Greg Iles - The Devils Punchbowl

“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 hoped 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.

Who’s watching me?

Walt wonders. Someone in this room was studying him right now, evaluating every reaction. One of the men on the far side of the crowd probably. But the spy could be Ming herself. Sands or Quinn might be planning to question her later and draw out every detail of how he’d behaved during the fight. He’d have to make sure that nothing she said would arouse suspicion.

“You want me call driver?” Ming asks.