Joe Tracy lives in an airplane hangar at the Santa Carmella airport, keeps a Beechcraft Staggerwing mounted through the roof and eats too much of Twyla Rae's pie. He is a former Navy pilot, a former soap-opera detective and a private investigator still healing from the Angel case. He has promised his doctor to slow down.Then Cal Hughes calls. Cal is an ex-Marine and an old friend from Joe's Navy days, the kind of man who believes every room improves when he walks in. He is offering a vacation with the DEA, a seaplane checkout and, apparently, Russians. Joe knows better. He gets on the plane anyway.In Miami he is briefed and given a new name. In Key West he becomes Kendall Hobbs, a man just out of prison and looking for work. He learns to fly floats from a pilot named Jaz and a crusty instructor called Pappy Bolger. He takes a room above Reverend Jimmie Byrd's Spirit of the Sea Church. And he goes looking for Buzz Bazzano, the one man who might know why Ivan Ditson drew a palm tree full of numbers before he died.Somebody gets there first. Joe's room is searched and his money taken, and a casino chip from The Palm, a long-gone Havana casino, is left on the bed. The Night Ferry, a network that once smuggled people out of places nobody was supposed to leave, learned long ago that desperation pays. Evangeline Woods has been waiting for years for word of her missing brother, Elias. And an old notebook surfaces with a warning that Joe cannot ignore.Before it is over, Joe will be shot at, half drowned and trapped beneath the sea. The hardest part will be getting someone to listen to a dead man.
