Greg Iles - The Devils Punchbowl

The splash barely registers in my ringing ears, but I feel Caitlin panting against me. She’s hyperventilating.

“Are you hit?” I ask, lifting her to her feet and pulling off her fleece jacket.

“She’s not hit,” Kelly says, sliding his pistol into a storage slot in the boat’s dash panel.

“Is he dead?” Caitlin asks, leaning on the gunwale and looking out into the dark.

“If he is, he got off easy. A bullet’s a lot better than what’s waiting out there.”

“People had to hear that shot. Oh, my God.”

“It’s all right,” I assure her, even as my heart bangs against my chest wall. “People shoot snakes and armadillos all the time up here.”

“It’s almost deer season,” Kelly says. “Already bow season. Folks will figure it’s poachers trying to get a jump on a big buck. There might be a game warden out this way, but twenty minutes from now, there won'’t be anything left to find.”

Caitlin shivers in the wind. As I pick up her jacket and help her into it, Kelly eases the boat thirty yards up the chute. When he puts the engine in neutral again, the rumble of the engine quiets, and a heavy swish of water reaches us. Kelly removes a monocular night-vision scope from his pocket and pans across the water.

“Do you see him?” I ask.

“No.”

Caitlin turns from the gunwale, walks to me, and splays her palm on my chest. “He was lying,” she says, looking into my eyes with steady intensity. “About raping me. He was just trying to hurt you. He thought…we were really going to kill him.”

“Weren’t we?” Kelly asks.

She glances back at him, but Kelly keeps the scope trained on the surface of the water. Caitlin pushes her palm deeper into my chest.

“You believe me, don'’t you?”

“Of course.”

What else can I say?

“If you ever worry about what he was saying, then Quinn got what he wanted.”

“I know.”

Her anxious eyes remain on mine for several seconds; then she hugs her cheek against my chest. As I stroke her hair, three quick splashes come out of the dark.

Caitlin stiffens. “What’s happening?”

“It’s starting,” says Kelly. “Jesus.”

“He’s dead, isn’t he?”

A shriek of terror pierces the night.

“Guess not.”

“Have they got him?” she asks, squeezing my wrist tight enough to cut off my circulation.

The next scream is defiant, like that of a hiker shouting at a grizzly bear to forestall an attack. Sound can carry for miles over water, and from this distance it’s as though the nightmare is playing out only a few feet from us. Wild splashing echoes over the lake, as though a dozen kids are leaping into it from tree limbs. Then a high wail rolls out of the dark, rising in pitch until a glottal squawk cuts it off, and I know without looking that Quinn’s head was just dragged beneath the surface. The sound of thrashing water makes my skin crawl.

“I can’t listen,” Caitlin says, shuddering against me. “Do something, Kelly. Make it stop.”

Keeping the night-vision scope trained on its target, Kelly reaches back blindly toward the dashboard. I step around Caitlin and give him his pistol from the storage slot. He raises it quickly with his right hand, aiming along a path parallel to the scope held against his eye.

“I need light.”

I scoop the flashlight from the aft deck and point it along the path of his aim, but I see neither man nor beast in its beam, only a churning maelstrom of water like a sand boil behind a saturated levee.

“My God,” breathes Caitlin.

“He’s gone,” Kelly says with finality.

“We should go too.”

Kelly lowers his pistol, but he doesn’'t take his eyes from the slowly subsiding frenzy.

“Let’s

go,

” Caitlin pleads. “I want to forget this.”

I nod, thinking,

You never will.

EPILOGUE

FIVE DAYS LATER

The season has turned at last. Before we even got off Lake St. John, a wall of rain rolled out of the west and covered the land for twelve hours before moving on. Behind the rain came a cold wind that took the last illusions of summer with it. The leaves on most trees are still green, some so dark they'’re almost black, but now the bluff is splashed with orange and yellow sprays of autumnal color.

Caitlin and I are on the river again, this time in Drew Elliott’s old Bayrider, which I borrowed from his storage building. We’'ve come to spread Linda Church’s ashes. We chose the river because it was the place where Tim and Linda found each other. On shore, Tim belonged to his wife and son. But on the

Magnolia Queen,

where he went to work as a sort of penance for his squandered birthright, he found another lost soul who might have become much more, had she been born with Tim’s advantages.

Caitlin and I haven'’t spoken much since the night Quinn died on Lake St. John. I’'ve spent most of my private time with Annie and my parents, mulling over the past and wondering about our future, but the aftermath of what happened on the

Magnolia Queen

has kept Caitlin busy day and night. In addition to writing stories and fending off requests from other media, she has funded and overseen the effort to rescue the fighting dogs Sands kept on both sides of the

river, and also to return the many stolen pets to their owners. Some of the fighting dogs had to be put down, but others will be adopted. So far, twenty-three dogs and cats have been returned to homes as far away as Little Rock, Arkansas. I suspect that this whirlwind of activity has helped distract Caitlin from the aftermath of what we did on the lake that night.

