Emile snorted like a mule. “They told me they sending two boats way out, maybe sixty mile. They think they gone to Cuba or something.” He took a long drag and talked out the smoke. “We gonna find those boys close in, or ain’t nobody gonna find them at all.” He turned to Colette briefly, the way a doctor might when breaking bad news. “Alfred LeBlanc came in with his big trawler two nights ago, and one of his booms was tore loose, two windows broke out, and all his buckets and boots gone overboard. He told me he thinks he came through the same squall line Etienne steered into. I’m hoping they made a run for a platform or an island.”

She looked at a bass boat coming at them, whizzing past without a wave. “How long can we stay out?”

Emile took another long drag and thought a minute. “How long you want to stay out?”

“Until we can’t,” she said. “Would Etienne want you to do less?”

He passed her a long, surprised look, as though he had noticed her for the first time. “Well, no, I guess not.”

She looked at a paper bag behind her on the floor. “You like Vienna sausage, peanut butter and jelly?”

“I’ve eat worse.”

“Then we can last as long as the fuel.”

“Girl, you as hardheaded as you pretty.” He slid back a window and flicked his cigarette out. “You know, the boys up at the fuel dock said I was crazy going out like this.”

“I guess we are,” she said, holding on as they rolled up behind a large tugboat. Emile ran right up the white tunnel of propeller wake before cutting to port, missing the hemp fender on the stern by four feet, humming past the tug and alongside the barges. Colette watched the rusty smudge in the window on Emile’s side and figured the crew boat was making around thirty miles an hour. They would be in open water by half past seven.

Down past Boogalee Island, the canal dumped into the Chieftan, and when they broke into the big river, Colette caught sight of something white streaking across the water on her left like a giant Styrofoam ice chest. It was an open boat with a broad nose, a twenty-five-footer, shooting out from the bank straight for them. She got the field glasses and saw that it was the Larousse twins in a dirty fiberglass hull with the name Unsinkabelle painted in bright red script on the sides of the bow. Victor was flashing his new smile and waving his arms over his head like giant pincers. She went out onto the open deck in the rear of the boat as Emile slowed down to meet them.