The Devils Punchbowl - Greg Iles

“Jenny was just run off the road in Bath. Her car flipped.”

I swallow hard as an image of my sister lying dead beside an English motorway flashes through my mind. “Is she alive?”

“Yes. She called me from the hospital, and I spoke to her doctor. She’s in mild shock, but she could easily have been killed.”

“When did it happen?”

“About an hour ago. She’d dropped the kids with a friend and was on her way to the university.”

A wave of heat rushes over my face as guilt suffuses me. “Where are you?”

“On my way to the safe house.” Kelly insisted that we have an empty house within ten miles of the operation to review any evidence we collected without having to go to a place Sands could know about. “Caitlin’s with me,” adds my father.

“Doc?” Kelly cuts in. “I know you’re upset, but go easy on the names, okay?”

“Fuck that,” says my father. “I’'ve had it with these sons of bitches.”

“How soon will you reach the house?” Kelly asks, his eyes moving right and left like those of a man thinking fast.

“Twenty minutes. And I want you there. I want everybody there.”

Kelly looks down at the corpse of the white dog. His left hand is balled into a fist, probably against pain, but I sense that he’s weighing the possibility of progress against the immediate crises. His entire posture communicates frustration; he looks as though he’s about to kick the dead dog.

“Pave Low?” he says into the Star Trek.

“Here.”

“Come get us.”

“Ten-four. You want me to set down right where you are?”

“No. We can’t be sure that building’s empty. We’ll find a sandbar downstream. A mile, maybe.”

“I'’ll be flying right over the water, coming upstream. Out.”

I key my Star Trek again. “Dad, we’re on the way.”

“I heard. Don’t waste any time.”

As I shove the walkie-talkie into my pocket, the sound of my father angrily carving a Sunday roast makes me turn. But it’s a trick of the mind. Kelly has the Bully Kutta’s head wedged between his knees, and he’s sawing through the lower part of its neck like a man being paid for piecework, not by the hour.

“What are you

doing

?”

“Rabies,” he grunts without looking up. The spinal column slows him down for a few seconds, but Kelly’s obviously field-dressed a lot of game in his time. “I don'’t know if this fucker’s had his shots or not. You gotta get the brainstem and everything for that test.” When the head tears free, Kelly lifts it by its wrinkled face and stuffs it into his gear bag. Then he straps on his pack, heaves the dog’s carcass over his right shoulder, and stands with a groan. “What are you waiting for? Pick up the other one.”

“Where are we going?”

“To throw them in the river.”

With a strange buzzing in my head, I kneel beside the black dog, lever my right arm under it, then wrestle it over my shoulder in an awkward fireman’s carry. The damn thing must weigh a hundred pounds, and it stinks. I'm winded before I cover twenty yards, but Kelly’s already far ahead.

This is one time I should have let him do the job alone.

When I reach the river’s edge, the white carcass is already spinning slowly downstream under the stars, and Kelly is stuffing the dog’s head into the rear cargo hold of his kayak. With the last of my strength, I stagger downstream from the boats and heave my burden into the current. The Bully Kutta disappears with a splash, then bobs to the surface.

“They actually went after my sister,” I say with breathless disbelief. “I haven'’t heard my dad sound that upset since Ruby died.”

Kelly squats and rinses his wounded forearm with river water. “I'’ll tell you what I think,” he says softly, scrubbing the half-clotted blood from his skin.

“What?”

He looks up, his mild blue eyes like those of a choirboy. “I think Jonathan Sands has become a one-bullet problem.”

CHAPTER

34

“A one-bullet problem?” Caitlin asks, echoing Kelly’s repeated phrase. “You mean you want to kill Sands? In cold blood?”

Kelly looks around the circle of faces in the room. Along with Kelly and Caitlin, Carl Sims, my father, and I are seated in chairs in the den of a lake house owned by Chris Shepard, my father’s youngest partner. Because it’s after Labor Day, most of the houses used as second homes by Natchezians are empty now. As I drew the curtains over the broad glass doors on the far wall, I saw the narrow black line of Lake Concordia, the oxbow lake that carries the name of the parish, behind the house. I also saw James Ervin, who’s guarding us from the lake side, while his brother Elvin guards the road entrance. Danny McDavitt is sitting in the chopper across the lake road, in the cotton field where we landed.

