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against you, Thorn, this time anyway,” he said. He let his eyes drop from Thorn’s, studied the ground between them. “There’s rules,” he said to the dirt. “You either play by them, or you get screwed. That’s just how it is.”
    The load on Sugar’s shoulders was bearing down. He was shaking his head. He seemed to be doing that a lot lately. Saying oh, no, not this again. No, I don’t believe this.
    Thorn said, “What is it, Sugar? You look terrible.”
    Sugarman settled against the edge of the maple workbench. He shook his head again.
    “I just helped slide two decomposed teenagers into body bags,” he said. They were out in the weather at least a week, at Dynamite Docks. The raccoons’d been at them.”
    “A drug deal,” Thorn said.
    “Looked that way,” he said. “Just a couple of Miami high school kids.”
    “That’s tough,” Thorn said.
    “Days like this, I think it may be time for another forty-day flood. Wash it all clean and just start over.”
    “Yeah, well,” Thorn said, looking off at the darkening sky. “The problem with that is, nowadays it’s the bad guys who have all the arks.”
    Gaeton Richards sat on the edge of the motel bed. He watched Myra Rostovitch standing in front of the window, sipping her coffee from a large Styrofoam cup. The light was leaking in around the venetian blinds now. It was still before eight on Saturday. He listened to the traffic on Calle Ocho, the blat of motorcycles, Cuban voices arguing in the parking lot.
    She ran her fingers down the blinds, flattening them a bit more. There was a shine in her curly black hair.
    A year ago Gaeton would’ve risen from the bed and kissed her, turned her around and unzipped that gray dress, rolled down her panty hose, and led her to the cool sheets. They would’ve stayed the weekend, their handguns on the bedside tables.
    “Adamson sick or what?” Gaeton said.
    Myra Rostovitch said, “Things have changed, Gaeton. Adamson’s out of it. I’m taking it over from here on.”
    She blew on her coffee, paced in front of the TV, sipping it.
    Yeah, things had changed all right. But she hadn’t. She was still inside herself. Still could work a stretch of silence as well as anybody he’d ever seen. Turn it into some kind of drama or make it sexy. He’d seen people talk for an hour and not say as much as Myra got out of a minute of dead air.
    “You know I’ll have to call Adamson, check this out.”
    Myra nodded, still pacing, staring into her coffee.
    She sat down in the Danish modern chair across the room, crossed her legs, set her cup on the bureau.
    “Gaeton,” she said, “there’s been a fuck-up. A major one.”
    Now Gaeton tried it, the thing she did with the silence. But it didn’t have the same effect. It just lay there.
    Finally he said, “A fuck-up.”
    She studied him carefully.
    “It was a simple case of the right hand not knowing what the hell the left was up to,” she said.
    “Give it to me,” he said. “I can probably handle it.”
    “Well, it all sounds perfectly reasonable when you list it out,” she said. “Adamson gave us the history of it, from his point of view. Last January one of his confidential informants gives him Benny Cousins’s name, suggests Benny may be consorting with known felons for unknown purposes. Adamson is intrigued. Former DEA official up to no good. It sounded like it was worth a look. So he put you down there. It made sense it should be you. You already had a network of contacts in the Keys. You were the obvious choice. It could be a RICO case, racketeering, whatever. Adamson OK’s it; you go undercover, move down there; the bureau drops some taxpayer money on it.
    “And let me tell you, you did a good job. Buddied right up to Benny. In six months you were his number one man. And you’ve got a case on him, no question. I’ve seen your reports, bribery, extortion, conspiracy. Some of it is maybe a little dirty, entrapmentwise, and a trifle rinky-dink, but still,