tight to the skull shape. We had done a little business from time to time in years past. He had always been cool, remote, careful. I was one of the very few who knew that he actually owned the hotel he worked at.

Now here he was, grinning at me, delighted to see me-a character change. The handshake was like taking hold of a few little breadsticks.

“Pull up a chair, McGee. Tell me what you’re doing for laughs.”

“Come to think of it, I haven’t been laughing very much lately, Willy.”

“Having no fun?”

“Not very much.”

“Then you’re not thinking good. There’s a Hungarian proverb: Before you get a chance to look around, the picnic is over. What’ll you drink?”

“A beer would be fine.”

“I got Carta Blanca.”

“Better than fine.”

“Briney, get my friend McGee a Carta Blanca, love.”

She left the big room. I looked around at it. “Great place here, Willy.”

He shook his head. “I was going to live great. Everything I wanted. The timing was terrible.”

“I heard you were sick.”

He grinned at me, a merry grin. “What I’m doing here is dying. Right before your very eyes. I was getting chemotherapy, but I finally had them stop that shit. The only way I could be halfass comfortable was smoke pot all day, and that fogged up my head so I couldn’t keep track of anything. Where I got it is in the pancreas, and I don’t even know what that is or what it does. Or used to do.”

Briney brought the beer in a big frosty mug. I said, “Thanks, Briney. What does that stand for?”

“Well, it was Brenda and then Brenny and then I got hung up on surfing and I was out there all day riding waves and so it was Briney. Like salt.”

“California meat,” Willy said in that whispery voice. “Stuff Greenberg sent her to me as a free gift. You ever meet him? No, I guess you wouldn’t. She owed him one and he owed me one, and so it goes. What I’ll do, McGee, if you’re going sour, I’ll will her to you.”

“Human bondage is against the law,” I said. “McGee,” he said in his tiny voice, “she’s had nurse training. We had her twenty-fifth birthday party last week. She’s healthy as horses and she can cook anything you can think up, and she keeps this place clean, and she loves to eat and sleep and cook and dance and sunbathe.”

I stared at him and then at her. “You’re serious?”

“What am I going to do?” he said. “I send her back to Stuff, I’m ungrateful. Almost everybody I know is a mean bastard except you. You are mean too, but in another kind of way than the other guys. And if you’re not having any fun, she’ll be a nice change for you.”

“Don’t you have any say in this?” I asked her.

“Where do you live, McGee?” she asked.

“In a houseboat at Bahia Mar in Fort Lauderdale.”

“Hey, I’ve never lived on a boat! Neat-o!”

“Don’t you have something you’d rather do? Someplace you’d rather go?”

She grinned at me. There was one gold filling, way back. “Shit, man. Everybody has to be someplace.”

Willy said, “It’s a load off my mind. I’ve got everything pretty well straightened out except Briney. And now that’s done.”

“Have you heard me say yes?” I said.

“Jesus, Nooch. Maybe you came on him too fast. Maybe he’s got a girl there to take care of him. Maybe he’s married. Maybe he’s gay.”

“None of the above,” I heard myself say.

“You hear about me, you come get her, okay?” Willy asked. “Briney’ll have cash money to pay her own way.”

“I’ve never seen anybody so enthusiastic,” she said, and walked out.

“What are you trying to do to me, Willy?”

“She sees a dumb bird in a tree singing, it’s the greatest bird ever, singing the best song in the world. It sets her up for hours. She hops up for the sunrise, and it starts off the best day she ever had-every day. She hums to herself all the day long. I turn on the TV, she leaves the room. She says it is like living secondhand. Every morning, every night, she stands on her head in a corner fifteen minutes.”

“Willy, you can’t give people to people.”

“You heard me say I’m dying? A dying guy can do what he wants. You hurt her feelings, right? In ten minutes she won’t even remember. Okay, you had a reason to come here. You’ve never come to see me without a reason.”

“Do you stay in touch?”

“Guys stop by. We do a little talking. I’ve been dropping business, spreading it around, mostly unloading it on the people doing the work. All I got left is a little bit of numbers and some sharking that is being paid off slow. So I know mostly what is going on.”

“So you lost some friends lately?”

“What I lost was some guys I knew.”

“What about Ruffino Marino?”

“One of the ones I knew. Not too bad of a guy. I read once about a cowboy escaping from the Indians. What he did, he walked backward across a sandy place and he had this big leafy tree limb and he brushed out his footprints. That was Big Ruffi. He got big in the Church, and all that. A thousand years ago he was a button man out of Cleveland, doing invitation jobs in Vegas and Pittsburgh and wherever. So he gets to be a big man in the community, million-dollar condo, wife and four kids, the youngest nineteen and all of them out of the house, and they come in and stick him like a pig.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I heard what people are guessing, though. I heard he tried to put the lid on something Ruffi Junior did. There’s a legitimate crazy He wants to be some kind of a hero but he doesn’t know what kind. Some girl from a very important South American family that works close with the drug people here, she got herself raped and killed during some kind of drug hustle, and it wouldn’t have happened if anybody knew who she really was. Anyway, Ruffi Junior went to his old man and confessed he’d been a part of the scene. He swore he hadn’t killed anybody, and didn’t know that his pal, Bobby Dermon, was going to kill three people until it was done.

“Big Ruffi was probably sore as boils that his oldest kid was getting into a drug thing after the old man had dry-cleaned the family name. Ruffi Junior had boats, airplones, fast cars, anything he wanted. The old man tried to put the lid on it. After all, his son hadn’t killed anybody. It was his son’s friend, Bobby. But somehow the whole Latin crowd got word that Ruffi Junior had killed the girl. They came after Big Ruffi and he gave them Dermon.

“They took Dermon someplace and they didn’t kill him. I heard they probably took him to a warehouse where it wouldn’t matter if he screamed, and they hot-vvired him and kept plugging him in until they got the very same story over and over, and it turned out it had been Ruffi Junior all along. People think that by then Dermon wasn’t going to live anyway, so they took a Polaroid shot of him, and they sent the photo and the tape to Big Ruffi and they put Dermon into a condo foundation one of them was building down past Dinner Key. They asked for Ruffi Junior. Big Ruffi said he was gone, and he didn’t know where. Frank Pochero had been involved in the Dermon thing, so they threw a grenade into his convertible. Then Hanrahan was blown up on general principles, and it spread from there. A war, like old times.”

“Now it’s quiet?”

“I hear it is quiet but it is tense. Big Ruffi got it for trying to put the lid on and not telling them where to find his kid.”

“Why all the others?”

“Why not? All it ever was was a working arrangement. When it starts to come apart, then people get what maybe they asked for in other deals a while back. Maybe short weight or short money-just a suspicion, not enough to rock the boat for. Once it opens up you pay back old scores. And new ones.”

“Anybody have any idea where Ruffi Junior is?”

“Nobody knows. Maybe he’s in Toronto, or maybe he’s in Tampa. Wherever he is, he’s scared shitless. He’s sending out for food, booze and broads.”

“He wasn’t at the Mass.”

“So I heard. Nobody thought he’d be there, but they covered it anyway. You were there?”

“I kind of want him.”

“Do yourself a favor. You get a line on him, don’t dirty your hands. Call me and I’ll get the word to the right place.”

“It’s a little more personal than that.”

“Why should it be personal?”

“I got to the three people he killed before the law did.”

He smiled and shook his head. “You are a nutcake like Ruffi Junior. Not the same kind, but just as nutty. What are you? The Spotless Avenger? Whyn’t you go find work in a comic book? Ruffi is a sad sorry little creep who can’t walk past a mirror without stopping and smiling at himself.”

“Okay. Maybe, if I find him, maybe I’ll call you.”

There was a sudden twist of pain on his face, a spasm of one arm. He smiled again. “Don’t take too long. Go get Briney.”

I found her in the kitchen. She hurried to him. “A bad one, kid,” he said. She trotted out of the room and came back with a hypo kit. She flipped his robe open, turned him to expose a wasted haunch and shot him, scrubbed the place with cotton dipped in alcohol.

Willy said apologetically, “It’s spread to places where it hurts. Listen. McGee. You’ve got everything. Don’t piss your life away because you got some kind of blues. Honest to God, I never started to live until I found out I was dying. You promise you’ll come get Briney?” His voice was getting slurred. She was where he could not see her, bobbing her head violently at me, frowning.

“Who am I to turn down something like that?”

“Atta boy. That’s using the old…” And the next inhalation was a snore.

She walked over to a chair and dropped into it, crossed her arms, lowered her chin to her chest. I saw one tear fall to her lap. She raised her head and gave me a sweet sad smile. She spoke softly. “He was really glad to see you. I’m glad you came. I hope you’ll come back soon. Please. He is not all that glad to see some of the other people who visit him. Some of them are very weird. Some of them, I have to leave the room while they talk. Thanks for telling him you’d come after me.”

“It’s a pretty strange offer.”

“He’s a funny old guy. He thinks I’m some dumb little kid he has to find a foster home for. Stuff is an old buddy of his. Stuff heard he was very depressed and he’d have to have around-the-clock nursing or go into a nursing home to die. So he sent me like a present. Only what he did was give me round-trip airfare and ten thousand dollars to come cheer Willy up, make him feel part of life again. It took a little while but I nudged him out of it. He can accept dying now. We talk about it. He’s beginning to think of it as some kind of an adventure. A trip. He hates the needle because it takes him out of it, takes away some of what he has left. He hates to sleep at night. He talks to me about the old days. He hasn’t got anybody else in the world. That must really be hell on wheels, to have nobody at all. He says he wasted his whole life and if he gets another life to live, it’ll be different.”

“I’ve never heard of a better present.”

She shrugged. “So you do what you can. I gave him Demerol, so he’ll be out four hours. Do come back.”

She took me to the door. I looked back at her and said, “People are always giving you presents and then taking them back.”

She winked at me. “Ain’t it hell?”

Seventeen

WHEN I walked into the lounge of the Busted Flush my phone was ringing.

Millis said, “Trav? My God, I bet I’ve called you thirty times. A friend of mine is here and he would like you to talk to him.”

“Put him on.”

“No. He wants you to come here.”

“Who is he?”

“He goes sailing in the mornings.”

“Oh. Well, sure. Give me a half hour.”

When she let me into the duplex, the sea through the great windows was a soft shade of gray and there were streaks of rose and pink in the eastern sky the afterglow of the unseen sunset behind us. They had not yet turned on the lights. Jornalero struggled up from a deep chair to shake my hand. He seemed to have lost the flavor of confidence and authority. His voice was softer, subdued. Millis brought drinks and turned on a low lamp on the table between our chairs. Our chairs were at right angles to each other. The light winked on the ice in his drink as he raised it to his lips. It left his face in shadow. Millis sat off to my left in darkness, sat yoga-fashion on a low square table surfaced in squares of ornamental tile. I had the feeling that she sat off to the side like that when Jornalero was keeping her, when he had asked men to come to the place he rented for her, to talk their business in safety.

“Was it what you hoped would happen?” he asked.

“I didn’t know what would happen.”

“A craziness,” he said. “Madness. Hatred. I have lost valued friends. Friends of many years. I’ve sent my wife far away, just in case. There isn’t any meaning to it anymore. Tit for tat. That’s all it is. You kill my friend, I kill your friend, you kill me, my brother kills you. Did you know it would be like this, McGee, when you told me about Ruffino’s boy?”

“I didn’t. Browder did.”

“Who is Browder?”

