“I found the goddamn baby!”

The whole crowd started for us. Other cops were coming too. People reached us, pushed around us. In the crowd, the director was making large semaphore gestures at the assistants, who were trying to keep the cables from underfoot. The man with the string tie was coming forward too, talking into his mike the while. But you couldn’t hear him because other people were shouting too much. A lot of niggers got in my way and somebody else—it was the white orderly; I looked down and saw his red socks flash below his jean cuffs—pushed me back.

And while I was trying to keep from falling, another person grabbed my shoulder and spun me around, hard: I stared up into the face of an angry black, in a blue workshirt with the sleeves torn off. I didn’t even recognize him till he bellowed: “Where the hell you run off to, you motherfuckin’ little son of a bitch?”

It was Big Sambo.

“You get your yeller nigger ass back down to the tug there with Honey-Pie, or I’m gonna bust your yellow-headed self all to hell!” He raised his hand to hit me. I cowered back. “An’ if I don’t find you there when I come, you better not never let me see you again, or it’s gonna be me and you! You hear me?”

His fist fell—caught me on the shoulder, because I ducked. I dodged through the two fishermen pushing up behind me, and ran. I ran until I got to the tugs.

Then I stopped.

I looked back at the crowd. I looked at the squat, rust-hulled tug at its dock. I looked over the roadway that Nigg and Hawk had brought me down on the motorcycle.

I looked at the tug again.

I walked out on the dock, crossed the sagging plank, went to the cabin door, pulled it open, and went inside.

At the galley table, Honey-Pie sat on a chair with her bare feet wrapped behind the rungs and her fists in the lap of her dress. She looked at me, blinking.

On the windowsill, the radio was still going: “… have been other mass murderers—indeed, man has committed atrocities against man, even in this decade, that render the terror here insignificant; yet the concentration of all this violence into a single day, in a single town, coupled with the alleged youth of the assassin—” Sawyers’ voice was interrupted by another, further away: “Oh my God!” Then, louder: “I found it! Hey, I found it, right here!” There were murmurs, whispers, shouts; then, one shout among them: “What you got?” And Whitey’s bawling reply: “I found the—” Bleep!—“baby!” Sawyers’ voice returned in an intense whisper: “Wait a minute … Wait …! I think they’ve found something. Yes. I think they’ve got the … Everyone is running toward the water. I’m moving with the crowd. I’m moving. Fishermen, policemen, and those who are simply curious onlookers are clustered at the water’s edge, crowding onto the docks to see, staring down into the …! What? No, we’re trying to find out for you if he’s all right. Hello? Hey …? Is he all …? One of the orderlies has just pushed by me, making for the ambulance. Now he’s getting out the stretcher. People are making so much noise, you couldn’t hear the sound of a baby crying even if—What’s that …? Two of the policemen now, with grapple-hooks, I can see from here, are reaching down into the—Yes …? Oh my God, folks, the poor thing is …”