Greg Iles - The Devils Punchbowl

I shake my head. “No. Those men work for a private security company I’'ve dealt with in the past. They have no government or law enforcement connection whatever. They’ll guard anybody for the right price. Even you.”

Jiao rises silently and takes two steps toward me. A scent like warm caramel reaches my nostrils. “Please do not involve yourself in our business. I can see that you care about your family. It would be unfortunate for everyone if you allowed your priorities to become confused.”

“I haven'’t,” I tell her, trying to blot out the memory of Tim’s mutilated corpse. “I promise you that.”

“We very much want our property back.”

Yeah, I got that.

With her feline gaze still on my face, Jiao reaches out and takes hold of my hand. Then she looks down, turns my palm up, and traces out the lines that curve across my skin. Her exotic face becomes somber, as though a cloud has passed over a terra-cotta figure. She looks over her shoulder at Sands, then back at me. I try to penetrate the blue-green portals of her eyes, but I can’t. At last she drops my hand, murmurs something softly in a foreign language, then leaves by the same door she entered through.

“What was that about?” I ask.

Sands raises his eyebrows. “Who knows? I'm guessing she saw something linking the two of us. Or thinks she did, anyway.”

“What did she say?”

“I have no idea. Nor do I give a fuck.” With his flint-hard eyes on me, the Irishman stubs out his cigarette, then lights another, drawing deeply. When he leans forward and speaks, exhaling smoke with every word, I'm reminded of how Tim characterized him in the cemetery. “Listen to me, mate. I’'ve done things for kicks you wouldn'’t do to save your own life. I’'ve lived in places where nightmares are scenery, killed too many people to remember. Man, woman, child—it makes no difference. After you'’ve gone where I have, you understand: There are no civilians. Not on this stinking planet. Now, I gave you the rules last night. You cross me, I act—immediately and irrevocably.”

“I haven'’t crossed you. I’'ve only done what any father would do.”

“Father,” Sands echoes thoughtfully. “I suppose

your

father could serve as de facto hostage for now. While we see where you really stand.”

“I can live with that,” I say with apparent resignation, even as my heart begins to race. “You don'’t mean as a prisoner?”

Quinn laughs behind me.

“No need for that,” says Sands. “We know where to find him.”

“All right. Look—”

“Tell him about the USB drive,” Sands says.

“Jessup made a copy of the DVD he stole,” Quinn says. “Part of it, anyway. He made it while he was still on the boat. We need you to find that too.”

“Why didn't you tell me that last night?”

“We didn't know last night, did we?” Quinn says angrily. “We’'ve been going over the computer logs, and we just found it. He copied nearly two gigabytes of data from the DVD drive to something attached to a USB port. It was probably a thumb drive, but we don'’t know. You just keep your fucking eyes peeled.”

Real exasperation enters my voice. “How am I supposed to find this stuff? I don'’t even know what I'm looking for. How do you know he didn't e-mail a copy of the data to a dozen people?”

Sands shakes his head slowly. “He couldn'’t access the Internet from where he was. It would have set off an alarm.”

“Plus there’s no record of that in the logs,” Quinn says.

“He could have done it from his car, couldn'’t he? From a notebook computer.”

“If he had done, he would have e-mailed it to

you.

Do you have my property, Mr. Mayor?”

“No!”

“Then stop worrying about things we’re not worried about.”

“Okay. Fine. If that’s all, I have somewhere to be.”

Sands looks at his watch. “The first race? You’ve already missed it.”

“I should still make an appearance.”

The Irishman makes a clucking sound with his tongue. “What you

should

do is start looking for my property. While everyone else is busy. I’d start in the city cemetery.”

So Tim did make it that far last night.

“Maybe I will.”

Sands picks up the newspaper from the kitchen table. “Yer one from the

Examiner

wrote a story about Jessup’s death. They must have held the presses for that one.”

I have no idea what he’s talking about. My

Examiner

is still lying beside my front porch where the paperboy threw it this morning.

“See that she sticks to the script, right? And not too loud with it. Wouldn’t want anything to happen to her. You might want to go back to banging her one day. If she’ll have you.”

As I bite off a stinging reply, Sands cuts his eyes at Quinn. “Take him back to Bedford Falls, Seamus.”

Without another look at me, Sands exits through the same door Jiao used, his muscular calves rippling beneath the hem of the robe.

Quinn grins but says nothing while I follow him down the long, tiled hall to a stone portico, then out to my Saab.

The two goons I brought back are nowhere to be seen. Quinn reaches into his pocket and fishes out my cell phone, then takes my gun from the small of his back and passes it to me.

“Don’t do anything like this again, Your Honor. That was local boys watching you last night. Next time it’ll be my men.”

“Who was that girl back there? Miss Teen China?”

A gleam of malice lights Quinn’s dark eyes. “Maybe one day you’ll find out.”

Ignoring his implied threat, I reach for my door handle.

“Keep your cell phone switched on,” Quinn says. “I like to know where my friends are.”

With my gun hanging loose in my hand, I look off toward the river, then turn back to Quinn, my eyes stripped of all affect. “You stay away from my family.”

The Irishman’s eyes flash with challenge. “Or what?”

“This isn’t Northern Ireland. It’s Mississippi. We know how to play rough here too.”

