Hall was a cheerful, good-looking, middle-sized guy with broad shoulders and bright white teeth, who must have said a hundred times in his life, "Watch this — and hey, hold my beer, willya?"

He had a girlfriend named Sue, who he'd known since fourth grade, who was happy to hold his beer, most of the time, and then apply the bandages afterwards. Hall worked after school and all summers as a mechanic in his dad's yacht salvage yard, or junkyard, depending on who was doing the talking.

"I'm trying to do better, sir," he told the counselor.

"Don't bullshit me, son. Would I be correct in believing that you were drinking beer at Toby Jones' wedding last weekend and got drunk and fell off the dock and damn near drowned?"

"I'm a good swimmer, sir. There was no danger."

"That's not the point, Barney. Anyway, if you want to do anything in life, you need to get serious, and right quick. Knowing you, looking at these records, I'm thinking your best course would be the military. The military would give you responsibility from day one. If you don't come through, they'll slap your ass in the brig. You need that discipline. Mind, I'm not saying the Marine Corps. You're way too smart for that."

"I wasn't thinking college, not right away," Hall said. "I've been talking with Sue, and... how about the Coast Guard, sir? There're some Coasties that hang out at my dad's place and I like listening to them talk. I've been on the water and working on boats all my life."

The counselor poked a finger at him: "That's the smartest thing I ever heard you say, Barney. You do a few years in the Coast Guard, get yourself some rank and responsibility and they'll even send you to college when you're ready. God help me, you could wind up an officer."

"Whoa. That'd be awesome, sir."

"And do me a favor, son. Get rid of that tee shirt." The tee shirt featured a basketball-sized, full-color image of a bantam rooster, with the legend, "Everything's bigger in Texas."

Hall looked down at the tee-shirt. "It's just a chicken, sir."

"It's a cock," the counselor said. "You know it and I know it. I don't want to see it in this school again."

Sue Hall went to Broward College and became a registered nurse and started working on a bachelor's degree in nursing. Hall found the boatyards of Marina Mile to be the most amazing places he'd ever been. When Sue got pregnant with their first one, he got off-duty work rebuilding diesel engines in one of the Marina Mile engine shops. The extra work would get them child-care money so Sue could finish her BS degree.

At night, they'd drink PBR under palm trees in their trailer park, until Sue got pregnant, when they switched to ginger ale, and she'd say, "Barnes, we're gonna do good in life. I can feel it coming on."

The owner of the engine shop had fifteen or twenty old boats out back, which he couldn't sell, and Hall kept looking at a 1999 Boston Whaler Outrage 260 which had been stripped of the twin outboards and had a hole in the hull, and now sat derelict atop a tandem trailer with two flat tires on each side, overgrown with weeds. After some talk, the owner agreed to give Hall the boat along with two badly abused, but salvageable, Merc 225s and the trailer — all Hall had to do was work five additional unpaid hours a week, in the evenings and on weekends, on top of his regular weekend shift, for two years, and the boat was his.

Plus, he could use the shop and its tools to rehab the trailer and the Mercs and do whatever Fiberglas work the boat needed. The boat was solid, except for the hole, which could be fixed.

The Mako had two white outboards hanging off the back, which Hall recognized as big 350s, giving the boat seven hundred horses with which to get across the ocean.

"What's out there, Barnes?" Sue asked. She was a rangy young woman, would have been a cowgirl in Texas, sunburnt, fighter-pilot blue eyes, her rose-blonde hair frizzy from saltwater.

"Something strange going on, babe. I've been watching him, 'cause that's a sharp boat. All of a sudden it slowed down and stopped and it looks like it picked up a diver in the middle of the ocean. I mean, who was already in the middle of the ocean before they got there. Went right to him."

"You don't see that every day," Sue said.

Hall was still on the glasses. "He's, uh, looks like they've got some lift bags coming over the side... in the middle of the ocean."

"Maybe picking up some bugs?" She was referring to spiny lobsters.

"From a guy they left in the middle of the ocean?"

Sue said, with a sudden urgency, "Barnes, I've got a bad feeling about this. Let's turn around. Bring the boat back north."

"Yeah." That seemed like a good idea.

Hall turned the boat in a wide fisherman's semi-circle and headed back north, but kept watching the Mako through the glasses. He was careful to be standing behind the center console when he used the binoculars, because he'd learned early on in his Coast Guard training that if you saw somebody whose arms, head and chest formed an equal-lateral triangle, they were looking at you through binoculars — and every few minutes, one of the men on the Mako would check them out with binoculars.

Twenty minutes after it stopped, the sleek-looking craft lurched forward and headed south. Hall got his cell phone, called into the watch officer at the Coast Guard station at Fort Lauderdale.

"Sir, this is Barney Hall. I'm south of Pompano Beach in my own boat, but I saw something strange out here. There's a black-and white Mako 284 heading toward Port Everglades. We saw him picking up something from the middle of the ocean. He was running fast, then stopped, and there was a diver waiting for him right there in the water. There were no other boats around, no dive flag. They were using lift bags..."

