The Devil's Punchbowl

  The district attorney remains stone-faced.

  “I think I know where you are on this,” I say, trying to help him along. “You think that drive is your ace in the hole, if everything goes to hell. I don’t know how badly compromised you are, or what Sands has on you. But you need to figure out which side you’re on. Because if you give me that drive now, I’ll make sure you stay out of trouble when the wheels come off of this deal.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Shad says evenly. “But even if I did, you don’t have the power to offer anybody any kind of deal—certainly not immunity from prosecution. I’m the DA, Cage, and I could jail you for assault right now, based on what I saw five minutes ago.”

  I want to snatch Shad up from his chair and bang his head against the desk, but that’s not going to get me the drive. I’d find myself in the county jail in short order, and it’s right across the street.

  “Shad, there’s a federal investigation going on in this county, and my guess is you don’t know a thing about it. Or if you do, you only know enough to make your asshole pucker. When the feds don’t tell you they’re on your turf, it’s bad news for you. So, I repeat, you need to decide which side you’re on. And the best way to prove you’re on the right one is to give me that drive.”

  Shad gives me a tired smile. “I think we’re done here.”

  I make no move to leave or even straighten up. “After I leave, you might be tempted to destroy that drive. I could see the logic of it, from your point of view. But that would be a mistake. You’re going to need a friend when this blows up. And if Caitlin dies because you didn’t give it to me, I’ll hound you right into Parchman, I swear to God. You’ll have a cell right next to Sands.”

  There’s a sudden rush of heavy footsteps outside, and then someone pounds on Shad’s door. I jump to my feet and open the door, expecting to see Paul Labry making another plea for forgiveness. But it’s Mitch Catton, a deputy from the sheriff’s department, and he’s breathing hard.

  “What is it, Deputy?” Shad asks calmly.

  “Paul Labry was just killed in a car accident!”

  “What?”

  “He hit a bridge abutment. Must have been doing seventy, at least.”

  “Was anyone else hurt?” I ask.

  “Nope. One-car accident. There was an empty bottle of vodka in the car too. Sally, over to the clerk’s office, told me Mr. Labry’d been hanging around here all during lunch. Said he smelled like a liquor cabinet.”

  I look down at Shad, my eyes filled with foreboding.

  “Thank you, Mitch,” Shad says. “Mayor Cage and I need to finish our conversation.”

  “Okay, sorry. I just figured you’d want to know. I mean, is there anything special we should do because it’s a selectman?”

  “No, just follow your normal procedures.”

  Catton stares at us in puzzlement for a few seconds, then shuts the door and bangs down the stairs.

  “This town is under siege,” I say softly. “And the biggest threat always comes from within. Don’t kid yourself that you can come out of this clean. Not without me. I don’t know if Paul committed sui cide or if they killed him, but when this is all over, there’s going to be a reckoning. Pick your side, Shad. Fast. That thumb drive is your only get-out-of-jail-free card. You know how to reach me.”

  “Get out of my office.”

  I hold up my forefinger and point at him, my eyes burning, then turn and go.

  CHAPTER

  54

  Caitlin stands naked in the storeroom of the kennel, a leather dog collar tight around her neck, its thick chain binding her to the wooden support post of some shelves behind her. She’s bound so tightly that she can’t turn her head, which forces her to watch the scene taking place before her. She’s shut her eyes as long and as often as she could, but Quinn has sworn to Taser her if she does it again.

  Linda Church lies bent forward over a crude table, her collar chained to a ringbolt set in its top. Naked from the waist down, Seamus Quinn plunges relentlessly into her from behind, his eyes on Caitlin to be sure she’s watching. Linda screamed so much when he began that Quinn wrapped four long pieces of duct tape around her face. Caitlin is afraid Linda will vomit and aspirate it before Quinn can get the tape off—if he’d even try.

  “Don’t pretend you don’t want to look,” Quinn says, panting from exertion. “Everything that walks on two legs would watch this if they knew nobody was looking. Why do you think Romans paid their last coin to see this kind of thing? This is what we are, princess. The emperors gave the people what they wanted—sex and death. Everything else is just window dressing.”

