Rescue

Breath at All“). In an open-air dining area, I sat on white resin furniture and had a great plate of mixed seafood with a couple of Jamaican Red Stripe beers in the squatty brown bottles. From a counter near the bar I bought Nancy a T-shirt with a boar’s head, and the bar’s motto, on rt- Before I was able to elbow my way slowly toward the door, three different tables of tourists asked me to take their group portraits with thirty-five-millimeter automatic cameras.
    Back on the street, the crowd was swelling toward the Water. I joined them and ended up on a pier with hundreds spectators and dozens of peddlers hawking everything from ice cream to youth elixirs. The best, though, were the performers.
    Against a backdrop of honky-tonk harbor and tethered drug-enforcement blimps, I watched a couple of men playing the bagpipes in full Scottish regalia except for white tank tops showing off heavily developed upper bodies. Another guy, the “Evel Knievel of the Dairy Bar,“ astounded his audience with “stupid egg tricks.“ Down the line past him was a man who balanced things on his head, from a snow tire to an inverted bicycle to a grocery cart, for a finale tossing the tire and bike into the cart and balancing the whole shebang by clenching one rung of the cart in his teeth. The best, though, was a man screaming gibberish in English with a German or French accent, it was literally impossible to tell which. The gibberish was aimed at a group of house cats, sitting on red- padded pedestals supported by umbrella sticks, like lions and tigers in a circus act. The man would scream at the cats, and they would do tricks like opening the latches of a cage or dancing a pirouette, all to the amazement of the fairly generous crowd. And, oh yeah, the sunset was beautiful, too.
    As I walked away from the pier, I began to think I’d have to spend significant time on Key West to get the hang of it.

    “Mack?“
    A man swabbing the bar top of the Far Horizon lifted the wet rag and looked up at me. He was stocky, with hammy forearms and that honey tan some blonds get. His handlebar mustache stretched almost from ear to ear beneath piercing blue eyes and very faint eyebrows.
    “You Dawna’s friend?“
    An accent that sounded northern Midwest, and I remembered Adair saying he was from Wisconsin. “Yes, John Francis.“
    Olsen dried his hands on a different towel before shaking-“What can I do for you?“
    I looked around. It was about nine, not as many people in the place as when I’d stopped there earlier. Maybe they weren’t back from sunset yet. “It’d be a help if you could tell me what you know about the Church of the Lord Vigilant-
    You could see the shutters come down, like a pawnshop locking up for the night. “No, thanks.“ He went back to the swabbing.
    “I’m trying to find a missing boy. I think he may be in the Compound on Little Mercy Key, and I need some information about it from somebody who’s been on the inside.“
    “Something wrong with your ears, pal?“
    “Dawna said I should tell you that she owes me a favor.“
    Olsen stopped with the rag again. Closing his eyes, he shook his head, then opened them to look at me. “That the truth?“
    I took a chance. “You know it is.“
    A grim smile, then a lighter one. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s Dawna, all right. Back when I was living on Mercy, she helped me through a pretty rough patch. When I asked her what I could do for payback, she said, ‘Hey, just help some body else sometime, huh?’“ He tossed the rag into a sink. “Okay, what do you want to know?“
    “How did you come to the Church?“
    “I was living in Milwaukee. Married, but no kids, and the marriage itself was heading into the toilet. I hated the winters, didn’t know why until I got to Key West and somebody told me about S.A.D.“
    “What’s that?“
    “ ‘Seasonal Affective Disorder.’ Up in Milwaukee, we’d have weeks where it’d be dark, all day long. Turns out I’ve got to have sunlight, otherwise I’m real tired, even mean, during the winter. I’d put on weight, then be mad about it, always on the edge of depression even though I was sleeping ten, twelve hours a night, you know?“
    “And coming down here cured it?“
    “Yeah, but you wanted to know how I got started with the Church, right?“
    “Right.“
    “Well, that’s how. You see, the marriage was breaking up, and I saw this circular for Reverend Wyeth’s church, and it sounded real good. I’m sure I was