The Devil's Punchbowl

  “You know,” he said, “if you count the Missouri as the main channel of this river, the Mississippi was the longest river in the world until army engineers shortened it by three hundred miles. Longer than both the Nile and the Amazon.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Me either. In 1811, there was an earthquake so big that part of the river flowed backward for hours.”

  “I have heard that story. New Madrid, right?”

  Kelly nodded. “Created a hole so big that the lower Mississippi flowed backward until the hole filled up. There’s a lake there now. It’s in Tennessee.”

  Kelly rarely chatters to hear his own voice, so his musings prompted a question. “Why do I get the feeling there’s a message here? Are you going Zen on me?”

  “Maybe so, grasshopper. Change. That’s the message. Man wants to control this river, but the river wants to go where it will. And in the end, it will.”

  “I still don’t get it. Beyond the obvious, I mean.”

  “Look out there,” he said, gesturing with his arm to take in the great sweep of the river. “River pilots like Sam Clemens had to learn everything about the Mississippi. Every bend, cut, crossing, chute, island, hill, sandbar, and snag along thirteen hundred miles. Then they had to learn it all over again on each passage, because the river changed that fast. Not many men had the brains to do that, and even fewer had the guts to risk the lives of a boat full of people at every turn. Steamboats wrecked all the time.”

  “Uh-huh. And?”

  “Well I could see how a river pilot might start feeling like his job was futile—even absurd. There certainly were easier ways to make money.”

  I suddenly saw where he was going. “Like writing, for instance?”

  “Well, Twain did a little writing, yeah. But he did his share of piloting too. And he was proud of it.”

  “How much piloting did he do?”

  “I’m not sure.” Kelly turned to me, his blue eyes as mild as ever. “But I know one thing. He never walked off a boat halfway down the river, leaving his passengers stranded in a storm.”

  I nodded to show that I’d taken Kelly’s point, but my thoughts weren’t on local politics. Despite my promise to Caitlin, Seamus Quinn’s final raving words had been preying on my mind since the last night on the lake.

  “What’s wrong?” Kelly asked. “Something’s eating you, man. Cough it up.”

  “Do you think Caitlin was telling the truth? About Quinn?”

  His face darkened. “You think she’d lie about being raped?”

  “Maybe. To protect me. So I’d never have to think about it. I want to believe her, but she was ready to have you throw Quinn out of the boat. She wouldn’t have done that unless he’d done something terrible to her—personally.”

  Kelly shook his head. “I disagree. For some people, seeing somebody suffer an atrocity can be as bad as it happening to them. Worse, sometimes. They feel impotent, you know? Guilty because they stood by and did nothing.”

  Uncertainty must have shown on my face, because Kelly put his hand on my shoulder and said, “I’m telling you, that’s what happened with Caitlin and Linda. Quinn didn’t rape Caitlin.”

  “He described her naked body.”

  Kelly sighs heavily. “Bro. I was alone with him for a long time before you guys showed up. There’s nothing I don’t know about that cocksucker. He saw her naked, yeah, but Sands showed up and made him give her clothes back. Quinn never raped her, Penn. He wanted to. But if he had, Sands would have killed him. You can let go of that.”

  I felt shamed by the rush of relief that coursed through me after this assurance, but the idea that Caitlin might have chosen to suffer something so terrible alone rather than let me try to help her had been more than I could bear. “Thanks,” was all I could manage.

  An hour after this conversation, Danny McDavitt picked Kelly up at the Natchez airport and flew him to Baton Rouge. By now he’s back in the mountains of Afghanistan, working for an outfit I never heard of, but almost certainly some version of Blackhawk Risk Management. The last thing Kelly said to me was “Spartacus.” Then he handed me a scrap of paper with a phone number on it. I embraced him, shook hands with McDavitt, and drove back to my house on Washington Street to try to sort out my feelings.

  Each day since then has brought more developments, some surprising, others predictable. Jiao has cooperated with Shad Johnson’s office, but not yet with the FBI. Most of her testimony up to this point has implicated Jonathan Sands, but not her uncle in Macao. I can’t fault the woman for her survival instincts. Edward Po is not someone you want angry at you.