“Actually,” says Kelly, “my blood is still pretty hot at this point.”

“Mine too,” says my father. “Gutless bastards.”

While my father dressed Kelly’s wounded arm, we listened to his account of Jenny being attacked on the highway (not even the British police believe it was an accident), then brought Dad up to speed on the events on the river. While we talked, Carl tied the Bully Kutta’s severed head in a trash bag, then stored it in the refrigerator, so that its brain can be examined by the path lab in the morning. Coming after the events beside the river tonight, this scene was so surreal that

I could scarcely separate thought from emotion. Kelly’s assertion that the time has come to kill Jonathan Sands seems perfectly natural to me, given the situation. I can tell by Caitlin’s hard-set face that she doesn’'t agree. She doesn’'t want to antagonize my father, but she’s not going to be silent when the matter at hand is assassination.

“Look, I want the guy to go down,” she says. “He’s scum, okay? No question. But you can’t just kill him. I mean, if it’s all right for you to decide who lives and dies, the same goes for everyone else. Who empowered you? If you’re free to do that, where does it end? Back in the cave, that’s where.”

Kelly listens patiently until she stops. “Let me tell you a secret, Caitlin. We’re still in the cave. It’s just bigger, and we wear nicer clothes. We make alliances and try to be civil, we save the weak instead of leaving them out in the cold to die. But guys like Sands, Quinn, Po…they play by the ancient rules. To them, life is a zero-sum game. You win or lose, live or die. And the most important rule of all is, you take everything you can, when you can, until somebody draws a line and says, ‘No more.’”

“Is that your view of life?”

“If it were, I wouldn'’t be offering to kill a man in front of witnesses. You probably studied existentialism in college, right? Survey of philosophy course? I'm not trying to patronize you, okay? But I

am

an existentialist. A soldier. Asleep or awake, in uniform or out. There’s war in Afghanistan, but there’s war here too. When Sands threatened to kill Penn’s child, he opened hostilities and declared the rules of engagement. We know from Linda Church’s note that Sands probably murdered Ben Li, or else ordered it done. It’s a miracle Linda isn’t dead too—

if

she’s still alive, which we don'’t know for sure. I'm sure they'’re hunting for her as we speak.”

Caitlin shivers at this thought.

Kelly nods with certainty. “Given where things stand now, we have only one practical solution. Remove Sands from the equation.”

“You’re willing to do that?” Dad asks. “If we say here and now that that’s what we want…then Sands will die?”

Kelly nods soberly. “Quinn too, I think. Unavoidable.”

Caitlin shakes her head in amazement. “And you’ll go back to Afghanistan and never lose a night’s sleep over it?”

“I'’ll sleep better.”

What strikes me most about Kelly’s cool assertion is that a couple of hours ago, he was unwilling to put a dying dog out of its misery. But that mystery will have to wait. I look at my father, who’s rubbing his white beard with arthritically curled hands.

“It’s tempting,” Dad says. “When I think of Jenny rolling over in that car, I could do it myself.”

“I'm sorry to be a drag here, guys,” Caitlin says. “But this is

way

over the line. What does killing Sands even accomplish? If Edward Po is the problem, who’s to say he won'’t carry on the vendetta and send men here to kill Penn and every member of his family?”

“She’s got a point,” Carl says. “You’d be crazy not to consider that.”

“I’'ve considered it,” Kelly says. “Edward Po is a businessman. Whatever he’s up to here, he ultimately views it in terms of profit and loss. You can’t go around murdering government officials in small-town America. It draws the wrong kind of attention. That'’s bad business. Sands is Po’s cat’s-paw, his control mechanism for Golden Parachute. If Sands dies, Po will simply order Craig Weldon to put someone else in that job.”

“Yet you’re arguing that Sands

will

murder government officials,” Caitlin points out. “Or their families.”

“I think he’s proved that he will. I don'’t think Sands is motivated primarily by money.”

“You don'’t know that Po is either. You’re ignoring the question of face. If Po is a criminal, can he afford to let other criminals know that his lieutenants can be killed without reprisals?”

“I considered face,” Kelly says patiently. “Also

guanxi.

I think killing Sands is actually the most elegant solution to our problem—and not just for us. If Sands is killed, I suspect Po will claim credit for the murder—unofficially, of course. Competitors will assume that Po had Sands murdered for interfering with his niece, Jiao, whom Po vowed to protect from people like Sands.”

