The Devil's Punchbowl

by Greg Iles

  Sands chuckles in appreciation. “You’re all balls, aren’t you, Danny boy? Where was your grandfather from? Derry?”

  “South Boston. You can play it as cool as you want, but you see me. You hear me. And I don’t want any misunderstanding after I leave this room. We’re not your problem anymore, and you’re not ours. You guys can rob this town blind for all we care. Neither I nor the mayor is going to lift a finger to stop you. Am I right, Penn?”

  “Right.”

  “But,” Kelly adds, “if anything happens to my friend or his family—if his father should suffer a minor heart attack while walking through the produce section of the local Wal-Mart, say then you, Jonathan Sands, will cease to exist. Your pal standing behind me too—but purely as an afterthought. I’d take him out just to get rid of the bog stink.”

  I hear Quinn shifting his weight, but Sands stops him with a glance.

  “Are we clear?” Kelly asks.

  “Danny, Danny,” says Sands. “Who do you think you’re dealing with?”

  “Rats,” Kelly says. “Informers. But that’s an old IRA tradition, isn’t it? That’s why you have the kneecapping with the power drills and all that, to try to keep your mates from selling you out for a bottle of Bushmills.”

  Sands’s eyes harden remarkably fast.

  “You’re ratting Po to the government,” Kelly goes on, despite my trying to shut him up with a glance, “which sounds like a risky proposition to me, even if they get him. But if I were you, I’d be worried about what your lapdog behind me’s going to do if Po doesn’t take the bait. Hull is going to want something to show for his years of investigation. Quinn might decide to flip on you and turn state’s evidence to keep his own ass out of jail. Yeah, I’d be thinking hard about that.”

  I hear a quick sliding sound, and then Quinn is flying over Kelly, a gun in his hand. At first I think he’s pistol-whipping Kelly, but when the motion stops, Kelly is wrapped around the Irishman like a boa constrictor, his bulging calf locked across Quinn’s thighs, his forearm wrapped around Quinn’s neck. The Irishman’s spine is bowed to the point of breaking around Kelly’s other knee. Sometime during this commotion Sands whistled and the white Bully Kutta went alert, but something makes Sands call him off. The dog stands with his forelegs braced three feet from Kelly and Quinn, his clipped ears back, his bunched muscles quivering, tongue panting in frustrated energy.

  Then I see why.

  Kelly’s free hand is holding something small and black against Quinn’s bulging neck. Thin and irregularly shaped, it looks like the ancient flint knives I used to see in my father’s anthropology books. Where the point should be, I see only skin; then a trail of blood begins to make its way down the flesh of Quinn’s neck. Sands is on his feet behind his desk, as ready as his dog to burst into action, but he can do nothing, short of ordering his dog to attack me.

  “Pick up the gun, Penn,” Kelly says in a steady voice.

  I look down. Quinn’s automatic is lying on the floor, two feet in front of me. It would be nothing to pick it up—if Sands’s dog weren’t here.

  “You give that animal an attack order,” says Kelly, “Quinn will be spurting blood like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and I’ll gut the dog before he’s dead. Pick up the gun, Penn. Now.”

  I feel like I’m reaching into a cobra’s basket, but I bend at the waist and pick up the gun. There’s no question about who’s in charge in this room.

  “Don’t point it at the dog,” Kelly says calmly. “Point it at his master.”

  I turn to Sands, which brings the barrel of the pistol in line with his stomach.

  “That’s right,” says Kelly, like a man giving instructions to toddlers. “That dog could take three or four rounds from a nine mil, but Mr. Sands will have a hard time surviving one.”

  Quinn suddenly jerks hard in Kelly’s grip, but Kelly tightens his arm and leg, and I hear a sound like rope being stretched taut. Quinn groans, then screams in agony.

  “How do you like being on the receiving end?” Kelly asks mildly. He drags the black blade farther along Quinn’s neck, and blood begins to stream from the cut.

  “You’re a dead man,” Sands says quietly.

  Kelly laughs. “It takes one to know one. Open the door, Penn. Nice and slow. Just put your foot in front of it. Anyone but Penn moves, I’ll sever Quinn’s carotid. Fair warning.”

