“Charming. Lead on.” She walked along behind him through the reeds and muck.

Every so often Sam would turn back to check on her. She was stepping along at a steady pace, and her face was set in a quiet smile. After about twenty minutes of walking, Sam stopped. “You figured it out, didn’t you?”

“Maybe.”

“Why only ‘maybe’?”

“Are you assuming they put a GPS tracker on our boat?”

He grinned. “I found it. I wondered why they didn’t sabotage the engine, then realized it was so we wouldn’t spend a lot of time looking around in the engine compartment.”

“Then yes. I have figured it out. Let’s finish the trek and see if they’re out following our trail to the treasure.”

He said, “Sometimes you amaze me.”

“Really?” she asked. “Still?”

He led Remi deeper into the swamp and then along a wide right turn so they completed a vast circle. When they came back to their boat, she went a hundred yards up to the next bend and pointed. The black-and-gray boat was anchored up there to hide it from them.

Sam sat down on an old fallen tree trunk, put on his flippers, and pulled his mask down over his face.

Remi put her hand on his arm. “The alligators weren’t just a figure of speech, you know.”

“Don’t tell them I’m here.” He moved into the murky water and disappeared. He reappeared at the stern of the black-and-gray boat. He went to the bow, pulled up the anchor, and let the boat begin to drift downstream.

Remi moved quickly along the shallows to where they had left the dive boat, close to the shore among the dead trees. She used the gaff to push off, lifted the anchor, and looked up the watery channel at Sam, drifting slowly toward her in the black-and-gray boat. She could see he was working with a set of wires he had cut and stripped with his dive knife.

As Remi watched, Sam touched the two wires together, the engine started, and he began to steer the boat down the bayou toward her. She started the engine of their boat and moved along the bayou ahead of him at quarter speed, relying on her memory of where sunken logs and muddy bars had been. In a few minutes she was out into Mud Lake, then into Vermilion Lake, and then out into the Gulf. In a moment, Sam was coming up behind in the black-and-gray boat.

When they reached the open water far out from the Caminada Headland, they brought the two boats together and tied them. Remi climbed aboard the black-and-gray boat. “Sneakily done.”

“Thank you,” he said. They began to search the black-and-gray boat, concentrating on the cabin. In a few minutes, Remi held up a blue binder with a hundred pages in it. “They’re a company. Have you ever heard of Consolidated Enterprises?”

“No,” Sam said. “Pretty vague. It doesn’t sound like anything specific.”

“I guess they don’t want to rule anything out,” she said.