“I'’ll remember,” Quinn says, his voice filled with good humor. “Looking forward to it.”

He turns and walks back toward the house.

I climb into the Saab, then check my cell phone. Quinn turned it off while I was inside. Switching it on, I drive toward the gatehouse. As soon as the phone locates a tower, it begins ringing, and also signaling missed calls. The LCD screen reads,

Caller: Hans Necker.

The Minnesotan is probably calling me from three thousand feet above the river, but as I glance back toward Louisiana, I see only a solitary balloon in the sky, scudding southward like a fast-moving cloud.

“Hello?”

“Penn! Hans Necker! Is your family all right?”

“Ah…yeah. I'm really sorry I had to miss the race. Everything’s fine now.”

“Good! Because we got delayed by wind. A couple of cowboys took off, but they were going the wrong way sixty seconds out. How far are you from the football field behind the prep school south of town?”

“St. Stephen’s?”

Necker speaks away from the phone, then says, “Yeah, yeah, Buck Stadium, they call it. Big hole in the ground.”

“Um…five minutes?”

“Perfect! Get down here. We’re waiting for you. But don'’t mess around. We’ll be one of the last to launch as it is.”

As I near the gatehouse, I slow the car and look back at the stucco boxes on the bluff. When the Natchez Indians looked at the dwellings of the French interlopers who’d appeared on their land in the early 1700s, they probably asked the same questions I'm asking now:

Who are these madmen and what do they want? Do they even know themselves?

The gate guard looks puzzled by my apparent reluctance to leave. I’'ve missed something here. Slowly I pan my gaze across the still-green landscape, past the alien mansion, to the rim of the bluff.

There.

In the shade of a scarlet oak, silhouetted against the blue-white sky, sits the white dog that pinned me to my front door while Sands prodded me with his knife. The animal is too far away for me to see its eyes, but he’s not looking out over the river, as I’d first thought. He’s looking at me. He seems a sculpture of alertness, his big head held high, his cropped ears erect.

As I stare, the dog raises his hindquarters until his huge body is aimed at me like a torpedo. Nearly two hundred yards separate us, but that dog could cover the distance in twenty seconds. Emboldened by the car around me, I raise my hand as though in greeting, then, irrationally, give the dog the finger. He instantly lowers his head and begins to trot toward me. After one last look, I drive through the gate.

A hundred yards down the road, a rolled newspaper lies at the foot of an asphalt driveway. I stop my car, get out, and take the rubber band off the paper. The front page carries the usual fluff about the Balloon Festival, but below the fold, I see a small story with the headline DEATH MARS POST RACE CELEBRATIONS. The byline reads

Caitlin Masters.

A quick scan of the story reveals a surprising number of facts, or perhaps not so surprising, considering the network of sources, including cops, that Caitlin developed while she lived here. But in the sixth paragraph I discover something I knew nothing about.

“Sources close to the investigation say that over a pound of crystal methamphetamine was discovered at the victim’s residence by officers sent there to inform the widow of her husband’s death. The widow had vanished, and the house was open. As of this writing, she remains missing. Anyone with knowledge of the whereabouts of Julia Stanton Jessup is urged to contact police immediately.”

Caitlin quotes the lead detective: “With this amount of drugs involved, we’re almost certainly looking at a drug murder. We need to find this woman and her child before anybody else does.”

Consumed by rage, I calmly roll the newspaper back into a tight cylinder and fit the rubber band around it. A pound of crystal meth? I searched Tim’s house myself, and I didn't find any drugs. And I beat the police there. If the two cops who drove up on me “found” the meth, either they planted it or they found drugs carefully planted by whoever tore up the house before I got there.

“Hey!” shouts a man in a bathrobe, from far up the driveway. “You work for the

Examiner

?”

“No, sorry,” I call, tossing the paper up the driveway.

“Well, who the hell are you?”

“Nobody,” I tell him, getting back into my car.

“Hey, you’re the mayor, aren'’t you?” he shouts.

“I'm supposed to be,” I mutter, leaving a foot of stinking rubber on the pavement as I fishtail onto the road.

CHAPTER

19

Two dozen balloons pass over my car in a stately if hurried procession as I drive from Sands’s house to St. Stephen’s Preparatory School, this morning’s new launch site. As I turn into the school’s driveway—painted with royal blue deer tracks the size of a brontosaur’s footprints—a huge yellow sphere rises swiftly from behind the building and sails over my head breathing fire from its gas jets.

Pulling around the elementary building, I turn onto the access road of Buck Stadium, a massive oval hole in the ground lined with modern bleachers. The stadium makes an ideal launch site, not only because it’s shielded from the wind, but also because its light poles are fed by underground electrical cables, which removes one of the primary risks for balloon flight.

More than a dozen pickup trucks are parked on the football field, but only two deflated balloons lie stretched on the grass like empty tube socks. The Athens Point sheriff’s department helicopter is parked on the fifty-yard line, its rotors slowly turning. Beyond the chopper, several crew members hold open the mouth of a partly inflated balloon while a large fan blasts cool air into it. They’ll continue until the balloon is round enough to light the burners without risk to the canopy. At the far end of the field, behind the goalposts, a single red balloon sways above the field, a half dozen people clinging