Sarah left early for school one morning, and David missed her at breakfast. David saw her halfway down the school’s main hallway and called to her. She scurried for the stairwell with an armload of books. As the first bell rang, David caught up with her on the stairs. She turned her face away, but not before David saw the two faint black eyes under heavy makeup.

  He sprinted up the stairs as Sarah yelled behind him.

  Seven classrooms of students at Tampa High that morning remember David Klein swinging open the door, looking around and running to the next room. The eighth class remembers David charging across the room to the last row and tackling Frank Sturgeon in his desk, both crashing into the radiator under the windows.

  Frank had at least three inches and twenty pounds on David. As nose guard on the football team, Frank was notches below David in school stature. But he also captained the wrestling team, which held its own separate sphere of popularity at Tampa High. David thought Frank was a moron, walking around with big arms held out a deliberate distance from his triangular torso. David had barely remained civil when Frank had picked Sarah up for their first date two weeks before.

  David broke Frank’s cheekbone and split the skin over his eye, producing an amount of blood more dramatic than the injury. David’s savagery, however, couldn’t be understated. Frank, dazed, crawled up the aisle; David grabbed him by the feet and dragged him back, pummeling him, reaching for book bags, purses, anything his hands found to hit Frank over the head and back. Two assistant football coaches ran in the room and pulled David off, David still kicking at Frank’s ribs.

  David was suspended for a week, which the coach got shortened to four days so he wouldn’t miss the annual rivalry with Plant High. “You’re suspended from school, but not practice!” the coach reminded him.

  Two hundred students stayed late that afternoon in the parking lot, watching the locker-room door for David to run out to practice. Everyone, even David, knew six or seven wrestlers would be waiting. There wasn’t a question of David not emerging from the door; everyone knew he’d never run. Because of the wrestlers’ size, they also knew he’d have no help.

  Out he came, number 12, in gold and green, jogging and carrying his helmet by the face mask. Two hundred people and the only sound was David’s cleats on the pavement.

  The wrestlers blocked his path to the field. David stopped and tightened the grip on his helmet’s face mask. He’d take at least one with him. The wrestlers started fanning out around him.

  Someone leaned on a car horn and several doors slammed.

  The crowd turned and parted. Three huge black men stepped out of an Oldsmobile; they looked to be in their late twenties. They unhurriedly removed suit coats and ties and folded them.

  They walked over and stood beside David. The one closest to David said to the wrestlers, “Four against seven. You need to get some more guys?”

  The arrogance in the wrestlers’ faces dissolved. The man spoke again, barely above a whisper. “David stubs a toe and we’re coming to your houses to ask why.”

  The wrestlers’ exit wasn’t even an attempt at graceful. They walked briskly to their cars, yelled something unintelligible and patched out.

  The man who had done the talking turned to David. He pointed back to the Olds, where Sean was standing. “Sean’s the youngest in the family.” The man smiled for the first time. “And the smallest. He says you watch out for him.” He slapped David on the shoulder. “Take care of yourself.”

  David stared at Sean. I’ll be damned.

  The other students didn’t quite know what to make of it. Sean joined David and Sarah as an inseparable trio. Sean’s influence opened up David’s personality, and he became more jocular when they were together.

  Mostly, they fished together, usually off the Gandy Bridge that spanned the bay to St. Petersburg. Not catching anything. It became a tradition, and before they knew it they had not been catching fish together for twenty years. They had not been catching fish both times when Sean asked David to be godfather to his children.

  Sean consistently touted the joys of fatherhood to David, and he was always trying to get David matched up with some nice woman from the office. The dates never went badly, but they never clicked either.

  “At least they’re better than some of the women you find on your own,” said Sean.

  David had to admit Sean had a point. He’d just gotten his car back from the paint shop after it had been egged and keyed by a woman who later left a weepy message on his answering machine demanding to know what was so wrong with her that he wouldn’t call anymore.

  “It’s genuinely scary out there,” David told Sean.