“An undercover agent with the DEA. He hoped it would be like this. He’s dead.”

“Why would anybody hope for this? Fathers and sons. Husbands.”

“He said that if you shake the tree, the ripe fruit falls out. He told me the law can’t touch you, Mr. Jornalero. He said you might possibly be indicted for violating laws about foreign currency exchange, but probably never convicted in any way that would stick.”

“Then he is the one who told you about the mules?”

“That’s right.”

“I wondered. That was a long time ago. I am three and four times removed from any of that. I am a legitimate businessman.”

“But you launder the cash.”

He didn’t answer directly. He seemed to be looking off into the distance, into the final fading streak of rose. “Sometimes it comes in cardboard boxes,” he said. “Thirty and forty at a time. Supermarket boxes. Lux soap. Shredded wheat. Grapefruit juice. Sealed with silver duct tape. Fives, tens, twenties, fifties, hundreds. Just thrown in and packed down and they had no idea how much was there. They take my word. My word is always good. I’ve got two girls who do nothing but sort it, count it and band it. They won’t have much to do, for a while. Not for very long, though. Then it will start flowing again. It has to come somewhere. It has to come to a safe place.”

“Three percent?” I asked.

He sighed. “Three to some. Four to others.” He turned toward me and his tone changed. “My damned fool countrymen did a number on Tom Beccali last night.”

“Who is he?”

“A prominent area businessman. Like me. Like Ruffino. I told them enough was enough. It’s over. Forget it. But they thought the scales were out of balance. He won’t be missed for some time. He travels a great deal. He is at the bottom of the ocean. The police don’t know that, and the news people don’t know it, but they know it. And I’m the logical response. Millis said I have to have your permission.”

“For what?”

“He wants to be my house guest for a few days, maybe longer.”

“I have no say in the matter. It’s up to you.”

“It was the only place I could think of,” he said.

“Why my permission?” I asked Millis.

“Arturo used the wrong word,” she said. “I meant more like advice. Could it be a bad idea?”

“Who knows you’re here?” I asked him.

“No one outside this room. And two men downstairs.”

“But there are people who know you two used to be friends?”

“Yes. Quite a few.”

She broke in. “But the security here is good. I can tell anybody I’m alone here. He’ll stay out of sight. What do you think, Travis?”

“It’s up to you. But don’t the security people downstairs know his name?”

“I used a different name.”

She stirred uneasily. “Fortez,” she said. “One hell of a shock.”

He leaned toward me, putting his empty glass down. “Mr. McGee, even if I had known it would all go this far, I still would have had to pass along your information about young Ruffi. There were some doubts about it for a time. But not after his friend Bobby Dermon was… interrogated. They flew down to the Keys in a float plane Ruffi borrowed from a friend. They both boarded that boat. The man who’d made the buy had hidden the money and the product and he tried to negotiate a better deal. They tied him up and questioned him. Dermon kept the women from trying to leave. Once they found the money and the shipment, they raped the women. Ruffi killed both the women. Dermon suffocated the man by jamming the money into his mouth. Her uncle in Lima now has the full story. I wanted to talk to you to tell you nobody wants you dead, not anymore.”

“How about Ruffi?”

“He will be found. Sooner or later. There is a reward. A big one. And so the interest is high. He is the rabbit in the forest with ten thousand wolves.”

“Nothing that happens is going to resurrect Billy Ingraham,” I said.

“Or many, many others,” Jornalero said.

“But Billy was an innocent bystander,” I told him.

“Innocent people and guilty people are killed every day Stray bullets in small wars. Fog on the Interstates. If innocence could keep us alive, my friend, we’d all be saints.”

“I’m sure Billy would be very comforted to hear that, Jornalero, especially from the lips of a man who’s made it big in the world’s dirtiest business, an unctuous, well-dressed, high-living son of a bitch who may have even convinced himself he isn’t doing anything rotten. All you do is make all the rest of it possible by keeping it profitable.”

“Trav!” Millis said sharply.

“I do a lot of good in the world,” Arturo said. “The rest of it is a small favor for old friends.”

I grinned at him. “I know. Somebody has to do it. Right? Now your hide is at risk too, Artie. I hope they find you.”

“Goddamn it!” Millis said. “Who are you to get so Christly? From stuff Billy told me about you…”

“I never told you I was perfect. Have a happy reunion, kids.”

After I was back aboard my refuge, drinking by a single low light, with Edye singing along with the Tres Panchos in the background, I mourned the sappiness of my exit lines. I had used old Arturo to get myself off the hook, and then took some swings at him. Somewhere there are in telligent and highly skilled design engineers working the bugs out of ever more deadly weapons-lasers to blind armies, multiple multiple warheads, flames that stick to flesh and can’t be extinguished, heat beams to fry the crews inside their tanks. And they pack up the printouts and turn off the computers and have a knock with the guys on the way home to the kiddies. Somebody has to do it. Right?

Night and gin and music-the right setting for peeling off the thin clinging layers of bullshit and finding one’s way down closer to the essential self. I had let loose on Jornalero because I had been disturbed by the feeling of the relationship between him and Millis. A residual fondness, a product of years shared. And that of course could be peeled back to reveal a dissatisfaction with myself for having sought out sex with her. That first time was by her invitation. From then on by my design. The proceedings had been very skillful, orgasms noteworthy, pleasure intense. But I had not gotten one millimeter past the surface gloss of those tilted green eyes. Though our actions had elicited a wide range of sounds and responses from her, from little yelps to earthy groans, she was just about as real to me as would have been one of those blowup pneumatic ladies Japanese sailors tote aboard for the long freighter trips and stow in little satchels under the bunk until needed. They now make them with microprocessors, little motors, long-life batteries and voice boxes: Crever people.

So, as Edye sings of her corazуn, peel back another leaf. I had wanted the curiously impersonal relationship with Millis because I did not want to set up any new emotional debts or obligations. I wanted no involvement in any significant dimensions. I wanted Millis as a receptacle.

So, recharge the glass with more ice and Boodles, change the tape and go back and peer under the next leaf. Why no emotional involvement? Because there was nothing left in the inventory. Nothing left to give. I had said “forever” too many times to too many people. I had spent my stock. I was bankrupt.

With the next leaf pulled back I discovered that the bankruptcy was what was souring the look of my world. That led me back to Willy Nucci’s concern and advice.

But, for God’s sake, you can’t suddenly spring up and clap your hands and say, “Hey, what a wonderful world!” Piss and vinegar can’t be summoned on command. The muted colors of a muted life will not suddenly brighten because you think it a good idea they should. What could I look forward to otherwise? To a winding down? To becoming a sour, peevish old bastard, too stubborn to admit loneliness. Long ago I had been unable to commit myself totally when I should have. And later, when I wanted to, the timing was tragic. But as Jornalero had pointed out, the bad things happen to the innocent and to the guilty without reference to their desires or merit.

The answer, of course, would be under the next leaf. So I peeled it back and there it was. Nothing! Just a little hole in the middle, protected by all the folded leaves of self-deception. McGee, the empty vessel. The orifice had at one time been packed full of juice and dreams. Promises. Now there was a little dust at the bottom of it. Some webs across it. It is to moan, beat the breast, tear the hair. I had no smart retort, nothing witty to say to myself. I was ten thousand times better off than Willy Nucci physically. But in spirit, he was laps ahead.

So I pulled myself away from the dubious pleasures of introspection and self-analysis. Think about Ruffino Marino the Second. A smart-ass. Vain. Tricky. Violent. What would he be thinking now? I could assume he had sense enough to be terrified. They had gotten into the old man’s fortress and slit his fat throat in bed as he slept. He had awakened, dying, unable to make a sound, able to thrash a little but not enough to awaken his wife.

He would probably know Bobby Dermon was gone too. To run and to hide takes the motivation of terror. To run and hide well takes money. Lots of it. Assume he was able to grab it before he started running.

Okay, even though he couldn’t act, he probably thought of himself as an actor. Out of his vanity he would think his face would be recognized anywhere. I got out the publicity shot of him and studied it. Take off most of that glossy black hair, down to a boot camp cut. Dye it pale blonde. Dye the brows too. Pad out those flat cheeks with some cotton behind the side teeth. Glasses with gold rims. New ID, Nordic name, fake address, a history easy to memorize. To trace somebody, you have to know their habits, their tastes. In time they slip up. A man cannot change himself into somebody else. When there is no great urge to find a man, he can stay lost. No problem there. The countryside is full of men with new identities.

I decided it would be stupid romanticism to believe for an instant that I could find him. I believed also that young Marino did not have the discipline or control to get lost and stay lost. He couldn’t let himself fade into the woodwork. Too much ego. Too much restlessness and recklessness.

I was startled by the bong of someone stepping on the mat on the aft deck next to the small gangplank. When there was no knock at my door, I took the little Airweight from its temporary resting place in the back of the yellow couch, wedged into the springs and padding behind an inconspicuous slit in the fabric, and went to the door, staying well off to one side as I flicked the switch for the outside light. I looked out cautiously and saw nothing.

After five minutes of listening and waiting, I went forward, up into the bow, released the hatch, lifted it a few inches and listened, then folded it back silently, eeled out and squatted in half darkness. Nothing. Nothing on the side decks or up on the sun deck. Nothing on the bow or stern.

I went down through the bow hatch, dogged it from below and went back through the lounge to turn out the aft deck light. Then it occurred to me that maybe someone had left a note.

It was not exactly a note. It was three more pipe-cleaner cats arranged in a row at the edge of the mat. A black one, a white one and a gray one. If it was some kind of kid trick, the point eluded me. Now I had five of the beasts. Again there was the tiny tug at memory. It was like trying to remember the name of a place you had visited long ago. All I knew was that if I could retrieve the memory, it would be saddening somehow. I had not liked that place.

I picked them up to flip them into the trash tin, then changed my mind and brought them in. I locked the door, turned out the light and put the cats with their prior visitors-the two colorful ones-on a shelf with a raised lip near my bed. I put them in the order of delivery. The red one shortly after New Year’s Day, the blue one a week later. And now, on the thirtieth, in order-black, gray, white. A code of some kind? R-B-B-G-W. Someone was trying to tell me something, but the message wasn’t clear. Cat, kitten, feline, tomcat, puss, pussycat. Nothing there to remind me of anything except a woman I had known once, who died long ago.

The last day of January was warm and gentle, with a breeze from the southwest moving the kind of air that makes the snowbirds get off the airplanes and say, “Ah!”

I walked to the hotel and bought a morning paper to go with a stunted breakfast of juice and coffee. Nothing about any Tom Beccali. The murders looked ordinary. A Haitian had drowned his crippled sister in a bathtub. A drunk passed out in his own driveway and his wife ran over him with a Ford station wagon-seven or eight times. A naked secretarial trainee had shoved an ice pick into her supervisor. A crazy had burst into the bus terminal at a full gallop, firing at random blacks with a.22 target pistol, killed one, slightly wounded four. A thirteen-year-old girl had shot a fourteen-year-old boy to death in a dispute about whose turn it was to ride a bicycle. Everyday stuff the kind of thing you read about in every urban paper in the land. Minor characters in the play buying lifetime regret. People scuffling around, trying to make sense out of the mismatched parts of their lives.

I walked over to see Meyer, but he was out and the Veblen was locked up. The chairs had been taken in off the cockpit deck, so it looked as if he would be gone a while. And he hadn’t even mentioned going anywhere. So I had not been mentioning where I was going lately. The hell with him. The hell with everybody on every vessel in the whole damn yacht basin and every other yacht basin and boat dock within a forty-mile radius.

