Greg Iles - The Devils Punchbowl

Looking up, I see no more cars at the door. One of the teachers looks up the hill at us and gives a friendly wave.

“You’re going to be late, baby.”

She takes my hand and squeezes it. “It doesn’'t matter, Dad.”

“No. I guess it doesn’'t.”

“Let’s go,” she says brightly, as though everything has been resolved. “Like Gram says, ‘One way or another, everything’s going to be fine.’”

I laugh and drive down to the door of the school. Annie leans over and kisses my cheek, then lifts her backpack from the floor. When I start to speak, she presses her finger to my lips.

“You don'’t have to tell me not to worry, or not to talk about any of this. I know how things work.”

With that, she smiles, gets out, and disappears through the door of the school I loved as a child, the school that made me what I am, the school that my daughter will soon be leaving forever.

CHAPTER

49

Caitlin hunches naked on the balls of her bloody feet, listening to Linda’s chain rattle. She can tell by the sound that the chain is heavy, the kind with big, bright links that farmers use to tie tractors to flatbed trailers. Some people, Caitlin knows now, use them to strengthen fighting dogs, by making them drag the chains around every minute of their lives, as Linda must do now. Linda sleeps fitfully in her fever, moving frequently, shifting the dog collar that holds her to the chain.

Caitlin has not slept. She feels as though she’s awakened in some nightmare version of

The Count of Monte Cristo,

but instead of solitude as her curse, she must endure the cries of a woman who has suffered thirty hours of rape and abuse, while being powerless to help her. Caitlin doesn’'t intend to stay that way. She knows a lot more about her situation than she did when she arrived last night, and she doesn’'t believe their plight hopeless, as Linda so clearly does.

Being betrayed by her former pastor seems to have cracked the foundation of Linda’s religious faith. Caitlin senses that her will to live is fragile, her injuries and infections no doubt aggravating the situation.

From long and careful questioning of Linda during the night, Caitlin believes they'’re not far from Natchez. Yesterday, Seamus Quinn visited the kennel building that is their prison three separate

times, with only a few hours between each visit. Caitlin is sure he must be driving back and forth to Natchez between the bouts of rape.

What interests her more is that Quinn has told Jonathan Sands that Linda is already dead. Quinn was apparently supposed to kill her on the night Ben Li died, but by a brave leap from the boat, Linda saved herself. Quinn found her again by quietly putting out the word among hard-luck gamblers that all debts would be forgiven if someone could deliver Linda Church to him. Quinn’s ploy paid off, and he’s apparently kept her alive because he always coveted his master’s favorite mistress.

That Quinn would lie to his boss about something so important might offer a chance to drive a wedge between the two men, but the more frightening aspect of this lie is that Quinn must mean to kill Linda soon, so that Sands will never know he failed in his first effort—or risked letting Caitlin hear what she’s already heard. This, Caitlin knows, is the worst indicator of her own likely future. For if they mean to let her live, why would they allow her to see or hear what they’ve done to Linda Church? Her best hope is that some disconnect between Sands and Quinn has resulted in this scenario. Otherwise, she has only one chance: escape.

During the night, Caitlin kicked at the kennel’s tin roof for two hours, off and on, taking breaks before repeating the skin-the-cat move required to get her feet up to where the tin meets the wall. Her feet were bruised and bleeding after ten minutes, and the pit bulls outside went crazy while she did it, but no humans appeared. Quinn apparently believes that the dogs alone are sufficient to prevent an escape.

After she got a section of tin pried up, she learned why. The kennel building is surrounded by a heavy Cyclone fence eight feet high, set back twenty feet on all sides, and hidden from the air by a huge shed, like those that house machine shops. The metal struts that support its roof are twenty feet above her head. If she had a rope, she might be able to reach one of the rafters, but she doesn’'t know if there’s rope in the kennel. Even if there is, and she could climb hand over hand to the struts, Linda would not be able to follow.

According to Linda, the kennel building is forty paces long and hardly more than a glorified doghouse. They placed Caitlin in the

structure’s only room with four walls, other than a locked storeroom that occupies one end of the building. The remainder of the kennel’s interior consists of two rows of empty dog stalls partitioned by heavy Cyclone fencing, with a central aisle running between them. The first stall on the right, past the entry door, holds several live cats to be used as training bait. Despite Linda’s fevered state of mind, all this conforms to what Caitlin remembers from her hooded journey down the central aisle.

Using this knowledge, she reconnoitered the entire roof, looking for a weak spot where she might drop down into another part of the kennel. Everywhere she went, the dogs followed, looking up with the obsessive fascination that only real hunger can bring. The pit bulls have narrow waists and massive chests, like those of steroid-addicted bodybuilders. The musculature of a couple of them actually looks human in the chest and forelegs area. Still, she thinks, based on the Internet reading she’s done on dogfighting, these are probably not true fighting dogs. If they were, they wouldn'’t be left to run loose in the same yard; they’d be chained far enough away from each other not to do any damage. Instead they'’re probably guard or “protection” dogs, which can be controlled by commands, at least by the proper person. What puzzles Caitlin is what happened when she was brought through the yard to the kennel last night. The dogs weren’t ordered away by command. She remembers Quinn telling a man to “use bait if you have to” to get them away from the gate. This makes her think the pit bulls might just be a pack of dogs they use for training purposes, kept hungry to intimidate Linda—and now her—into staying put.

The comment about using bait stayed with her, though, and before much time passed, the rudiments of a plan had formed in her mind. If she could somehow get to the stall that holds the cats, she could pry off the bars of a window on one side of the kennel, toss a couple of cats out as bait, then jump through a window on the opposite side and sprint for the fence. If the dogs are hungry enough, she feels sure she can cover the twenty feet required before they figure out her trick. Of course, getting to the cats proved impossible last night. Prying up a sheet of tin from the top side of the roof had proved much harder than kicking up a section from below. If she didn't have to worry about sliding off into the jaws of ravenous pit

bulls, it might be easier, but there’s no point thinking like that. She’s made decent progress on the tin sheet over the spot where, by the sound of mewling, she judges the cats to be, but she stopped with first light, worried that Quinn would show up. It will take another hour’s work to get the sheet pried up enough to drop down and get at the cats.

The real problem with her escape plan is Linda. Even if Caitlin can somehow free Linda from her collar and chain, her leg injuries might keep her from running quickly enough to the fence—never mind climbing it.