The Devil's Punchbowl

  Kelly was clever to choose this place. It’s difficult to step outside the law when you’re surrounded by all its tangible expressions. But here, in this prehistoric darkness under the cypress trees, it’s easy to ask why we should bother taking Seamus Quinn back to the world of cops and lawyers and plea bargains. Intellectually, I know the answer to that, of course. But the shape behind the curtain is becoming clearer to me, even as I try to hold the curtain shut.

  “What the fuck’s she gawkin’ at?” Quinn asks.

  Caitlin swings the beam away from the red eyes and aims it down at Quinn. Then she switches off the flashlight and covers her face with a shaking hand. Five minutes ago I thought of Caitlin’s period of captivity as a transient nightmare she had miraculously managed to escape. Now I know she might never escape it. Thinking this is like cracking the gate to hell.

  “Stand him up,” she says. “Let him see.”

  Kelly grabs Quinn under the arms and heaves him up onto one of the seats. The Irishman looks out, but all is darkness around the boat. Then Caitlin shines the light toward the cypress knees, and the red eyes gleam like rubies in its beam.

  “Bloody hell,” says Quinn, his voice in a higher register. “What’s that?”

  The satisfaction I feel at the sound of fear in his voice cannot be denied. “American alligator,” I inform him. “Alligator mississippiensis. I’m sure you’ve seen them on TV.”

  As Quinn slowly draws back his head, a throaty bellow blasts out of the dark at unbelievable volume. His bound feet scrape against the deck, but he has nowhere to run.

  “You’re a big fan of people fighting animals,” Caitlin says. “You told me all about the Romans and their games, how they made animals rape girls.”

  Reaching out my right hand, I touch her shoulder softly. “Caitlin ? What did he do?”

  She looks back at me, her eyes wet with tears. “It’s what he didn’t do.”

  “What didn’t he do?”

  “He didn’t stop. It was unforgivable.”

  Anger like corrosive acid burns the lining of my heart.

  “Where’s your Christian mercy, darlin’?” Quinn asks mockingly, but his eyes are those of a cornered animal—desperate and calculating. He looks at Kelly. “It’s always the women. The most bloody-minded creatures ever the Lord made.”

  “That’s why you treat them with respect, Seamus.”

  Another hard slap rebounds over the water, and Caitlin whips the beam over to the cypress trees. Quinn can’t tear his gaze away from the glowing eyes. When Kelly claps him on the back, the Irishman jumps in terror.

  “Ready, tough guy? Here’s your chance to prove what a badass you are. Ultimate Fighting Challenge times fifty.”

  “Ah, you’re bluffin’,” Quinn says, turning back from the water and smiling like a man who can appreciate being the butt of a good joke. “Cage is a lawyer. He won’t have any part of this. He can’t.”

  “Do you remember what I told you outside Sands’s house?” I ask.

  Quinn nods. “Sure. This isn’t Northern Ireland. You were right about that.”

  “‘Stay away from my family.’ That’s what I told you. Well, Caitlin is family. And this is Mississippi. You remember what I told you about that?”

  “Cage, listen—”

  “I said, ‘We know how to play rough too.’ But you didn’t believe me. And now here we are, with you telling me about the law.”

  Recognizing the steel in my voice, Kelly eases the throttle forward, and we begin creeping through the narrow chute. Caitlin shines the light over the bow to assist him, and Quinn stares along the beam as though hypnotized by the unblinking eyes that surround us. After a couple of minutes, the chute opens into a wide pool. The old fishing camp stands somewhere in the trees to our left, but I can’t see it. The place is deserted now, and there’s nothing else down this way. The water’s too shallow and dangerous for people to build here. With seemingly infinite patience, Kelly turns the boat and heads back up the chute.

  Quinn’s naturally pale skin looks as white as a movie vampire’s in the moonlight. Fear has drained the blood from his face. This man has fed human beings to dogs. He may even have imagined what it might be like to suffer such a death. But he has never contemplated the fate Daniel Kelly has set before him. Kelly has appointed himself the instrument of the karma he believes in, and for him the terror Quinn suffers now is as important as his dying.

