The Devil's Punchbowl

  Grabbing two pairs of pants off a rack, I ask an older woman staffing the ladies’ department to open a fitting room. She recognizes me as the mayor, makes a show of offering all the help she can, then leaves me with the room. A second later, Caitlin slips into my dressing room and opens the bag. It takes all my strength to get the plastic packaging off the tape recorder, but Caitlin’s deft fingers make short work of inserting the batteries and setting up the headphones and splitter. When this is done, I take the cassette from my pocket, insert it into the recorder, and hit PLAY.

  A hiss fills my left ear. Caitlin’s head is tilted, tensely poised, her eyes wide and bright as though reflecting every bit of light in the cubicle. She’s hearing the same thing I am, a low-quality copy of a low-resolution voice memo made on a cell phone and played back through the cheapest equipment available. Yet when I hear Tim’s voice, it pierces me to the quick. He’s breathless, as though he’s sprinted most of a mile, but the whine of an overrevved engine in the background tells me he’s in a car.

  “Penn, where are you, man? I waited as long as I could, but they’re onto me. I had to run. I tried to call you, but both my phones say ‘No service.’ They’re jamming the signal like they do on the boat sometimes. They blocked Cemetery Road, so I’m headed out into the county almost to the Devil’s Punchbowl now. I’m going to have to shut off this phone, because they may be tracking me with it. I can’t say much, because they might get the phone. I’m doing eighty on gravel, man!”

  Caitlin’s eyes go wide as the creak of a car seat conjures an image of Tim craning his neck around as he races down Cemetery Road.

  “They’re still back there. I found what we needed, okay? It’s a DVD disc. I got it through the guy who shot the cell phone pictures I showed you. He’s a computer genius named Ben Li. I got him so stoned he didn’t know up from down, then sedated him. He must have woken up early. He probably panicked and called them, he’s that dumb. Anyway, here’s how to find the disc in case anything happens to me. Ready? ‘Dog pack. The Great Escape.’ Okay? You’ll figure it out, but I hope to God you don’t have to. If I don’t make it, then look where the sun don’t shine, as Coach used to say. I’ll be all right, though. These bastards don’t know Adams County like I do. I’m going to—wait, wait, shit, I forgot—”

  It sounds like Tim dropped the phone. He yells, “Fuck!” and groans as if he’s bending double, then his voice is close again. “Ben said something while he was stoned. See, I always thought he had more pictures than what he showed me. Insurance, you know? To protect himself. He said I should ask his birds about the pictures. He had two cockatoos, but all I ever heard them say was stupid lines from movies. I searched their cages and couldn’t find anything. Shit, they’re gaining I’ve got to shut down. No airplane mode on this bitch. I love you, man, but you picked a hell of a time to be late. Bye for now—”

  The electric silence in the headphone is cut off by a blank hiss.

  My hands are shaking, my heart pounding as though the chase just happened, as though I were in the car with Tim rather than listening to a dead man talk two days after he was murdered. The realization that Tim probably died because I was thirty minutes late makes me dizzy with nausea. My ears roar as an infinite string of what-ifs blasts through my mind like a line of runaway subway cars.

  “I can’t believe I wrote that first story,” Caitlin says in a dazed voice. “I wrote just what his killers wanted me to, didn’t I?”

  She doesn’t cry often, but there are tears in the corners of her eyes. Behind the tears seethes anger—and wounded vanity. No one likes to be played for a fool, but some people, usually the vainest among us, truly cannot handle it.

  Despite wrestling with my own guilt, I nod.

  “I’m going to bury Golden Parachute,” Caitlin vows. “Bury them.” Then her eyes snap to mine. “What do the clues mean? Do you know where the disc is?”

  In the maelstrom of guilt swirling inside me, childhood memories spin and flicker like buoys glimpsed through heavy rain. “Not yet. I’m thinking.”

  “They could be passwords.”

  “To what? Tim found a physical object and hid it somewhere.”

  “Right, right.”

  “The Great Escape is a movie. Tim and I were kids when it came out.”

  “Did you watch it with him?”

