The Devil's Punchbowl

  “Cunts like this run off all the time,” Quinn says. “With Jessup dead, no one would even ask what happened to her, if it weren’t for the pictures.”

  “The pictures sell the story,” Sands says. “Just make sure no one finds her.”

  Quinn laughs, dark and low. “Don’t worry. The lads are starving.”

  A black curtain falls over the world.

  Linda awakens to a cold wind on her face, a sky filled with stars. A silver moon shines down like a pitiless eye, made hazy by fog. She hears a motor, feels herself pitching like someone trying to lie on a trampoline while someone else jumps on it. She tries to brace herself, but her hands are bound with rope. Worse, they’re numb. On the next bounce, she rolls over and retches on hard, white plastic.

  Boat, she realizes. I’m in a boat. A real boat.

  She looks up from the white deck. Seamus Quinn sits behind a steering wheel, the wind blowing his curly black hair wildly behind him. He grins down at her, his eyes flickering like silver points of light.

  “Wakey wakey,” he says, mocking an Australian accent. “You’ve got company now, Benny lad.”

  Linda turns her neck and looks behind her. Ben Li lies hog-tied on the deck behind her, a strip of duct tape over his mouth. His eyes bulge, and in them she reads a desperate plea for help. As if she could do anything. After the first few moments, he stops straining against his bonds and falls back against the deck. Ben Li graduated from a college called Cal Tech, she remembers. His parents are Chinese immigrants. Tim said Cal Tech was better than any school in the South, when it came to computers. Linda wonders if Ben Li ever imagined he would end up hog-tied in a boat in the Mississippi River.

  “Where are we going?” she asks.

  Quinn laughs. “You know where. To have some fun.”

  “Fun for who?”

  He laughs harder, then jerks the speedboat’s wheel as though to avoid an obstacle in the water. “Me first. Then the dogs.”

  Linda swallows, trying to block her memory of the one night she worked a dogfight for the company. It was like stripping in Vegas after a fight. All the girls hated it. Boxing earned millions because men were drawn to violence like a drug. But dogfights took it to another level entirely .

  It was as if ten thousand years of civilization had been stripped away in an hour. Every guy in the place wanted to fuck or fight, and half didn’t care which. If they got you in the VIP room, they wouldn’t take no for an answer, and if they fought, it hardly mattered who won or lost. They just craved the release.

  Fighting was the only way some men could have sex with other men. Men like Quinn. Fighting or sharing a woman. That was what they really wanted, and what she’d narrowly escaped the night of the dogfight. She’d only needed one night to know she’d never go back. How many times had the drunks started chanting, “Train! Train! Train!”? She’d finally persuaded Sands to take her to a separate building, and she’d had to service him to get him to do that. But at least she’d escaped what the other girls got. Some had apparently done that kind of thing before, but others hadn’t. Some had been more afraid than she was—

  “I’ve been watching you for a long time,” Quinn says. “Strutting up and down like the queen. You’ve been off-limits long enough. Tonight I’m going to find out what’s kept the boss interested for so long.”

  Linda shivers and watches the moon grow fainter as the fog on the river thickens. She wishes she knew enough about the stars to know whether she’s moving upstream or down. But even if she did, the heavy mist is quickly whiting out everything around the boat.

  “I think you got to him,” Quinn says. “Anybody else, he’d have had that bolt up their arse and the juice full on.”

  She shakes her head. “No. It’s not in him.”

  Quinn laughs. “Don’t be too sure. If Jessup hadn’t got away, he’d have suffered like a saint.”

  Linda looks at Quinn in alarm. “Got away? I thought Tim was dead.”

  “That’s what I mean. Falling off that bluff was the best break that header ever caught. If he’d lived, Sands would have made the crucifixion look like a mild digging. You cross the boss, you get special treatment. Like Benny back there.”

  Quinn wants me to talk, she realizes. He wants a relationship.

  “You ever see anything eaten alive?” he asks, turning the boat slightly to starboard.