"Can you stay with him, Hall?"

"No sir, not entirely, he's running fast. I can keep him in sight until he makes the turn. I'll be a mile back of him by then."

"He looked suspicious?"

"Yes, he did, sir. If I was on duty, I'd stop him, for sure."

"We'll do that, then. We'll have somebody waiting for him inside."

"We're on it, Hall. Good job."

Coast Guard inspection boats were usually larger RIBs with pilot houses; the boat that had been scrambled to intercept the Mako was smaller, three men aboard, no pilot house. The Coast Guard boat pulled up behind the Mako and the Petty Officer in the bow saw two men waiting in the stern — bulky guys, dressed like sport fishermen, bright-colored shirts and shorts, sunglasses and billed hats.

Then, as they were a few feet off, ready to board, one of the men on the stern of the Mako lifted up a long-nosed black rifle with a red-dot sight. With a motion that was practiced and almost graceful, he shot the two Coast Guardsmen in the bow, and then twice shot the PO2 who was running the boat. The four shots together took no more than two seconds. The gun barked, rather than banged, a flat noise because of the suppressor on the barrel; the gun was loud, but not especially audible over the sound of the boat engines.

The PO2 had killed the boat's speed for the boarding and when he saw the rifle come up he reached forward to hit the accelerator, but a bullet took him in the throat and then another in the chest, and the slugs turned him away and he fell into the bottom of the boat, dying, blood spreading around him on the wet floor, a purple flood. The Coast Guard boat turned into a slow circle across the wide port and the Mako accelerated away.

Hall watched for a moment, then said, "There's something wrong, Sue."

"Get over there," Sue said. "That Mako's running like a thief in the night. I'll get the gun." They kept a .38 Special in a waterproof can down an equipment hatch.

Hall pushed the boat as hard as he could, but they were a full minute away from the Coast Guard RIB. He couldn't see anybody aboard as he approached. He slipped his cell phone out of his pocket, but when he got alongside, he saw the three bodies in the bottom of the boat and he dropped the cell phone and grabbed the VHF and screamed, "Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, Port Everglades, three Coast Guards shot in boat chasing black and white Mako..."

The Coast Guard came back instantly: "Mayday caller identify yourself!"

"This is Coast Guard Petty Officer Two Barney Hall we have three men shot inside the Port Everglades entrance. They look bad, man, they look really bad."

Then the watch officer: "Hall, can you help them? We're on the way, but you gotta do what you can..."

"My wife's a nurse, I'm putting her on board, sir. Should I go with her or go after the Mako?"

There was a moment of radio silence — Sue had handed him the .38, and was already clambering into the Coast Guard boat with the baby and their First Aid kit — and then the officer came back: "Your call, Hall. Chopper's coming, but it'll be a few minutes."

Hall looked down at his wife who had checked one man quickly and then moved to the bow. She'd done two years in emergency rooms and she knew what she was seeing; and she looked back at him and shook her head and Hall shouted into the radio, "I'm going after the sonsofbitches, sir."

A fourth man hoisted a five-gallon gas can out of a hatch on the Mako's stern and began spraying the boat with gasoline and then, as Hall roared toward them, stepped off the boat, lit what looked like a piece of newspaper and threw it toward the Mako. The boat exploded in flame.

The three men who'd been loading the black buckets into the SUV jumped into the car and the fourth man ran up to the back door and yanked it open. Hall had the .38 in his hand — he was close enough to feel the heat from the flames — and fired three wild shots at the car, no hope of hitting anything because the careening Whaler was hammering the deck against his feet, making any kind of an accurate shot almost impossible.

And impossibly, one of his shots hit the fourth man in the head.

The man dropped flat on the concrete pier, stone-cold dead. The driver of the car jumped out, grabbed the man by his shirt, looked at him, dropped him, looked for a moment at Hall, his face unreadable behind dark glasses, then leaped back into the car and spun it out of sight.

The Mako was burning like a torch.

The watch officer was shouting, "Hall, Hall where are you?"

"Look for the fire, sir; I'm south of the cut where the fire's at."

The Mako's Florida registration was real enough; the owner wasn't. The fire, which sank the boat, wiped out fingerprints and DNA. The SUV was never identified or found; the men apparently had taken the black rifle with them, because no gun was found on the sunken boat or the area around it.

Hall was presented the medal by the rear admiral who commanded the Coast Guard's District Seven. When the admiral asked him his plans, Hall said, "My hitch is almost up, sir. I'm going to college at FIU. If I go fulltime, I'll be out in three years. Then I might be back, if I can get into OCS. I really like what we do."

The admiral patted him on the shoulder with some affection. "You'll get in. With your history, I can guarantee it. Get a degree in something useful. Something involving computers. Or propulsion systems."

"That's what I'm thinking," Hall said. "Sir, if you don't mind. I do have a question."

"Go ahead."

"Nobody's been caught for killing our guys," Hall said. "Where's the FBI?"

