The Devil's Punchbowl

by Greg Iles

  “You going to give me one of those Star Treks?”

  Kelly laughs and passes me the one from his pocket. As I take it, he turns to Walt and says, “How about you, Mr. Garrity? You want one?”

  The old ranger smiles. “Where I’m going, they’d just take it off me. A gun they might not mind, but radios are a big no-no.”

  “Just making sure.”

  “Thanks, but I work alone. Kind of a habit.”

  Kelly laughs suddenly, as though at Walt’s expense.

  “What is it?” Garrity asks, a little edge in his voice.

  “I’ve been trying to remember something all night. Something my uncle used to say.”

  “What’s that?”

  “‘One riot, one Ranger.’ That’s the motto, isn’t it?”

  Walt sighs like a man who’s heard this line a thousand times too many. “That’s the myth, not the reality.”

  Kelly says, “I understand,” and offers his hand.

  Garrity takes it and shakes firmly. “Good luck to you, soldier. And keep your eyes peeled for dogs.”

  “I’ll hear the dogs,” Kelly assures him.

  “No, you won’t. Dogfighters are like the dopers now. Once upon a time, they used guard dogs to warn you away and alert them to run. Now they sever the vocal cords so there’s no bark to warn you.”

  A chill races across my skin.

  “My God,” says my father.

  “They’re on your throat before you even know they’re there,” Walt says. “A lot of cops have been hurt like that this past year. Some killed.”

  “Thanks,” Kelly says. “I’ve heard of that before, but I’ve never seen a dog it’s been done to.”

  “I have,” I say softly. “Jonathan Sands has one.”

  Everyone turns to me.

  “It’s white, and it’s big. I think the breed is called a Bully Kutta.”

  I’ve rarely seen astonishment on Kelly’s face, but I see it now. “That’s a Pakistani breed,” he says. “A war dog. It’s related to the Bully Ker. I’ve seen those fight in Kabul. The tribesmen fight them against bears. Two dogs against a bear, and the dogs always win.”

  “Who the hell are these people?” Dad asks.

  Kelly pats my father on the shoulder. “I don’t think we’ll know that until we find out how Jonathan Sands spent the first part of his life.”

  “Are we going to find out?”

  Kelly nods. “The British government can stonewall Blackhawk all they want, but I’ve got personal friends in the SAS, vets who served in Northern Ireland. We’ll have the story before long.”

  “By tonight?” Caitlin asks.

  “Maybe. In any case, I think we should get out of here. It’s going to be a long day, and an even longer night. Everybody know what their job is?”

  After everyone nods, Kelly reaches into his gear bag and brings out two more walkie-talkies. One he gives to Danny McDavitt, the other to my father. Then he looks at Caitlin and me.

  “You two are together for the duration, right?”

  She nods, and I see color in her cheeks.

  “Glad to see it,” Kelly says with a smile.

  “I am too,” says my father. “Too bad it takes a goddamn crisis to bring them together.”

  “Dr. Cage,” Kelly says, “I’d appreciate it if you’d scope out some safe houses for us, on both sides of the river. Think you can do that?”

  “This time of year, I’m sure I can. Both of my partners’ lake houses are empty.”

  “Hey,” I say, pointing at Kelly. “Caitlin and I are together until tonight. Then I’m with you.”

  CHAPTER

  28

  If it were any other year, this would be my favorite day of the Balloon Festival: the “barge drop” event as seen from the Ramada Inn above the Mississippi River Bridge. The flashy trappings of the festival stand a mile away at Fort Rosalie. Here there is no grand stage, no headline act or spotlights, no carnival rides. But the Natchez Ramada Inn, a monument to bourgeois America, commands one of the most breathtaking views of the Mississippi River on the continent. Soon it will be leveled to make way for yet another casino hotel, but for locals it remains the beating heart of the Balloon Festival. A strong pilot presence gives it the buzz of a military command center from Friday until Sunday evening. You can smell the pork ribs being barbecued by the swimming pool even before you get out of your car. Every room with a river view has been rented for a year in advance, many by local organizations who use the event as an excuse for three days of uninterrupted partying.

