The Devils Punchbowl - Greg Iles

“Understood. We’ll see you in seven hours. Six, if we can manage it. Stay well.”

I feel a rush of relief so powerful that my face goes hot. “Thank you.”

Waiting in the dark with my hand on the phone, I sense the fragility of those who matter most to me, as though they'’re barely clinging to the planet as it spins through its orbit: my mother and daughter sleeping across the street with only my aging father to pro

tect them; my sister in England, going through her day without even a hint that she could be in danger; Julia Jessup hiding in or near the city, or running for her life with a fatherless child to protect. Swirling around them are people whose paths I can neither control nor predict: the men watching my house, who may realize I'm gone and call their master; Caitlin, who might return at any moment and discover me; Sands himself, who might decide he can’t trust me after all and consign me and mine to Tim Jessup’s fate.

The half hour I must wait for Kelly’s call is measured in clenching heartbeats, rapid-fire eyeblinks, startle reflexes, sudden bowel constrictions, and drops of sweat. When I don'’t see the ghostly white dog peering at me through the guesthouse window, I see images of my friend’s brutalized body, or his wife and young son hiding in terror and grief. Strangest of all is my memory of last night’s dream of Tim on the ice sheet, and the white wolf watching me. How did I dream of an animal I’d never seen before? Or

have

I seen that white dog around town somewhere, perhaps even with Sands, and stored the memory in some reptilian neurons, where they waited to be triggered by Tim’s twisted tale?

When the phone rings, I jerk it to my ear so fast the chirp fades almost before it’s begun.

“Hello? Hello!”

There’s only silence at first. Then Kelly’s voice comes into the receiver as though it’s being transmitted from a distant spacecraft. “What’s happening, man? Somebody threatened Annie?”

“Jesus, Kelly, it’s great to hear your voice. We’re in trouble here. They threatened Annie, my parents, my sister, everybody. They already killed a friend of mine tonight. A guy I went to school with.”

“Slow down. Are you safe where you are?”

“Yeah, but I don'’t have much time. Are you still in Afghanistan?”

“Yeah. The mountains. Look, talk to me. Who’s your problem?”

“The main guy is Irish. He runs one of the casinos here. He pretends to be English, but that’s just a front. He goes by the name of Jonathan Sands. I have no idea who he really is. Paramilitary type, but hiding it in a suit.”

“I don'’t like the sound of that,” Kelly says reflectively. “Ex-IRA, maybe?”

“He definitely knows how to handle weapons.”

“What the hell have you got into?”

“I'm not sure. But I didn't take it seriously enough at first, and a friend died because of it. According to him, I can’t use conventional law enforcement. Sands has got a lot of people on his payroll.”

There’s a long silence. Then Kelly says, “It could take forty-eight hours.”

“What could?”

“Me getting there. The company will get Annie and your mother sorted out, but it could take me two days to get back to the States.”

“Dan…are you sure?”

“Hey, it’s only money.”

“You know I'’ll—”

“Shut the fuck up, okay? Before you embarrass both of us. And try to keep breathing for the next forty-eight hours.”

“I'’ll do my best. Look, you can’t call me, okay?”

“Understood. The Blackhawk team is going to bring you a secure telephone. A satellite phone. You’ll have to decide when it’s safe to use it. Update the company when you can. Just keep using

Spartacus

as your code. They’re also going to bring a gear bag. That'’s for me. I'’ll have them stash it somewhere in town, and you can pick it up if you’re not being tailed.”

“Okay. Daniel—”

“Hold up. If you get in a really tight spot after the team leaves and before I get there, there’s couple of guys in your area I trust. They’re from Athens Point, down the river.”

“Who are they?”

“One’s a young guy, ex-marine. Carl Sims. Met him at the range there. He’s a black guy, a sniper. I don'’t care what you’re mixed up in, use my name, you can trust him.”

“Okay. Who else?”

“There’s a guy used to fly for the sheriff down there at Athens Point. Ex–air force. Name’s McDavitt. He’s the real deal. If you need to get somewhere fast, or get away fast, he’s your man.”

