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On the hottest day of July, trolling in dead-calm waters near Key West, a tourist named James Mayberry reeled up a human arm. His wife flew to the bow of the boat and tossed her breakfast burritos.
“Another fucking day in paradise,”
“It’s the Keys, man. The code is for suckers.”
Yancy noticed the upraised finger on the end of the arm. “A sour farewell to the mortal realm?”
During his sixteen years as a road patrol officer, Sonny Summers had received numerous commendations for not fucking up on the job. He was well-groomed, courteous and diligent about his paperwork. One year he led the whole force in DUI arrests, a highly competitive category in the Keys. His spelling on arrest forms was almost always legible, he never took any of his girlfriends on dates in his squad car and he smoked pot only on his days off.
Even in the dead of summer it was crawling with overfed tourists courtesy of the cruise ships, which Yancy considered a vile and ruinous presence in the harbor.
Coming in low over the waves was the only way to cross undetected, because on Cudjoe Key the U.S. government tethered a famed surveillance blimp known as Fat Albert, which had been effectively used by the DEA to bust some of Claspers’s colleagues in the aerial import trade.
