The Devil''s Punchbowl

  With a sigh of resignation, I step from behind the gravestone and call toward the river, “Tim? Hey, Tim. It’s Penn.”

  Jessup whips his head around, and his right hand darts toward his pocket. For a panicked second I fear he’s going to pull a pistol, but then he recognizes me, and his eyes widen with relief.

  “Man!” he says with a grin. “At first I thought you’d chickened out. I mean, shit.”

  As he shakes my hand, I marvel that at forty-five Jessup still sounds like a strung-out hippie. “You’re the one who’s late, aren’t you?”

  He nods more times than necessary, a man who’ll do anything to keep from being still. How does this guy deal blackjack all night?

  “I couldn’t rush off the boat,” he explains. “I think they’re watching me. I mean, they’re always watching us. Everybody. But I think maybe they suspect something.”

  I want to ask whom he’s talking about, but I assume he’ll get to that. “I didn’t see your car. Where’d you come from?”

  A cagey smile splits the weathered face. “I got ways, man. You got to be careful dealing with this class of people. Predators, I kid you not. They sense a threat, they react—bam!” Tim claps his hands together. “Pure instinct. Like sharks in the water.” He glances back toward town. “In fact, we ought to get behind some cover now.” He gestures toward the three-foot-high masonry walls that enclose a nearby family plot. “Just like high school, man. Remember smoking grass behind these walls? Sitting down so the cops couldn’t see the glow of the roach?”

  I never got high with Tim during high school, but I see no reason to break whatever flow keeps him calm and talking. The sooner he tells me what he came to say, the sooner I can get out of here.

  He vaults the wall with surprising agility, and I step over it after him, recalling with a chill the one memory of this place that I associate with Tim. Late one Halloween night a half dozen boys tossed our banana bikes over the wall and rode wildly through the narrow lanes, laughing hysterically until a pack of wild dogs chased us up into the oak trees near the third gate. Does Tim remember that?

  With a last anxious look up Cemetery Road, he sits on the damp ground and leans against the mossy bricks in a corner where two walls meet. I sit against the adjacent wall, facing him at a right angle, my running shoes almost touching his weathered Sperrys. Only now do I realize that he must have changed clothes after work. The dealer’s uniform he usually wears on duty has been replaced by black jeans and a gray T-shirt.

  “Couldn’t come out here dressed for work,” he says, as though reading my mind. What he actually read, I realize, was my appraising glance. Clearly, all the drugs he’s ingested over the years haven’t yet ruined what always was a sharp mind.

  I decide to dispense with small talk. “You said some pretty scary things on the phone. Scary enough to bring me out here at this hour.”

  He nods, digging in his pocket for something that turns out to be a bent cigarette. “Can’t risk lighting it,” he says, putting it between his lips, “but it’s good to know I got it for the ride home.” He grins once more before putting on a serious face. “So, what had you heard before I called?”

  I don’t want to repeat anything Tim hasn’t already heard or seen himself. “Vague rumors. Celebrities flying in to gamble, in and out fast. Pro athletes, rappers, like that. People who wouldn’t normally come here.”

  “You hear about the dogfighting?”

  My hope that the rumors are false is sinking fast. “I’ve heard there’s some of that going on. But it was hard to credit. I mean, I can see some rednecks down in the bottoms doing it, or out in the parishes across the river, but not high rollers and celebrities.”

  Tim sucks in his bottom lip. “What else?”

  This time I don’t answer. I’ve heard other rumors—that prostitution and hard drugs are flourishing around the gambling trade, for example—but these plagues have been with us always. “Look, I don’t want to speculate about things I don’t know to be true.”

  “You sound like a fucking politician, man.”

  I suppose that’s what I’ve become, but I feel more like an attorney sifting the truth from an unreliable client’s story. “Why don’t you just tell me what you know? Then I’ll tell you how that fits with what I’ve heard.”

