Warlock leaned against a light pole behind the power plant. He glassed the marina and its madly flapping gale flag with Diana’s Leitz Trinovid bird-watching binoculars, a Christmas gift from her parents. They were an expensive item and he tried to protect them from the first drops of slight but stinging rain, a responsible gesture, the irony of which was lost on him. He slid the binoculars under his trench coat and took a sip of whiskey from a flask he carried to counteract the bad weather. He stomped his feet in the mud to keep them warm, thinking that though Florida was overloaded with perverts, it did have sunshine as a counterbalance. He squinted at the fifty-three-foot Hinckley center cockpit ketch bobbing in its slip, another expensive toy for the good doctor. Warlock would not have known it was a Hinckley ketch without having asked a marina employee an hour before; this nonchalance about particulars had been a disadvantage in the past ten months. He would have bet a week’s salary that Schmidt was another anonymous grease monkey, not a top operator.

O Diana, O Diana, O lovely D., how could you? Tears fought for an exit but were met by a strong stomach grumble. What an asshole he had been not to bring a sandwich when there were those leftovers: a rare, roasted tenderloin he had studded with slivers of garlic and cracked peppercorns. He had wondered if it would be their last meal together. In an unwitting act of sensitivity she had brought him a new edition of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows with illustrations by Michael Hague, a favorite book from childhood. She had thought it might help counter his depression and, after dinner, had read to him on the couch with his head poised dangerously on her lap. He roared with laughter and sentimental pleasure. Even betrayed people, he thought, don’t act betrayed all of the time.

He stomped his feet, then did a few scissor jumps to revive circulation. Far out in the bay a serious rain cloud was approaching: a huge, black cumulus, intact as a giant dirigible. Directly underneath the cloud it was raining hard. Warlock studied the cloud with a painter’s eye and thought it looked a trifle too ornate, with the sun shooting through the rain and intermittently casting a light that was alternately silver and yellow on Marion Island.