The Devils Punchbowl - Greg Iles

“Will it kill me?”

“No. It will make you sleep.”

She sniffs the cup. The clear fluid inside smells like Sprite. “Will it hurt?”

“No. It’s a drug called Versed. It’s like Valium. It’s what they give children before they sew them up in the casualty ward.”

“Casualty ward?”

“Emergency room.”

A faint memory of a kind doctor stitching her knee long ago brings fresh tears to Linda’s eyes. For some reason, she is suddenly sure the doctor was Penn Cage’s father, Tom Cage. With a silent prayer that Penn and his daughter will be all right, she nods to Sands and opens her mouth. The fluid tastes just the way it smells. Sprite, gone half-flat. She coughs as she swallows, but it all goes down. She half believes the drink will kill her, but she’s past caring. She cannot endure the clips or the bolt.

Sands walks forward and gives her a strange smile. “You gave a good ride, I'’ll say that. One of the best. Quinn’s been itching to have a go at you from the beginning. Now he’ll get his chance, I guess.”

She shakes her head slowly. “Don’t leave me with him. Please. Give me enough of that stuff to finish it. Please.”

Quinn’s eyes flash behind Sands. “Now where’s the fun in that?

Linda feels herself fading already. The hum of the generator is the brightest thing in the room.

“Where are you taking them?” Sands asks. “The farm or the island?”

“The farm. I’d just as soon stay out there tonight, if you’re okay with it?”

Sands’s voice is tight. “I don'’t care what you do with her, if that’s what you’re asking.”

That'’s it, right there,

Linda thinks. No one had ever really cared what anyone did with her. No one but Tim.

“Cunts like this run off all the time,” Quinn says. “With Jessup dead, no one would even ask what happened to her, if it weren’t for the pictures.”

“The pictures sell the story,” Sands says. “Just make sure no one finds her.”

Quinn laughs, dark and low. “Don’t worry. The lads are starving.”

A black curtain falls over the world.

Linda awakens to a cold wind on her face, a sky filled with stars. A silver moon shines down like a pitiless eye, made hazy by fog. She hears a motor, feels herself pitching like someone trying to lie on a trampoline while someone else jumps on it. She tries to brace herself, but her hands are bound with rope. Worse, they'’re numb. On the next bounce, she rolls over and retches on hard, white plastic.

Boat,

she realizes.

I'm in a boat. A

real

boat.

She looks up from the white deck. Seamus Quinn sits behind a steering wheel, the wind blowing his curly black hair wildly behind him. He grins down at her, his eyes flickering like silver points of light.

“Wakey wakey,” he says, mocking an Australian accent. “You’ve got company now, Benny lad.”

Linda turns her neck and looks behind her. Ben Li lies hog-tied on the deck behind her, a strip of duct tape over his mouth. His eyes bulge, and in them she reads a desperate plea for help. As if she could do anything. After the first few moments, he stops straining against his bonds and falls back against the deck. Ben Li graduated from a college called Cal Tech, she remembers. His parents are Chinese immigrants. Tim said Cal Tech was better than any school in the South, when it came to computers. Linda wonders if Ben Li ever imagined he would end up hog-tied in a boat in the Mississippi River.

“Where are we going?” she asks.

Quinn laughs. “You know where. To have some fun.”

“Fun for who?”

He laughs harder, then jerks the speedboat’s wheel as though to avoid an obstacle in the water. “Me first. Then the dogs.”

Linda swallows, trying to block her memory of the one night she worked a dogfight for the company. It was like stripping in Vegas after a fight. All the girls hated it. Boxing earned millions because men were drawn to violence like a drug. But dogfights took it to another level entirely….

It was as if ten thousand years of civilization had been stripped away in an hour. Every guy in the place wanted to fuck or fight, and half didn't care which. If they got you in the VIP room, they wouldn'’t take no for an answer, and if they fought, it hardly mattered who won or lost. They just craved the release.