  Looking more anxious by the second, Jessup gives in to his nicotine urge at last. He produces a Bic lighter, which he flicks into flame and touches to the end of the cigarette, drawing air through the paper tube like someone sucking on a three-foot bong. He holds in the smoke for an alarming amount of time, then speaks as he exhales. “You hear I got a kid now? A son.”

  “Yeah, I saw him with Julia at the Piggly Wiggly a couple of weeks ago. He’s a great-looking boy.”

  Tim’s smile lights up his face. “Just like his mom, man. She’s still a beauty, isn’t she?”

  “She is,” I concur, speaking the truth. “So what are we doing here, Timmy?”

  He still doesn’t reply. He takes another long drag, cupping the cigarette like a joint. As I watch him, I realize that his hands are shak ing, and not from the cold. His whole body has begun to shiver, and for the first time I worry that he’s started using again.

  “Tim?”

  “It’s not what you think, bro. I’ve just been carrying this stuff around in my head for a while, and sometimes I get the shakes.”

  He’s crying, I realize with amazement. He’s wiping tears from his eyes. I squeeze his knee to comfort him.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispers. “We’re a long way from Mill Pond Road, aren’t we?”

  Mill Pond Road is the street I grew up on. “We sure are. Are you okay?”

  He stubs out his cigarette on a gravestone and leans forward, his eyes burning with passion I thought long gone from him. “If I tell you more, there’s no going back. You understand? I tell you what I know, you won’t be able to sleep. I know you. You’ll be like a pit bull yourself. You won’t let it go.”

  “Isn’t that why you asked me here?”

  Jessup shrugs, his head and hands jittery again. “I’m just telling you, Penn. You want to walk away, do it now. Climb over that wall and slide back down to your car. That’s what a smart man would do.”

  I settle against the cold bricks and consider what I’ve heard. This is one of the ways fate comes for you. It can swoop darkly from a cloudless sky like my wife’s cancer; or it can lie waiting in your path, obvious to any eyes willing to see it. But sometimes it’s simply a fork in the road, and rare is the day that a friend stands beside it, offering you the safer path. It’s the oldest human choice: comfortable ignorance or knowledge bought with pain? I can almost hear Tim at his blackjack table on the Magnolia Queen: “Hit or stay, sir?” If only I had a real choice. But because I helped bring the Queen to Natchez, I don’t.

  “Let’s hear it, Timmy. I don’t have all night.”

  Jessup closes his eyes and crosses himself. “Praise God,” he breathes. “I don’t know what I would have done if you’d walked away. I’m way out on a limb here, man. And I’m totally alone.”

  I give him a forced smile. “Let’s hope my added weight doesn’t break it off.”

  He takes a long look at me, then shifts his weight to raise one hip and slides something from his back pocket. It looks like a couple of playing cards. He holds them out, palm down, the cards mostly concealed beneath his fingers.

  “Pick a card?” I ask.

  “They’re not cards. They’re pictures. They’re kind of blurry. Shot with a cell phone.”

  With a sigh of resignation I reach out and take them from his hand. I’ve viewed thousands of crime-scene photos in microscopic detail, so I don’t expect to be shocked by whatever Tim Jessup has brought in his back pocket. But when he flicks his lighter into flame and holds it over the first photo, a wasplike buzzing begins in my head, and my stomach does a slow roll.

  “I know,” he says quietly. “Keep going. It gets worse.”

  CHAPTER

  2

  Linda Church lies beneath the man who pays her wages and tries to hide the fear behind her eyes. As he drives into her, his eyes burning, his for
ehead dripping sweat, she imagines she’s a stone figure in a cathedral, with opaque eyes that reveal nothing. Linda reads fantasy novels during her off hours, and sometimes she imagines she’s a character in a book, a noblewoman forced by a cruel twist of fate to do things she never thought she would. Things like that happened to heroines all the time. All her life (or since she was four years old and played the princess in her nursery-school play) Linda has searched for a real prince, for a gentle man who could lead her out of the thorny maze that’s been her life ever since the other kind of man had his way with her. When she first met the man using her now, she believed that magical moment had finally come. Only a year shy of thirty (and with her looks still holding despite some rough treatment), Linda had finally been placed by fate in the path of a prince. He looked like a film actor, carried himself like a soldier, and best of all actually talked like a prince in the movies her grandmother used to watch. Like Cary Grant or Laurence Olivier or somebody.

