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names you could've picked, you couldn't do any better than that?"
    "It was Rochelle's idea. It's ironic."
    "Ironic?"
    "Well, actually she's got another name for it. Post-modern. It's a post-modern thing. Like an intellectual joke."
    "Ironic I've heard of."
    "That year of Harvard," Thorn said, "it gave her a peculiar sense of humor. Some of the books she reads, I can't pronounce their titles."
    "Well, making your dog the butt of a joke, I don't know about that. Seems like bad karma."
    "He doesn't mind. Rover seems to suit him fine."
    Rover was curled in a ball in the shade of the middle seat.
    Out in the center of the cove, a single dolphin rolled. Lingering behind to clean up the scraps. Thorn watched it surface and dive, surface again, its sleek gray hide blending perfectly with the water. It made one more round of the cove, then headed toward the bay to catch up with its buddies.

CHAPTER 3

    "The wind's changing."
    "I don't feel anything." Sugarman raised his palm into the still air, moved it around.
    Gazing to the north, Thorn tried to find some sign he could point to, a riffle in the mangroves, some darkening of the waters, a swerving frigate bird. But the sky was the same impeccable blue it had been all day, the bay gleamed as bright and motionless as ice, no birds, just a quiver of breeze out of the southeast.
    So here was another of those things Thorn knew to be true but could not find words for. There were turning out to be more of those as the years went on. The silence inside him teeming with inexpressible knowledge. Things his skin knew, his fingertips, a host of sounds and scents, visceral data he could decode but not describe.
    "You're sure?"
    "Yeah," Thorn said. "Switching around to the north. Going to be in our face pretty soon."
    "I sit here, I'm looking the same place you're looking, and hell if I see anything."
    "Birders call it jizz," Thorn said.
    Sugarman turned his eyes, gave Thorn a skeptical smile. The yellow lab puppy lifted his head and stared at Thorn.
    "Jizz." Thorn smiled. "It's all the little things a bird does, preening, fluttering around on its perch. The way it lands, the way it takes off. Body language. Birders can tell the jizz of one bird from the jizz of another. When they're too far away, or the sun's in their eyes, even with binoculars they can't see the bird's exact shape or coloration. To identify it, they have to recognize its jizz."
    "Jizz," said Sugar suspiciously. "Jizz."
    "Yeah, a tremor in the mangrove leaves, smell of the water. Something's different. It's like you and your guy on the cruise ship, his furtive gestures. Maybe you can't describe it, what exactly he was doing that caught your attention, but you knew it anyway. It's like intuition. You know something, but you don't know how you know it."
    "Well then," Sugarman said, reeling in his line. "I guess we better pack it in."
    Sugar set down his fly rod, took a minute to neaten his gear, then picked up his wooden paddle, let go of a long breath, and began to slice through the water.
    In sync with Sugar's stroke, Thorn swung the canoe back to the north, toward that first set of mangrove islands a mile away. They glided across the windowpane, kept a smooth pace, Sugarman groaning slightly with each stroke.
    Thorn watched a leopard ray approach from the right, saw it flash beneath them, just the tips of its wings waving as it skimmed flat across the sand. With his bare feet on the thin canvas floor, Thorn could feel the faint tickle of its passing.
    Half an hour later as they left the protection of the last mangrove island and swung out into the open miles of Whitewater Bay, the wind was full in their faces, a twenty-knot breeze, and they had to jab their paddles in deep and pull hard just to move ahead a few feet at a time.
    But still, that wind felt good. It was laced with clean, freshly filtered air that tingled in Thorn's nostrils. Dewpoint in the fifties, a few more grains of oxygen than usual, drier than anything they'd