  Linda doesn’t answer, but one of her cats used to catch chipmunks and torture them for hours before she killed them. Let the pitiful creature run a few feet, feel a taste of freedom, then pounce and rip its belly open with a claw—

  “Nothing like it in the world,” Quinn says, marveling at his insight. “That’s why the Romans loved the games. That’s life, right in front of you. Kill or be killed. Eat or be eaten. You’re a predator or you’re prey. And deep down, everybody knows which they are, right from the beginning.”

  A huge beam sweeps over the boat, stops, comes back, then arcs away. Linda has an impression of treetops shot with a flashbulb to her right.

  “Just like that stupid bastard,” Quinn says, nodding at Ben Li. “Too clever for his own good. He makes more money in a day than his parents earned in ten years, but it wasn’t enough. Had to fuck it up. Look at him. A genius, they say. By noon tomorrow, a pit bull will be shitting out his brains. Next morning, his bones will be gnawed to powder.”

  Linda’s stomach rolls. The night of the dogfight, she’d kept away from the pit as much as possible. The noise alone had sickened her, and the brief glimpses she’d been unable to avoid were burned into her memory. Two blood-soaked, muscle-bound animals locked in nearly motionless combat for an hour, one’s massive jaws buried in the chest of the other, each struggling for advantage while two dozen screaming men goaded them to kill.

  “And me?” she forces herself to ask.

  Quinn purses his lips like a man figuring a price on something. “The day after, maybe. Depends on how interesting you make things. If you didn’t know so fucking much, I’d keep you around for the weekend. Rent you out. Lots of big boys coming in for the next couple of weeks. They like their business mixed with pleasure.”

  The boat leaps free of the water, then smashes back down. Soon it’s bouncing like a tractor over farm rows. It’s a wake, Linda realizes. Now the spotlight makes sense. We must be overtaking a tugboat pushing barges.

  “I have to go the bathroom,” she says. “Bad.”

  “Go in your pants. You already did it once.”

  “No, I mean really go. I can’t hold it. I’m sick. You don’t want it in the boat.”

  “Christ on a crutch. There’s an ice chest under the seat behind Benny. Go in that.”

  Linda works herself up onto her elbows, which is more difficult than she thought with her hands bound, then crawls back to the stern, where Ben Li looks desperately at her through bloodshot eyes. Putting her mouth beside his ear, she says, “I wish I could help you. I’m sorry.”

  She smells fear coming off him like body odor. She remembers her thought back on the Queen, that she’d entered a state beyond fear. Then later, in the chair, she’d realized that only the dead are beyond fear. But now, struggling to her feet, using Ben Li as a prop for her bound hands, she isn’t so sure.

  For a moment the fog breaks, and she can see the shore, lone treetops whipping past fifty yards to her right. To her left she sees only mist. A hundred yards in front of them, a tugboat churns the river into a maelstrom. Quinn is running fast enough to pull a half dozen water-skiers.

  “Can you slow down a little?” she calls.

  “Just do your business! Christ.”

  Bending carefully at the waist, Linda pulls the edge of the rear seat up with her bound hands. She marvels at the bright white lid of the Igloo. The logo brings tears to her eyes. She remembers picnics and parties from years long past, reaching down with a sweating arm and pulling a wine cooler from the ice—

  “I thought you had to go,” Quinn shouts, looking back at her with annoyance. “Take your bloody pants down. Give us a preview, eh?”

  Linda glances down at Ben Li. Before, his eyes had been pleading,
but now they watch her with a strange fascination, waiting to see if she’ll take down her pants. It is all about power, she knows. Ben Li heard Quinn talking about him and the dogs. He knows he’ll be the first to die, and all he can do is lie there watching, waiting, probably praying for some kind of miracle, or even just a diversion before death.

  Around the boat the fog has thickened again, turning the night a deeper shade of black.

  Linda straightens up. From deep within her, so deep that she’s forgotten it was there, something begins to rise. The density of it fills her as it expands. It’s love, she realizes. Or whatever you call the thing that huddles in the last dark closet you’ve locked against the world, waiting to find something like itself. Linda has never known why she let herself go so far with Tim. She knew all along that he wouldn’t leave his family. She wouldn’t have asked him to, though she wanted it desperately. But now—standing almost in the river Tim died within sight of—she knows.

