I turn off the engine and step out of the car. I see a couple of divers with tanks and wet suits heading the other way, out toward the dock and the schooner.

“Excuse me.”

One of them turns to look at me.

“Either of you know anything about a sunken tugboat around here?”

They keep walking, hauling their heavy gear, but the guy looking at me waves his left arm as if to point, in the general direction they’re going. So I follow.

We walk through the lot, past parked cars toward the schooner. Just off to the left, toward the bow of the vessel, is a small building with a white metal roof and a sign over the door that says DIVE SHOP. I follow the two guys toward it, and just before I get there, I see a large boulder, a jagged piece of gray basalt the size and shape of a headstone. It is painted red with a white diagonal strip running across it from top left to bottom right, the international symbol for a dive site. Across the stone at the top right is the word TUGBOAT painted in black letters.

As I look off to the left past the stone, I see a small cove, no sand beach but a shelf against the cliff, covered by broken pieces of gray coral. There are maybe eight or ten plastic chaise lounges set out on top of the coral, a few with towels on them. Two at this end, closest to me, are occupied by a couple readying their masks and fins for a snorkel adventure. Farther back in the cove, perhaps forty yards away, is a solitary figure, a guy sitting sideways on the lounge, facing me. He is talking on a cell phone.

I’ve never seen a picture of Aranda, but the man’s appearance fits the bill. He looks to be in his early thirties, short-cropped dark hair, well built, broad shoulders and narrow waist. With him seated, I can’t tell how tall he is, but he is lean and appears very fit.

I keep checking my watch every few minutes, hoping that Herman will get here.

If the man sitting on the chaise lounge is Aranda, I know that he is not going to talk on the phone for long, not with roaming charges just off the coast of Venezuela. And when he hangs up, he’s going to either hit the water or head back to wherever it is he came from. I could approach him and try to talk to him, but I’m afraid he would simply get up and run, in which case I would have to track him in the car on winding dirt roads through clouds of dust. And you could be sure that he would not go anywhere near Ginnis until he was certain he’d lost me.

Once Herman gets here, we can take our chances. Herman can block him with his girth while I talk. Herman always packs a folding knife. If we have to, he can punch one of the tires on Aranda’s car and we can trap him in the lot until we talk his ear off. Give him a ride and let him show us where Ginnis is.

I check my watch again. Herman should be here any second. Then I see it, a cloud of dust, a fast-moving vehicle coming this way from the land side of the hill with the towered fortress. Herman to the rescue. When the large, dark SUV comes out of a line of brush and turns this way, it’s moving so fast that the rear end fishtails on the sand and loose gravel.

As soon as they stop and two of them get out, one of them with a good-size camera, I know I’m in trouble. Part of the media mob has found its way to Jan Thiel, and they’re ahead of Herman.

Now there’s no time to waste. I head directly toward the man on the phone, long strides, my shoes digging into the broken pieces of coral. As I walk right up to him his head is down, he’s smiling, talking on the phone. When he sees my feet stop a yard or so in front of him, he finally looks up.

“Are you Alberto Aranda?”

The expression in his eyes is one I have seen before, whenever I am forced to surrender a client to be taken into custody by police in my office.

“Sweetie, I gotta go. I’ll call you later.” He snaps the clamshell phone closed. “Who are you?”

“My name is Paul Madriani. I’m a lawyer from San Diego-”

Before I can even finish the sentence, he slips rubber thongs on his feet, grabs his snorkel gear, gets off the chaise lounge, and brushes right past me.

“You better not go that way. The media is waiting for you with cameras in the parking lot.”

This stops him like a bullet.

He turns and looks at me. “What do you want?”

“I want to know where Arthur Ginnis is.”

At this moment his expression is a mask of anxiety. He thinks for a second, then looks toward the parking lot again. “Are you with them?”

“No. I just want to talk to you. All I want to know is where Justice Ginnis is.”

“Get me out of here,” he says, “and I’ll take you to him.”

A towel over his head for shade, carrying his gear, and me walking beside him, we draw little or no attention. We head back through the parking lot. By now the cameras have swelled to two crews, who are gathering their equipment. One of the reporters is scanning the forest of chaise lounges and oiled bodies on the beach at the other side of the parking area. Their vehicles, two full-size SUVs, motors still running with drivers behind the wheels, are parked not in spaces but behind other cars, blocking them. One of these is mine.

I’m a step or so ahead of Aranda, wondering how we’re going to do this, finesse our way past them. I’m hoping that they don’t have a picture of him, when suddenly I realize he is no longer behind me.

By the time I turn and look, Aranda is ten feet away. He has the door open, and before I can take two steps, he slides into the car, a compact rental, slams the door, and locks it. As I reach the car and grab the handle on the outside, he already has the engine started and he’s rolling, shooting gravel at me from under the rear wheels as he pulls out. I have to throw my body onto the hood of the vehicle behind me to keep from being crushed as he does the turn, pulling out.

I’m up on the hood of the vehicle on my back watching as he jams the car into first and guns it straight ahead through the parking lot. Of course, the screeching tires and the sound of flying gravel draw the attention of the cameras like bees to honey.

By the time he tears past them and I’m back on my feet running toward my car, the obstacles blocking my vehicle are gone. The two camera cars with lenses protruding from the rear passenger windows pull U-turns, and within seconds they’re in hot pursuit.

As I get in and start the car, I’m guessing that I’m already a quarter of a mile behind Aranda. Turning to exit the parking lot, I see their dust ahead of me as Aranda goes straight, taking the road I came in on. One of the camera vehicles follows him. The other cuts off to the left on another road. I don’t follow it. I stay with Aranda.

A few hundred feet up, there is a bend in the road, and I see a large cloud of dust. As I enter it, I’m forced to slow down. When the dust begins to settle, I see the car with the cameras off in a ditch on the right and what appears to be a taxi with its nose stuck into the side of the hill on my left. I know it’s a taxi because Herman is standing just next to it talking with both hands, Italian style, to guys crawling out of the SUV.

I slow down and get a mouthful of dust as I open the window and wave him toward me. The instant he sees me, Herman stops talking and sprints to the passenger side of my car and gets in. Before his feet even hit the floorboards, we’re moving again.

“It’s Aranda up in front of us,” I tell him.

“Damn near killed us,” says Herman. “I thought we were clear till the other car nailed us. Couldn’t even see ’em in the dust.”

“I had him in the parking lot. He got away. The press showed up.”

“As soon as I saw the cameras in the car, I figured,” he says.

We are racing, bouncing along in ruts on the unpaved road. Herman hits his head on the roof of the car and finally gets himself strapped in.