The Devil's Punchbowl

by Greg Iles

  “You just said they wouldn’t!”

  Labry is fidgeting again, trying to think of anything he can to stop me. “I don’t know! I have no idea what’s really going on. But you must, right? Just do whatever it is they need, and she’ll be fine!”

  “Get out of my way, or I’ll throw you down these stairs. I’m not going to Shad about the kidnapping.”

  He backs away, looking stricken. “Why, then?”

  “He has something I need.”

  “What?”

  “You’re still trying to get something for Sands, aren’t you?”

  “No! I had to do this, Penn. He was going to tell my father everything! Pop would die of shame, man.”

  I leap down the stairs and race out of the building, headed down the block to the DA’s office. Labry chases after me, yelling where anyone can hear. A deputy going into the sheriff’s office looks up and stares after us.

  “Let me make it up to you, man!” Labry screams. “I’ll do anything.”

  “Get her back for me!” I shout over my shoulder. “Can you do that? That’s the only way to make this up.”

  As I enter the building that houses the district attorney’s office, a sudden epiphany hits me. I run up the stairs, knowing that Labry will follow. When I reach the top, Paul calls out from the landing, trying to keep from being heard by the people on the upper floor.

  “Penn, don’t! Don’t say anything you can’t take back! Let’s go talk to Sands. I’m sure we can work something out. You’ve got money—”

  “They don’t care about money! Not the kind we have. They could buy this town a thousand times over!”

  “There’s got to be something we can do!”

  “There is. Come up here, and I’ll tell you.”

  Labry climbs warily toward me, then stops one step below the top as I make room for him at the head of the staircase.

  I reach out and pull him up to the top step, then speak quietly. “You’re going to come into Shad’s office with me and tell him just what you told me. The message you gave me, and who told you to give it.”

  Labry jerks back, his eyes wide, then tries to turn to go back downstairs. I reach out and grab his shirt, half to hold him here, half to keep him from breaking his neck. But panic has seized him. He windmills his arms to get his balance, then strikes out at me hard enough to disengage us. As we separate, he falls backward, but the wall catches him, and he practically rides it to the bottom of the steps.

  “How could you do it?” I shout. “Our children play together!”

  Labry is sobbing again, staring up in despair. “I had no choice,” he says in a dead voice. “No choice.”

  He looks as if he’s about to say something else, but then his eyes go wide, and he backs out of the building.

  “What the hell was that about?” asks a clipped baritone voice behind me.

  I turn and look into the face of Shadrach Johnson. He regards me with cool detachment, waiting for me to explain my presence on his territory.

  “You and I need to talk,” I tell him. “But first get rid of your secretary. You don’t want any witnesses to this conversation.”

  CHAPTER

  52

  Caitlin is staring out the window of her plywood cell, into the sharklike eyes of a giant white dog. After Quinn took Linda to the storeroom, her screams stopped, but soon men arrived in a pickup hauling a long trailer behind it. What caught Caitlin’s attention was a man wearing a heavily padded suit that made him look like the Michelin tire man. She assumed this was for working with dangerous dogs, and her assumption soon proved correct.

  The trailer unloaded four white dogs that dwarfed the pit bulls outside. Their heads reached the men’s waists, and they had wrinkled faces with cropped ears that gave them the look of some hybrid fighting creature she had never before seen. The pit bulls went wild when the white dogs appeared; several cowered near the kennel. A few minutes later, a second trailer appeared with more men. They opened the gate of the kennel yard, gathered up the pit bulls, loaded them into their trailer, and drove away in a cloud of dust. Then the white dogs were released into the kennel yard.

  After studying them for a while, Caitlin felt sure these new dogs must be Bully Kuttas, like the dog Penn described on his porch the night Sands revealed himself. Penn had thought the dogs that attacked him and Kelly on the river island were also Bully Kuttas, but he couldn’t be sure. In any case, these white dogs frighten Caitlin more than the pit bulls, something that hadn’t seemed possible an hour ago.

