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breathed since last March. Air off the glaciers. It popped open the sinuses like menthol, gave everyone an extra jolt of energy, the chattering pulse of a new season.
    Off to the west in an upper limb of a slash pine, a bald eagle observed them as they labored across the sound. Approaching from the northwest was a wedge of dark, silver-tipped clouds. Whorls of white foam spun upward off the leading edge of the front like an extravagant pompadour, some ghostly Elvis about to wail.
    Thorn watched Sugar's back. Watched him paddle, timing his own stroke to Sugar's, falling easily into Sugar's rhythm as if he were waltzing with a lifelong partner.
    Sugar was in his early forties. Thorn's closest friend. Six three, a thin and handsome man with severe cheekbones, dark almost pretty eyes with long lashes, and caramel skin a half shade lighter than Thorn's constant tan.
    Sugar's Jamaican father disappeared shortly after his birth and his Norwegian mother, a fragile blond teenager, stayed around Key Largo a year or two more before she too vanished. There was an overexposed photo of her in Sugarman's office, his only one. Not more than eighteen at the time, his mother sat on a ratty sofa, a cigarette in one hand, a can of Schlitz in the other, laughing at someone's joke. An attractive young woman, but with eyes already shadowed by harsh memories. Thorn had only one vague memory of her. She was kneeling in the sand helping Sugar and Thorn build a sand castle on a beach somewhere. He remembered her jittery manner, nervous as an April butterfly. Eyes always scanning the area as if she were searching for something she couldn't name.
    After she ran off, Sugar was raised by two black spinster sisters who sang in the Key Largo Baptist choir and whose income came from running a tomato stand beside the overseas highway. Tomatoes and the dented hubcaps they retrieved daily from the shoulder of the rutted road.
    The spring Sugarman graduated high school, he married Jeannie Frost, his cheerleader girlfriend of several years. She was fair and blonde, a devout Caucasian. Unconsciously, Sugar had duplicated his parents' mixed marriage, a fact Jeannie was fond of reminding him whenever they argued.
    A year or two ago, after twenty years with the Monroe County police department, Sugarman grew so disgusted with the hamstringing bureaucracy, he dumped his shield on the Sheriffs Department desk and walked. His idea was to rent out his expertise to small businesses, install alarm systems, handle employee surveillance. But it hadn't worked that way.
    What he discovered was that hardly any businesses in the Keys made enough profit to pay for a security advisor. Even the lawyers and doctors were just scraping by. Dropouts from colder climates, most of them worked only when they had to. Half-assed fishermen or drunks, more likely both. They all seemed to be running from some failed life back on the mainland. One thing was certain, it was rarely money that attracted people to that string of limestone islands trickling off the tip of Florida.
    While Sugarman struggled as a cop and later as a capitalist, Jeannie devoted herself to self-discovery. She'd had a host of hobbies, none of which lasted more than a few months. But still, by God, she knew she was good at something. It was out there, all she had to do was find it—that self-actualizing activity. That's how she talked. Jargon she'd picked up from years of fifty-dollar-an-hour counseling sessions.
    Back in August Jeannie had given up on her most recent fantasy, to be a Flamenco guitarist, and she'd sold her two guitars to a high school kid who lived across the street. By September, she'd decided what she'd really wanted all along was to get pregnant. Be a mother before her clock expired. Already she'd visited half a dozen Miami doctors, sent Sugarman to labs up there for sperm cultures, hemizona binding tests, hypo-osmotic swelling tests, some new unpronounceable outrage every week.
    "Hell, I could tell her