When I got back there was a man up on my sun deck. He looked down at me over the stern rail and smiled a- merry smile. “Welcome aboard,” he said. He was a brown man with a lantern jaw, blue eyes, dingy teeth. He wore a white shirt open to the belly to show a good rippling of the kind of chest muscles you get from weights. He had three gold strands around his neck. His ears stood straight out like Mortimer Snerd’s. He had on blue shorts and running shoes. He had a brown purse on a long narrow shoulder strap. He had a pale brown brush cut and bushy sideburns that came down past his ears. I guessed they were to draw attention from the ears, but instead they seemed to highlight them. When I climbed up to the sun deck and saw him at closer range I could see how the weights had built his arm and leg muscles. He stood about five ten, a very solid five ten.

“And you would be…”

“Let me get a look at you. I been interested in you.”

“That’s nice. I can’t think of anything I want to buy today. What are you selling? Muscle building?”

He kept his smile. “Hey, that’s pretty good. My hobby is the old bod. Treat it right and it treats you right. Where can we talk?”

“Right here.”

“McGee, let’s at least get a little bit under cover. Like over there where you steer this thing. Suppose somebody took a shot at me and hit you instead, after all you’ve been through.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m the Foreman, pal. I’m the Capataz.” And as he passed me on the way toward the wheel, he whacked me on the arm. He sat in the pilot seat and left the copilot seat to me. He swiveled around toward me.

“You sent those three clowns after me?” I asked.

“Listen, Rick, Louie and Dean are not the very best in the world, but they’re pretty good. I mean, they were pretty good. You did a hell of a job on Sullivan. The bone guy says it was a twisting impact, and the legs were turning as you went over them. So all he could do was freeze both knee joints. Rick is going to walk like one of those electric people, you know.”

“Like a robot.”

“That’s it.”

“He happened to get in the way.”

“You see a robot coming, duck. He wants you so bad he can taste it. You don’t need to worry about Dean Matan. He got taken out in the troubles.”

“Why did you come here?”

Still smiling, he said, “There aren’t too many places left I can go, you want to know the truth. A lot of things are over for good. Over and done. Browder was a plant. It didn’t take too long to figure that out. But what he turned in didn’t do much damage. They just change the routes around a little, zig instead of zag. They lose a little that’s coming in, and they lose a little in transshipment. But there you are. For the little guys like me, it’s nothing much, right? But the boss men, they’ve gone crazy. There they were, tucked back out of sight, no way to pin a thing on any of them, and they go nuts. I don’t know what it is. Why should it make so much difference that Ruffi the actor killed the Reyes kid? Maybe it’s because there’s been too much money for too long. Or things have been easy for too long. What we got here, you’d think it was Jews and Palestinians. All of a sudden everybody hates everybody. My boss ends up in the back of a car, fried. I get orders to take out the boss of the people who took my boss out, so I did. Now they are working their way down the list. So I hang around, my head is going to roll. I got warned day before yesterday. What is it, something in the air down here? I can’t even get to my safety-deposit box. I’ve got a little over forty dollars. Think of that! Cappy, who had it all made. Who’d believe it?”

“Why did you come here? What do you want with me?”

He didn’t seem to hear the question. “The big hassle is over. Annoyed the shit out of the politicians and the developers. Tourism is down already, and all of a sudden all over the country there’s news pictures of dead bodies. It has to hurt. So the pressure is on to stop it, but it won’t stop it. I mean, it will be a lot more quiet. But it will keep happening for a while. You have to get the scales dead even. After that happens the money machine gets cranked up to full speed again, and the payoffs get made and the product comes in and gets shipped out, and dollars get turned into pesos and sent south. The coke base will come in by ship and they’ll keep cooking it into white lady out in those garages in the suburbs, and the money will roll.” He turned to look directly at me. “And I need twenty thousand dollars. I think six months will clear things up. I’ve got a place I can go. When I can come back and get to my box, I’ll pay you back thirty.”

“I don’t have that kind of cash money.”

“I think you do.”

“If I did, why would I give it to you?”

“It would be a loan, like I told you.”

“Absolutely no way.”

“You haven’t heard about the sweetener. As a kind of bonus, I’ll give you young Ruffi. You can sell him to the Latinos. I can’t get close enough to them to make a deal without getting myself hurt.”

“How would I go about getting close?”

“I can give you a name. You could come out of this in real good shape. Invest twenty and you get back thirty from me plus what you can sell him for.”

“How do I know Ruffi will be where you say he’ll be? How do I know you’ll ever come back?”

“You go through this world looking for guarantees, McGee, you’ll live small.”

“Where is he?”

“Money in hand, and I tell you.”

“Half the money in hand until I see him.”

He thought it over for a slow ten count and then said, “Let’s give it a shot.”

Eighteen

I HAD been planning on turning the rental Buick in after breakfast. But Cappy said he would not ride in that crazy Rolls pickup of mine. He said Dean had told him about it. He said it was too conspicuous. He took a pair of very dark sunglasses out of his purse and put them on and asked me if I had a hat he could use. He said he had lost his in the night, running down an alley. I found him an old white canvas fishing hat with a Sherlock Holmes shape. He pulled it well down on his head.

“Button up the shirt,” I said, “and take off the jewelry.”

“I never b… Oh, hell yes. It’s hard to keep from being stupid.”

After I got him into the car, I said I had forgotten to get the key to my box. I knew he would stay put. He got edgy whenever he was out in the open. I got the ten in hundreds. Divided the pack into two parts and inserted them into the two flat black packets that Velcro neatly just below my knees.

I drove to the branch bank near the marina where I have a safety-deposit box. I left him in the car in the lot and after the girl helped me unlock the little door, I carried my box into one of their little phone-booth rooms. I have it only because there are a few little items I would not care to have sunk or burned. Pictures of my mother and father and brother, all long gone. Birth certificate. Army discharge. Some yellowed clippings of my brief prowess as a tight end before they spoiled my knees. One theater ribbon, one Purple Heart, one Silver Star with citation for Sergeant McGee. A smiling photograph of Gretel Howard, another of Puss Killian, a few-a very few-letters, a copy of my will, which Meyer keeps telling me should not be in a safety-deposit box. I took the brown envelope in which the will had been, and put the hundred hundreds into it, a stack not an inch thick.

When I got back to the car he looked asleep with his hand over his eyes, but when I opened the door on my side, the blued muzzle of an automatic pistol flicked up and stared at me across his thigh. Then it was gone and he straightened up and said, “Sorry, pal. I thought I saw visitors. Got it?”

“Put away the gun.”

“Sure.”

“Here it is. Count it.”

He held it well below the dash, below the level of his knees. He took two bills out at random, bent forward and examined them very carefully. He sighed, smiled, put them back in the envelope and slid the envelope into the zippered pocket on the back of the brown leather shoulder bag.

“Keep much in the box?”

“Millions,” I said. “Untold millions.” I’ve never kept money in the box. Money is expendable. It can always be replaced, one way or another.

“My problem was keeping too much in the box and not enough around loose. But who’d think things would get so jammed up I’m like on some kind of a list?”

“Where to?”

“What we’ve got to do is get a look at him. You, not me. So you know it’s him. We have to do it without making him jumpy, or he’ll run, God knows where. It isn’t going to be easy. He’s maybe up to twenty or thirty lines a day. That’s how he got into all this. That stuff makes you think you can do anything and get away with it. He’s using enough to make him very hard to figure, but not enough to make him easy to take. Years ago he used to be not too bad of a little kid. But they gave him the moon and the stars. The oldest kid, the favorite.”

“Where to?”

“We’re going to have to work out something. I won’t tell you where, but I’ll tell you what. What you’ve got is an asphalt two-lane road running along the side of a canal. No trees growing close to the canal. Then you’ve got a wooden bridge that is kind of a hump that crosses the canal. The canal is maybe fifteen feet wide, I don’t know how deep. There’s a one-story frame house on the other side of the plank bridge, set back twenty or thirty feet. It’s got an aluminum carport on one side, big enough for one car. In back of the cottage and on either side is like jungle. Maybe there’s a way back through there. I never tried. At night there’s a big bright barn light fastened to the front of the house, lights up the whole place. It’s got electric and a telephone.”

“How do you know so much about it?”

“I stayed there waiting for a man to come home. He was doing ten to life in Raiford and they let him out in a little over six. That was last year. I don’t want to get into all the whys and wherefores. Put it this way. It was the kind of scene you have to do it yourself and not put somebody else on it. So I was there with his wife and kid, waiting. It took him four days to get home. She was scared out of her wits he’d be too much for me. She hated the bastard. We kept the kid out of school. The kid had her orders-the minute he arrives, she shuts herself in her room. It went quick and easy and the woman and me, we dragged him way back into the saw grass and water and palmetto and slid him into a gator pond and put cement blocks on him to hold him down. Then we let the kid out and they hugged each other and they both cried, but they weren’t crying for old Daddy. They were crying for happy.”

“Ruffi’s there now?”

“He lets her go shopping while he stays with the kid. She’s eleven years old. The woman hasn’t dared try anything. I left her my phone number last year. Nice woman. She phoned me from the supermarket ten miles down the road, asked for help. She said he was starting to mess with her kid. I said I’d try, but I didn’t tell her that right at that point in time I was trying to figure some way of getting out of my place without getting myself killed. It was staked out very tight. That was yesterday.”

“How did she know his name?”

“She didn’t. I asked her what he looks like. She told me and said he came in a white Mercedes convertible and it is in her carport with tarps hiding it. It’s Ruffi.”

“So why don’t you go take care of him and pick up his cash?”

“First, because I happen to know he got out without hardly any. It cost him what he was carrying to bribe his way out. Second, I don’t know if I could take him. It’s hard to tell what a nutcake will do next. And Ruffi is quick and tricky. And he’s the one sent me there last year, so he knew the layout.”

“So why don’t you make a phone call and sell the information?”

“The people that want Ruffi don’t buy information from dead people. I’m on the list, so I’m dead. There’s some others on the list too, running like hell, or holed up someplace.”

“Why did you come to me?”

“Jesus H. Christ, McGee! I happened to find out you told Art Jornalero about Ruffi cutting throats down there in the Keys, and that’s what started the whole shit storm. I heard you want him. How should I know? Maybe he killed friends of yours. People living around on boats, the kind of rent you have to pay at places like Pier 66 and Bahia Mar, you have to have some money. I knew where to find you from when they told me you should have an accident.”

“What kind?”

“Dean was in charge. He was going to work something out.”

“What’s the woman’s name?”

“Irina Casak. The kid is Angie. The RFD box is out by the road next to the bridge. It says Casak on it in red paint.”

“What name does she know you by?”

“Good question. Maybe the way you took my guys out, it wasn’t all dumb luck. She knew me as Ben Smith.”

“What kind of car does she have?”

“Last year it was a yellow Volkswagen bug, pretty beat up. Maybe she’s got the same one now. I don’t know. Do you know him by sight?”

“From a publicity still. I wouldn’t forget the eyelashes.”

“So what we got now, McGeer I take you there and we have to figure out some way you get a look at him without stampeding him. You’re satisfied, we come back and you loan me the other ten and I give you the name you can sell him to. You’ll have to work out your own arrangements to keep from getting screwed on the payoff. Done right, you’ll end up smelling like roses.”