  She wanted a child.

  Over thirty and she’d never even been pregnant. But she was still young enough. And Tim wouldn’t have had to leave Julia to give her that. Tim was the closest thing Linda had ever had to a child of her own, a big little boy who wanted the world to be better than it was. Now he was gone, and with him her hope of a child.

  “He loved me,” she says aloud, once, for all the times she’d yearned to say it to the people around her.

  This knowledge surges in her breast, filling her so profoundly that a faint radiance shimmers from her skin. She feels like the Madonna in the old Italian painting printed in her grandmother’s Bible. All of this she gives to Ben Li in a single downward glance, one long look that holds a woman’s infinite mercy.

  “Do you have to go or not, you crazy cunt?”

  Seamus Quinn’s angry voice pierces night and fog, but not the light that shines from Linda Church.

  “Yes,” she says. “I have to go.”

  With the grace of a bird taking flight, she steps onto the lid of the Igloo and leaps into the river.

  CHAPTER

  16

  If physicists want to develop a time machine, they should explore fear. Fear dilates and compresses time without limit. For desperate people awaiting rescue, every instant stretches into unendurable agony; for those awaiting death by cancer, the earth spins relentlessly, shortening the days until they pass like fanned pages in a book. Trapped in our bodies, perception is all, and the engine of perception is hunger for life.

  Before tonight, I could not have imagined playing a six-hour card game with my father. Yet here we sit, betting matchsticks without expression, occasionally searching each others’ eyes or looking with disbelief at the guns lying between us on the sofa. I’m not much of a cardplayer, so it’s been a one-sided contest. We’ve spoken enough to persuade whoever might be listening that we’re passing a long night while Dad waits to see that my heart is all right, and typed enough that Dad is fully caught up on the circumstances surrounding Tim’s murder. I’m fairly confident that there’s no video surveillance of my upper hallway—ditto any keystroke-sensing technology around the house—for our desultory computer conversations would surely have earned us a call from Jonathan Sands by now.

  “Ante,” Dad says.

  “Sorry.” I push a red-tipped matchstick across the tatted surface of the sofa cushion.

  “You keep playing like this, I’m going to own this house before the sun comes up.”

  “Sorry I’m distracted. I keep thinking I feel my heart starting up again.”

  “Let me worry about that. You play poker.”

  We have not been without interruptions. Libby Jensen called twice, nearly catatonic with panic about what might happen to her son in jail. I did what I could to reassure her, but in truth the time has come for Soren to pay a price for his misbehavior. Looking at life through cell bars for a few weeks will probably do more than any treatment center to convince him that he’s had all the drugs he needs for a while. During her second call, Libby asked if she could come over, but I shot that idea down immediately, in a voice that brooked no appeal.

  Two minutes after we hung up, I heard an engine stop in the street before my house. Thinking Libby had come anyway, I got up and walked to the front window. A Chevy Malibu with rental tags was parked in front of Caitlin’s house. The passenger door popped open, and Caitlin got out laughing. She said something to someone in the car, then ran up to her front door and waved back at the car. The bohemian filmmaker I’d met earlier got out and walked lazily—perhaps drunkenly—up to the porch and followed her inside. I heard their laughter even through my closed window. Pathetically, I hoped the car was still running, but it didn’t seem to be. I stood looking down at the car until I sensed my father standing at my shoulder.

  “What is it?” he whispered.

  “Caitlin.”

  “Huh.”

  “She already went in.” I gave it a moment. “Not alone.”

  Dad thought about this, then sighed, squeezed my arm, and walked back to the couch. I should have followed, but I stood there stubbornly, stupidly, waiting for the light in her bedroom to click on and destroy whatever hope remained that she had somehow returned to town for me, and not for a quick party with her new playmate.

  My breath fogged the glass, faded, fogged it again. A dozen times? A hundred? Then I heard a bang, and Caitlin ran back out of the house. She was still laughing, and the filmmaker seemed to be chasing her. She carried a wine bottle in one hand, and she held it up as though she meant to brain him with it. This time she jumped into the driver’s seat, and the man—Jan, I remember now—barely got himself folded into the passenger side before she sped up Washington Street toward the bluff and the river, never once looking at my house.

