We started walking and the black boy hit the muzzle into my spine two or three times because he'd seen it done in the movies I suppose but it was annoying because he could chip a vertebra and I was tempted to spin on him with the right forearm doing the work. There wouldn't be any risk because when a gun gives a man the type of cocky confidence this one was showing then you know he's not paying enough attention and you can take it away from him like a toy from a boy. But he wasn't alone here and it wouldn't do any good: I needed to get clear as soon as I could and I mustn't rush anything.

'Keep movin'!'

Another prod, though I hadn't slowed. He was young and fresh out here from Jamaica or Haiti, recruited from some cardboard city on a mudbank by an entrepreneur with a gold watch and a diamond pin and stories of fortunes to be made, hey big daddy here I come, and I didn't want to spoil everything for him but it would have to come to that.

Behind me I heard Nicko swinging the Trans Am straight and rolling it down the quay on the wall side, parking it and cutting the engine, slam of a door. Catching up with us, 'She's parked okay for you, limey, we don't want anything illegal going on around here,' a thin wheeze, something like laughter, pleased with himself. He was the pseudo manic-depressive type and I would have to watch him because they're the most dangerous, they'll kill out of caprice.

I said it was decent of him because I didn't like tickets and we reached the Lincoln and the black boy pulled the rear door open and pushed me inside and slammed it and stood away and his voice came through the glass – 'Stay in the car, mister, you wanna live, you know?'

He had a point because that Suzuki was big enough to blow the whole of the Lincoln through the wall without even being selective.

There wasn't anything I could do for the moment. There were three other man standing near the cars, all in dark clothing – a navy sweater, a jump suit, no shirts, nothing white. Two of them were smoking; they didn't talk; sometimes they turned slowly to look at Nicko and then they looked away again. It was important for me to get the hang of their relationships so that I could work with it; at this stage my thinking was that they were all traders except for the boy Roget, that Nicko was in charge but they didn't like him, were even afraid of him, perhaps because he'd killed people – don't kill too many, Nicko – and would be ready to kill more.

I couldn't see Monique; she must be in the Chevrolet parked in front of the Lincoln.

2:14 on the facia clock.

It looked as if they were waiting for a boat because they stood watching the sea, the strip of water between the dredger and the jetty. It wasn't dark out there; the moon was throwing a milky light across the swell left by the hurricane, and ships lay silhouetted at anchor. A helicopter was working a course from north to south across the Port to Virginia Key, presumably a US Coast Guard patrol. If these people were Lights and the squeal of tyres under the brakes and the three men stood back, nearer the wall, one of them bending to look through the windshield; then Nicko came past the Lincoln from behind and was there beside the grey Pontiac when it stopped rolling and a door came open and two men got out, one of them holding the other in a police grip with an arm twisted behind him, both Latins.

'Where's Martinez?' This was Nicko.

The driving window of the Lincoln was down and I caught most of what they were saying, patching a word in here and there to construct the sense.

'He's on his way. Toufexis had some business.'

'We're running late, for Christ's sake. Put him in the big one.'

'What's Roget doing there like that?'

With the gun.

'We've got someone else in the car, same kind of thing.'

For the first time I began to worry. It's easy to think, when there are guns around and the talk is tough and they're confident to the point of inattention, that you won't find it very difficult to get clear. I've got clear in situations totally controlled by field intelligence people, sometimes KGB, people trained and drilled and capable, so that in this kind of lax crime-world setup the danger was in under-estimating the odds. These men were shipping coke and they were doing it in competition with twenty or thirty major narcotic gangs and that meant they had to carry firearms, but they hadn't been trained to use them and they hadn't been through unarmed combat instruction and they wouldn't have fast reactions, but to underestimate them could be fatal because it only needed one stray shot and finis.

And there was the fat man, Nicko.

I knew his kind. He'd been spoiled by his mother and he'd grown up to take what he wanted and hurt if he had to hurt when they wouldn't give it up and later kill if he had to kill, and it had begun with cake and now it was wealth and power and women and sometimes death if someone's death would give him one of those things or all of those things. But the thing about him that warned me, frightened me, was that he'd started to enjoy killing and had probably begun to want only those things that would give him the excuse for doing it. This was my impression.

He wasn't uncommon in the terrorist world or the narcotics world but that was no comfort to me: he was here now, tonight, and the cake he wanted was another death. My own.

'Not there! Put him in the front!'

Roget moved away from the rear door, backing off and keeping the gun levelled and ready to swing: he at least knew the rudiments. The Latin -1 would have said Cuban – moved in front of him with loose jerky steps and his hands crossed over his head as if he knew exactly what had to be done, tugging open the front passenger door and climbing in, slamming it shut, putting his hands on the ledge below the windshield now and leaning his head forward. I could hear that he was praying.

'No talkin' between you two bastards!'

Roget's face at the window. But it was the other face that worried me, the fat man's. He was standing a few feet from the car with his hands hanging by his sides, the little pink fingers bunched like the legs of hermit crabs. He looked at the Cuban, taking his time, and then looked at me, taking his time, his fleshy red mouth in the faintest of smiles, his small eyes shining.

We've got someone else in the car, same kind of thing.

Chill rising up the spine, reaching the nape of the neck. The fat man turned away, and I seemed to hear the echo of shots.

'What's your name?' I asked the Cuban softly.

He didn't answer, went on leaning his dark head on his arms, the tremor in his shoulders never stopping, as if he were in fact bending forward under the lashes of a whip. I could hear his prayers now, tumbling in Spanish from his lips, his prayers and his plea to madre mia, a plea for help, madre mia, the sibilants throwing echoes back from the facia panel, soft as the rustling of dead leaves.

I left him to it and watched the quay, the men standing there. Nicko had his eyes on the water now, like the others, and sometimes looked at his watch. The others weren't talking together, nor to Nicko. The black had his back to them, his gun still levelled at the Lincoln, his jaws working on the chewing-gum.

When the Cuban took his hands off the ledge I asked him again, 'What's your name?'

'It's too late,' he said. I think he was at the stage where he realised he wasn't alone in the car, and wanted to voice his thoughts, and that was more important than my question.

'Too late for what?'

'For anything.'

The quiet despair of the damned in his voice. He didn't turn in the seat to look at me; he looked at my reflection in the windshield. Roget had said no talking.

'Is your name Juan?'

'No. My name is Fidel.'