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around the face-down deadweight of Dean’s body bobbing in water. The thin line between winning a race and burial at sea had been crossed. But something more had been crossed. Burial at sea for a speeding thrill seeker was one thing, forty-one dead Haitians was another. One man’s bait is another man’s meal. Everyone races to the same fate, but there was more. St. Cloud felt it wasn’t all so simple.
    The weight of Brogan’s body shifted on the barstool, knocking against St. Cloud. Brogan’s heavy insistence was not that of a drunken challenger or an overzealous friend, more like an anxious load seeking universal balance. “Have I ever told you about my brother?” Brogan raised an emptied cocktail glass close to his lips, his words echoing up with urgency. “My brother’s a sort of adventurer down in Central America. Yeah, that’s what he is, a sort of adventurer.”
    St. Cloud knew enough to write a book about Brogan’s brother and always wanted to hear more, but sliding his attention over to Brogan on the stool next to him was going to be a tricky maneuver.The blood of St. Cloud’s veins hummed with the sugar slush of rum; any coherent thought trying to swim upstream to his brain was almost certain to drown. First things first. St. Cloud struggled to focus his eyes from the television set, down the mirrored wall into the narrow runway behind the bar, where Angelica reigned supreme. He tried to steady the blond vision of Angelica, tears streaming down her cheeks as she poured a Niagara Falls of alcohol into drained glasses held out to her along the bar. Angelica’s white shorts were of such insignificant material they could be stuffed into a whiskey shot glass with room left over for two olives. Each time Angelica spun around in a provocative pirouette, bending over to expose fleshy charms as she snagged yet another bottle of West Indies rum, enough silent prayers went up from the men along the bar to have turned the tide of the Crusades. Angelica presented a fast-moving target for St. Cloud, he struggled to keep the target steady as she poured rum to the top of Brogan’s empty glass without his asking for it. She wiped tears from her eyes, holding the bottle of rum up expectantly before St. Cloud, her smoky voice delivering the slow curve of a daring confrontation. “Why don’t you just take me away from all of this and fuck me?”
    Brogan sucked the rum out of his glass in one gulp. “My brother says Central America is where the buck bucks. He says what’s going on down there is like a poker game with your mother. You can only play that game one way. To the end. You lose, you are not born. You win and you can’t live with your conscience, because you have fucked your mother over. What was that you just said, Angelica?”
    “I asked St. Cloud why he just didn’t take me away from all of this.”
    Brogan raised his empty glass to Angelica in an unsteady salute. “I was talking about motherfuckers. I was talking about politics. I was talking about my brother.”
    “He was my brother and now he’s dead.” Angelica brushed a new set of tears from her eyes.
    “What are you talking about?” Brogan stammered, lowering his glass in disbelief. “MK is not your brother. MK is my brother. Did I ever tell you how MK got his name?”
    “Karl Dean is what I’m talking about, you jerk. Karl Dean was my brother and now he’s dead.”
    “He wasn’t your brother.” Brogan shoved his empty glass across the bar. “He was your lover.”
    “You’re all my brothers.” Angelica poured Brogan another drink, her tears splashing on the mahogany gloss of the bar top.
    Among Angelica’s many charms, which St. Cloud found too numerous at this moment to count, she had one seductive quality that went unrivaled. This quality, which attracted St. Cloud most to Angelica, was that she was wicked and there, immediately available in a way which intended no harm to others. Angelica wasn’t a beat me, whip me, bite me,