"I asked that exact same question, a couple of weeks ago, but I wasn't as polite as you are," the admiral said. "I asked, 'Where the fuck is the FBI?' The answer was, 'Nowhere,' and you can quote me on that."

When the elevator doors closed, a woman next to Virgil said, "Well, that was weird. I thought she was going to shoot you."

"Couldn't get a gun in the courthouse," Virgil said. A couple of people behind him laughed, more nervously than heartily.

Virgil worked his way down to the Hennepin Government Center's basement cafeteria, where he spotted Lucas Davenport sitting at a table to one side, legs crossed, reading a free newspaper. Davenport saw him at the same time and waved. He'd walked to the courthouse from the federal building.

Virgil went over and shook hands and asked, "You eat?"

"Not yet. I wasn't sure when you'd get out." Davenport was a tall man, but thin, weathered, athletic, dark hair shot with gray, crystalline blue eyes; he was fifty-two, and looked his age. He was wearing a blue woolen suit jacket, a white dress shirt, black woolen slacks and cap-toed dress shoes; a light cashmere coat was draped over the back of his chair. He might have been a prosperous attorney, but he wasn't.

"What's that?" Virgil asked, nodding at a two-inch thick brown file envelope sitting by Davenport's right hand.

"Maybe a case," Lucas said. "I'm thinking about it." He stuck a hand in a jacket pocket, pulled out a twenty-dollar bill and handed it to Virgil. "Get me cheeseburger, fries and a Diet Coke."

"What, I'm a waitress now?"

"I'm saving the table," Lucas said. "Or would you rather eat standing up?"

He sat down and Lucas looked casually past his shoulder and checked the woman. He turned back to Virgil and picked up his cheeseburger and asked, "Who is she?"

"She's either the wife or the girlfriend of a guy I just testified against. He's going to prison for ten years or so."

"What'd he do?"

"Robbed credit unions. One every three or four months, down in southern Minnesota and northern Iowa. I caught him a couple of months ago, in Blue Earth. He was the family's sole support."

"She does look sort of hard-bitten," Lucas said. "I'd be worried, if I were you... did you get mustard?"

"Only ketchup. I don't think she's armed, but..." Virgil picked up a piece of silverware and waggled it at Lucas. "... I'd rather not have a fork stuck in my eye."

"Not to worry. If she rushes you, I'll put three Hydra-Shoks in her bellybutton."

"Thank you, I'd appreciate it," Virgil said. Davenport got up, went to the cafeteria line, and came back with three packages of mustard. Through a spoonful of hot macaroni and cheese, Virgil said, "Frankie says hello."

"How are the twins?"

"Loud. Very loud. Relentless," Virgil said. The twins, one of each, were two months old. "Frankie would need about six tits to keep them happy — don't ever tell her I said that. My mother's down there with them. I get two hours of sleep a night."

"I thought you keeping your mother away?"

"That would be like keeping gravity away," Virgil said. "Not gonna happen. She still staring at me?"

"Still staring," Lucas said, watching Virgil's stalker from the corner of his eye.

"I can feel her eyes burning a hole in the back of my neck," Virgil said.

Lucas asked, "What happened with your novel?

Virgil had been writing wildlife magazine articles for years, but since the previous winter had been working on a thriller novel. Lucas was one of the few people who knew about it. Virgil said, "Didn't fly. Not good enough."

"You gonna give up?"

"No. I've got this agent in New York. She told me that I could make a living at it, but I didn't know what I was doing yet. And she told me some other things, and I'm starting over."

"Good. I think you can do it," Lucas said.

"You know what a federal law enforcement officer's main priority is?"

"Not pissing off anyone with more clout?" Virgil was as tall as Lucas, but with blond hair worn too long for an agent of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. He was wearing his court clothes, a gray suit, white shirt and blue necktie, an ensemble unsettled by his cowboy boots, though the snakeskin was well-polished.

Lucas nodded. "Exactly. You're seeing it everywhere now. People afraid to move. People so afraid of fuckin up that they don't do anything. Three Coast Guardsmen got shot to death a few months ago, down in Fort Lauderdale. Broad daylight. Nothing's happened on that. Nothing."

"I remember reading about the shootings..."

"The FBI has been investigating, but haven't been getting anywhere," Lucas said. "The thought was floated by a U.S. Senator from Florida that maybe the Marshals Service could take a look."

"Was the senator one of your political backers?"

"No, but people talk," Lucas said. "He called me directly."

"So when he suggested the Marshals Service, he meant you. Personally," Virgil said.

"Yes. That did not go over real well — it implied that the FBI wasn't getting anywhere," Lucas said.

"Which they weren't."

"True, but the implication was resented. The FBI has a lot more clout in the Justice Department than the Marshals Service and they've been peeing on our shoes," Lucas said. "The longer the case stretches out, with no progress, the more pressure... Uh, the woman with the handbag got up, she's..." Virgil pulled his head down. "... Going to the cafeteria line."

"Check what she orders. I've seen a woman get burned bad by a slice of hot pizza. Red hot, stuck to her face, couldn't get it off ," Virgil said, resisting the urge to look at the woman. "Anyway, you're tangled up in a bureaucratic feud. What are you going to do?"