  I walked back to the sofa, trying to dissociate myself from the anger rising in me. In the wake of Tim’s murder, Caitlin’s laughter seemed obscene. Surely, I thought, she must know about his death by now. Tim wasn’t a close friend of hers, but she’d known him, and she knew we’d been close friends as boys. But all she seemed to be thinking about was getting drunk and finding a good time.

  Two hours after the wine-scavenging trip, her car drew me to the window again. This time the Malibu pulled into Caitlin’s driveway. She emerged unsteadily but alone and walked to the side door. For a brief moment she glanced across the street, up toward my window, but by then I was far enough behind the curtain that she couldn’t see me. She turned away and vanished into the house.

  “I want to look up something on Medline,” Dad says. “I might want to prescribe you something.” With a groan he picks the MacBook off the floor, pecks out a long message, then pushes it over the matchsticks to me.

  I’ve been thinking about Tim’s story. This isn’t the first time we’ve had that kind of thing around here. And I’m not talking about the flatboat days, either. I mean the 1960s and 70s. Just down the river on the Louisiana side, at Morville Plantation. They had a big gambling operation and some white slavery too. Literally. They had taken girls from God-knows-where and were holding them against their will, using them as whores. The sheriff ran the whole parish and took a cut of all the action. I’ve heard horror stories from patients, and I had a couple of brushes with the place myself. My point is, the situation was the same as now, in that the people who were supposed to stop those problems were making money off them instead.

  I read his message carefully, then type I’ve been thinking too. Corruption doesn’t have to be widespread to serve its purpose. All it takes is one well-placed cop, one sheriff’s deputy, one FBI agent, one selectman, or one assistant in the governor’s office etc. to keep Sands informed. The spider pays off a dozen of the right people, and he has his web. And God knows the casinos have the money to buy anybody.

  Dad motions for me to give him back the computer. You need somebody from the outside, Son. Way outside. Somebody with experience handling this kind of thing. I’ve been thinking all night, and I keep on coming back to Walt Garrity.

  The name brings me up short, but two seconds after I read it, I sense that Dad’
s onto something. Walt Garrity is a retired Texas Ranger I met while serving as an assistant DA in Houston. He was the chief investigator on a capital murder case I was working, and when he heard I was from Mississippi, he asked if I knew an old Korean War medic by the name of Tom Cage. That brought about the reunion of two soldiers who’d served in the same army unit in Korea decades earlier and also started a new friendship for me, one that lasted through several cases. I haven’t talked to Garrity in a couple of years (since I last pumped him for information while researching a novel set in Texas), but my memory of him is undimmed. He’s a cagey old fox who seems reticent until you get him talking; then you realize he has a dry sense of humor and long experience dealing with human frailty in all its forms. Walt Garrity is the kind of lawman who’ll try almost anything before resorting to gunplay but, once pushed to that extreme, is as dangerous as any man on the right side of the law can be.

  Dad takes back the computer and types, Walt helped take on the big gambling operation in Galveston in the fifties and sixties, when he first became a Ranger. I know that sounds like a long time ago, but vice doesn’t change much.

  This reminds me of Mrs. Pierce’s warning—“Vice is vice, whatever cloak it wears”—but I’m not sure that’s true, given the technology of the digital age. Still, I can’t deny that the thought of Walt Garrity gives me some comfort. Walt may be over seventy and officially retired, but I’ve heard he still takes on occasional undercover jobs for the Harris County DA’s office.

  You might have something there, I type. But I can’t risk calling Walt until I have a secure line of communication.

  You leave Walt to me, Dad types. I’ll set it up. And don’t warn me to be careful, goddamn it. I know how to sneak around.

  As if summoned by my dad’s assertion about sneaking around, my mother’s voice floats down the hall. “What are you doing here, Tom?” she asks in the stage whisper common to grandmothers who don’t want to wake sleeping children.