On the other barge, a man in a rumpled brown suit, with a loose, knitted tie, came from the cabin. A chain of sweatdrops crossed his forehead under his gray hair. He squinted among the searchlights, saw the two shoveling on the scow and hollered: “Hey! What the hell do you guys think you’re doing?”

The cop who’d been surprised by the can stood up. “Well you said to look all over for it.”

“Come on,” the man in the rumpled suit shouted. “He wouldn’t have had time to bury it. That would have taken him at least five or ten minutes. He didn’t have no five or ten minutes. We figured out he couldn’t a’ been on here no more’n—”

The first cop called: “Maybe he didn’t bury it very deep!” The second cop had stopped shoveling too.

“Look! You two jackoffs start lookin’! And I mean lookin’ someplace sensible!”

With their shovels, the cops walked to the edge of the scow. The first cop used his like a cane. The other just swung his alongside of him.

The man in the rumpled suit took out a handkerchief that, even from here, I could tell he’d been using for at least a couple of weeks. He wiped his forehead, then turned to talk to one of the guys on the floodlights. They must have been pretty hot, because already the letters on the tattered tarpaper only had a few palm-sized spots of clear red left. One, nearest the light, I could actually see drying.

A van, bigger than the ambulance, rolled into the crowd—the back doors were already open and three guys and a woman all wearing earphones jumped down—and stopped. The woman was smoking a cigarette.

Inside the truck, another man was handing down coils of cable to the guys. “You want to take this stuff, Mary? It’s pretty dusty—”

“Come on. Come on. Gimme.” Her cigarette bobbed as she gestured for the powerlines. Carrying them around to the side of the van, she left them with the others against the front wheel and came back for another load. On the third trip back, she picked up a clipboard from where it lay on the van floor, stopped a second to speak into the mike on the wire curving from her earphone. The cigarette bumped plastic and lost its ash. When she finished talking, the other men with the earphones began moving much faster.

She took one of the ballpoints out of her blouse pocket—she had at least half a dozen pens and pencils in there in one of those plastic pen-cases that have a lip that goes over the pocket edge—made a mark on the clipboard, and put it back. She must have smudged the paper, because she looked at her hand, rubbed her fingers together, frowning, then wiped her hand on her gray skirt.