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horrendous end for desperate people.”
    Pat whistles and calls out to Luz on the screen. “Look at you! You’re a gorgeous star. They should put you in a Hollywood movie. You could be the warden in a woman’s prison.”
    Zoe pushes a firm finger against Pat’s lips. “Quiet. Let’s hear what Luz is saying.”
    Hard bangs his beer bottle on the counter. “Luz be one black sister can’t be trusted. I hate cops, ’specially colored cops. Be bad for business.”
    The outside door to the bar slams open. In the doorway is Hogfish, backlit by a shaft of sunlight. His iPhone earbuds are clamped into his ears. He looks wild-eyed from beneath his long-billed fisherman’s cap and screams in panic: “This world is rigged for hurricanes! El Finito’s coming! I see the eye of his category-five hurricane winking offshore! Monster of destruction blowing two-hundred-mile-an-hour winds and pushing a fifty-foot-high storm surge before it! I’m the best fishing guide on this island, I read the weather. The ocean’s currents spell out the future to me! I see the ocean’s truth with my own eyes!”
    Big stomps his feet on the floor and shouts back at Hogfish. “You’re no fishing guide anymore! You can’t find your own pecker to take a piss, let alone find yourself a fish to hook.” Big grabs his beer bottle and hurls it at Hogfish.
    The bottle flies by Hogfish’s head, hitting the wall behind in a shatter of spraying glass. He ignores the shards around him, his head bobbing to music pumping through the earbuds. He lurches violently, seemingly caught by a great wind. He staggers, regains his footing, stands alone in the center of the room, with everyone fixed on his screaming rant.
    “Like the baby Jesus grown into a righteous monster, El Finito will shut your mouths and open your minds! You don’t need satellite photos to see him coming! Finito is speeding here to punch your lights out! Punch your teeth down your throat! Punch your civilization down the drain!”

    A long one of the many deep-water canals running in from the Gulf of Mexico side of Key West and crisscrossing the island stands Noah’s nautical-deco-style house. The 1930s structure is long past its glory days, the paint of its once-sleek exterior spider-cracked and peeling. In the hazy humid atmosphere of the setting sun, the rounded walls and porthole windows give the appearance of a formerly glamorous yacht now forsaken and stranded on land.
    Inside the sparse living room, a few pieces of worn-out dull-yellow bamboo furniture are scattered around, and piles of dusty hardcover law books and tattered paperbacks are stacked along the walls. Noah sits at a lone bamboo table, listening to the chorus of frogs outside croaking anxiously for night to fall. He takes a drink from his rum bottle and stares pensively through the open window, across a parched grassy expanse, at the still water of the canal. A fish leaps from the flat surface. It snaps into its gaping mouth an unlucky flying insect, then splashes from sight back into the depths of the canal.
    Behind Noah, in the rose glow of dusk, Zoe quietly walks in. She sits across from him at the table and watches him drink. The sound of frogs outside grows more insistent, at odds with the measured tone of Zoe’s words: “I need you to sign the divorce papers in two weeks. Don’t play any tricks.”
    A nervous twitch crosses Noah’s face. He takes another drink. He holds the liquor in his mouth, feeling its sting before swallowing. His throat is tight as his words comeout with a cut: “What’s the hurry? We haven’t been living together for a year.”
    “You haven’t been living for a year.”
    “Depends on what you call living.”
    “You’re either drunk or out there on your boat, ranting on the radio.”
    “I’m not an alcoholic. If a man drinks himself into oblivion, it means he doesn’t want to see the sun rise the next morning. I still want to see the sun rise.”
    “You haven’t obliterated