"I've been reading the files," Lucas said. "They keep coming, but they never have much in them. Lots of paperwork. The feeling is, we're dealing with drug smugglers and the drug is most likely heroin, and it may be coming in from Colombia, but nobody knows for sure. You ever read about the Cocaine Cowboys?"

"Sure, down in Miami. They've been over with for thirty or forty years."

"The FBI thinks somebody, some group, is getting organized the same way, and the same area. South Florida, Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach," Lucas said. "Some group, probably American, maybe with East Coast organized crime ties. The Coast Guard says that a freighter probably dumped a bunch of heroin in water-tight containers on a reef off Lauderdale. It was being recovered by a diver off a local fishing boat, and when the Coast Guard tried to stop the boat, three Coast Guardsmen got shot and killed, the boat was burned. A Coast Guardsman killed one of the smugglers, but the rest got away. The Coast Guard has been watching the general area of the dump, but they haven't seen any more recovery efforts. Maybe it's all gone. Then again, the Broward County sheriff has picked up rumors that there's a hundred million in heroin still sitting out there."

"Has anybody been looking for the stuff? Navy divers?" Virgil asked.

"Yeah, that's mentioned in the files, but the search area is large, the water is really deep for divers and the visibility isn't all that good," Lucas said. "They had one of those remote-control submarines looking for a while, but didn't find anything."

"Then how are the bad guys finding it?"

"They've probably got precise GPS coordinates that'll put them right on top of the containers," Lucas said. The Coast Guard thinks the containers may have some kind of proximity device — push a button on a transceiver and it sends out a locator beep. That's what they tell me, anyway."

"Huh. What do you think you could do? You're not a diver, you don't know shit about submarines or GPS. If the feds..."

Lucas said, "Your friend bought two slices of pizza."

Virgil: "When I went by there, the pizza was so hot the cheese was bubbling... What's she doing now?"

"Staring at you. Carrying the pizza to her table... Okay, she's sitting down. She's eating the pizza. Still staring."

"It's creeping me out," Virgil said.

"It's creeping me out, and I'm not even you," Lucas said.

Virgil wrenched the conversation back to the heroin dump. "What do you think you could do down in Lauderdale? Other than get out Minnesota in November?"

"What could I do? That's what I've been thinking about," Lucas said. "The FBI doesn't do confrontation. I believe we need some confrontations to shake things up. Push some people around. Deal some get-out-of-jail cards in return for information. Street-cop stuff. Find out who gets upset."

"So you're gonna do it?"

"I dunno. Those meatheads at the FBI..." Lucas stroked his chin with a thumb and forefinger, staring past Virgil, not at the woman, but at the blank wall to one side. Virgil let him stare, uninterrupted. Then, abruptly, Lucas looked back at Virgil and said, "Yeah. I'm gonna do it."

"Good. Nice to see an older guy have a hobby... What's she doing now?"

"Finishing the pizza," Lucas said. "She's still staring, though. She looks really tense. She's fumbling in her purse..." Lucas backed his chair up a few inches, so he could clear his gun if need be. "She's got a..."

"What?"

"... Chapstick."

"Chapstick?"

"Yeah, you know, for chapped lips," Lucas said.

Virgil leaned back in his chair. "Wait: I gotta change my underwear for a Chapstick?"

"My daughter's husband is a commander in the Coast Guard and these boys were like family to them," Colles said. "Elmer and Porter say you're my best shot." Elmer was Elmer Henderson, Porter was Porter Smalls, both U.S. Senators from Minnesota.

"I've looked at the files, and I'm interested, Senator," Lucas said. "Would you know the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida?"

"Sure do, she's one of my crew. Anna Rubio. Can she help you out?"

"When I go in on something like this, maybe with a couple other marshals, we don't have the investigative abilities of the FBI... the research abilities, the surveillance teams, the personnel. What we do is we go in and kick things over, make some offers that some bad people can't refuse. The FBI doesn't really do that. We won't do anything illegal, you understand, but I might need backup from the U.S. Attorney. Or, an assistant U.S. Attorney, who carries the water for the boss."

"Give me an example of what you're talking about."

"Maybe a get-out-of-jail card for a relative," Lucas said. "Not for murder, but for like a mid-level drug deal. Maybe somebody's got two more years to serve on a ten year sentence, they get an early parole. Maybe we catch somebody with an ounce of cocaine and instead of waving him off, we talk to him about serious about prison time, and the U.S. Attorney talks tough to him and his attorney..."

"Sounds fine to me," Colles said. "I'll call up Anna and tell her you'll be in touch. Give me a call every once in a while and tell me how you're doing."

"I will do that," Lucas said.

"Looks like it. Are you going to give me a hard time?"

"No. It's what you do, but you've got to be here for Thanksgiving," she said. "Letty's coming and there'll be some parties that weekend. You should plan to be back that whole Thanksgiving week." Letty was their adult adoptive daughter, who was working for an oil company in Oklahoma City.

