The Devil's Punchbowl

  Who’s watching me? Walt wonders. Someone in this room was studying him right now, evaluating every reaction. One of the men on the far side of the crowd probably. But the spy could be Ming herself. Sands or Quinn might be planning to question her later and draw out every detail of how he’d behaved during the fight. He’d have to make sure that nothing she said would arouse suspicion.

  “You want me call driver?” Ming asks.

  Walt stands on tiptoe, pretending to base his decision on what’s happening in the pit. Genghis, the brindle, still has a lock on the foreleg of the black, and Mike has lost a lot of blood. The floor of the pit is viscous with it. Mike’s handler looks worried, and Walt senses that Genghis is about to try for his throat.

  “I guess,” Walt says in a bored voice. “Hell, I’d rather be back on the Queen than in this dump.”

  Ming takes his callused hand in her soft fingers and looks up at him with liquid eyes. “Or in hotel room, maybe?”

  Walt swallows hard, trying to conceal how desperately he wants to be alone with her. Ming removes a cell phone from her tiny handbag, presses a key, and puts a finger into her opposite ear. Their driver had told them he couldn’t wait outside, since a random bust was always possible. If that happened, they were to run into the nearby woods and wait until the police left, then call him on Ming’s cell phone. Because they’re far out in the woods, Walt figures the limo is at least twenty minutes away.

  Ming stands on tiptoe again, and he leans down. “Driver come back fifteen minutes,” she says. “Okay, Zhaybee?”

  “That’ll do. This fight will be over by then, anyway. The black’s about had it.”

  Ming peeks between some people in front of her. “Yes.”

  Now all Walt has to do is pretend to be excited about cruelty and slaughter for fifteen minutes.

  The black’s handler is shouting at Genghis to break off the fight. The other handler looks angry about this, but the fight’s being conducted under “Cajun Rules,” a code that strictly governs all aspects of a fight from the washing, weighing, and handling of the dogs to what constitutes a turn and a scratch—even the duties of the referee and timekeeper. Any dog handler with experience ought to know that Cajun Rules allow the handlers to yell at both dogs.

  To Walt’s surprise, a sharp cry from Mike’s handler finally distracts Genghis, and Mike tears himself free, twisting away in a move that warrants a cessation of the fight. As Mike limps back to his corner on three legs, the referee calls a turn, signaling that the black has tried to break off the battle. Mike’s handler straddles his gasping dog, rubbing him vigorously after only a cursory check of the injured leg, which is almost surely broken.

  “Get ready, Mike!” he yells, tossing a bloody towel aside. “You ain’t out of it yet. You got your second wind now. Get ready to scratch, boy!”

  To scratch, Mike will have to limp across a line in the dirt four feet in front of him—within two seconds of the referee’s signal—then voluntarily engage Genghis, whose handler is struggling to hold him in his corner. Walt tries to imagine a boxing trainer encouraging a human fighter to continue with a broken, mangled shoulder. They don’t even do that in UFC fighting.

  “Let go!” shouts the referee, and the timekeeper begins counting. Before the second syllable dies in his throat, Mike limps out of his handler’s grasp and hobbles across the scratch line. Half the crowd whoops with approval. Across the pit, Genghis strains in his handler’s arms, almost mad to finish the battle. Mike hesitates at the center of the pit, then tucks his tail between his legs and starts to turn away.

  “Goddamn it, don’t you turn!” screams his handler. “Hit him! Hit! Hit!”

  Mike looks back across the pit, then lowers his square head, charges across the bloody dirt and lunges at Genghis, seizing the brindle’s nose in his jaws. When Genghis’s handler releases him, Mike tries to roll him over, but the broken leg prevents his getting enough leverage to do it. As the churning dogs wheel to one side, Genghis rips his nose free and darts out of Mike’s reach, then hurls himself bodily into the smaller dog, knocking him onto his back. Genghis leaps for Mike’s exposed throat, but Mike twists his trunk at the last instant, and the massive jaws bite deep into his chest instead. The crowd roars and stomps the floor in approval.

