The Devil's Punchbowl

  I’ve called on other, private resources in extraordinary situations, but none are ready to hand tonight. The man I trust most to help me in a crisis is in Afghanistan, working for a security contractor based in Houston. His company may have some operators Stateside who could help protect Julia, but none would be any closer than Houston—seven hours away by car.

  Most people who felt they couldn’t trust local law enforcement would probably call the FBI, but that option presents problems for me. Seven years ago I forced the resignation of the Bureau’s director, when I proved that he’d been involved in the cover-up of a civil rights murder in Natchez in 1968. That won me few admirers in the Bureau (open ones, anyway) and made me a liability to the field agents I’d befriended during my successful career as an assistant district attorney in Houston.

  “Damn it!” I shout, pounding the wheel in frustration. “What the fuck is going on?”

  It’s like screaming inside a bell jar, but at least my outburst gives vent to the rage and frustration that have been building since I saw Tim’s body. Closing my right hand into a fist, I pound the passenger seat until my wrist aches. When the national park at Melrose Plantation flashes by, I realize I’m driving eighty—forty miles an hour over the speed limit.

  Settle down, I tell myself, remembering my father, who becomes calmer the more dire the medical emergency. When everything is at risk, good judgment, not haste, makes the difference between life and death. Panic is the enemy .

  My decision to run every stop sign on Washington Street is perfectly rational. They are four-way stops, and unless someone else is doing the same thing I am at exactly the same place and time, I have enough visual clearance to safely jump the intersections.

  I park on the street, exit my car, and move toward the house in continuous motion, my mind in flux. Taking the porch steps at a near run, I notice that the cast-iron lamp hanging above me is out. Mom must have inadvertently switched it off. That isn’t like her, but I don’t have time to worry about personal inconsistencies tonight. I’m slipping my key into the lock when a man’s voice speaks from the shadows to my right.

  “That’ll do, Mr. Cage. Stand easy where you are. No need to disturb the women.”

  I fight the urge to whirl toward the sound. I’ve tried too many cases where people were shot because they saw the face of someone who didn’t want to be remembered. Yet from the voice alone, I’m almost certain that the man in the shadows is Seamus Quinn, the security chief on the Magnolia Queen. I’ve never heard an Irish accent like Quinn’s outside the movies, and even then only in Irish-made films.

  “What do you want me to do?” I ask.

  “I want you to listen. It’s all right to turn. I want you to see.”

  By now my eyes have adapted to the darkness, so when I turn, I see enough to register how wrong I was: The face staring at me out of the shadows belongs not to Seamus Quinn, but to his boss, Jonathan Sands.

  Wait, I think, the voice is all wrong. Gone is the refined English accent of the Magnolia Queen’s general manager, replaced by a coarse, working-class Irish accent identical to that possessed by Quinn. Then it hits me: I’m looking at Sands, but it was Quinn who spoke. The Irishman must be standing behind his boss, down in the flower bed. I glance past Sands, but all I register is something low and pale in the blackness behind him, like a crouching animal.

  Sands moves his hand slightly, which pulls my eyes back to him, and then I see his gun, a small but efficient-looking automatic held at waist level.

  “Easy now, darlin’,” he says. “I only brought this wee pipe so I don’t have to lay hands on you.”

  With a start I realize it was Sands who spoke the first time. He’s simply speaking with Seamus Quinn’s voice rather than the cultured English accent he doles out for public consumption. I only know about British accents because my sister, Jenny, lives in England. She went to Britain as a visiting professor of literature at Trinity College, dated a Dubliner for several years, then married an Englishman and settled in Bath. For this reason, what would sound like a British accent to most other Southerners sounds like Belfast to me, and it tells me I know a lot less about Jonathan Sands than I thought I did. Tonight he sounds like a cross between Bono and the lead singer of the Pogues.

  “You’re not English,” I murmur, trying to get my mind around it. “You’re Irish.”

  “As Paddy’s goat, Your Honor,” he says, chuckling softly. “But let’s keep that between us, eh?”

  While Sands’s eyes flicker with private mirth, the evil that Tim hinted at fills my soul like a squid’s ink. I know without doubt that everything my dead friend suspected must be true.

