The Devil's Punchbowl (22 page)

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER
16

 

 

If physicists want to develop a time machine, they should explore fear. Fear dilates and compresses time without limit. For desperate people awaiting rescue, every instant stretches into unendurable agony; for those awaiting death by cancer, the earth spins relentlessly, shortening the days until they pass like fanned pages in a book. Trapped in our bodies, perception is all, and the engine of perception is hunger for life.

 

Before tonight, I could not have imagined playing a six-hour card game with my father. Yet here we sit, betting matchsticks without expression, occasionally searching each others’ eyes or looking with disbelief at the guns lying between us on the sofa. I’m not much of a cardplayer, so it’s been a one-sided contest. We’ve spoken enough to persuade whoever might be listening that we’re passing a long night while Dad waits to see that my heart is all right, and typed enough that Dad is fully caught up on the circumstances surrounding Tim’s murder. I’m fairly confident that there’s no video surveillance of my upper hallway—ditto any keystroke-sensing technology around the house—for our desultory computer conversations would surely have earned us a call from Jonathan Sands by now.

 

“Ante,” Dad says.

 

“Sorry.” I push a red-tipped matchstick across the tatted surface of the sofa cushion.

 

“You keep playing like this, I’m going to own this house before the sun comes up.”

 

“Sorry I’m distracted. I keep thinking I feel my heart starting up again.”

 

“Let me worry about that. You play poker.”

 

We have not been without interruptions. Libby Jensen called twice, nearly catatonic with panic about what might happen to her son in jail. I did what I could to reassure her, but in truth the time has come for Soren to pay a price for his misbehavior. Looking at life through cell bars for a few weeks will probably do more than any treatment center to convince him that he’s had all the drugs he needs for a while. During her second call, Libby asked if she could come over, but I shot that idea down immediately, in a voice that brooked no appeal.

 

Two minutes after we hung up, I heard an engine stop in the street before my house. Thinking Libby had come anyway, I got up and walked to the front window. A Chevy Malibu with rental tags was parked in front of Caitlin’s house. The passenger door popped open, and Caitlin got out laughing. She said something to someone in the car, then ran up to her front door and waved back at the car. The bohemian filmmaker I’d met earlier got out and walked lazily—perhaps drunkenly—up to the porch and followed her inside. I heard their laughter even through my closed window. Pathetically, I hoped the car was still running, but it didn’t seem to be. I stood looking down at the car until I sensed my father standing at my shoulder.

 

“What is it?” he whispered.

 

“Caitlin.”

 

“Huh.”

 

“She already went in.” I gave it a moment. “Not alone.”

 

Dad thought about this, then sighed, squeezed my arm, and walked back to the couch. I should have followed, but I stood there stubbornly, stupidly, waiting for the light in her bedroom to click on and destroy whatever hope remained that she had somehow returned to town for me, and not for a quick party with her new playmate.

 

My breath fogged the glass, faded, fogged it again. A dozen times? A hundred? Then I heard a bang, and Caitlin ran back out of the house. She was still laughing, and the filmmaker seemed to be
chasing her. She carried a wine bottle in one hand, and she held it up as though she meant to brain him with it. This time she jumped into the driver’s seat, and the man—Jan, I remember now—barely got himself folded into the passenger side before she sped up Washington Street toward the bluff and the river, never once looking at my house.

 

I walked back to the sofa, trying to dissociate myself from the anger rising in me. In the wake of Tim’s murder, Caitlin’s laughter seemed obscene. Surely, I thought, she must know about his death by now. Tim wasn’t a close friend of hers, but she’d known him, and she knew we’d been close friends as boys. But all she seemed to be thinking about was getting drunk and finding a good time.

 

Two hours after the wine-scavenging trip, her car drew me to the window again. This time the Malibu pulled into Caitlin’s driveway. She emerged unsteadily but alone and walked to the side door. For a brief moment she glanced across the street, up toward my window, but by then I was far enough behind the curtain that she couldn’t see me. She turned away and vanished into the house.

 

“I want to look up something on Medline,” Dad says. “I might want to prescribe you something.” With a groan he picks the MacBook off the floor, pecks out a long message, then pushes it over the matchsticks to me.

