The Devil's Punchbowl

by Greg Iles

  When I get up to the sandy hump where Kelly stands, I see that we’re in a line of trees beside a marshy field. Across the field, faint yellow light spills from a windowless metal building that looks like a small warehouse, and beyond this stands a black wall of trees.

  “Turn off your Star Trek,” Kelly says.

  “Why?”

  “You’re going to be with me, and we don’t need any noise-pollution accidents. Also, we want Danny to airlift us off the river later, and your radio is our spare batteries.”

  Before I obey his order, he lifts his Star Trek and says, “How we looking on sentries, Pave Low?”

  Pave Low is McDavitt’s code name for tonight; it’s the model of helicopter he flew in the air force.

  “You got a couple of dogs prowling on the far side of the building,” he answers. “Pay attention.”

  “What about the field?”

  “Nothing. Some deer bedded down in the tree line about seventy meters to the north of you.”

  Standing in near darkness, it’s strange to know that Danny McDavitt is looking down on us with a God’s-eye view that sees every warm-blooded creature around us.

  “Hold up,” McDavitt says in my ear. “Do you see that?”

  Across the field, a horizontal bar of light appears, growing rapidly into a rectangle.

  “That’s an overhead door,” says Kelly. “Shit!”

  As the rattling whine of a chain drive reaches us, a black SUV roars out of the building, followed by two more just like it. Their headlights flash on when they leave the spill from the open door.

  “We’re too late?” Kelly says in disbelief. “What the ?”

  “What do you want me to do?” McDavitt asks. “Cover you or go with the vehicles?”

  “Go with the SUVs!”

  “Ten-four.”

  Kelly winces, then looks longingly across the field. “I’m tempted to go into that building and see what they left behind.” He keys his Star Trek. “Did they take the dogs with them?”

  “Negative.”

  “Okay, we’re bugging out. We’ll see you a couple miles downriver.”

  Through the trees I see three pairs of headlights cutting through the dark, moving north at gravel-road speed. Carl Sims’s voice replaces McDavitt’s.

  “I can take out those dogs for you, no problem.”

  Kelly considers this. “No. We don’t know that we’ll get anything from the building. If you waste the dogs, they’ll know we know about this place. Find out where the SUVs go—that’s all.”

  With a last look across the field, Kelly shakes his head. Far to my right, the headlights turn away, and I see taillights that remind me of those I saw on Cemetery Road the night Tim died.

  “All this work,” I mutter, “and it’s come to nothing.”

  “Maybe not nothing. We’ll see what Danny turns up.”

  “Should we just call the Highway Patrol and have them stopped on some pretext?”

  “No, they’re clean now, away from the scene. Honestly, I’ll be surprised if the plates on those SUVs are traceable. But we’ll find out who owns this land and see if we can learn something that way.”

  As Kelly turns away from the field, a pale shadow flashes across my sight from right to left. I fall backward as Kelly goes down with a thud. Scrambling to my feet, I see a huge white dog mauling his left arm, trying to reach his throat. I yank out my Star Trek and yell, “Danny! Carl! We need help!”

  Kelly’s gun is still in his gear bag, and the bag is behind him. As I crab-walk toward it, my eyes on the attacking dog—a Bully Kutta, I see now—the dog whips its head from side to side, trying to rip off Kelly’s blocking arm. Kelly’s struggling to get his right hand under the dog’s belly. Yanking the gear bag clear of the fight, I struggle with the zipper, but before I get it open, the Bully Kutta arches its back, its four paws galloping in midair as it tries to wrench away from Kelly, who is jerking a knife from the dog’s scrotum to its rib cage. When I see a loop of intestine spill out in silence, I know that this dog too has had its vocal cords removed. As the animal rolls on the ground in its death throes, Kelly cinches his belt around his left biceps as a tourniquet.

  “Are you okay?” I ask. “I couldn’t get the bag open!”

  “It’s okay. Find me a rock.”

  “A rock?”

  “A rock! Half an inch thick—flat, if possible.”

  Three feet away I find a flat pebble smoothed round by the river. Kelly takes it and wedges it under his tourniquet, against the artery, I guess. Both sides of his forearm show puncture wounds, and the flesh is ripped near his inner elbow.