  “What do you want?”

  “Your undivided attention. Do I have that, Mr. Cage?”

  “Obviously.”

  “Before we talk, I’ll ask you to hand over that weapon you’ve got in your pocket. Two fingers only.”

  Sands materialized so suddenly on my porch that I actually forgot I was carrying a gun. But his ability to spot my concealed pistol in the dark tells me that trying to use it against him would be the last thing I’d do on earth. As directed, I carefully draw the Smith & Wesson and pass it to him, butt first.

  With the sure movements of a man accustomed to handling firearms, he slips the gun into his waistband at the small of his back, then gives me a courteous nod. “Fair play to you, Mr. Mayor. I’m going to pay you the compliment of speaking frankly, because this town is full of cute hoors, but you’re not one of them. A friend of yours died tonight, and died hard. He died because he stepped over the line into other men’s business. Timmy Jessup thought he was the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike. When the flood rose and rolled over him, he sucked in his breath and kept his finger where it was. Pity, really, because he was all alone. Everyone else in this culchie town is swimming in the flood—sunbathing beside it, windsurfing on it. Because it’s a flood of money, Mr. Mayor, not water. And if you try to put your finger in the hole Jessup left Well. What matters now is that he’s dead, and nothing can bring him back.”

  As the initial shock of being surprised on my own doorstep begins to fade, my outrage boils over. “You sorry son of a bitch. Are you telling me you killed—”

  Sands silences me with an upraised hand. “Quiet now, mate. You’re in more danger than you know.”

  CHAPTER

  12

  My mouth has gone dry. It’s not the screamers who scare me; it’s the men who don’t let emotion get in the way of what they want. They’re the ones who’ll kill without hesitation. “I’m listening.”

  “Grand. Because this is all the talking I’m going to do. After this, I act, immediately and irrevocably. Understood?”

  I nod.

  Sands puts his hands behind his back and looks down like an officer contemplating a job in progress. A born soldier was my immediate impression of the man when I met him, for his bearing seems altogether military, though somewhat more fluid than that of the regular officers I’ve known. Sands has little skin fat; his face looks like a skull overlaid with the optimum amount of muscle, and little else. He’s losing his hair in front, but his baldness gives no impression of weakness; rather, the heavy brow and blue-gray machine gunner’s eyes give one the feeling that hair was simply an inconvenience better dispensed with. He stands right at six feet, but his trim waist and thickly muscled shoulders give one a much more aggressive perception of his height.

  “I have a problem, Mr. Cage,” he says. “I’m here because I want you to solve it for me.”

  “What’s your problem?”

  “Your friend Jessup stole something from his place of employment.”

  I blink slowly, a man trying to find an appropriate response.

  “You don’t look surprised enough to suit me, Mr. Mayor. Not nearly.”

  “Tim wasn’t exactly a Boy Scout,” I say as calmly as I can. “What did he steal? Money? Drugs?”

  The Irishman gives me a tight smile. “You know better than that.”

  “What I know about Tim Jessup is that he was a fuckup. And I don’t know what any of this has t
o do with me.”

  Sands takes a deep breath and exhales slowly. “I have a decision to make tonight, Mr. Mayor. A decision about you. And you’re not helping yourself. Your family either.”

  At the word family, something squirms in my belly.

  “The question,” Sands enunciates softly, “is can I trust you? For example, you may already know what Jessup stole from my boat. Do you know that, Mr. Cage? Don’t lie. If you lie, I’ll know it.”

  By God, I just about believe you. “I have no idea.”

  The blue eyes don’t waver; this man has spent a lifetime calculating odds. “Don’t you now?”

  I shake my head deliberately.

  After what seems a full minute, Sands says, “Would you bet your daughter’s life on that answer?”

  An image of Seamus Quinn holding Annie prisoner upstairs fills my mind, and terror compresses my heart. I grab for the door handle, but before I can turn it, something white explodes out of the flower bed, and iron jaws clamp around my wrist, pinning it motionless in the air. I try to jerk away, but the jaws tighten, numbing my fingers as surely as a nerve block.

