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Zane flicked the switch to turn on his boat’s lights. The red and green navigation lights radiated on the bow while the white anchor light blazed on the stern, altogether illuminating the deck with a dizzying patchwork of color.
    “Are you an idiot?” shouted Miguel, turning off the lights and smacking Zane in the back of the head. “You’re as stupid as your father, aren’t you?”
    “Sorry, I just thought—” Zane touched his head where Miguel had struck him, and then he looked up with sudden su r prise. “You know my dad?”
    Miguel studied Zane for a moment. “We’ll discuss that later.”
    Zane stood there perplexed. His father had innumerable acquaintances, some of them shadier than others, but he could not recall ever hearing of Miguel before. Skip was no saint, but he was no hard criminal, either, and certainly not someone who would ever knowingly consort with a drug smuggler. Then Zane remembered that Skip had begun calling him not long after they picked up the bale, so many times that Zane’s cellular phone—safely enclosed in a Ziploc inside his shorts pocket, as usual—was nearly depleted of its battery power. Miguel had forbidden Zane to answer.
    The succession of illumined hotels and condom i niums—elaborate jack-o-lanterns adorning the coast for the last hundred miles—ended abruptly. Beyond them, as far as Zane could see, stretched a long dark shoreline blanketed by the silhouette of forest and a sprinkling of dim lights. The di g ital chart on Zane’s GPS showed that they were approaching Cape Canaveral. The lights, he now realized, sat atop launch pads, some of which were still used to hurl rockets carrying satellites—including the ones that provided GPS—into orbit; others were relics left undisturbed since the Space Race, decaying ruins that now sat as lifeless as most of the men who once worked on them.
    Gemini. Mercury . Apollo . The Space Shuttle . At one time all had punctured the stratosphere above the Cape but now they were things of history. Some had failed dramatically, and Canaveral shrimpers still occasionally dredged up ba r nacle-encrusted pieces of the Challenger in their trawls. The rockets and vehicles that retired unscathed, on the other hand, had become tourist attractions in museums and visitor centers, their defunct metal controls now burnished by countless greasy fingers, their framework always creaking as if they longed for the thrill of the countdown, the furious shudder of the ignition, and the cold serenity of outer space.
    “Three miles,” said Miguel after a quick glance at his tracking device. “And coming fast.”
    Even though they were several miles offshore, Zane could see a swath of breaking waves in their path. Globs of white water would materialize, peak rapidly, and then disappear. He realized that they were coming upon the Canaveral Shoals, an undersea peninsula of shallow sandbars that jutted out many miles from shore. Some parts of it were only a few feet deep and his chart had the word DANGER inked in red across the entire area. Experienced mariners knew that the shoals had caused countless wrecks throughout history. Most of the vessels were swallowed so completely by the shifting sands that traces of debris were rarely found.
    “We should go around the shoals,” said Zane. “We need to change course.”
    Miguel shook his head. “No way in hell. We’d use too much fuel.”
    “We could capsize.”
    “You really are gutless, aren’t you? We go north and nothing else. Got it?”
    Zane trembled. Behind them and before them peril was imminent. If by some miracle the authorities did not stop them, the sea surely would. He reached into his pocket and turned on his cellular phone, then snuck a peak at it. Both the low battery light and the voicemail indicator flashed. He yearned to pick it up and call his father, but he felt certain that Miguel was waiting for any excuse to kill him. He turned it off again and sealed the baggy.
    As they reached