What Roy would really like to do is take out his uncircumcised member and urinate all over the precious lobby, add a little sheen to the hardwood floors. Instead he tucks in his shirt, straightens out his Caterpillar ball cap, and presents himself at the famous bar.

“Hey, um, Donny,” Roy says, addressing the barkeep by the name pinned to the lapel of his Tommy Bahama shirt.

“Good afternoon, sir.”

“Stick around?”

“Excuse me, sir?”

“Stick Davis. Supposed to meet him here.”

The barkeep eyes the otherwise empty bar, the message being, see for yourself, moron, nobody home.

“Gimme a Bud,” says Roy, taking a stool.

“Corona, Heineken, Harp, and Sapporo on tap,” he recites.

“Bottled beer listed on the board. No Budweiser today. No Budweiser tomorrow.”

“You ain’t from around here.”

The barkeep, a sly, surfer-blond dude about Roy’s age, volunteers that he’s from Orlando. Roy has never been to Orlando. Fact is he’s never been north of Bradenton, and then only once to visit his mother in the hospital.

“Orlando,” he says, rolling the word around on his tongue. “That’s Disney World, right?”

“Yes, sir. Disney World, Sea World, lots of worlds in Orlando.”

“And your name ain’t really Donny, am I right about that, too?”

The barkeep glances warily at his own name tag. “It’s like a tradition, I guess.”

“For Donny Nyles, yeah. This was his bar, back in the day.”

“Is that right?”

“Yeah. You know what he did once, Donny Nyles? Got in a fight with some tourist, mighta been from Orlando, come to think, and he hits the guy with one of those little clubs they break ice with, and the guy is so drunk he’s knocked out cold. So Donny decides to wake him up by throwing him off the dock. Guy never woke up. He drowned. They stood there and watched him drown in his sleep. Pretty funny, huh?”

The barkeep shrugs. “If you say so.”

No more “sir,” Roy notes. Apparently the “sir” time is over. He wonders why he’s being ugly to a young man, a stranger that’s never done him any particular harm, and then he remembers why. He hates the Hunt Club and everybody in it including, at the moment, himself.

“Donny Nyles thought it was real amusing,” Roy goes on, unable to stop himself, the dangerous edge in his voice sharpening like a gutting knife on a grindstone. “Must have told that story a hundred times, about how he drowned a guy trying to wake him up. Most folks, prob’ly they thought it was just a bar story, only it really happened. Donny, the guy whose name you got on that little green tag on your skinny little chest, he thought killing a loser was really funny, like a good fart joke or a rubber crutch.”

The fake Donny is eyeing the intercom, wondering if he’ll have to call in enforcements, when Stick Wilson enters the bar and raises his straw cowboy hat. “Roy the boy!”

“Hey, Stick.”

Stick must be about forty now, and looks it, still skinny everywhere but for his little vodka belly, straining the buttons of his safari shirt. Aviator glasses covering bloodshot eyes the color of a bleeding battle flag. When Roy was just a little tyke, Stick got temporarily famous for putting a DC-3 down on Alligator Alley after both engines flamed out. Deadstick, they called him, then Stick, and it stuck. Almost as legendary was how he persuaded a startled Florida State trooper that he’d been hijacked, dadgum it, Officer, and that the cargo of Jamaican marijuana now burning merrily within the wreckage was not connected to him in any way, shape or form.

What really impressed the good old boys in Glade City, who had financed the venture, was that Stick, barely twenty years of age, an outsider hailing from Mobile, Alabama, had the good sense to torch the aircraft, thereby eradicating not only the evidence but any possible connection to their august selves. What really impressed five-year-old Roy was that the famous pilot actually seemed to like Roy’s father, treating Pappy like an equal and wanting to know about cool and interesting things like running jars of whiskey to the Indians, and did bull gators really mate with their dead prey.

Near as Roy’s been able to determine in the intervening years, Stick wasn’t one of those involved in betraying the old man. One of the very few. Which is precisely why he’s decided to go out on a limb and trust Stick, despite his reputation as a major league juicehead and plane-wrecker, the old DC-3 being the first of many.

They take their drinks, a beer for Roy and two tall triple-vodka tonics for his guest, and retire to the far frontier of the veranda. Few couples having dinner, seated in high-back wicker chairs, around white-clothed tables overlooking the canal. Very civilized. Very Hunt Club, the sleepy afternoon, flooded with dappled sunlight version.

“Yawl still lookin’ out for your brother?” Stick wants to know.

“Dug? Yeah, I guess.”

“That’s a fine thang, takin’ care of family.”

Stick looks around the old club, never raising his shades, a faint smile twitching on his thin chapped lips.

“Same place, different people,” he drawls. “Less puke, too. Old days, somebody’d be whoopin’ over the rail by now, messin’ up their Top-Siders.”

“Yeah,” says Roy. “The good old days.”

Stick smiling with his teeth and drinking gulps of chilled vodka like ice water, waiting for young Roy Whittle to make his move, say his piece.

Roy puts down his empty glass.

“What if I was to help you put your hands on a pretty little thing worth a whole lot of money?” Roy asks, trying to see through the dark glasses, into those bloodshot eyes.

Stick sits up straighter in his high-back wicker chair, caressing his hard little belly. “Pretty little thang? What kind of pretty little thang?”

6. Get This Party Started

Back in civilization, the concrete, steel and palm tree variety, we’re scheduled to meet with a local FBI guy, who is supposed to bring us up to speed. I assume we’ll go to the office, like they do on the TV shows, all those nicely dressed, unfailingly polite agents focused on making us safe, on getting our children back. But Shane directs me to a drowsy shopping mall in a Miami neighborhood called Miramar, where Special Agent Sean Healy eventually finds us staking out a table at a Denny’s. It seems the field office is nearby, but since we’re not on board in an official capacity it’s better we don’t make ourselves known—the way Agent Healy puts it, we’re off the books. Plus he’s dying for a spicy buffalo chicken melt and a side of seasoned fries, and this, he says pointedly, won’t take long.

After the waitress takes his order he goes, “So. You’re Randall Shane, huh? Heard of you,” he adds, without any particular enthusiasm. “You took early retirement, whatever that is.” “Yup,” Shane says, nodding. “That I did.” “Obviously you’ve still got friends in high places.” “What makes you say that?” Shane asks, all innocent. Healy is a good-looking guy in his late-thirties, kind of a hunk, actually, if you think for instance that Josh Hartnett is a hunk. You know, rangy and slim and masculine but somehow boyish, with good bones and really nice hair and plump, kissable lips. Except Healy looks vaguely pissed off, and that makes him unattractive in a faintly disturbing way. Something to do with the fact that his default expression seems to be a sneer, and the sly way he’s clocking my boobs, it makes me form a negative impression of the man inside the body. Nice to look at but definitely a don’t-touch, because the more you see the less you’ll like.

“What makes me say you got pull?” Healy responds, snorting. “Reality makes me say that. Reality is, we got more than two hundred agents actively working cases from here to Key West, and we never work a case without opening a file, not ever, and along comes this former agent, and suddenly we got six people, more you count support, six agents and who knows how many staff gathering information regarding a certain individual, even though no file as been opened and officially we’re not looking at the individual, if you know what I mean.”