“The Coast Guard will come around the Point to recover the boat,” Tyler said. “And the ambulance will take your friend. Hell, they’ll want to take all of you, just to be safe. I don’t know if the police will come. Does it matter?”

Brucie looked over at Cap. “No,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”

Leon’s bandmates were waiting for us on the dock. We must have been some sight. We got everybody off the boat and wrapped up in towels. The unconscious man we laid out on the dock. In the dim light from the house, I could see that he was a lot younger than the other two men. He looked like he had just graduated from high school. Tyler covered him with a thick woolen blanket and pressed a clean white cloth against his head. I could see some superficial wounds to his scalp, but God knows what could have happened to him internally. The men all wanted to stay outside with him. So we all stood there on the dock while the fireworks kept exploding in the fog.

“Cap,” Brucie said, “what if he doesn’t make it?”

“He’ll make it,” Cap said. “Just stop talking.”

“What if he’s still alive but he’s like…you know, brain dead. What’s going to happen to us then?”

“If you don’t shut up,” Cap said, gritting his teeth, “I’m going to make you brain dead right here on the dock. Okay?”

Brucie kept his mouth shut after that. The time crawled by, until finally the ambulance showed up in Tyler’s driveway. I went around and led the men down to the water. A Michigan state trooper showed up a minute later. He wrote a few things down while the EMS guys got the men into the ambulance. Cap and Brucie weren’t too sure about going with them. They wanted to drive separately, even though their car must have been a half mile away, at the casino.