  “I don’t think so.” I think frantically, trying to grasp images that float away like leaves in a swirling current. “The part about the birds was separate from that, right? From ‘dog pack’ and The Great Escape?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because he said that guy’s birds could say movie lines.”

  “Yes, but that first part wasn’t connected to the birds. The first clues were for you alone.”

  I’m trying to make the missing connections, but Caitlin’s urgency feels like an overcurrent shorting out my neural processes. “Just don’t say anything for a minute. I’m thinking.”

  She nods, but I know silence requires extreme effort from her. She’s a puzzle-solver by nature, and not having the tools to solve this one must drive her mad.

  “Could ‘dog pack’ have something to do with the dogfighting?” she asks.

  “Caitlin!”

  “Sorry—I’m sorry.”

  I try fast-forwarding through my childhood friendship with Tim Jessup, but the memories are blurry, like stock images, shot poorly and faded with age. Many involve bike riding or playing steal the flag, but nothing related to dog packs comes—

  “Oh my God,” I groan, first amazed, then appalled as the significance of the second clue drops into place.

  She grabs my arm. “What is it?”

  “I can’t believe I was that stupid.”

  “What? Do you know what it means?”

  “Yes.” I reach for the doorknob. “Come on!”

  “Where?”

  “The cemetery! It’s been there all along!”

  “I thought you already searched the cemetery.”

  “I did. But it’s huge. Now I know where to look.”

  Something vibrates in my pocket. At first I think it’s my cell phone, but then I realize it’s Kelly’s Star Trek. “Peek outside,” I tell Caitlin, suddenly nervous. “Hurry.”

  She opens the door and freezes.

  “What is it?” I ask, trying to pull the gun from my pocket.

  “I’m helping him get the things fitted,” Caitlin says awkwardly.

  “It’s Sunday,” a woman says with disgust. “There’s kids out here. Why don’t you just get a room?”

  Caitlin closes the door. I click the TALK button on the Star Trek and say, “It’s me.”

  “We’ve got a problem,” Kelly says in my ear.

  “Short of a death, it doesn’t matter. I think we’re at the endgame.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Not over the air. Not even on these things.”

  “You found what we’re looking for?”

  “I know where it is. Can you cover us to the cemetery?”

  “Screw that. You’re in the store now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You have the satphone with you?”

  “In Caitlin’s purse.”

  “Walk straight back to the staff area like you own the place, then leave by their private exit door. Use a fire door if you have to. I’ll be waiting out back. If anybody tries to stop you, tell them you’re the fucking mayor. If that doesn’t work, pull your gun. Just get to my car. The game has changed.”

  When Kelly’s voice gets tense, I know we’re in trouble.

  “We’re on our way.”

  CHAPTER

  29

  Linda Church sits on a folding chair in the corner of a small kitchen and studies her left knee, which is swollen and blue at the front, and purple in back. The joint doesn’t hurt too bad, but she knows some gristle in it is torn because her skin is stretched tight as a drumhead and the bones slip when she walks. The lower part of her right leg looks worse. There’s a tear in the bruise, and the skin around it feels like it just came out of a microwave oven.

  She remembers leaping from Quinn’s boat but has no memory of hitting the water—only a white flas
h coming out of darkness. She awakened in terror that she was drowning, but the sound of a motor in the dark told her she couldn’t afford to splash. Quinn was trolling slowly back the way he’d come, searching for her with a spotlight that lit the fog yellow. She felt sure he would find her since she could hardly swim with the leg, but as the boat drew near, and she prepared to slide under the water, she’d heard something strike the hull—not hard—more like the sound of kicking shoes.

  Then she remembered Ben Li.

  The spotlight arced up into the sky, and some sort of commotion broke out on the boat. She heard more hollow impacts, then two shots cracked over the water. The echoes seemed to go on forever, and before they died, the big motor revved up and the boat turned south again.

