He pursed his small mouth and studied the pale expanse of lines and numbers spread out on the deck. “No, but there’s a lot of water under it. They’d have to have a light on it.” He gave the Larousses a look. “Did you boys check it?”

“We didn’t get out that far, man. We checked three or four empty platforms close in.” He held up an arm. “Over there.” He pointed to a cluster of old twelve-legged platforms spread over five square miles of water to the east, probably idle or capped wellheads. If one tried to notice, there were dozens of wells, intermittent dots running to the horizons. Victor rolled the wheels on his binoculars and leaned out toward the Gulf.

Emile got on the radio and raised LeBlanc again, who could barely get his signal.

“What you got?” LeBlanc sounded as if he was shouting.

“Where you at?”

“About a mile south of that platform. We’ll keep looking and then come back to it to meet y’all.”

“You check it?”

“Aw, no. We passed a mile north of it and gave it the onceover with the glasses. Nothin’ on it.”

Emile looked again at the chart, which he had dragged into the cabin. He bent his head low, held his breath over the map as though a passage of wind might blow the spidery printed figures off the paper. Colette looked through the cabin door and watched his face become heavy with blood as he studied. When he looked up, his mouth was a tiny oval. “That’s the first lighted platform east of where I think they were trawling.” He pulled the microphone to his mouth and sat down on the deck. “LeBlanc.”

“Yas.”

“Get right up on that platform and call us back.”

“We done checked it out with the glasses.” LeBlanc’s voice was tired. Colette imagined the hundreds of gallons of fuel they had burned.

“Well, damn it,” Emile yelled, “check it out with your eyeballs.”

There was no transmission for two minutes, and she wondered whether an argument had broken out in the wheelhouse of the tug. Finally her brother’s voice came over the set. “We’ll turn north right now. Over.”

For the next forty-five minutes, the Larousses, one motor picked up for reserve in case they damaged the other in the shallows, cruised close in over the mud and sand flats. Sometimes their boat stalled when they wandered in too close, their engine kicking up a geyser of mud. Colette and Emile worked a half mile out from them, her glasses scanning only lazy vees of pelicans sailing low. Eventually they turned the crew boat south to get in range of the tug’s radio, and when they were within three miles, they got a fuzzy signal.

Colette was steering, Emile on the roof. “What did you say?” she hollered into the mike, her fingers slippery with sweat on the instrument.