Kelly left town the morning after Quinn died. We walked down to the bluff together and watched the big diesel boats push barges up and down the river for a while. The

Magnolia Queen

had already been towed to a refitting yard for repairs, so once again Pierce’s Landing Road led only to an empty stretch of water. Leaning on the fence near the gazebo, Kelly told me that he’d spent the previous night reading a copy of Mark Twain’s

Life on the Mississippi

that my father had lent him. It seemed an odd choice after what we’d done at the lake, but I supposed Kelly needed a way to come down from all that had happened that final day.

“You know,” he said, “if you count the Missouri as the main channel of this river, the Mississippi was the longest river in the world until army engineers shortened it by three hundred miles. Longer than both the Nile and the Amazon.”

“I didn't know that.”

“Me either. In 1811, there was an earthquake so big that part of the river flowed backward for hours.”

“I have heard that story. New Madrid, right?”

Kelly nodded. “Created a hole so big that the lower Mississippi flowed backward until the hole filled up. There’s a lake there now. It’s in Tennessee.”

Kelly rarely chatters to hear his own voice, so his musings prompted a question. “Why do I get the feeling there’s a message here? Are you going Zen on me?”

“Maybe so, grasshopper.

Change.

That'’s the message. Man wants to control this river, but the river wants to go where it will. And in the end, it will.”

“I still don'’t get it. Beyond the obvious, I mean.”

“Look out there,” he said, gesturing with his arm to take in the great sweep of the river. “River pilots like Sam Clemens had to learn everything about the Mississippi. Every bend, cut, crossing, chute, island, hill, sandbar, and snag along thirteen hundred miles.

Then they had to learn it all over again on each passage, because the river changed that fast. Not many men had the brains to do that, and even fewer had the guts to risk the lives of a boat full of people at every turn. Steamboats wrecked all the time.”

“Uh-huh. And?”

“Well…I could see how a river pilot might start feeling like his job was futile—even absurd. There certainly were easier ways to make money.”

I suddenly saw where he was going. “Like writing, for instance?”

“Well, Twain did a little writing, yeah. But he did his share of piloting too. And he was proud of it.”

“How much piloting did he do?”

“I'm not sure.” Kelly turned to me, his blue eyes as mild as ever. “But I know one thing. He never walked off a boat halfway down the river, leaving his passengers stranded in a storm.”

I nodded to show that I’d taken Kelly’s point, but my thoughts weren’t on local politics. Despite my promise to Caitlin, Seamus Quinn’s final raving words had been preying on my mind since the last night on the lake.

“What’s wrong?” Kelly asked. “Something’s eating you, man. Cough it up.”

“Do you think Caitlin was telling the truth? About Quinn?”

His face darkened. “You think she’d lie about being raped?”

“Maybe. To protect me. So I’d never have to think about it. I want to believe her, but…she was ready to have you throw Quinn out of the boat. She wouldn'’t have done that unless he’d done something terrible to

her

—personally.”

Kelly shook his head. “I disagree. For some people, seeing somebody suffer an atrocity can be as bad as it happening to them. Worse, sometimes. They feel impotent, you know? Guilty because they stood by and did nothing.”

Uncertainty must have shown on my face, because Kelly put his hand on my shoulder and said, “I'm telling you, that’s what happened with Caitlin and Linda. Quinn didn't rape Caitlin.”

“He described her naked body.”

Kelly sighs heavily. “Bro. I was alone with him for a long time before you guys showed up. There’s

nothing

I don'’t know about that cocksucker. He saw her naked, yeah, but Sands showed up and

made him give her clothes back. Quinn never raped her, Penn. He wanted to. But if he had, Sands would have killed him. You can let go of that.”

I felt shamed by the rush of relief that coursed through me after this assurance, but the idea that Caitlin might have chosen to suffer something so terrible alone rather than let me try to help her had been more than I could bear. “Thanks,” was all I could manage.

An hour after this conversation, Danny McDavitt picked Kelly up at the Natchez airport and flew him to Baton Rouge. By now he’s back in the mountains of Afghanistan, working for an outfit I never heard of, but almost certainly some version of Blackhawk Risk Management. The last thing Kelly said to me was “Spartacus.” Then he handed me a scrap of paper with a phone number on it. I embraced him, shook hands with McDavitt, and drove back to my house on Washington Street to try to sort out my feelings.

Each day since then has brought more developments, some surprising, others predictable. Jiao has cooperated with Shad Johnson’s office, but not yet with the FBI. Most of her testimony up to this point has implicated Jonathan Sands, but not her uncle in Macao. I can’t fault the woman for her survival instincts. Edward Po is not someone you want angry at you.

No one knows this better than Jonathan Sands. The former general manager of the

Magnolia Queen

seems quite content to be tried in Mississippi for murder rather than in federal court on money-laundering charges. Without William Hull to protect him—and with Po at large in the world, rather than in custody—Sands would be a fool to implicate the crime lord in even a misdemeanor. Sands may hope to escape Po’s legendary vengeance by remaining silent, or he may simply be posturing to lure the Justice Department into offering him protective custody in exchange for his testimony. Either way, I don'’t think he has much chance of living out the year. The State of Mississippi has no intention of turning Sands over to federal authorities without a fight, and Edward Po’s arm is very long.