  No one knows this better than Jonathan Sands. The former general manager of the Magnolia Queen seems quite content to be tried in Mississippi for murder rather than in federal court on money-laundering charges. Without William Hull to protect him—and with Po at large in the world, rather than in custody—Sands would be a fool to implicate the crime lord in even a misdemeanor. Sands may hope to escape Po’s legendary vengeance by remaining silent, or he may simply be posturing to lure the Justice Department into offering him protective custody in exchange for his testimony. Either way, I don’t think he has much chance of living out the year. The State of Mississippi has no intention of turning Sands over to federal authorities without a fight, and Edward Po’s arm is very long.

  As a powerful Chinese national, Po will not be extradited to the U.S. even if Sands survives to testify against him. But under the broad powers of the Patriot Act, he will be declared a terrorist and stripped of his U.S. assets. Since Po legally owns less than five percent of the Golden Parachute Gaming Corporation, Craig Weldon, the California entertainment lawyer, will finally gain control of the company he naďvely thought was his in the first place. The Golden Parachute casino boats will run as legitimate businesses now, and continue to pump much needed money into Mississippi’s struggling economy.

  William Hull’s days as a rogue lawyer are over, but I doubt he’ll spend a day in prison. Like the men he pursued, Hull was the type to maintain detailed records of all he did in the service of his masters. Such is the currency of politics, and Hull was, if anything, a political creature. This was verified when Shad Johnson received a call from the Director of Homeland Security, asking that Hull be released into federal custody. To Shad’s credit, he called to ask my opinion before he agreed. After some thought, I decided that I had no moral authority to judge Hull. Last week, I almost ordered Kelly to assassinate Jonathan Sands without even the semblance of due process. As for what happened on Lake St. John though I’m loath to admit it, the difference between Hull and myself is one of degree rather than kind.

  No one has learned the fate of Seamus Quinn. Perhaps those who rolled over in their beds during the wee hours of that night on Lake St. John have an inkling that something happened, but gunshots are common there, and it would take a small skirmish to warrant a call to the sheriff’s department. The ignorance of the public doesn’t mean Quinn is forgotten. Kelly will remember him as one more face in the shadow gallery of those who saw him last upon the earth. For Kelly, the existentialist, there is no moral issue: The deed is done, today is a new day. For Caitlin and me, however, the thing is more complex. Here in this place where the past is never dead, or even past, Quinn rises between us at odd moments, most often when we moralize or make the easy generalizations that we as “liberals” tend to make. Caitlin now knows that all the fine words spoken down the centuries mean nothing when you have watched someone remorselessly brutalize a member of your tribe—even if that tribe includes all the women of the world. When offered a choice between certain death for the transgressor or a fair trial with the prospect of acquittal, she came close to choosing death. I did also. Moreover, she did not shy from delivering blows herself. The temptation we felt that night haunts us both and makes us question all we’d stood for until last week.

  The awful philosophical musings that Quinn shared with Caitlin and Linda in the kennel are partly true, and they echo what Kelly told Caitlin in Chris Shepard’s lake house: We’re still in the cave. As with the
dogs that Sands twisted into killers, there are urges in the blood that that no amount of socialization will ever remove. Lies and cruelty and murder are in us all.

  All.

  “Is that it?” Caitlin asks, pointing to a deep seam in the overgrown riverbank.

  “Maybe,” I say, throttling back and getting to my feet in the gently rocking boat. “I just don’t know.”

  The “it” she’s referring to is the Devil’s Punchbowl. The real one. We figured that since the great defile lies north of town, it would be a good landmark to use for spreading Linda’s ashes on the water. From there they would drift down past the remaining casinos, then under the bridges and past the old plantations where Sands imprisoned dogs and women alike, as other men had done before him. Three or four days later, what’s left of Linda Church would flow through New Orleans and out into the Gulf of Mexico.

  “I don’t think we’re going to find it without a GPS,” I confess. “The bank’s still too overgrown.”

  Caitlin shrugs. “It doesn’t matter. We’re far enough north. Let’s do it out in the main channel.”