  “I’ve heard a lot of guys brag about the biting strength of pit bulls,” Kelly says in an offhand tone. “But I’ll tell you something. A gator could bite a chunk out of a car fender.”

  “Alligators don’t usually attack people,” I recall aloud. “It’s usually by mistake, or if one feels threatened.”

  “This is a unique situation,” Kelly says with relish. “Lots of gators out there tonight. Protective females, territorial males.” He glances back at Quinn. “They don’t need to see you, man. They smell you. Which reminds me ”

  Motioning for me to take the wheel, Kelly lifts a seat cushion and opens the lid of an ice chest. A rotten smell instantly permeates the boat.

  “That’s awful!” cries Caitlin, holding her nose. “What is it?”

  “I’m not sure. Got it out of the Dumpster behind the Mexican restaurant.”

  Kelly reaches across me and shifts the engine into neutral, then pulls on a gardening glove and reaches into the ice chest. I pinch my nostrils shut as he tosses something heavy into the trees. The splash silences the frogs, but they soon resume their dissonant chorus.

  No one speaks. Something primitive holds us spellbound. Then I hear a single, powerful swish, like a sound effect from a horror movie: a heavy, armored tail moving water. A primitive grunt comes from the dark, then a choked bellow. More swishes follow. Too many to count.

  “Feeding time,” says Kelly. He pulls a knife from a sheath on his ankle. Quinn jerks in his seat when Kelly leans down and slices the duct tape binding his ankles. After a few seconds, Quinn stands erect on his good foot and holds out his wrists, but Kelly shakes his head.

  “Come on!” says Quinn. “Jaysus, give a man a chance. Give me something to work with.”

  I point at Quinn’s feet. “He just did.”

  Caitlin turns the flashlight on Quinn. “More of a chance than you gave Linda Church.”

  “The water’s only four feet deep here,” I offer. “Kind of tough to run in that, but I know you’ll give it all you’ve got.”

  “I wouldn’t do that,” Kelly advises. “I’d swim for it. Real slow. Alligators have some kind of organ that picks up vibrations in the water.”

  Quinn’s dark eyes are bulging. “You’re wired, right?” he says in a hyperexcited voice. “You want a confession? Fine. Let’s start with Jessup.”

  “Save your breath,” mutters Kelly.

  “Wait a second,” I say. “What about Ben Li?”

  Quinn shakes his head angrily. “That kid attacked me on the boat! That crazy Linda jumped into the river, and when I turned around to find her, the chink went crazy. He was kicking me and screaming nonsense. I had to shoot him to try to save Linda.”

  Caitlin looks incredulous. “You killed Ben Li to save Linda? So that you could rape her later?”

  Panic arcs from Quinn’s eyes.

  “Do you have any idea what she went through?” Caitlin asks. “She hanged herself because of what you did.”

  “There you go!” he cries. “She killed herself. That’s not murder!”

  “Enough of this,” says Kelly. “Let’s get it done.”

  He turns to Caitlin as though for final permission, but her eyes are locked on Quinn.

  “Linda begged you to stop,” she says. “She begged you, but you kept on. She was sick. She was in pain. But you wouldn’t stop.”

  “I was only doing what Sands ordered me to do!”

  “Liar! He beat you for it.”

  “What do you think that was but show?” Quinn barks a hysterical laugh. “He did that in case he had to let you go later. So you could tell everyone what a merciful bastard he is.”

  Caitlin turns to me, her eyes luminous in the half dark. “How long would Quinn spend i
n prison?”

  I lower my voice. “I can’t answer that without knowing what happened. Everything that happened.”

  She closes her eyes. “Beyond a reasonable doubt,” she says instantly. “That’s the standard for murder, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s guilty, Penn.”

  “I know.”

  “Come on then, ya fuckin’ cunt!” Quinn roars, dropping his mask of submission. “Stop asking for absolution. Kill me if you’ve got the guts!”

  She turns and takes a step toward him. “You think I won’t?”

  “No. You’ll have your hard boy there do it.” Quinn leers at Caitlin like an uncle with a dirty secret. “But why don’t you tell them the real reason? Eh? You don’t want your man to know what really happened in the kennel.”