Everyone is silent, not least because Kelly seems two steps ahead of us all.

“We either kill him or we back off,” Kelly concludes. “Conventional methods are too slow. They’re just going to get someone we care about killed.”

“Carl?” Caitlin says pointedly. “Would

you

kill Sands?”

The sniper gives her a “Why me?” look, like a grade-school student being called on by his teacher. “Kelly’s a free agent,” he mumbles. “The man makes his own decisions.”

“I'm asking about

you.

”

“Depends on the situation. If somebody was going to die because I didn't, I would, yeah.”

“But would you shoot him sitting at his breakfast table?”

Carl turns up his palms. “I don'’t think so, but it’s complicated. I

have

shot somebody who was eating dinner, because the Marine Corps told me he needed to die. Now, I don'’t know Jonathan Sands from Jonathan Livingston Seagull. But if I knew he was going to kill my sister or my mother…then I’d vaporize him.”

Caitlin turns to me, as though I'm the court of last resort. “You’re an attorney, sworn to uphold the law. You’ve sent people to death row for doing exactly what Kelly’s offering to do now. Are you really going to send him out of this house to commit murder?”

The fact that I think Kelly is right surprises even me. I’'ve been in similar situations before, with the power of life and death over someone almost as evil as Sands, and I chose to use the court system, even with the chance that they might escape punishment. But Sands is a special case. I wish Caitlin and I could have this discussion in private, because she tends to get more stirred up when she’s in front of people. But there’s no alternative now.

“I have sent people to death row,” I concede in a level voice. “But not for doing something like this. This is a unique situation. Tim stumbled into something far bigger and more complicated than he knew. Blackhawk’s position and Peter Lutjens’s warning prove that. We still don'’t really know what we’re dealing with. We only know that the government is involved in some way, and that Sands and Quinn are prepared to kill to prevent anyone from learning what they'’re doing. I also know that wherever they are, my mother and Annie are scared to death. They’re holding their chins up, but they'’re terrified that they’ll get a phone call saying that Dad or me is dead. And I believe that’s a real possibility.”

“That sounded like a summation, not an answer,” Caitlin says, her tone still challenging.

“Caitlin…this is like a stalking case. When I was a prosecutor, I saw a lot of women die needlessly because the police had no effec

tive way to intervene until after they were dead. A lot of the men who killed those women went to prison afterward. But the women were still dead.”

This time I get no ricochet response.

“In this case, there are four women who could die,” I go on, “all of whom I love. And one of them is you.”

“Don’t do that,” she says with startling intensity. “Don’t use me to justify killing someone.”

“Maybe we should take a vote,” Kelly suggests.

“No!” snaps Caitlin. “We’re not taking any goddamn vote. No one here has the right to vote on murder. If you kill Sands, you'’ve done it on your own.”

“What would you do if he went through with it?” I ask. “Would you report Kelly to the police?”

She gets to her feet and turns to my father. “Tom, you’re not seriously condoning this?”

Dad looks up at her with sad eyes. “I understand your feelings, Kate. I believe in the rule of law. And Sands hasn’'t killed a member of my family—yet. But that’s only thanks to chance. My daughter could easily have died two hours ago.”

“But she

didn't,

Tom. She’s going to be all right. We have time to take another path.”

“What path would that be?”

“We could go public. I can have this story on the front page of twenty-three papers tomorrow, and a lot more than that, if I bring my father into this. I’d hate to do that, but if we’re to the point of assassinating someone, then I think it’s time to break the story nationwide.”

“If we go public,” I point out, “Edward Po won'’t set foot on U.S. soil for ten years, at least. Whatever he’s doing here, he won'’t be nailed for it.”

Caitlin looks at me like I'm an idiot. “What do you think Po is going to do if you murder Sands? You lose Po that way too.”

“What exactly would you print?” I ask. “Unsubstantiated allegations?”

Kelly leans forward and says, “I know going public seems like a magic solution, throwing light onto people who live in the shadows. But men like Po don'’t see the world the way you do. They’re not

politicians. While you’re stirring up your media storm, they will be

acting.

To them, this is war. And if they take you out, or Annie or Peggy or Penn, none of us is going to feel comforted by the fact that you splashed Sands’s and Po’s names in the paper. Because that won'’t bring back the dead.”