Which was true, in a way -- but I had my own reasons for wanting to go back to Cozumel. On the evening before my near-fatal scuba dive on Palancar Reef, I had stashed 50 units of pure MDA in the adobe wall of the shark pool at the local aquarium next to the Hotel Barracuda -- and this stash had been much on my mind while I was recovering from the bends in the Miami hospital.

So when the Cozumel assignment came through, I drove immediately into town to consult with my old friend and drug crony Yail Bloor. I explained the circumstances in detail, then asked his advice.

“It's clear as a fucking bell,” he snapped. “We'll have to go down there at once. You'll handle the fishermen while I get the drugs.”

These were the circumstances that sent me back to Cozumel in late April. Neither the editor nor the high-powered sport-fishing crowd we'd be dealing with had any notion of my real reason for making the trip. Bloor knew, but he had a vested interest in maintaining the cover because I was passing him off, on the tab, as my “technical advisor.” It made perfect sense, I felt: In order to cover a highly competitive situation, you need plenty of trustworthy help.

When I got to Cozumel, on Monday afternoon, everybody on the island with any clout in the tourism business was half-mad with excitement at the idea of having a genuwine, real-life “ Playboy writer” in their midst for a week or ten days. When I slumped off the plane from Miami, I was greeted like Buffalo Bill on his first trip to Chicago -- a whole gaggle of public-relations specialists met the plane, and at least three of them were waiting for me: What could they do for me? What did I want? How could they make my life pleasant?

Carry my bags?

Well. . . why not?

To where

Well. . . I paused, sensing an unexpected opening that could lead almost anywhere. . . “I think I'm supposed to go to the Caba–as,” I said. “But --”

“No,” said one of the handlers, “you have a press suite at Cozumeleno.”

I shrugged. “Whatever's right,” I muttered. “Let's roll.”

I'd asked the travel agent in Colorado to get me one of those VW Safari jeeps -- the same kind I'd had on my last trip to Cozumel -- but the PR crowd at the airport insisted on taking me straight to the hotel. My jeep they said, would be delivered within the hour, and in the meantime, I was treated like some kind of high-style dignitary: A few people actually addressed me as “Mr. Playboy” and the others kept calling me “sir.” I was hustled into a waiting car and whisked off along the two-lane blacktop highway through the palm jungle and out in the general direction of the American Strip, a cluster of beach-front hotels on the northeast end of the island.