  “It’s genuinely scary out there,” Susan Tchoupitoulas said to herself at that same moment, four hundred miles away. She had just walked into her house and closed the door following a particularly repugnant good-night kiss.

  Susan had dreaded the kiss during the entire pathology of the date. This was no way to spend her night off—more stressed than on many of the stakeouts she’d endured on the Key West Police Department.

  Susan was on the tallish side at five-eight and had just enough tomboy in her to be cute. Her blonde hair came to just above her shoulders, and she often used a plain rubber band to keep it in a stubby ponytail. While the fashion runways of New York currently favored thin horse faces, Susan was a throwback beauty—the full-faced, healthy good looks of an Ingrid Bergman.

  Susan may have been one of the youngest sergeants in the history of the department, but her father still waited up for her. When Samuel Tchoupitoulas rolled into the living room in his wheelchair, Susan gave him a big hug. She had that look on her face.

  “Rough night?” he asked.

  “What a loser,” she said. “He kept asking me if I was scared being a cop and said he would be. How appealing.”

  “Yeah, I thought he was a clown when he came to the door,” her father said. But it was without any “I told you so” edge.

  Susan and her father, a former sheriff’s deputy, lived in a conch cottage on Olivia Street in Old Town. Everything was just how they liked it.

  Susan had followed in her father’s footsteps and become a cop, and she was a great one. Her father had taught her that far worse than a criminal was a bad cop, whether corrupt or incompetent. She was proud of the Key West police force. Most of the officers, she knew, were as good as any in the state. One problem, however, was that for all its international reputation and the millions of tourists who visited, Key West was still a small town on an island only four miles long by one and a half miles wide.

  In the police department, this translated to smalltown politics that kept certain well-connected officers in uniform who had no business with a badge and a gun. They gave the department a bad name far out of proportion to their numbers on the force. The problem was so well known that the residents had a nickname for them: “The Bubbas.”

  Some of The Bubbas tried in vain to date Susan, and then, in the alternative, harass her on the job.

  “I can’t get a break with men,” Susan told her dad. “Either they’re telling me idiotic sex jokes at work or wasting my private life.” She said it with a smile.

  “Someday you’ll meet the right guy,” her father said.

  The Gasparilla festival was held in February, and Sean and his family and David were running up a tab at the Columbia Restaurant. Sean’s wife, Karen, had the tenderloin, and Sean and David shared paella served in a bowl the size of a satellite dish. Christopher, four, had a hamburger, and in the fifth chair at the table, the Breens’ three-month-old daughter, Erin, woke up hungry.

  A waiter prepared a bottle of baby formula with the showmanship of a wine presentation, and neighboring tables applauded. The lights dimmed except for a red glow on the stage of the main dining room. Four people lined up in tight, ornate costume, the women in scarlet silk with lace fans, the men in black cotton. For the next twenty minutes, the crowd was still for the flamenco dancing set.

  The stage cleared and the sound system played “Oye Como Va” during the costume change. The dancers returned in tropical colors, the women in short skirts and the men in white shirts and floral sashes for belts. Upbeat Cuban music, metal drums, fast dancing. The tempo rose and the dancers clapped in unison. They marched down off the stage, winding between the dinner tables, and a conga line fell in behind.

  As the dancers came by their table, Karen pushed her chair out and got Christopher and they joined the line, laughing. Sean shrugged at David. “Can you watch Erin?” David nodded yes and Sean joined the line. They all ended up back onstage, dancing in opposition to the rhythm.

  The music continued, the amateur dancers kicking out legs way out of time, and David smiled in a moment of distilled contentment. The paella was a pile of mussel shells, shrimp tails and chicken bones on a bed of leftover yellow rice and peppers. A long, good day was winding down.