  Then God had saved her. She’d had no idea whether she was near the bank or in the center channel of the Mississippi, about to be run down by a barge weighing thousands of tons. But as she floated downstream, thankful for every ounce of body fat she’d cursed until then, she felt her good leg scrape sand. The river was lifting her onto a gently shoaling sandbar as surely as if God himself were holding her in his hand. When she came to rest, her eyes filled with black sky, she felt like Moses in the bulrushes.

  Unlike Moses, however, no one found her lying by the river. How long she lay there, she had no idea. But sometime before dawn, she got to her feet and started limping toward the levee. Soon the sand had dirt mixed in it, then she was dragging herself over rich soil, the farmland her grandfather used to hold to his nose and smell as if it were pipe tobacco. She’d wanted to scream as she climbed the levee, but she didn’t dare do more than grunt. On top of the levee was a gravel road, and she guessed it ran all the way from New Orleans to Missouri, if not to Minneapolis. The levee made her think of her grandfather too; he’d told her how during the flood of ’27 they’d put the nigras and the cows onto it to save them from the rising water, and kept them there for weeks and weeks.

  She knew she couldn’t walk on the levee, as bad as she wanted to. There’d be trucks coming down it before dawn, and if Quinn sent even one man along the road to look for her body on the bank, he’d pin her in his headlights like a doomed deer. She couldn’t move well enough to be sure of getting away in time. So she’d slid down the far side of the levee, down to the scrub trees by the borrow pits, from which they’d taken the dirt to build the levees. She limped along the pits until the sun came up, her eyes always on the ground, looking for snakes. She remembered a teenage boyfriend walking along a borrow pit, breaking the backs of moccasins with a heavy branch. Despite this frantic killing, the snakes swirled slowly through the shallows but did not flee to the middle of the pit. This puzzled Linda. Were they lethargic from the suffocating heat? Or was it the poisonous fertilizer chemicals that drained off the fields whenever it rained? Her brother shot snakes with a .22 rifle, but this was different. With their backs broken, the serpents writhed and curled back upon themselves in endless figure eights until they drowned and became meat for the nutrias. Later, when that boy was inside her, she’d remembered how the snakes had twisted and cracked like whips, and she wondered if they’d been screaming. Could snakes scream? Could they hear each other screaming?

  Linda walked until the skin on the back of her neck felt like it would split from sunburn, dragging her throbbing leg behind her, but by then she’d climbed the levee again and figured out where she was—and where she was going. She was on Deer Park Road, and while there were only a couple of farmhouses for many miles, she knew about a church that stood alone at the edge of the cotton fields, and this confirmed God’s participation in her survival. She got so thirsty she licked the sweat from her arms, and this made her smile. Yankees whined about the heat and the humidity, but it was the humidity that made the heat bearable. Louisiana wasn’t like the barren hills outside Las Vegas, a place so dry you hardly saw the sweat leave your skin. Here there was almost as much water in the air as in your body, and the sweat beaded on your skin like water on a car that had just been waxed.

  The last time she’d climbed the levee, she’d seen the church. In her mind it was white and clean and straight, rising from a green ocean of soybeans, but in truth it lay beside an empty cotton field like an oversize box thrown carelessly from a truck. The bright tin roof she remembered was a mosaic of rust and primer, and the steeple looked like a doghouse someone had squashed onto the apex of a roof. But even so, even with the crucifix atop it looking like a broken TV antenna, she’d seen deliverance. Pastor Simpson was alone behind the building, walking from the back shed to the main building with two boxes under his arms.

  Linda had wept with joy.

  She’d never been to services at that church, but she’d gone to Pastor Simpson’s old church for years. Linda’s father had been strict Assembly of God, but Linda had discovered Pastor Simpson when a friend had taken her to the Oneness Branch of the church. The Oneness people believed God couldn’t be split into three, but the main thing was, they hated the hypocrisy of the mainliners. Pastors preaching against television while buying big sets for their lake houses, where they thought nobody would see them. But while Linda was in Las Vegas, Pastor Simpson had splintered off from the Oneness people too and had formed something called the Wholeness Church. It wasn’t official, but he had a small congregation of forty or fifty hard-core believers, and they’d gotten together to renovate the old church by the river. She’d heard about it when she got back to town and went to work on the boat.