Fighting was the only way some men could have sex with other men. Men like Quinn. Fighting or sharing a woman. That was what they really wanted, and what she’d narrowly escaped the night of the dogfight. She’d only needed one night to know she’d never go back. How many times had the drunks started chanting,

“Train! Train! Train!”

? She’d finally persuaded Sands to take her to a separate building, and she’d had to service him to get him to do that. But at least she’d escaped what the other girls got. Some had apparently done that kind of thing before, but others hadn'’t. Some had been more afraid than she was—

“I’'ve been watching you for a long time,” Quinn says. “Strutting up and down like the queen. You’ve been off-limits long enough. Tonight I'm going to find out what’s kept the boss interested for so long.”

Linda shivers and watches the moon grow fainter as the fog on the river thickens. She wishes she knew enough about the stars to know whether she’s moving upstream or down. But even if she did, the heavy mist is quickly whiting out everything around the boat.

“I think you got to him,” Quinn says. “Anybody else, he’d have had that bolt up their arse and the juice full on.”

She shakes her head. “No. It’s not in him.”

Quinn laughs. “Don’t be too sure. If Jessup hadn'’t got away, he’d have suffered like a saint.”

Linda looks at Quinn in alarm. “Got away? I thought Tim was dead.”

“That'’s what I mean. Falling off that bluff was the best break that header ever caught. If he’d lived, Sands would have made the crucifixion look like a mild digging. You cross the boss, you get special treatment. Like Benny back there.”

Quinn wants me to talk,

she realizes.

He wants a relationship.

“You ever see anything eaten alive?” he asks, turning the boat slightly to starboard.

Linda doesn’'t answer, but one of her cats used to catch chipmunks and torture them for hours before she killed them. Let the pitiful creature run a few feet, feel a taste of freedom, then pounce and rip its belly open with a claw—

“Nothing like it in the world,” Quinn says, marveling at his insight. “That'’s why the Romans loved the games. That'’s life, right in front of you. Kill or be killed. Eat or be eaten. You’re a predator or you’re prey. And deep down, everybody knows which they are, right from the beginning.”

A huge beam sweeps over the boat, stops, comes back, then arcs away. Linda has an impression of treetops shot with a flashbulb to her right.

“Just like that stupid bastard,” Quinn says, nodding at Ben Li. “Too clever for his own good. He makes more money in a day than his parents earned in ten years, but it wasn'’t enough. Had to fuck it up. Look at him. A genius, they say. By noon tomorrow, a pit bull will be shitting out his brains. Next morning, his bones will be gnawed to powder.”

Linda’s stomach rolls. The night of the dogfight, she’d kept away from the pit as much as possible. The noise alone had sickened her, and the brief glimpses she’d been unable to avoid were burned into her memory. Two blood-soaked, muscle-bound animals locked in nearly motionless combat for an hour, one’s massive jaws buried in the chest of the other, each struggling for advantage while two dozen screaming men goaded them to kill.

“And me?” she forces herself to ask.

Quinn purses his lips like a man figuring a price on something. “The day after, maybe. Depends on how interesting you make things. If you didn't know so fucking much, I’d keep you around for

the weekend. Rent you out. Lots of big boys coming in for the next couple of weeks. They like their business mixed with pleasure.”

The boat leaps free of the water, then smashes back down. Soon it’s bouncing like a tractor over farm rows.

It’s a wake,

Linda realizes.

Now the spotlight makes sense. We must be overtaking a tugboat pushing barges.

“I have to go the bathroom,” she says. “Bad.”

“Go in your pants. You already did it once.”

“No, I mean

really

go. I can’t hold it. I'm sick. You don'’t want it in the boat.”

“Christ on a crutch. There’s an ice chest under the seat behind Benny. Go in that.”

Linda works herself up onto her elbows, which is more difficult than she thought with her hands bound, then crawls back to the stern, where Ben Li looks desperately at her through bloodshot eyes. Putting her mouth beside his ear, she says, “I wish I could help you. I'm sorry.”