  Sean and David had spent the morning out in Sean’s fourteen-foot skiff, not catching fish. They drifted with the tide across Cockroach Bay, where they had never seen a cockroach. There was something about the mangrove flats that had a pull on both of them. Out in the middle of the Stone Age, stingrays gliding under the shallow water, ibises on the oyster bars, and the roots of red mangrove grabbing out into the water like spider legs. Sean and David couldn’t get any of their other friends hooked on the mangroves, so whenever they got together, they made a beeline down US 41, past the Coffee Cup restaurant, to the boat launch south of the Little Manatee River. They hoped it was a spiritual thing and wondered if they were just rednecks.

  Sean cut the engine, and David got on the platform with the push pole. Sean was forward, wearing polarized sunglasses, squinting at the mangrove roots looking for snook. They heard a loud crack and water behind them roiled. Dolphins charged a school of mullet, and one slapped the surface of the water with its tail fluke to stun them, the dolphin version of fishing with dynamite. Two dolphin tossed a mullet back and forth with their bottle noses like it was a football.

  “There goes every fish till the next tide,” said Sean.

  The Columbia Restaurant had been built in 1905 in Tampa’s Latin quarter, Ybor City. Ybor had been the Cuban-Italian core when Tampa was “Cigar City USA.” After the heyday, Ybor was boarded up. This attracted bohemians, who loitered, which attracted businessmen, who opened nine hundred bars and restaurants. David thought the place looked like a gene splice of Greenwich Village and Havana, and run by Planet Hollywood.

  After dinner, the group stepped out of the Columbia onto Seventh Avenue. They strolled west into the heart of the district. The oncoming sidewalk traffic was heavy with body piercing, tattoos and beepers. A white Rastafarian operated a marijuana pipe kiosk. He explained to a customer that it was legal because you could somehow use the devices to smoke cigarettes.

  A man with a kettle of oil, potatoes and a power drill was making curly fries. A seventeen-year-old girl in a halter top and pigtails chewed on a pacifier because Ecstasy made her grind her teeth.

  In the courtyard beside an industrial-dance club, a trailer sprouting a large antenna. A man in a Stetson hat sat behind a table and microphone. It was the famous radio talk show host Mo Grenadine, broadcasting The Mo Grenadine Show.

  “Isn’t that the guy you used to promote?” David asked. “You did his advertising campaign.”

  “Don’t remind me,” said Sean.

  Mo’s success was based on demographic research that showed talk radio audiences were predominantly male, bitter, undereducated, untraveled, did not know how to figure percentages and unfailingly blew all major life decisions. Research also showed Mo’s ratings spiked when he called homosexuals “fudgepackers,” which he had to do constantly to fill airtime because he did not possess talent or knowledge.

  The problem with Mo’s audience was that it had an incredibly low per-capita income, which is why The Mo Grenadine Show was sponsored by Hot-to-Trot Jerky Sticks, Red-Eye Beer ($1.99 a six-pack) and The Galactic Wrestling Federation.

  Grenadine, fifty-one, had started unlikely enough as a private investigator specializing in fabricating evidence to deny insurance claims of legitimate and generally poor accident victims, some of whom were now his listeners. Sitting home one afternoon, he had a bad medical reaction to drinking nine scotches. He saw something on TV about a Tampa city council hearing that evening on a gay rights ordinance. Grenadine went out and bought a gay porno magazine and made a hundred Xeroxes of a man giving another man oral sex. On each he drew a red circle with a slash through it. He stood next to the doorway of the city council chambers and handed a copy to each person who entered.

  The following morning he was in the newspaper, the next afternoon a guest on talk radio. The next week he was the host of the radio show. And that November, Mo Grenadine surfed a wave of homophobia into the Florida senate, also picking up the overlapping assault-rifle vote.

  To fertilize his power base, Grenadine called press conferences to attack AIDS benefits, gay public speakers at the University of South Florida, lesbians in general and those who wouldn’t date him in particular.

  Grenadine kept open his private eye practice to launder the bribes of insurance companies with pending legislation.

  Then the scandal.

