Bonaire, Netherlands Antilles

WE ARRIVED ON a typical Bonairian evening: 80 degrees and dryer than the crumbs left over in your toaster oven. We hailed a cab outside Flamingo Airport and loaded our luggage into the minivan. Our cabbie, a stocky man with a head that looked like it had been drawn with a compass, drove quickly through the saguaro forest, flipping off the occasional donkeys chewing on god knows what.

"When were you here last?" he asked in a thick accent.

"Never," we said.

"Never?" He sat up taller in his seat so he could turn around and face us. "Great! I'll drive you around the city."

Which he did. The whole entire block of it.

Welcome to Bonaire, an autonomous island-state within the kingdom of the Netherlands located 50 miles off the northern coast of South America. Bonaire, where the flamingos outnumber the humans (10,000 at high season) and can, depending on the amount of Venezuelan beer you've consumed, easily be confused for a sunset when they take flight. Bonaire is where the indigenous language, Papiamento, has no past or future tense, forcing you to remain forever in the present. Time is measured as day or night, not by the hours on a clock, and when the rain falls in heavy flooding curtains, it lasts all of seven minutes but puts the electricity out for days.

Here, the biggest hurry of the day is to make it to the beach or pier bar to argue over whether or not there was a "green flash" when the sun was swallowed by the infinite sea. (The "green flash" could, of course, come from staring at the blinding light of that sunset.) Despite boasting the second and third top diving spots in the world, this 170-square-mile island remains one of the few, rarely visited places left for globetrotters to find.

At one of the island's three stop signs, a small black car squeezed in beside us. Our cabbie grumbled something about "bastards" and "thieves" under his breath, then the other car revved its engine and peeled out, leaving us in a foul cloud of black smoke.

"You have that in New York?" he asked us.

"Punks? Yeah."

"No. Cops. They do that where you are from?"

"No. Uh, no. Wait, those were-"

"Did you know this isn't an island? It's a coral reef. It grows a half a centimeter a year?"

Cops forgotten, he rambled on about Bonaire being the only place in the world that won't eventually be swallowed by the sea.

We shot awkward glances at each other. Those were cops?

In addition to hosting two top diving spots, Bonaire is also a major stop for cocaine on its way to the United States. Packages leaving the island are stamped as Dutch property, making it less likely that the American Coast Guard will be suspicious. Conveniently located an hour off the Venezuelan coast and promising cops who turn a blind eye-so long as a little something falls off the boat every once in a while-what better place to refuel?

Two months passed in the way time does on quiet, palm-treed beaches that slip into turquoise blue seas, and we forgot all about the cops in the small black car. We visited the donkey sanctuary, and went to the nudist beach to watch bare, white asses strapped into windsurfing harnesses. We watched spectacular meteor showers from the edge of a cliff where the sky was so littered with stars it was hard to find darkness.

Happy and safe in our own world of bike riding and sunsets accompanied by Polar Beers (the Venezuelan equivalent of a Corona), of snorkeling with electric green and purple fish, we forgot all about shipments and things falling off of boats. We forgot all things dodgy.

Until one late night at Karol's Beach Bar, one of the two bars in town. There had been a lot of "traffic" that day-i.e. lots of chartered sailboats were in dock, mostly without their rich owners. Which meant plenty of pretty sailors happy to be back on dry land and happier to be getting drunk with a handful of girls. We'd had countless blended drinks and were weaving our way to the other bar, where karaoke was about to begin. We stopped at an empty fruit shack to smoke a cigarette and came upon our downstairs neighbor smoking a joint.

"Shouldn't you be careful, Juni? Isn't that a cop car over there?" one of us asked, nodding to a car parked down the block.

He smiled, shrugged his shoulders. "I don't think he really cares."

In the car, two uniforms were fussing around under the seat. One of them sat up, rolled down the window and lit a cigarette. Bon Jovi's "Living on a Prayer" blared from the radio. His partner was fiddling with something on the dashboard. He had a card in one hand that he kept sliding back and forth, then he'd tap it, then slide some more. He took out a bill of some kind, rolled it up, stuck it in his nose and ran it across the dashboard. Then his partner did the same.

"See," said Juni. "Told you they were busy."

Our neighbor smiled and stubbed out his roach for later. We stared, our jaws dropping at the sight of this cop car that was parked under a bright streetlight. The cops each did a second line, shut off the radio and got out, dabbing their noses and wiping sweat from their foreheads.

I've seen cops in Paris point machine guns at school children looking for identification. I've seen cops in Mexico who couldn't be bothered to search through the fly-riddled filth in our car as we passed checkpoints. I've seen cops in Prague too young to apply to college. I've even seen cops in Texas flirt with 16-year-old beauty-pageant queens. But this was the first time I'd witnessed two officers, in uniform, in their squad car, doing blow off the dashboard.

On an island 26 miles long with just one road wrapping around it, where there are more flamingos than people during the high season, where new faces and names are learned for a week at a time-it's no surprise that policing the police isn't a top priority. It's easy to forget about cops and cocaine on an island with white beaches surrounded by blue seas. Better to lie in a hammock and drink blended drinks from a coconut in the shade of a palm tree. Watch, instead, the flamingos take flight and wonder for a moment if the sun is setting sooner than you expected.