The Devil''s Punchbowl

  A wave of fear rolls through me. “Are you saying Blackhawk might give up Annie’s location if the government pushed hard enough?”

  “No, no. But they might give up my name, and maybe yours. Sands could find out I’m involved and figure you’re trying to bust him, not help him.”

  “I see.”

  Kelly gives me a sidelong glance. “What are you going to do with that disc, if you find it?”

  The truth is, I’m not sure, but I keep that to myself. “I hope you’re about to find out.”

  “So how did you figure out the clues?” Kelly asks.

  “He hasn’t even told me that,” Caitlin says with pique.

  “When I searched the cemetery yesterday, I searched the graves of everyone Tim and I both knew. Classmates we’ve lost, people from St. Stephen’s who died young. I even searched all the famous graves I knew. But I left out one grave. It never even occurred to me that Tim would use it.”

  “Whose was it?”

  “A high school senior who was killed by a drunk driver in 1979.”

  Caitlin leans up between the seats. “Why didn’t you think of him the other day?”

  “Because Tim Jessup was the driver who killed him.”

  “My God. But how did the clue make you think of him?”

  “The boy’s name was Patrick McQueen.”

  Kelly smiles after a moment, but Caitlin shrugs. Sometimes a ten-year age gap causes issues.

  “The Great Escape?” I prompt. “Steve McQueen ? He ran from the Nazis on a motorcycle? Crashed into barbed wire at the end?”

  “Oh okay, I get it.”

  “I never considered Patrick’s grave because I couldn’t imagine Tim thinking about him in a desperate moment like that. Tim spent a year in jail because of that accident, and it ruined most of his life. I figured he’d done everything he could to get Patrick out of his mind. But I should have known better. He’s probably thought about Patrick every day of his life since that night. Especially lately. I think he’d been trying to make up for what he did by living a good life.”

  Caitlin shakes her head sadly.

  “But what does ‘dog pack’ mean?” Kelly asks. “What’s that part of it?’

  “Tim and I used to ride our bikes in the cemetery when we were kids. Once a pack of wild dogs chased us there. I’m not positive about the connection, but I think I know. We’ll be sure in two minutes. When you get up to the flat part of this road, you’ll see the river on your left. Turn at the main gate.”

  As Kelly does so, Caitlin touches my shoulder. “Are you sure you can’t remember anything else about the girl who gave you the note? Something must have triggered that feeling of familiarity. What was it?”

  I try to recall the girl’s face, but the harder I concentrate on it, the less distinct it becomes. “I really can’t place her. I have this vague feeling she reminded me of a girl who used to wait on me across the river somewhere. A store or a restaurant in Vidalia, maybe. But the girl I’m thinking of was really heavy, and a lot plainer. I’m probably way off.”

  “Don’t stop thinking about it. Maybe it will come to you later.”

  “I do better with remembering when I’m not trying to.”

  Despite this assertion, I plumb my memory for some connection to the girl’s face, but as we climb Maple Street toward the hill from which the Charity Hospital used to look down upon the cemetery, a very different memory rises. In the summer after sixth grade, a bunch of us were staying overnight with a friend who lived downtown. Most of us lived in subdivisions, but a few schoolmates still lived in ramshackle Victorians fronted with wrought-iron fences and backed by narrow alleys and deep gullies. We’d ride our jerry-built banana bikes downtown, pretending to be Evel Knievel, then spend the night tearing around the city streets, trying to do enough yelling to get the police to chase us.

  We were just old enough that when Davy Cass suggested we should invade the cemetery, no one dared to say he was afraid to do it. I certainly didn’t. Partly it was the idea of a deserted graveyard that scared me, but another part knew that the cemetery lay on the north side of town, uncomfortably close to the Negro sections of the city. During that era, no black male with his wits about him would have dared say a cross word to a white child, but we didn’t know that. There was old Jim Clay, who lived in a shack on the Fenton property and who would fire rock salt from a shotgun if we got too near his place. Nook Wilson at the gas station had killed his wife with a butcher knife and sometimes looked at you like he’d just as soon kill you too. That was who I thought about when our bike routes took us close to the north side after dark, and not Ruby Flowers, our maid, who lived out that way and would have coldcocked anyone who tried to hurt me. But mostly—and wisely—we feared the unknown.

