'You mean it's too late at night?'

'Too late for anything. He will kill me.'

'Nicko?'

'Yes. It is why I am here. Is it the same with you?'

'Yes.'

Same kind of thing.

'Maybe he'll change his mind,' I said.

'How long have you known Nicko?' His tone calling me a fool.

He was perhaps forty, this man, short but I would have said muscular under the dark seaman's jacket, his face weathered, less by the sun and the wind than by the demons in his head. He looked as if he'd come a long way through the years, missing the right turning and having to go back. He was shaking a little as if cold, on this warm tropical night; I don't think he was on cocaine, on a downswing.

'What happened to your hand, Fidel?'

He didn't answer.

'What are they waiting for, out there?'

His eyes, reflected, widened a little, perhaps surprised by how little I knew of things.

'The boat,' he said.

'Where is it coming from?'

He went on staring into the windshield for a time and then his eyes closed. 'Juanita,' he said, kept on saying, whispering, 'Juanita', and was weeping now, his head going down and the tears coming freely, 'Juanita, oh, Juanita...' in a tone of such desolation that I saw her in the distance, a red rose on her black dress and her face waxen white as she turned and waved, her hand no higher than her shoulder, and turned away, walked away, his woman I would suppose, Juanita.

My nerves jerked as he moved suddenly, hitting the door open and swinging it against the wall, his bunched body projecting itself out of the car as Roget swung the gun and shouted at him – 'Freeze! Freeze right there!' – and Nicko and the others turned to watch, one of them giving a short laugh, having seen this sort of thing before, perhaps, having expected it.

Nicko said nothing, didn't make any move towards the car. He was smiling.

'Back in the car! Back in the car, you wanna get fuckin' shot?'

Fidel the Cuban stood turning, writhing, his head in his hands, moving as if he were struggling to get out of some kind of restraint, a strait-jacket, struggling but not succeeding.

I knew what he felt. I had no Juanita, but I knew what he felt. I wasn't doing the same thing because I had done the same thing in my mind a long time ago when I was new to things, before I learned that a trap cannot be sprung by allowing the onset of panic, which sounds stuffy, perhaps, considering this man was approaching his death, but it doesn't mean that I had no feeling for him, do not ask for whom the bell, so forth.

'Back in the fuckin' car!'

And the man came, Fidel, back into the car, his crouched shadow leaving the wall as he dropped onto the seat and pulled the door shut, leaning his head back against the squab, his eyes closed.

I began waiting until I thought he might be ready to listen to whatever I had to say, and while I was waiting, lights came from the dark sea, lifting and falling to the swell.

'Fidel. Is this the boat?'

He turned his head a little. 'Yes.'

'What are they going to do with you?'

'They will kill me.'

'Listen, Fidel, I might be able to do something to stop them but I'll need your help, so brace up, get your head together, you know what I'm saying?'

'Do something? With him there?'

I think he meant Nicko but he could have meant the black, Roget. Roget would be easy to work on.

'Listen, there's no point in giving up, Fidel, it won't get us anywhere. You've got to -'

'Who are you?' interested for the first time.

'I can get you out of this but you've got to help, now understand that. We -'

'You know nothing,' he said, 'you think you can do anything against him, against Nicko, then you know nothing.'

Not a lot of use. I wanted information out of him so that I could get something together and set it in motion but there wasn't going to be time because the arrival of the boat would change things and I wasn't ready.

'Where will they take us, Fidel? Quick.'

'Across the sea.' His eyes watching me in the glass.

'Across the sea to where?'

'They will take us out to sea, and then shoot us, and throw us to the sharks. That is the way it is done.'

Jesus Christ it sounded like a regular programme, sweating a little, I was sweating a little now because the time frame was narrowing, closing on us, and once they'd got us on the boat there'd be nothing we could do, finito.

In my trade I've seen one or two deaths, caused one or two deaths, all right, killed if you want me to spell it out for you but listen, this is the point, I've never taken it lightly, a man's death lightly, even when he was at my throat before I managed to beat the odds, even when he'd been doing everything he could to blow me away, I've never thought of it as all in the day's work, although to many that's all it is, a trick of the trade, a necessary inconvenience. But I would have to get perspective: this was Miami Florida and the drug trade here was a multibillion-dollar industry and the stakes were high and life was cheap and that man over there, the fat man, Nicko, had probably made this trip a dozen times, fifty times, and thought of it as no big deal, and if I got the correct perspective on what was happening tonight, if I pulled back from the environment as you pull back with a zoom lens, all I would see would be a miniature black Lincoln down there with some tiny figures standing around it and two tiny figures inside it, and they would be the two tiny figures who would be dropped into the sea in a little while from now, to float for a time on the slow lifting and falling of the swell until the dark fins broke through, accelerating and closing in, and then there was just a lot of blood on the surface, a lot of threshing about and then the blood, Christ, it was a beautiful red, he was a beautiful man, he coloured the whole sea like a flag, like a banner, and that was all it was going to be about, given the correct perspective and the background of a multibillion-dollar industry with its primal laws and its murderous checks and balances, a whorl of crimson blossoming on the moonlit breast of the sea.

And this perspective, I knew, was necessary to me: it would give me a tool for getting inside Nicko's mind, so that I could see if there were anything I could do to it, if there were time.

They will take us out to sea, and then shoot us, and throw us to the sharks. That is the way it is done.

'Fidel,' I said, 'why will they shoot us first?'

'Because otherwise we might swim to shore. It will be only a few miles.' His eyes watching me in the glass, interested in me now, perhaps because I wanted to know all about this thing instead of wailing to my mother. 'It is their way because they do not have to get rid of our bodies. There will only be bits and pieces found, perhaps.' Impatiently – 'You are not afraid?'

'I don't intend to be thrown to any sharks; I wish you'd understand that.'

In a moment, 'You are not American, I think?'

'No.'

'You are English?'

'Yes.'

'It explains things, then. I have heard that the English cannot see the nose on their face.'

'We try to look beyond it, you see. Have they sent for this boat especially to take us out there?'

'Of course not. There will be a pickup.'

Some of the fear had gone out of his voice; he'd got over his madre mia bit and his prayers to the almighty God who had decided understandably to drop him in the shit, and now he was fatalistic, but that wasn't really any better, any more useful to me. I would need to get some feeling back in him. Anger, perhaps. Anger towards Nicko. That could be dangerous because this man was a Latin and liable to shoot the whole chamber dry before he took aim, but I'd have to make the best of the material. I would much rather have worked alone, but he might get in the way and it was probably safer to bring him into the act than risk his messing it up.