He was swimming faster than the boat? Impossible. He dared a quick look back, a break in the rhythm of the crawl, and the cigarette boat had stopped back there, was glaring at him like an attack dog on a leash, while both men in the boat were pointing at him and yelling toward shore.

Shore. He couldn't stay floating in place out here; he had to keep swimming and somehow try to see the shore at the same time. He did it, panting, straining, and yes, there it was over there, a white limousine moving leftward beside the water, someone in the backseat yelling at the men in the boat.

Well, at least they'd sent a limo for him.

It was too shallow here for the cigarette boat — that's what had happened — so he no longer had them to worry about. Now all he had to concern him was whoever was in that white limousine.

The fishermen had realized something was up, and one of them now put down his pole, sat, and started his little outboard. Putt-putt, it came toward him as the limo stopped, unable to continue along the deep sand and wet mangrove swamp along the shore. Three men clambered from the limo, all in shorts and light shirts and sunglasses, and began fighting their way through the vegetation, waving their arms around as though mosquitoes were happy to welcome them to their island.

The little boat came to a bobbing stop beside Preston, and the man in it called, "Come on up here!"

"Right! Thank you! Right you are!"

Preston flung his arms over the gunwale but could do no more. His legs kept drifting, under the boat, and he couldn't lever his body up out of the water.

Finally, his rescuer grabbed Preston under both armpits from behind, pulled, and scraped his chest up and over the splintery wooden edge of the boat, until he could reach the top of Preston's bathing suit and yank on that, at which point Preston found it was possible to help, thrashing and lunging and kicking and beating until he landed himself on the wet, dirty bottom of the boat.

The man gazed down at him with a grin. He said, "I like that watch."

Gasping, Preston cried, "Get me out of here!"

"Oh, maybe you wanna see your friends, man," the fisherman said, with a snotty little grin. He was Hispanic, heroically mustached, unshaven, dressed in a hopeless straw hat, a Budweiser T-shirt, and ratty green work pants. He was barefoot, and his toenails did not bear thinking about. Still grinning at Preston, he said, "Maybe we wait for them. That's some nice limo."

Preston sat up. No time for nonsense. "If those people capture me again," he said, "they'll kill you. You're a witness."

Abruptly the smile went away, and the fisherman gave a worried look toward the running men. He would know the stories about what sometimes happened in this part of the world. He said, "I don't want none a this shit, man."

"You're already in it," Preston told him. "Get me away from here, and this watch is yours."

"Oh, it's mine, man, I know that," the fisherman said. "Okay, get down now." And at last he turned back to his outboard motor.

Get down? Preston was already seated on the bottom of the boat. "What are you doing?" he wanted to know, and twisted around to look forward.

The fisherman was steering them directly toward the shore. The trio from the limo had found some sort of path and were running much more strongly than before, their arms pumping. The boat and the three, it seemed to Preston, were all going to meet at the same spot, on the shoreline. "What are you doing?"

"Get down, man!"

Then he saw it. A tiny inlet curved away into the mangroves, and just visible way back in there, a footbridge stood barely above the water.

"We can't go under that!"

"Not with you sitting up that way, fool!"

Preston flopped down onto his face as the three men ran on, almost to the bridge, which slapped Preston on the backside as he zoomed by.

39

WEDNESDAY WAS THE most jam-packed day of Judson Blint's life, beginning when he got to the office in the morning and J. C. paid him for his first week's work, and ending when he rode in the rented Ford Econoline van full of his earthly possessions through the Midtown Tunnel into Manhattan just before midnight. And in between, he'd joined a gang and learned a skill.

The start was nine in the morning, when he entered suite 712. He started toward his desk, and J. C. stuck her head out from the inner office to say, "Come on in. It's time you got paid."

He'd wondered about that. He'd been working here a week now, taking care of all the businesses J. C. didn't need any more, Intertherapeutic and Super Star and Allied Commissioners, and apart from a few cash advances he still hadn't seen any money. Yes, this was essentially a criminal operation going on here, or a whole bunch of criminal operations, but he still needed to get some kind of salary.

However, he hadn't yet figured out how to raise the subject, so it was a relief that J. C. had brought it up herself. "Good!" he said, and followed her back into her office, still a neater place than his own.

She gestured to him to sit in the other chair, herself sat behind the desk, and opened a drawer to take out a ledger book and a gray canvas sack with a zipper on it and a bank logo across the side. Setting the sack apart, she opened the ledger and said, "You started here last Wednesday, so I guess it's just easiest to put you on a Wednesday to Tuesday week."

"Okay."

"I gave you a couple advances — a hundred fifty — so that comes out of it."

"Uh huh."

She took a wad of cash out of the sack and started counting it on the desktop as she said, "Your take this week comes to seven hundred twenty-two, but I don't do singles, so we round it down to seven-twenty, subtract the yard and a half, five-seventy, and here you are."

Five hundred and seventy dollars, a thick wad of cash, was thrust toward him. He took it, gaped at it, gaped at her. "J. C, uh," he said, "can I ask?"

"What, you don't think that's enough?"

"No, it's fine! It's more than I — But you said, my take for this week. I don't understand. How did you get to that number?"

She looked surprised for a second, then laughed and said, "That's right, I negotiated your deal for you, and then I never got around to telling you the agreement you made. You get twenty percent of the scams you're covering. The rest goes to me for office upkeep and thinking them up in the first place."

"Twenty — twenty percent of all those checks?"

"Judson, I just don't think I can get you a better piece. Believe me, I—"

"No no," he said. "I'm not complaining. Twenty percent, that's fine. Fine. I didn't, I didn't realize it was going to work that way."

"What'd you think I was gonna do, pay you by the hour? Do you want wages? Or do you want a piece?"

"I want a piece," he said. Some answers he knew right away.

Later that morning, when he brought into her office today's mail for Maylohda, he said, "I want to come back late from lunch. I'm pretty much caught up out there."

"Got a nooner?"

Peeved with himself for blushing, but feeling the damn blood in his cheeks anyway, he said, "No, I just thought — I need my own place in the city, I thought I'd go look for an apartment."

She nodded. "Furnished or unfurnished?"

"Furnished for now, I mean, I don't—"

"Studio?" At his blank look, she said, "An L-shaped room, sofa over here, bed over there, separate kitchen, separate john."

"Oh. Yeah, that'd be good." Did she also rent apartments?

Reaching for her phone, she said, "Lemme make a call. There's a woman in this building, down on four, she's got a pretty good agency. Muriel, please. Muriel, it's J. C. Making a living. Listen, I got a jailbait boy here needs a furnished studio. Well, he can go two, but he'd rather not." She looked at Judson. "East Side or West Side?"