  A white dog more than half my size stands like an apparition between Sands and me, its eyes cold and blue above the wolfish mouth locked around my arm. Hot saliva runs down my tingling fingers, yet I can’t quite accept the evidence of my eyes. No sound preceded this attack, not a growl or a bark or a word of command—only a quick swish of foliage from behind Sands.

  “Easy now,” he says either to me or to the dog, maybe to both of us. “Your daughter’s just fine, Mr. Cage. For the moment, at least. She’s sleeping soundly, with your sainted mother beside her in the scratcher. But if you step through that door before we come to an accommodation, that could change very quickly.”

  I try to back away from the door, but the dog’s forelegs are braced like white-painted fence posts, its jaw locked like a steel wrench. After a few moments, Sands makes a clicking sound with his tongue. The dog releases my arm, then walks to his master’s side and sits at attention like an obedient soldier. I stare at the animal as I rub the circulation back into my hand. I’ve never seen its like before, not even a similar breed; an oversize pit bull might be its closest cousin, but this dog has a wrinkled face that throws me. White from nose to tail, he has cropped ears and a thickly muscled chest to match his master’s. The animal has an unearthly silence about him, as though spectral and not a thing of blood and flesh, but I can still feel the imprints of his teeth in my muscles; I’ll have blood bruises in the morning.

  “You’re not a stupid man,” Sands says, rubbing the dog’s head affectionately. “Don’t start playing at it now. I make it my business to know who I’m dealing with. I know you put a lot of hard men in prison back in Texas. Rapists. Robbers. Murderers. Aryan fanatics. Got some of them executed too. I also know you’ve taken on men from your own side of the table. That FBI bastard, for example. I only mention this because you need to understand something. Despite your grand experience, you’ve never come across a man like me.” A smug smile. “I’m sure you’ve heard that one before, eh? The innocent man on death row. The whore with a heart of gold. But every now and then you come across a bloke who knows what he’s on about.” Sands smiles to himself. “That would be me. And this is how you know.”

  He utters a low whistle, and suddenly the dog is upon me again, rearing on his hind legs and pinning me to my front door with his forepaws. His mass and strength are astounding, and the hot breath in my face triggers a primitive, almost subhuman fear. The dog still hasn’t made a sound, but it’s all I can do not to piss down my leg.

  “Starting this minute,” Sands says, looking at this watch, “you have twenty-four hours to find the property your friend stole and return it to me. Use any resource at your disposal, but don’t mention me or my company to anyone. If you do, I’ll know it, and a penalty will be exacted. If you talk to the police or the sheriff’s department, I’ll know. If you contact the FBI, I’ll find out faster than you’d believe possible. If you talk to the state gaming commission, you’re fucked. You call the governor, a senator, or your old friend the district attorney of Houston, I’ll know that too. And if I find out you’ve done any of these things I’ll kill the little girl sleeping upstairs.”

  Sands moves up beside his dog and drags the cold barrel of his gun along my stubbled jaw. “And I won’t use a gun. I’ll use this.”

  A needle point of steel pierces the skin just below my navel, sending a shock of fear through my intestines.

  “I’m very good with a knife,” Sands says softly. “And I’d take my time about it. Understand? Now”—he presses the gun into a hollow beside my trachea, and the knifepoint digs a little deeper—“after your daughter’s dead, you might bring me into a court and try to punish me. But you’ve dealt with enough victims’ families to know how useless that is. If you executed me five seconds after I killed her, it wouldn’t bring her back, would it?”

  Out of the numbness that has enveloped me like a fog, I shake my head.

  As Sands presses his right ear almost against my lips, the knifepoint vanishes; then I feel it burrowing into the skin between two ribs on my left side. “I didn’t hear you, Your Honor.”

  “I understand.”