So we went to take a look. It took an hour and forty minutes to get there, first south and then west. A lonely road on the edge of the Glades. Lumpy asphalt running string-straight through wetlands past wooded hammocks where the white birds sat on bare trees like Christmas doodads, thinking white bird thoughts.

He told me when to start slowing. We cruised past the bridge and the mailbox at a sedate thirty-five. I saw a yellow beetle pulled halfway into the carport on the left side of the frame house. The house was gray with green trim, and I had a glimpse of a broken rocking chair on the shallow porch, bed springs in the side yard, a swing made of a tire.

“Same car as before, parked in front of his,” Cappy said.

Two miles down the road I found a shell road off to the right. It went about fifty feet before it went underwater. I pulled in and turned off the motor. I rolled my window down and heard ten billion bugs saying it was a nice warm day.

“We can’t risk going by more than one more time,” I said. “I didn’t know there’s no neighbors at all. Who would have a reason for stopping there?”

“Mailman, meter reader. Look, maybe the easy thing to do is you take my word he’s in there, and sell him.”

It was momentarily tempting. The shabby house in the swampy setting had an ominous look. And I didn’t want to sell Ruffi to the people who would take him out too quickly. I wanted to sell him to the law, for ten cents’ worth of satisfaction. I wanted to untie the knot in my necktie. I wanted Ruffi to make some ineffectual attempts to maintain his ego and his vanity in jail.

We had passed the supermarket and shopping plaza ten miles back the other side of a village. So I headed back there as soon as I found out Cappy could remember Irina Casak’s phone number.

The plaza was anchored by a big Kmart. As I sat brooding in the car, Cappy began to get impatient with me. “What’s going on?”

“Deep thought. She have television?”

“Little old black-and-white RCA.”

When I told him the plan, he didn’t like it at all. The second time around. he thought better of it. The third time I told him, he made minor changes. I would turn around after I came across the bridge and park heading out, and I would leave the Buick keys in the ignition. He assured me before I phoned her that there was just the one telephone:

“Hello?” she said, her voice soft and hesitant.

“Irina, this is a friend of Ben Smith. I want to help you. Is the man there?”

“Yes.”

“Can he hear you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You tell him you ordered a color TV from Kmart and it has just come in and they are coming out to deliver it in an hour.”

“But I…”

“You ordered it two months ago. I’m bringing it out.”

I heard a man’s voice in the background. “What’s going on.”

She turned to him and said, “The Kmart is sending out my new color TV.”

“Tell them you don’t want it.”

“But I ordered it…”

He came on the line. “She changed her mind.”

“It’s all paid for, Mr. Casak. I’m the manager of the television and electronics department here at Kmart and I have to come out that way on personal business and I thought I could kill two birds with one stone instead of having Mrs. Casak come in here to get it. It’s our best table model, guaranteed parts and labor for six months. A really beautiful reception even in fringe areas like you have out there.”

“Well… okay. Bring it out. Leave it on the front porch.”

I had counted on boredom to sway him. He was used to a wider world. I didn’t know what his plans were, but I imagined he wanted to stay right there until the trail was cold, and then go whizzing away in his little white car.

I took back the cash from Cappy to buy the set, $439 plus tax or $460.95 with tax. The clerk gave me a cash receipt form and a claim slip to present at Customer Services near the loading dock. Cappy grumbled about giving up the money. He said there was no way I was going to get into the house.

I found a place to pull off the road on the way back. The big cardboard carton was in the Buick trunk. An inch bigger and the trunk wouldn’t have closed. I opened the carton and got the set out, then took it out of the clear plastic that sheathed it. I put Cappy’s flat little.32 automatic in the plastic sack where it would be close to my right hand when I reached down into the carton and lifted the set out, with the screen facing away from me. Cappy didn’t like that part either. I had made certain there was a full clip and the safety was off. I had fired once into the woods to see how it felt. It had a nasty, flat, cracking sound. He said it was a spare, all he could pick up when he left in a hurry, and he didn’t like it either. He said it was Czech, and badly made.

I set off again with Cappy on the floor in back. I rumbled over the private plank bridge, turned around in the yard and parked with the front wheels inches from the bridge. I got out, whistling, and walked around to the trunk and opened it. Whistling is disarming. It can’t be done with a dry mouth. I had to gnaw at the inside of my cheek to get enough spit to whistle.

I lifted the carton out and carried it to the porch, put it down beside the front door and knocked. I knocked again and again. “Oh, Mrs. Casak! Mrs. Casak?” I called, and thumped the door.

“Go away!” yelled Ruffino Marino, Junior.

“She has to sign the delivery slip.”

“Sign it yourself, dummy!”

“But I can’t do that. Mrs. Casak has to sign.” The door opened just enough for her to slip out. “Just sign right here,” I said cheerfully, putting the cash receipts on the carton and handing her a balipoint. I pocketed the receipt and dipped and lifted the set in its plastic sack out of the carton. “Will you get the manual and guarantee out of the carton, please, Mrs. Casak? Thank you. Now we have to make sure there’s nothing wrong with the set. It wasn’t checked at the store. It’s better to check them out at the customer’s home. Open up, please.”

She was terrified. She was shaking. But she turned the knob and pushed the door open. I carried the set in. I caught a glimpse of Ruffi in the doorway to the kitchen.

“You dumb bitch!” he yelled as he moved back out of sight. I had seen only that his hair was tousled and he had blue beard shadow on his jaws. Up until that instant I hadn’t been certain Cappy was pulling some kind of elaborate scam.

I ignored him. I had her move the black-and-white set off the low table it was on. I put the new set on the floor, reached down into the plastic bag and lifted the set out, with my fingertips holding the automatic pistol against the underside of the set. I put the set so far to the front of the low table I was able to ease the weapon out from under it and leave it on a couple of inches of table behind the color set.

Chatting merrily about what a good set it was, I plugged it in and I took the aerial leads off the black-and-white set and fastened them to the new one. When I turned it on I got a splendid picture on Channel 5, and I quickly jiggered one of the back side controls until I started the picture rolling slowly. And then, of course, I was very concerned.

“I can’t imagine why this is happening, Mrs. Casak. I’m very sorry about this. I don’t understand it.”

She stood near me, breathing through her open mouth, almost panting with nervousness. Her breath was sour. She was a flat-faced pallid woman with a wide flat nose and so much dark discoloration around her eyes she made me think of a raccoon. The cotton dress, sweaty, revealed a ripe, big-breasted, serviceable body. Her face was twisted with alarm. Her fists were clenched.

So I couldn’t depend on her to play her part in the original scenario. I fixed the horizontal hold and got the good picture back. I motioned her to back away from me. I yelled, “Mr. Casak! Hey Mr. Casak. Will you please come see if these color values are okay? Mr. Casak!”

He had to know I had seen him in the kitchen doorway. And he had to know that if I had recognized him, I probably wouldn’t be hollering for him.

He came into the living room, and glanced at the screen. “It’s okay, dummy. Get the hell out!”

I said, “I can make an adjustment in the back here to give it slightly less vivid color values.”

As my right hand closed on the grip of the pistol, I sensed movement out the corner of my eye and knew before I turned that he was too close.

Nineteen

WHEN I turned he was on the inside, clubbing my wrist away with a sharp and powerful swing of his left forearm. Before I could bring it back, he dropped away and kicked me on the point of the right elbow. Red-hot wires ran up into my shoulder and down to my fingertips, and the arm went slack, half numbed. The gun fell and skidded across the frayed grass rug. When he pounced toward it, bending to pick it up, I took one long stride and drop-kicked him in the stomach, lifting him clear of the floor.

Instead of quieting him, it galvanized him. He started bounding around like a big rubber ball, yelling sounds without words. I was in a small room with a crazy person. In hospital wards and precinct stations it takes six people to subdue one crazy. Six trained people. He came at me and drove me back against the wall, hit me a good one high on the left side of the head, and I went over, taking a tall cabinet with a glass door with me. When he spun to lunge for the gun, I dived forward and caught an ankle, hugged the foot to my chest and spun with it. He went down and turned with the foot, kicked me on top of the head with the free foot and tore loose. By then I had a glimpse of Irina holding the gun in both hands.

I yelled to her to throw it out the window. They were double-hung windows, the bottom sash up, screening across the bottom. As he reached for her she spun and flicked it through both layers of glass, out past the porch and into the dirt yard.

Roaring, he came back at me, swinging good punches. I could lift the numbed arm. I took the blows on my forearms and upper arms, protecting my head. It was like being hit with round rocks. When he saw what was happening, he came right down through the middle with an overhand right that hit the shelf of my jaw and knocked my mouth wide. My knees went loose and white rockets sailed behind my eyes. I bicycled backward and only the wall kept me from going down. I hit it hard enough to shake the house. Just as my head was beginning to clear I saw him coming at me again, and this time he launched himself into the air in some kind of strange scissor kick, coming at me feet first. I slid sideways along the wall, and with my good left arm operating well, I snatched at the heel of the lower of the two feet and whipped it as high as I could. The first thing that hit the floor was the back of his head. He rolled slowly up onto his hands and knees, shaking his head. Once again the dropkick. He came down on his back, rolled up, and as he came halfway up, I chopped him hard with the edge of my left hand, a diagonal blow just under the ear. He melted down onto the floor, eyes unfocused. And then he began to climb back to his feet, in slow motion. He was like some mythical monster that can’t be killed, blinking slowly, like a lizard.

As I was reaching to chop at him again, Cappy pushed by me, and with a wide swing laid the flat side of the automatic against the side of Ruffi’s curly head. It made a crisp, sickening sound. Ruffi lay down so hard his head bounced. There was a nearby scream and a plump young girl came running in to drop to her knees beside him. She had a fatty face, long straight brown hair, lipstick, mascara, little wide-apart breasts the size of baking-powder biscuits under a tight pink T-shirt. She wore short white shorts. “You kilt him!” she sobbed. “You shits kilt him!”

“Shut up, Angie,” said her mother in a tired voice.

“Don’t get too close to him,” I told Cappy. “He’ll play possum.”

“Not for a while, he won’t.”

“Something to tie him up with, Mrs. Casak?” She took me into the kitchen and opened a large low drawer. It was full of odds and ends of string, tape, rope, chain, screwdrivers. As I was selecting some rope, I noticed two little tubes of Miracle Glue, still in the store pack that can only be opened by gorillas. It would be easier and quicker.

I took the Miracle Glue into the living room. I nipped the tip off one tube and divided it evenly between the palms of his slack hands. Then I pulled his shirt high, crossed his arms and pressed the hands against the sides of his torso, against the hairless skin just above belt level. I rubbed them around a little bit, then pressed them hard against his body. In a few moments when I released his hands, they stayed right there. I used the second tube on the inside of one thigh, after pulling his shorts high, spreading it from just above the knee to halfway to the groin. I pressed the thighs together and in a few moments they clung.

He coughed and rolled his head from side to side and then opened his eyes.

When he couldn’t move his hands or his upper legs he frowned and muttered, “What’s going on?

“Miracle Glue has a hundred household uses,” I told him.

“Hey, Roof,” Cappy said. He turned his head to see Cappy. “Getting a nice bonus, you freak?”

“Get away from him! Get away!” a child-voice said from the other doorway, which I assumed led to back bedrooms: The voice trembled. She held a Ruger longbarrel.22 target pistol in two fat tan hands.

“Atta girl!” Ruffi said. “At’s my lover girl. Shoot them, sweetie. Shoot ‘em all and we’ll go away together and I’ll show you the whole world. Shoot the big bastard first.”