  “This isn’t good,” he says, staring at the wounds. “I don’t even know—”

  A sound like running hoofbeats makes us whirl. This time the flying shadow is black, not white. Before I can even backpedal, I hear a bullwhip crack, and the wolf-size dog slides harmlessly to my feet, a quivering pile of muscle and bone. I leap backward, but Kelly just shakes his head and holds up his wired earpiece.

  “That dog knocked it out of my ear,” he says.

  “What just happened?” I ask, trying to get my breath. “Did you shoot that dog?”

  “Hell no.” Kelly pulls his pistol from the gear bag and shows it to me. “Carl shot it from the chopper.”

  Kelly inserts his earpiece and says, “Thanks, buddy. You cut that kind of close.”

  “You’re lucky I even saw the damn thing,” Carl replies. “I missed with my first shot. That was the second.”

  McDavitt’s voice cuts through the chatter. “What’s the situation down there, Delta? You want me to follow the vehicles or do you need a hospital? My partner says it looks like a dog got to one of you.”

  “We’re fine,” Kelly lies. “We need to ID those vehicles.”

  “I already got a license plate.”

  “I want to know where they’re headed.”

  “Okay.”

  “Are there any more of these monster dogs out there? That old Ranger sure was right. I didn’t hear a damned thing till it hit me.”

  “The two dogs by the building are still there. I don’t know where those came from.”

  Kelly chuckles darkly. “I think they’re the ‘deer’ you thought you saw bedded down. They’re big, man.”

  “Penn? Penn, are you there?”

  Kelly looks sharply at me as the new voice breaks into the conversation, but I recognize the tone immediately. It’s my father.

  “I’m here,” I tell him. “What’s the matter?”

  “Jenny was just run off the road in Bath. Her car flipped.”

  I swallow hard as an image of my sister lying dead beside an English motorway flashes through my mind. “Is she alive?”

  “Yes. She called me from the hospital, and I spoke to her doctor. She’s in mild shock, but she could easily have been killed.”

  “When did it happen?”

  “About an hour ago. She’d dropped the kids with a friend and was on her way to the university.”

  A wave of heat rushes over my face as guilt suffuses me. “Where are you?”

  “On my way to the safe house.” Kelly insisted that we have an empty house within ten miles of the operation to review any evidence we collected without having to go to a place Sands could know about. “Caitlin’s with me,” adds my father.

  “Doc?” Kelly cuts in. “I know you’re upset, but go easy on the names, okay?”

  “Fuck that,” says my father. “I’ve had it with these sons of bitches.”

  “How soon will you reach the house?” Kelly asks, his eyes moving right and left like those of a man thinking fast.

  “Twenty minutes. And I want you there. I want everybody there.”

  Kelly looks down at the corpse of the white dog. His left hand is balled into a fist, probably against pain, but I sense that he’s weighing the possibility of progress against the immediate crises. His entire posture communicates frustration; he looks as though he’s about to kick the dead dog.

  “Pave Low?” he says into the Star Trek.

  “Here.”

  “Come get us.”

  “Ten-four. You want me to set down right where you are?”
/>   “No. We can’t be sure that building’s empty. We’ll find a sandbar downstream. A mile, maybe.”

  “I’ll be flying right over the water, coming upstream. Out.”

  I key my Star Trek again. “Dad, we’re on the way.”

  “I heard. Don’t waste any time.”

  As I shove the walkie-talkie into my pocket, the sound of my father angrily carving a Sunday roast makes me turn. But it’s a trick of the mind. Kelly has the Bully Kutta’s head wedged between his knees, and he’s sawing through the lower part of its neck like a man being paid for piecework, not by the hour.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Rabies,” he grunts without looking up. The spinal column slows him down for a few seconds, but Kelly’s obviously field-dressed a lot of game in his time. “I don’t know if this fucker’s had his shots or not. You gotta get the brainstem and everything for that test.” When the head tears free, Kelly lifts it by its wrinkled face and stuffs it into his gear bag. Then he straps on his pack, heaves the dog’s carcass over his right shoulder, and stands with a groan. “What are you waiting for? Pick up the other one.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To throw them in the river.”