  “He’s bluffing,” gasps Quinn, still struggling against the hold.

  With a strained smile, Kelly tightens his calf muscle, and Quinn screams like a heretic on the rack.

  “I never bluff,” Kelly says. “You came after me with a gun. I kill you, it’s self-defense all the way. Right, Mr. Prosecutor?”

  “Absolutely. Any reasonable person would have been in fear for his life.”

  “Yeah, I almost shit myself from fear. Now, open the door.”

  I obey, but slowly, the dog watching me all the way.

  “Okay,” says Kelly, his voice strained from the effort of holding Quinn immobile, “just so we’re all clear. First, I’m going to let this piece of shit go. Then Penn and I are going to walk off this tub. And you two, after licking your wounds, are going to realize that business is business. You crossed the line when you brought Penn’s family into this, and I’ve pointed out your mistake. Now we’re all going to go our separate ways.”

  “Are we?” says Sands. “I think we have some unfinished business. You killed two of my dogs last night. I had an investment in those animals.”

  “Consider it overhead. Now, I know what you’re thinking. As soon as the door closes, Quinn will say, ‘We’ve got to kill that bastard. I’m not spending the rest of my life looking over my shoulder for him.’ But you don’t have to do that, you see? For two reasons. First, because I’m a man of my word. We’re backing off. And second, because it would be a waste of time. You’d never see me coming anyway.”

  Sands is smiling again, but the effect is more frightening than a scowl on a normal person. “Before you go, Mr. Kelly, let me tell you something about myself. I don’t often do that, but you’ve earned it, so I’ll make an exception. You ever hear of the Shankill Butchers?”

  Kelly thinks for a few seconds. “Northern Ireland. They were a Prod bunch, right? Mass murderers. More gangsters than political.”

  “One of the bloodiest gangs as ever stalked the streets of Belfast. Scum, really. Grabbed Catholics at random off the streets and tortured them. Cut them to ribbons, beat them to death. When they couldn’t get Catholics, they took whatever they found. I know, because I worked with them now and again, on legitimate UDF missions. For a while they were protected by the Brits because they occasionally topped an IRA man or two. But eventually, everyone on both sides knew something had to be done.”

  “My arm’s getting tired,” Kelly says. “Can you cut to the chase?”

  Sands smiles, then rubs the Bully Kutta’s head and speaks in a barely audible voice. “I killed their headman, Mr. Kelly. When two armies of killers who couldn’t agree on a fucking thing for thirty years decided one of their own needed killing, they came to me. And I wasn’t even twenty. Oh, it’s a famous murder. Never solved.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “Let’s don’t be making threats that it’s in neither of our interests to back up. We’re both tough boys, but there’s room in the jungle for both of us. At least until Mr. Hull and I conclude our business. We have a cease-fire until then.”

  “That’s exactly what we came to get.”

  “After that, we can renegotiate new terms, if you like. I hear you may be looking for work soon.” Sands gives me a pointed look. “You go back to worrying about city ordinances and garden clubs. However, if you should come across that data that Jessup copied, make sure it gets to me. If you find out somebody else has it, you do the same. No copies. No games. Are we clear?”

  “No problem,” I say. “It’s your property anyway.”

  “Right.” Sands doesn’t move, but the sense of dismissal is unmistakable. “I think we’re done here, gentlemen.”

  In a burst of motion almost as fast as the one with which he restrained Quinn, Kelly disengages from th
e Irishman and bounds to his feet. Then he takes the gun from me, and we back out of the office, the dog watching us like a wolf cheated of a kill.

  “I’ll leave the gun with your doorman,” Kelly says. “Have a grand day altogether, gentlemen.”

  The doors hiss closed.

  Outside, stepping off the far end of the gangplank, I finally take my first easy breath.

  “I know that was tense,” Kelly says, “but it was necessary. Especially if I’m leaving town for a few hours to get Annie back.”

  “Why did you provoke them like that?”

  “Guys like that only understand one thing. Force. I wanted them to know who they’re dealing with, and I wanted more information about Sands than we had before. I accomplished both things.”

