Greg Iles - The Devils Punchbowl

“Penn, where are you, man? I waited as long as I could, but they'’re onto me. I had to run. I tried to call you, but both my phones say ‘No service.’ They’re jamming the signal like they do on the boat sometimes. They blocked Cemetery Road, so I'm headed out into the county…almost to the Devil’s Punchbowl now. I'm going to have to shut off this phone, because they may be tracking me with it. I can’t say much, because they might get the phone. I'm doing eighty on gravel, man!”

Caitlin’s eyes go wide as the creak of a car seat conjures an image of Tim craning his neck around as he races down Cemetery Road.

“They’re still back there. I found what we needed, okay? It’s a DVD disc. I got it through the guy who shot the cell phone pictures I showed you. He’s a computer genius named Ben Li. I got him so stoned he didn't know up from down, then sedated him. He must have woken up early. He probably panicked and called them, he’s that dumb. Anyway, here’s how to find the disc in case anything happens to me. Ready? ‘Dog pack.

The Great Escape.’

Okay? You’ll figure it out, but I hope to God you don'’t have to. If I don'’t make it, then look where the sun don'’t shine, as Coach used to say. I'’ll be all right, though. These bastards don'’t know Adams County like I do. I'm going to—wait, wait, shit, I forgot—”

It sounds like Tim dropped the phone. He yells,

“Fuck!”

and groans as if he’s bending double, then his voice is close again.

“Ben said something while he was stoned. See, I always thought he had more pictures than what he showed me. Insurance, you know? To protect himself. He said I should ask his birds about the pictures. He had two cockatoos, but all I ever heard them say was stupid lines from movies. I searched their cages and couldn'’t find anything. Shit, they'’re gaining…I’'ve got to shut down. No airplane mode on this bitch. I love you, man, but you picked a hell of a time to be late. Bye for now—”

The electric silence in the headphone is cut off by a blank hiss.

My hands are shaking, my heart pounding as though the chase just happened, as though I were in the car with Tim rather than listening to a dead man talk two days after he was murdered. The realization that Tim probably died because I was thirty minutes late makes me dizzy with nausea. My ears roar as an infinite string of what-ifs blasts through my mind like a line of runaway subway cars.

“I can’t believe I wrote that first story,” Caitlin says in a dazed voice. “I wrote just what his killers wanted me to, didn't I?”

She doesn’'t cry often, but there are tears in the corners of her eyes. Behind the tears seethes anger—and wounded vanity. No one likes

to be played for a fool, but some people, usually the vainest among us, truly cannot handle it.

Despite wrestling with my own guilt, I nod.

“I'm going to bury Golden Parachute,” Caitlin vows. “

Bury

them.” Then her eyes snap to mine. “What do the clues mean? Do you know where the disc is?”

In the maelstrom of guilt swirling inside me, childhood memories spin and flicker like buoys glimpsed through heavy rain. “Not yet. I'm thinking.”

“They could be passwords.”

“To what? Tim found a physical object and hid it somewhere.”

“Right, right.”

“

The Great Escape

is a movie. Tim and I were kids when it came out.”

“Did you watch it with him?”

“I don'’t think so.” I think frantically, trying to grasp images that float away like leaves in a swirling current. “The part about the birds was separate from that, right? From ‘dog pack’ and

The Great Escape

?”

“Yes.”

“Because he said that guy’s birds could say movie lines.”

“Yes, but that first part wasn'’t connected to the birds. The first clues were for you alone.”

I'm trying to make the missing connections, but Caitlin’s urgency feels like an overcurrent shorting out my neural processes. “Just don'’t say anything for a minute. I'm thinking.”

She nods, but I know silence requires extreme effort from her. She’s a puzzle-solver by nature, and not having the tools to solve this one must drive her mad.

“Could ‘dog pack’ have something to do with the dogfighting?” she asks.

“Caitlin!”

“Sorry—I'm sorry.”

I try fast-forwarding through my childhood friendship with Tim Jessup, but the memories are blurry, like stock images, shot poorly and faded with age. Many involve bike riding or playing steal the flag, but nothing related to dog packs comes—

“Oh my God,” I groan, first amazed, then appalled as the significance of the second clue drops into place.

She grabs my arm. “What is it?”

“I can’t believe I was that stupid.”

“What? Do you know what it means?”

“Yes.” I reach for the doorknob. “Come on!”

“Where?”

“The cemetery! It’s been there all along!”

“I thought you already searched the cemetery.”

“I did. But it’s huge. Now I know where to look.”

Something vibrates in my pocket. At first I think it’s my cell phone, but then I realize it’s Kelly’s Star Trek. “Peek outside,” I tell Caitlin, suddenly nervous. “Hurry.”

She opens the door and freezes.

“What is it?” I ask, trying to pull the gun from my pocket.

“I'm helping him get the things fitted,” Caitlin says awkwardly.

“It’s

Sunday,

” a woman says with disgust. “There’s kids out here. Why don'’t you just get a

room

?”

Caitlin closes the door. I click the TALK button on the Star Trek and say, “It’s me.”

“We’'ve got a problem,” Kelly says in my ear.

“Short of a death, it doesn’'t matter. I think we’re at the endgame.”

“Tell me.”

“Not over the air. Not even on these things.”

