murder weapon, promised to keep his mouth shut and be on the pier at first light. Coffee and pie
brought Stick, Dutch, and me nothing but endless speculation. We packed it in early and I went to bed
after checking the hospital and being told that Raines? condition was “guarded.”
At five thirty am. I was back at the park with Stick, huddled over the river?s edge in fog thicker than
the previous night?s, sipping black coffee from a plastic cup and listening to George Baker describe
what he and his partner were about to do. Baker was a big man with a barrel chest, hulking shoulders,
a neck like a spare tire, and black hair cut shorter than a buck private?s. A telephone man by trade, he
was a black-water diver by avocation and an auxiliary policeman, whatever that was, for the hell of it.
“It?s dark down there,” he said dramatically as he pulled on his wet suit. His patois, a blend of
southern colloquial and old English, was as descriptive as it was archaic. He sounded like the hawker
for an old medicine show.
“Yessir, dark and dangerous. Don?t take much more?n a Mexico minute for a man to perish under
these waters. A man cannot afford errors of the mind, for you don?t make any miscalculations, least
not more than once. Why, sir, I dive in waters so dark, even a torch will hardly cut their swarthy
depths. The bottom is either sugar mud, which is shifty and quicksandy, or it?s covered with old, rusty
cables, the likes of an octopus, and old boat propellers, tin cans, and other such various obstacles from
time past when this here was a pier for mighty ships of the sea. Why, say, at high noon, it?s so dark at
the depths of fifteen feet, I must, by needs, do everything by the touch of these here fingers.”
He wobbled ten fingers at us, just in case we didn?t know what a finger was, and stared at them
himself with awe.
“Yessir,” he said, „sometimes there ain?t nothin? twixt me and the Almighty but a measly ol?
fingerprint.”
The bottom, Baker told us, sloped away from the bank for about thirty feet, then dropped off sharply
into the channel. He would use what he called his “tender system,” a ball of twine that he ran from
pillar to pillar and used as a guide under water. His buddy diver, a scroungy-looking young man
identified only as Whippet, who I later learned was a bootlegger by trade, kept track of his progress
by means of a tie line around Baker?s waist.
“If I get in trouble,” said the master diver, “Whippet will endeavour to pull me up, careful but sure, in
hopes that I will survive whatever calamity might befall me.”
Baker also had a theory, derived from looking for more than just a few murder weapons in his time.
“A man most likely will throw the gun out in the water, such as flingin? a baseball,” he said, “whereas
a lady, who don?t normally have much truck with guns, will tend to just drop the weapon
straightaway, so as to get ii out of hand as quick as is possible. I will operate from the edge of the