  “Course you do,” Sands says almost musically. “But that quick mind of yours is already working, trying to squirm out of the trap. Hide the girl, yeah? You’d have to hide your mum and dad too. And of course your sister in Bath, and her husband, and the two brats. I have a lot of mates in England who owe me that kind of favor. Then there’s yer one who owns the local bookstore, and her langer of a son. And let’s not forget the lady newspaper publisher, fresh back from the big city. A mouthy cunt, I’ll wager, but the prettiest piece of them all. So, let’s put an end to that nonsense. Either you get me back what your friend stole, or you pay the price. There’s no third choice.”

  My hands have begun to shake, but whether from fear or rage I don’t know. “You still haven’t told me what he stole.”

  “And I don’t intend to, do I? That’s your job.”

  “How can I find something when I don’t know what it is?”

  The knife pierces skin again. I tense, and Sands’s eyes flash. “Give me your best guess.”

  “Documents?” I grunt. “Data?”

  “Brilliant. It’s a disc, right? A DVD. Started out as one, anyway. The data could have been copied onto something else by now. USB drive, digital tape, hard drive, even a fucking iPod. What the data is, I won’t tell you, but you’ll know it when you see it.”

  “How?”

  “It’s encrypted.”

  The knifepoint withdraws a fraction of an inch. “Are you a betting man, Mr. Cage?”

  “No.”

  “Good. That’s a sign of intelligence. I don’t gamble either. Because the house always wins. People can’t seem to remember that. But I’m trusting you will.”

  The knife again. I wince and try not to cry out.

  “I know this is a lot to take in,” Sands says. “You lost a mate tonight, and that’s never easy. But the truth is, you cut yourself loose from Jessup a long time ago. And rightly so. The man was a header. Christ, he got weepy whenever he talked about how you two were lads together, watching the moon shots on the telly.”

  The revelation that this meant so much to Tim almost brings tears to my eyes. I steel myself and keep my eyes on Sands’s face to avoid looking into the dog’s eyes.

  “Listen to me now,” he says. “Let the rupies investigate Jessup’s death. Do everything you planned to do before Jessup died. Show the visiting CEO the town, give interviews, fly around in the balloons. But while you’re having your craic, you find time to find my property. If I find it first, I’ll let you know. Remember, I’ll be watching. And listening.” In a blur, he raises the knife and pricks the soft skin beneath my left eye. “Don’t play games with me, mate. Remember the first rule: The house always wins. And I’m the house.”

  Sands bends and slips his pistol into an ankle holster, then takes my gun from the small of his back, removes the clip, ejects the remaining round from the chamber, and hands
the pistol to me. As he slides the clip into my front pants pocket, his dog pushes off my chest, retrieves the ejected bullet from the flower bed, and drops the brass into his master’s hand. Sands rubs the dog between its cropped ears, then drops the loose round into my pants pocket.

  “One last thing.” Sands kneels at the edge of the porch, reaches down into the shadows behind him, and brings up a black leather briefcase.

  “What’s that?”

  “A quarter million dollars.”

  “Why is it here?”

  “Why, it’s the money you asked for.” Sands gives me a theatrical hug, then says sotto voce, “For the cameras, mate.” Then loudly again: “Like you said, you have the biggest job in town, and that’s why we pay you the big bucks.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “Just smile and say thank you,” he whispers. “So your daughter keeps breathing.”

  Given no choice, I accept it. “Thank you,” I mutter. What else can I do? Seamus Quinn could be upstairs with a knife, waiting for a signal from Sands.

  Jonathan Sands pats my arm and walks down the steps as lightly as Fred Astaire, and again I sense the fluid efficiency of his motions. He waves airily.

  “I wish you the pleasure of the evening. And I look forward to hearing from you.”

  Only now do I realize that his upper-crust English accent has returned. The working-class Irish has vanished like a vapor trail, like it was never there at all.

  As I stare after him, he stops and calls, “Oh, if you’re worried about the grieving widow, rest easy. If I wanted her out of the picture, she’d be room temperature already. The lad too.”

  My face must betray something, because he adds, “Sure, I heard every word you said to her tonight. I know she doesn’t have my property, so ring her up and tell her to get a good night’s sleep. In fact, if you find the disc before morning, I’ll toss in a few quid for the widows and orphans’ fund.” He smiles at the thought, then gives me a parting shot in his native accent. “Have a grand night altogether, now.”