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the yacht back up to Fort Lauderdale instead of me.”
    I’d met white Bahamians before and always found their lilting accent disarming. With Pinder, though, it sounded overdone and pretentious.
    “I take it you didn’t like Nestor. You sure don’t seem to show much respect.”
    “Neither did he. Asshole come in here talking trash to me and my partner, even gone so far as saying that I might be in on something with his boss.”
    I didn’t say anything for several seconds. “The man’s dead.”
    “So? Just because he went out and got himself killed don’t change the fact that the man was bad-mouthing my business.” Pinder leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on the corner of his desk. The flip-flops on his feet looked like somebody my size could use them as wakeboards.
    I glanced around the office. For an operation that was making the big bucks on all these recent salvage claims, they weren’t spending it on office decor. The desk was made of gray metal that matched the folding chairs and the four-drawer file cabinet in the corner. The only other item in the room was a calendar on the wall that showed a Key West schooner sailing past a flaming sunset.
    “Do you know why Nestor recommended me?”
    “I know that Ted Berger now thinks I’m ripping him off when I’m only asking for the industry standard here.”
    I had been prepared—after the stories Sam had told me and after seeing the flaky receptionist—for Pinder to be a total space cadet. I was surprised by his blunt reply. He knew something about salvage.
    “Come on, if you’ve been in this business any amount of time, you know that’s not true. There’s no such thing as an industry standard in salvage. Sure, you can get an award of thirty to forty percent of the value of the small sailboat you keep from sinking, but with a multimillion-dollar yacht like this, you’re looking at a much smaller percentage. Not ten, maybe not even five.”
    “There been salvage awards as high as six million,” he said as he reached for a pack of Marlboro cigarettes and shook one out.
    “That was when a friggin’ oil tanker saved a fuel cylinder from the space shuttle, for Pete’s sake. The Power Play wasn’t even holed. You know, Pinder, it’s guys like you who don’t know what the hell they’re doing who are giving this business a bad name. Learn a little more about the law, look at history.”
    He pawed through the papers on the desk until he found the lighter, then lit the cigarette. He blew a stream of smoke just to the left of my face. “I look at history every fuckin’ day when I walk to the office. I look at these fancy old Victorian houses ’round this town built by poor Bahamian suckers for the rich wreckers. Yes, indeed. I’ve given it quite a bit of thought, and I made my decision concerning which group I’m goin’ to belong to.”

    I stepped out into the sunlight and pulled the door shut behind me with a bang. I wanted that barrier between Pinder and me. I had harbored a naive hope that somehow I would be able to put some sense into his head, get him to lower the amount he was asking for on the Power Play salvage. I had become a part of this job, and I didn’t like being associated with this deal he was pushing for, which would undoubtedly get written up in the papers and talked about in all the waterfront bars. It wasn’t as though Berger and his insurance company couldn’t afford a big salvage award, but it was bad for this business as a whole, this business I had made my life.
    Jamming my hands into the pockets of my jeans, I took off walking back down Fleming Street. At the corner I looked up, trying to decide what to do next, and I recognized the gray-haired, stooped man coming toward me in the crosswalk.
    “Hey, Arlen,” I called out, then waited for him to reach my side of the street. I embraced him with a swift air kiss past his cheek. “What are you doing here in Key West?”
    Arlen Sparks had been a near neighbor of the