Page 57 of The Devil''s Punchbowl

  Seldom have I felt more free-floating testosterone than I do in this elevator. Sands and Kelly, predictably, have gained the back wall, but I have to stand with Quinn’s chest pressing into my back. I half expect the knife he used to slice open my belt to slide between my kidneys.

  “Fifteen minutes,” Hull says, as the car stops on the main deck. “You don’t have Kelly a suit by then, we’re leaving without him.”

  “He’ll have it,” I say, my mind on the recorder downstairs as the doors open.

  Hull and his man are first out. When they step around the partition, Hull beckons Kelly forward. As Kelly moves past me, I feel a hand grab my shirt and pull me backward, then a man’s breath in my ear. “Remember that night on your porch?” Sands whispers. “You make all the agreements you want with Hull, mate. Just remember this. Nothing in my world gets resolved on paper. Nothing.”

  As I pull away, he twists a piece of flesh on my side hard enough to pop blood vessels, but nothing matters at this point. Nothing but signaling Chief Logan to get the recorder from below. Kelly fades back to me with a curious look, as though sensing that something has transpired, but I shake my head and push him forward.

  Rounding the partition, I look up to the head of the escalator, but Logan isn’t there. A large crowd is upstairs, and I try to pick the chief from the moving mass of bodies as Kelly takes my wrist and tugs me forward.

  The ring of a cell phone behind me makes me turn. When I do, I see Seamus Quinn holding his phone close to his ear, trying to hear above the jangling noise of the casino. I’m about to turn forward again when Quinn’s eyes go wide, and he grabs the arm of Jonathan Sands, who’s two feet to his right. Sands looks annoyed, but Quinn jerks him sideways and speaks urgently into his ear.

  Every instinct tells me something has gone horribly wrong. Without even sighting Logan, I raise my hand to the top of my head and pat it three times. Sands’s eyes lock onto mine from a distance of ten feet, the malice in them absolute. For a brief time we are joined by mutual hatred, then his hand darts into his pocket, my eyes scarcely able to follow the swift movement.

  A burst of white lights the night outside the casino, then a staccato blast like fireworks rattles the windows. The crowd falls into a shocked hush, and then the whole casino lurches away from the shore, sending hundreds of people reeling. As a collective scream of panic fills the saloon, Sands gives me a savage grin, then turns and races toward the stern of the barge, Quinn close behind him.

  “Get off the boat!” Kelly shouts, knocking me aside as he flies past in pursuit. “Go, go, go! I’ll get the tape!”

  CHAPTER

  69

  Water cascades from the sprinkler system, and alarms ring shrilly while a recorded voice directs people to the exits with absurd calm. The bow of the barge seems to be drifting away from the riverbank, slowly but with increasing speed, like a log being pulled into a flooding river. The sensation is eerie, as though a huge hotel ballroom had begun to spin on its axis.

  A scream of terror draws my gaze to the escalator. Chief Logan stands at its head, shouting for calm. Below him, a surging mass of gamblers has clogged the motorized staircase. Many have fallen, and people higher up are trampling them in their headlong flight to reach the main deck. Logan tries to stop the stampede, but the crowd swells over him like a tide, everyone with a single thought in mind—reaching the main exit.

  Whirling from the mob scene, I look for Kelly, but I can’t find him in the seething mass of bodies. Then, to my right, I see his blond ponytail disappearing through a service door disguised as a section of wall. Maybe the elevator has stopped working.

  I charge through the door where Kelly disappeared and immediately hear footsteps on the staircase below. Leaning over the rail, I see the top of his head as he crashes through a fire door. Taking the stairs two at a time, I follow. Are Sands and Quinn somewhere ahead? Or is Kelly only after the tape? All I know is that whatever happened to this vessel was triggered by Jonathan Sands. Someone phoned Quinn with information, he relayed it to Sands, and Sands triggered the explosions.

  Beyond the fire door, I see Kelly sprinting down a narrow passage that seems to run the length of the lower deck. It’s the same corridor we were in only a minute ago. Ten yards past Kelly, Seamus Quinn veers right and disappears, and I realize he’s back in the room we just left—the torture room nicknamed the Devil’s Punchbowl.