Cappy dropped to his knees and socketed the blued muzzle of his pistol in Ruffs left ear. He grinned at the child. “It better be me first, pumpkin. My finger will probably twitch, though, and it’ll come right out that other ear.”

Irina walked slowly toward her daughter, saying in a sing-song voice, “Shoot your mommy, dear. Go ahead, Angie. Shoot your mommy.”

The girl began crying. “But I love him and he loves me.”

Irina reached and took the target pistol out of the girl’s sagging hands. “He doesn’t love you, honey. He can’t love no eleven-year-old fat dumb kid. The only thing he loves is that thing that sticks out of the front of him. He stuck it into me a dozen times by promising if I let him he’d leave you alone. Then he got tired of me. So he started sticking it into you. He’d stick it into a gator if she’d lie quiet. And I know what I’m going to do to him so nobody else has to put up with him.”

She handed me the target pistol and as she did so her back was to Ruffi. She gave me a wink that screwed up the entire left side of her face. Some people can’t move the eyelid alone. It has to be half the face. I knew it meant she wanted to have her way. She went out into the kitchen and came back with poultry shears. They were slightly rusty but they looked able to cut through tough skin and chicken bone.

She knelt beside him and unzipped his shorts and reached in and pulled him out.

“Mom!” the child yelled. “Oh, Mom, no!”

Ruffi raised his head and looked down. “No, Irina, please.” He raised his knees and tried to scooch backward. She followed right along, moving sideways on her knees until his head reached the wall and he could move no further. He was circumcised and the glans was so bloodless with his fright it was a pallid lavender. She opened the shears and laid the penis between the blades.

He groaned, his face contorted, ashen.

“Want you to remember this, Ruff or Roof or whatever they call you. Anytime the rest of your life you get a chance to stick this thing into anybody or anything, you’re going to remember how steel feels and it won’t get hard.”

She gave it a little pinch with the shears for emphasis, then tucked it back into his shorts and zipped him up. She grunted to her feet. Ruffi was trembling, his eyes leaking.

Cappy had put the gun away, probably back into his shoulder bag. He went over and put his arm around Irina. She turned toward him, rested her forehead on his shoulder. “Thanks,” she said in a low voice. “Thanks for helping me one more time.”

He patted her. “We gone sell this cat to the Peruvians. Won’t bother you again.”

In a husky voice, Ruffi said, “Cappy, I can make you a good deal. More than you can peddle me for. I know where you can get to one hundred thousand dollars. I can’t get to it, but you can. ItIl be a better deal foryou.”

Cappy said to me, “You think of any reason we have to keep listening to all that shit?”

“None whatsoever.”

Cappy picked up the two tubes of glue, discarded one, squatted next to Ruffi and put one hand on Ruffi’s forehead to hold him still and dribbled the final bit of glue along his lips. He tossed the tube aside and then pinched the lips together, smiling up at me. He did too good a job. He left Ruffi all pooched out, looking as if he were about to kiss or whistle. Ruffi’s eyebrows went high and his cheeks hollowed as he tried to pull his mouth open.

“It’s gone nice and quiet around here,” Cappy said.

“Mmmm gh mmm. mm,” Ruffi said.

“I want to look around,” Cappy said. He went into the back of the house. The television was still on, the sound off. A woman who looked like an expensive hooker was apparently yelling bad things into the face of a man who looked like a hairdresser. They were both overdressed and standing in what could have been the bedroom of the departed Shah of Iran. So it was an afternoon soap, and I felt the hollowness of no lunch yet. My jaw creaked. I had sore bruises on both arms. My head ached.

“What about the TV?” Irina asked.

“Enjoy.”

She turned the sound up. Mother and daughter moved closer, watching and listening. Cappy came out of the back of the house carrying a tan leather duffel bag and a jar with a screw-top lid.

“These clothes will fit, and what I got here is maybe eleven or twelve ounces of prime white lady”

‘Leave me some!“ Angie yelled. ”You leave me some.“

Her mother stood up and Angie never saw the hard palm coming. It smacked her on the side of the face, spun her halfway around and dropped her onto her hands and knees. Angie scrambled to her feet and went bellering into her bedroom and slammed the door.

“Will she testify?” I asked Irina.

“Would that be a good idea?”

“I think so. He killed a couple of girls on a boat last year. Raped them and cut one’s throat and cracked the other one’s skull. I don’t think they’ll ever nail him for it. The only witness is dead. They can get him for this.”

“What charges?”

“Statutory rape. Corrupting the morals of a minor child.”

The woman nodded. “She’ll testify. By God, she’ll testify! He’s been here a week yesterday. I had to phone her in sick at school. He walked in on us like he owned the place.”

Cappy came in from outside. “McGee, I don’t think I’ll go back in with you for that other ten. On the same ratio when I pay off, you get fifteen. Wait a minute. You took five hundred back, so you’ll get… fourteen thousand two hundred fifty.”

“What are you going to do?”

“The big genius there with his mouth stuck together, he had the title and registration in the side pocket of that Mercedes out there. It shows no paper out on it. It’s got a little over four thousand miles on it, and give me a half hour I can sign his name better than he can. And I got a contact on Route 19 a little north of Clearwater. I can get thirty minimum for it in cash in ten minutes. I go back in with you, I’m taking an extra chance. I head west from here. How about you come out with me, Irina, and move that little junker of yours out of the way.”

He picked up the duffel bag, nodded to me and said, “See you around.”

“Hold it. You’re forgetting something.”

He snapped his fingers. The three of us went out. He led me away from Irina and said, “What you do, you go to the magazine stand in the lobby of the Contessa over on the Beach and you find a girl works there name of Alice. She’s got little half glasses. You tell her you want to see Lopez. She’ll say she doesn’t know any Lopez. You tell her the Capataz told you to ask her. Wait until there’s no tourists around. Okay? Try for fifty. What the hell. See you around. You got good moves, McGee.”

He put the top up on the Mercedes. I moved the Buick back out of the way. He gunned the white car a few times, then put it in gear and went rumbling over the hump bridge, turned west, waved, and was soon a high-pitched whine in the invisible distance.

I went back into the house with Irina. Ruffino had managed to work himself up into a sitting position, back against the wall, dark eyes glaring at us over the pursed mouth. She went to the ruins of the toppled cabinet and picked a small white bowl, unbroken, out of the shards of other treasured things. She put it on top of the new television set.

I asked her permission to use the phone, and looked up the number for the county sheriff. It had been a few years. I wondered if Wes was still there. A lot of them leave. The top slot is political, and the pressure seeps down through the ranks. When the communications clerk answered, I asked if Deputy Wesley Davenport still worked for the department.

“Yes, sir, Captain Davenport is here today. Is this a personal call?”

“Yes,” I lied. She gave me a different number to call.

“Cap’n Davenport,” he said.

“Wes, this is McGee. Travis McGee.”

“You kilt somebody again, pardner?”

“I’ve managed to hold back.”

“Builds character. What have you got?”

“Last time I talked to you those twin daughters of yours were pretty small. How are they doing and how old are they?”

“They are just fine little old gals. Going on eleven.”

“You know where the Casak house is?”

“Rings a little bell. Hang on. Sure. Hugo Casak, armed robbery. Put him away and he’s been out well over a year now. But he never reported in, so right now he’s on the list for violation of parole. He lived out there on that damn little lonesome swamp road that goes nowhere. Okay. I can find the house. So?”

“I’m calling from the house. I want to ask you to do things a certain way.”

“For old times’ sake, I suppose.”

“Congratulations on making captain.”

“Well, thanks heaps. What have you got?”

“I’ve got a guy here hiding from the Miami fireworks.”

“Looks to me like they all went nuts over there.”

“They did indeed. This one has a big coke habit. And he’s right here looking at me. Before you come out here, you stop off and buy a big bottle of nail-polish remover.”

“Of what!”

“I’ve got him glued together with Miracle Glue. Mouth, hands and legs. Second thought. Let’s try it another way. He can move his legs from the knees down, so maybe we better walk him to your car and you get him into a cell before you unglue him. He’s strong and quick. I outweigh by maybe fifty pounds but he nearly took me. He kicks.”

“Okay, champ. What am I arresting him for?”

“The only people here when he came in on them were Mrs. Casak and Angie, her eleven year-old daughter. He’s been here over a week and he got the kid on coke and taught her to enjoy screwing.”

The silence was so long I finally said, “Wes?”

“Okay. I was just thinking it through.” His voice had grown heavy and tired. “Can I get statements?”

“Guaran-damn-teed, Wes.”

“But there’s more, isn’t there? Knowing you.”

“Remember the rape killings aboard the Lazidays down off Big Torch last October?”

“Surely do.”

“There were two of them did it. This is one of them. The other is in the foundation of a new condo. Nobody will ever make this one I got here for it. Never.”

“So?”

“Wes, I want him held as John Doe. Maybe his prints are on file. Send the wrong classification. Anything. Also, this little shit is very big on publicity. He loves his picture in the paper.”

“Will the mother and the girl talk it up? If they do, there’s nothing I can do on this end.”

“They won’t say a word. She’ll keep the kid out of school for a while longer.”

I looked over at Irina and she nodded agreement.

“Then okay, McGee. You got my provisional promise to bury the son of a bitch. But first I have to come check it out. You stay there?”

“Right here.”

By the time Wes arrived I felt better for having had two of Mrs. Casak’s oversized fried-egg sandwiches and a quart of milk.

Wes and I shook hands, surveying each other. He was heavier and he had less hair. He told me I was leaner and had less hair.

He had a bottle of nail-polish remover. He squatted heavily beside Ruffino and scrubbed the man’s mouth roughly with a rag he got from Mrs. Casak.

After Ruffi had run out of breath, Wes turned to me, face a mask of imitation surprise, and said, “You hear that? You ever hear a dirtier mouth? My, my! Right now I got me a tank full of weight lifters. They’re motorcycle queens down from Houston, tattooed all over butterflies and spring flowers. Guess I’ll put this John Doe in with them. They’ll take to those eyelashes.”

He went in and had a closed-door session with Angie. He came out looking sour and angry. After we got Ruffino Marino into the back seat of the county sedan, he took me over to the side and said, “I know an assistant state’s attorney that can take this on without making waves. Maybe he can work out a plea. He goes into state prison as a child molester, he won’t last through the first year. Too many doing time up there got kids of their own. There’s still something I don’t know. Right?”

“Wes, the people looking for him, I’m going to tell them where he is.”

“Look, I don’t want any wild men trying to bust him out of our store.”

“That’s not their style.”

“That name he was yelling, that’s his real name?”

“Except in the movies. In his one dud movie. Then it was Mark Hardin, Florida’s answer to Rocky one, two, three, four, five and so forth.”

“I’ll tell the weight lifters he’s a movie star.”

“You really going to put him in with them?”

He stared bleakly at me. “How much choice did that kid in there have? How much choice did the girls on the boat have? You always do fine up to a point, McGee, and then you get a little bit mushy at the edges.”

Twenty

ON FRIDAY, the first day of February, it took such a long time to get out of bed I decided Miami Beach could wait one more day. My worst knee kept threatening to give way. My right elbow was agony. There were big dark bruises on both arms and shoulders. I could not recall how I got the painful lump on the back of my head.

This was no morning for a shower. I lowered myself, inch by inch, into the imperial bathtub, into water as hot as I could stand it. I soaked there for a long time, and after drying off on the biggest towel I own, I took a pair of aspirin and dug into the Ace bandage box and found the one that works well on the knee, and used a strip bandage for the right elbow.