A jolt of synchronicity makes my scalp tingle. “I met McDavitt

today.

No shit. Some corporate big shot hired him to fly us around the city.”

Kelly laughs softly. “You see? Things don'’t look as bad as you thought. Now, you get back to Annie. We’ll take care of things on our end. See you in a couple of days. I'm out.”

I wait until I hear the click, then slowly hang up.

The circuitous trek back to my house doesn’'t seem to take nearly as long this time; I feel Daniel Kelly sitting on my shoulder like one of Odin’s crows. The watcher on the corner is still in place, but I move across Washington as though cloaked in darkness. Just as I slip through the hedges into my backyard, I see a man walking across the parking lot of the bank behind my house. I silently double my pace, drop into the moat beside the basement window, and slide into the relative safety of my home.

My father is standing watch at the top of the stairs. He looks old in the shaft of light falling from my bedroom door, like a monk meditating over a gun he found by chance.

“Don’t shoot,” I hiss from the bottom of the staircase.

“Son of a bitch,” Dad whispers with relief. “I was about a minute from calling 911.”

“I'm feeling a little better now,” I say loudly, hurrying up the stairs.

“I think that was worse than Korea,” Dad whispers, standing slowly and rubbing his lower back. “Except for the frostbite. I took two nitro pills while you were gone. Let’s get to that damned computer so we can talk.”

He follows me into my bathroom, and I bend quickly over Annie’s MacBook.

Kelly called me himself from Afghanistan. I had to wait a half hour, but it was worth it. Blackhawk dispatched a team as soon as I told them we were in danger. They’ll probably come in an armored SUV. I imagine they’ve already left Houston. They’ll be here in less than seven hours.

Dad nods thankfully, then pecks out two words:

And Kelly?

Kelly’s coming himself. 48 hours minimum before he gets here though.

Good. So. What do we do now?

Wait for the cavalry. We should probably stop using the computer. There are lasers that can read keystrokes by the vibrations of window glass. This is sci-fi stuff we’re up against.

As Dad shakes his head slowly, I type:

We’d better stay upstairs. We can pull shifts. One of us by Annie’s bedroom door while the other catches a catnap in my bed.

You think I can sleep a wink after what you told me tonight? Drag a couch out here and we’ll play cards until dawn.

Cards? You don'’t play cards!

A smile that’s almost a grimace makes my father’s eyes squint.

Haven’t since Korea. Bores the hell out of me.

But tonight?

The enemy’s out there. Tonight we play cards.

CHAPTER

15

Linda doesn’'t know whether she’s paralyzed by fear or whether she’s entered a place beyond fear. Her mind has given way to grief or shock, or some mixture of both. They have taken her deep within the bowels of the barge that supports the faux riverboat above her head, to the long hold with black foam on its walls, like the foam in a recording studio. It’s dim, but it doesn’'t stink of mildew as some areas of the lower deck do. This hold smells like a new car. It’s here that Sands brings Linda and his other mistresses when he wants sex during business hours. A sofa bed in the corner faces two large LCD screens that display an ever-changing feed from the security cameras upstairs. On those screens Sands can monitor all areas of the casino, even during sex. This room has other uses too. Here they bring the troublemakers and scam artists who aren'’t lucky enough to be handed over to the police. For these occasions, a single chair stands in the center of the hold, and beside it a shiny cart like a printer trolley. But the square device on the cart is not a printer. It’s smaller, with thin wires coming off it, like the EKG machine at a doctor’s office. It’s that machine that makes the staff refer to this hold as the real “Devil’s Punchbowl.”

As Quinn leads her by her elbow to the chair, Sands following behind—she can feel his presence—Linda sees something against the far wall of the room. It’s a person, a small man with dark skin and

short black hair. She cannot see his face. He’s lying on his side, facing away from her. He’s wearing a T-shirt that says THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS across the shoulders, but his legs are bare. His naked thighs and buttocks look strangely vulnerable, like a boy’s behind, and something dark is smeared across one calf.

“Sit,” Quinn says.