  I turn the boat to port and push the throttle forward. When we’re midway between Mississippi and Louisiana, I kill the engine. I don’t like doing that in the middle of the river, but given the occasion, it seems necessary. Caitlin removes a simple bronze urn from beneath one of the seats and rests it on the gunwale.

  “Should we say something?” I ask.

  “Anything we say now is too late.”

  Squinting into the sun, she looks back at Natchez high on the bluff, then across at the levee on the Louisiana side. I don’t know what she’s thinking, but I don’t intend to disturb her. The extremity of what she endured with Linda in the kennel remains unknown to me. And while I take Kelly at his word that Quinn never raped Caitlin, the few details she has revealed were enough to convince me that Seamus Quinn deserved an express ticket to hell. Whatever really happened, it inspired Caitlin to pay for Linda’s cremation and memorial service, which was attended by a handful of cocktail waitresses and no one else.

  “I’ll never forget her,” Caitlin says, still looking westward toward the place of their captivity.

  “She’d be glad to know that.”

  “She would. She had a high opinion of me, for some reason. She taught me how lucky I was to have the childhood I had. I’m not a poor little rich girl anymore. Linda gets the credit for that.”

  I smile at this rare display of self-deprecation.

  “You want to know a secret?” she says, removing the lid from the urn. The breeze catches some dust from the opening and sends it dancing over the water like a swarm of gnats.

  “Sure.”

  Caitlin raises her eyes until we’re looking directly at each other. “I sprinkled some of this over Tim’s grave this morning.”

  “Did you really?”

  “I couldn’t see the harm. Julia will never know, and it would have meant the world to Linda.”

  “To Tim too.” I can’t help but smile. “Just when I start believing you’re a real cynic, you show your romantic streak.”

  Caitlin turns back to the water. “I’ve always been a romantic. You know that. Here goes nothing.”

  Lifting the urn by its base, she flings the ashes far over the orange-red water. A hiss like falling rain reaches the boat, and then only a small cloud of dust hangs over the river, dissipating slowly in the wind.

  “How long till she gets to New Orleans?” Caitlin asks.

  “That depends on a lot of things. No more than a week. Maybe sooner.”

  She watches the ashes drift away from the boat. “The other day, you asked me if I’d learned anything about Tim’s last minutes while I was with Linda. I did, actually. Quinn told her about it between the rapes. To torment her.”

  “Christ.”

  “I’m going to tell you, but I don’t ever want to talk about it again. Nothing about Quinn.”

  “All right.”

  Caitlin sits on one of the padded seats and crosses her legs. She tugs at the end of her ponytail as she speaks, her gaze on the fiberglass deck. “When Tim stole the DVD from the Magnolia Queen, there was already a homing device on his car. Quinn tracked him sometimes to see if he was at Linda’s apartment. Ben Li woke up and called Quinn to warn him just after Tim left the casino. Quinn and a couple of goons tracked Tim up to the cemetery in a security van. Then they switched on a cell phone jammer and started hunting. They found Tim’s car right away. They left one guy guarding it, then fanned out through the graveyard. Tim must have been hiding the DVD in the tree about then.”

  “Because he couldn’t find me.”

  Caitlin pauses, then nods in sober agreement. “After he hid the disc, Tim somehow got back to his car and overpowered the guard, then took off for town. But Quinn had already called for help. The second vehicle blocked the road, so Tim turned and headed out Cemetery Road as fast as he could.”

  “That’s when he made the voice memo in his phone.”

  “Right. The plan he mentioned in his memo was simple. He ran his car off the cliff into the Devil’s Punchbowl and dived out at the last second. He was trying to make them think he’d spun out and killed himself.”

  “Why didn’t it work?”

  “Think about it.”

  This takes only a moment. “Dogs.”

  “Dog, singular. The backup team had brought Sands’s Bully Kutta in the second vehicle. Tim hid in the woods across the road from the Punchbowl, but he didn’t have a chance with that monster hunting him.”

  “My God,” I whisper, remembering the massive white dog pinning me to the wall of my house.

