A refugee from a world of drug addicts and misfits, Thomas Skelton goes home to Key West. But Key West itself turns out to be an alien world - torrid, hostile and grotesque. Taking up residence in an abandoned airplane fuselage, Skelton plans to become a skiff guide in the shining blue subtropical waters and enters into a competition with Nichol Dance, supreme guide of the Keys. Dance has already killed one man while tending bar in Kentucky and will not hesitate to kill another. But Skelton will not back down and the two, surrounded by an assortment of eccentric characters, embark on a deadly course from which neither can turn back.