"Let's have it," Tool said.

"Okay, here's the deal. I got a boy does some work for me, he lost his wife a few days back. He's a little shaky right now and I need you to keep a eye on him."

"How'd she die?" Blood was trickling out of Tool's mouth from where the pizza crust had lacerated his gums.

"She fell off one a them cruise liners out in the ocean."

"No shit? Was she some kinda retard or somethin'?"

"Not hardly." From experience Red Hammernut knew it was best not to clutter Tool's brain with a surplus of information.

"Anyway, the boy's nerves are 'bout fried on account of her bein' lost at sea and the cops askin' questions and so forth. This mornin' I get a message on my machine. Now he thinks somebody's sneakin' into his house and movin' shit around and generally tryin' to freak his ass out. Personally, I got a feelin' it's all in his head. Either way, he needs a guardian angel, and that would be you."

Tool nodded, chewing savagely. "You say he works on the farm?"

Red Hammernut raised his arm in time to deflect an errant chunk of pepperoni. "Nope. He lives over in Boca Raton."

"Oh fuck, Red."

"I know, it's hor'ble. That's how come the five hundred a day."

Tool spat again, this time intentionally, and stomped back into the trailer. He came out with a bag of beef jerky sticks.

"Gimme one a them bad boys," Red Hammernut said, helping himself.

"Boca! I swear to God, Red."

"I'm really sorry, man."

"What kinda work he do for you, this guy?"

"Nuthin' I want advertised, unnerstand? You notice any funny bid-ness, I spect you to call me."

"Sure thing," said Tool.

"And don't hurt nobody," Red Hammernut said, "less I say so."

Once, when the feds were investigating potentially damaging (though well-founded) accusations that Red was holding farm laborers as indentured slaves, he sent Tool to discourage the aggrieved workers from cooperating with the authorities. While nobody disappeared or died, the few workers who dared to testify unanimously portrayed "Mr.

Hammernut" as a saintly, paternal figure who'd plucked them from a life of aimless destitution and given them a bright future in modern agriculture.

Based on what he'd seen in the labor camps of Immokalee and Belle Glade, Red felt confident that Tool would have no trouble handling a weak, pampered white boy like Chaz Perrone.

With a grunt Red stretched his arms and announced he was going home to sleep for about four days. Tool followed him out to the paved road, where the gray Cadillac waited. As usual, Red's driver had kept the engine running and the thermostat set at sixty-eight degrees.

"She a pretty girl?" Tool asked.

"Who-the wife? Yeah, she was."

Tool scratched at his neck. "Maybe he kilt her."

"I don't care," said Red Hammernut, "and neither do you."

One spring evening in 1896, a prominent Pennsylvanian named Hamilton Disston blew his brains out in a bathtub. He had become gravely depressed after depleting his inheritance on a grandiose campaign to drain 4 million acres of Florida swamp known as the Everglades.

Although Disston died believing himself a failure, he was later proven a pioneer and an inspiration. In the years that followed, one version or another of his rapacious fantasy was pursued by legions of avaricious speculators-land developers, bankers, railroad barons, real-estate promoters, citrus growers, cattle ranchers, sugar tycoons and, last but not least, the politicians they owned.

Those wetlands that could not be dried, paved or planted were eventually trenched out and diked into vast reservoirs by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Billions of gallons of freshwater that for eons had flowed freely as a broad marshy river toward Florida Bay was now held captive for siphoning by agriculture, industry and burgeoning municipalities. First one cross-state highway and then another transected the southern thumb of the peninsula, fatally interrupting the remaining southbound trickle from Lake Okeechobee. What precious water made it to the heart of the marsh often arrived tainted by pesticides, fertilizers and mercury.

To protect farms and subdivisions from frequent flooding-the unsurprising consequence of having occupied a bog-hundreds of miles of canals were dug to carry the overflow out to sea during the rainy summer months. Engineers employed a string of pumping stations to manipulate the water levels according to whim and weather, heedless of the historic natural cycles. Inevitably the Everglades and all its resplendent wildlife began to die, but nobody with the power to prevent it considered trying.

It was, after all, just a huge damn swamp.

Toward the latter part of the twentieth century, a series of severe droughts shattered the cocksure assumption that there would always be plenty of water to steal. Those whose fortunes depended on luring home buyers and tourists to South Florida now contemplated the dreadful possibility that the infernal granola-head environmentalists had been correct all along. If the Everglades dried up or succumbed to pollution, so might the vast underground aquifer that supplied drinking water from Palm Beach to the Keys. Growth would come to a gagging halt, and the dirty fortunes that accompanied it would evaporate faster than jizz on a griddle.

This apocalyptic scenario was laid out before Florida's politicians, and in time even the most slatternly among them were extolling the Everglades as a national treasure that must be preserved at all costs. Officeholders who had for decades abetted its destruction now delivered quavering oratory lamenting its demise. During election campaigns, they shamelessly contrived to be photographed kayaking around the East Cape or hiking Shark Valley, drowsy alligators and snowy egrets prominent in the background. Saving the Everglades became an apple-pie cause embraced by both political parties, and voters responded avidly.

Sadly, there wasn't much left to save. Ninety percent of the original 'glades already had been developed, converted to agriculture or otherwise debauched. The only untrampled remnant was a national park, the waters of which were of dubious purity. Nonetheless, in the late 19905 the United States Congress and the Florida Legislature allotted a boggling $8 billion to restore a natural and unpolluted flow to the fabled river of grass. Many decent and well-meaning people believed this to be a moral imperative.

Then there were those such as Samuel Johnson Hammernut, whose sole interest in sustaining the Everglades was to make sure that his thirteen thousand acres of lettuce, cabbage, sweet corn, tomatoes, radishes, escarole and parsley would have cheap and unlimited irrigation forever. Red Hammernut cared only slightly less about the imperiled wildlife than he did about the wretched souls who toiled for dirt wages in his crop fields, held captive to his employment with imaginary debts imposed by violent crew bosses.

As for the pollution issue, Red Hammernut intended to continue using the vast marshlands as a latrine, and to hell with the law. A pragmatic fellow, he'd watched closely as the bureaucracy of the Everglades restoration project evolved, and he had taken measures to safeguard his stake. Eight billion dollars was an unholy shitload of dough, and Red Hammernut calculated that no less than a third of it would be ripped off by lobbyists, lawyers, consultants and bid-riggers favored by well-placed politicians. The remaining windfall would be spent more or less earnestly, if not efficiently, by a phalanx of municipal, state and federal agencies that would seldom communicate with one another.

Prominent among these was the South Florida Water Management District, which was recruiting field biologists to test for harmful substances in farm runoff. It was a specialized mission, one that held some potential to complicate Red Hammernut's life.