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meant it was friendlier. He spied a seat down at the end of the bar and slid into it with practiced ease. 
    He looked both ways, scoping out the neighborhood, and caught the eye of the bartender. She came toward him, pecked him on the cheek, and placed a cold beer in front of him. He sat back and enjoyed the scene.

Chapter 6
     
    Mac idled past the public mooring buoys, heading toward the maze of channels that constituted Sister Creek. He had a house on a canal off Boot Key, but he wanted no part of other people right now. The truth was, he rarely wanted any part of other people. They all wanted something. There were few in his life who he could count as friends, knowing they wanted nothing of him. 
    Women were especially in the outlawed class. Currently he was a platinum member of the Little Rascals “He-man Women Haters Club.” Not that he didn’t like women, he did. But time and experience, mostly bad, had made him wary of their charms. Two divorces, both bitter, revealed too much of where the female mind could go. Not all that interested , was his state of mind about social entanglements. 
    The wake of the boat was the only movement on the water as he coasted to a stop. Ten feet from shore, he dropped anchor and let the current turn the boat so that he could set the hook in the sandy bottom. He let out some scope on the anchor line and shut down the running lights, leaving the white anchor light on top of the wheel house as the only sign he was there.
    The cold fronts coming from the north every week or so started at about this time of year. Late October offered the best weather of the year — it still got hot during the day, but early mornings and evenings were pleasant. The rainy season was all but over, hurricane season quickly winding down. 
    He went into the galley and poured a couple of inches of scotch from his well-hidden stash into a tumbler. The bottle remained well hidden because Trufante could smell alcohol from a distance, and had a habit of drinking anything he found. Leaving the cabin door open with only the screen to keep out bugs, he went back on deck. 
    The scotch began to work its magic halfway through the drink, the adrenaline of the day receding. He knew sleep would not come easily tonight, not that it usually did. The questions started to move through his mind now that it had finally shut down enough to let them work themselves out. 
    Nukes didn’t show up every day, and now that one had, what the hell to do about it? Truman AFB was still manned outside of Key West. Wood surely had some contacts there. The old man had run the construction on half the bridges in the lower Keys. Many of the newer spans adjacent to the old bridges had his fingerprints all over them. These same bridges had been the bulk of Mac’s work life as well. Trained as a commercial diver, he’d worked for Wood in the late ‘80s and most of the ’90s. They had built a close bond over those years. As Wood said, “Dependable help in this spit of sand is hard to find. Better you stick around.” Indeed, most of the labor in the Keys came and went with seasons and storms. Mac, on the other hand, showed up one day and never left. And now he hoped to use that relationship to solve this problem.
    He thought the Navy was the logical choice. After all it was theirs, but his distrust of authority and his guess that Wood knew something about it had stopped him from reporting it right away. But, maybe the Navy was the best choice after all. They’d take it and he could wash his hands of the whole incident. 
    Satisfied with his solution, he drained the last finger of scotch in one swallow, as if to put the entire day in the past.
     
    ***
     
    Alan Trufante was still glued to his barstool at last call, the smile from his fake choppers bigger and whiter than ever. He’d been pretty conservative on the beers, figuring he would have to drive back. Locals and experienced drinkers knew that the Keys were no place to drink and