  Caitlin closes her eyes. Recounting this is obviously a struggle for her. “The dog mauled Tim pretty badly, as you saw. But the real torture happened in the backseat of the SUV. They were taking him back to the Queen to question him with electricity, but naturally Quinn couldn’t wait. He beat Tim with a club to subdue him, then started on him with a cigarette.” She wrings her hands as though unsure what to do with them. “Quinn told Linda a lot of horrible things, but I think he was just trying to make her suffer. Tim was only in the SUV for a couple of minutes. At least I hope he was.”

  “A couple of minutes of fire is more pain than most people can imagine.”

  Caitlin pulls her jacket tighter around her. “Tim had passed out by the time they reached the bluff—or so they thought. But just as they passed Bowie’s Tavern, he exploded off the seat and started hitting everyone in sight. Then he grabbed his cell phone and jumped out of the SUV.”

  “Where the witnesses first saw him.”

  “I doubt Tim even knew where he was when he started running.”

  My throat constricts when I think of Tim giving his last reserves of strength to escape his torturers. By then he must have been thinking only of Julia and his son. But now I remember Logan telling me that Tim tried to call me just before he went over the bluff. This memory brings blood to my face and tears to my eyes.

  “It was Quinn who chased him?” I whisper.

  “Yes. I think Quinn panicked. They switched on the jammer to stop Tim from calling anybody, but Quinn wasn’t sure he could get Tim back into the vehicle before a crowd gathered. That’s why he shot him.”

  “They would have killed him in the end anyway.”

  “Yes.” Caitlin reaches out and touches my hand. “Penn, there’s a reason I told you this story. I wouldn’t want you to have that stuff in your head unless I thought it was necessary.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You blame yourself for Tim’s death. I know it. I don’t think you could have done what we did at the lake unless you did.”

  My throat is so tight that breath can hardly pass through it. She’s right. When Kelly shoved Quinn off the boat, I didn’t protest because I had focused all my guilt and self-disgust on him. But Quinn’s death has not lightened my guilt—or eased my suffering.

  “Look at me,” Caitlin says. “Sit down and look at me.”

  I do.

  “You think Tim died because you were late for that meeting.”

  “Didn’t he?”

>   “No. He died because he put himself into a situation he didn’t understand, with some very bad people. Only one thing would be different today if you had showed up at the cemetery on time. You’d be dead too.”

  “You don’t know that. I had a gun with me.”

  Caitlin shakes her head. “Don’t kid yourself. You and Tim were no match for Quinn, his gang, and that dog. You were lucky to get off the Queen alive the other day, and you were only fighting Sands.”

  She’s right again. “I know that. My real mistake was letting Tim go forward at all. I knew what could happen when—”

  “Stop,” she says sharply. “You have to stop. You’ll drive yourself crazy. Do you want me to spend the rest of my life torturing myself for not saving Linda?”

  “You couldn’t have—”

  “Stop. You have to let go, Penn. Now, out here, today. And I mean all of it. Tim, Quinn, everything. When you start this boat again, we’re going to leave it behind us, in the river.”

  She stands and comes to my seat, then pulls my head against her abdomen and runs her fingers through my hair. I haven’t been this way with her in so long that a dizzying feeling comes over me.

  “Are you still planning to resign?” she asks softly.

  When I don’t answer, she says, “Paul Labry must have mentioned your talk with him to someone before he died, because the rumor’s already spreading.”

  “I know. Drew asked me about it when I called to borrow this boat.”

  Caitlin steps backward and looks down expectantly. “Well?”

  She’s waiting for me to say yes. Hoping for it. I can see that as plainly as the sun over the river. But from the moment Kelly gave me his Mark Twain speech on the bluff, I’ve been questioning my decision. Surprisingly, my father gave me his blessing only a day after Kelly left. The two had evidently discussed my dilemma, and Dad was aware that my reluctance to disappoint him had already kept me in office longer than I might have stayed otherwise. He told me that, considering all that had happened, he wouldn’t think less of me if I felt I had to step down. I don’t know if he meant that, but he said it, and he said it knowing that if I resigned, I would probably move Annie to a new town far away. But yesterday, as I watched two black men in overalls lower Paul Labry’s casket into the earth not far from Tim’s grave, I knew with utter certainty that if I resigned, I would think less of myself for the rest of my life.