  Caitlin keeps her eyes on Quinn but speaks to Linda. “Think about something else,” she says in what she hopes is a maternal voice. “Anything but this. This will pass, like every other thing in life. You don’t believe me right now, but it will—”

  “Shut your gob!” Quinn shouts, seizing Linda’s haunches and driving harder. “You know what they really loved in the arena? Women and animals. They’d take the urine of female animals and spread it on virgins, sometimes twenty at a time. Then they’d let the trained males at them. Baboons and mandrills, bulls and boars, dogs and leopards, even giraffes. That’s history—real, every bit of it.” Quinn shows Caitlin his gray teeth. “People don’t change, and you’re no different.”

  Caitlin can’t bear to look at Linda’s face. All she can think to do is deflect some of Quinn’s bottomless rage onto herself. “I’d like to see you get it this rough,” she says. “See how you like being on the receiving end.”

  Quinn huffs and laughs. “A man does the givin’, princess. The woman does the takin’. I’m not particular, so long as it’s warm and tight.”

  “Your day is coming,” Caitlin says in a barely audible voice. “There are places not far from here where men twice your size will be happy to give you what you’re giving her. Twice as much, from what I saw when you dropped your pants.”

  Quinn pulls out and starts toward Caitlin, but before he can reach her, the door to her right bursts open and two men enter the room. One wears a black balaclava hood, the other a green one. The man in the black mask looks from Quinn to Caitlin, then back at Quinn. It’s as though Linda isn’t in the room.

  “What are you doing here?” Quinn asks in a dazed voice.

  “Liam called me.” The black-masked man’s voice seems hardly distinguishable from Quinn’s. “About a day late, by the look of it.”

  “You told me I could do what I wanted with her.”

  “You bloody sod. For one night, I said.” The man looks at Caitlin, eyes glinting through the slanted eyeholes cut in the balaclava. “Has he touched you?”

  Caitlin is certain that the man in the black balaclava is Jonathan Sands, but given the circumstances, letting him know that could be fatal. “Only to put this collar on me,” she says. “He’s raped her for two days straight, though. She has some serious infections, her leg and her urinary tract. She needs an emergency room right away.”

  Quinn laughs, then cuts off the sound with a cough.

  The man in the black balaclava takes two steps toward Quinn and leans forward as though to speak, but then his right hand lashes out and cracks the bridge of Quinn’s nose. Blood erupts from the Irishman’s face, and he topples backward, holding his nose with both hands.

  The third man watches without reaction.

  Quinn gets to his knees but remains doubled over, blood pouring through his hands. Sands extends his arm to help him up, but when Quinn takes the hand, Sands snaps his boot into Quinn’s rib cage with a crunch. The force of the blow lifts Quinn bodily from the cement. He drops flat on his belly, gasping for air.

  “Get up, you piece of shite.”

  Quinn gets slowly to his knees, covering his belly like a beaten dog preparing for another kick, then slides up the wall behind him until he’s erect.

  Sands jerks his head toward Caitlin. “Where’s her clothes?”

  “Over there. In the cabinet.”

  “Get ’em. And take that fuckin’ collar off her.”

  “Why? Are you trading her?”

/>   “Get her bloody clothes. And keep your mouth shut while you’re about it. Jaysus.”

  Quinn goes to the cabinet and retrieves Caitlin’s jeans and T-shirt. “You broke my ribs,” he grunts, as he hands them to her.

  “I ought to give you a proper digging,” Sands mutters. “You ignore another order and I’ll have Liam kneecap you. I’ve half a mind to do it here and now. Got a drill in the lorry.”

  Quinn holds up both hands, silently pleading for mercy.

  “What about it, ladies?” Sands asks. “You want to hear this bastard scream?”

  “We just want to go home,” Caitlin says. “We don’t care about you or him or whatever you’re doing.”

  A toothy smile flashes through the mouth of the balaclava. “That’s what you say now. But you’ll feel different later.”

  “What are you going to do with us?”

