"I think you know what's going on."
Kyle looked at Reggie. He looked back at Wade. He looked, for one wild flickering second, out at the water, at the open end of the dock, and Wade saw him see it and saw him measure it and saw him understand there was nowhere out there to go but wet. His shoulders came down.
"They found it," Kyle said. "Didn't they."
"Moss Point. Jackson County's sitting on it right now."
"Yeah." Kyle sat down on an upturned dock box as if somebody had cut a string. "Yeah, I figured. When you put out that thing about the green. Mr. Vance read it out loud in the office this morning. I almost threw up in the trash can." He rubbed the back of his neck, hard. "How'd you even think of green?"
"I didn't," Wade said. "Mr. Tran did."
Kyle closed his eyes.
Reggie stepped forward and read him his rights, every word, in an even, unhurried voice, and Kyle nodded at each one without opening his eyes. When Reggie asked if he understood, Kyle said, "Yes sir," in a voice so small that Wade had to look away, out at the marina, where three or four men had stopped what they were doing on their boats and were watching. Somebody up at the office had come to the window.
"You don't have to say anything," Wade said, crouching so he was level with his cousin. "You heard him. You want a lawyer, we stop right here."
"I know." Kyle opened his eyes. They were wet. "I want to say it. I want to say it to you."
So Wade let him.
It came out in pieces, the way those things always do. A man in Mobile from the old days, before the program, who said Kyle owed him eleven hundred dollars and then said it was two thousand and then said it was four. A phone call at two in the morning that said the man knew where Patsy lived. The first motor, off a sportfisher at the county landing, a hundred and fifty horse, so easy it scared him, sold to a guy behind a tire shop in Theodore for six hundred cash. Then another. Then the man in Mobile saying it was six thousand now, interest, and a buyer in Texas who'd pay real money for a whole rig, no questions, and Mr. Vance's skiff sitting there in slip fourteen with its keys on a hook in the office, because Mr. Vance didn't lock anything, because Mr. Vance didn't believe anything could happen to him.
"I knew the bulletin'd say navy," Kyle said. "So I figured, paint it. And I'm thinking, what color, and every morning I see Mr. Tran's boat go by the marina. Every single morning, same time, same boat. Everybody in town knows that boat. Everybody sees a white skiff with a green stripe, they don't even look at it. It's like a mailbox. It's just there." He laughed, a terrible small laugh. "I didn't even buy paint. I went in his shed. I didn't take anything else, Wade, I swear to God. I didn't touch his tools."