The Devil's Punchbowl

by Greg Iles

  “I’m not leaving without you,” Caitlin says again. “But we have to go as soon as those trainers leave. Quinn’s going to be furious after what Sands did to him today. He’s going to want to take it out on you. As soon as the trainers leave, you get those other bars off.”

  “I know what they’re going to do,” she says. “They’re going to take you away, and then they’ll put that armor suit on me and throw me to the dogs.”

  “No!” Caitlin shouts, but she suspects Linda is right.

  “You saw how they acted. They can’t afford to kill you. That’s why they came and asked who popped your cherry. The mayor’s working some kind of deal for you. But I won’t get that. I’ve seen too much.”

  “If they are letting me go, then they can’t kill you. I’ve seen you. I could tell people you were alive. You see?”

  A shout with a ring of finality echoes across the yard beneath the great shed, and Caitlin hears the lid of a pickup’s toolbox clang down.

  “They’re getting ready to leave,” she says, feeling her heart pound with anticipation. “Get ready to get those bars down. The second they’re gone, I’m getting up on the roof.”

  “Caitlin?”

  “Yes?”

  “You shouldn’t try it. They’re going to let you go, if you’ll just wait for the trade. But if you go out there with those dogs, you’re going to die. Puppy chow won’t hold them for five seconds. They’ll smell you coming, and they’ll rip you to pieces.”

  “I’m not waiting.”

  “I’ll pray for you, then.”

  “I don’t want a prayer. I want you with me.”

  “I can’t run no more!”

  Caitlin can’t sustain the deception any longer. “Linda, if you don’t run, you’re going to die. You’re right. Quinn means to kill you. It’s only twenty feet to that fence. I’ll help you across the space, and I’ll boost you up.”

  There’s a long silence. “I can’t let you do that,” Linda says finally. “It wasn’t meant to be. This is my time, that’s all. If you’re really going to do it, just go.”

  “I won’t. Not without you.”

  “Yes, you will. Don’t feel bad about it either. You’re a good person, Caitlin. Not stuck-up like I would have thought. I wish we could’ve been friends. I haven’t had a good girlfriend since grade school.”

  “We can be friends. We are friends. You’re a good person too, and you deserve a long, happy life!”

  This time the silence drags. “I done some bad things in my life,” Linda says. “Stuff I wouldn’t want my mama to know about.”

  “We all have, Linda. Trust me on that.”

  “Maybe. I don’t imagine you’ve seen the world from some of the places I have. But at least I can say this. I never took money for it.”

  Outside, the truck engine rumbles to life, and two doors slam.

  “That’s it,” Caitlin says, jumping to her feet. “Get those bars off your windows. I’m going to the storeroom. When Quinn gets back, he’s not going to find anything but empty stalls!”

  She grabs her window bars and starts her skin-the-cat inversion, but stops before pushing up the tin sheet above her. “Linda?” she says. “Linda?”

  She hears nothing but the receding truck at first, then the rattle of the chain next door.

  “Are you working on them?” she calls, as the blood pools in her head.

  “Uh-huh. It hurts.”

  “No pain, no gain. Get them off!”

  “Caitlin?”

  “What?”

  “Thanks for getting my clothes back.”

  “You’re welcome. I’ll see you in a few minutes, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “No more Quinn, right?”

  “Right. No more.”

  Caitlin almost rejoices in the pain as she kicks the tin sheet upward, then drops to the floor and climbs onto the windowsill, bent nearly double. In one smooth motion she straightens her legs and catches hold of the outside roof, then raises herself through the hole by main strength. When the cool breeze hits her face, it feels like freedom, and when the four Bully Kuttas gather below her, their upturned faces watching her with unmistakable malice, she leans out just a little and speaks softly.

  “Let’s see who’s smarter, eh? Dogs or women?”

