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machine guns, but it beats the hell out of a daily commute and having some faceless corporation tell me I’ve got to change ten passwords every twenty days.
    The most recent bullets, however, that had embedded themselves in both my boat’s speaker and me, were the result of an assignment from the colonel. I had risked my life to retrieve a classified letter from the Cold War that was held by a man named Raydel Escobar. Kathleen had questioned why I put everything on the line every time. I had no answer but gave her a love letter from fifty years ago that had been in the same envelope as the classified letter. It contained an arrangement of words that expressed, beyond my capability, my feelings for Kathleen. That letter was now in her home. A man I never knew, from a time we didn’t share, expressed what I could never say.
    I had tried to assuage Kathleen’s fear. “It won’t be like last time. The police are involved. I’ll just be there to help where I can.”
    “I’m fine,” she’d said. But it came out too fast and with nothing behind it.
    “I’ll call you when I get a feel for how long I’ll be there.”
    “Be careful.”
    “Always.”
    “Don’t give me that crap.”
    “Okay.”
    My conversation with Kathleen faded in my mind and was replaced with my reflection in the glass. I turned away. It was time to return to Susan Blake’s house. This time I’d have to get out of the truck.

CHAPTER 5
    S usan lived on a street named after a bird. Other streets on the island were named after states. Not the most creative effort, but it sufficed, and at least they gave Carlos a break.
    Her house, halfway down on the south side, was a golden stucco ranch with sculptured hedges and a shaved lawn. It backed up to a canal that led to Estero Bay, where at the moment, tailing reds lay in the shades of the mangroves, waiting for me to drop a live shrimp on them. Not today. A dark sedan rested in her driveway, so I pulled up behind a car the color and size of a large fresh lime. An osprey screeched, and monk parakeets chirped back. Crushed seashells littered the street. Fort Myers Beach, like the island I lived on and hundreds more throughout Florida, was nothing more than an inhabited sandbar.
    I hit the doorbell before I had time to think. Susan opened it, and I followed her on a wood floor with varied-width planking through a great room to her back lanai, a spacious area that overlooked a small pool, her dock, and the canal. A twenty-foot Grady-White rested on its lift. Impulse is a twenty-seven-foot Grady. The back of Susan’s home, like mine, faced south. Fate speaks a strange tongue. I tried to rein in my mind, which insisted there was a damn good reason she and I had connected that night. I avoided eye contact with her, which I thought was a totally gutless thing to do, but there you have it.
    A man in tan slacks and a blue blazer stood and extended his hand. The sports coat appeared as if it hadn’t seen a dry cleaner since he’d snatched it off the discount rack. His short-cropped hair matched his physique. His left shoulder was slightly lower than his right.
    “Detective Patrick McGlashan, Lee County Sheriff’s Office.”
    “Jake Travis.”
    A quick word about the fuzz and me: I avoid them at all cost. In my experience, there are two types of people with guns: those against me, who I want to put a bullet in, and a buddy in my foxhole, who I’d take a bullet for. I don’t know where a man with a badge, or in this case, a man in a disheveled suit, fits into that world.
    I shook McGlashan’s hand. One finger sported a Super Bowl ring. I’m sure he was proud of that and was used to questions, but he wouldn’t get any acknowledgment from me. We each claimed a wicker chair as if they had our names on them. He started right in.
    “Ms. Blake wanted me to bring you up to speed. You work in the boat-recovery insurance-fraud business?” Translated: you don’t have a job, so why do I have to sit here and chat