  Genghis thrashes his head from side to side, grinding his jaws, widening the wound. A rush of blood soaks Mike’s ribs, glistening on the black coat, and for a moment both dogs stop moving. Genghis seems content to rest in this dominant position, his jaws locked in Mike’s chest, his tail held high. Mike gazes back at his handler with cloudy eyes, like a boy who has disappointed his father.

  “Get up!” the handler screams. “You goddamn worthless sack of meat!”

  At this furious cursing, Mike jerks weakly, his back legs paddling the air as he tries to wrestle free from the terrible jaws, but his effort only spurs Genghis to drive deeper into the wound. The brindle whips his head back and forth with monstrous power, flinging Mike bodily across the pit, and the crowd shouts in manic anticipation of the kill.

  “Finish him!” yells a woman from the throng.

  “Kill him, G! Gut that black cur!”

  Walt’s stomach heaves, unable to tolerate the mixture of anger and disgust flooding through him. This is like standing in a room where prisoners are forced to fight or copulate for the pleasure of their guards. The Nazis did that, and the Japanese, and probably the jailers of all nations in all epochs of history. Walt knows men who have done it; he witnessed such a fight once at an army stockade. The specter of Abu Ghraib rises in his mind. The terrible truth is that brutality is part of human nature, and all the laws in the world can’t neuter it. That’s the accursed nub of the thing. Some people in this barn probably think he’s obscene—a geezer on the wrong side of seventy with a delicate beauty hardly past twenty. Of course, they don’t know that being with Ming is simply part of his job, just as being with Nancy had been. Although the two aren’t quite the same. Being with Nancy felt like work. Being with Ming feels like the first rush after a good shot of whiskey, dilated into a constant state of euphoria. Ming is one of those rare women who draws every eye wherever she goes. Every man wants her, and every woman hates her because they can’t be her. Her very existence is an affront to other women’s efforts to attract the opposite sex.

  But Walt doesn’t want Ming for the reason these rednecks thinks he does. She’s beautiful, yes, and she radiates sensuality like a magnetic field. But for him the girl is a living door to the past: a time when he felt more alive to love than at any other time in his life. He can’t bear to think about Kaeko in this obscene place, but the pain of being forced to leave her in Japan returns with even the faintest memory. Walt had been so despondent that he’d gone half out of his head. He’d stopped thinking right, stopped paying attention, and that got men killed in Korea. If it hadn’t been for Tom Cage, Walt would have died during the retreat from Chosin Reservoir.

  Ming touches his arm, stands on tiptoe, and says, “We must go, Zhaybee. Now.”

  “Is the driver here?”

  She hands him her cell phone and points to a text message on its LCD screen. It reads GET OUT NOW. HELICOPTER SEARCHING FIVE MILES AWAY. HIDE IN WOODS. WILL CALL SOON.

  As Walt reads these words, the referee calls a turn, which silences the puzzled crowd. There’s been no turn. Genghis is standing over Mike with his head still buried in the black’s chest.

  “Folks,” cries the ref, “we may be about to get a visit from the sheriff. I designate location number four as the site to finish this battle, if Mike’s still game.”

  The crowd begins to swirl around the pit like water around a drain, as people pick up coats, gather children, and toss beer bottles at the overflowing trash cans.

  The ref looks at Mike’s handler. “Is your dog still game?”

  “Hell, no,” the man mutters. “Sumbitch is good as dead. You call it. Collins can have the purse.”

  At this concession, the crowd explodes into motion. Walt feels like he’s in an ant pile some kid stomped on. Wads of cash change hands as people ma
ke for the doors, and nearly everyone has a cell phone jammed against his ear.

  “We go now!” Ming says, real fear in her eyes.

  “No, we don’t,” says Walt.

  Engines roar to life outside, shaking the barn. Dirt and gravel hammer the walls as the vehicles flee.

  “Yes, yes. Must go now!”

  “Take it easy. After these yahoos clear out with their dogs, we’ve got nothing to worry about.”

  “Helicopter coming!”

  The barn is empty now, save for Walt and Ming and a pile of black fur in the pit. Mike’s handler has left him behind. Walt steps down into the pit, kneels beside the valiant bulldog. Thankfully, Mike is dead. Walt closes his eyes for a moment, thinking of soldiers he’d known who died just as uselessly as Mike did.