  Caitlin raises the flashlight as though to strike him.

  “Go on,” Quinn says, grinning. “Tell him. Nothing to be ashamed of, lass. Tell him what you did for me, yeah?”

  When she doesn’t speak, Quinn looks over her shoulder at me. “She sucked me like a ten-dollar whore, Cage. Didn’t think twice about it. They’ll do anything for a little extra food and toilet paper. Swallowed it all too—”

  Caitlin throws the flashlight, but Quinn deflects it with his bound forearms.

  “That’s it!” he says, laughing. “That’s my little wildcat. Katie likes it rough, gents.” He winks at me. “But then you know that already, don’t you?”

  I want to smash my fist into his windpipe, but something keeps me rooted where I stand.

  “Or do you?” Quinn looks back at Caitlin and raises an eyebrow. “You play the lady for him, eh? That’s the way of it?” He laughs crudely, then begins describing Caitlin’s naked body—accurately—and how she serviced him in the kennel in exchange for certain privileges.

  Kelly watches Caitlin and me with animal alertness, waiting for a signal that we’ve had enough. One word from either of us would send Quinn into the lake. This knowledge feels like a loaded gun in my hand.

  Caitlin stands like a sapling against the torrent of sewage coming from Quinn’s mouth, but her hands are quivering at her sides. If she had a gun, she might shoot him. With no more than six feet of deck separating her from Quinn, she could probably hit him. Kelly’s probably thinking the same thing. But no matter how Caitlin feels right now, she would never be able to live with herself if she did that. The three of us stand like judges being taunted by a madman we have the power to silence at any moment, but who lack the last measure of will to do so.

  Quinn rants on, like a man driving a car a hundred miles an hour along a cliff edge. “She took it in every hole, mate! She was scared at first, but I went deeper than you ever have. And she loved it. She told me that. She’ll never forget it, and you won’t either. No matter what you do to me tonight, you’ll lie awake thinking how I filled her up—”

  Caitlin snaps first, lunging for him with outstretched hands, and only then do I realize what he’s wanted throughout his tirade.

  A hostage.

  My thought is far ahead of my muscles. Even as I fling out my arms to pull Caitlin back, Quinn’s eyes flash with triumph, and he grabs her left arm with his bound hands, twisting her into him. They’re almost one form when a blast of flame lights them like a flashbulb, and a deafening report echoes across the water.

  Caitlin cries out, backpedaling away from Quinn and falling against me. Quinn staggers like a boxer who’s taken a blow to the solar plexus, then looks down at the black hole between his shoulder and his heart. Clawing at the T-shirt, he grunts in disbelief, then looks up openmouthed at Kelly, his eyelids pinned back over bulging eyes. Kelly reaches out with his free hand and pushes Quinn backward, flipping him over the gunwale into the lake.

  The splash barely registers in my ringing ears, but I feel Caitlin panting against me. She’s hyperventilating.

  “Are you hit?” I ask, lifting her to her feet and pulling off her fleece jacket.

  “She’s not hit,” Kelly says, sliding his pistol into a storage slot in the boat’s dash panel.

  “Is he dead?” Caitlin asks, leaning on the gunwale and looking out into the dark.

  “If he is, he got off easy. A bullet’s a lot better than what’s waiting out there.”

  “People had to hear that shot. Oh, my God.”

  “It’s all right,” I assure her, even as my heart bangs against my chest wall. “People shoot snakes and armadillos all the time up here.”

  “It’s almost deer season,” Kelly says. “Already bow season. Folks will figure it’s poachers trying to get a jump on a big buck. There might be a game warden out this way, but twenty minutes from now, there won’t be anything left to find.”

  Caitlin shivers in the wind. As I pick up her jacket and help her into it, Kelly eases the boat thirty yards up the chute. When he puts the engine in neutral again, the rumble of the engine quiets, and a heavy swish of water reaches us. Kelly removes a monocular night-vision scope from his pocket and pans across the water.

  “Do you see him?” I ask.

  “No.”

  Caitlin turns from the gunwale, walks to me, and splays her palm on my chest. “He was lying,” she says, looking into my eyes with steady intensity. “About raping me. He was just trying to hurt you. He thought we were really going to kill him.”

