Hooligans

I kept watching Nance, his snake eyes gleaming malevolently. Nance had killed a dozen men I could

think of.

“The real badasses,” I affirmed. “The way it is, if anybody in the Tagliani outfit is capable of wasting

the whole family, it?s Chevos, with Nance probably doing the batting.

“Twenty-four-hour surveillance on these two, okay?” I said to Zapata.

“I?ll see to it personally,” he said, obviously proud of his score.

“It also might help to know where the two of them were last night. Particularly Nance. But don?t let

them on to you.”

“That may be a little tougher but I?ll see what I can do. You want Nance, you got him.”

I gave the glasses back to Zapata. „I?ll tell you how I want Nance. I want Nance doing the full clock in

the worst joint there is. I want him screaming in solitary for the rest of his natural life.”

The Stick stared at me with surprise for several moments, then broke into his grin.

“We got the point,” he said.

33

ISLE OF SIGHS

It was eight thirty when I started out to the Isle of Sighs and it was dusk by the time I had put Front

Street and Dunetown behind me. Crab fishermen were standing hard against the railing of the twolane bridge that connects the main island to Sea Oat Island. Below it, an elderly woman, as freckled as

an Iowa corn picker, and wearing a battered white fishing hat with its brim folded down around her

ears, fished from a flat-bottom skiff that drifted idly among the reeds in the backwater. The hyenas

hadn?t got this far yet.

Sea Oat was the buffer, a small, marshy islet that separated the whore-city from the wistful Isle of

Sighs. There were few cars, the road was populated mostly by weathered natives on bikes. The

islanders seemed to have prevailed here, stubbornly refusing to surrender to time or progress. I passed

what seemed to be an abandoned city square, its weeds crowding the wreck of a building at its center,

then half a mile farther on, a small settlement of restored tabby houses, surrounded by laughing

children and barking dogs. Streets narrowed to lanes, oyster shells crackled beneath my tires, and the

oaks, bowed with age, turned the roadways into living arches, their beards of gray Spanish moss

shushing across the top of my car.

I was racing the sun, hoping to get to Windsong before dark, but as I got closer to the old, narrow,

wooden bridge that ties the Isle of Sighs to Sea Oat, I unsuspectingly burst out of the trees for several

hundred yards and the marsh spread out before me for miles, like an African plain. It was as if I had

suddenly driven to the edge of the world.