  The sound of a closing door pulls her away from the window. Linda’s door rattles the wall of Caitlin’s room, then she hears Linda’s gate close. Quinn says something too soft for Caitlin to make out, and Linda doesn’t reply. Then the booted feet stump off down the kennel.

  After the door closes, Caitlin says, “Linda? Are you all right?”

  “My stomach hurts.”

  “Did he hurt you again?”

  “No. He gave me some different pills. I think that’s why my stomach hurts.”

  “Well, try to hold them down. Drink some water if you can. That will dilute your urine, and it won’t hurt as bad when you pee.”

  A sound like a scoff comes through the wood.

  “Linda, I’ve got an idea about how to get out of here. I want you to listen to me. Will you do that?”

  After a brief silence, Linda says, “I’m listening.”

  Quickly, Caitlin describes her plan to use a cat as bait to distract the dogs to one side of the kennel, while she and Linda make a break for the fence on the other side. She makes it sound as plausible as she can, but Linda’s lack of questions worries her. “Well?” she asks at last. “What do you think?”

  “It won’t work.”

  Caitlin tries to suppress her frustration. “Why not?”

  “Because first you have to get the cats. And just getting the roof off won’t get you through the Cyclone fence. It’s over my head too, not just walls.”

  Caitlin starts to argue, but Linda’s still talking.

  “And even if you get the bars off the windows, you’ll never get this chain off my neck.”

  “I will. After everyone leaves, I’m going to get into that storeroom and find a way. There has to be a key in there. Or some kind of tool. Didn’t you say he takes the collar off when he abuses you?”

  “Sometimes. Other times he hooks it to a bolt on a table with a shorter chain.”

  “Where does he get the key when he takes it off you?”

  “From the same ring as his car keys.”

  Damn.

  “You have to leave me out of it,” Linda says, almost too low to hear. “You know that.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You do. Because even if you get the collar off, I’ll never make it to that fence. Not before the dogs get me. And I can’t die like that. I can’t.”

  “You’re not going to die, Linda. You’re going to get out of here with me.”

  Silence.

  “What if I drugged the dogs?”

  “With what?”

  “There might be tranquilizers in the storeroom.”

  “They took all that stuff out. I looked when I was in there a minute ago, like you told me to. When he was getting me the pills. All I saw was junk that looked like steroids and supplements. I used to date a bodybuilder in Oklahoma City, and he took the same kind of stuff.”

  “Linda, you have to stop thinking it’s impossible. If you think that way, you make it so. I’m going to get us out of here.”

  To her amazement, Caitlin hears what sounds like sad laughter. “You think that because you’re different from me. Stuff works out for girls like you. That’s just the way life is. But for me it’s different. No matter what I do, something always goes wrong.”

  “I want you to stop saying that kind of thing! There’s no difference between you and me.”

  “You’re wrong,” Linda says wearily. “I got away once. I risked everything and jumped off that boat. I put myself in God’s hands. And here I am. You can’t get me out. Go without me. Maybe you can bring help back in time.”

  Caitlin considers this. The od
ds of Quinn leaving Linda alive once he knew Caitlin had escaped would be zero. And how long might it take her to find help?

  “I’m not going without you,” she says.

  “Caitlin?” Linda says in a tighter voice.

  “Yes?”

  “I haven’t told you everything.”

  The hair rises on Caitlin’s neck. There is no terror like the terror of the unknown. “What is it? Tell me.”

  “I know what those white dogs are for.”

  “What?”

  “They’re going to fight them against a man.”

  Caitlin looks at the wall, as if she could read Linda’s face through it. “What? You mean like feed a man to them?”

  “No. A man’s gonna fight them. Try to kill them in a pit.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I heard them talking, and I’ve seen them getting ready for it.”

  “What did you see?”

  “Yesterday morning, they brought a man into the kennel and put him in a stall. They were waiting for those white dogs to get here. The guy looked like a homeless man they pulled off the street. A drunk. Later Quinn told me he was.”

  “What did they do with him?”

  “First they put some kind of vest on him.”