  “You did that, all right. Sands shocked me when he asked about the USB drive. I’ve assumed they had that for a while now.”

  “I think Quinn has it,” Kelly says. “But he’s keeping it for himself. It’s his ace in the hole if the Po sting goes bad. A chip in the game with Hull. That’s one reason Quinn flipped out and attacked me. I was dead right about him getting positioned to stab his boss in the back.”

  “Do you think it’s really safe to bring Annie back?”

  “As long as we stick to the agreement. They have nothing to gain by antagonizing you further, and now they understand they have a lot to lose.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They know we’ll bypass the law as easily as they will. That’s something they needed to know.”

  I look into Kelly’s eyes for a while but say nothing. When I start to shake his hand, he turns and starts walking toward the parking lot.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Quinn’s bound to be watching us. We don’t want anything that looks like a good-bye scene. We want them thinking I’m right around the corner, day and night.”

  “Sorry.”

  Kelly laughs softly as I catch up to him. “That felt good, didn’t it?”

  The last knot of tension is starting to uncoil in me. “I’ve got to say, seeing Quinn on the floor with the knife to his throat beat any courtroom moment I ever had. How did you get the knife in there?”

  “Flint doesn’t show up on the wands. No metal.”

  “Where was it hidden?”

  “Lower back, in the little valley over my spine. I guess it’s my version of Walt Garrity’s derringer necklace. People miss it all the time.”

  “A flint knife,” I marvel. “A caveman’s weapon.”

  Kelly turns back and gives me a serious look. “Remember what I told Caitlin last night. We’re still in the cave. It’s just bigger now.” He pats my shoulder. “Tonight you’re going to eat dinner with your little girl. Let’s get to the airport.”

  CHAPTER

  37

  Linda Church crouches naked and shivering in the corner of the kennel stall, praying for deliverance to a God she has almost given up on. There’s a dog collar around her neck, and a heavy chain runs from the collar to a steel post anchored in cement. The kennel is a long, low building with a tin roof, hidden entirely beneath a tall shed so that it can’t be seen from the air. The two rows of gated stalls are made of Cyclone fencing, with an office and a storeroom made of plywood at one end. There’s a barred window in her room, but she doesn’t dare try to break out of it. The kennel is surrounded by a high fence, and a half dozen ravenous pit bulls roam free between the outer wall and the fence.

  That’s why Quinn feels confident leaving her alone here. Even if she could somehow get the chain off, Linda couldn’t leave the kennel. But the truth is, she hasn’t the strength for any of that.

  When someone is hurting you and you beg them to stop—and they don’t stop—something breaks inside you. Linda learned that very young, and she’s lived most of her life trying to escape that feeling, to heal what was broken inside her. Tim was the first man who ever really helped her with that, and Quinn killed him. He’s already admitted that. The first time Quinn raped her in the kennel, he described Tim’s last minutes on earth, the desperate attempt to make them think he had wrecked his car, his flight into the woods near the Devil’s Punchbowl. But Tim hadn’t counted on Sands’s dog. The Bully Kutta had run him down in minutes and savaged him before the men could pull him off.

  Linda shuts her eyes and tries not to think about last night, but it’s impossible. On top of her infected leg and torn knee, she’s getting a urinary-tract infection. The pain is almost unbearable when she pees, like a razor blade in her urethra, and she shivers for two or three minutes after she’s finished. She stopped drinking water to keep from having to endure any more pain, but that seemed to make it worse. She can’t understand why a man would want to have sex with a woman in the shape she’s in, but Quinn does. Maybe the pain arouses him; maybe that’s the whole point.

  She’s cried until she has no tears left. She believed with all her being that her escape from the boat had been divine providence, that she was really going to get clear as a reward for her bravery on the boat—which had in reality been a willingness to accept death, if necessary. To take that step and then be betrayed by the very servant of God, or one who put himself up as that this had broken her. She feels valueless. Doomed. Like the altar boy must feel when he realizes that the priest who is using him doesn’t love him, doesn’t care for him at all, but sees him only as a means to an end.

