A gleaming sign above the fence read, ROMEO JOHNSTON, LICENCED UNDERTAKER, Your One-stop Funeral Home: Embalming, Caskets, Mourners, Burial Plots, Memorial Stones, Service Arrangements, Off-Island Shipment of Remains. Also: Car Rentals, Guided Tours, Insurance.

In the shade of the palm grove sat Romeo's hearse, an ancient, beautifully polished black Chrysler with purple curtains in the rear windows.

Hoagie got out. He glanced back toward Kingston Street. As he had known from watching Romeo's eyes in the rearview mirror, they had been tailed by a taxi. Three blocks back, it was rounding the corner, slowing, parking.

The street was quiet; only the faintest rumble of the goombay drums reached here. Alejandro, glancing quickly around, got out behind him. His linen jacket bulged ominously. It would be useful to know his firepower, before they learned it the hard way, but Hoagie saw no prospect of finding out.

"Qué pasa?" Alejandro asked suspiciously, jerking a thumb toward the sign. He shot a glance at Hoagie. "El Inglés, what is it goes on in there?"

"Our clients," Hoagie told him, "are dying to find out."

Alejandro did not smile. "No games. Is this your factory? A house of death?"

"Por qué no?" Hoagie nodded, gesturing toward the home. "Why not? We have the dock there for deliveries, and the islanders don't like to get too close to stiffs."

Alejandro was suddenly sniffing the air for ether and acetone. Good, thought Hoagie; the smell of both was heavy on the breeze. Romeo explained their odor to his neighbors as a constituent of embalming fluid, like formaldehyde. No one knew the difference, anyway; happy with the money Romeo spewed around, no one cared.

They passed into the funeral home. In the reception room a pretty black girl sat reading a paperback. "My daughter, señor," Romeo told Alejandro in Spanish. They moved through a casket showroom and the tiny chapel behind it. Romeo unlocked a door behind the altar marked EMBALMING.

Alejandro studied the embalming room as if he were an artist about to paint it. He moved to a closet, swung it open quickly, hand close to the bulge in his jacket. He went to the rear entrance, unlocked it, surveyed the back. He pulled aside a blind and peered down at the dock. Then he eyed the back of the room, past a cadaver on which a scrawny young white woman was applying makeup.

Two black men, stripped to the waist, were siphoning a mixture of ether, alcohol, and cream-colored coca paste from a stainless-steel keg through a transparent plastic tube. It was dripping into a GI can through a tightly woven cloth stretched across a wooden frame.

On top of the cloth was a slurry of white powder, still damp. A horizontal rack of cloth filters was drying by the side of the table.

Alejandro moved to the rack, took up a pinch, tasted it, smelled it, and finally snorted it into a nostril.