  Our first thirty minutes in the cemetery were euphoric. We flashed down the narrow lanes between the mausoleums like the superheroes we worshipped, riding no-hands and seeing who could shut his eyes the longest without crashing. I rode from the main gate to Catholic Hill without once touching the handlebars, holding my arms out like wings (and only peeking a couple of times). But this hyperexcited state ended with the sound of a single growl. Barks wouldn’t have frightened us, since most of us owned dogs. But when Davy suddenly skidded to a stop, the rest of us slammed into him from behind, and then we saw what had stopped him.

  Crouching in the middle of the path was a black cur that had to weigh sixty pounds. Behind him a dozen more dogs stood alert, awaiting an attack signal. The cur had his teeth bared and his ears back, and when I saw his feverish eyes glint in the moonlight, I cringed with prehistoric fear. The lane cut between walls of earth twelve feet high, so our only escape route lay behind us. I felt my bladder turn to stone, then communal panic flashed through our little tribe. By the time we got our bikes turned, fifteen or twenty dogs were in pursuit. We’d had trouble with wild packs before, usually in the woods, and every summer our mothers reminded us that Billy Jenkins had been forced to take twenty-three rabies shots in his stomach because of a dog bite. This knowledge made us pedal like madmen for the gates, praying for deliverance as the frenzied animals snapped at our legs.

  We didn’t have a chance. Only the savant-level survival instincts of Trey Stacy saved us. When he jumped from his bike and dashed for the low-hanging branch of an oak tree, the herd instinct kicked in. Soon seven boys were treed like coons in the great gnarled branches of the oak. The furious dogs leaped and gnashed their teeth, barking and howling like demons among the gravestones, but that was their undoing. Their baying eventually drew the attention of a passing motorist, who called the police. The first cop shot one dog with his pistol, but the pack didn’t retreat until his red-haired partner killed the alpha male with a shotgun. Several boys were crying as the police hauled us back to our sleepover, not for fear of their parents, but from the shock of seeing the dogs killed. I was shivering myself and glad when my father arrived to take me home rather than let me stay the night.

  Caitlin touches my shoulder again and says, “Penn? We just went through the main gate. Where are we going?”

  I point along a rank of oaks that line the nearby lane. When we reach the oak of my memory, I tell Kelly to stop. Its trunk is massive now, and its great branches hang so low that weather-treated four- by-fours have been propped beneath to keep them from sagging to the ground. Across the lane from the tree, beneath a twisted limb, lies the grave of Patrick McQueen.

  With Caitlin trailing, I walk to his gravestone, a tall slab of granite with the text of Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young” engraved on its face. One quick scan tells me that no disc is hidden beside the stone, but I’m certain now that Tim told me what I need to know. Leaving the stone, I walk out to where the crooked limb almost touches the grass. Then I set my foot in its crook, grip the rising branch with both hands, and begin climbing toward the trunk of the tree.

  I don’t have to go far. Fifteen feet from where I mounted the limb, wedged into a forked branch, is a hardcover copy of my third novel, Nothing but the Truth. The sight of its jacket moves me strangely, but the feeling p
asses as I look down and see Patrick McQueen’s grave almost directly beneath me. For an infinite second, I feel as though I am Tim Jessup, clinging here in the dark, desperate to preserve the evidence I’ve stolen from the men I hate so deeply. Closing my eyes for a moment, I let this déjŕ vu bleed out of me. Then I fan the pages of my own book.

  A flash of silver makes my heart thump. Lying between pages 342 and 343 is a DVD in a transparent plastic sleeve. There’s no mark or label on the disc, and from the purplish color and look of the data side, it appears to be homemade.

  “What did you find?” Caitlin calls from below. “It looks like a book.”

  “The disc is in it. We need a computer with a DVD drive.”

  “I can grab a notebook computer from the office.”

  Kelly steps up beside her, his blond hair bright beside her black mane. “I’d feel better with four walls around us. And we need to make some copies.”