  “You want go to jail?” Ming cries.

  Walt isn’t worried about jail. He’s almost certain that the helicopter is being flown by Danny McDavitt. Still, if some gung-ho sheriff’s deputy were to show up on a random raid, Walt would either have to blow his cover to get out of it or spend the night in some parish shithole. With a heavy sigh he stands and climbs out of the pit, then takes Ming by the hand and leads her to the barn door.

  “You crazy man?” Ming asks gravely.

  Walt thinks of the howling crowd and the bleeding dogs and wonders how he wound up in the middle of nowhere while the real action went down somewhere else.

  “Maybe so,” he says wearily.

  The limousine waits outside like a long black hearse, its engine purring in the dark. When the driver jumps out and opens the rear door, Walt helps Ming in, then settles back into the leather seat beside her.

  “Any sign of that chopper?” he asks.

  “It moved off toward the river,” says the driver.

  “Good.”

  “Are we going back to the boat?”

  Ming clenches his hand and puts her lips against his ear. “Hotel now. Make you forget dogs. Yes?”

  Walt draws back and looks into her bottomless eyes. Back on the Queen, outside the Devil’s Punchbowl, they had seemed opaque, but now he feels he could lose himself in their depths.

  He looks up and sees the driver watching them in his rearview mirror, smug judgment in his eyes.

  “Eola Hotel,” Walt says. “And if you look back here again, I’ll cut your right ear off. Comprende?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then move out.”

  CHAPTER

  59

  Caitlin stands alert on the tin roof of the kennel, her ears attuned to the slightest sound. For a few moments she thought she’d heard the distant drumbeat of a helicopter, but it faded so quickly that she decided it had been some resonant vibration of her feet on the tin. Even if a chopper was searching for her, it would be unable to spot her beneath the shed that shields the kennel from the sky.

  It had taken half an hour, but she’d finally got two sacks of puppy chow onto the roof. The Bully Kuttas made no noise other than a sort of strangled cough, and she’d realized that this was what it sounded like when they tried to bark. But they’d followed her as remorselessly as sharks, and she wondered if Linda was right—that they were too smart to be distracted by a pile of puppy chow. Caitlin had searched the storeroom for other possible distractions but had found none. Nor drugs that might sedate the dogs. Quinn had removed everything that might help them to escape.

  Very carefully, she carries a heavy sack of puppy chow to the hole above her prison room. She’s studied the Cyclone fence from the roof and decided that barefoot is the way to go at it. The Bully Kuttas are tall, and instinct tells her that a full-out sprint followed by a leap for the highest point she can reach—a leap with all four limbs grasping for holds—will offer the best chance of escape. Bare toes will surely fit into the openings in the fence better than the toes of her shoes. It will probably hurt like hell, but compared to the jaws that will be pursuing her, such pain is meaningless.

  Of course, this reasoning goes to hell when she considers Linda. The reality is, she will be dragging Linda across the open space at a snail’s pace, probably gagged to keep her from crying out in pain. As soon as she tries to boost Linda up, the fence wire will ring against the poles, and at least one dog will come to investigate the noise—if they’ve been distracted at all.

  Caitlin wonders if she’ll have the courage to stay on the ground if the dogs come running and Linda is slow to climb. Will she risk being eaten alive to help someone who has little chance of making it over the top without her? Can she live with the memory of standing safe on the far side of the fence while four dogs tear a helpless woman to pieces?

  Stop, she tells herself, humping the second bag across the roof on her shoulder. Cross that bridge when you come to it.

  More than once she’s wondered whether, if she went over alone and ran nonstop from the time she cleared the fence, she might be able to bring back help before Quinn returned to do whatever Sands has ordered him to do. Linda could probably get onto the roof and hide there, and Caitlin could pull the tin back down into place before she made her break. Surely such a ruse would have some chance of working—not on Sands, of course, but maybe on Seamus Quinn.

  Pausing beside the hole over her room, Caitlin considers bringing this up to Linda. Linda would agree, of course. She doesn’t want to risk the dogs anyway. Offering her the choice is the same as copping out on trying to save her.

