"Please wait."

The man said, "Fine. Whatever you say."

His voice came from farther away, and Joey knew he was standing in the doorway. She figured that he was humoring her. "You're gonna call anyway, aren't you? Soon as I'm asleep, you're gonna sneak out to your boat and phone the cops."

"No, I won't. That's a promise."

"Then where you going, Mick, huh?"

"To take a leak. That okay with you?"

She sagged back on the sheets and laughed to herself, thinking: Sometimes I'm such a pill, I swear to God.

The Coast Guard expanded the search to almost three thousand square miles, though most of its effort focused on a trapezoidal sector off the northern Miami-Dade coastline that corresponded to the false information provided by Chaz Perrone. He remained confident that the searchers wouldn't find Joey, but he held a secret fear that if the sharks were negligent, her body might wash ashore somewhere down in the Keys. That would poke a gaping hole in his fictional chronology, and serve to energize the annoying Broward detective.

Only an hour after leaving the Sun Duchess, Chaz got a scare. He was watching television in his room at the Harbor Beach Marriott when there was a teaser for the evening news: A charter boat out of Ocean Reef had snagged a dead body while trolling for billfish-stay tuned for details!

Breathlessly, Chaz shot out of the bathroom, where he had been masturbating fruitlessly over a stack of Danish pornography. Through three minutes of laxative commercials he trembled in dread, waiting to hear if it was his wife who'd been reeled in by the startled anglers.

The newscast began with shaky helicopter footage of the charter boat at anchor, followed by a zoom-in shot of the corpse-cloaked in a bright yellow tarp-being hoisted on a stretcher to a Coast Guard cutter. Interviewed later at dockside, a sun-bleached young mate on the charter boat said of the gruesome catch: "We knew right away it wasn't no sailfish because it didn't jump."