As Linda turns to obey, she sees that the chair is bolted to the floor. This registers like something on a movie screen, not reality; she cannot suspend her disbelief. Before that occurs, before reality breaks through, Quinn has folded thick leather straps over her wrists and ankles and fastened them tight. Quinn’s usual curses and grunts are strangely absent. He’s acting like a pious man in church; he has entered what he feels to be a sacred place. She feels a thick, padded strap tighten around her abdomen, hears the soft rip as Quinn hitches, then rehitches the Velcro that holds it fast.

“Don’t do this,” she whispers.

“Don’t make us,” Sands answers, then steps into her field of vision.

The look in his eyes is terrible to behold. Yet he speaks softly, like a man talking to a child. Behind him the white dog stands alert, awaiting a command. He looks something like a giant pit bull, but his face is wrinkled, and his eyes project a sentience that makes her shiver.

“I need to know some things, girl. And I don'’t have a lot of time.”

She nods quickly, submissively. “Can I ask a question first?”

“One.”

“Is Tim dead?”

Sands inclines his head slowly.

She doesn’'t want to let them see how this hits her, but she shuts her eyes before she’s even aware of it, shuts them the way a little girl does hearing her father has been killed in a car wreck, as hers was when she was nine.

“How did he die?”

“That'’s two questions. We’'ve no time for tears, Linda. Timothy tried to bite the hand that fed him. He stole something from me, and we have to get it back. Answer up the first time. Don’t make me ask twice.”

“I don'’t think I know anything. But I'’ll tell you what I do.”

“Fucking right you will,” Quinn mutters from behind her.

Sands raises a hand to silence him. She has never seen Sands this way. He is more focused now than he is during sex. The pupils of his eyes gleam like scorched motor oil. When he looks at her, she feels her will sapped away, like a bird being hypnotized by a snake.

“What did Timothy tell you he was going to do tonight?”

“He told me he was going to stop you. That'’s all I know. I don'’t know what he was after, exactly. I tried to talk him out of it. I knew he’d never get away with it.”

“Fucking right,” grunts Quinn again.

“What did he want to stop me from doing?”

“The dogs,” she says, trying to think. “He had a thing about dogs. He went to a dogfight on the river. Remember? You must have said he could go. It upset him. Something happened to him there. The dogs…and the girls. He couldn'’t deal with it.”

“The girls?” says Sands.

Quinn laughs. “He was bending you over the aft-deck head while his wife nursed a kid at home. What did he care about some runaway whores?”

Linda shrugs. “He did. He was like that. I don'’t know.”

“There’s more,” Sands says. “A lot more. Give us the rest.”

“There isn’t any more. He wasn'’t complicated.”

“He had a plan. You had the TracFone hidden in your car.”

“That was just so that he could find me afterward.”

“You were running away together?”

“Not like that. We had to leave for a while, he said, until it was safe. He wasn'’t leaving his wife and son, though.”

“How long was it going to be before it was safe?”

She shrugs. “I don'’t know. A few days. A week. He never really said. I don'’t think he knew.”

Sands’s eyes bore into hers like the light the ophthalmologist shines into your eye to see the very back of it, where the blood vessels and the nerve go in. Sands knows she’s concealing something. If Tim could see her now, he would want her to save herself, to spare herself pain. But he wouldn'’t want her to sell out Penn Cage. Penn has a child, and that child needs him.

“Where’s your cell phone?” Sands asks. “Your personal phone.”

“I lost it.” She knows this is stupid even before she finishes speaking.

Quinn makes a mocking sound, but Sands only sighs. “I’'ve known you for seven months and I’'ve never once seen you without your phone. I’'ve read your text messages to Timothy. Everything from ‘I love you, my darling’ to ‘I want you to come in my mouth tonight.’ If he’d known the things you did for me…the boy would’ve gone mad.”

Hot tears streak her face. Sands is right: Tim never got pleasure from degrading her; but Sands lived for it. Worse, he knew that some sick part of her derived pleasure from it as well. Once you’d been wired that way, there was no way to short-circuit those urges and reactions. A harsh voice and a slap made her wet, like Pavlov’s dogs hearing the dinner bell. All you could do was struggle against it, try to drive it out with something else.