“You found what we’re looking for?”

“I know where it is. Can you cover us to the cemetery?”

“Screw that. You’re in the store now?”

“Yeah.”

“You have the satphone with you?”

“In Caitlin’s purse.”

“Walk straight back to the staff area like you own the place, then leave by their private exit door. Use a fire door if you have to. I'’ll be waiting out back. If anybody tries to stop you, tell them you’re the fucking mayor. If that doesn’'t work, pull your gun. Just get to my car. The game has changed.”

When Kelly’s voice gets tense, I know we’re in trouble.

“We’re on our way.”

CHAPTER

29

Linda Church sits on a folding chair in the corner of a small kitchen and studies her left knee, which is swollen and blue at the front, and purple in back. The joint doesn’'t hurt too bad, but she knows some gristle in it is torn because her skin is stretched tight as a drumhead and the bones slip when she walks. The lower part of her right leg looks worse. There’s a tear in the bruise, and the skin around it feels like it just came out of a microwave oven.

She remembers leaping from Quinn’s boat but has no memory of hitting the water—only a white flash coming out of darkness. She awakened in terror that she was drowning, but the sound of a motor in the dark told her she couldn'’t afford to splash. Quinn was trolling slowly back the way he’d come, searching for her with a spotlight that lit the fog yellow. She felt sure he would find her since she could hardly swim with the leg, but as the boat drew near, and she prepared to slide under the water, she’d heard something strike the hull—not hard—more like the sound of kicking shoes.

Then she remembered Ben Li.

The spotlight arced up into the sky, and some sort of commotion broke out on the boat. She heard more hollow impacts, then two shots cracked over the water. The echoes seemed to go on forever, and before they died, the big motor revved up and the boat turned south again.

Then God had saved her. She’d had no idea whether she was near the bank or in the center channel of the Mississippi, about to be run down by a barge weighing thousands of tons. But as she floated downstream, thankful for every ounce of body fat she’d cursed until then, she felt her good leg scrape sand. The river was lifting her onto a gently shoaling sandbar as surely as if God himself were holding her in his hand. When she came to rest, her eyes filled with black sky, she felt like Moses in the bulrushes.

Unlike Moses, however, no one found her lying by the river. How long she lay there, she had no idea. But sometime before dawn, she got to her feet and started limping toward the levee. Soon the sand had dirt mixed in it, then she was dragging herself over rich soil, the farmland her grandfather used to hold to his nose and smell as if it were pipe tobacco. She’d wanted to scream as she climbed the levee, but she didn't dare do more than grunt. On top of the levee was a gravel road, and she guessed it ran all the way from New Orleans to Missouri, if not to Minneapolis. The levee made her think of her grandfather too; he’d told her how during the flood of ’27 they’d put the nigras and the cows onto it to save them from the rising water, and kept them there for weeks and weeks.

She knew she couldn'’t walk on the levee, as bad as she wanted to. There’d be trucks coming down it before dawn, and if Quinn sent even one man along the road to look for her body on the bank, he’d pin her in his headlights like a doomed deer. She couldn'’t move well enough to be sure of getting away in time. So she’d slid down the far side of the levee, down to the scrub trees by the borrow pits, from which they’d taken the dirt to build the levees. She limped along the pits until the sun came up, her eyes always on the ground, looking for snakes. She remembered a teenage boyfriend walking along a borrow pit, breaking the backs of moccasins with a heavy branch. Despite this frantic killing, the snakes swirled slowly through the shallows but did not flee to the middle of the pit. This puzzled Linda. Were they lethargic from the suffocating heat? Or was it the poisonous fertilizer chemicals that drained off the fields whenever it rained? Her brother shot snakes with a .22 rifle, but this was different. With their backs broken, the serpents writhed and curled back upon themselves in endless figure eights until they drowned and became meat for the nutrias. Later, when that boy was inside her,

she’d remembered how the snakes had twisted and cracked like whips, and she wondered if they’d been screaming. Could snakes scream? Could they hear each other screaming?

Linda walked until the skin on the back of her neck felt like it would split from sunburn, dragging her throbbing leg behind her, but by then she’d climbed the levee again and figured out where she was—and where she was going. She was on Deer Park Road, and while there were only a couple of farmhouses for many miles, she knew about a church that stood alone at the edge of the cotton fields, and this confirmed God’s participation in her survival. She got so thirsty she licked the sweat from her arms, and this made her smile. Yankees whined about the heat and the humidity, but it was the humidity that made the heat bearable. Louisiana wasn'’t like the barren hills outside Las Vegas, a place so dry you hardly saw the sweat leave your skin. Here there was almost as much water in the air as in your body, and the sweat beaded on your skin like water on a car that had just been waxed.

The last time she’d climbed the levee, she’d seen the church. In her mind it was white and clean and straight, rising from a green ocean of soybeans, but in truth it lay beside an empty cotton field like an oversize box thrown carelessly from a truck. The bright tin roof she remembered was a mosaic of rust and primer, and the steeple looked like a doghouse someone had squashed onto the apex of a roof. But even so, even with the crucifix atop it looking like a broken TV antenna, she’d seen deliverance. Pastor Simpson was alone behind the building, walking from the back shed to the main building with two boxes under his arms.