"I can do that," Lucas said. Thanksgiving was almost a month away. "By then I should have a handle on the situation."

"Don't forget Christmas. And New Year's. There's a lot of stuff coming up."

"But it feels so good when I've got permission to go," Lucas said.

"I could use a lot of sex between now and then."

"I think we could arrange that," Lucas said. "I'll have a word with the butler."

"Taken you a while to get back," Bob said. "We sent that stuff to you a month ago. More than a month."

"There were some complications in Washington. Homeland Security and the Justice Department have been arm-wrestling over jurisdiction and decided to split the difference," Lucas said. "I'm allowed to monitor and assist the investigation, but the FBI keeps the lead."

Bob said, "I don't know what that means."

"It means we're in, if we want to be. We might have to go to some meetings, but basically, we'll be on our own."

"You and me?"

"Well, and Rae."

"Rae's out for the time being," Bob said. "Her mom was diagnosed with breast cancer last week and Rae's taken leave and gone home. She'll be there until the docs figure out a treatment program."

"Her mom gonna die?" Lucas asked.

"That's not what the docs are saying, but it's serious. The treatment is gonna be tough. She's at M.D. Anderson in Houston, so that's good."

"All right. Let's stay in touch with her," Lucas said. "I'm thinking we get down to Fort Lauderdale in the next few days... the task force is working out of a hotel off I-95."

"How many guys?" Bob asked.

"A half dozen FBI agents, representatives from the Miami-Dade cops, Broward sheriff's department, Fort Lauderdale cops, and Homeland Security — Homeland Security is the Coast Guard. We'll be the last guys through the door."

"Ah, man." Bob was pre-discouraged.

"It is what it is. You want in?" Lucas asked.

"Of course. I'm already packing my Jockey shorts."

"Girlfriend's okay with it?"

"I told her it might be happening," Bob said. "She worries, but she knows what's what."

"I've got to do some more diplomacy here, but Weather's on-board. I'll talk to Russell and get your airline tickets going."

"See you in Lauderdale, man."

"That sounds fine," Lucas said.

"When do you expect to start?" she asked.

"Monday. I'm not sure we'll need your help, but it's a possibility. I wanted to have it lined up in advance."

"We're here, this Coast Guard thing has been a constant irritant, and the FBI doesn't seem to be making a lot of progress," Sweat said. "We'd love to get rid of the whole problem — so good luck, and keep your asses down."

"We'll do that."

Keep your asses down.

Lucas had been told that by other cops, and had even used the phrase himself a few times, but had never been told that by a prosecutor. Maybe there was something about the culture of South Florida that would make the reminder relevant?

"I guess we'll find out," he said aloud, in the dark.

Weather was nearly asleep: "What?"

"Just... ruminating.

"Give me a half hour. I want to wash the airplane off and knock on the task force leader's door and day hello..."

Lucas spent five minutes in the shower, pulled on jeans and a tee-shirt, then went up a floor and knocked on Dale Weaver's door. They'd talked on the phone, and Weaver seemed like a congenial guy, for an FBI supervisory agent, anyway, and Lucas had told him that he'd stop up when he got to the hotel.

Weaver came to the door, a stocky man with a square face, lined by years and maybe tobacco, balding, showing white in what was left of his originally reddish hair. He was wearing a tee-shirt and gray sweatpants. The run-up to Monday Night Football was playing on a TV behind him. He smiled and said, "Davenport — you look just like your picture on the Internet."

"Well, shit. I thought I looked like George Clooney in real life."

"He could be a distant relative," Weaver agreed, as they shook hands. "Very distant. C'mon in."

Weaver sat on his bed and Lucas took the desk chair and they spent twenty minutes getting acquainted,, talking about the task force and the problems it faced. Weaver didn't try to disguise the fact that they hadn't accomplished much. "We didn't have a place to start. We know where the boat was kept, which was on the New River, next to a house. You get closer to the coast, it's like Venice, the New River and all these canals running up through the neighborhoods. The space was rented from an absentee home owner based on an advertisement he'd put up on the net and he'd never actually met the boat owner."

"Pretty convenient for the boat owner, given what they were doing with the boat," Lucas said.

"Good piece of research by the assholes, is what I think," Weaver said. "The home owner, the guy with rights to the dock space, is one of those super-rich guys. He has about six houses, up in Manhattan and the Hamptons and a ranch in Wyoming and another place down in the Islands. He says he's here about three or four weeks a year, he has a management service to take care of cleaning and maintenance, and it was actually the service that put up notice for the dock space rental. Those people didn't see the boat owner, either. They said the whole deal was handled by mail, they got a money order to pay six month's rent, and one day the boat was parked there. They do the house twice a week, and they only saw the boat twice, so it probably wasn't parked there for more than a month and a half. The last time they saw it was a week before it burned and sank."

"And the home owner looks straight?"

"We now know what color of shorts he prefers. I mean, however much junk got dumped in the ocean, he could buy all of it, and a hundred times more with the money he earned last year. I got the feeling he's a crook, but not as dope crook, a financial services crook."