  “Weren’t we?” Kelly asks.

  She glances back at him, but Kelly keeps the scope trained on the surface of the water. Caitlin pushes her palm deeper into my chest.

  “You believe me, don’t you?”

  “Of course.” What else can I say?

  “If you ever worry about what he was saying, then Quinn got what he wanted.”

  “I know.”

  Her anxious eyes remain on mine for several seconds; then she hugs her cheek against my chest. As I stroke her hair, three quick splashes come out of the dark.

  Caitlin stiffens. “What’s happening?”

  “It’s starting,” says Kelly. “Jesus.”

  “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  A shriek of terror pierces the night.

  “Guess not.”

  “Have they got him?” she asks, squeezing my wrist tight enough to cut off my circulation.

  The next scream is defiant, like that of a hiker shouting at a grizzly bear to forestall an attack. Sound can carry for miles over water, and from this distance it’s as though the nightmare is playing out only a few feet from us. Wild splashing echoes over the lake, as though a dozen kids are leaping into it from tree limbs. Then a high wail rolls out of the dark, rising in pitch until a glottal squawk cuts it off, and I know without looking that Quinn’s head was just dragged beneath the surface. The sound of thrashing water makes my skin crawl.

  “I can’t listen,” Caitlin says, shuddering against me. “Do something, Kelly. Make it stop.”

  Keeping the night-vision scope trained on its target, Kelly reaches back blindly toward the dashboard. I step around Caitlin and give him his pistol from the storage slot. He raises it quickly with his right hand, aiming along a path parallel to the scope held against his eye.

  “I need light.”

  I scoop the flashlight from the aft deck and point it along the path of his aim, but I see neither man nor beast in its beam, only a churning maelstrom of water like a sand boil behind a saturated levee.

  “My God,” breathes Caitlin.

  “He’s gone,” Kelly says with finality.

  “We should go too.”

  Kelly lowers his pistol, but he doesn’t take his eyes from the slowly subsiding frenzy.

  “Let’s go,” Caitlin pleads. “I want to forget this.”

  I nod, thinking, You never will.

  EPILOGUE

  FIVE DAYS LATER

  The season has turned at last. Before we even got off Lake St. John, a wall of rain rolled out of the west and covered the land for twelve hours before moving on. Behind the rain came a cold wind that took the last illusions of summer with it. The leaves on most trees are still green, some so dark they’re almost black, but now the bluff is splashed with orange and yellow sprays of autumnal color.
r />   Caitlin and I are on the river again, this time in Drew Elliott’s old Bayrider, which I borrowed from his storage building. We’ve come to spread Linda Church’s ashes. We chose the river because it was the place where Tim and Linda found each other. On shore, Tim belonged to his wife and son. But on the Magnolia Queen, where he went to work as a sort of penance for his squandered birthright, he found another lost soul who might have become much more, had she been born with Tim’s advantages.

  Caitlin and I haven’t spoken much since the night Quinn died on Lake St. John. I’ve spent most of my private time with Annie and my parents, mulling over the past and wondering about our future, but the aftermath of what happened on the Magnolia Queen has kept Caitlin busy day and night. In addition to writing stories and fending off requests from other media, she has funded and overseen the effort to rescue the fighting dogs Sands kept on both sides of the river, and also to return the many stolen pets to their owners. Some of the fighting dogs had to be put down, but others will be adopted. So far, twenty-three dogs and cats have been returned to homes as far away as Little Rock, Arkansas. I suspect that this whirlwind of activity has helped distract Caitlin from the aftermath of what we did on the lake that night.

  Kelly left town the morning after Quinn died. We walked down to the bluff together and watched the big diesel boats push barges up and down the river for a while. The Magnolia Queen had already been towed to a refitting yard for repairs, so once again Pierce’s Landing Road led only to an empty stretch of water. Leaning on the fence near the gazebo, Kelly told me that he’d spent the previous night reading a copy of Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi that my father had lent him. It seemed an odd choice after what we’d done at the lake, but I supposed Kelly needed a way to come down from all that had happened that final day.