Tool regarded him as if he were some sort of school-yard flasher.

"The gun, boy."

Chaz said, "I told you. I threw it away."

"Red said no funny bidness out on the water."

"I heard him."

"You done here?" Tool motioned snidely at the toilet. " 'Cause it's time we should go."

"Let me get dressed. I'll meet you outside," said Chaz.

The blue-plated.38 was hidden at the bottom of the laundry hamper. He slipped it with his cell phone into a zippered pocket of a Patagonia rain jacket, which he folded neatly and carried to the Hummer. Tool was enthroned behind the steering wheel, chewing a stick of beef jerky and tapping his stained fingers to a country song.

Chaz said, "What're you doing?"

"What's it look like?"

"You are not driving my truck."

"Red said so. Hop in, Doc."

Chaz was steamed. "What about the suitcase?"

He'd purchased a gray hard-shell Samsonite with retractable wheels.

Tool had packed the cash by himself, stack after stack of hundred-dollar bills. Although he'd refused to let Chaz anywhere near the money, the mere sight of it had been intoxicating.

Tool motioned with his thumb. "It's in the back."

Chaz climbed in on the passenger side. To remind Tool who owned the vehicle, he reached for the tuner knob on the stereo. Tool caught his hand and slammed it against the top of the dashboard. Chaz's arm went numb.

"That's Patsy Cline," Tool said simply.

"Christ, I think you broke my wrist!"

"Don't ever mess with the radio when Patsy Cline is on."

Goddamn psycho, Chaz thought. He couldn't feel any fractures, but something in his left hand was either sprained, torn or jammed.

Tool maintained a surly silence during the ride to Miami, though he turned out to be a decent driver. Chaz was holding himself together pretty well until he heard the first boom of thunder and eyeballed the blackening line of clouds ahead of them.

"What if they won't rent us the boat in this weather?" he asked.

Tool seemed entertained by the question. "Don't you worry, Red's got it all took care of."

Chaz opened the envelope and read over the blackmailer's instructions again. "You sure you know how to use a GPS?" he asked.

Tool said it was easy. "One season I had some trouble over at Immokalee, so I went down to Ramrod Key and run a crawfish boat for a feller. He had a import bidness on the side, so we spent some time in the islands, off the books. Made the crossing back and forth from Cay Sal in all kinds a storms."

"Worse than this?" Chaz said.

"On occasion, you bet."

The rain was sheeting by the time they parked at the Bayside Marina and found the boat. It was a twenty-three-foot outboard with a Bimini top and a big four-stroke Yamaha. A Garmin GPS had been mounted on the console.

Tool set the heavy suitcase in the stern. Chaz bundled unhappily into his foul-weather jacket, the hammer of the pistol poking his ribs. He pulled up his hood and peered at the leaking leaden sky. His left wrist throbbed painfully.

Tool found a portable spotlight and plugged it into a battery jack. He seemed surprised that the device actually worked. Tool started the engine and cast off the ropes and motored slowly away from the docks. When they reached the open water, he told Chaz to sit his ass down and he threw the throttle forward. Simultaneously there was a clap of thunder that made Chaz duck. This is insane, he told himself.

What he had planned for tonight would have been difficult in clear, calm conditions; in a squall it could be suicide. He hunkered low, cringing at every glint of lightning. Tool seemed at ease-one hand on the wheel, the other working the spotlight-though his overalls were soaked and sagging. The rain had slicked down the dense black curls on his arms and shoulders, giving him a surreal lustrous sheen in the twilight.

Soon they passed beneath the Rickenbacker Causeway Bridge, which Chaz had crossed often as a grad student on his way to the Rosenstiel School. The sight reminded him of his long-ago ordeal with sea lice, and he speculated that the hungry little bastards were floating all around them in avid anticipation, should Tool manage to capsize the boat. Also looming in Chaz's imagination was the larger, more lethal menace of sharks. Such attacks were virtually unheard of on Biscayne Bay, one of many facts that Chaz had either forgotten or simply failed to register during his idle schooling in the marine sciences. The ravenous two-headed alligator starring in Chaz's recent nightmares could just as easily have been a hammerhead, given his visceral dread-and lazy ignorance-of both species.

Blessedly the thunder quieted and the downpour faded to a drizzle, although they hit a chilly wall of wind, which buffeted them most of the way to Cape Florida. The ride was more than sufficient to reinforce Chaz's loathing of the great outdoors. Clinging with his uninjured hand to the bench seat, he envisioned himself hurled to the deck with such force that the pistol in his jacket would discharge accidentally. If the shot didn't kill him outright, the noise would probably give him a heart attack.

Navigating with the magic of global satellites, Tool located what was left of Stiltsville, an old community of wooden houses constructed on pilings in the shallow grass beds. Hurricane Andrew had practically leveled the place, and the few remaining structures had been taken over by the National Park Service. The empty, unlit homes looked skeletal beneath the hot-blue flickers of lightning.

Tool turned off the engine and let the boat ride the outgoing tide down the channel. He muttered under his breath, his scowl visible in the green glow of the GPS screen.

"What's wrong?" Chaz asked.

"This is right where he told us to meet him," Tool said, "but I don't like it."

As they came abreast of the last stilt house, Tool lumbered to the bow and heaved out an anchor. The rope went taut and the boat stopped dead, the bow dipping slightly under Tool's bulk. He made his way back to the console and sat down with a grimace.

"Now we wait," he said, rubbing his buttocks.

Chaz checked his watch-it was more than an hour until the meeting. He turned on his cell phone, as the blackmailer had instructed. From the mainland came another rumble and, high in the clouds, a jagged burst of bright light.

"That bunch is still a ways off," Tool said. "If a-hole is on time, we'll be long gone 'fore it hits."

At least one of us will, Chaz thought. He was sure that Red Ham-mernut had ordered Tool to kill him and make it look like a suicide- the grief-stricken widower, unable to cope with the loss of his wife, decides to join her at sea for eternity.

But Chaz Perrone had 13 million reasons to stay alive, and a plan of his own.

"Where's the damn ice chest?" Tool asked. "I'm thirsty."

"Guess I left it in the Hummer."

"Tell me you ain't serious."

"Sorry." With his good hand Chaz took the Colt from his jacket and pointed it at Tool's massive silhouette.

Tool didn't notice the gun until it was illuminated by a flash from the oncoming storm. Chaz couldn't make out the goon's expression, but he plainly heard the warning: "I wouldn't do that, boy."

"Sure you would," Chaz said, and squeezed the trigger twice.

The first shot punched a hole in the canvas Bimini top. The second knocked Tool overboard, causing a splash that was more of a concussion, like a meat freezer being dropped into a swimming pool. Chaz emptied the.38 into the foamy crater and watched to see if the body would float up right away, like they did on TV cop shows. He'd expected Tool's wintry coat of hair to provide extra buoyancy, yet there was no sign of the dead man bobbing to the surface.

As Chaz pocketed the revolver, his cell phone rang.

"What the hell's going on?" The blackmailer sounded serious and alarmed; no Jerry Lewis impressions tonight.