Five of the seats were empty. The sixth was occupied by Graham Clifton, aka the Weeble. I’d never even seen him leave the limousine. He sat facing us, a leather-bound notebook in his lap, a closed fountain pen on top of it.

“Mr. Clifton,” I said, “I didn’t know you’d be joining us.”

“Mr. Stone thought you could use an extra hand down there. I know the Gulf Coast of Florida well.”

“We don’t usually need extra hands,” Angie said and sat down across from him.

He shrugged. “Mr. Stone insisted.”

I picked up the phone attached to my seat console. “Well, let’s see if we can’t change Mr. Stone’s mind.”

He placed his hand on mine, pushed the phone back into the console. For such a small man, he was very strong.

“Mr. Stone doesn’t change his mind,” he said.

I looked into his tiny black eyes, and saw only my reflection blinking back at me.

We landed at Tampa International at one, and I felt the sticky heat in the air even before our wheels touched down on the tarmac without so much as a bump. Captain Jimmy and copilot Herb might have seemed like goofball knuckleheads, and maybe they were in all other aspects of their lives, but by the way they handled that plane during takeoff, landing, and one bit of turbulence over Virginia, I suspected they could land a DC-10 on the tip of a pencil in the middle of a typhoon.

My first impression of Florida after the heat was one of green. Tampa International looked to have erupted from the center of a mangrove forest, and everywhere I looked I saw shades of green—the dark blackish green of the mangrove leaves themselves, the wet gray-green of their trunks, the grassy small hills that bordered the ramps into and out of the airport, the bright teal tramcars that crisscrossed the terminals like something out of Blade Runner if it had been directed by Walt Disney.

Then my gaze rose to the sky and found a shade of blue I’d never seen before, so rich and bright against the white coral arches of the expressway that I would have sworn it had been painted there. Pastels, I thought, as we blinked against the light streaming through the windows of the tramcar—I hadn’t seen this many assaultive pastels since the nightclub scene in the mid-eighties.

And the humidity. Jesus. I’d gotten a whiff of it as I left the jet, and it was like a hot sponge had punched a hole in my chest and burrowed straight into my lungs. The temperature in Boston had been in the mid-thirties when we left, and that had seemed warm after such a long winter. Here, it had to be eighty, maybe more, and the moist, furry blanket of humidity seemed to kick it up another twenty degrees.