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make me write bad checks girl. Angelica was a woman clearly without her own mind and never in need of it; she functioned on a level of selfless emotions. At the point in her life when most other women begin to wear jewelry to enhance their fading youth, Angelica wore less makeup and fewer clothes. Instead of dressing in a manner designed as sensible, Angelica was in headlong pursuit of the irresponsible. She had a reputation, among the town’s self-appointed male judges of female virtues, as having at any one given moment the hardest nipples and the softest heart. Angelica was a northern woman who had drifted on a bet and a dare along the high-rise, time-sharing Gulf of Mexico coast, and ended up in the southernmost Redneck Riviera. But Angelica was not a Saturday night tickle to be found seven nights a week in the Wreck Room. She was no hillbilly harlot or card-carrying member of the drug-a-day club, rather, she was the marrying kind who spent her whole life trying to prove she wasn’t the marrying kind. Even Angelica’s five-year-old daughter knew that. Angelica was the kind of woman who aimed to please, and aimed straight. Right now St. Cloud knew her aim was targeted at him. That didn’t stop Brogan from rattling on anyway.
    “Yeah, you could call my brother an adventurer I guess. MK’s done all the usual stuff. You know, blowing up power stations of little Marijuana Republic islands so his men could load grass onto boats in the harbor and slip away under cover of darkness. MK’s been chased by Cuban gunboats in the Bimini Windward Passage. He even had a small nine-hundred-acre garden in Jamaica on the side of a mountain in Rasta Cockpit country. Thick jungle, had to truck the marijuana harvest out on donkeys, MK cut their vocal cords so nobody knew they were mule-training by. Those gentlemen donkeys had their ball bearings whacked off too, so they handled sweet as Bambi. Did I ever tell you how my brother got his name? MK was real decorated in the Nam war. I mean heavy decorated.”
    St. Cloud wanted to hear the story again. The story always changeda little, but over the years he had heard Brogan talk of MK the central facts remained the same. MK was everything St. Cloud wasn’t. MK had been Special Forces in Vietnam during the 1960s when St. Cloud was marching against the war in San Francisco, having people spit on him and hiss
Commie
, that was the usual stuff back then. It seemed to St. Cloud now, after twenty years had passed, some curious circle was bringing him and MK together, fusing them in a bond of unfathomable brotherhood, inexorable and uncomfortable.
    Angelica’s tears were melting the hardened sugar in St. Cloud’s veins. He cocked himself up on the barstool and leaned over the counter, wrapping his arms around Angelica so her face rested against his chest. Angelica’s sobbing shook the two of them until St. Cloud almost lost his balance and pitched over backward.
    “Karl Dean was a great man!” Angelica sobbed against St. Cloud’s chest.
    “Yes.” St. Cloud held onto Angelica for dear life. He knew if he let go he would take such a fall he would never get up. “Karl was a regular guy.” The sugar had not melted so much in St. Cloud’s veins that he didn’t know Karl Dean was one of the most disagreeable scammers in a town that prided itself in producing one hundred percent disagreeables. Karl was just another homegrown boy who figured out before he left high school that he could pump gas the rest of his life or run a few fast boats around in the dark across shallow water and get paid big money for the least amount of questions asked. Karl had a solid gold watch, but he could barely tell time or count to ten using the fingers of both hands. Karl always had one eye on the next girl in town to turn fifteen, the other eye on himself in the mirror resting on his knee as he snorted up his daily five G’s. A real regular guy around the island. Racing boats was not a sport to Karl, but a way of