Greg Iles - The Devils Punchbowl

This time the door rattles hard, and she hears wood splinter. Moving around the cabinet, she braces her back against the door and reorients the cabinet for another rush. This time she drives it even faster into the wood, and when the impact comes, she feels the frame give way. Dragging the cabinet back just far enough to squeeze by, she darts into the hall and stops in front of Linda’s stall.

What she sees steals her breath entirely. Linda appears to be standing by the left side of her stall, but in truth she’s hanging by her dog collar, its shortened chain bound to the Cyclone fence with what looks like one of the bars from the window, twisted into a hook. She’s wearing a waitress’s uniform, with an emblem of a steamboat embroidered on the blouse. Her wrists are bound tightly with a pair of cotton panties, and her face is blue.

Caitlin stands frozen for a moment, then looks down and jerks open the latch that keeps Linda’s stall closed. With the collar and

chain holding her, Quinn never felt the need to lock her in, saving himself the trouble of finding another key whenever he had the urge to rape her.

Caitlin bends her knees and tries to lift Linda high enough to ease the pressure on her neck, but it’s no use. Cursing in panic, she searches for a pulse. She waits, counting slowly, but feels nothing.

“Damn it!” she screams. “Goddamn it, Linda! You gave up!”

But inside she knows this isn’t true. Linda was afraid that Caitlin would risk death by forcing her to try to escape, or by remaining with her if Linda refused to try. Linda had hanged herself to release Caitlin from this burden.

Caitlin stares at the woman whose face she has never seen in life before this moment and thinks of the nude pictures she was shown, those supposedly taken from the house of Tim Jessup. She’d condemned the girl in those photos out of hand, and now…now she owes that woman her life. Caitlin has met so many women like Linda during her years in Mississippi, girls with plenty of native sense, but who married right out of high school, and, if they were lucky, did two years of junior college before the first baby came. What could Linda Church have accomplished had she been born with Caitlin’s advantages? So many women from Caitlin’s world pretended to ask these questions, but down deep they felt a sense of entitlement that assured them that their rarefied places in the nation’s elite schools and corporations were based on merit alone. Caitlin reaches out and lays a hand on Linda’s arm—then freezes.

She’s heard the sound of a motor. Not a helicopter, but a car or truck. Maybe even a jeep.

Her body jerks as though she’s grabbed hold of a 220-volt cable. A fraction of a second later she’s racing to the storeroom, certain of what she must do. High on both side walls of the storeroom are windows without bars. Caitlin slides open the one on the side opposite Linda’s stall. Then she runs back to Linda’s stall and listens.

The engine is louder now, intermittent but getting closer.

Wedging both hands behind Linda’s distended neck, she pulls on the twisted bar that Linda somehow managed to bend into a hook. It takes more strength than Caitlin expected to open the loop. Almost…

Linda pitches forward onto her face, the chain rattling behind her.

Caitlin feels once more for a pulse. Nothing. Now the engine is a smooth rumble. How far is that sound traveling over the flat ground? A half mile? A mile?

With a silent prayer, she looks down at Linda’s body, then gets to her knees and hauls Linda onto her shoulder. It takes most of her strength to bear the dead weight, but this is not enough. She has to get to a standing position. Breathing hard, she redoubles her effort and drives herself to her feet.

Holding the body in a fireman’s carry, she turns until Linda’s feet are pointing toward the unbarred window and drives one of Linda’s heels through the brittle plastic pane. A chorus of coughs enters the stall. Then something heavy slams against the wall. The Bully Kuttas are leaping for the window.

Filled with shame and horror, Caitlin presses Linda’s lower legs together and shoves them through the window. Any worry about how she would push more of the body through the small space vanishes, for the moment the legs clear the frame, Linda’s weight is yanked from Caitlin’s arms and shoulders as though by a threshing machine.

The sounds that follow send a bolt of primal terror through her. After one paralyzed second, she breaks for the storeroom. The whole building is rattling from the force of the dogs trying to drag Linda’s corpse through the window. Caitlin feels her stomach trying to come up, but she forces down the bile and runs to the storeroom window.

No sound,

she thinks, like a child playing hide-and-seek.

I can’t make a single sound….

Standing on tiptoe, she pokes her head far enough through the window to make sure no dog waits below. The engine is much louder than before. The far wall of the building sounds as if a construction crew is demolishing it.

First, she tries to put her feet through the window frame, but she can’t manage it. She’ll have to go through headfirst, then roll and sprint for the fence. She checks the dark yard again, then wriggles through the window and falls facefirst onto the ground.

Bounding to her feet, she runs for the fence without looking to either side.

If I look back, I'm dead,

she thinks. Halfway to the fence, she hears a cough, then a sound like galloping hooves. Even as her

brain calculates how far the dog must run, she’s leaping for the top of the eight-foot fence.

Her fingers lock into the heavy wire, and she whips her thighs and ankles up beneath her, spread-eagling them like an Olympic gymnast as a Bully Kutta slams into the fence below her rump. She’s already climbing as the dog falls, and by the time he leaps again, her hands are on the top bar and she’s flinging her legs over.

Another dog has joined the first. They leap for her again and again, their frenzied hacking like the rage of mute wolves. Panting hard, Caitlin feels a dizzy moment of triumph, then drops to the far side of the fence and sprints into the trees. She hears no engine, no dogs—nothing but the dull thump of her feet on the sandy soil. If the engine was Quinn’s, she knows, those dogs will be set loose on her trail in moments. And if they are…

CHAPTER

60

“Penn?” Major McDavitt says in my headset.

“Yeah?” I jerk out of the nauseated doze into which four hours in a free-floating roller coaster have submerged me. Leaning forward and looking at the FLIR screen, I see that we’re flying along what looks like a one-lane road.

“We’re getting into a fuel situation. We’re into the reserve. My GPS is set to the airport, and we’re already going to be cutting it close. We need to get back and refuel.”

“Kelly?” I say. “You seen anything?”

“SOS, man. Sorry. We need the air cav for this job. A fleet of these bitches.”

“I'm willing to keep going,” says McDavitt, “but we’ve got to be honest with ourselves. Without more specific intel, these are really long odds.”

I rub my eyes hard and try to see the larger picture, but exhaustion and airsickness are taking their toll. The only thing I can hold clearly in my mind is an image of Caitlin standing on her porch with her arms folded, the night we had our last talk. Remembering this, I try to imagine telling Annie that Caitlin was kidnapped and won'’t ever be coming back.

“Let’s refuel and keep going,” I say. “I know it’s a lot to ask, but we all know what’s at stake.”