  Sands sniffs and keeps looking at her, but says nothing. Slowly, his eyes travel from her breasts to her ankles, then back to her eyes. As this happens, she realizes that there is no “us” for Sands or Quinn. In their minds, Linda is already dead.

  “You’ll be home in twenty-four hours, good as new,” Sands says. “That’s a promise.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “You don’t have to. It’s the truth.”

  “What about Linda?”

  Sands glances to his right, where Linda remains bent over the table, sobbing through her nose, covering the duct tape with glistening mucus.

  “She’ll be looked after. She can’t go back home, though. Not right away. She’ll have to start over somewhere else. We’ll either give her a job on one of our other boats or see she has the money to start somewhere else. Money’s no problem.”

  Caitlin knows he’s lying, but there’s nothing to be done. She wishes Linda believed what he was saying, but who knows better than Linda Church how worthless Sands’s promises are?

  Quinn takes a key from atop the cabinet, then comes over and unlocks the thick leather collar from Caitlin’s neck. He’s still naked from the waist down, but his erection’s gone, his penis shrunk to a nub.

  “Go ahead,” Sands says to Caitlin.

  “What?”

  “Kick him. Right in the bollocks. He deserves it for being so bloody stupid.”

  As Quinn darts out of reach of her feet, Caitlin recalls what he asked Sands: Are you trading her? Penn must be trying to negotiate her release by trading something for her. What? Could he be onto Ben Li’s private insurance policy? During the night, Linda told her that Quinn had several times asked her what “The birds know” might mean. Apparently Ben Li had screamed this phrase several times as he was being interrogated belowdecks on the Magnolia Queen. Maybe Penn has cracked this mysterious code—

  “Put her back in the office,” Sands says to Quinn, who’s pulling on his pants.

  “What about the other one?”

  “Wherever you had her before. And get her some fucking medicine. Human medicine. You know where to get it.”

  Quinn looks puzzled by this order, but he signals his willingness to obey with a nod.

  “I’ll take Masters,” Sands says, motioning Caitlin toward the storeroom door.

  Her door is the first outside the storeroom, the only other room with four walls. Now she can see the rest of the kennel, and it’s just as Linda described it, two rows of Cyclone-fence stalls, the cats housed in the one nearest the main door.

  Sands pauses outside her room, waiting for her to enter first. Caitlin looks through the eyeholes of the balaclava. “Will you give Linda her clothes back? Please?”

  Sands stares into her eyes for a long time. Then he shouts, “Give Linda her clothes!” and prods Caitlin into her cell.

  Caitlin goes to the corner and squats over her bloody footprints, but not in time. Sands grabs her wrist and pulls her across the floor. Staring down at the prints, he looks around the walls, then up at the roof. An appreciative smile shows through the mouth hole.

  “Seamus?” he calls.

  “Yeah?”

  “Get those fucking cats out of here.”

  “Why?”

  “Just do it!”

  “What am I supposed to do with them?”

  “What do I care? Just get ’em outside the fence, yeah?”

  “Okay.”

  Sands takes a strand of Caitlin’s hair between his fingers, rubs it softly. “Very fine,” he says in the tone of a man judging an animal pelt.

  She pulls away but makes a point of not jerking back, so as not to appear afraid.

  Sands smiles again, then looks back at the bent tin of the roof.

  “Smart girl,” he says. “Cage is a lucky man.”

  CHAPTER

  55

  When I come out of the district attorney’s office, I find Kelly sitting on the concrete wall by the courthouse, beneath the shade of a gnarled oak. His rented 4Runner is parked in front of him, but when he points at it, I shake my head and sit beside him on the wall.

  “What’s the deal?” he asks.

  “Shad has the thumb drive, but he’s not giving it up unless I get more leverage.”

  “He admitted having it?”

  “No. But he’s got it. I’d like to take you back in there and sweat it out of him, but he is the DA. Two minutes after we left him, we’d be in there.”

  Kelly looks to where I’m pointing, a tall pile of red brick with slit windows above the sheriff’s department across the street. He nods. “Okay, what’s plan B?”

  “While Shad’s at work, I want you to search his house. If you don’t find it there, come back to his office after work and search that. Can you get his safe open?”

