"I'll get it." Tensing his body for a straight buck up the middle, Jake threw open the door.

The boy in the Marlins baseball cap and high-top Air Jordans stood on the threshold. "Where's Miss Lilia at?"

Lilia swished her way past Jake. "What's happening?"

The boy handed her a crumpled slip of paper. "Old man in cutoffs and sandals say to call this number."

Lilia turned from the boy and slipped the paper in the folds of her kimono. "It's a message," she said.

"Who from?" asked Jake.

"Garcia," she replied.

Lilia Sands worked her overpainted face into a frown. "Garcia? Which Gar-cia? Do you know how many Garcias there are in the Dade County phone book?" She studied the young messenger, who was orbiting her as though he expected a tip. I'll give you a tip, all right, kid, Jake Lassiter thought. You'd better earn that ten bucks I just gave you and go back outside to keep an eye on Fay's pickup.

"What's his first name?" she asked the boy.

He shrugged. "He said you'd know."

Lilia smiled, then delicately raised her fingertips to her temple as if to brush away imaginary perspiration.

"Ah . . ." she said, with a long, rapturous sigh. "ThatGarcia."

Jake shifted his weight from one sore leg to the other. Time out, he thought. He, Britt, and Fay had come to Lilia's for a lock of Castro's hair – the realCastro's hair. So, they had what they'd come for. No need to tango here all day. Even a pit bull reporter like Britt had to know when it was time to move on.

"Look, Miss Sands," he said, surprised at his own politeness, "we can bail out of here if you need to catch up on your phone calls."

"This will interest you," Lilia said, holding up her index finger to silence Jake. (Watching, Fay and Britt both took mental note of this tactic in case it might come in handy someday.) Lilia cradled the receiver of her black novelty telephone, which was shaped like a baby grand piano. Each time she pressed a key, a tone sounded; she was dialing a laborious version of "When the Saints Go Marching In."

Long-distance, Britt noticed.

Off key, Fay decided.

Damn annoying, Jake thought.

"It's me. Put him on," Lilia said abruptly, in Spanish, and then she smiled and nodded, her green-flecked brown eyes wide with pleasure as she listened to an indiscernible voice. Hanging up, she surveyed her waiting audience as though she were reliving a finale number onstage at the Nacional.

"I shouldn't tell you this ... " Lilia began.

But you will,Britt thought, perking up. Sentences that began with "I shouldn't tell you this" were verbal foreplay, and satisfaction was never far behind.

"You didn't hear this from me, and don't ask who told me – but Miami is about to have an important visitor from Cuba. Believe me, when hecomes, the people's reaction will make Nelson Mandela's reception in Miami look like the papal visit. He's coming soon, within days. He didn't say exactly when."

"Give me a break," Jake said, not buying it.

"It can't be," Fay said.

"It is," Lilia said, beaming.

Britt's brain was turning somersaults. Not one head, but two, and Fidel was stillalive? And, apparently, intending to set foot in a city that nourished itself on fantasies about the day he would drop dead? Home to weekend commandos who would love to help him do just that, with a million-dollar price tag on his head?

Castro is Coming! Britt was already thinking in headlines. This was top-strip, front-page, WW II type. She'd need to get on the phone and pull some favors with her sister-in-law's bureaucrat uncle in Havana to get confirmation.

Britt's delight at the whiff of a huge story warred with her disappointment that the man who killed her father was still breathing. "I can't believe he's alive," she said.

"Si, como no,"Lilia said. "Of course he's alive. But if he's planning to come to Miami, he's obviously lost his head."

Silence. The three of them started.

"What do you mean?" Britt asked first.

Lilia circled her finger around her ear. "You know ... loco."

The proportions of this story were growing in light-years, Britt realized. They'd been fearing riots if people thought Fidel was dead?What about the riots when word got out that he was about to enjoy a big plate of arroz con polio in the glare of fluorescent lights and mirrors at La Carreta?

Did that phone call mean that this woman, a disenchanted revolutionary, was still maintaining her own special brand of diplomatic relations with Fidel Castro? And if that was the case, exactly how "inside" was her mysterious tipster on the phone?

Britt, having a hunch – and her hunches were rarely wrong – fixed a probing gaze on Lilia.

"Listen," Britt said, "on a scale from one to one hundred, if I ask how confident you are of that tip – how close your source is to Castro himself – where would it rank? Tell me that and we'll be out of your life."

Lilia smiled a wide smile. She was reliving memories that had wiped thirty years from her face; there was no mistaking that despite politics, she was in love.

"One hundred and ten."

Right again, Britt thought. Fidel had been on the phone.

Guess who's coming to dinner, Britt told herself, already writing her story's lead in her head.

"Doesn't make sense," Jake said, holding the door open for Fay and Britt as they walked outside into the liquid afternoon heat. His hulking form stood high above the two women. "If Castro comes here, Miami's welcoming committee is going to grind him into hamburger. Or picadillo anyway. He won't last two hours."

"Maybe that's what he wants," Britt said. "Think about it. Phony heads. A staged assassination. A reward for proof of his death. And where better than Miami? Everyone expectspeople to get killed in Miami."

Fay, following them to the curb, was silent. She noticed that her pickup was now tagged KING in bright orange paint across the cab, and the kid had vanished. Jake cursed loudly, but Fay wasn't worried about her truck. She had other things on her mind.

There was no mistaking that Pulitzer lust glazing Britt's eyes, so Fay figured her friend would head straight for the newspaper, where she'd be no help – and Jake was content, saying something about getting a beer. Him and his damned Grolsch. It figured. He'd always been too eager to punt on fourth down instead of going for it, she recalled from their brief courtship.

To her, something just didn't add up. Even if those creepy Castro heads were part of some fake assassination scheme, how had one of them found its way into her grandmother's hands by way of Booger, the manatee? And they still weren't any closer to figuring out what had happened to Phil, her ex-husband, who'd been mixed up in bringing the heads in the first place.

It would be funny if it weren't so pathetic, Fay thought. She could have told whoever had hired Phil that the guy couldn't be trusted to bring back the change from the grocery store, or even the groceries, much less deliver valuable cargo.

The poor jerk had already tried to kidnap her to get the heads back once he lost them, and now they'd somehow led to his disappearance. He was a loser, but he was herloser, and it had touched her to see him so shaken. Her stupid mothering instinct had drawn her to Phil in the first place, like a moth to a burning stick of dynamite. She should have listened to her grandmother and gotten a puppy instead, and she wouldn't be in this mess now.

Granny.

A thought made Fay shiver slightly, despite the hostile midafternoon sun: If Castro's heads had put Phil in danger, wasn't her grandmother in danger too?

Granny had tucked the lone metal canister with Castro's head on the bottom shelf of her refrigerator – "Just in case it starts to thaw," she'd said, patting it like a leftover pot roast. "I'm not too fond of dead flesh at room temperature, Fay. Even a head of state."