  Could Quinn know about the tape? Did someone betray the presence of the recorder?

  Kelly darts though the hatch where Quinn disappeared. Before I can follow, the boat abruptly stops drifting, and I crash to the floor. Either the barge has hit something or it’s reached the limit of any mooring cables that remain intact. Scrambling to my feet, I move through the hatch after Kelly.

  The interrogation room is lit only by red emergency lights. Kelly stands thirty feet from me on the landing of the metal stairs by the far wall, his back braced against a steel hatch. One arm is locked around Quinn’s neck, the other pins one of the security chief’s arms. Jonathan Sands crouches two steps down from the landing, both hands raised, his fingers curled inward. There’s blood on the side of his face. He seems to want to get to the hatch, but when he lunges toward it, Kelly flicks out a lightning kick, driving him back.

  “Where’s the recorder?” I shout. “Did they get it?”

  “I don’t know!” Kelly answers, wrenching his arm tighter around Quinn’s neck.

  The cart at the center of the room looks undisturbed. Before I can reach it, the boat shifts again, and a thunderous rumble rolls through the barge. Then a vibration like thousands of running feet rattles the hull. On the monitor screens to my right, I see screaming passengers trying frantically to escape the upper deck.

  As Sands rushes the hatch once more and Kelly drives him back, I snatch open the lower door of the cart and probe with my hand, unwilling to take my eyes off Kelly. Feeling several hard objects, I rake everything onto the floor. The recording device is there, amid rolls of wire and duct tape, but I have to blink before I can take in what also lies beside the recorder: a tiny, antique-looking pistol with a leather string attached to its curved butt.

  Walt Garrity’s derringer.

  Jiao

  Sands’s lover obviously feared that he’d never be taken as easily as we’d thought. Scooping up the recorder, I stand without reaching for the gun. There’s no need for it.

  “Kelly, let them go! I’ve got it! Don’t risk your life! They can’t get away!”

  Sands looks back at me and laughs, then makes another try for the hatch. Kelly drives him off with a kick, but as he does Quinn shifts in his grasp, and Kelly almost loses him.

  “Danny and Carl are out there!” I shout. “It’s time to get off the boat! Carl can blow them away if they go through that hatch!”

  “Sands still has the detonator!” Kelly screams. “Call Logan! We need cops down here!”

  As the significance of detonator hits me, Quinn smashes an elbow into Kelly’s chin, stunning him long enough for Sands to kick him away from the hatch. While Quinn engages Kelly, Sands spins the hatch wheel, then seizes the heavy metal door and throws it to the foot of the stairs with a clang. I drop to my knees, grabbing for the derringer, but too late. Kelly twists like a cat, flinging Quinn bodily over his shoulder in a judo throw. The Irishman’s legs slam the rim of the open hatch, and I hear the crack of bone. I’m running forward with the gun when Quinn snatches Kelly’s shirt from behind and yanks him backward with all his strength. Sands kicks out at the same moment, and Kelly tumbles through the open hatch, snatching Quinn after him as he falls out of the barge.

  Sands and I are alone.

  I stop at the foot of the stairs, aiming the derringer up at the Irishman’s back. He’s standing in the hatch, staring down at what must be Kelly and Quinn fighting in the water. Certain that Kelly can handle himself against Quinn, I’m tempted to run for the main deck, but I can’t leave Sands with a detonator in his hand—not if any unexploded charges remain aboard.

  “Back away!” I yell. “Get back! We’re g
oing up to the main deck!”

  Sands looks over his shoulder and laughs again. “Look at those screens! Do you want to be trampled to death? Do you want to drown under a thousand people?”

  The monitor screens are blinking erratically, but I can still see that the grand saloon is teeming with panicked gamblers who have nowhere to run. Sands is right. Trying for the main exit at this point would be crazy. And the likelihood that Logan and his squad can impose any kind of order on that mob is minuscule. Climbing the first two steps, I steady the tiny derringer in my right hand and aim between Sands’s shoulder blades.

  “Look at me, damn it! Give me the detonator!”

  Sands turns from the hatch and raises his right hand, turning a small metal box in the red light. “What are you going to do with that peashooter? You need to press that against a man’s belly to be sure of hitting him.”