She smells fear coming off him like body odor. She remembers her thought back on the

Queen,

that she’d entered a state beyond fear. Then later, in the chair, she’d realized that only the dead are beyond fear. But now, struggling to her feet, using Ben Li as a prop for her bound hands, she isn’t so sure.

For a moment the fog breaks, and she can see the shore, lone treetops whipping past fifty yards to her right. To her left she sees only mist. A hundred yards in front of them, a tugboat churns the river into a maelstrom. Quinn is running fast enough to pull a half dozen water-skiers.

“Can you slow down a little?” she calls.

“Just do your business! Christ.”

Bending carefully at the waist, Linda pulls the edge of the rear seat up with her bound hands. She marvels at the bright white lid of the Igloo. The logo brings tears to her eyes. She remembers picnics and parties from years long past, reaching down with a sweating arm and pulling a wine cooler from the ice—

“I thought you had to go,” Quinn shouts, looking back at her with annoyance. “Take your bloody pants down. Give us a preview, eh?”

Linda glances down at Ben Li. Before, his eyes had been pleading,

but now they watch her with a strange fascination, waiting to see if she’ll take down her pants. It is all about power, she knows. Ben Li heard Quinn talking about him and the dogs. He knows he’ll be the first to die, and all he can do is lie there watching, waiting, probably praying for some kind of miracle, or even just a diversion before death.

Around the boat the fog has thickened again, turning the night a deeper shade of black.

Linda straightens up. From deep within her, so deep that she’s forgotten it was there, something begins to rise. The density of it fills her as it expands. It’s love, she realizes. Or whatever you call the thing that huddles in the last dark closet you'’ve locked against the world, waiting to find something like itself. Linda has never known why she let herself go so far with Tim. She knew all along that he wouldn'’t leave his family. She wouldn'’t have asked him to, though she wanted it desperately. But now—standing almost in the river Tim died within sight of—she knows.

She wanted a child.

Over thirty and she’d never even been pregnant. But she was still young enough. And Tim wouldn'’t have had to leave Julia to give her that. Tim was the closest thing Linda had ever had to a child of her own, a big little boy who wanted the world to be better than it was. Now he was gone, and with him her hope of a child.

“He loved me,” she says aloud, once, for all the times she’d yearned to say it to the people around her.

This knowledge surges in her breast, filling her so profoundly that a faint radiance shimmers from her skin. She feels like the Madonna in the old Italian painting printed in her grandmother’s Bible. All of this she gives to Ben Li in a single downward glance, one long look that holds a woman’s infinite mercy.

“Do you have to go or not, you crazy cunt?”

Seamus Quinn’s angry voice pierces night and fog, but not the light that shines from Linda Church.

“Yes,” she says. “I have to go.”

With the grace of a bird taking flight, she steps onto the lid of the Igloo and leaps into the river.

CHAPTER

16

If physicists want to develop a time machine, they should explore fear. Fear dilates and compresses time without limit. For desperate people awaiting rescue, every instant stretches into unendurable agony; for those awaiting death by cancer, the earth spins relentlessly, shortening the days until they pass like fanned pages in a book. Trapped in our bodies, perception is all, and the engine of perception is hunger for life.

Before tonight, I could not have imagined playing a six-hour card game with my father. Yet here we sit, betting matchsticks without expression, occasionally searching each others’ eyes or looking with disbelief at the guns lying between us on the sofa. I'm not much of a cardplayer, so it’s been a one-sided contest. We’'ve spoken enough to persuade whoever might be listening that we’re passing a long night while Dad waits to see that my heart is all right, and typed enough that Dad is fully caught up on the circumstances surrounding Tim’s murder. I'm fairly confident that there’s no video surveillance of my upper hallway—ditto any keystroke-sensing technology around the house—for our desultory computer conversations would surely have earned us a call from Jonathan Sands by now.

“Ante,” Dad says.

“Sorry.” I push a red-tipped matchstick across the tatted surface of the sofa cushion.