Liestraker grinned. "You ate Cuban?"

"Uh-huh. I want you to go to your AUSA and get a grand jury subpoena and check the registers of all the hotels in the Greater Miami area for a male possibly of Cuban origin posing as a Dr. Allende, mid-forties, five-ten, hundred ninety pounds, heavy athletic build, brown eyes, close-cropped haircut, no distinguishing physical characteristics, checking in December 7 or 8 and checking out December 22. Start with hotels close to the restaurant and work out, but cover all of them."

Liestraker said, "Cuban origin, no distinguishing marks? In Miami? Are you kidding?"

"No," said Diatri.

"Why hotels?"

"He wasn't from here, so he had to stay somewhere."

"How do we know he wasn't from here?"

"His Spanish accent was wrong, New York maybe. Also, he asked a waiter directions a couple of times."

"All the hotels?" These new guys.

"I've got to go… back to the motel. Call me."

Diatri was just inserting the butterfly needle into the antecubital vein when the phone rang. It was Liestraker. "Do you know how many hotels there are in the Greater Miami area?"

"No," said Diatri, reaching over and pulling the tubing around his upper arm with his teeth like a parrot. "Ha muny?"

"Four hundred and sixty-seven."

"Then you better get started." Diatri started the glucose drip. The first bottle would empty into him in an hour; the second always took longer. "Something else," he said. "Call round all the RC churches. See if anyone fielded any strange calls the night of December 21."

"Strange?" said Liestraker. "Strange how? Sightings of the Virgin Mary?"

Diatri had already hung up. He set the drip regulator and lay back and let the rattle of the old air-conditioning lull him to sleep. He dreamed he was underneath a waterfall floating on his back in a pool of cool blue water and standing at the top of the waterfall was Paulina Porizkova, smiling and beautiful, tossing a huge, huge Alka-Seltzer tablet to him that floated down toward him in Super Slo-Mo.

15

He felt badly for Felix, he truly did. Hunched over the gunwale, making sounds like a dying seal. Rrroaaaa. Having his ribs wrapped up tight as an Egyptian mummy, that couldn't help.

Charley dipped the washcloth into the ice water at the bottom of the cooler and put it on the back of Felix's sunburning neck. "You want a cracker? That might help." Charley's suggestion was followed by a basso profundo rrrruuuuua. Charley patted his back. "That's it. Let it out. Don't fight it." Take a cracker the size of the Ritz to soak up what was ailing Felix. Should have put on that scopolamine patch. Felix could be stubborn. Didn't want drugs, wanted a clear head.

The Gulf Stream was rocking the boat in the cleavage of D-cup bosomy swells. It was hot, the sun beat down on the [unclear] slick. Charley reached over the side and cut the line holding a perforated white bucket of mashed grunt and watched it descend. The water was so clear out here beyond the hundred-fathom [missing]. Small fish followed the bucket, pecking at the loosened chunks of greasy meat, darting and retreating with the glee of looters. Charley followed it down to where the water turned cobalt and the became a speck on its way to becoming a free lunch for great marlins. Suddenly it was many years ago and he could hear Margaret's voice.

"Daddy has a nervous stomach," she was saying.

"Ain't nuthin' unusual about that," said Charley, coiling a line.

Margaret smiled at him. "Isn't."

"Huh?"

"Not huh, Charles. And it's isn't," Margaret whispered, the [missing] her daddy couldn't have heard over the sound of his overboard retching. "You're not trying, Charles."

"Maggie-"

"Margaret."

"Why don't we get him inside. He's gonna sunstroke himself out here."

"Going to get sunstroke. Daddy," she said, "I want you to go inside now and lie down. Charles, you take that arm now." The captain stayed aloof at his controls on the cabin top while the mate helped the daughter of the drunk who'd chartered his deep-fishing boat get her father down below out of the scorching sun. The man had prepaid in full, so it was no skin off his ass; it was a mystery why a man who drank like that would come down Houston to Rockport to go deep-sea fishing when he couldn't [missing] stand. It was his genes that would kill Charley Junior, his son, on that road in Bethesda thirty years later. It's all Charley thought. You can run from that double helix, but you hide…

Rrrruh. Charley wrung out the washcloth and put it on [missing] neck. "You know," he said, "it makes you appreciate all the more what your people went through leaving Cuba in those leaky boats getting away from Castro."

Felix appeared to derive no consolation from this. Charley said, "We oughta head back into Cat Cay."

"No," Felix said, and spat. "I'm okay."

"We'll, I'm getting sick watching you. I'm taking her in." He climbed up onto the tuna tower and started the engines and throttled up to 2,100 and pointed her north-northwest. He said into the radio, "Papa Dog One to Bird Dog."

"Bird Dog."

"I got a sick sea dog out here I'm taking into the flat and level. You okay on supplies for tonight?"

"We got a severe mosquito situation here, Papa Dog."

"Well, I'm sorry about that but you boys are capable of handling that." Mac and Bundy had gotten a tad soft since Vietnam, considering Bundy had told him about a time in the Delta when he'd spent three entire days in his ghillie suit crawling across a hundred-meter rice paddy teeming with leeches, pinned down by snipers, so thirsty and hungry he started eating the leeches after the second day. Now he was griping about mosquitoes. "Roger that, Bird Dog. I'll bring some more of that bug juice with me." They used something called Skin So Soft, by the ding-dong Avon Calling folks, a bath oil that repelled bugs. Mercenaries smearing themselves with ladies' bath oil. Charley looked over at his radar screen and there it was, a green phosphorus dot at ten o'clock, bearing north and moving fast.

"Stand by, Bird Dog, we got a possible heading your direction." Charley put his binoculars on the horizon and waited. He saw her, bouncing off the Gulf Stream's crests like a giant flying fish. The speed these things were capable of took your breath away-or could give you a spine problem. Men with gold chains would turn up at boat shows with briefcases full of hundred-dollar bills-twenty pounds of hundreds to a million; that was how they counted their money, they weighed it-to buy the latest hot boat. U.S. Customs had some hot boats, but these-these boats were pure speed. Charley clocked her on the radar. Eighty-five miles an hour. "You up to this?” shouted down at Felix. Felix chambered a round into the shotgun he had velcroed under the gunwale for quick release. He looked up at Charley as if to say that dying could only be an improvement.

A minute later they saw the plane.

It was a twin-engine Piper Aztec, coming out of the southwest, less than a hundred feet off the water to avoid Miami Center. Fat Albert, the Customs aerostat over Cudjoe Key, might have picked it up, but unless they had a chaser on station, the plane would be on its way back to Panama with a bellyful of fuel and cash before they were clear of Cape Florida. The plane veered toward them. Charley and Felix scrambled to switch places, Charley in the fighting chair, Felix at the controls in the tuna tower. The plane swooped over them. Charley waved. It circled back toward them and for a moment Charley thought it might open up on them. Barazo said it was fitted with a fifty-cal, but that was probably bluster. If dopers started turning their planes into fighters, that was all the excuse the military would need to go after them with F-14s. Charley waved again. The plane flew past toward the beach on the west shore of Andros, where German U-boats used to put in. Charley saw him lining up for his final approach. "Papa Dog, you see him?"