The Devils Punchbowl - Greg Iles

Nancy blows on the dice again, then gives them a backhand throw, but the pit boss’s eyes are on Walt now. Just like the PTZ cameras in the hanging domes on the ceiling. The guys in the security room were probably bored shitless when he started his run, but now they'’re watching with the same hunger as the people leaning against the table, wishing somebody would beat the house and walk away flush.

Suckers every one,

Walt thinks.

How empty does your life have to be to spend your nights in this place?

The dice come up three and one—the needed four. Nancy shrieks, and the crowd surges against Walt like a tide. It’s so easy to win when you don'’t care one way or the other.

Walt ups his line bet, and Nancy rolls, establishing a point of four again. Walt takes the maximum odds, then places two thousand-dollar bets on “hard four”—one for him, and one for the dealers. Another crazy bet, way past the edge of probability. But a thrumming on that old taut wire stretched from his balls to his throat tells him that tonight is his night.

“Get ready, boys!” he says, feeling like Joe Namath before Super Bowl III. “You’re going home with folding money tonight!”

Nancy skips the dice across the table with evanescent excitement, and they rebound half the table’s length, wobbling over to a two and a two.

The dealers blink in astonishment as the crowd goes wild around them.

“Four the hard way,” the stickman says with unaccustomed awe. “Hard four. Pay the man.”

“And don'’t forget to pay yourselves, son,” Walt says with grandiose intimacy, having won both men another two grand each to take home. “You’re gonna remember J. B. Gilchrist, aren'’t you?”

The stickman smiles with genuine gratitude. “Yes, sir.”

“Color me up,” Walt tells the dealers, and the crowd falls silent. The dealers change his winnings into high-denomination chips that he can carry easily to the cashier.

Walt pockets the chips, then grabs the hooker and dips her low, like Fred and Ginger. Nancy squeals, but the crowd claps and cheers as Walt brings her back up, red-faced from the effort. “Time to move on, hon!” he bellows. “I like action, and the action’s always moving. Anybody knows where to find it, you come talk to me. I'm always looking!”

The crowd parts as though for a prophet, and Walt leads his hooker across the casino floor like a king escorting a royal consort. He hasn’'t felt this good about a job in a long time. He’d never gamble with his own money, but he does believe in luck. Any man who’s been in combat has seen luck in all its infinite variations, and Walt has been putting his life on the line for fifty years since he got back from Korea. He’s the last of the Rangers from his old company still doing law enforcement work, and while he knows that judgment and experience have helped get him this far, without luck he would have died long ago. Driving out from the ranch, he’d wondered if he might be pushing a little too hard this time, tempting the lady to turn against him. But tonight he feels the fullness of his abilities in all their old potency. He’s got his mojo working, as an old Houston cop used to tell him.

“I'm waiting for you,” he says softly, thinking of the man who threatened Tom Cage’s granddaughter. “Come on and take a nibble, sonny. I'’ll set the hook so hard it’ll break your goddamn jaw.”

In the parking lot on the bluff, Walt tips the driver of the shuttle bus, then steps off and joins Nancy on the pavement of the parking lot.

“Where’s your car?” the hooker asks, looking up the line of modest cars in the lot. “I'’ll bet you drive a big old Cadillac or something, don'’t you? Old school, right?”

“Hell no,” says Walt, pointing to the big Roadtrek van. “That'’s me right there.”

The girl’s mouth falls open. “Where? That?”

“That'’s me.” Walt clicks open the locks from his key ring. “Wait till you see her.”

The girl looks wary, but she follows him into the van, which is finished as finely as a boat cabin. “Ain’t no regular RV, is it?” she marvels, turning in the small space. “You got a stove and a microwave and a flat panel and a refrigerator and a—”

“Shower,” he finishes.

“Man! What did this thing set you back?”

“’Bout a hundred,” Walt says.

Nancy shakes her head and eyes the sofa in back doubtfully. “You’re not sleeping in this thing, are you? I mean, you got a hotel room, right?”

“Sure. I'm at the Eola.”

