“Then stop,” said Jim Tile.
“I drank about a gallon of Sanka this morning and I’m fit to ‘splode.”
“Anywhere’s fine. Gale.”
The guard cut the engine and the boat coasted silently in the milky green water. Gale removed the life vest and modestly turned around to urinate off the stern. The featherweight boat swung sidelong in the current, and at that moment an ill-timed gust of wind disrupted Gale’s golden outflow, blowing it back on the front of his uniform. He let out a yowl and clumsily zipped himself up.
“Goddammit. That won’t work.” He started the engine and idled the nose of the boat into the trees, up against the bank. Stepping out, he snagged one foot on a barnacled root and nearly went down. “Be right back,” he told the state trooper.
“Take your time, Gale.”
To escape the messy effect of the breeze, the security guard clomped twenty yards into the woods before choosing a spot to unzip. He was midstream—and pissing gloriously, like a stallion—when he heard the chuk-a-chuk of the outboard motor. Gale strained to halt his mighty cascade, tucked in his pecker and charged back toward the water’s edge. When he got there, the johnboat was gone.
Jim Tile headed down Steamboat Creek at half throttle. A school of finger mullet scattered in silvery streaks ahead of the bow. From behind he heard Gale the security guard bellowing hoarsely in the mangroves. He hoped the young man wouldn’t do something completely idiotic, such as attempt to walk out.
As he followed the creek, the trooper closely scanned the shoreline along both sides. He wasn’t expecting an obvious sign; a flotilla of searchers had been up and down the waterway and found nothing. Jim Tile knew his friend would be careful not to leave tracks. The trooper shed the life vest and reached inside his shirt, where he’d hidden the brown envelope. He took out the contact sheet and glanced once more at frame 36.
The photo had been snapped with the camera pointed aimlessly downward, as if the shutter had been triggered by mistake. And even though the picture was underlit and out of focus, Jim Tile could make out a patch of water, a three-pronged mangrove sprout and—wedged in the trident-like root—a soda-pop can. Schweppes, it looked like.
A Schweppes ginger ale, of all the unlikely brands.
At least it was something. Jim Tile started scouring the waterline for cans, and he found plenty: Coke, Diet Coke, Pepsi, Diet Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Dr Pepper, Orange Crush, Budweiser, Busch, Colt.45, Michelob—it was sickening. People are such slobs, the trooper thought, trashing such a fine and unspoiled place. Who could be so inexcusably disrespectful of God’s creation? Jim Tile had grown up in neighborhoods where there was more broken glass than grass on the ground, but his mother would’ve knocked him on his scrawny black butt if she’d caught him throwing a soda can anywhere but in a trash bin…
The trooper had twisted the throttle down so that the johnboat was barely cutting a wake. Back and forth across the creek he tacked, scooping up floating cans where he saw them; easy to spot., Clinting in the bright sun. But no Schweppes. Jim Tile felt foolish for chasing such a weak clue—he knew that weather skidded flotsam all over these creeks. And if the tide rose too high, the trident-shaped mangrove bud would be submerged anyway; invisible. The trooper crumpled the photographic contact sheet and shoved it into his pocket.
Still he kept searching the banks, mechanically collecting other cans and bottles and paper cups. Soon the inside of the johnboat began to look like a Dumpster. He was turning a wide bend in the creek when something caught his attention—not a ginger-ale can or a three-pronged mangrove sprout., but a slash of canary yellow paint. It appeared as a subtle vector across a cluster of tubular stalks, a yard above the waterline, where somebody had dragged something heavy and brightly painted into the trees. Something like a canoe.
Jim Tile tied off the bow and rolled up his trousers and pulled off his shoes. He bird-stepped from the johnboat and gingerly made his way into the snarl of trees. His left foot poked something smooth and metallic: The Schweppes can from the photograph, trapped beneath the surface by its mangrove talon. The trooper moved ahead, excruciatingly, the soles of his feet rasped by roots and shards of broken mollusks. He slipped repeatedly, and twice nearly pitched onto his face. Jim Tile was aware that he sounded like a herd of drunken buffalo, and not for a moment did he entertain the fantasy that he could sneak up on the governor. It would have been impossible, even on dry land.