  Grenadine and two call girls were in the hot tub at his condo one night and he somehow got his penis caught in the pool pump’s intake valve. His subsequent engorgement left him inextricable. The women fled and in the morning the neighbors found him incoherent and pruney-skinned. The sheriff’s department dive team used rescue equipment to cut into the pool’s wall and remove the entire mechanism in front of TV crews.

  “Stick a fork in him, he’s done” was the thinking man’s bet in the newsrooms. In the face of all contrary facts and accounts, Grenadine called a press conference in his hospital room and claimed he’d been attacked by a platoon of perverts who’d molested him in an unspeakable manner because of his courageous, God-fearing work in the legislature. The attack emphasized the need to vote for him and stop the sodomites who break Jesus’ heart. The performance brought convulsive laughter at the television stations.

  Grenadine was reelected in a landslide.

  On the radio he started calling himself “Holy Moly.”

  Sean and David listened from the sidewalk in Ybor City as Grenadine screamed “fudgepacker!” into the microphone.

  On the way home, Sean said he’d gotten a phone call that morning inviting him to a Gasparilla party. One of the social clubs was recruiting him to join.

  “Too White Krewe? I dunno,” said David. “They probably think you’re an archconservative because of your work on the senator’s campaign. Are they in for a surprise!”

  “Let’s give ‘em a chance,” said Sean.

  They gave ‘em a chance and stopped at George Veale’s party, leaving quickly when a parrot was blown through a plate-glass window by indoor artillery fire.

  Later that night, when Gasparilla fireworks burst over Tampa Bay, Sean and Karen were standing over the crib in their nursery, smiling at a sleeping baby.

  David walked alone and admired Tampa’s skyline from the Ballast Point Pier.

  Coleman stumbled along Seventh Avenue on the downhill side of a twelve-beer buzz and stopped to buy curly fries from a man with power tools. Serge took photographs of a historic marker honoring José Martí.

  Sharon Rhodes gyrated in George Veale’s lap and thought about absolutely nothing.

  Mo Grenadine was passed out in his one-bedroom condo with his pants around his knees, a dominatrix tape on the video, and a plastic novelty device from Hong Kong attached to his penis with rubber bands.

  Five

  March, seven months before the World Series.

  The Florida National Bank branch office sat in an alcove near the rest rooms of the Tampa Bay Mall, and Coleman’s note told the teller no funny stuff, just give him the money.

  The teller hit the silent alarm as she filled the bag and yelled bloody murder when Coleman fled around the corner. Next to the bank was the Gold Coast Arcade. Dark and loud, lots of distracting flashing lights. Coleman stuffed the money bag down the front of his pants and climbed in the cockpit of Tail Gunner. In eight seconds, he peeled off his mustache and wig and pulled the red shirt up over his head. He dropped it all inside the Tail Gunner cockpit and retrieved a baby carriage hidden under a pinball machine. The pillow under the blanket looked like an infant.

  Cops and security guards flew in from all directions, and Coleman walked through the middle, toward the food court.

  The cops formed a perimeter around the mall, and Coleman planned to wait inside, have a little lunch, and head out when the authorities packed it in. Coleman sat on a bench, removing pickles from a Chick-fil-A.

  A field trip was in progress. Two nuns led second-graders in their little Catholic uniforms through the mall. As they passed Coleman, two of the children became curious about the baby carriage and tried to peek inside. Coleman edged the carriage away from them.

  “Now, now, musn’t wake him up,” said Coleman. One of the nuns leaned over to take the children by the hands.

  Suddenly, there was a loud bang in Coleman’s crotch. An explosion ripped open the front of his pants, and a shower of warm red liquid splattered in the faces of the nun and the children. Pandemonium ensued. Coleman writhed on the floor of the food court, grabbing his sore nuts and cursing the bitch who had put the dye pack in the money bag. The nun and kids screamed inconsolably. The closest they could make of it was something they’d seen in a science-fiction movie. Coleman had unleashed The Horrible Dick-Worm from Outer Space.

  Two skinheads ran to the screams. They didn’t know what to make of it either, so they kicked Coleman unconscious.