  “You don’t even know if you can get the chain off her,” Caitlin mutters. “Quit borrowing trouble.”

  Being careful of the tin’s sharp edges, Caitlin drops the first sack down the hole in the roof. It hits with a solid thud. She looks at it a moment, then lifts the second bag and drops it onto the first. From the ground below, the four white dogs watch with ardent curiosity.

  “Bye-bye, suckers,” she says with a wave.

  Then she flattens her palms on both sides of the hole, lets herself down, and drops to the floor.

  “Linda?” she says, tearing open one of the bags. “You got those bars off yet?”

  No answer.

  “Linda? Talk to me.”

  Caitlin leans close against the plywood wall. She hears nothing. This time she shouts Linda’s name, but there’s no reply, and suddenly she realizes she didn’t really expect one. Screaming irrationally, Caitlin climbs to the windowsill and lifts herself onto the roof again. The dogs are making barking motions, and she hears their hacking coughs, but she ignores them and runs to the hole over the storeroom.

  Dropping through it, she cries out when her bruised feet hit the cement, but she doesn’t slow down. She runs to the door and tests it by pulling on the handle. She’s done this already and thought it too strong, but now adrenaline has electrified her muscles. Taking two steps back, she throws her shoulder against the door. It moves in the frame, but the impact tells her it will take many more such blows to make headway.

  Looking around desperately, her eyes fall on the medicine cabinet. She hadn’t noticed before, but the cabinet is resting on casters. Without even thinking, she heaves the heavy cabinet away from the wall and places it perpendicular to the door, about eight feet away. Then she braces her shoulder against the cabinet and drives it against the door with all the power in her legs.

  This time the door rattles hard, and she hears wood splinter. Moving around the cabinet, she braces her back against the door and reorients the cabinet for another rush. This time she drives it even faster into the wood, and when the impact comes, she feels the frame give way. Dragging the cabinet back just far enough to squeeze by, she darts into the hall and stops in front of Linda’s stall.

  What she sees steals her breath entirely. Linda appears to be standing by the left side of her stall, but in truth she’s hanging by her dog collar, its shortened chain bound to the Cyclone fence with what looks like one of the bars from the window, twisted into a hook. She’s wearing a waitress’s uniform, with an emblem of a steamboat embroidered on the blouse. Her wrists are bound tightly with a pair of cotton panties, and her face is blue.

  Caitlin stands frozen for a mom
ent, then looks down and jerks open the latch that keeps Linda’s stall closed. With the collar and chain holding her, Quinn never felt the need to lock her in, saving himself the trouble of finding another key whenever he had the urge to rape her.

  Caitlin bends her knees and tries to lift Linda high enough to ease the pressure on her neck, but it’s no use. Cursing in panic, she searches for a pulse. She waits, counting slowly, but feels nothing.

  “Damn it!” she screams. “Goddamn it, Linda! You gave up!”

  But inside she knows this isn’t true. Linda was afraid that Caitlin would risk death by forcing her to try to escape, or by remaining with her if Linda refused to try. Linda had hanged herself to release Caitlin from this burden.

  Caitlin stares at the woman whose face she has never seen in life before this moment and thinks of the nude pictures she was shown, those supposedly taken from the house of Tim Jessup. She’d condemned the girl in those photos out of hand, and now now she owes that woman her life. Caitlin has met so many women like Linda during her years in Mississippi, girls with plenty of native sense, but who married right out of high school, and, if they were lucky, did two years of junior college before the first baby came. What could Linda Church have accomplished had she been born with Caitlin’s advantages? So many women from Caitlin’s world pretended to ask these questions, but down deep they felt a sense of entitlement that assured them that their rarefied places in the nation’s elite schools and corporations were based on merit alone. Caitlin reaches out and lays a hand on Linda’s arm—then freezes.

  She’s heard the sound of a motor. Not a helicopter, but a car or truck. Maybe even a jeep.

  Her body jerks as though she’s grabbed hold of a 220-volt cable. A fraction of a second later she’s racing to the storeroom, certain of what she must do. High on both side walls of the storeroom are windows without bars. Caitlin slides open the one on the side opposite Linda’s stall. Then she runs back to Linda’s stall and listens.