"All right. Well, my partner and I, I think you've heard from him..."

"I have..."

"We've read all your research paper and we'll be reading it again, and then we'll go kick over some garbage cans. You've been around for a while, what do you think about that whole idea?"

Weaver shrugged: "Nothing else has worked. Might as well try some marshal shit. I know about your record, so... glad to have you."

"Yeh, we'll get along. Weaver will take anyone who could help. Any scrap he can get."

They left the hotel and walked down a narrow dark street to a place called the Rendezvous, got a table outside overlooking a marina filled with half-million dollar boats — those were the small ones — ordered sea bass for Bob and chicken tenders for Lucas.

Bob was a large man, with a square face, small battered-looking ears, short hair and an easy smile. He was neither fat nor tall. He'd killed a cannibal earlier that year, more by accident than by intention, but nobody grieved for the dead man. Bob had finished third in the NCAA's heavyweight wrestling division in his senior year at Oklahoma and could do a hundred good pushups in two minutes with his girlfriend, who weighed a hundred and thirty pounds, sitting on his shoulders. He was wearing a double extra-large golf shirt, khaki shorts and cross-trainers. He could have sold billboard space on his back.

He said to Lucas, over margaritas, "I've seen a couple of FBI spooks. I went up the elevator with two of them. They had those plastic cards around their necks, you know the kind? It's not like they're hiding. I said hello and one of them was tempted to nod at me, but he didn't."

"Sounds about right," Lucas said. A good-looking waitress came over and to make sure the food and drinks were okay, complimented Bob on his shoulders, and said she'd be back to check on them. When she left, Lucas looked back to Bob and asked, "How's Rae doing?"

"She was in town yesterday to get more clothes. Her mom's starting chemo right away. Gonna lose her hair. Rae's talking about getting her to shave her head before it starts coming out."

"Ah, boy... Is Rae still pissed at me?" Lucas had shot to death a man on a case the three had worked together.

"She was never pissed. She just would have given that guy a chance," Bob said. "She thinks you went there intending to kill him and that's what you did. Her brain doesn't work like that. Neither does mine, come to think of it."

"Even though you saw the dead kid in the school yard?"

"Even though. I'm a lawman," Bob said. "You want justice. Those are two different things. We know that, me'n Rae, and we're willing to live with it."

"Yeah, well..."

"I'll still kiss you on the lips if you want," Bob said.

"I can do without that."

"What's there?"

"The Coast Guardsman who killed that dope runner. He's out of the Coast Guard now. He's going to college down here, but he's working the boat show for extra cash. We need to talk to him. Before that, there's an eight o'clock status meeting with the task force in one of the hotel meeting rooms. That should be done by nine o'clock or so."

"I'm looking forward to it," Bob said, and he yawned.

"Maybe you should bring your gear bag with you. Leave it partly unzipped with the M4 on top."

Bob brightened. "That wouldn't have occurred to me, but I can already see it in my mind's eye."

They glanced at Bob and Lucas from time to time, but made no move to talk to them. The daytime temps were supposed to reach 84 and Lucas and Bob were going to a boat show, so they were wearing guayabera shirts loose over their guns, khaki cargo shorts and athletic shoes. Bob added a blue baseball cap that said "Nimbus" on front.

"What's a Nimbus?" Lucas had asked.

"A rain cloud. Or, could be a halo, but in this case, I think a rain cloud, since we're gonna rain on the FBI's parade."

"Good-looking hat."

"Thank you. I got it for free from some guy who had a box full of them in the lobby," Bob said. "I think it's the name of a boat he's trying to sell. Guy looked like a country singer, but I can't remember which one."

One the way to the elevators, Lucas, trailing Bob, realized that their shirts and shoes almost matched, and their shorts did match. In the elevator, he asked, "The way we're dressed... you think we look like aging gay guys?"

"I'm not aging," Bob said.

Six other men and one woman were chatting or finding chairs, opening laptops. They were all in their twenties or thirties, dressed in either suits or sport coats with coordinated slacks. Some wore ties knotted at the throat, others had slung their ties over their shoulders, like ribbons, to be tied when they went public. They stopped chatting to check out the guayabera shirts and shorts on the marshals.

One of the agents looked at Bob's knees, and then Lucas', and said, "You're the marshals."

Bob said, cheerfully, "Yup," and pulled out a chair, sat down. He didn't have his gear bag, but he winced and said, "Ouch, goddamnit." He reached under his shirt, pulled out his .40-caliber Glock and dropped it on the table with a clunk. "Hate it when it pokes me in the gut, know what I mean?"

Lucas bit his lip and sat down himself, turned toward Weaver and said, "We're heading to the boat show right after the briefing. We thought shorts would be the way to go."

"What's over there?" one of the agents asked.

"Boats," Bob said. "And the Coast Guard guy who shot the smuggler. We wanted to start at the beginning."

Weaver nodded and said, "If you want, go ahead. If you read our interviews with him..."

