Arms out for balance, Red was climbing to the top of the highest garbage pile. He turned around to watch, back pretty much to me. There was a dark stain all down his ass.

Two cops with shovels came over to talk to Rufus. I couldn’t hear what they said. But finally Rufus shrugged, then gestured back with his chin. The cops, lifting their shoes pretty gingerly, went to the heap bottom, and started shoveling.

On top, Red shifted his weight, glanced down; his bare foot loosed a can that clanked toward the diggers.

The can bounced right in front of one of them—it startled him, and he danced to the side, looked up, shook his head, then went back to digging.

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—”