"I paid sixty for it," he said. "You can have it for forty. Cash, right now."

"I have a car," I told him.

"Not like this one. Thirty-five."

"Take it easy."

"Thirty."

I shook him off. When it was my turn at the window, the cashier asked me how much I wanted. She assumed that, like everyone else, I wanted cash. I had about two hundred dollars in my wallet. I was going out, and I wanted to go clean, but there was no sense in being stupid about it.

"Five thousand," I told her.

"That's all?" she seemed surprised.

I nodded, and she counted out the bills. I gave her my transaction slips, and said, "You see those old guys standing around the coffee machine? These slips belong to them. Pass them around after I leave."

"You going now?"

"There's nothing more for me to do around here."

I went to the garage and got my car. I didn't go back to my apartment. I was safe for at least twelve hours, but it was time to move quickly. I started driving north, but not too far north. Just far enough for a Cuban. Around here seemed just right.

"And you've been here ever since?" asked Snake.

"It's as good a place as any if you have to keep your head low."

"Are they looking for you?"

"I screwed Patrício Chavez. I have to assume they are. At least, here I blend in with the Cuban community. Here I'm Julio Ramirez."

"And what does Julio Ramirez do for a living?"

"A little bit of this, and a little bit of that. Mostly, I tell fortunes."

Snake laughed. "That old dodge."

"Sure, it's the easiest way for an ace to make a few bucks. I'm very big with the Cuban ladies here, especially the old ones. I tap their heads, and tell them what they want to hear."

"What a waste."

"It's reasonably honest work. That, and the frontons."

"Jai alai?"

"A jai alai game that isn't fixed is a very rare thing. I hang around the frontons, talk to the players, tap a few heads, make a few bets. Between that and the fortunetelling, I manage."

"It's still a waste. Have you ever thought of working for us?"

"I'm Cuban, Snake. If I worked for anybody, I'd work for Cuba, but I'm out of it."

"You won't stay out. No ace could. You'll get back in."

"I doubt it. Now it's your turn. What are you doing here?"

"I didn't make any deal with you. You wanted to tell me your story, and you did."

"The story was straight. You were in my head, and you know that."

"Yes."

"So I'm asking. What's a yankee ace doing in the middle of nowhere Florida?"

She did not hesitate. She had seen his head. He was really out of the game.

"It'a a weird one," she said, and she told him. Not all of it, just her part of it. The arson part.

"It's weird," he agreed, "but there has to be more to it. Do I get to hear more?"

"No, that's as far as I go. Sorry."

He accepted that. He thought for a while. "Watching this place by yourself, that's a lot for one person to handle. Do you want any help?"

"I was hoping you'd ask."

14

KILL Calvin, kill Calvin. Oh God, how I'd love to kill Calvin.

Just about everyone in the Cockatoo Lounge was thinking murderous thoughts about Calvin Weiss, and some of them were saying it out loud. As Weiss worked his way from table to table, greeting the first-timers on the cruise as well as the regulars, someone shouted from across the room, "You're dead, Weiss, your ass is mine," and someone else countered with, "I'll get you this time, Calvin, right between the eyes." There was laughter in the room, and Weiss paused long enough to flash the finger at each of the shouters before going back to his meeting and greeting.

The second purser, whose name was Fleckmann, saw the look on my face, and smiled. "It's a game," he explained. "We do it every trip. We call it Killing Calvin."

I didn't want to believe it. "You're kidding."

"Not at all. You see, it started a number of years ago on one of these trips. As soon as we cleared port, Calvin got up to his usual tricks, popping in and out of various beds and enjoying the favors of the ladies, and a time came when he didn't pop out quite quickly enough. Outraged husband, you know, caught a glimpse of him fleeing the scene, and wrung a confession out of his wife. That night the husband, a doctor from Pittsburgh as I recall, loudly and publicly announced that he was going to perform a rather exotic piece of elective surgery on our funnyman, and then he was going to kill him entirely. Well, Calvin got the word of the threat almost as soon as it was uttered, and, being a genuine coward and no fool to boot, he immediately went into hiding. It was our last night at sea, we were due back at Port St. James at eight in the morning, and all he had to do was lie low through the night."

"Did he?"

"Easily. There are dozens of hidey-holes on a ship this size, and, after all, there was only the one man looking for him. Calvin hid out, to this day he won't say where, and he didn't show his face until after the ship had docked and all of the passengers had gone ashore. He was pale and shaken, I can tell you. He said it was the most frightening experience of his life, and he swore that he'd never go through anything like that again, but of course he was wrong. The passengers saw to that."

"How so?"

"I don't know who actually started it, some of the regulars no doubt, but they turned it into a game. The idea of Calvin cowering under a bed was just too tempting to them, and so they announced that on the last night at sea, from eight in the evening until eight the next morning, Calvin was fair game. They made up a pool, each one kicked in a hundred dollars, and whoever killed Calvin won it all."

"You don't mean that they actually tried to kill him, do you?"

"No, no. In the beginning it was more like a game of hide-and-seek. Whoever uncovered Calvin, wherever he was hiding, would simply tap him on the shoulder, say, 'bang, bang, you're dead,' and go off to collect the cash. But it's grown into something far more sophisticated. There are rules, and time limits, and weapons. Not real weapons, of course. There are three allowable methods of killing Calvin: shooting, stabbing and strangulation. The ship supplies the weapons. We use those pistols that shoot pellets of paint, we use a Hollywood-type dagger where the blade slides back into the hilt, and for those who prefer strangulation we have a tasty little noose made out of black nylon. It's a little silly, I know, but the passengers love it. And for the winner, it can be highly profitable."

It may have started as a gag, but it was big business now. The ante was still a hundred apiece, but, according to Fleckmann, at least two hundred people signed up for the game every trip, which meant a jackpot that was never less than 20K. Registration took place in the Main Lounge on the last day at sea, the weapons of choice were distributed, and promptly at eight the hunt was on.

"Does he ever get killed?" I asked.

"Ever? He always gets killed. It has to be that way. I don't doubt that he could stay hidden all night, but that would never do. The passengers would never stand for it, and what would we do with all the money? No, Calvin knows how to play the game. Sometime during the night, usually on toward morning, he shows himself, and somebody pots him. It never fails."

"That leaves room for some chicanery, doesn't it?"

Fleckmann looked puzzled, then he got it. "You mean collusion between Calvin and a passenger?" He shook his head firmly. "The man may be a bastard when it comes to women, but he would never cheat that way. I can assure you that Killing Calvin is strictly on the level."

Which was what I was afraid of. I stood there trying to digest what I had heard, and what I came up with was mental indigestion. The assignment had been a bitch to start with, but there had always been a chance, a slim chance, that I would be able to pick the killer out of the crowd by tapping his head. Now that chance was gone. I didn't have a single person on board with murder on his or her mind, I had a couple hundred of them, and there was no way I could filter out fact from fantasy. My only edge was gone, and I felt like swimming back to Port St. James.