Now he was an old man who liked to take chances.

In the distance, he counted three separate waterspouts bridging the space between the slick blue water surface at the edge of the Gulf Stream and the gray-black phalanx of clouds belonging to the approaching late-afternoon thunderstorms moving steadily out of the west. The waterspouts were narrow cones of darkness, swirling with all the force their landed cousins, tornadoes, had. They were less subtle, though; they did not possess the terrifying suddenness that belonged to storms on the land. They grew instead out of the inexorable buildup of heat and wind and water, finally arcing between the clouds and the ocean. They seemed to the old man to be stately, moving heavily across the waves. They were visible from miles away, and thus easier to avoid-which is what every other boat working the edge of the great river of water that flows north from deep in the warmth of the Caribbean had already done. The old man was left alone on the sea, bobbing up and down on the slow rhythms of the waves, his boat's engine quiet, the twin baits he'd set out earlier lying flat and motionless on the water's inky surface.