  I take another step upward, and Sands’s grin disappears. He looks out the hatch, curses, then turns back to me.

  “That first charge was nothing. Primacord on the mooring cables. I can blow the bottom out of this tub anytime. You might hit me if you shoot, but that pimp gun won’t kill me. Not before I push the button.”

  Come on, Kelly, I think, wishing the commando would catapult back through the hatch like a ninja assassin. The river can’t be more than three feet below the hatch, if that.

  “They’re gone,” Sands says, reading my mind. “You got what you wanted, Cage. You threw a wrench into the works. You queered my deal with Hull and cost me my fucking casino. Jiao helped you, didn’t she? She planted the recorder.”

  “If you step through that hatch, a sniper’s going to blow your head off.”

  Holding the detonator tight, Sands crouches and looks out over the darkening river. “I don’t think so.”

  “He’s got a night-vision scope.”

  “Oh, I’m sure. But where is he?”

  “Helicopter.”

  “Well, then. You’re going to call him off.”

  “Why would I do that?” I move one step higher.

  Sands wields the detonator like a Taser. “Because if you don’t, I’ll send this bitch to the bottom. I’ve got seven or eight hundred hostages in my hand.”

  “You can’t destroy this boat while you’re still on it.”

  Sands gives me a defiant sneer and presses the remote.

  The Magnolia Queen shudders like a bell being pounded with a sledgehammer. When the reverberations subside, the sound of screams reaches my ringing ears. Whether they’re coming from the speakers or from other parts of the casino I don’t know, but I’m certain Sands has mortally wounded the barge.

  “If they don’t seal the forward hold in sixty seconds,” he says, “this tub is going to the bottom. Call off your sniper, Cage. I have two more charges left.”

  The barge shifts beneath my feet, wallowing in the river.

  “Okay! I’ll do it.” I take out my cell phone and pretend to make a call, but there’s no way I can let Sands leave this hold. If he gets twenty feet from the hull, he’ll blow every charge he has left just for spite.

  “Call him off,” Sands says, scanning the river from the hatch. “I’m leaving. You can stay and die with the white trash and niggers you love so dearly.”

  Walt’s derringer spits flame as I pull the trigger.

  Sands’s eyes register an instant of terror, but his fear fades into a smirk when the ricochet pings off against the steel wall.

  “What did I tell you?” he cries, laughing. “One shot left.”

  “No. I’ve got four left, thanks to a good friend. And your old lover.”

  Sands’s arrogance twists into rage before my eyes. He whistles shrilly, then spins toward the hatch as I fire again. A bloom like a red paintball round blossoms on his right shoulder blade, then he drops through the hatch.

  No splash, I’m thinking when I hear metal scrape behind me. Whirling, I see only a blur of white against the red wash of emergency lights.

  I twist away, but too late.

  The jaws of Sands’s Bully Kutta clamp down on my left upper arm, then hurl me bodily off the steps and slam me to the deck. Releasing my arm to go for my throat, the dog opens its maw and lunges downward, digging into my shoulder and neck. With the speed of blind reflex I whip my gun hand under its jaw and pull the derringer’s trigger. There’s a muffled pop, then the Bully Kutta lurches and topples onto its side, paws paddling the air as it voids its bladder and bowels on the deck.

  The sound of a revving outboard motor echoes through the room. Scrambling up to the hatch, I look down and see Sands seated three feet below me in a gray Zodiac raft. Bright red blood covers his back and right side, but his right hand still holds the detonator, which has several buttons on its face. With his left hand, he’s struggling to unmoor the raft from a cleat mounted on the barge’s side. Bracing myself in the hatch, I point the derringer down at him.

  “Turn off the motor!”

  The Irishman looks up in exhausted surprise, then holds up the detonator like a cross against a vampire. “Do you really want to die here, Cage?”

  “No more than you! That sniper’s an ex-marine. The same one who shot your dog on the island. He can put a round through your brainstem before you push your buttons.”

  Sands looks over the darkening river, then winces in pain. “I’ll take my chances. I’ve still got a few lives left.”

