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alive, but who knew where.
    That left among the possibilities his great-grandson, a boy for whom no sane man could hold high hopes. And yet still, the old man loved him. Which is why he sat on the edge of his bed and trembled in the tropical dawn, pondering those events so long ago…all the while praying that it could not be a curse he’d brought upon them all, but just an old man’s stubborn memory that came and went at random, that calamity no more loomed above this island now than that which chance might bring.
    The wail of distant sirens broke Ainsley Spencer’s reverie, and he glanced around his tidy bedroom to reassure himself of what was real, then forced himself up from his bed, willing the vision of the dead man’s sightless stare from his mind. That had been then, and this was now, he told himself.
    What a man might remember was one thing, but the events themselves belonged to the past. And even if he felt a certain responsibility for what had happened, it was far too late to change things now. Events that had happened once could not happen again.
    His concerns should be with what could be managed, he reminded himself. Take this day in hand and do with it well.
    Indeed, he thought as the sirens wailed. He would go check on his great-grandson now, though he already feared what he was likely to find.

Chapter Two
    Key West
    The Present Day
    “How come she didn’t bring you the cork?” Russell Straight said to John Deal.
    “That’s only when you buy the whole bottle,” Deal said, lifting his glass of red.
    Russell, who’d ordered a beer, nodded thoughtfully. He had his eyes on the receding backside of their cocktail waitress. She was tall and deeply tanned, with blond hair that just tickled the collar of the parrot-print Hawaiian shirt that the Pier House staff wore. She had the shirt untucked, and the khaki shorts were standard-issue unisex, but certain virtues were impossible to disguise. Deal didn’t blame Russell for staring. He was staring himself, starting to feel the different pulse of life as it was lived in Margaritaville.
    Deal, who’d inherited what was left of DealCo Construction from his late father, had come down from Miami to Key West to see a man about a job, as it were. Though it was summer and well ahead of the serious tourist season, which wouldn’t kick into high gear for months, the island paradise at the end of the American road—all one mile by four miles of it—was hardly sleepy.
    Last evening, for instance, he and Russell, his newly promoted construction superintendent, had idled away part of the cocktail hour walking along the seawall at the Malory Docks, the city’s tour-boat port, elbowing their way through a crowd of easily a couple of thousand who’d come down for the ritual viewing of the sun’s fiery plunge into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Despite the mixture of heat and humidity that had combined to form a bank of thunderheads off to the west, obscuring the fabled sunset, there’d been no dearth of gawkers for the fire-eaters, jugglers, mimes, and bygone-era folksingers providing their own brand of entertainment at the steely water’s edge.
    The number of tourists had simply been reduced to the very nearly tolerable, Deal thought, glancing around the crowded bar. He had promised himself that he’d never join that weary chorus who loved to tell newcomers how much better it had been “back in the old days,” before the swank hotels of the eighties, or before the highway in the thirties, or before Henry Flagler built his railroad at the turn of the twentieth century, when you could only get to the town by boat.
    There had always been better days, Deal thought, anywhere you went. But even with Duval Street turned into one big market and high-profile restaurateurs turning cottages into Cafés See and Be Seen on every corner, Key West was still unique, a tropical island plopped down in the middle of the Gulf Stream a hundred miles from mainland Florida, enough of