  “Like that protective suit? The padded thing?”

  “No. More like a bulletproof vest. I saw a lot of those in Las Vegas. And they put some kind of plates on his arms. When they were done, he looked like a gladiator or something.”

  Caitlin can scarcely form her next question. “What did they do then?”

  “They took him out there and let one of those dogs loose on him.”

  She closes her eyes. “What happened?”

  “It took that dog about twenty seconds to kill him. Ripped his throat out. Then they let the rest of the dogs tear him up.”

  “Why did they do that? To give them a taste of human blood?”

  “No. They were testing the suit. The armor. I heard them talking outside. They just wanted to see how it would stand up to the dogs’ teeth and jaws. The suit is special-made. They killed that man just to find out how good it worked.”

  Caitlin tries to shut out her horror and think logically. “Have they ever had a fight like that before? Dogs against a man?”

  “Once. They have a videotape of it. He had it.”

  “Who? Quinn?”

  “No. Him.”

  “Sands?”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “Why did you wait till now to tell me this?”

  “I didn’t want to scare you. I know you’re brave but I’m telling you, those dogs out there are devils. They’re war dogs. They’re like the one he has. He knows everything about them. Jonny’s dad raised dogs back in Ireland. When he was a boy, his daddy gave him a puppy to raise and then he made him kill it. To teach him how the world was, he said. Sands knows dogs like no one I ever met. And the dogs he trains you don’t want to be close to them. You may fool them for a second or two with those cats, but what they live for is killing. I don’t want to see you torn to pieces out there.”

  “Linda, when is this fight supposed to take place?”

  “Soon. That’s all I know.”

  “Will it just be another victim, some drunk or something?”

  “No. A man’s coming in to fight them special. He’ll have a weapon. A knife, maybe two.”

  “I wonder who he is.”

  “I think he’s a convict, from what they were saying. One of those UFC-type fighters. Some walleyed redneck, I’m sure. But they’re all getting ready for it.”

  Caitlin takes this in, analyzing their situation in light of these new developments.

  “Linda, have you ever heard of a man named Edward Po?”

  “No.”

  “What about a girl named Jiao?”

  Linda hisses. “Oh, I know who she is all right. The Queen of Sheba. She don’t know nothing about who Sands really is. How he screws all the girls on the boat. That Jiao she lives down there in New Orleans, away from all this. At least she did until Katrina, anyway. Now I don’t know. Maybe that’s one reason he wants me dead. I’ve seen her look at me like she knows I mean something to him. Or meant something.”

  “Have you heard Jiao has a cousin? From China?”

  “I did hear that. He flew in for one of the fights a while back. He brought his own dog with him.”

  Caitlin is starting to see the outline of a larger picture. “Linda, lis ten to me. I want you to tell me everything you know about Jiao and her cousin. And Sands. Everything, no matter how trivial it may seem. Will you do that?”

  “I think that medicine may be working,” Linda says softly. “My God. The pain isn’t as bad.”

  “You’re going to make it, I promise. Penn and his friends are looking for us with everything in their power right now. I know they are. A friend of his actually killed one of those white dogs the other night, with nothing but a knife.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “It’s true. He cut the dog’s head off to make sure it didn’t have rabies. You have to hang on, Linda. You have to believe. They’re coming to get us.”

  “If that’s true, then why risk your life to try to get past those devil dogs?”

  Caitlin thinks about this. “Because you can’t wait around to be saved. This isn’t Cinderella, honey. It’s Beauty and the Beast, but there’s no prince hidden inside the beast. After the feeders come this evening, I’m breaking through the roof and getting two of those cats. And then I’m getting that collar off your neck, if I have to chew through the leather to do it. Okay?”

  “If you say so.”

  “I do. Now—tell me about Jiao.”

  CHAPTER

  53

  Shad speaks over his shoulder as he ushers me in. “Why was one of our most distinguished selectmen drunk in the middle of the day?”