 

I’ve been thinking about Tim’s story. This isn’t the first time we’ve had that kind of thing around here. And I’m not talking about the flatboat days, either. I mean the 1960s and 70s. Just down the river on the Louisiana side, at Morville Plantation. They had a big gambling operation and some white slavery too. Literally. They had taken girls from God-knows-where and were holding them against their will, using them as whores. The sheriff ran the whole parish and took a cut of all the action. I’ve heard horror stories from patients, and I had a couple of brushes with the place myself. My point is, the situation was the same as now, in that the people who were supposed to stop those problems were making money off them instead.

 

I read his message carefully, then type
I’ve been thinking too. Corruption doesn’t have to be widespread to serve its purpose. All it takes is one well-placed cop, one sheriff’s deputy, one FBI agent, one selectman, or one assistant in the governor’s office etc. to keep
Sands informed. The spider pays off a dozen of the right people, and he has his web. And God knows the casinos have the money to buy anybody.

 

Dad motions for me to give him back the computer.
You need somebody from the outside, Son. Way outside. Somebody with experience handling this kind of thing. I’ve been thinking all night, and I keep on coming back to Walt Garrity.

 

The name brings me up short, but two seconds after I read it, I sense that Dad’s onto something. Walt Garrity is a retired Texas Ranger I met while serving as an assistant DA in Houston. He was the chief investigator on a capital murder case I was working, and when he heard I was from Mississippi, he asked if I knew an old Korean War medic by the name of Tom Cage. That brought about the reunion of two soldiers who’d served in the same army unit in Korea decades earlier and also started a new friendship for me, one that lasted through several cases. I haven’t talked to Garrity in a couple of years (since I last pumped him for information while researching a novel set in Texas), but my memory of him is undimmed. He’s a cagey old fox who seems reticent until you get him talking; then you realize he has a dry sense of humor and long experience dealing with human frailty in all its forms. Walt Garrity is the kind of lawman who’ll try almost anything before resorting to gunplay but, once pushed to that extreme, is as dangerous as any man on the right side of the law can be.

 

Dad takes back the computer and types,
Walt helped take on the big gambling operation in Galveston in the fifties and sixties, when he first became a Ranger. I know that sounds like a long time ago, but vice doesn’t change much.

 

This reminds me of Mrs. Pierce’s warning—“Vice is vice, whatever cloak it wears”—but I’m not sure that’s true, given the technology of the digital age. Still, I can’t deny that the thought of Walt Garrity gives me some comfort. Walt may be over seventy and officially retired, but I’ve heard he still takes on occasional undercover jobs for the Harris County DA’s office.

 

You might have something there,
I type.
But I can’t risk calling Walt until I have a secure line of communication.

 

You leave Walt to me,
Dad types.
I’ll set it up. And don’t warn me to be careful, goddamn it. I know how to sneak around.

 

As if summoned by my dad’s assertion about sneaking around, my mother’s voice floats down the hall. “What are you doing here, Tom?” she asks in the stage whisper common to grandmothers who don’t want to wake sleeping children.

 

Dad and I look up simultaneously, startled by the image of Mom gliding up the hallway in her housecoat, her eyes fully alert. The Deep South still boasts a few women like Peggy Cage, “society” ladies in their seventies who spent their childhoods on subsistence farms during the Great Depression, and who, by virtue of backbreaking work and sacrifice, managed to attend college, marry a man with an ironclad work ethic, and rise to a level their parents never dreamed of. My mother may look at home in a Laura Ashley dress and know which fork to use, but she picked cotton all the way through college. If World War Three broke out tomorrow, she could plant a truck garden and start raising hogs the next day. As I heard her tell one of my biology teachers at school, “Once you twist the head off a chicken, you never really forget how to do it.”

 

“Penn had a little panic attack,” Dad says, motioning her over to the computer.

 

My mother freezes where she is, her eyes moving from my father’s face to mine, then to the computer. She moves forward and kneels before the sofa.

 

Dad types,
We have a problem and we can’t discuss it out loud. You and Annie are in danger. Your lives have been threatened. We have people coming from Houston to take you to a safe place.