  When Linda limped down off the levee, she hadn’t known what Pastor Simpson’s argument with the Oneness people was, nor had she cared. All she knew was that for years Simpson had been a good pastor and tried to help people, especially the poor. There’d been some talk about him and a couple of the young girls in the congregation, but she’d never had any trouble with him.

  He’d recognized Linda almost immediately, and he’d taken her into the church and washed her wounds with water from the sink in the one bathroom they had. She hadn’t told him the truth of course—not because she didn’t trust him, but because she was afraid she might bring terrible harm down onto him or his followers. He’d sat there for half an hour with his silver hair and red skin and sympathetic eyes while she told him a lie about getting involved with a man she’d met on the gambling boat, a man who’d been in prison, who had almost killed her with a beating, and who would kill her if he found her. No, she couldn’t go to the police, she said, because the man had friends in the police, on both sides of the river. Pastor Simpson had shaken his head and promised to do all he could to help, including getting her out of town. And he’d stood by his word, so far. When she’d written out the long note for Mayor Cage, Simpson had called one of the girls in his church to come out from town and pick it up, a girl named Darla, and Darla had promised to deliver it, and to make sure the mayor had no idea where any of them were, or even who she was.

  Linda wished time would speed up. She’s going to have to move soon because there’s an evening service coming, and the pastor told her to be hiding in the shed well before the first car pulled up. She dreads that fifty-foot walk like nothing in a long time, but she’ll do it somehow. Because after the service, the pastor’s nephew is going to drive her to Shreveport, to stay with another group of Wholeness worshippers. There she will be safe from the “convict” who is hunting her. Linda lifts her shirt and wipes the sweat from her brow, which is burning like the skin around her torn leg. She needs a doctor, but she can hold out another few hours. They might even have a doctor in the church in Shreveport, she thinks. No matter how bad things look, God has taken her into his blessed hands. To know that’s true, all Linda has to do is think about Ben Li.

  CHAPTER

  30

  “You can talk in here,” Kelly says, gunning the 4Runner and heading out of the parking lot. “No bugs, guaranteed.”

  “We’re going to the cemetery.”

  “Okay. Why?”

  “The disc is there. Not only that—Linda Church is alive.”

  Kelly looks at me. “How do you know that?”

/>   I quickly relate what happened at the Ramada and describe the contents of the tape and the note. Caitlin supplements my account from the backseat.

  “Wait a minute,” says Kelly, turning onto Homochitto Street. “Two different people approached you at this one event?”

  “Yeah, I figured you saw them.”

  “I saw a girl watching you early on, but I was looking for males. I’m thinking of the coincidence.”

  “I know, but remember what you asked me early this morning? Everyone in town knew I would be at that event. It was published in the newspaper. Both Jewel and that girl knew they could talk to me without seeming to try to. It could look accidental. But what about you? You said we have a problem.”

  “One thing at a time. Do you know where Linda is?”

  “No, but she’s safely hidden, and her note says she’s leaving town.”

  “You didn’t recognize the girl who gave you the note?”

  “You said she looked familiar,” Caitlin reminds me.

  “I could say that about almost everyone in this town. Do you know how many people I’ve spoken to since becoming mayor? And during the campaign? I think the part of my brain that connects names and faces has been short-circuited.”

  “I wouldn’t mind having Linda Church in our back pocket,” Kelly says. “I think you’re going to need her as a witness before this mess is through.”

  “What the hell’s going on? What’s the problem you talked about?”

  “Blackhawk got a bounceback on Jonathan Sands.”

  “A bounceback?”

  “A return query. Rebound request. Someone in Washington wants to know who’s asking about Sands.”

  Caitlin’s eyes meet mine. “Washington?” she says. “Who in Washington?”

  “They wouldn’t tell me, and that’s not a good sign. The company says they’re covering for me, but I’ve got to be straight with you. Seventy-five percent of Blackhawk’s revenues come from the Defense Department, and that number goes up every month. If Washington demands something, sooner or later the company’s going to cave. They value my services, but in the end I’m just a grunt.”