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of an occasional bird call and the splash of a fish jumping that accompanied the arrival of my friends from Albania.
     
    They had waited until after the club closed. By my estimation, it was around three in the morning. There was a slight cloud cover, just enough to mask any light from the stars.
     
    I stood among the palmettos and scrub oak, next to the post that held the motion detector for the driveway. There were two posts and the installer hadn’t bothered to try to camouflage them.
     
    I figured my late-night visitors had spotted them on their first trip to see me.
     
    And I wasn’t wrong.
     
    They parked the same car about ten feet from the detectors, shut the engine off, and got out.
     
    They must have agreed on the best approach because they split off, one going to the right, the other going to the left.
     
    Toward me.
     
    The motion detector was on a short, metal pole that had been buried directly in front of an oak tree. In order to get around the motion detector he would have to step behind the tree. The ground behind the tree sloped down toward a gulley that had been dug to drain rainfall toward the river.
     
    When the thug stepped behind the tree, his head dipped down. I came out of the scrub oak without making a sound and executed one of the finest sucker punches of my career.
     
    My fist crashed into his jaw, and I felt bone give way—in his face, not my hand.
     
    He toppled forward, and I caught him before he landed in a stand of small palmettos. I lowered him gently to the ground.
     
    I patted him down then freed the 9mm from his shoulder holster.
     
    From the other side of the driveway, I heard someone whisper.
     
    “Pudge.” He sounded annoyed.
     
    “What the fuck, you takin’ a piss?” he said.
     
    I circled back behind the big car, then into the woods behind the second man.
     
    I took great care not to brush up against the larger palmettos on this side of the drive. When their fronds rubbed together it sounded like a violin lesson gone terribly wrong.
     
    The second guy had come out of the woods and now stood in the middle of the driveway on the other side of the motion detectors. Subtlety and stealth were clearly not lessons taught in the KLA.
     
    “Quit fucking around,” he whispered, this time with a bit more volume.
     
    I stepped up behind him and put the muzzle of Pudge’s gun behind his left ear.
     
    “He’s not taking a piss,” I said. “But he probably did shit his pants.”
     
    •
     
    I pulled the Albanians’ Lincoln, with Pudge safely ensconced in the trunk, into the parking lot of the Estero Bay Preserve. It was a huge tract of land, thousands upon thousands of acres, a lot of it swamp, that had been “saved” from developers. It had several walking trails, including one that went for eighteen miles.
     
    I popped the trunk, pulled the second thug out, checked to make sure the duct tape was still across his mouth, then marched him into the Preserve.
     
    We walked for at least two miles until we got to a stand of dead trees, all standing in about two feet of water.
     
    I stripped the duct tape from his mouth.
     
    “Fuck you!” he said, and he pressed his lips together but before he could spit, I whipped the barrel of the gun into his teeth.
     
    He fell on his ass.
     
    I put the muzzle of the gun against the top of his head.
     
    “So what was the plan?” I said to him.
     
    He hesitated, so I pressed the muzzle of the gun into the vertebrae of his neck.
     
    “The boat,” he said. “He was going to take you out on the boat.” He then described to me in great detail what Fama had planned for me.
     
    None of it was a surprise. Fama had mentioned something similar about his original plan for Kiki.
     
    “So what did she do? Why’d he kill her?”
     
    He shook his head. “She did the one thing he never lets his dancers do.”
     
    I waited.
     
    “She tried to leave,” he said.
     
    That’s what I’d figured. I tried not to think about