  The object of the “barge drop” is for a balloon crew to drop a beanbag onto a white cross marked on the deck of a barge holding position in the Mississippi River. Many end up landing—sometimes crash-landing—on the grounds of the hotel itself, or in the neutral ground at the foot of the massive hill the hotel stands on. But the true center of the festivities is the long hill that falls precipitously from the hotel pool toward Highway 84 and the river. Here hundreds of families gather on blankets and lawn chairs to watch their children slide hell-for-leather down the slope on flattened cardboard boxes, toward a concrete drainage ditch. Each sally is potentially life-threatening, and beyond the concrete lies a much longer slope covered with a thick mat of kudzu. I’ve seen fathers in their forties make twenty or thirty trips up that hill dragging a scarred Maytag box behind them, with a toddler or two still clinging to it like princes on a magic carpet. It’s a miracle the hotel’s owners allow this ritual in our hyperlitigious age. That a dozen lawsuits don’t arise from this activity every year says more about the crowd than anything else. They’re the kind of parents who, if their son broke his arm, would tell him it was his own damn fault for not stopping short of the concrete and to suck it up until they could get Dr. Cage away from his bourbon long enough to splint the bone.

  I spent my first thirty minutes anxiously searching the crowd for Daniel Kelly or signs of people following me. Several times I felt someone was watching me, but whenever I turned, I saw nothing suspicious. Ten minutes ago, I presented the citizenship award to Paul Labry, who had no idea he had been voted the honor. I actually saw tears in Labry’s eyes as he accepted the brass plaque, but my mind was only half on the presentation, because five minutes before my speech, my father had called on Kelly’s Star Trek and told me that Jewel Washington, the coroner, was at the Ramada and had something important to give me. I spotted Jewel right after the speech, serving barbecue under a tent, but she gave no sign of recognizing me, so I decided to stick around until she felt an approach was safe.

  Caitlin is roaming the crowd, just in case Jewel sees her as an obstacle to our communication. She has my backpack slung over her shoulder, and in it the satellite phone and my gun. We’ve done a good job playing the role of reconciled lovers; I only hope Libby Jensen’s not here today. Normally, Libby would be able to handle the situation, but with her son in jail, she might make a scene.

  “Mr. Mayor?” someone says nervously from behind me.

  Turning, I look into the cornflower blue eyes of a girl of about twenty. She’s mousy-haired and round-faced but pretty in her way, a hillbilly girl who will soon lose her looks along with the blush of youth. She’s either tall or wearing very high heels, because I’m look ing almost straight into her eyes. My first coherent thought is that someone should teach her how to apply eye makeup, because she could take off half of what she’s wearing and look twice as good.

  “Hello,” I say. “Are you enjoying the festival?”

  The girl smiles, but her eyes are filled with confusion, or even fear. Something about her seems familiar. Before I can figure out what, she shoves something into my front pants pocket. The contact startles me, but the crowd around us is intent on two balloons that are flying too close together as they sweep in off the river.

  “Don’t read that until you’re by yourself,” the girl says. “It’s superimportant.”

  “Are you—”

  “I gotta go,” she says, then turns and moves into the crowd. I see her leather jacket for a couple of seconds, then only a blur of bodies.

  “Who was that?” Caitlin asks, suddenly appe
aring at my side. She’s staring after the girl, but I can no longer distinguish her from the other people swirling between us and the hotel swimming pool.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What was she saying?”

  “She stuffed something into my pocket. I think it’s a note. She said to read it in private. Jewel must have sent her over. Somebody must be watching Jewel.”

  “Or you.”

  “Yeah.”

  Caitlin takes my hand. “Let’s get out of here.”

  I look around the grounds of the hotel. Unless you have a room, there’s no privacy to be had. “We shouldn’t leave until we’re sure I have whatever Jewel needs to give me.”

  “Have some barbecue, Mr. Mayor!”

  Jewel Washington’s sweating brown face appears before me so suddenly that I can’t quite tell where she came from. She shoves a Chinet plate piled high with tangy-smelling pork into my hands. Before letting go of it, she pinches the back of my hand, then adjusts the plate so that I feel something hard taped to the bottom it. It’s small and rectangular and feels plastic.