  CHAPTER

  57

  Despite our enthusiasm when we climbed aboard Danny McDavitt’s helicopter, it didn’t take long to figure out that even with the first-class equipment aboard the Athens Point JetRanger—and Kelly’s proficiency at reading a FLIR screen—the mathematics of our mission are going to kill us. Even assuming that Caitlin’s “rivers” clue meant the Mississippi River, and confining our search to the sixty miles of river between Natchez and DeSalle Island (the site of the hunting camp where Shad Johnson had his picture taken with Darius Jones), we’re conducting the equivalent of a single-aircraft search for a lifeboat over a small sea. Actually, our situation is worse, because at least on the ocean, it’s a matter of sighting a boat on empty water. Moreover, my sixty-mile figure was calculated as the crow flies. Flying the tortuous bends of the river easily doubles that distance, while covering both banks doubles that again. If we try to search more than a half mile deep into Mississippi or Louisiana, the square-miles numbers go stratospheric.

  Compounding this, we’re flying at night, using infrared radar to see through the darkness. Because FLIR sees everything with a temperature warmer than the earth, Kelly is having to sort through the thousands of living creatures moving or sleeping on the ground below the chopper, hoping to find something that looks suspicious. We’ve landed seven times already, checking out groups of dogs that seemed to be kenneled in out-of-the-way places. In almost every case we found ourselves in hunting camps, and in one case were almost shot at by an irate landowner. McDavitt feels sure that complaint calls have already been made, and if anyone wrote down our registration number, the pilot could be in deep trouble. Nevertheless, he hasn’t asked to return the ship to the airport. Like the rest of us, he knows that we may be Caitlin’s only chance.

  We’re flying at fifteen hundred feet, our speed sixty knots, which Major McDavitt and Kelly agree is ideal for FLIR work. It keeps the chopper out of the “dead man’s curve” (high enough to perform an emergency autorotation in case of engine failure), but low enough for good FLIR imaging. Kelly also told us that fifteen hundred feet is high enough to present a difficult target for small arms at night. The former Delta operator is sitting in the left cockpit seat, his eyes glued to the screen before him. McDavitt’s in the right seat, flying the ship and holding position whenever Kelly says he wants to take a closer look at something. I’m sitting in the cabin with Carl Sims, listening to Kelly and McDavitt work the land below, and thinking about the afternoon’s events.

  Per my instructions, Kelly searched Shad Johnson’s house while Shad was at work, and his office immediately afterward, but Kelly didn’t find the thumb drive. He also searched Ben Li’s yard for signs that anything had been buried or unburied recently, and found nothing. Finally, Kelly spent a couple of hours trying to track down Sands or Quinn, hoping that one or the other might lead him to Caitlin. While he’d seen plenty of Jiao, her daily routine as regular as clockwork, he hadn’t found a trace of either Irishman.

  While Kelly was busy with this, I had Chief Logan trace the license plate that Carl picked up in his rifle scope on Sunday night. It had been stolen off a similar make of vehicle from a parking lot in Baton Rouge. The SUV’s owner hadn’t missed it. I personally checked out the owners of the land where Kelly and I had made our kayak landings, but both were absentee landlords who leased to hunting clubs and had little idea what might be happening on their property.

  The one positive development of the afternoon was that Jewel Washington had located a hospital aide that she believed had removed the thumb drive from Tim Jessup’s rectum prior to his body being transported to Jackson for the autopsy. The aide didn’t admit this outright, but Jewel thinks he will for the right price, and that he might crack under aggressive police questioning. I wasn’t prepared to tell Logan to arrest the man yet, but I did call Shad and tel
l him I was now positive he had the thumb drive, and that if he destroyed it, I would make good on my threat to send him to prison, one way or another.

  I’ve brought along the file on Edward Po that Peter Lutjens sent to my father’s house, but despite my having taken Dramamine before we took off, efforts to read the dense type by the cabin lights have twice brought me to the point of vomiting. All I know at this point is that the file summarizes a shocking maze of criminal activities and associations spanning the globe, with personal and psychological profiles of Po and his associates that trivialize the Blackhawk bio Kelly gave us when he arrived. The one thing my limited study of the file has made clear is why William Hull and his task force are so aggressively pursuing the crime lord.