"We both have," Lucas said. "Good interviews. I want to hear him talk."

Weaver finished with the stack of papers he'd been sorting, and said, "Let's everybody sit down." When everybody was seated, Weaver poked a pencil at Lucas and said, "The dark-haired gentleman is Lucas Davenport, the bruiser over here is Bob Matees. I have bios for both of them, if anyone is interested. Don't let the stupid shirts and shorts fool you: Davenport closed out eighty murders over twenty-five years with the Minneapolis Police Department, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and the Marshals Service. In September, he killed the 1919 sniper. Matees is assigned to the Service's SOG, and he's the guy who took down out the New Orleans cannibal in that fire-fight in Nevada last summer. Davenport was there for that one, too."

"Shooters," one of the men said, with a skeptical tone.

Lucas looked at him and nodded. "Somebody's got to do the heavy lifting."

"Okaaaay..." Weaver said. To Lucas and Bob: "You weren't here Saturday for our end-of-week round-up session, but if you've read our latest info packets, you're up to date, because last week and the week before that, we got jack shit. The Miami-Dade cops and Lauderdale cops have mostly pulled out of the task force, we've got one guy from the Broward sheriff's department who for some reason is still with us, although he seems to be running late today, and over here..." He pointed his pencil at the woman. "... We have July Taylor, a warrant officer from the Coast Guard's Cape May facility. She's a Coast Guard cop."

His pencil did a 180-degree sweep of the remainder of the table: "The rest are FBI. You'll learn their names quickly enough. Now: Let's figure out what we're all doing."

"Our problem," Weaver explained to Lucas and Bob, "Is that the group doing the drug import is small and tight, and may not have lit up any law enforcement screens before now."

"I read that the guy who was killed was some minor Miami hoodlum," Lucas said.

"Yeah, he was. He worked for anyone who wanted some rough work done, he wasn't part of any specific organization. His main qualification is that he liked boats. In fact, he usually worked the boat show you're going to, and the Miami Boat show, which is in a couple of months. We think he was hired to run the boat. Like the diver, we think he had that one special ability, but nothing to do with the purchase and resale of the heroin. If it is heroin we're talking about."

"And the diver..."

"We thought that would be a weak point. If this gang is doing what we think they're doing, they need professional divers to work with them. Or, they need well-trained divers, anyway. Guys who can go deep with multiple tanks," Weaver said. "We worked that hard for the first month after the shootings and came up dry. We think it's possible that the divers involved were brought in from the outside for this one specific job and kept their heads down while they were here. No hanging out at diver bars. Now they may have gone back to wherever they came from."

"How do you know that they're not done with this?" Lucas asked. "The dope guys. That they might not have walked away from it?"

Weaver pointed his pencil at one of the suits, who said, "We've talked to half the goons in South Florida, in jail and out, and there's a persistent rumor that most of the product is still out there. Millions of dollars worth. Tens of millions. The word is, the importers only made a couple of recovery runs before they were rousted by the Coast Guard."

Bob: "And nobody can find where the dope was dumped?"

Weaver's pencil went to the Coast Guard. Taylor said, "Our enlisted man, the one who spotted the activity..."

Bob: "The one we're going to talk to.."

"Yes. He was in his own boat, a private boat, south of Pompano Beach... if you know where that is..."

"I looked at it on a map, so I have an idea," Lucas said. "Up north of here, not too far."

"Yes. His fish-finding gear has GPS but was an old unit and didn't have the ability to record his track. We would kill for that. He believes, but he's not sure, that the other boat was southeast of him, but he'd not positive of that, because the coast line isn't exactly north and south. The other boat could have been dead south. He's also unsure of the distance between them, because it was always changing. Less than a mile, but at least a quarter mile. With two moving boats on the water without landmarks, it's sometimes hard to tell. Altogether, we think the diver was somewhere in an arc a half-mile wide, but as much as two or even three miles north to south, covering a series of reefs off the coast, from fairly shallow and easily dived, to depths that would be at the extreme limit of what a Scuba diver might want to do."

"Doesn't sound like that huge an area," Bob ventured.

"There're almost forty-two million square feet in one and a half square miles mile," the woman said. "From Petty Office Barney Hall's description, the men were loading dark-colored, gray or black, bucket-sized containers off their boat before it burned. We suspect that they may have been twelve-inch or fourteen-inch PVC pipes sealed at the ends, each probably eighteen inches long. We have seen those kind of containers before. Lying on their sides, each pipe would show an area of about one-and-a-half square feet. Trying to find a dark object that small in an area of forty-two million square feet is... difficult, to say the least. We'd have to be very lucky to find one."

"Are you still trying?" Lucas asked.

She shook her head. "No. We had a submersible looking for two months and never found a single pipe. If they're even down there. There are strong currents, there's rough terrain, and the bottom gets churned up and visibility can be down to almost nothing. The pipes may very well be covered with sediment, so we could roll right over one and never see it."

"All of which is somewhat beside the point," Weaver said. "We know that something may be down there, or maybe there isn't, but we're interested in the men who did the shooting, not so much the dope itself. We'll take the dope if we can get it, but what we really want are the killers."

