Greg Iles - The Devils Punchbowl

“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.

“You keep playing like this, I'm going to own this house before the sun comes up.”

“Sorry I'm distracted. I keep thinking I feel my heart starting up again.”

“Let me worry about that. You play poker.”

We have not been without interruptions. Libby Jensen called twice, nearly catatonic with panic about what might happen to her son in jail. I did what I could to reassure her, but in truth the time has come for Soren to pay a price for his misbehavior. Looking at life through cell bars for a few weeks will probably do more than any treatment center to convince him that he’s had all the drugs he needs for a while. During her second call, Libby asked if she could come over, but I shot that idea down immediately, in a voice that brooked no appeal.

Two minutes after we hung up, I heard an engine stop in the street before my house. Thinking Libby had come anyway, I got up and walked to the front window. A Chevy Malibu with rental tags was parked in front of Caitlin’s house. The passenger door popped open, and Caitlin got out laughing. She said something to someone in the car, then ran up to her front door and waved back at the car. The bohemian filmmaker I’d met earlier got out and walked lazily—perhaps drunkenly—up to the porch and followed her inside. I heard their laughter even through my closed window. Pathetically, I hoped the car was still running, but it didn't seem to be. I stood looking down at the car until I sensed my father standing at my shoulder.

“What is it?” he whispered.

“Caitlin.”

“Huh.”

“She already went in.” I gave it a moment. “Not alone.”

Dad thought about this, then sighed, squeezed my arm, and walked back to the couch. I should have followed, but I stood there stubbornly, stupidly, waiting for the light in her bedroom to click on and destroy whatever hope remained that she had somehow returned to town for me, and not for a quick party with her new playmate.

My breath fogged the glass, faded, fogged it again. A dozen times? A hundred? Then I heard a bang, and Caitlin ran back out of the house. She was still laughing, and the filmmaker seemed to be

chasing her. She carried a wine bottle in one hand, and she held it up as though she meant to brain him with it. This time she jumped into the driver’s seat, and the man—Jan, I remember now—barely got himself folded into the passenger side before she sped up Washington Street toward the bluff and the river, never once looking at my house.

I walked back to the sofa, trying to dissociate myself from the anger rising in me. In the wake of Tim’s murder, Caitlin’s laughter seemed obscene. Surely, I thought, she must know about his death by now. Tim wasn'’t a close friend of hers, but she’d known him, and she knew we’d been close friends as boys. But all she seemed to be thinking about was getting drunk and finding a good time.

Two hours after the wine-scavenging trip, her car drew me to the window again. This time the Malibu pulled into Caitlin’s driveway. She emerged unsteadily but alone and walked to the side door. For a brief moment she glanced across the street, up toward my window, but by then I was far enough behind the curtain that she couldn'’t see me. She turned away and vanished into the house.

“I want to look up something on Medline,” Dad says. “I might want to prescribe you something.” With a groan he picks the MacBook off the floor, pecks out a long message, then pushes it over the matchsticks to me.