  Linda has never truly wished for death, despite enduring very hard times. She’s known girls who committed suicide, but she could never believe that they hadn’t had some better choice, if only they had looked hard enough. But here, in this place, she sees no hope of deliverance. Only more rape, more pain, and a terrible death in the end. Quinn has told her he means to feed her to the dogs when he tires of her, and she knows he will do it. He has hated her for being Sands’s favorite, and thus unavailable to him. Quinn would sometimes come sniffing around the Devil’s Punchbowl, but he couldn’t risk it often because the cameras were always on, and Sands might see him from the security suite or the interrogation room. Still, she always felt Quinn’s eyes creeping over her body whenever he was near. She’d turned to find him staring at her so many times that she’d come to think of his hungry gaze as she did the hairy black caterpillars she’d feared as a child, the ones that injected an anesthetic as they stung you. By the time you looked down and saw one of the revolting things on your leg, you knew it had been there for a long time, injecting its poison. And half an hour later the burning would begin.

  Now Quinn is free to do with her what he will. Linda has never seen so much hatred and anger knotted up inside a man, but she knows she will bear the brunt of it until she can bear no more. So she prays hopelessly for she knows not what, while the wind rattles the fences and the dogs prowl the dirt beyond the plywood wall.

  “Please, Lord, help me,” she whimpers in the dead air of the kennel. “Please send me an angel. I’m too sick to help myself. I can’t do no more.”

  CHAPTER

  38

  Caitlin has not come to Tim’s funeral. This morning she called and told me that the way to honor Tim’s life was not to grieve in a church, but to carry on his work. If we couldn’t do that, she said, she couldn’t bear to sit in the cathedral and dishonor his memory. When I asked what she intended to do instead, she said she was going down to the newspaper office to think about all that had happened and to try to make some decisions about her future. Her tone made it plain I was not to be a part of this process.

  Skipping the funeral wasn’t an option for me; I’m a pallbearer. Eight of us are sitting behind the Jessup family in the center pews of St. Mary’s, a beautiful Gothic Revival cathedral built in 1843. Most pallbearers in Natchez are old men grown too frail to carry their dead friends, but today I’m seated among seven strapping boys I went to high school with—men now, of course—who have flown in from every corner of the country. Los Angeles, Chicago, Wisconsin, Oregon, Atlanta, D.C., other places. To my surprise and relief, not one man that Tim’s father asked to perform this duty made an excuse not to show. More surprising, at least twenty-five people from o
ur senior class are present, and most have traveled far to be here. Since we had only thirty-two students in our graduating class, this is a significant percentage. Earlier, we held a sort of unofficial reunion outside the cathedral, trading updates on kids, careers, class gossip. After we pallbearers received our instructions inside, a couple of my old friends asked some pointed questions about what had brought us all together. I told them only that Tim had lost his life while trying to help the city, and that he’d transformed that life before he died.

  After the processional was complete, I was amazed to find St. Mary’s filled nearly to capacity. I had worried that, like his wake, Tim’s funeral would draw few mourners, but it seems that a decision has been taken by the congregation to support Tim and his family despite the poison being spread by Charlotte McQueen. These people understand that one of their children could easily have killed someone during a drunken drive to the county line during college, as Tim did, and only the grace of God spared them such a tragedy. The Catholics in Natchez have always seemed to me a great extended family, and they’re proving it today.

  Father Mullen made the right choice in the end: Tim is getting the full Catholic funeral mass. This, along with the presence of my friends and the large turnout, warmed my heart initially. But as the ritual proceeds, that warmth slowly dissipates in the vaulted vastness of the cathedral. Father Mullen, dressed in white vestments, begins a reading through coughs and throat clearings and the stifled cries of infants. He’s chosen a passage from 2 Timothy, one that has more relevance than the name of the book.

  “Remember the gospel that I carry, ‘Jesus Christ risen from the dead, sprung from the race of David’: it is on account of this that I have to put up with suffering, even to being chained like a criminal. But God’s message cannot be chained up. So I persevere for the sake of those who are chosen, so that they, too, may obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus with eternal glory. Here is a saying that you can rely on: If we have died with him, then we shall live with him. If we persevere, then we shall reign with him. If we disown him, then he will disown us.”