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"No, I like it here. I come here often to be by myself. I write poetry sometimes."
"You do?"
"It's not very good. But I'm gonna take a creative writing class at Miami-Dade Community College this fall. I showed my poems to a professor there. He said I had talent but I needed to study."
"I bet your poems are good," Clete said.
The sun had sunk beyond the Everglades, and the ocean was dark and flecked with whitecaps. At the end of the pier some Cuban kids had hooked a hammerhead shark and were fighting to hoist it clear of the water and over the guardrail. The woman smoked her cigarette and watched them, the thumb on her left hand repeatedly tapping the tips of her fingers. One of the kids drove a knife into the shark's head, impaling it on a plank. "Yuk," Babette said.
"I got to ask you something," Clete said.
"Go ahead," she replied, screwing her cigarette out inside a bottle cap.
"You work for Lou Coyne?"
"Yes, I do," she said, smiling in a self-deprecating way.
"You were checking me out at the daiquiri stand?" he said.
"It comes with my paycheck."
"I'm not knocking it."
"I know you're not," she said.
"I just thought Coyne might be a guy I knew a long time ago, a Galveston guy by the name of Lou Kale."
"He's always used the name 'Coyne' since I've worked for him. He's a pretty good guy, actually. He's just got to be careful."
"Dude I knew was hooked up with a gal by the name of Ida Durbin."
"You got me. Ask Lou. You like the hamburgers?"
"They're swell."
"You seem like a sweet guy. Look, I've got to check on my cousin's house. I'm taking care of her parakeet while she's out of town. You want to come?"
They drove in her compact down 1-95 and took an exit into a neighborhood of cinder-block apartment buildings and one-story wood-frame homes that looked like they had been built during the Depression years. Babette entered a dark street and turned into the driveway of a paintless house. The front porch was lit and the screens on it were stained with rust, the yard filled with waving shadows from clusters of untrimmed banana trees.
"Your cousin lives in Little Havana?" Clete said.
"She's not Hispanic, if that's what you mean," Babette replied.
"No, that's not what I meant," he said.
"Before we go in, I need to tell you something. The cell number I gave you, it wasn't mine. It belongs to a dial-in prayer service."
"Really?"
"See, Lou took a bunch of us to Lake Charles, to the hotel and casino on the lake there. We met this famous evangelical leader. It was like a spiritual experience for me. I think for the first time in a long while I can stop living the way I do. But I don't have enough money to quit yet and plus I got a little drug problem."
"That's why they have Twelve-Step programs," Clete said.
She had cut the engine and now she opened the door partway, lighting the interior of the compact. "I just wanted you to know how it is with me and why I gave you the prayer number," she said. "I'm just trying to be honest."
Clete did not try to follow her reasoning. He waited for her to ask him for money. But she didn't. "I need to use the bathroom. Then I'll clean the birdcage and we can go," she said.
The inside of the house was clean and squared away, the furniture bright, the rooms air-conditioned by two window units. Through a bedroom door he could see a water bed and a lava lamp on the nightstand. Babette went into the bathroom, then Clete heard the toilet flush and the faucet running before she came back out.
