“That’s a lot of product to be walking around with,” Stone said, “and there were no smaller bags, so I guess he wasn’t hawking it on the street.”

“More like a delivery,” Tommy said, “one that didn’t get made.”

“Enough to get killed for,” Stone pointed out.

“I guess the killer asked Charley for it, and when he didn’t give, the guy got pissed off.”

“It wouldn’t have taken long to search the houseboat,” Stone said,

“but he didn’t search the motorcycle.”

Dino had joined them. “Let’s take another look at the boathouse,” Dino said.

They did, and this time they looked everywhere. Dino stood in the little wheelhouse, holding a fl oorboard in his hand. “Take a look at this,” he said to Tommy. Tommy looked and found an empty compartment with a trace of white powder at the bottom. “Maybe the shooter didn’t go away empty-handed after all.”

“You could get half a dozen kilos in there,” Dino said.

“Yeah, and that’s more than enough to get shot for. Anybody know what a key goes for these days?”

“I don’t know,” Dino said, “maybe twenty-five, thirty thou? I guess it would depend on availability.”

“There’s no way he could sell five or six kilos of uncut cocaine in Key West,” Tommy said. “If that much was in there, it was bound for somewhere else, like Miami.”

“Tommy, if you had half a dozen kilos of pure coke and you wanted to get them to Miami, how would you do it?”

“Well, I wouldn’t drive it,” Tommy said. “There’s only one road, and if you get stopped for a broken taillight and get searched, well . . .” He looked thoughtful. “Boat or light aircraft,” he said. “And there’s a lot more boats around here than light aircraft.”

“How long to Miami in a boat?” Stone asked.

“Well, in something that could do twenty-five, thirty knots, one long day. Any faster than that might attract the attention of the Coast Guard.”

“The right boat sounds like a good investment in time,” Dino said.

“We got two questions to answer here,” Tommy said. “Where did he get it, and how was he going to move it?”

“He got it from South America or Mexico, like everybody else,”

Stone said. “And there’s no shortage of means to move it.”

“Evan Keating has a new boat,” Dino said, “and he was chummy with Charley Boggs, at least for a while.”

“And his boat was parked all night out at the reef,” Tommy pointed out. “Another boat could have handed something off.”

“Or an airplane could have dropped it,” Stone said. “As I recall, it isn’t very deep out at the reef.”

“Not deep at all,” Tommy agreed. “You could pick something off the bottom with a snorkel; you wouldn’t even need scuba gear.”