  “We’re two minutes from the office,” Caitlin says. “We can lock the building. If Sands tried to storm the Examiner, that would make national headlines.”

  “That doesn’t mean he won’t,” says Kelly. “We don’t know what’s on that disc. I’ll cover the building while you two check it out. If there’s anything you think I should see, call me on the Star Trek.”

  Closing the disc back into the book, I slide a little way down the limb, then drop six feet to the soft earth below.

  “Tim died for this.”

  Caitlin nods slowly, then puts her arms around me and lays her head on my chest. “You can’t bring him back. All you can do is finish what he started.”

  “Is that the plan?” Kelly asks.

  My thoughts on Annie, I pull away from Caitlin and put the book into her hands. “What do you think?”

  She looks back at me with the least feminine expression I’ve ever seen on her face. “I’m not your mother. I say nail the son of a bitch to the wall.”

  Caitlin and I are sitting in front of an Apple Cinema Display in the office of the Examiner’s publisher. Behind us Daniel Kelly stands alert, a Heckler and Koch MP5 submachine gun in his hands. Kelly thought he should stand guard outside, but I want him to see whatever’s on the DVD. He certainly knows more about data encryption than Caitlin and me.

  “It’s coming up now,” Caitlin says, pointing at a small, spinning beach ball on the blue screen. Then the screen goes black. “Do you think there’s any risk of destroying the data by playing it on the wrong machine or anything?”

  “I doubt it,” says Kelly. “The disc may not boot without a code, though. Let’s see. Look—”

  From out of the blackness comes an image of weathered, old Corinthian columns against a summer sky. The camera pans along the leaves of the capitals, then pulls back to reveal a square of great columns with no building between them, fronted by a set of broad steps that lead into thin air.

  “What the hell?” asks Kelly.

  “I know that place,” says Caitlin. “That’s the Windsor Ruins, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I say, a chill of foreboding in my chest.

  “What’s the Windsor Ruins?” Kelly asks.

  Caitlin’s shaking her head in confusion. “It’s where Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift filmed Raintree County.” She turns and looks at me with disbelieving eyes. “Penn, is this ?”

  “Maybe.”

  A couple of years after Caitlin moved to Natchez, she watched Raintree County with me on cable one night. When I told her that part of the movie had been filmed close to Natchez, she’d insisted on visiting the burned-out mansion. We took a video camera with us, and as we toured the columns, which stand like silent sentinels in the deep woods north of town, we thought it would be fun to film a romantic kiss on the steps where Taylor and Clift had shot their scene. As was common during that phase of our relationship, things quickly got heated, and we retired behind the huge base of one column to finish what we’d begun on the steps. We’d had some wine, and since we were alone at the site, Caitlin suggested we leave the camera running. I have a feeling that the results of that suggestion are about to flash up on the screen before us.

  “Oh, God,” Caitlin cries, as a shot of her moving ardently beneath me fills the screen. Feminine moans come from the computer’s speakers.

  “I’ll close my eyes,” Kelly offers, “but will somebody tell me what the hell is going on? Did you put in the wrong disc?”

  They both turn to me as though I’m playing some childish joke on them.

  “That’s the DVD that was in the book,” I say softly. “What the hell?”

  There’s a jerky cut, then Caitlin is sitting astride me, her bare breasts flushed, her neck mottled pink.

  “You want me to leave?” asks Kelly, staring in confusion at the screen.

  “I don’t care if you see my tits,” Caitlin snaps, “I want to know what’s going on!”

  I’m about to stop the player when the scene changes. This image is lower resolution than the first, because it was shot on an early eight-millimeter video camera, one my father bought around 1993. In this video, Annie is three years old, and she’s pretending to make her way hand-over-hand across a horizontal ladder. Beneath her, trying to stay out of the frame, are her mother and me. Annie giggles with the unalloyed joy that no parent can hear without a tug at the heart, and Sarah laughs every time Annie giggles.

  “You’re almost there!” Sarah yells encouragingly. “You’ve almost done it!”

