Once you have crossed the bridge onto Key Bonita, you see a lot of coconut trees. They line the highway along the Gulf. If you look through these palms and past the bight, you see a few lights from the town itself: streetlamps, the windows of fishing lodges, the neon of taverns, hamburger places and tourist courts. The foliage is dense and it makes these lights seem to twinkle like lightning bugs. Along the boardwalk at the edge of the bight, moored to the many piers that extend from it, there are hundreds of boats: shrimp boats and barges, boats for pleasure and for every kind of fishing. You will even see a houseboat with laundry hanging on her decks and potted palms on her windowsills.

Go along for another mile, pass a traffic light, turn to the right, and you are on the main street of the town, Gasparilla Street, named for a buccaneer who made his headquarters here in the darker days of blood and treasure. The houses are old, made of wood, most of them white but a number of them gray from neglect and in bad repair. Many of the yards are unkempt and have turned to jungle: thick clumps of banana trees send up leaves taller than men to reach into the fern-like branches of poincianas; the giant philodendron vines are like serpents in fancy dress, they climb every wall and fence and suck the knotted trunks of banyan trees; there are breaks in the sidewalks where rubber-tree roots have gone berserk; and enormous cactus plants lean on houses, like monsters with tiny brains they threaten the lacework of tired Victorian porches.

You see people on the streets all night long. Sailors alone and in twos and threes, Latin dandies in pleated shirts, black-haired women at their elbows, drunken shrimpers clinging to parking meters for support. And all the solitary persons. Men and women young and old lean on storefronts and streetlamps, wander in and out of taverns, all of them seeming to take part in the same slow and indifferent search. And for every person you see, you will feel as sharply the presence of several invisible souls. For the town is plainly haunted. Lazy ghosts of old inhabitants rock forever on all the empty porches, and others watch over the street from shutters at second-story windows. If you do not believe in ghosts, the town will make you nervous: give up your disbelief or you will wonder forever at the sources of certain inexplicable sounds.

A number of young men in their late teens and early twenties leaned against the green plaster front of a hamburger place called Pepito’s. Others congregated in its doorway.

Most of these young men watched the arrival of the motorcycle, watched with a kind of boldness of eye that would disturb any stranger.

Clinton climbed off and started to untie his duffel bag, but the owner of the bike stopped him gruffly. “Here! I’ll do that!”

Then he tossed the bag into Clinton’s arms. “Okay. Now you want something else?”