Page 11 of Rowe

The line went slack, tightened, and angled down. The float disappeared. All four men watched the rope slide through Cowboy’s glove. Ten feet. Fifteen. Twenty. Gator laid two fingers on the line, reading vibrations. The rope shivered as Alvin pushed through debris, went still, then moved sharply to the right.

“There’s space back there,” Patrick said. Gator nodded.

“More than we thought.”

The camera cable transmitted broken images to the monitor mounted near the console: green-black water, white haze, the sudden flare of concrete inches from the lens. Alvin’s tail stirred the bottom and blanked the screen. When it cleared, the slab was no longer in front of him. The beam found a void beneath a second slab, wider and deeper than the divers had mapped. Steel posts had been driven into the mud around its perimeter. Chains ran between them.

No one made a joke.

Alvin turned. The lamp swept across cloth moving in the current. A pale shoe. A wrist encircled by metal. Hair drifting like river grass.

Christopher reached for the monitor, then stopped before touching it. Gator whispered.

“Bring him back.”

Cowboy pulled twice on the guideline. For a moment nothing happened. Then the rope moved toward them. The float broke the surface halfway across the bayou, followed by the ridged back. Alvin came alongside and waited while Gator removed the camera. Cowboy tipped the rest of the bucket into the water without comment.

The screen had recorded only seconds, but it was enough. Patrick replayed the image frame by frame. Beyond the first wrist were ankles, shoulders, and lengths of chain converging at the steel posts. Some shapes lay half covered by silt. Others had been suspended above the bottom, held where the current moved through the cavity. The deeper the beam reached, the more forms emerged.

They counted what could be separated with certainty.

Thirteen.

Then Christopher pointed near the edge of the frame, where two shoes rested side by side beneath a fallen panel.

Fourteen.

Patrick advanced one more frame. Behind the shoes, another chain vanished into darkness beyond the camera’s reach.

“More,” he said.

The word remained on the boat like a fifth man.

Gator lifted the radio and called the sheriff’s command post. His voice was flat and precise. Unstable concrete. Multiple victims. Minimum fourteen visible. Do not send divers until structural engineers and lift equipment are on scene. Shut down boat traffic north and south of the channel. Bring lights, barriers, recovery bags, and every available team.

The reply dissolved in static, then returned with confirmation.

Cowboy sat on the deck with his back against the gunwale. Mud dried in a crescent across his cheek. He stared at the rosary on the bench.

“Fourteen,” he said. Christopher corrected him quietly.

“At least.”

No one looked toward the slab. They had all seen enough of it on the screen: a roof over a chamber built to hide the dead, its bad steel and careless concrete now the only things keeping the bayou from closing over them forever.

Sirens began far away, thin at first, traveling over the marsh roads. Gator set anchor and kept the bow pointed into the current. Alvin floated ten yards off, only his eyes and nostrils visible, stationed between the boat and the concrete as if he, too, had taken watch.

The wind strengthened. It pushed leaves across the surface and tapped a branch against the hull. Patrick checked the safety lines, coiled them, and checked them again. Christopher wrote the visible count, and location estimates on the slate. Cowboy took the broken lawn-chair leg from his gear pouch—somehow, he had brought it up—and held it without remembering why.

“You stole evidence,” Christopher said.

Cowboy looked down at it. For a second the old answer almost arrived. Patrick could see it gathering behind his eyes, some remark about furnishing the boat or opening a bayou resort. Cowboy set the plastic leg on the deck instead.

“Put it with the rest,” he said.

The recovery convoy reached the distant levee. Men and women in bright vests moved along the bank, reduced by distance to flashes of color. A crane crawled behind them on a low trailer. The sight should have brought relief. It did not. It only made the scale of what waited below feel official.

Gator touched the radio again.