  “The pork was going fast,” she says loudly. “Paul Labry told me to bring you a plate before we got down to the bone.” Jewel interposes herself between me and Caitlin, then starts talking to Caitlin in a “girl talk” tone—probably to give me time to remove whatever it is she’s trying to pass me.

  “Caitlin’s cool, Jewel,” I say softly. “What’s under the plate?”

  Without breaking the rhythm of her conversation, the coroner laughs loudly and squeezes Caitlin’s arm, then pulls the two of us together and leans in as though dispensing romantic advice. “A tape of a voice memo Tim Jessup recorded on his cell phone right before he died. Shad has the phone. He has your cell records too. This case is getting crazy, Penn. You need to watch yourself.”

  “You’re crazy, girl!” Caitlin says, playfully shoving Jewel’s shoulder. “But if this keeps up, I might consider moving back here.”

  “You come on back!” cries Jewel. “We need you back here gettin’ on people’s case.” She backs away from us. “You two be talkin’ again, so you can share that plate!”

  Jewel waves broadly, then makes her way back toward the barbecue tent. Two sheriff’s deputies standing in line watch as she approaches, and they don’t take their eyes off her as she moves behind the serving table.

  Caitlin grabs my arm and pulls me around some shrubs beside the pool. “I don’t know what’s going on, but let’s get the hell out of here and see what we’ve got.”

  Balancing the plate on my right hand, I put my left arm around Caitlin and walk toward the breezeway that leads to the hotel parking lot. Nearly everyone we pass speaks to me, and several call Caitlin by name. A local Realtor tries to stop me and talk about a zoning variance, but I plead official business and push on. The moment we get twenty yards of space around us, Caitlin says, “Is the tape in the freaking barbecue or what?”

  “It’s taped to the bottom of the plate.”

  “What kind of tape is it?”

  “A minicassette, I think.”

  “Old school. I have that kind of recorder at the office.”

  “Kmart’s only a minute away.”

  “Okay.” As we make our way through the crowded lot, Caitlin says, “If the tape is what Jewel had for you, then who’s the note in your pocket from?”

  “Probably some nut job, if not the girl herself. There’s the car. Come on.”

  Caitlin unlocks the car we drove here, a Corolla owned by the newspaper. Before we get in, I realize that if someone did follow us here, they could have planted a listening device in the car while we were gone. I feel like hammering my fist against the roof in frustration, but instead I take Caitlin by the upper arms, lean into her neck, and kiss her below the ear.

  “Don’t say anything about this stuff in the car,” I whisper, surprised by the force of my reaction to her scent. “We can read the note on the way to Kmart, but don’t talk about it. We’ll talk in the store.”

  She nods and gets behind the wheel.

  Before I get in, I crouch between the cars, take out the Star Trek, and call Kelly. When he acknowledges, I ask, “Are you at the hotel?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We’re driving to the Kmart, just up the highway. I want you to cover us.”

  “No problem. Everything okay?”

  “I may have good news. Stay close to us.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  As soon as I’m inside the car, I pull the tape from the bottom of the plate and confirm that it’s a standard minicassette. Slipping it deep into my left front pocket, I dig out what the girl shoved down my right pocket. It’s blue-ruled newsprint from the kind of tablets first-graders use when they’re learning to write block print. It’s been folded and refolded many times, like a love note someone passes you in junior high.

  “Let’s get some food for this afternoon,” I say casually. “For postcoital munchies.”

  Caitlin laughs convincingly. “What do you want?”

  “Chips and dip, drinks and stuff. You don’t have anything at your house.”

  “What do you expect after a year and a half?”

  She backs out of the parking space and carefully negotiates the packed vehicles. Soon we’re coasting down the long, curving hill that leads to the highway below the bridge. Across that highway is the Visitors’ Center, where only yesterday I blew Caitlin off in the parking lot. That feels like three days ago. She drops a hand from the wheel and makes a fast “hurry up” motion.