She smiles and nods knowingly. “Well, hell. Let’s get this thing going and get up there. We’ll open up the minibar and have us a party, Daddy.”

Walt opens a cabinet over the sink and pours himself a shot of Maker’s Mark. Then he sits at the table in back and drinks it, feeling the burn in his gullet.

Nancy looks puzzled. “You got any rum, by any chance?”

“Rum is for pirates and high school girls. You’re out of high school, aren'’t you?”

She giggles. “Maybe I am and maybe I ain’t. Do you want me to be?”

“What I want is for you to pour yourself a little whiskey and sit here by me.”

Nancy pours a glass of whiskey and sets it on the table, then sits beside Walt and nuzzles her face into his neck. For an instant he feels a shiver of desire, but then her hand creeps across his thigh and down between his legs, rubbing insistently.

“Don’t you want to get on over to that hotel?” she coos. “We wanna be where we can spread out. Don’t we?”

Walt doesn’'t want to take the girl back to the hotel. He wants to go back to his room alone and call Carmelita. He can’t do that, of course, not without breaking cover. He never had any intention of screwing Nancy. He figured he’d get her to do a little striptease, overtip her, then pretend to pass out and hope she didn't try to rob him. If she did, he’d “wake up” and ease her out gently. But now that they'’re alone, he knows he doesn’'t have the stomach for even that. Seeing those little tits drop out of that dress wouldn'’t do anything but make him think about the kids she has waiting at home, and the idea of her working with mechanical urgency to make him climax nauseates him.

What he really feels like doing is talking to her. Asking the same stupid question he asked the whores back in Korea—“How did you wind up doing this?”—which was all the more pointless back then because almost no one could answer even the simplest queries in English. Only in Japan had he received a real answer, on his extended R&R, and that had almost changed the course of his life.

“Don’t you want it, Daddy?” Nancy murmurs, rubbing clumsily at his trousers. “Huh?”

He drinks off her shot, then says, “Listen, Nancy,” and gently moves her hand out of his crotch. “You brought me some good luck in there, and I sure appreciate it. But I think I'm gonna call it a night.”

The girl’s face falls. “What’s the matter, J.B.? You don'’t like me?”

“Oh, I like you. A lot. But I'm gettin’ on up there in age, in case you haven'’t noticed.”

Nancy gives him a conspiratorial laugh.

“Hell, I got kids older than you. I like having a girl on my arm, putting on the dog a little. But the truth is, honey, old J.B. can’t really get it up no more.”

Her brow furrows as though she’s trying to understand an algebra problem. “What about Viagra?”

Walt chuckles as though with embarrassment. “I’'ve got a bad ticker, hon. Can’t take that stuff.”

Nancy looks almost frantic. “Well, there’s other things I can do. I mean, you got me out here and all. And I got to make a living, you know?”

“Oh, I know that, sweetheart. Don’t you worry ’bout that.” He digs out his roll and peels off five $100 bills. Nancy almost licks her lips at the sight of them, but she waits until he passes them to her. “Does that cover your time?”

The glow in her eyes tells him she hasn’'t seen that kind of money in a long time, if ever. “What about my tip?”

Walt hesitates, then winks like a man who knows he’s being taken advantage of and peels off another hundred, which he folds into the damp little palm.

“How long you gonna be in town, J.B.?” Nancy asks, obviously thinking about her future prospects. “I can put on the dog all you want, darling.”

“I'’ll be around all week. Got a piece of some Wilcox wells down here. You’ll see me around the boats. If I'm with somebody else, you just give me the high sign, and I'’ll come get you if I can. If not, I'’ll catch you the next night. Okay?”

She nods soberly. “I got you.”

Walt smiles with genuine gratitude. “Can you get home all right?”

“Yeah, my car’s in the lot here.”

“Where?”

“Other side.”

Walt gets up and cranks the Roadtrek, then follows Nancy’s pointing finger to the other side of the vast lot, where he stops beside her wreck of a car.

“It’s a junker,” she admits, “but it runs good. My ex is a mechanic.”

Walt feels like giving her the rest of the roll, but that would be pushing it.