I checked the morning and found we had gone back to chill, so I put on an old sky-blue wool shirt, stretch denims, wool socks and the gray running shoes. I looked at myself in the mirror and said aloud, “Tell me the truth, old buddy. Are you getting too old for this kind of boyish shit? Have you lost a lot more than a half step getting to second?”

Self-delusion is one of the essentials of life. I told myself that my bruises and abrasions were not the result of a fading physique, but rather the result of a mental lapse. I had underestimated young Marino. And that gave him an edge he didn’t deserve. I wondered if he had enjoyed a restful night.

When I stepped out onto the fantail I found another pipe-cleaner cat on the mat looking up at me. With quick and unexpected anger, I stomped it flat. Then I sighed and picked it up, bent it back into shape, took it back in and stood it in formation on the shelf with the earlier arrivals.

I went to the hotel alone and for breakfast I had USA Today, double fresh orange juice, three eggs scrambled with cheese and onion, crisp bacon, home fries, whole-wheat toast and two pots of coffee. The exercise improved the right elbow.

When I went back aboard my home I went up onto the sun deck and came upon the seventh cat, a purple one, staring at me from the flat place atop the instrument panel. I sat in the pilot seat, the cool wind on my face, and looked at the fool thing. Somebody was going to elaborate trouble to have a tiny bit of fun. If they were sending a message, they had forgotten to include the code. Maybe somewhere in the world there was some other McGee who’d find the pipecleaner cats comprehensible and delicious and hilarious.

On Saturday morning when I approached my blue truck at nine to head for Miami, I found a brown pipe-cleaner cat on the windshield with one paw under the wiper so it could stare in at me. I put it in the ashtray.

At the Contessa, I browsed the newsstand paperbacks until the girl was free. She had half glasses, no makeup, straight mouse-colored hair. “Sir?”

“I want to talk to Lopez.”

“Lopez? I don’t know any Lopez.”

“Aren’t you Alice?”

“Yes. Yes, my name is Alice.”

“The Capataz said to tell you I want to talk to Lopez.”

Her eyes changed. “Just a moment, sir.” She helped a new customer who’d come in, took his money for a racing form. She came back to me. “Go out to the pool bar and wait.”

“How long?”

“Just wait. That’s all I know.”

After an hour I went back to the newsstand and she told me to go back and keep on waiting. It was past noon when a man sat down beside me. He sighed as he climbed onto the padded stool. He was short and fat and he sounded as if he had emphysema. Each inhalation had a throaty little snore at the end of it. He wore a Palm Beach suit and a white straw hat. His nose and cheeks were tinted purple by tiny broken veins.

“What I got to tell you, friend, no choice in the matter. I got to tell you right now there’s absolutely no way Cappy can make a deal.”

“I think he knows that.”

“What he should do, he should get out of town.”

“That’s what he’s done.”

“He could stay like a year someplace and keep his head down, then put out some feelers. Stick his big toe in the water.”

“That’s the way he has it figured out.”

After a thoughtful silence the man swiveled his head on his quarter inch of heavy neck and stared at me. “Then what the fuck you want with me?”

“Before Cappy left he said you might want to make an offer for young Ruffi.”

“Shush!” he said. “Jesus Christ, hush your mouth.” He looked around. “Let’s move over to that farthest-away table.”

It was in the shade of tall, broad-leafed plantings elephant ears, rubber plants, a juvenile banyan, a white iron table with a glass top, four iron chairs. In spite of the chill in the air, the pool people were warm and happy. The pool Cubans had laced the canvas wind shields in place. Executive types who had recently acquired a tan were parading around in a distinctive way. You can always pick them out. They have to hold their bellies in. To do this properly, they have to tense their muscles and square their shoulders. This makes them hold their arms out from their sides, slightly bent. They cannot swing the arms naturally, and so they walk slowly. If they were turkeys, the tail feathers would be spread. The young girls look beyond them and through them and never see them at all. Sad world.

Lopez put his drink down, took off his hat and wiped his brow with a dingy handkerchief. “With Cappy, people know he was a hired hand, all right? So when the blood cools down it can come back to live and let live. But young Marino, he went against everything. No class at all. Who are you?”

“McGee.”

He tilted his head. “Like they were trying to set you up for the Reyes girl?”

“Like that. Yes.”

“It was you found out Ruffi did it?”

“I didn’t find out. But I passed the news along.”

“And you started up a feud that got a hell of a lot of good men killed.”

“Instead of standing and saluting and letting them kill me like they killed an innocent friend of mine, Billy Ingraham.”

“That was sloppy and dumb, that Ingraham thing.”

“And all you people are good God-fearing, law abiding businessmen.”

“You’ve got no call to get smart-ass, McGee.”

“I know that. I know that. I just want to sell him.”

“Alive or dead?”

“Alive.”

“Where?”

“Where he’ll stay for a while. One hundred thousand.”

“For that little punk kid?”

“For that little punk kid.”

“I can’t get approval for that kind of money, even if I was sure you got him.”

“That kind of money wouldn’t half fill one of those cornflakes boxes that get shipped to Art Jornalero.”

He nodded slowly. “You get around pretty good.”

“Maybe I can fly to Lima and sell him down there.”

“Maybe you try to do that, they wouldn’t set up any kind of exchange that would be safe for you to make.”

“What are you offering?”

“Frankly, I think it might be closer to fifty than a hundred.”

“I’ve had a hundred worth of grief from this.”

“Look, what can I say? I’ll do my best.”

“How do you want to work it?”

“If we come up with a figure makes us both happy, we pick a third party everybody can trust.”

“Such as?”

We ran through several names before we came to one we could both agree on. Hillary Muldoon of Muldoon and Grimes, specialists in labor law. On Monday, the fourth, the agreed figure was sixty thousand. On Tuesday afternoon, the fifth, Lopez and I met with Muldoon, a narrow, stooped bald man with one eye that looked off to the left. The money was counted. I objected to his fee coming out of my end. We compromised. I would come up with half the fee, provided the reward money was granted. Fifty-seven thousand, net.

So I opened the envelope Wes had given me and handed them the full-face and profile mug shots and the Xerox copy of the arrest report, including the charges filed.

After they studied it, Lopez said, “Hillary, I don’t like this a damn. He’s in some damn little boondocks slam. This McGee doesn’t have him. The law does.”

“You understand I can’t know why you want him, Lopez, but I do understand that he is awaiting trial and as such he can be released on bail. He could be released in the custody of whoever makes bail. I would say that, in effect, Mr. McGee has lived up to his end of the bargain. Fifty-seven thousand to Mr. McGee.”

We shook hands and I left with the money and hastened to the nearest branch post office and sent it to myself by registered mail.

I got home to find, in the last light of day, an orange cat on the mat. And so, with a pattern roughly predictable, I made preparations for bed, cut all the lights, put on dark slacks and turtleneck, eased out the forward hatch, crept around the side deck and settled down in the deep shadows, my back against the bulkhead, a navy-blue blanket over me. I could see the mat in the angle of dock light, five feet away. Got nothing but an almost sleepless night. No cat. No intruder.

At noon Millis phoned me, her voice remote, lifeless. “Travis? Arturo died.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. I was up early working in the garden. So many things died in the cold. When he didn’t get up I looked in on him. And he was just there dead. Maybe his heart. I don’t know. Nobody got in here. Nobody did it. He was so very depressed. Did you know he was sixty-eight? He was so proud of not looking that old.”

“Is he still there?”

“Oh no. I phoned some people, and finally they sent an ambulance and took him down like he was sick. With a mask on his face, oxygen or something, so he wouldn’t look dead. People are dying around me, Travis. I hate it so. They said I did the right thing. They’ll keep me out of it. Roger Carp kept me out of that other thing. I had to appear, you know. But the indictment said person or persons unknown and they sent a copy of the grand jury minutes and the medical records to France.”

“I’m glad you had no trouble.”

“I’m getting out of everything, aren’t I? I haven’t even gone to Billy’s grave.”

“Do you think you should?”

“I don’t know. What we talked about, it’s still open. If you want. Not the same ship or the same cruise. We can find one we think we’ll like. If you want.”

“Your enthusiasm is fantastic.”

“Don’t lean on me like that. I’m not up to it today. I’ll be here for a couple of weeks. Call me. Whatever you say, I’m going anyway.”

She hung up before I could say good-by.

I tried not to think about Millis all day. it worked half the time. I didn’t answer the phone. It rang twice. I couldn’t think of anyone I wanted to have a conversation with.

That night I was out under my dark blue blanket by nine-thirty, all lights out aboard. February has a cheerless sound about it. Halfway to Valentine’s day. Five days to old Abe’s birthday. The winter wind whips around the ancient images of the homeplace, sleet whisk-brooming the kitchen windows.

Tipsy boatmen went past, guffawing their way back to their floating nightcaps. “Let Marie take the wheel and she had it hard aground in ten minutes…”

“You remember Charlie. He found three bales of it floating off Naples and he got them aboard. Took it home and dried it out and he’s got enough there to keep the whole yacht club airborne until the year two thousand.”

“.. should have had it surveyed, damn it. Dry rot down all one side of the transom.”

And some sour harmony, ending when somebody used a bullhorn to tell them to knock it off, people were sleeping.

Slow hours. And then a swiftness of slender femininity, half seen in the glow from the distant dock lights. Creak of my small gangplank. She had learned not to step on the mat. She kneels, hair a-dangle, leans far forward to put the pipecleaner cat on the door-side edge of the mat. I gather myself. Lunge and snap my hand down onto slender wrist. Yelp of fright and dismay. Then some real trouble when I dragged her aboard. Impression of tallness. She was all hard knees, elbows, fists. She butted and kicked and thrashed, and almost got away once, until finally I caught her hand in a come-along grip, her hand bent down and under, her elbow snug against my biceps.

“Ow!” she yelled. “Hey, ow! You’re breaking it.”

“Shut up or I will.”

It settled her down. She made whimpering sounds, but she had become docile enough for me to fish out my keys and unlock the door and escort her into the lounge, turning on the lights as we entered. I shoved her into the middle of the lounge and she spun around, glaring at me, massaging her wrist. Just a kid, sixteen or seventeen. A reddish blonde kid, red with new burn over old tan, a kid wearing a short-sleeved white cotton turtleneck and one of those skirts, in pink, that are cut like long shorts, surely the ugliest garment womankind has ever chosen to wear. But if anybody could ever look good in them, this one could. Tall girl. Good bones.

“You’re brutal. You know that? Really brutal!”

“Okay,” I said wearily. “I’m brutal. What’s all this with the cats. kid?”

In response I got a wide humorless grin. “Got to you, hah?”

“It has begun to annoy me. Puzzle me. That’s all.”

She stared at me. “You’re serious? You’re not having me on?”

“Kid, when somebody starts invading my privacy with pipe-cleaner cats, I would like to know what’s going on. That’s all.”

She stared at me. “My God, you’re even more opaque than I thought. You’re an animal!”

“Okay. The animal is asking you to sit down and the animal will buy you a Coke. Maybe you can stop emoting and make sense. What are you kids taking lately? It has warped your little head.”

She hesitated and then sat on the edge of the yellow couch. “Thank you, I don’t want a Coke. And I don’t take anything. Aside from getting a little woozy on wine a couple of times. You sit down too. Are you ready for a name?”

“I’m Travis McGee.”