  “No problem.”

  “Okay. We need to check Ben Li’s place too. They burned it down, but we should check the yard, anything. I’ve got Chief Logan looking into any other property he might have had. Storage units, safe-deposit boxes, like that. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  “You trust Logan?” Kelly asks, as two women come down the courthouse steps and turn our way.

  “As much as anyone in this town.” One of the women waves. I do the same, acting as if I recognize her.

  “What about you? What are you going to do?”

  “Run the bluff of my life.”

  “What’s your play?”

  “The only way to increase the odds of Caitlin living through the night is to make Hull think I’m willing to blow his case wide-open if they hurt her. That they’ve pushed me so far I no longer give a shit about Po or anything else.”

  “That shouldn’t be a tough sell. If the time limit Labry gave you is right—thirty-six hours—and he was supposed to tell you that this morning, the Po sting must be set up for tomorrow. Tomorrow night at the latest. Hull will be sweating bullets until then.”

  “Exactly. But I have to be careful. I can’t demand that they trade Caitlin for something I don’t have, and I don’t want Sands to panic. He could kill her and split.”

  “He’ll figure the moment Caitlin’s loose, she’ll go public anyway.”

  “Right. What I want is to know Caitlin’s alive.”

  Kelly scratches his chin. “Proof of life. It’s like you’re keeping your cool, but you know better than to trust Sands and Quinn. Do you think Hull knew they were going to take her?”

  I shake my head. “He would have tried to stop that. I think they panicked and did it, then presented him a fait accompli—if they’ve told him at all.”

  “So what will you ask for? A phone call from her?”

  “They won’t do that. We could backtrack with the cell company and figure out where she called from.”

  “A photo with today’s newspaper is standard. They could text it to you.”

  “I’m thinking of something even faster and simpler.”

  “What?”

  “A question only she would know the answer to.”

  Kelly gives me a thumbs-up. “Do it.”

  I speed-dial Hull, but he doesn’t answer. There’s a click that I think is his voice mail, but suddenly his voice comes from the phone.

  “Yes? Who is this?”

  “Penn Cage.”

  “I’m in a m
eeting. What is it?”

  “You’d better take a bathroom break if you want Edward Po’s scalp on your wall.”

  “Don’t use that name on an open line.”

  “Buddy, I’m sixty seconds from calling the FBI and telling it to their kidnap squad.”

  “Kidnap squad?” Hull sounds genuinely shocked.

  “Is that news to you?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says under his breath. “But I told you, the FBI is part of my task force.”

  “Part of the FBI is part of your task force. The National Security Branch, I’m guessing. And the Money Laundering Task Force. But I know how the FBI works kidnappings, Hull. Five minutes after I call the New Orleans and Jackson field offices, they’ll call the Puzzle Palace, and you’ll have a world-class clusterfuck on your hands.”

  “Give me just a minute,” Hull says softly. “I’ll be right back.”

  I hear shuffling, then a closing door. “Cage, I don’t know what the hell you’re up to, but we’re into endgame on this. You’re begging for an obstruction-of-justice charge.”

  I laugh out loud. “Last night Caitlin Masters was kidnapped from her home. A sworn officer of the law was almost killed protecting her. I don’t know how much you know about this, and I don’t give a shit. I want proof that she’s alive.”

  “How can I—”

  “Do you have any idea who that girl’s father is? Clinton Masters owns twentysome newspapers across the Southeast. He’s got Rupert Murdoch on speed dial. If I pick up the phone and tell him what’s happened, you can kiss Edward Po smack on the ass as he flutters out of your net. Capisce?”

  Kelly’s smiling and nodding encouragement.

  “Let’s just calm down,” Hull temporizes. “If there has been a kidnapping, you should know this: Going public sometimes results in the death of the hostage. The Bureau can tell you that.”

  “You’re not hearing me, William. Your pet psychopaths crossed the line down here. I no longer give a shit about your investigation, and I have enough evidence to arrest Sands for money laundering on my own hook right now. I want proof of life, and I want it in fifteen minutes. If I don’t get it, your investigation goes straight down the toilet. Make it happen.”