  With a strange buzzing in my head, I kneel beside the black dog, lever my right arm under it, then wrestle it over my shoulder in an awkward fireman’s carry. The damn thing must weigh a hundred pounds, and it stinks. I’m winded before I cover twenty yards, but Kelly’s already far ahead.

  This is one time I should have let him do the job alone.

  When I reach the river’s edge, the white carcass is already spinning slowly downstream under the stars, and Kelly is stuffing the dog’s head into the rear cargo hold of his kayak. With the last of my strength, I stagger downstream from the boats and heave my burden into the current. The Bully Kutta disappears with a splash, then bobs to the surface.

  “They actually went after my sister,” I say with breathless disbelief. “I haven’t heard my dad sound that upset since Ruby died.”

  Kelly squats and rinses his wounded forearm with river water. “I’ll tell you what I think,” he says softly, scrubbing the half-clotted blood from his skin.

  “What?”

  He looks up, his mild blue eyes like those of a choirboy. “I think Jonathan Sands has become a one-bullet problem.”

  CHAPTER

  34

  “A one-bullet problem?” Caitlin asks, echoing Kelly’s repeated phrase. “You mean you want to kill Sands? In cold blood?”

  Kelly looks around the circle of faces in the room. Along with Kelly and Caitlin, Carl Sims, my father, and I are seated in chairs in the den of a lake house owned by Chris Shepard, my father’s youngest partner. Because it’s after Labor Day, most of the houses used as second homes by Natchezians are empty now. As I drew the curtains over the broad glass doors on the far wall, I saw the narrow black line of Lake Concordia, the oxbow lake that carries the name of the parish, behind the house. I also saw James Ervin, who’s guarding us from the lake side, while his brother Elvin guards the road entrance. Danny McDavitt is sitting in the chopper across the lake road, in the cotton field where we landed.

  “Actually,” says Kelly, “my blood is still pretty hot at this point.”

  “Mine too,” says my father. “Gutless bastards.”

  While my father dressed Kelly’s wounded arm, we listened to his account of Jenny being attacked on the highway (not even the British police believe it was an accident), then brought Dad up to speed on the events on the river. While we talked, Carl tied the Bully Kutta’s severed head in a trash bag, then stored it in the refrigerator, so that its brain can be examined by the path lab in the morning. Coming after the events beside the river tonight, this scene was so surreal that I could scarcely separate thought from emotion. Kelly’s assertion that the time has come to kill Jonathan Sands seems perfectly natural to me, given the situation. I can tell by Caitlin’s hard-set face that she doesn’t agree. She doesn’t want to antagonize my father, but she’s not going to be silent when the matter at hand is assassination.

  “Look, I want the guy to go down,” she says. “He’s scum, okay? No question. But you can’t just kill him. I mean, if it’s all right for you to decide who lives and dies, the same goes for everyone else. Who empowered you? If you’re free to do that, where does it end? Back in the cave, that’s where.”

  Kelly listens patiently until she stops. “Let me tell you a secret, Caitlin. We’re still in the cave. It’s just bigger, and we wear nicer clothes. We make alliances and try to be civil, we save the weak instead of leaving them out in the cold to die. But guys like Sands, Quinn, Po they play by the ancient rules. To them, life is a zero-sum game. You win or lose, live or die. And the most important rule of all is, you take everything you can, when you can, until somebody draws a line and says, ‘No more.’”

  “Is that your view of life?”

  “If it were, I wouldn’t be offering to kill a man in front of witnesses. You probably studied existentialism in college, right? Survey of philosophy course? I’m not trying to patronize you, okay? But I am an existentialist. A soldier. Asleep or awake, in uniform or out. There’s war in Afghanistan, but there’s war here too. When Sands threatened to kill Penn’s child, he opened hostilities and declared the rules of engagement. We know from Linda Church’s note that Sands probably murdered Ben Li, or else ordered it done. It’s a miracle Linda isn’t dead too—if she’s still alive, which we don’t know for sure. I’m sure they’re hunting for her as we speak.”

  Caitlin shivers at this thought.

  Kelly nods with certainty. “Given where things stand now, we have only one practical solution. Remove Sands from the equation.”