  After I get the note unfolded, I see a woman’s printed script, the fancy, tightly written kind some girls use when they write poems or diary entries. It begins like a thousand other letters and e-mails I’ve received in the past two years—“Dear Mayor Cage”—but when I read the first line after the salutation, my heart starts pumping at twice its normal rate.

  My name is Linda Church. I am hiding out and can’t speak to you in person. Please don’t try to find me. Tim is dead, as you probably know, and they were going to kill me too, but I escaped with my life. Just barely, though. I am hurt, but some good people are helping me. I’m writing to you because on the night Tim was murdered, I learned some things that I think he would have wanted you to know. Honestly, though, I’m afraid even to tell you these things. But TIM TRUSTED YOU, so I am taking this risk. I pray that you did not betray Tim and cost him his life. I loved him and still do, and there must be some good men left in this world.

  Caitlin is poking my leg; she wants to know what’s in the note. To put her off, I place my thumbnail under the first line and hold the note where she can read it. The shock on her face tells me I’ll have to read it where she can see it too, even at the risk of an accident.

  A young man named Ben Li is probably dead by now. He worked on the boat sometimes, but we hardly ever saw him. Tim told me his job was computers. I doubt you will find his body, as I’m pretty sure they have fed him to the dogs. This dogfighting that upset Tim so much is still going on. I don’t know what all Tim was trying to get from the company, and I don’t know if he got whatever it was to you. I can only hope that he did, that he didn’t die for nothing. You should know that Mr. Sands and Mr. Quinn are MONSTERS. They are not just cruel, or sick men. I knew men like that in Las Vegas, and everywhere else I’ve lived too. But Sands and Quinn are demons who live on other people’s pain. I have prayed on this and know it to be true. I have sinned by lying with Sands, but I was in fear for my life, and I believe now to some extent that it was rape. Sands has sex with lots of girls who work on the boat, not always by their choice. He is not who or what he pretends to be. He is a demon wearing a human skin. Quinn is not a demon but he is an animal. No, worse. Animals would never do the awful things he has done. But I’m losing my track. What’s important is the facts, and it’s hard to keep facts in my head right now. I think my leg is infected and maybe broken too. But I can’t risk going to a doctor. I feel so guilty about Julia and the baby. I hope they are going to be all right. If I get out of this alive and I ever manage to make any money, I am going to send some to Julia (Anonymous) to make up for whatever p
ain and worry I have caused her.

  You need to know that Quinn bragged to me that “big things” were coming up soon or about to happen. “Big people” coming into town for something, I don’t know what. But I worked one of those dogfights, and it is probably something like that, even though they are horrible things. The animals die and the men have orgies on the girls and stuff like that. If you could just bust one of those fights, you would find enough drugs to put them all in jail until Judgment Day. I hope I have not made a mistake in writing to you, Mr. Cage. I am trusting Tim’s instinct, but I’m afraid that was not very good in life. If it was, he might still be with us and not in Heaven.

  The people who are hiding me are going to get me away to somewhere safe. May the Lord bless you and keep you safe if you are doing His work.

  Yours in Christ, Linda Mae Church.

  The sound of Caitlin’s opening her door brings me out of my trance. With one inquisitive look she asks if I still want to go into Kmart. I nod, then refold the note and put it back in my pocket. Motioning for her to hand me her purse, I take the satphone from my backpack and stuff it into her bag, then shove my pistol into my pocket.

  “Let’s go.”

  When we’re ten yards from the car, Caitlin says, “You still think Tim didn’t have an affair with her?”

  “Wait till we’re inside the store to talk. I’ll get the chips and dip and see if we’re being tailed. You get the recorder, some triple-A batteries, two pairs of cheap headphones, and a miniplug splitter. You know why?”

  “Because those cheap recorders only put out a mono signal.”

  It’s good to be back with somebody who needs no spoon-feeding.

  Inside the Kmart, I walk to the snacks section and grab some Doritos, then watch the store entrance. A few people come in and out, but most are black, and none look remotely like Quinn’s goons. The white people are Pentecostals or older folks wearing gardening clothes. Less than five minutes pass before Caitlin appears at the head of my aisle with a stapled bag held low beside her. I walk past her and whisper, “Men’s clothing department.”