 

I watch my mother process this information. She looks shocked, then angry. Then she types,
How serious are these threats?

 

Dad responds,
Jack Jessup’s boy has already been murdered.

 

Mom closes her eyes and sighs deeply.
When are they getting here?

 

An hour or less.

 

What about school?

 

I shake my head and type,
Think Ray Presley times ten,
referring to a man my mother thought of as evil incarnate.
If you want to take Annie’s textbooks along and work with her, that’s great, but safety is the priority. We’ve learned that the hard way.

 

Mom nods with resignation.
I’ll get Annie’s things ready,
she
types,
but if we can’t discuss this, I don’t want to wake her until the last minute. I’ll tell her it’s a surprise vacation just for us.

 

I nod agreement and start to type a reply, but as my fingers touch the keyboard, I hear the sound of the downstairs television rise. Dad and I left it on to distract any listeners, but I’m positive the audio track has suddenly doubled in volume. My father lost most of his high-frequency hearing long ago, but even he notices the amplitude change. He’s already holding the .357 snubnose in his hand.

 

I lean down to Mom’s ear and whisper, “Get back to Annie’s room. If you hear a shot, call 911.”

 

She looks longingly at the pistol on the sofa, but I motion for her to move to the bedroom. Dad is already moving toward the head of the stairs, but I catch up to him and pull him back.

 

“I’m going down first,” I whisper. “You back me up. If there’s more than one target, I’ll hit the deck and fire low, you shoot high.”

 

“Could it be Kelly’s friends?”

 

I glance at my watch. “Not unless they drove eighty-five all the way.”

 

Dad nods and moves aside so that I can reach the stairs. I slip off my shoes, then step on the top tread and move quickly downward, staying close to the wall to minimize the creaks.

 

Halfway down, I see a well-dressed man standing in my front hall holding a sign in his hands like a limo driver in an airport. My finger tightens on the trigger, but the word BLACKHAWK printed in red at the top of the sign stops me.

 

I hold up my hand to stop Dad, then read the words below the company name: YOU’RE SAFE NOW. WALK FORWARD. With relief surging through me, I look back upstairs and give Dad the OK sign. After he lowers his gun, I move up and whisper, “The cavalry’s here. Get Mom and Annie ready.”

 

He turns without a word and moves up the stairs with what for him is dispatch.

 

When I reach the ground floor, the Blackhawk operator sets the poster aside and gives my hand a businesslike shake. He’s wearing a black sport coat with a gray polo shirt beneath it, and he obviously chose his position because it’s not visible from the street. Like Daniel Kelly, he looks about thirty-five, but his hair is cut military-style,
where Kelly has the blond locks of a tennis pro. Before I can speak, the operator passes me a handwritten note and a typed sheet of paper. The note reads,
I’m Jim Samuels. There were two men watching your house. They’re alive but neutralized. We took their guns and cell phones. We need to get the packages moving in under ten minutes. Are they ready?

 

I nod, then hold up my hand and splay my fingers to indicate five minutes. Leaning up to his ear, I whisper, “How did you guys get here so fast?”

 

Samuels smiles briefly, then whispers, “Dan Kelly called me and told me to gun it all the way.”

 

While I say a silent thank-you to Kelly, Samuels points to the typed sheet in my hand. It reads,
Daniel Kelly should arrive Natchez in approximately 40 hours. We’ve rented room 235 at the Days Inn. Kelly’s gear bag is waiting for him there. There’s a satellite phone in your kitchen pantry, detailed instructions with it. There’s a number programmed into the phone that you can call for updates on your mother and daughter. We’ll be encrypted on our end, but be careful where you use the phone. Kelly told us to make absolutely sure that you don’t want to come with us and wait until he gets here before you proceed with anything.

 

I look up and shake my head, and the Blackhawk man acknowledges with a sober nod. Leaning forward again, I whisper, “Do you feel confident about getting out of town safely?”

 

Samuels gives me a thumbs-up with such assurance that I suddenly wish I were going with them. Then he leans in close and says, “We were gentle with your watchers, to minimize reprisals against you. You’ll have to decide how best to handle the situation. We left them behind the house.”