  We’ve been airborne for hours, and the combined vibrations of the engine, the main rotor, the tail rotor, and the buffeting air have pushed me past my limit. If our goal were anything but rescuing Caitlin, I would have begged to be taken back to the airport long ago. During the first half hour of the flight, I leaned forward and tried to read the screen myself, but I soon got a headache. The FLIR unit is set to “white-hot,” which means the images detected by the sensor mounted beneath the chopper’s nose are displayed in a gradient from black to white, black being coldest, white hottest. A deer running along the ground appears bright white against black, but the scenes Kelly has to sort through are much more complex. Vehicles appear white on their hoods (where the engines are) and also beneath (where heat is radiating), but dark near the trunk. Most of the roads appear lighter than the land they cross, and buildings register differently, depending on how well heated and insulated they are. In several cases Kelly spotted dogs beneath sheds by seeing them from the side, but none of these sightings led to anything. Worst of all, vegetation degrades the system, so whenever we get into heavy cover, Kelly’s job becomes that much tougher.

  Carl has tried to keep me upbeat, but like me he knows that in spite of our best efforts, if Caitlin is being held one mile north of Natchez, our initial assumption that she’s being held to the south doomed our mission before we lifted off. That assumption was based on the sites where we encountered evidence of dogfighting, as well as the island where Shad Johnson probably attended a dogfight himself. In addition, most of the better deer camps are to the south, though there are certainly some famous ones to the north.

  “Penn?” says Kelly. “We’re about three miles east of the Red River now. It doesn’t flow into the Mississippi for a good ways yet, but I wondered if you might want to head over and take a quick look.”

  “If we try to fly every river and bayou that drains into the Mississippi along here, we’ll run out of fuel in no time.”

  “We’re using it fast, as it is,” says McDavitt.

  “Let’s stick to the Mississippi,” I decide. “Louisiana bank, is my guess, based on what we know.”

  “Okay.”

  “If we’re that far south, we’re about to leave Concordia Parish. Now that I see how tough this is, I think the practical thing is to stay within twenty miles of town. Let’s start flying a grid search of the Louisiana bank, starting close to the river and moving slowly westward.”

  “You figuring they want to stay close to town?” Kelly asks.

  “I think they have to. They don’t know what we might do, and they need to be able to react fast. I think we have to play the percentages.”

  “We still looking for dogs?”

  “I think so. Don’t you?”

  “Yeah,” Kelly says wearily. “I’m just starting to think there’s more damned dogs in Louisiana than people.”

  “You’re doing good. The next pack you find could be guarding her.”

  “Oh, I’m staying with it. I’m gonna find that girl. When I think about her tied up somewhere with those sons of bitches—”

  “Kelly ”

  “Sorry, man. Let’s do it, Major. Take her back north.”

  McDavitt banks wide, and my stomach rolls again.

  CHAPTER

  58

  Walt Garrity stands at the periphery of a crowd that looks like a New York film director’s idea of a Southern lynch mob. Under the roof of a dilapidated barn, two dozen people have gathered to watch dogs try to kill each other in a shallow pit. Boys of eight or ten tussle around the edges, worming their way through the adults when they hear a shout indicating a change in the status of the dogs locked together at the center of the circle. The men are dressed in camo or overalls, the women in T-shirts and halter tops made tolerable by hissing propane heaters behind them. Two dowdy women have babies slung on their hips, and one white-whiskered man who must be ninety sits in a wheelchair at the edge of the pit, apparently a place of honor.

  The expressions on their faces look exactly like those Walt has seen in photographs taken at lynchings. The women are bug-eyed with rapture, fascinated, even aroused by the primal spectacle. The men look grim yet ecstatic, riding an intoxicating flood of testosterone sparked by the sight of blood and combat. They watch the canine battle with total absorption, occasionally making comments, then screaming in frustration or jubilation when the fight takes a turn, and changing their bets according to the fortunes of their chosen dog.

  The two pit bulls—a brindle called Genghis and a black named Mike—have been in the pit for nearly an hour, their handlers goad ing them from the corners, but no real damage was done until a few minutes ago, when Genghis sunk his jaws into Mike’s brisket and began trying to rip his foreleg off.