  As he struggles to free the line with his good hand, I swing Walt’s derringer to the left and fire a round through the Zodiac’s side.

  Sands screams in rage at the hiss of escaping air, but the Zodiac’s line is almost free of the cleat. Though part of the raft is deflating, it still looks seaworthy. And while Carl is out there somewhere, he has no idea what’s happening in this small recess in the barge’s side. He and McDavitt are probably trying to rescue people from the deck of the sinking casino—or from the river itself.

  I’m on the verge of firing at Sands’s head when I see riverbank twenty yards behind him. What I should see is three-quarters of a mile of water and the Louisiana shore. The Queen’s stern must have broken away from the bank and now must be pointing downstream. The three huge ramps providing egress from the boat must be hanging in the main channel of the river. Escape for the passengers is truly impossible. If Sands gets clear of the barge and blows the remaining charges, hundreds will drown in the fast-moving water of the cut bank.

  Sands shouts in triumph as the line comes free.

  Afraid of missing with a headshot, I aim at the center of his chest and fire. The shock of the impact jolts him. He looks down at his chest, then up at me in amazement. While his eyes bulge with incomprehension, I leap for the bloody hand holding the detonator.

  My momentum topples us both into the river. The cold water shocks me, but I scrabble for his hand, my only thought to submerge the detonator long enough to short it out. The metal box goes under, but Sands drives his arm upward and gets it clear again, just out of reach. To keep it there, he clings to a length of cable on the barge’s side with his good arm, while I cling to him. He’s wheezing with every breath, but hatred still burns like molten glass in his eyes.

  I must have hit a lung, not his heart .

  Unable to reach the detonator, I climb Sands’s bloodied body like a drowning man, and my weight begins to push him down. Using the cable for leverage, he snaps up both knees and almost jars me loose. The powerful current tugs at my body, and I wonder briefly where Kelly is.

  Sands brings up his knees again, but this time I’m ahead of him, clawing at his chest, searching for the bullet hole. When my forefinger finds the opening, I drive it deep into the hole and tear at the muscle, hoping to find his heart. It’s all he can do to stay afloat, I think, but as I turn to look for the detonator, Sands slams his forehead into my right ear. There’s a flash of white, and my hands go limp, but as the river begins to pull me away, I feel his shirtsleeve tangled in my fingers, and I yank it down with all my strength.

  This time the detonator goes under and stays there. Sands bellows and tries to fight, but his strength is failing. His lung
must be filling with blood. I’m riding his arm now, leverage on my side, the detonator wedged against my groin.

  With his last reserve of strength, Sands releases the cable and smashes his good hand into my face. So powerful is this blow that I nearly lose consciousness, but one thought glows in my fading mind: Hang on to the detonator. He pounds the side of my head again and again, but each blow carries less force than the last, until the beating ceases and the arm in my hands goes limp. Then I’m clinging not to Sands, but to the crumpling Zodiac, and Sands is spinning out into the river.

  CHAPTER

  70

  Caitlin and I are walking toward the pier at Drew Elliott’s house on Lake St. John. It’s one thirty in the morning. The moon is high, the air is cold, and the lake looks as deserted as it must have when the Mississippi River cut off this wayward bend long ago.

  We’re here because Daniel Kelly called me at City Hall three hours ago and asked me to bring Caitlin out here—alone. I was stunned to learn that Kelly had survived—Chief Logan and the Coast Guard had written him off as drowned—but Kelly would give me no details over the phone. When I asked about Quinn, he told me the Irishman was dead. He would explain the rest in person, he said, at Lake St. John, but Caitlin and I must come alone and be absolutely sure we weren’t followed.

  It seemed a strange request given all that had happened on the river, and it was difficult to get away from town, even at this late hour. The insanity of the early evening had devolved into a night of phone calls to the state capital and to Washington, meetings with Shad Johnson and the police, visits to the hospital, and a few stolen moments with my family. Annie is staying at my parents’ house, under the watchful eyes of James Ervin, his brother, and my father, who refuses to believe that all danger has passed. We found the lake house locked when we arrived, with no lights on, no cars parked in the driveway, and no sign of Kelly. Unsure what to do, we decided to walk down to the pier and sit by the lake.