“I know that! Oh, don’t I know that. I’ve made a study of your life and times, Mr. McGee. I can’t think of anything more pathetic than an aging boat bum-beach bum who won’t or can’t admit it or face it. You are a figure of fun, Mr. McGee. Your dear friends around here are misfits or burnouts, and I don’t think there’s one of them who gives a damn about you. You’re a womanizer, and you make a living off squalid little adventures of one kind or another. You have that dumb-looking truck and this dumb-looking houseboat and nobody who cares if you live or die.”

“Kid, you’ve got a good delivery and a pretty fair vocabulary.”

“Stop patronizing me!”

“What’s with the multicolored cats, kid?”

“My name is Jean Killian.” It was almost shouted, like some kind of war cry.

And then I knew she had reminded me of someone. I felt the tears behind my eyes. I got up and walked over toward her and she got up, tall, to face me. In a rusty, shaky old voice I said, “You’re her kid sister.”

Eyes so pale in her sun-dark face they looked like the silver of old rare coins, stared into mine. The strength of her emotions had narrowed her eyes. I could not remember anyone ever looking at me with such venomous concentration. There was hate in there. Contempt. But she spoke softly.

“No, you stupid jerk. I’m Puss’s daughter. And, God help me, I’m your bastard child. Look at me! People around here have asked me if I’m related to you. To him? I said. Hell no!”

I really looked at her. The shoulders and the long arms. The level mouth, shape of the jaw, the high cheekbones, texture of the hair, with my coarseness and Puss’s auburn.

“That’s… what the cats were all about?”

“If you had any kind of conscience at all, Father dear, it would have hit you. Puss. Pussycat. But she didn’t even mean enough to you so you’d get the connection.” She sat down again and put her hands over her face. “A rotten pointless idea.”

“Why should I have a bad conscience about Puss?”

“Perhaps for men like you it is standard procedure. But I think it is cruel and wicked for a man to live with a woman and then, when she becomes ill and pregnant, he kicks her off his dumb houseboat and looks for a new lady.”

“Puss told you that?”

“My mother lived just long enough to have me, and she died the day afterward. Her sister brought me up. Her sister, my Aunt Velma, told me all about you and where and how you live, and I’ve been planning this for three years. I wanted to make you feel so guilty you’d kill yourself. But you d-didn’t even know what the c-cats meant.”

“How old are you?”

“Seventeen in April. What’s that got to do with anything?”

I moved over to the chair by the built-in desk, put my foot up on it, rested my forearms on my knee and studied her. She sat on the yellow couch, out on the edge of it, fists clenched, returning my inspection, meeting my gaze, showing me her contempt, her hate.

“I had the feeling there was something wrong with Puss. But I never realized she was sick.”

“Or pregnant. Sure. You just never realized.”

“Do you want me to try to tell you a little bit about this, kid, or do you want to step on everything I say?”

“There’s nothing you can say.”

“Do you want to know how I met her?”

“Not particularly Mr. McGee.”

I sighed. “Kid, I just wish you…”

“Stop calling me kid!”

“Okay. Jean, then. I was running on the beach one morning. Puss had stepped on a sea urchin in shallow water. She came hobbling and hopping ashore, in obvious trouble. Okay, so I got the spines out and brought her over here and got her heel fixed up. She was… a lot of fun.”

“Lots of fun, huh? A great sport, huh?”

“Merry is the word. A big random redhead who believed the world was mad. A loving person. Her mind and her speech went off at funny tangents. It made some people irritable. Not me.”

“Oh, no. Certainly not you!”

“Kid. Jean. I am talking about your mother and you never got to know her. Maybe you want to know a little bit about her.”

“Not from you!”

“She was with me for a few months. She stayed aboard this houseboat with me. I was involved in something at the time. A friend of mine had been killed. Tush Bannon. Some people wanted his land. In the process of finding out who killed him and why, some other people got killed and got badly hurt. Puss was especially good with Janine, Tush’s widow. Sometimes she would… go off somewhere inside herself, out of touch. It seemed odd. Meyer-he’s my best friend-”

“I know.”

“He noticed it too. We talked about it and we decided it was probably something about her divorce.”

“What divorce? She was never divorced.”

“So I found out.”

She stood up. “What’s the point of all this? You’d lie to me. You lied to her. You’d lie to anybody, wouldn’t you? After I watched you walk by me on the beach, I knew you’re my father. I was hoping you weren’t. I can’t make you sorry because you haven’t got any conscience at all. And that is giving me some pretty wonderful thoughts about my heredity, Dad. Sorry I went to all the trouble. You aren’t even worth that much. You are so smooth and plausible, you make me sick. You worked a scam on her, but it won’t work on me.”

“Hate is poison, Jean.”

“It nourishes me.”

“I have a farewell letter from your mother.”

“So?”

“Do you hate her so much you don’t even want to read it?”

“I never said I hated her!”

“What is your opinion of her?”

“Okay, I guess she wasn’t very smart about people. Why should I tell you my opinion of her?”

“I want to know why you are afraid to read her letter to me.”

“Afraid? Bullshit! Let me see it.”

“It’s one of the few things in my life worth keeping in a safety-deposit box.”

“I bet.”

“The bank is closed. It will open tomorrow morning at ten. I don’t want you to think I have any possible way of tricking you. I had no idea you existed, so I couldn’t have faked a letter in expectation you’d show up someday.” I wrote the name and address of the bank on a slip of paper. “Meet me there at ten in the morning.”

“I don’t want to meet you anywhere ever.”

I took the chance. “Okay. Then don’t bother. I’ll be there in case you change your mind. In case you decide it might be nice to know something more about your mother than you do. It’ll be a better check on your heredity, kid. Now get out. Tomorrow you might grow up a little, and when you do, then I’ll want to talk to you. But not now, not the way you are now. Good night.”

I matched her flat and level stare until she spun and left. I had detected no uncertainty in her. I felt that maybe the gamble had failed and I had lost her. I went out slowly and saw her, far down the pier, walking swiftly under the dock lights.

I wanted to tell Meyer, but not yet. Not now. I didn’t want to tell anybody while I was still trying to comprehend what had happened to me. I saw the cat she had been trying to leave. It had been flattened in our little fracas. I straightened it out, went in and put it with the others.

I could recall every plane and texture of her face, recall the timbre of her voice, the style of her movements-all in sweetly excruciating detail. Some strange mechanism in my head was projecting color slides of all the familiar parts of my life. I seemed to hear the click as each slide fell into place. Everything familiar had assumed a different shape, sharper outlines, purer kind of color. It seemed very much to me like the strangeness which happens after you have spent weeks in a hospital, when you come back out again into the world, seeing everything fresh-a stop light, a brown dog, a yellow bus. Something has changed the world and washed it clean.

I paced the lounge and paced the sun deck half the night, thinking about her, wondering if she would be there. I knew she had to be there. If Puss and I had given her anything at all, it would be a sense of fairness.

When the hard winds of change blow through your life, thqy blow away at lot of structures you thought permanent, exposing what you had thought was trivia, buried and forgotten. The sweet soft taste of the side of the throat of Puss Killian. The rough and husky edge of her voice as her laughter stopped. The small things, are lasting things.

Twenty-one

FRIDAY CAME in with a hard winter rain and a steady wind. I awoke with the conviction I would never see her again. She was half real and half imagined. I was too restless to have anything but coffee, too edgy to keep my attention on any small manufactured boat chore. Wind tilted and creaked the houseboat again and again

Finally I put on foul-weather gear, a complete set, with hood, in that electric orange-red of the gloves and flags they wave at you at road construction sites. It is useful when anyone falls overboard in heavy weather, to become the only dot of color in a steep gray surging world.

I started walking so early I was at the bank by nine-fifteen, and I knew that if I tried to just stand there and wait, I would be maniacal by ten o’clock. So I went striding past the bank and kept walking for a measured twenty-three minutes. A mile and something. Turned on the mark and came back. But got to the bank at five of ten. Had I found shelter in the entrance I wouldn’t be able to see her coming. So I stood out in the rain. It made such a deafening clatter against the crisp plastic of the hood I could not hear the traffic sounds. I kept turning my head like a man at a tennis match, because I did not know from which direction she would arrive.

Ten o’clock. Five after. Ten after. And I knew it had been a bad gamble. From the two of us she would have gotten an unforgiving stubbornness, stronger than the sense of fair play. The rain was heavier. It bounced high off the asphalt, an eight inch curtain fringe of lonely silver rain. I could stand there until it ended and nothing would change.

She came moments later at a hard run, with a transparent raincoat over sweater and jeans, her hair tucked into a shower cap. Her face looked set and pallid, her lips almost colorless. We went in and stood over at one side, dripping on their giant rug. I pushed my hood back and she pulled her shower cap off and shook her hair out.

“So we play your game, Mr. McGee; whatever it is.

“I was beginning to think you wouldn’t show.”

“I nearly didn’t.”

‘Where are you staying?“

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“I guess it was social conversation.”

“Don’t waste it on me.”

So she walked with me back to the vault area, where I signed the card and gave the tall black attendant my key. She buzzed the gate open and we followed her back to the aisle where my box was. I pulled it out and took it to one of the little rooms where people clip their coupons, and closed the door. There were two chairs in front of the counter top, a lamp with a green shade, scissors on a chain.

Before I opened the box I took off the rain jacket and pushed my sleeves up. I showed her my hands were empty, then opened the box lid and reached in and took out the letters, took Puss’s from the thin stack and handed it to her. Then I told her to wait a moment. I took some other things out of the box and said, as I showed them to her, “This is a picture of your paternal grandfather standing beside his automobile long ago. It is an Essex. This is a picture of your paternal grandmother sitting on the steps of a vacation cottage on a lake you never heard of. This is your uncle, who died young. And this is a picture of your mother.”

She had been feigning indifference until I showed her Puss’s picture. She took it from me and read the inscription aloud, “Chocolate peanut butter love.” She looked at me in question.

“A private joke.”

“She was lovely, really lovely!”

“Now if you wouldn’t mind reading the letter aloud? Careful unfolding it. The paper has cracked in a couple of places.”

“Why should I read it aloud?”

“Because your voice quality is a lot like hers.” She shrugged, unfolded it, began reading.