  But not even Cary Grant was Cary Grant. He was named Archie Leach or something, and though he was probably an okay guy, he wasn’t who you thought he was, and that was the truth of life right there. Nothing was what you thought it was, because no one was who they pretended to be. Everybody wanted something, and men mostly wanted the same thing. If her prince had turned into a frog, she would at least have had the comfort of familiarity. But this story was different; this false prince had morphed into a serpent with needle-sharp fangs and sacs of poison loaded behind them. Linda now knew she was only one of twenty or thirty women he’d slept with on the Magnolia Queen, and was probably still screwing, no matter what he claimed. With good-paying work so hard to find, who could afford to say no to him?

  “What’s your problem tonight?” he grunted, still going at her without letup. “Squeeze your pissflaps, woman, and give the lad something to work with.”

  She hates his voice most of all, because the beautiful way he speaks in public is just another cloak he wears to hide what lies beneath his skin, and behind those measuring eyes. He really is like a character in one of her books, but not a hero. He’s a shape-shifter, a demon who knows that the surest way into the souls of normal people is to appear to be exactly what they most want, to make them believe he sees them exactly as they wish to be seen. That was how he’d snared Linda. He’d made her believe her most secret fantasies about herself, just long enough to make her willingly give herself, and then the mask had come off.

  The horror of that night is graven on her soul like scar tissue. In the span of a few minutes, she saw what she’d allowed inside her, and something in her withered away forever. It happened in this very room, a cavernlike hold in the bowels of the Magnolia Queen, one of the only two rooms on the casino boat without security cameras. Linda works upstairs in the bar called The Devil’s Punchbowl, but the women on the Queen call this off-limits room the real Devil’s Punchbowl. For it’s here that the demon inside her conducts all business that cannot stand the light of day. Here he brings card counters and other troublemakers, to strap them into the chair bolted to the floor in the middle of the room. Here he brings the women who endure what Linda suffered that night after the mask came off .

  After he’d gone, while she put herself together as best she could, she’d told herself she would quit the boat. But when it came to it, she hadn’t had the nerve. Partly it was the money, of course, and the insurance benefits. But it was also the mind’s ability to lie to itself. A familiar voice began telling her that she was mistaken, that she’d misinterpreted some of the things he’d done, that she had in fact asked for those things, if not verbally then by her actions. But each new visit brought further confirmation of her warning instincts, and the fear in her had grown. She wanted desperately to stop, to flee the Queen and the city, yet she didn’t. This demon seemed to have—no, he had —some strange power over her, so much that she was afraid to mention her predicament to anyone else. In rational moments, this made her furious. Surely she had an open-and-shut case for sexual harassment. Of course, he might argue that the relationship was consensual. She’s given him enthusiastic sex in several places on the boat, and except for his office and this room, every inch of the casino is covered by surveillance cameras—even the bathrooms, no matter what the law says.

  She’s thought about asking some other girls to go to a lawyer with her, but that would be riskier than laying all her money down on one of the table games upstairs. Linda only knows about the other girls because she’s heard a couple of the trashier ones talking about how they did a group thing with him and a big player from Hong Kong. Knowing that the man inside her now has been inside those other women makes her shudder, yet she doesn’t cry out or try to throw him off. Why? A heroine in one of her novels would do just that: find a hatpin or a dagger and stab him in the back during his “moment of greatest passion.” But real life isn’t like that. In real life that moment comes and goes, and when he rolls off of you, you feel like your soul has been ripped out by its bloody roots, leaving only a husk of what you were before.

