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the candy store from whose hidden garden Carmen Salazar ran his operation.
    The store itself was gloomy and a mess, a graveyard for soggy pretzels and stale chocolate. Cobwebs fluttered in the corners; flies circled and sometimes stuck to gooey bottles of brightly colored Cuban syrups. The guy whose job it was to look like he was running a business sat behind the counter in a yellowed undershirt, baring his wet armpits to an oscillating fan matted with beards of dust.
    Ziggy silently went through to the open doorway at the rear.
    Carmen Salazar, as always, was sitting, alert but not tense, in a lawn chair. His back was to the door, he was gazing past tangled shrubbery to a light-blotting curtain of vines, yet as always he knew who had arrived. Without turning his head, he said, "So Bigtime, how goes it?"
    Ziggy sort of liked it when Salazar called him Bigtime. He vaguely knew it was sarcastic, but a sarcastic compliment was better than none at all. He moved around so that he faced his boss, and said, "Goes fine".
    "Goes fine," Salazar repeated. He was small and elegant, with hollow cheeks, a sharp chin, and thick black hair so short and glossy, it looked like it was painted on. On an island of damp skins, he never seemed to sweat; in a town of sloppy dressers, his sky-blue and mint-green guayaberas were always crisp, their pleated fronts immaculate. "You northern guys," he went on. "With you it always goes fine. Why? Because once you're in the south, you assume you're overqualified, smarter than the locals. This ignorance, it makes you confident."
    Ziggy chewed his gums a moment but couldn't swallow back the words. " 'Cept I am overqualified," he said.
    "Of course you are," Salazar agreed. "Much too smart to be just a bagman in a little numbers racket. Far too sophisticated to be an errand boy for a whorehouse. I only wish my humble enterprise offered greater scope for your talents."
    Ziggy said nothing, just looked around the garden at monstrous flowers and bulbous fruits he didn't know the names of.
    "Then again," Salazar went on, "if I was into bigger things, I would have to deal with bigger people, and they in turn would be doing business with bigger people still, and soon it might involve the kind of people I don't think you want to work with anymore. Isn't that right, my friend?"
    Ziggy didn't answer, tried with limited success to keep his face as smugly placid as his boss's. He couldn't figure exactly how much Salazar knew of his past, but it was clearly more than he ought to; and that, Ziggy realized, was his own damn fault, the result of certain ill-advised boasting—references to New York friends, associates with broad connections, that kind of thing. Had Ziggy imagined it, or did Salazar stare a little too closely at his altered hairline the first time the two had met in private?
    "But Ziggy, hey," the little boss resumed, and his voice seemed very abrupt as it bit through the other man's thoughts. "I'm a small-time guy, I'm gonna stay a small-time guy, so what's the problem? Pablo, bring the bag."
    With only the slightest rustling, the vine-curtain parted, and Salazar's bodyguard appeared. He was always there, Ziggy knew he was there, and yet it never stopped surprising him that someone so big could hide so totally behind those slender vines. Pablo reached out an enormous hairy hand and passed along a briefcase.
    "The usual place," said Carmen Salazar. "Gordo counts it, gives you a thousand. I'll call you in a few days."
    *
    So Ziggy headed up the Keys.
    Long before he reached his destination, Angelina had had two margaritas and a glass of Chardonnay and was feeling very blue.
    In each bar men had approached her; the wrong men, always—obnoxious, leering, or just plain wrong. Sunburned vacationers had imposed on her their noisy, trivial, and irritating fun. She'd had smoke blown in her face, her breast had been elbowed, someone had stepped on her foot as he lumbered toward the bathroom.
    Through it all, she had