Old dear darling, I said one time that I would write it down to get it straight for you, and so I have and even have the eerie idea you might be able to read all the words between the words. The name was right. I lied about that. But the town wasn’t, and Chicago isn’t the town either. And there was no divorce. And I love Paul very dearly and have all along, and love you too, but not quite as much. That lousy Meyer and his lousy Law. Get a pretty girl to kiss Old Ugly and tell him he was absolutely right. You see, my dear, about six months before you met me on the beach with that living pincushion stuck into the sole of my foot, they took a little monster out of my head, maybe as big as an English walnut almost, and with three stumpy little legs like a spider. Half a spider. And the men in white dug around in my head to try to find every little morsel of the beast, because he turned out to be the bad kind. So… I got over confusions and got my memory all straightened out again, and my hair grew back, and I pinned an old buddy of mine to the wall of his office and he leveled because he has known me long enough to know I have enough sawdust to keep me solid. His guess was one chance out of fifty. No treatments possible. Just go off and get checked every so often, bright lights in the eyes, stand and touch the tip of your nose with your fingertip while keeping the eyes closed. That stuff. And pens drawing lines on little electric charts. I could accept it, my dear, because life is very iffy and I have busied up my years in good ways. But I could not accept the kind of life that went with the waiting. Dear as Paul is, he is a sentimental kraut type, and we had the awareness of the damned time bomb every waking moment. So life became like a practice funeral, with too many of our friends knowing it, and everybody trying to be so bloody sweet and compassionate during a long farewell party. I began to think that if I lucked out, I’d be letting them down. So I finally told Paul that if it was the end of my life, it was getting terribly damned dreary and full of violin music, and I am a random jolly type who does not care to be stared at by people with their eyes filling with tears. So I cashed in the bonds for the education of the children I’ll never have, and I came a-hunting and I found you. Was I too eager to clamber into the sack? Too greedy to fill every day with as much life as would fit into it? Darling, I am the grasshopper sort, and so are you, and, bless you, there were dozens of times every day I would completely forget to sort of listen to what might be happening inside my redheaded skull. Be glad you jollied and romped the redheaded lady as she was coming around the clubhouse turn, heading for the tape. She loved it. And you. And how good we were together, in a way that was not a disloyalty to Paul! He is one of the dogged and steadfast ones. Can you imagine being married, dear, to Janine, great as she is, and having her know you could be fatally ill? She would mother you out of your mind until you ran. As I ran. But there was the little nagging feeling I was having it all too good. I kept telling myself, Hell, girl, you deserve it. And then hairy old Meyer and his damned Law about the hard thing to do is the right thing to do. I suppose you have been wondering about me and maybe hating me a little. I had to run from you exactly when I did and how I did, or I couldn’t have left at all. You see, the dying have a special obligation too, my dear. To keep it from being too selfish. I was depriving Paul of his chance of being with me, because it is all he is going to have of me… all he did have of me, and I was forgetting that I had to leave him enough to last him long enough to get him past the worst of it at least The darling has not done the interrogation bit, and if he thinks or doesn’t think there was a man in the scene, I couldn’t really say. You would like each other. Anyway, the female of the species is the eternal matchmaker, and I have written the longest letter of my life to Janine, all full of girl talk, and about living and dying, and I have, I hope, conned her into spinning a big fancy pack of lies about the Strange Vacation of Puss Killian, because I am leaving her name and address with Paul, saying that she could tell him how I was and what happened among people who didn’t know. It is a devious plot, mostly because they would work well. He is a research chemist and perhaps the kindest man alive. Anyway, last week all of a sudden the pupil of my big gorgeous left eye got twice as big as it should, and they have been checking and testing and giving me glassy smiles, and I am mailing this en route to the place where they are going to open a trapdoor and take another look. So they may clap the lid back on and say the hell with it. Or they may go in there and, without meaning to, speed me on my journey, or they may turn me into a vegetable, or they may manage to turn me back into me for another time, shorter or longer. But from the talk around the store, the odds on that last deal make the old odds seem like a sure thing bet. Do you understand now? I’m scared. Of course I’m scared. It’s real black out there and it lasts a long time. But I have no remorses, no regrets, because I left when I had to, and Meyer got me back in good season. Don’t do any brooding, because if I can try to be a grownup, you ought to be able to take a stab at it. Here’s what you do, Trav my darling. Find yourself a gaudy random gorgeous grasshopper wench, and lay aboard the Plymouth and the provisions, and go fun-timing and sun-timing up and down the lovely bays. Find one of good appetite and no thought of it being for keeps, and romp the lassie sweetly and completely, and now and again, when she is asleep and you are awake, and your arms are around her and you are sleeping like spoons, with her head tucked under your ugly chin, pretend it is…

Puss, who loved you.

At first it had been a mechanical reading, but then she slowed. The words had almost too much meaning for her to handle. And for me to handle. I had closed my eyes for a little while pretending it was Puss. But that was too much for me, and I had to watch Jean as she read, watch the slow tears, listen to the breaking voice.

Without looking at me she folded it and put it back in the box and said, “Can we get out of here? Can we walk?”

We walked. She had the same good long stride Puss bequeathed her. We walked back to the beach, where the hard rain had pocked all the footprints out of the sand above high mean tide. The wind-driven waves curled and smacked. Kids were out there, vague in the rain curtain, surfing. Some G-stringed joggers passed us. No talk. I knew she would talk when she was ready.

Finally we sat on one of the small fat fences that keep the parked cars off the beach. The rain was easing.

“They did a caesarian in the eighth month when they knew she was slipping away. She was too far gone for labor. She died the next day. I… I just didn’t know all this!”

“She must have told her sister something about how she… about how it was like between us.”

She thought that over, frowning. “Maybe she did. I guess she probably did. Maybe she told her husband too. From what Velma said, he was really great to my mother after she came back. But he couldn’t handle having me. The arithmetic was all wrong. Child of unknown person. He fixed it with Velma to raise me with her batch. Look, I love Velma and all my half brothers and sisters. She didn’t treat me differently at all. Not in any way. She’s great. He sent money all the years, what he thought was fair. More as prices went up. I’ve never met him. I think he’s a fine person. I can understand him not wanting me as a kid. I wasn’t his kid.”

“I never knew she was pregnant. I never knew she was dying.”

“I know that now, McGee. I thought you knew all that stuff. I thought you just didn’t want to be involved. Let me tell you something I wish they’d never told me. No. Cross that out. I’m glad Velma told me. Puss hurt a lot. Some of the stuff they wanted to give her for pain would have hurt the baby inside her. Me. So she stiffed it out alone. For my sake. Loved me.”

She bent over, face against her knees. She made a small sound of grief, lost in the surf crashing and hissing.

Carefully, gently, I put my hand on her shoulder. “Maybe Velma lied about me because she didn’t want to lose you. She didn’t want you to get some kind of romantic image of your beachbum father and come looking for me, ever. She know you’re here?”

She straightened and looked at me with reddened eyes. “Oh, no. She thinks I’m visiting a girlfriend in Santa Barbara.”

“Where is home?”

“Youngstown, Ohio. I graduated high school last June.”

“You graduated from high school.”

She gave me a crooked, tear-stained smile. “Old Dad takes over the grammar, huh?”

“Takes over whatever he can take over. Whatever you’ll let him take over. Have you been working?”

“At a Charming Shoppe. It’s a chain. I worked through Christmas and quit. Look, can I have a copy of that letter? To keep?”

“Why not? We’ll walk back and get a copy made at the bank.”

She looked at me, her head tilted, her expression puzzled. “You know. I feel as if I’ve just gotten over being sick, sick a long time. I used to dream about you dying. You were always fat and bald.”

“At times I have a fat bald disposition. Look, Jean. It’s just the same for me. That strange feeling.”

“How can it mean anything much to you? You never knew I was alive even.”

I reached for her and she put her hands in mine. “I don’t know if I can say this. It means more than I can say. It turns my life upside down. It changes a lot of things I thought I was. It’s some kind of a door opening for me. We’ve got lots of plans to make.”

“I said rotten things to you last night.”

“And enough of them were true.”

“No. Now I know what you’re really like. Puss is telling me in that letter what you’re like. She didn’t know she was telling her daughter anything, but she was.”

And we walked back slowly, talking all the way. There was a lifetime of good talk ahead of us. There was another feeling I had about myself more difficult to grasp. In the last few years I had been ever more uncomfortably aware that one day, somewhere, I would take one last breath and a great, iron door would slam shut, leaving me in darkness on the wrong side of life. But now there was a window in that door. A promise of light. A way to continue.

It is May, early May, a lovely time of year in Florida. We have taken the Busted Flush north up the Waterway to a place where it opens into a broad bay. I have dropped the hooks at a calm anchorage well away from the channel and far enough from the mangrove coast to let the south breeze keep the spring bugs away.

We brought aboard pungent cauldrons of Meyer’s Special Incomparable Chili, and enough icy beer to make the chili less lethal. How many of us are there? Twenty? Thirty? Let’s say a lot. Jim Ames and Betsy. The Thorners, Teneros, Arthur and Chook Wilkinson, the Mick and Carlie Hooper, Junebug, Lew, Roacy, Sue Sampson, Sandy, Johnny Dow, Briney, Frank and Gretch Payne, Miguel, the Marchmans, Marilee, Sam Dandie with two nieces, and a leavening of beach folks, and two dogs and a cat, dutifully ignoring one another.

We are here, and there is music and there are bad jokes, and so we are all a little bit longer in the tooth and have seen life go up, down and sideways without any rhyme or reason anyone can determine. We laugh at tired old jokes because they are old and tired and familiar, and it is good to laugh.

I am prone on a large sun pad on the bow, beside that incomparable bikinied, sun-lush figure of Briney, who’d been on loan to Willy Nucci until he breathed his last.

I am staring at four small freckles on the outside top of her left shoulder, four inches from my nose. Connect the dots and find the farmer’s cat. The freckles are brown against gold, and there is a fuzz of tiny white peach hairs, almost too fine to be visible.

“What are all these people doing in our home, sweetheart?” she asks drowsily.

“We invited them all, every one.”

“Oh?” she says. “That’s nice.”

“Figuring on staying a while?”

“Too long already, love. Gotta get back out to the big surf, ride the dark blue tunnel under the big white curl. Don’t let it get you. Bam, you’re out. Hey, two more weeks, then gone. No regrets.”

Somebody brings us two cold beers. Briney rolls up onto an elbow and drinks with her eyes closed. I lift my beer and say, “To Willy.”

She grins and says, “To the Nooch.”

In a little while she is asleep, beer half gone. I study the amount of tan on her smooth broad back and I peer at the angle of the sun and decide she’s in no danger of burning. In a momentary flash of panic I believe the gaudy boat, the noisy people, everything is dead and gone, imagined long ago and forgotten. It passes.

I get up and go ambling back through the folk. A great day. I find Meyer up on the sun deck leaning against the aft rail, alone for a change. He is now Uncle Meyer, a dispensation from my daughter Jean which pleased him immensely.

We talk about Jean, about her latest letter. “You two get talked out before she left?” he asks.

“There’s a couple of years of talk to make up,” I say. “We’ll have time. You get a chance to look over the trust agreement Frank sent you?”

“Good work,” he says. “As a trustee I can vote to invade the principal in case of emergency. Sound.”

“She got one hell of a score on her college boards.”

“Three times you’ve told me, Travis.”

“And she’s a horse bum. Imagine that? A horse bum from Youngstown who is going to go to a school of veterinary medicine eventually. Imagine me, fathering a horse bum from Youngstown?”

“Travis, she is handsome. She is tough and good and staunch.”

I look at him. It strikes me that he has not been surly or hostile at any time. Lately I have been bringing out the worst in people. No more.

He seems to know what I am thinking. “How much went into the trust?” he asks.

“Everything!” I say.

He stares in consternation. “Everything? Everything?”

“Well, I saved out about four hundred bucks, and so I’ve got to scramble around and find some salvage work real soon.”

He puts his hand on my arm, beams at me and says, “Welcome to the world.”

CREDITS

Sale of this book without a front cover may be unauthorized. If this book is coverless, it may have been reported to the publisher as “unsold or destroyed” and neither the author nor the publisher may have received payment for it.

A Fawcett Crest Book Published by Ballantine Books Copyright © 1985 by John D. MacDonald Publishing, Inc.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof, under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

http://www.randomhouse.com

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96-96201

ISBN 0-449-22485-6

Printed in Canada

First Ballantine Books Edition: March 1986 First Fawcett Crest Edition: April 1996

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Table of Contents

Travis McGee Book 21 The Lonely Silver RainJohn D. MacDonald For Jean and Walter ShineCREDITS