Nancy raises her slim frame from the seat, leans down, and kisses him on the top of the head, then walks to the door in the side of the Roadtrek. As he looks back to watch her go, she pauses and lifts her tight skirt over her hips. A thin band of black elastic encircles her surprisingly feminine hips, and the thong disappears between the firm cheeks of her rump. She bends and touches her toes without effort, then stands and turns to face him, drawing the thong away from her pubis. The hair there is trimmed flat, a dark shadow over taut skin and protuberant lips. This time something stirs in him, something beyond thought or reason, the old Adam in him coming back to life.

“Do you miss it, J.B.?” she asks softly. “Don’t you just want to put your finger in it sometimes?”

Walt tries to laugh this off, but something sticks in his throat.

“Everybody wants to,” she says. “You don'’t never get too old for that.”

Walt looks into her eyes, then back at the triangular shadow.

“I'’ll be around,” she says, letting the thong pop back into place. “You let me know.”

She pulls down the clingy skirt, opens the door, and steps out of the van.

Walt drives away without looking back. Her groping touch had repelled him, but that last, unexpected display, her frank lack of embarrassment, arced across the space between them and struck something vital. It’s enough to make him want to stop the van and pour another drink. A girl he wouldn'’t have looked at twice ten years ago has pierced his armor with a simple tease. The confidence he felt on the boat has been shaken. As he climbs the long road that leads up the bluff, he wonders,

Am I getting too old for this game?

CHAPTER

27

After two nights without sleep, seven hours’ rest is not enough, but ten minutes in a steaming shower at least make me feel human again. Caitlin woke me from a dead sleep at 3:45 a.m. and led me to her bathroom. Now, as I'm toweling off, she comes in and sets a cup of coffee beside the lavatory. I wrap the towel around my waist, and she perches on the edge of the commode. She’s still wearing the clothes she had on at the police station.

“Have you slept?” I ask her, taking a hand towel off the rack to dry my hair.

“I’'ve been reading about dogfighting.”

“And?”

“My mind is blown. I'm serious. This is a worldwide sport—if you can call it that—and it goes back centuries. It’s been outlawed almost everywhere except Japan, but it’s still thriving all over the world. Did you even Google this?”

“I haven'’t had time.”

Caitlin shakes her head as though I'm hopeless. “I pictured, you know, a mob of hicks with twenty-dollar bills in their hands gathered around a couple of bulldogs. But this is a big-money business. There’s a whole American subculture out there. Two subcultures really: the old-timer rednecks—who specialize in breeding ‘game’ dogs and pass down all the knowledge about fighting bloodlines

from the 1800s; then there’s the urban culture—the street fighters, they call them. Hip-hop generation and all that. It’s a macho thing. They fight their dogs in open streets, basements, fenced yards. But as different as the two subcultures are, they have a lot in common. They’re highly organized, they train the dogs the same way, and they expose their kids to it very young to desensitize them…It’s

sick.

”

“‘Game dogs,’ you said. Is that what they call fighting dogs?”

“No, no. ‘Gameness’ is a quality that a dog has or doesn’'t have. If a dog is ‘game,’ that means he’s willing to fight to the point of death, no matter how badly injured he is. Truly game dogs will keep fighting with two broken forelegs.”

“Jesus.”

Caitlin stands, outrage animating her. “Apparently pit bull terriers are among the most loyal dogs in the world, and it’s that loyalty that these assholes twist to create animals that will sacrifice their lives to please their masters. You should see some pictures. When they'’re not fighting, these dogs live on heavy three-foot chains or on the breeding stand. That'’s it. And they don'’t live long. You know what happens to dogs that aren'’t considered game?”

“I can guess.”

She nods. “They kill them. Kill them or use them for practice. ‘Practice’ means letting other dogs tear them to pieces, to give them a taste for blood. If it’s the first option, they shoot them, hang them, bash in their skulls with bats, electrocute them, run them over with trucks. Sometimes they just let them starve.”

“It’s hard to grasp,” I say, knowing this is hardly adequate. “I need my clothes.”

“They’re in the dryer. I'’ll get them. Though I kind of like seeing you this way. It’s been a while.”