His heart sank. A thousand yards ahead—eight hundred now, then six—the water was as calm as glass. Fat Molly Hill, the only southern rise on Whiskey Cay, was going to cut off all his wind.

He had only once choice, and no time to make it. He leaned back, back, back, trailing his blond hair in the water, hearing the swish of his wake, feeling the board alive beneath his feet....

Gripping his boom, he shifted his weight and slammed the board up the face of the wave, rising, rising, rising toward the morning sun.

At the crest he leapt as a ski jumper leaps, with calf and thigh and gut. He left the water and flew in the last of the wind, climbing like Icarus toward the sun.

He glimpsed the fin, far astern, and felt wind, blessed wind, ruffling the waters below. He had timed it perfectly and was out of Fat Molly's grasp. Once back on the wind-skimmed surface, nothing in the ocean could catch him—this he knew.

He whooped in triumph.

Then his left foot strap broke and he was suddenly tumbling, flailing in the air. His boom, released, swung out of his reach. The sail filled, took the boom, and slammed it into his stomach.

He hit the water on his back, arms and legs askew. For an instant he lay in shock.

By the time he righted himself and struck out for shore, he knew that he was finished.

The great white hit him once, at fifteen knots, shearing him as a scissors cuts a paper doll. The torso it ingested while it glided on toward shore; the lower half of the body, trailing guts, it took when it turned back to the sound.

It swam north again, toward Prince George Town. The drums were beating louder.

***

Romeo's Cadillac nosed along a street already jammed with revelers. He inched through the Royal Bahamas Police Force Band. Flown in from Nassau, they were assembling in Whitechapel Square in their white jackets and red sashes. From the tops of their white tropical helmets rose shining spikes of gold. They parted for the Cadillac, ebony cheeks gleaming in the hot morning sun, and closed in after the limousine had passed.

From the sidewalk a Junkanoo dancer, masked and hidden behind cones and ruffles of pink, purple, yellow, and orange crepe paper, waved a garlanded staff at the car; at its end glared a long-billed duck that must have taken weeks to fashion from papier-mâché.

Romeo turned off Kingston and drove along a quiet street. He stopped by a white picket fence.

His funeral parlor lay shaded by palms on the shores of Pretty Sally Bay, with a dock reaching out to the water. Alongside the dock was a Cigarette boat, as ominous and black as the one that Lomas used.