Lucas: "If we can find somebody who knows how to get to the dope, we'll have somebody who can take us to the killers."

Weaver said, "Yes. Of course. The Coast Guard is doing surveillance of the area. We have cameras mounted in beach-side condos that scan the area for suspicious activity — boats that may be putting down divers in the target area."

"Are there legitimate divers going out there?" Lucas asked.

Taylor said, "We contacted all the local dive boats and told the owners that anyone diving out there is going to get inspected right down to the screws in the hull. They'll stay away."

Another agent — Lucas could see his plastic name card and it said, "Bruce, David C." — said, "Unless we want them out there. The divers."

Yet another agent said, "Do we have to talk about that again?"

Weaver pointed his pencil at Bruce and said, "The marshals haven't heard this yet — so talk."

Bruce, a thin, boyish man with careful brown hair and narrow-rimmed, rectangular glasses, cleared his throat and said, "I suggested that we sponsor a kind of... Easter-egg hunt. That instead of forbidding the dive boats from going there, we offer a substantial reward for one of the pipes. A lot of divers like the idea of treasure hunts. If we offered say, a fifty thousand dollar reward for one of those pipes, and outlined the area that we thought they might be in... I bet we'd have a dozen boats out there every day, with expert divers. At no cost to us."

"Plus a few amateurs who'd probably die," somebody else said.

Bruce shrugged. "It may be distasteful to some, but... not our problem. We could have the Coast Guard check each boat and make sure everybody was properly certified. I don't think deaths would actually be likely."

He looked directly at Lucas: "The other benefit, of course, is that it might stir up talk between the killers and we might hear about it."

Weaver jumped in, speaking to Lucas and Bob: "It's in the paper you read, but we believe each... dope container, each can... probably carries a location beeper of some kind. You dive down close with your own sonar unit, put out a specific low-power code, maybe a complicated code because it'd be all mechanical, so why not? Then, when the capsule's unit picks up the code, it beeps back. You use your sonar unit to track right into the capsule. All we need is one of those things and we'll have the code and then we could find the rest."

Bob asked, "What's wrong with that idea, the Easter egg hunt? That's the best thing I've heard so far... not counting the dead amateur diver thing."

"It's a weird way to operate," the objecting agent said. "We'd have to run it through Washington, the whole fifty-grand thing..."

Bruce, annoyed, cut him off and said to Weaver, "Dale, we're supporting seven people here in hotel rooms. We're probably spending fifteen thousand dollars a week getting, as you said, jack shit. Ask Washington for the money."

"It'd be a waste of time," said the agent who hadn't wanted to talk about it.

After a little more snarling and chipping, Weaver sighed and said, "I already asked for the money. I could hear back today."

There were a couple of groans and Bruce leaned back in his chair, looking pleased. "Good move," he said.

The case was most likely to be resolved by accident, Lucas thought — a cop somewhere arrests a guy who really needs to walk away, and who has a piece of information, and who voluntarily rolls on the killers. Or, he thought, it'd be solved by him and Bob.

When the meeting broke up, Weaver said, "Is there anything I can do for you guys?"

"We like to talk to a few of the local narcs, here and down in Miami, if that can be fixed," Lucas said. "Guys who could put us onto some of the longer-time dealers."

"Sure. How about this afternoon? Three o'clock?"

"Where at?"

"The best place would be at the Miami-Dade North police station," Weaver said. "They've got a bunch of conference rooms down there. I'm sure we could get one. We could pull in people from both Miami-Dade and Broward. And city of Miami and Lauderdale."

"That'd be great," Lucas said. "Sure you can fix it?"

"Pretty sure. They've all been cooperative. I mean, they get federal grants."

"Ah."

"Want some DEA agents?"

Lucas said, "There were a few things." He had some sympathy for Weaver, running the task force to nowhere; he'd been on a few of those.

"They've given up," Taylor said. "A couple of more weeks and Dale will write a report suggesting that we continue to monitor the possible dive site and arrests of drug-related persons, but that the task force be closed down."

"Is that what you think should be done?" Bob asked.

"I think we should try David Bruce's idea of the reward. If nobody finds a dope can, we're no worse off than we are now. At least we've got an iron in the fire." Then she shrugged: "Right now, we have nothing. Unless you two are law enforcement geniuses, that won't improve. I'm ready to go home."

Bob smiled at her: "But we are law enforcement geniuses. At least I am. Lucas is more like my assistant, he carries my gun and so on, does my PR. We'll break it in a week or two."

"I'm holding my breath," she said. "Waiting to see you two at work. I know Dale is impressed, and I mean, I could learn so much."

Lucas said to Bob, "A cynic. She doesn't entirely believe you."

Bob shook his head. "It's sad to think about."

"I have to confess," Taylor said to Bob, reaching out to touch his arm. "I loved that part where you dropped your Glock on the conference table. That was the most exciting thing that happened in that room in two months. Well, aside from your shorts."