  “You’re willing to do that?” Dad asks. “If we say here and now that that’s what we want then Sands will die?”

  Kelly nods soberly. “Quinn too, I think. Unavoidable.”

  Caitlin shakes her head in amazement. “And you’ll go back to Afghanistan and never lose a night’s sleep over it?”

  “I’ll sleep better.”

  What strikes me most about Kelly’s cool assertion is that a couple of hours ago, he was unwilling to put a dying dog out of its misery. But that mystery will have to wait. I look at my father, who’s rubbing his white beard with arthritically curled hands.

  “It’s tempting,” Dad says. “When I think of Jenny rolling over in that car, I could do it myself.”

  “I’m sorry to be a drag here, guys,” Caitlin says. “But this is way over the line. What does killing Sands even accomplish? If Edward Po is the problem, who’s to say he won’t carry on the vendetta and send men here to kill Penn and every member of his family?”

  “She’s got a point,” Carl says. “You’d be crazy not to consider that.”

  “I’ve considered it,” Kelly says. “Edward Po is a businessman. Whatever he’s up to here, he ultimately views it in terms of profit and loss. You can’t go around murdering government officials in small-town America. It draws the wrong kind of attention. That’s bad business. Sands is Po’s cat’s-paw, his control mechanism for Golden Parachute. If Sands dies, Po will simply order Craig Weldon to put someone else in that job.”

  “Yet you’re arguing that Sands will murder government officials,” Caitlin points out. “Or their families.”

  “I think he’s proved that he will. I don’t think Sands is motivated primarily by money.”

  “You don’t know that Po is either. You’re ignoring the question of face. If Po is a criminal, can he afford to let other criminals know that his lieutenants can be killed without reprisals?”

  “I considered face,” Kelly says patiently. “Also guanxi. I think killing Sands is actually the most elegant solution to our problem—and not just for us. If Sands is killed, I suspect Po will claim credit for the murder—unofficially, of course. Competitors will assume that Po had Sands murdered for interfering with his niece, Jiao, whom Po vowed to protect from people like Sands.”

  Everyone is silent, not least because Kelly seems two steps ahead of us all.

  “We either kill him or we back off,” Kelly concludes
. “Conventional methods are too slow. They’re just going to get someone we care about killed.”

  “Carl?” Caitlin says pointedly. “Would you kill Sands?”

  The sniper gives her a “Why me?” look, like a grade-school student being called on by his teacher. “Kelly’s a free agent,” he mumbles. “The man makes his own decisions.”

  “I’m asking about you.”

  “Depends on the situation. If somebody was going to die because I didn’t, I would, yeah.”

  “But would you shoot him sitting at his breakfast table?”

  Carl turns up his palms. “I don’t think so, but it’s complicated. I have shot somebody who was eating dinner, because the Marine Corps told me he needed to die. Now, I don’t know Jonathan Sands from Jonathan Livingston Seagull. But if I knew he was going to kill my sister or my mother then I’d vaporize him.”

  Caitlin turns to me, as though I’m the court of last resort. “You’re an attorney, sworn to uphold the law. You’ve sent people to death row for doing exactly what Kelly’s offering to do now. Are you really going to send him out of this house to commit murder?”

  The fact that I think Kelly is right surprises even me. I’ve been in similar situations before, with the power of life and death over someone almost as evil as Sands, and I chose to use the court system, even with the chance that they might escape punishment. But Sands is a special case. I wish Caitlin and I could have this discussion in private, because she tends to get more stirred up when she’s in front of people. But there’s no alternative now.

  “I have sent people to death row,” I concede in a level voice. “But not for doing something like this. This is a unique situation. Tim stumbled into something far bigger and more complicated than he knew. Blackhawk’s position and Peter Lutjens’s warning prove that. We still don’t really know what we’re dealing with. We only know that the government is involved in some way, and that Sands and Quinn are prepared to kill to prevent anyone from learning what they’re doing. I also know that wherever they are, my mother and Annie are scared to death. They’re holding their chins up, but they’re terrified that they’ll get a phone call saying that Dad or me is dead. And I believe that’s a real possibility.”