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after you was shot, you had to prove you was more’n just a cripple people could write off. You understand that?”
    “I understand my big problem was writing myself off, Henry. It took me a while to understand it, but now I do. Don’t get down on yourself because you’ve got a lot of miles on your odometer.”
    “If you tend to forget things, Carver, how do you know? I mean, how do I know how much I forget?”
    Carver said, “Well, how much is worth remembering, anyway?”
    “All I wanna remember for now,” Tiller said, “is that I got some good years left in me. Not many, but a few. It ain’t easy holding on to that thought when there’s people treating you like you’re halfway in the grave. It works like voodoo or something; they give up on you, so you give up on yourself. You wither and die like a plant that gets no water.”
    Carver knew what Tiller meant. He’d seen it happen. He patted Henry Tiller gently on the shoulder and told him he’d move into his cottage and poke around Key Montaigne. Not to worry, if Rainer was up to anything illegal, he’d tumble to it.
    “Let me know if and when,” Tiller said.
    “Sure. I’ll stay in touch by phone.”
    Tiller gave him a feeble wave, bumping a tube and causing his glucose bottle to sway on its steel pole, making Carver worry for a moment that the IV needle might pull from the back of his hand. “I give you the key?” he asked.
    “I’ve got it,” Carver assured him. “Try to get some rest, okay?”
    “Not much else to do here.” Tiller closed his eyes.
    Thinking about his dead son, maybe, Carver thought. Remembering. The way Carver remembered.
    Or maybe just thinking about the pretty blond nurse due back with the bedpan.
    Clutching the key tightly in his free hand, Carver limped from the room.

5
    S OUTH OF M IAMI , U.S. Route 1 trails like a thread unraveling from the sleeve of the Florida peninsula. It connects the Florida Keys, a string of small islands that curves gently southwest to end at Key West, only ninety miles from Cuba.
    Route 1 was constructed after a hurricane in the thirties had devastated the Keys and swept an Overseas Railroad train and all its passengers out to sea, forever ending rail service from the mainland. The highway, built in part over the remaining railroad trestle, was a safer, more durable way to connect the islands to each other and to southern Florida. For the first several miles from the north, it cuts through flatlands and is mostly a level two-lane road, where passing slower traffic is almost impossible. Farther south it’s flanked by water, the Gulf of Mexico on the west, the Atlantic on the east, and has long four-lane stretches. The islands, some of them almost too small to appear on a map, are sometimes so close together only the highway signs let the driver know he’s bridged open water and passed from one key to the next. Some of the keys, like Marathon and Isla Mirada, are larger and well populated. Even many of the smaller islands support condo developments, retirement communities, and fishing resorts. And tourist shops. Even ahead of fishing, tourism ranks as the Keys’ primary industry.
    The bridge from Duck Key to Key Montaigne was a narrow, arced ribbon of concrete that still had the fresh, sunwashed look of new construction. Studying it through the windshield, Carver thought that probably an older bridge had recently been replaced.
    Key Montaigne wasn’t exactly kidney-shaped; it more closely resembled a miniature Africa, one that barely showed up on the standard road map. According to the more detailed map Carver had bought when he’d stopped for gas at a Texaco station on Marathon Key, Key Montaigne was slightly more than half a mile across at its widest point, and about a mile from its northern to southern tip. It was flat, like the rest of the keys, and heavily overgrown with lush tropical foliage that concealed the condo developments and single-family residences.
    Carver was driving the Olds