  Explosive giggles fill the soundtrack as Annie reaches out and grips the last crossbar with her plump little hand. When I pull her free and set her on my shoulders, Sarah hugs us both, then raises her hand in triumph. Too upset to speak, I reach out, turn the red trackball on the desk, and pause the video.

  “Penn?” Caitlin says worriedly. “What is this? Are you okay?”

  “It’s not the videos that bother me,” I say, lying just a little. “That first one? The one of us doing it?”

  “Yes?”

  “I didn’t want Annie to see this tape by accident, so I put it in my safety-deposit box at the bank.”

  Caitlin blinks rapidly, trying to work out what’s going on.

  Kelly gets there first. “Sands made this disc. Or Quinn. Sometime before this afternoon, they found the real disc, then made this one and replaced the original with it. That’s what you’re saying, right?”

  “It’s the only explanation.”

  “And the tape of you and Caitlin—the one in your safe-deposit box was the only copy?”

  “Absolutely. Does that mean someone at the bank helped them?”

  “Not necessarily. Sands may have a box at the same bank. Depending on bank procedures, he or Quinn could have gone in to see their box, then broken into yours. They probably did it as soon as Sands perceived you as a threat. Same with your house. That’s probably where he got the old home movies, right?”

  “No. Those were in my dad’s house.”

  “The fact that he got to this stuff is the message. Even though he got his stolen disc back, he’s saying he can get to you anyplace, anytime.”

  “We’d better watch the rest of the tape, just to be sure.”

  Caitlin looks at me. “Are you sure you want to see it?”

  “Me? What about you?”

  “Kelly already saw me naked. Big whoop. It’s you I’m worried about.” Her voice goes quiet. “Stuff with Sarah? Things you might not want to see with me? Or me to see at all?”

  I take her hand, and Kelly looks away. “It’s okay. Whatever there is, you can watch.”

  Caitlin swallows hard, and her eyes soften. Then she sighs, composes herself, and clicks the button on the trackball.

  On the screen, Sarah and Annie and I fade to black. Then Annie appears again, alone this time. She can’t be more than ten months old, and she’s sitting on the steps of our house in Houston. She looks into the lens, then reaches for someone outside the frame. When no one takes her, her eyes fill with confusion and she begins to cry. Just as Sarah’s hands enter the frame to take her, the sound of maddened dogs bursts from the speakers. The savage cacophony hurls me thirty years back in time, to the night Tim and I p
edaled for our lives in the cemetery. From the sound, five or six dogs are fighting over something, but then the snarls and snapping teeth are punctuated by a sound that freezes my blood. It’s a man screaming—first like a man, then like a little boy being torn apart by wolves. Male voices shout in the background, but I can’t make out distinct words. The screams become shrieks, rising in pitch and volume until they’re suddenly cut off. What follows can only be the sound of animals fighting over meat. As we stare in stunned horror, the screen goes blue.

  “That’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard,” Caitlin says. “Do you think the disc has fingerprints on it?”

  “Yours,” I say. “These guys don’t make that kind of mistake.”

  “Who are these people? That wasn’t dogfighting.”

  “That was a snuff tape,” Kelly says, a strange awe in his voice. “I’ll bet they have video too. They just couldn’t risk showing it to us.”

  “You think it shows them?” I ask.

  “Maybe. I’ll bet we could ID the victim from it.”

  “Ben Li?” I suggest.

  Kelly shrugs. He’s already read Linda’s note and listened to the tape of Tim’s car chase. “Could have been. This guy sounded older to me when he first screamed, though. Late thirties, forties maybe.”

  “Jesus,” says Caitlin. “You can guess people’s ages by their screaming?”

  The Delta veteran shrugs again. “Occupational hazard.”

  She turns to me and starts to speak, then steps close. “Penn? I’ve never seen you look like that. Except maybe after Ruby was in the fire.”

  “Sands got what he wanted, right?” I say too loudly. “He found his missing disc. So why go to all this trouble? Why keep fucking with me?”

  “Because they’re still vulnerable,” Kelly says. “They don’t have all the variables locked down. The USB drive copy may still be out there. And now we find out this Ben Li kid may have kept some kind of insurance. Sands means to keep you on the hook for that stuff too. That’s what he’s saying with this.”