  That was the state she’d been in when her true prince walked into her life. He wasn’t riding a white charger or wearing a doublet or a wizard’s robe; he was wearing a blackjack dealer’s uniform, and watching her with an empathy that cut right through her hardened defenses. His eyes were the opposite of those burning above her now: soft and kind and infinitely understanding. And somehow, she’d known, he had seen her torment before speaking to her. He didn’t know the nature of it; that would have killed him, literally, for he would have tried to stop what was going on, and he is no match for the shape-shifter. He’s too good for the job he has—too good for her, really—but he doesn’t think so. He loves her.

  The problem is that he’s married. And to a good woman. Linda despises herself for wanting the husband of another woman. But what can you do if you truly love someone? How can you banish a feeling that is stronger than the darkness that’s eating you from the inside out?

  “You’re making a bloody bags of it,” the demon growls in contempt. “Do ye want me to change at Baker Street?”

  Linda shrinks in fear, moves her hips faster. She’s picked up enough slang to feel nausea at the innocuous-sounding euphemism. Her extra effort seems to allay his anger; at least there’s no more coded talk of turning her over.

  She shuts her eyes and prays that the demon moving inside her won’t discover her secret prince, or what he’s doing at this very moment to put the world in balance again, like the heroes in her novels—not until it’s one delicious second too late. For if the demon or his henchmen discover that, Timothy will die—horribly. Worse, they will surely make him talk before the end.

  That’s one of their specialties.

  CHAPTER

  3

  “Penn?” Tim says softly, touching my knee. “Are you okay?”

  I’m bent over three blurry photographs in my lap, trying to absorb what’s printed on the rectangles of cheap typing paper, with only the wavering flame of a cigarette lighter to illuminate them. It takes a while to truly see images like these. As an assistant district attorney, I found that murder victims—no matter how brutally beaten or mutilated—did not affect me quite so deeply as images of those who had survived terrible crimes. The mind has a prewired mechanism for distancing itself from the dead, surely a survival advantage in our species. But we have no effective filter for blocking out the suffering of living humans—none besides turning away, either physically or through denial (not if we’re “raised right,” as Ruby Flowers, one of the women who “raised” me would have said).

  The first picture shows the face of a dog that looks as though it was hit by a truck and dragged a hundred yards over broken glass. Yet despite its horrific wounds, the animal is somehow standing under its own power, and staring into the camera with its one remaining eye. Wincing with revulsion, I slide the photo to the bottom of the group and find myself looking at a blond girl—not a woman, but a girl—carrying a tray filled with mugs of beer. It takes a moment to register that the girl, who’s no older than fifteen, wears no t
op. A vacant smile animates her lips, but her eyes are eerily blank, the look of a psych patient on Thorazine.

  When I slide this photo aside, my breath catches in my throat. What might be the same girl (I can’t be sure) lies on a wooden floor while a much older man has intercourse with her. The most disturbing thing about this photo is that it was shot from behind and between a group of men watching the act. They’re only visible from knee to shoulder—three wear slacks and polo shirts, while a fourth wears a business suit—but all have beer mugs in their hands.

  “Did you take these pictures?” I ask, unable to hide my disgust.

  “No—Damn!” Tim jerks the hand holding the cigarette lighter, and the guttering light goes out. “You seen enough?”

  “Too much. Who took these?”

  “A guy I know. Let’s leave it at that for now.”

  “Does he know you have them?”

  “No. And he’d be in serious shit if anybody knew he’d taken them.”

  I lay the pictures beside Tim’s leg, then close my eyes and rub my temples to try to stop an incipient headache. “Who’s the girl?”

  “Don’t know. I really don’t. They bring in different ones.”

  “She didn’t look more than fifteen.”

  “If that.”

  “Those pictures were taken around here?”

  “At a hunting camp a few miles away. They run people to the dogfights on their VIP boat. Change the venues each time.”

  Now that the lighter is out, my night vision is returning. Tim’s haggard face is wan in the moonlight. I expel a rush of air. “God, I wish I hadn’t seen those.”

  He doesn’t respond.

  “And the dog?”

  “The loser of a fight. Just before his owner killed him.”

  “Christ. Is that the worst of it?”

  Tim sighs like a man stripped of precious illusions. “Depends on your sensibilities, I guess.”