It was sometime around dusk on Saturday, hunkered down at a big round table on the Bal-Hai porch, that I noticed the pea-green Mustang making its second pass in less than ten minutes. There is only one pea-green Mustang on the island, and one of the divers had told me it belonged to the “mayor” -- a heavy-set young pol and an appointed, not elected, official who looked like a beer-bellied lifeguard on some beach at Acapulco. We had seen him often in the past few days, usually in the late afternoon and always cruising up and down the seaside frontera.

“That son of a bitch is beginning to make me nervous,” Bloor muttered.

“Don't worry,” I said. “They won't shoot -- not as long as we're here in a crowd.”

“What?” A gray-haired woman from Miami sitting next to us had caught the word shoot.

“It's the Striker crowd,” I explained. “We hear they've decided to get heavy with us.”

“Jesus Christ!” said a retired airline pilot who'd been living off his boat and the Bal-Hai porch for the past few months. “You don't think they'll start shooting, do you? Not on a peaceful island like this!”

I shrugged. “Not here. They wouldn't shoot into a crowd. But we can't let them catch us alone.”

The woman from Miami started to say something, but Bloor cut her off with an outburst that spun heads the length of the porch:

“They're in for the shock of their goddamn lives, tomorrow,” he snarled. “Wait till they see what gets off that goddamn ferry from Playa del Carmen in the morning.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” the ex-pilot asked.

Bloor said nothing, staring blankly out to sea. I hesitated a moment, then instinctively picked up the thread: “Heavies,” I said. “We made some calls last night. Tomorrow morning they'll come off that boat like a pack of goddamn wolverines.”

Our friends at the table were glancing nervously at one another. Violent crime is almost unheard of on Cozumel; the native oligarchy is into far more subtle varieties. . . and the idea that the Bal-Hai might be the scene of a Chicago-style shoot-out was a hard thing to grasp, even for me.

Bloor cut in again, still staring off toward the mainland. “You can hire just about anything you want in MŽrida,” he said. “We got these thugs for ten bucks a head, plus expenses. They'll crack every skull on the island if they have to -- then burn every one of those goddamn red-neck boats right down to the waterline.”

Nobody spoke for a moment, then the woman from Miami and the retired airline pilot got up to leave. “See you later,” the man said stiffly. “We have to get back to the boat and check things out.”

Moments later, the two divers who'd been sitting with us also left, saying they'd probably see us tomorrow at the Striker party.