“I am more things than you could possibly fathom,” Trevor Stone told Jay that night. “I own trading corporations, shipping companies, more real estate than can be assessed in a day. I own judges, policemen, politicians, whole governments in some countries, and now I own you.” His hand tightened on Jay’s neck. “And if you betray me, I will reach across any oceans you try to put between us, and rip your jugular from your throat and cram it through the hole in your penis.”

So Jay went to Florida.

He had no idea what he’d do once he found Desiree or Jeff Price, only that he wouldn’t kill anyone in cold blood. He’d done that once for the feds in Mexico, and the memory of the look in the drug lord’s eyes just before Jay blew his heart all over his silk shirt had haunted him so completely, he quit the government a month later.

Lila had told him about a hotel in downtown Clearwater, the Ambassador, which Price had often raved about due to the vibrating beds and varied selection of porn movies available through the satellite TVs.

Jay thought it was a long shot, but then Price proved stupider than he’d thought when he walked out the front door two hours after Jay began staking the place out. Jay followed Price all day as he met with his buddies with the Thailand connections, got drunk in a bar in Largo, and took a hooker back to his room.

The next day, while Price was out, Jay broke into his room, but found no evidence of the money or Desiree.

One morning Jay watched Price leave the hotel and was about to give the room another toss when he got the feeling he was being watched.

He turned in his car seat and focused his binoculars, panned down the length of the street until he came face-to-face with another set of binoculars watching him from a car two blocks down.

“That’s how I met Desiree,” he told us. “Each of us watching the other through binoculars.”

He’d been wondering by this time if she’d ever really existed at all. He dreamed about her constantly, stared at her photographs for hours, believed he knew what she smelled like, how her laugh sounded, what her bare legs would feel like pressed against his own. And the more he built her up in his mind, the more she grew into something mythic—the tortured, poetic, tragic beauty who’d sat in Boston parks through the mists and rains of autumn, awaiting deliverance.

And then one day she was standing in front of him.

She didn’t drive away when he left his car to approach hers. She didn’t pretend it was all a misunderstanding. She watched him come with calm, steady eyes, and when he reached her car, she opened the door and stepped out.