Greg Iles - The Devils Punchbowl

“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.

“How long has Timothy been talking to Penn Cage?”

Linda blinks but says nothing. Hope has flickered in her breast with religious power. Tim was supposed to meet Penn tonight. Either Tim missed that meeting or he delivered his evidence to Penn. Either way, she has reason to hope. If Tim missed the meeting, Penn will surely turn the town upside down to find him, starting with the

Magnolia Queen.

And if Tim did manage to get him the evidence, Penn, being the mayor, must certainly know by now that his friend is dead. Either way, his first instinct will be to have Sands arrested. That'’s why Sands feels pressed for time. The mayor could be on his way down to the boat with a squad of police at this moment.

You have to stay on the boat,

says a voice. Tim’s voice.

If they take you off this boat, you’re dead. Or lost, because no one will know where to look for you. But as long as you’re here, you can be found. Whatever they do, you have to take it—

A stalling strategy occurs to Linda, one learned so long ago that it feels inborn.

I'’ll give them things in stages,

she thinks.

Lie first, then give up something true. Something to keep them trying. When they feel I'm cooperating, resist again, then give up the next bit.

It was like negotiating with a boy in the backseat in junior high. Let him slide his hand under your shirt, but not your bra. Kiss awhile, then push his hand out and kiss some more. When he’s finally, really angry, let him push up the bra and feel them for real. Then the game begins again with the belt and the snap to your jeans.

Only this was no backseat. And these weren’t junior high boys. Every minute of delay would be bought with pain.

You have to take it,

Tim’s voice says from within her.

Whatever it is—

Sands reaches out and lays a hand on the gleaming metal printer cart. A black rag lies on it. Sands lifts the rag like a magician beginning a trick, and her eyes track to what’s beneath it. The wires end not in EKG leads, but in shiny metal clips.

Alligator clips,

she remembers from a lab in high school. One of the wires is connected to a metal bolt about five inches long. Dried blood coats it.

When Linda recognizes the blood, her mind jumps to the man on the floor with no pants, and the idea she had before—that she was in some place beyond fear—vanishes like water thrown onto a hot skillet. She’s only crossed the threshold of fear. When she first entered this room, her grief over Tim had smothered everything, even her will to live. Now she wants only to keep breathing, to avoid pain.

Sands moves closer, leans down, pushes a strand of hair from her eye. With an intimate caress he wipes a tear from her cheek, then raises his finger to his mouth and licks it.

“Linda, girl,” he says softly, “there are things far worse than death in this world. I’'ve seen people beg to be where Tim is now. There are…appetites. Appetites that fall outside the pale. Quinn is a man of such appetites. I, on the other hand, prefer the shortest path from A to B.”

This statement confounds her.

“In business,” he clarifies, seeing her reaction. “This machine generates electric current, in varying intensity. The clips attach to things that protrude, and the bolt is for…insertion.”

Linda’s stomach heaves.

“Get the bucket,” Sands says.

Quinn moves behind her; a door opens and closes. Then Quinn returns and places a bucket stinking of vomit on the floor. The stench is so primal that it cuts through every last illusion.

They’re not going to stop until they know everything,

she realizes.

Maybe not even then. Because he’ll have to be sure.

Linda has never known such despair. She can protect no one. They’ll find out about Penn Cage, where Julia is hiding—

The generator hums ominously when Sands switches it on, like

the motor in a dentist’s office revving up to drive a drill. At the sound, the dog tenses with arousal. Despite its remarkable discipline, it cannot remain still.

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

“I threw it overboard.”

“Why?”

“Tim told me to. He said you could track us with it.”

Sands shoots Quinn a brief glance. “What else? What was on the phone? I can get your records.”

“I got a text message I didn't understand.”

“From who? Timothy?”

She nods quickly. “I think he used a stranger’s phone. He thought that was safer.”

“What did it say? Word for word.”

“It wasn'’t words. Not really. It didn't make sense.”

Sands picks up the bloody bolt on its wire. “It’s very important that you remember, Linda.”

“It was just letters that only half made sense. I thought he meant to send it to someone else.”

“What were they?”

“The first word was

Thief

with a capital

T.”

Then

www,

like for ‘World Wide Web.’”

Quinn takes a small pad from his pocket and begins writing on it.

“What else?” Sands asked.

“‘Kill mommy,’ that was next.”

“Kill mommy?”

“I know, it makes no sense.”

“Was there more?”

“The last said, ‘Squirt too,’ or something like that.”

Sands’s eyes narrow in confusion. “Are you lying to me, Linda?”

“No.”

Sands sighs and nods to Quinn. Quinn steps forward and rips the blouse from her chest, his eyes flashing.

She struggles not to void on the chair. “What do you want to know?”

“Was that a code for something else? Who would Timmy be sending that to?”

“I don'’t know! I swear to God!”

“Wire her up,” Quinn says. “Give her a jolt.”

“I might, just,” said Sands, “depending on how she answers the next question.”

Sands nods toward the corner. “Turn the boy over. Show her his face.”

Linda’s gaze follows Quinn as he walks to the wall. He bends and pulls the bare-bottomed man over on his back. She’s afraid the face will be butchered, but it’s not. She recognizes a young Asian man she has seen a few times on the boat. Ben Li. She only knows who he is because of Tim. Li works in the security area, running the computer accounting system. On paper he’s listed as a gaming consultant, but his real job is working some sort of illegal magic on the computers that track the profits. Tim only found this out because Ben is lonely, and he uses drugs to dull the ache. Unlike the other employees, Li isn’t given monthly drug tests. In the past few weeks, Tim has become Ben’s supplier. That somehow played into Tim’s plan. Linda only learned this last week, and she wasn'’t sure she wanted to know, but it seemed important to Tim to tell her. It was as though by telling her this—information that could get him killed—Tim was proving how much he loved her, trusted her.