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galley and poured himself fresh coffee. I saw the cup tremble slightly as he lifted it to his lips for a cautious sip.
    He sat and frowned down into the cup. "I wanted them out of here so I could think. They were a distraction."
    "An incompetent distraction?"
    "That too." He sipped again and set the cup aside. "Of course it could have something to do with drugs. Somebody cheated somebody or, turned them in, and a bomber was hired and he hit the wrong boat. But the anonymous phone call rules that out. The caller knew my name. I'm thinking out loud, using rusty equipment, Travis. Forgive me."
    "Keep going."
    "The phone call came about eight minutes after the explosion. So the caller knew it was going to happen and had a vantage point where he could watch for it and then make his call. So the explosive had to be placed just before Hack took the boat out."
    "I'd agree with that."
    "If the caller knew that much about what was going on, wouldn't he have known I wasn't aboard?"
    "Reasonable assumption."
    "Then the call was intended to deflect attention from the real motive and the real victim. Somebody wanted to kill Hack, or Evan Lawrence, or Norma. So there was one victim and two innocent bystanders, not three."
    "Hack Jenkins?"
    "It's possible, I suppose," he said. "I keep wondering why he wanted to go on out into that chop."
    "While you were in Toronto, Hack took them outside after fish. Your niece developed a taste for it. She and Evan were good sailors. Some of it was in fairly heavy weather, so I guess Hack learned how much the Keynes could take, and he had some confidence in the boat. If he had word there was something working a little way out into deep water, I think Evan and Norma, especially Norma, would have urged him to take a shot at it and then come running back in if it started to get a little too rough."
    "She really liked it?" he said, eyebrows raised.
    "Hack put them into some small tarpon about two days after you left. She hooked a forty-pounder that jumped into the cockpit green, smashed a tackle box, and flipped on out again, and she managed to keep it on the line and bring it to gaff. She told me all about it, with lots of gestures, lots of energy. So, I can understand his heading out past the buoy."
    "Evan liked it too?"
    "Whatever Norma wanted was fine with him."
    "It seemed like a good marriage," Meyer said. "Never knew what hit them. Hell of a phrase, isn't it? Nothing can happen so fast that there is not a micro-instant of realization. Each nerve cell in the brain can make contact with three hundred thousand other cells, using its hundreds of branches, each branch with hundreds of terminals, and with electrical impulses linking cell to cell. Ten trillion cells, Travis, exchanging coded information every instant. The brain has time to release the news of its own dissolution, time to factor a few questions about why, what, who… and what is happening to me? Perhaps a month of mortal illness is condensed into one thousandth of a second, insofar as self-realization is concerned. We're each expert in our own death."
    And I knew that strange last statement was correct. We're experts. We get it done the first time we try it. And we spend too much time thinking about it before we do it.
    "Hack's two older boys are back in town," I said. "They're waiting for the sea to flatten out and one of these evenings, about seven thirty, all the charter boats will go out and they'll drop a wreath on the water, and the Reverend Sam John Hallenbee of the First Seaside Baptist Church will give the memorial service on a bull horn, consigning to the deep and so on."
    "I'd like to have that done for Norma and Evan too. But all her friends are in Houston. I'll have to go over there and see what shape her affairs are in. I would suppose I'd be her heir, but I'm not sure."
    "Want any breakfast?"
    "Thanks. I don't think I could keep it down yet."
    "Why don't you get dressed and we'll go talk to one or both or all of the Jenkins