  At Walt’s side, Ming stands motionless, her eyes forward as though watching the fight, but she must only be catching glimpses through the heaving mass of bodies in front of her. When she and Walt arrived—they were driven here in a limo by a casino bouncer—the crowd gaped at Ming in her silk kimono as though she were an alien being set down among them. The women reacted like territorial cats, practically baring their teeth at the incomprehensibly foreign beauty. Ming looked back at them the way a cloistered princess might look down upon her subjects while she waited for Walt to lead her where he would. It was their age disparity that broke the tension. After the crowd realized that Ming was “with” Walt, serving as his hired escort for the evening, she was slotted into place as a whore, and the world made sense again. Walt chose a spot that was close enough to the pit to make it seem as if he actually wanted to see the fight, but far enough that blood wouldn’t spatter their clothes.

  He hasn’t seen a dogfight in fifteen years, and he’d hoped never to do so again. The practice had waxed and waned in popularity in Texas during his tenure as a Ranger, but there had always been a core group of fanatical breeders who kept at it year after year. Rangers always had more important cases to work, but occasionally they would run afoul of dogfighters during an anti-gambling crusade. Such crusades were always politically motivated—they tended to come just before state elections—and thus very unpopular among the Rangers. Busting gaming operations was a no-win proposition. People loved to gamble, and they were going to find a way to do it, no matter what the law said. Fighting that reality meant risking life and limb to generate headlines for some politician, while the best you could accomplish was a brief interruption of the illegal activity. This dogfight was a prime example of the lure of the forbidden. Gambling was legal right across the river at Natchez, yet here stood this pack of fools, betting hard-earned money on something that could send them to the penitentiary for ten years.

  Twice in his career, Walt had actually stopped dogfights in progress. It was hard to imagine a more chaotic scene of flight. While the panicked spectators raced for their trucks or four-wheelers—and sometimes even horses—the handlers would snatch up their dogs and hightail it into the woods, leaving their vehicles behind. The aftermath of those cases was always the same. After tracking a handler or owner to his home, Walt would find dogs chained in such pitiful conditions that he wanted to manacle the owner to one of the poles and let the dogs into the house to live. In one case he’d actually done that, but only for half an hour, while he waited for the state troopers and animal control officers to show up. He’d h
oped the experience might give the owner some empathy for his dogs, but it hadn’t. A year later, the man had been stabbed to death beside a pit during a dispute over whether his dog’s coat had been laced with poison.

  “You like fight?” Ming asks, standing on tiptoe to speak in Walt’s ear above the howling crowd.

  “Not much.” Walt realizes that he’s hardly paid attention to the dogs since they first exploded out of their corners like projectiles shot from a gun. “This is bush league,” he says, truthfully.

  “Bush?” Ming asks, clearly confused.

  “Amateur hour. Low-rent. I can’t believe they sent us to this dump.”

  Ming’s remarkable eyes narrow in concern. “You no like?”

  “No. These dogs are mismatched. The brindle outweighs the black by two and a half pounds.”

  “You want go closer? I take you front row.”

  “I’m fine right here, hon.” It strikes Walt that Ming may not be as disgusted by the scene as he is. “Do you like the fight?”

  The young woman shrugs, then whispers, “No like people.”

  Her warm breath in the shell of his ear starts his heart pounding.

  “They no like me either,” she adds. “To hell with them, yes?”

  Walt chuckles at her frankness. “More than likely, is my guess. You want to leave?”

  Ming shrugs, then smiles and runs her finger along his forearm. “Whatever you want, Zhaybee.”

  Walt considers the matter. He knows he’s not thinking as clearly as he should. He ought to have been working the crowd for clues to Caitlin Masters’s whereabouts, but he’s just stood beside Ming, like the lazy old fart he’s pretending to be. It’s not the dogfight that’s messing him up. It’s the girl. But it’s not like it matters tonight. In his gut he knows he will find no clues here.

  Sands is testing me, he thinks. He has to be. This is how they screen prospective spectators. A thrown-together dogfight like this wouldn’t attract the kinds of gamblers Jessup had told Penn about. Not even the ones who wanted to go slumming. No rap star, NFL player, Arab prince, or Chinese billionaire was going to spend five minutes with this pathetic collection of pasty-faced, Skoal-dipping rednecks. They’re still talking about the “kickass” hog vs. dog exhibition that preceded the pit fight.