  I glance briefly around the district attorney’s office. He has a huge, antique desk pilfered from one of the historic buildings owned by the city—three-quarters the size of a billiards table. The wall behind him is covered with diplomas and plaques, while the one to my right almost bulges from the weight of framed photographs: Shadrach Johnson’s Wall of Respect. In most of the pictures, Shad stands beside the nationally famous black politicians and celebrities who visited Natchez during his 1996 mayoral campaign against Wiley Warren. Fewer than half of those figures returned to the city two years ago when Shad ran against me during the special election. Apparently, during the interim, they’d learned that Shad was primarily interested in advancing the cause of Shad Johnson, and no one else, no matter what color they might be. Many politicians share this illness, of course, but Shad has a particularly virulent strain of it.

  “Did you come in to look at the pictures?” Shad asks.

  I turn and look deep into his eyes. “Caitlin Masters was kidnapped last night. She was taken by Jonathan Sands and Seamus Quinn. Paul Labry just informed me that if I do nothing against Sands for thirty-six hours, they’ll return her to me unharmed.”

  Shad’s eyes go wide, then narrow slowly. “Labry works for Sands?”

  “You thought you were the only one?”

  The district attorney jabs his forefinger at me. “That’s slander.”

  “Sue me. Why aren’t you advising me to call the FBI, Shad?”

  He looks toward his window, then back at me. “If that’s what you wanted to do, you’d already have done it. What are you really doing here, Cage? What do you want from me?”

  “That’s a long list, buddy. I want to know why you soft-pedaled the murder of Tim Jessup. Why you misappropriated evidence and withheld facts critical to the investigation from the police chief. Why you’re not pushing to find out what happened to a computer programmer named Ben Li, who was also probably murdered. But I already know the answer, don’t I?”

  “I don’t know anything about that. Any of it. Those are police matters.”

  “The night Tim died, you made a point of telling me you were the chief law enforcement officer of the city. So why does your police chief think the last thing you want him to do is make progress on any of these investigations?” />
  Shad folds his hands together and leans back in his chair. “Chief Logan and I don’t always see eye to eye. That’s no secret.”

  I stand and put my hands on his desk, then lean over him. “I’ll tell you why I’m here. Right now, Jonathan Sands thinks I have a certain item that Tim Jessup stole from the Magnolia Queen. A USB thumb drive. But you know I don’t have it. Don’t you?”

  The district attorney’s face remains impassive. Shad is good in a courtroom, and he’d be a hell of a poker player, though I hear he prefers bridge. While he ponders my statement, I glance over at his Wall of Respect. One photograph draws my attention. It shows a huge boar hog, probably five or six hundred pounds, hanging by its hind legs from a hoist. Shad stands on one side of the hog, while on the other, wearing a bright orange jersey with the number 88 on it, stands a tall black man with a hunting rifle lying across his muscular forearms.

  “I didn’t know you were a hunter, Shad. I thought bridge was your game. Or the odd set of tennis.”

  Johnson regards me with silent hatred.

  “Is that Darius Jones?” I ask. “The wide receiver for San Antonio?”

  “You know it is.”

  “Was that photo taken around here?”

  Shad shifts in his seat. “On DeSalle Island. Hunting camp.”

  DeSalle Island lies farther downriver than we paddled last night, almost to Angola Prison, but it’s exactly the kind of remote spot in which Sands has been holding his dogfights.

  “I think I’ve got the picture,” I say quietly. “Darius win any money on the dogs?”

  “On the what?”

  I give Shad a knowing look. “I guess it doesn’t matter. Darius has got it to lose, right? Long as he doesn’t get caught.”

  “You’re wearing out your welcome, Cage. I don’t know anything about any computer drive.”

  I lean farther over the desk, into Shad’s personal space. “I know you have it. You’re the only person who could. You had Tim’s cell phone. You heard the voice memo he made before he died. And somehow you got into the morgue—or got someone to go in there for you—and you got that drive. You want to dig into dead men’s asses for fun and profit, that’s your business. But I need that drive. If I don’t have something to trade for Caitlin, they’re going to kill her. Do you read me, Shad?”