When Pete Amsterdam retired to Key West to live in relative luxury, he thought of his PI license as a simple tax dodge suggested by his accountant. So when a man who's supposedly been dead for two years turns up by the side of Pete's hot tub and asks him to help retrieve the money pouches he buried on a nearby island just before he disappeared, Pete is completely uninterested.

The discreet little bar that Jake Stonebender established a few blocks below Duval Street is simply called The Place. There, Fast Eddie Costigan learned to curse back at parrots as he played the house piano, the Reverend Tom Hauptman learned to tend bar bare-chested without blushing, Long-Drink McGonnigle discovered the margarita and several señoritas, and all the other regulars settled into comfortable subtropical niches of their own. Nobody