Greg Iles - The Devils Punchbowl

“Fine,” I rasp, still staring at the message. “Just my daughter texting me from school.”

I grab for my seat as the chopper bucks into the air.

“Easy, now,” Necker says soothingly. “Sit back and enjoy it. Boy, what I’d give to still have my little girl at home. It goes by so damn fast, you miss most of it. It’s only later that you realize it. That you were in the presence of a miracle. You know?”

I nod dully.

Bring a gun? Jic? Just in case? In case of what?

I’d give anything to take back the encouragement I gave Tim to pursue evidence against Mr. X and his employers. Yet somewhere beneath my panic surges the hope that Jessup, even after thirty years of drug abuse and aimlessness, has somehow proved able to do what he promised to do.

“Don’t you miss a minute of it,” Necker advises. “But, hell, what am I telling you? You had the sense to get out of the city and bring your kid to a place like this. A place where people are who they say they are, and you don'’t have to worry about all the sick crap that goes on out there in the world.”

I flick my phone shut and force myself to nod again.

“A goddamn

sanctuary,

” Necker pronounces. “That'’s what it is. Am I right?”

“Absolutely.”

I guess I'm not above a little selling after all.

CHAPTER

8

The hours after receiving Tim’s text message are an emotional seesaw for me; panic alternates with wild hope that Jessup has somehow obtained evidence of fraud and gotten safely away with it. This hope is a tacit admission that Tim’s allegations are neither exaggerations nor paranoid fantasies. The maddening thing is that I'’ll have to wait until midnight to talk to him. I assume his choice of hour means that he intends to stay on board the

Magnolia Queen

until the end of his shift. Why doesn’'t he simply walk off the boat, I wonder, and race up to my office at City Hall? My endless analysis of this question puts me into such a state that Rose, my secretary, asks repeatedly whether I'm all right and even convinces me to lie down for an hour on a cot in the civil defense director’s office. Lying by the director’s red phone, I find it almost impossible not to call Tim, but somehow I manage it. If he’s willing to risk his life, the least I can do is take his precautions seriously.

The afternoon passes slowly, with Rose doing her best to handle the calls from the various committees and charities using the Balloon Festival to generate support or contributions, and Paul Labry fielding complaints from merchants and residents involving zoning and noise violations. Like the other selectmen, Labry has a full-time job, but he always makes an extra effort to help me during crunch times.

From the volume of calls and the traffic outside City Hall, one thing is certain: Even if Jessup is right and Natchez is festering with corruption beneath its elegant facade, the “Balloon Glow”—tonight’s official opening ceremony of the Great Mississippi River Balloon Festival—will go on.

I manage to get out of City Hall by six and collect Annie from my parents’ house, where she usually spends her after-school time. I can tell she’s excited as we drive toward the bluff, and she blushes as the police wave us through the big orange barricades at Fort Rosalie. Annie’s at the age where anything that makes her stand out from her friends mortifies her, but I sense that she’s enjoying the VIP treatment.

The sun has already set below the bluff, and the truncated roars of flaming gas jets sound from beyond the great mansion whose grounds provide the setting for the town’s biggest festival. Annie gasps as we round the corner of Rosalie, and I feel my heart quicken. The term

balloon glow

perfectly describes this night ritual; from a distance the balloons glow like giant multicolored lanterns against the black backdrop of sky. But up close, among the inflated canopies swaying in the wind, the experience is much more intense. When the pilots do “burns” for the spectators, you can feel the heat from thirty feet away. Yellow and blue flares light the night like bonfires, awing children and adults alike. The tethered balloons tug against the ropes binding them to the earth, and kids who grab the edges of the baskets feel themselves lifted bodily from the ground. The ceremony is a perfect prologue for tomorrow’s opening race, when the balloons will leap from the dewy morning grass and fill the skies over the city, pulling every attentive soul upward with them.

“I'm glad ya’ll decided to go ahead with it,” Annie says, grabbing my arm as we hurry to join the people streaming among the balloons. “This will help the refugee kids forget about the hurricane.”

She tugs me toward the nearest balloon, and I use her momentary inattention to check my cell phone for further text messages. I don'’t know if I'm hoping Tim will cancel the meeting or move it forward. All I know for sure is that I want the truth about Golden Parachute. But there’s no message.

I spend the first forty-five minutes with Annie, looking at everything she instructs me to and buttonholing pilots so she can ask them all kinds of questions about the flight parameters of hot-air bal

loons. I get buttonholed myself a few times, by citizens with questions or complaints about their pet interest, but Annie has become adept at extricating me from such conversations. TV crews roam the grounds of Rosalie with their cameras: one from Baton Rouge, ninety miles to the south; another from Jackson, a hundred miles to the north. I promise a producer from the Baton Rouge station that I'’ll give her five minutes at the gate of Rosalie, where they'’re interviewing pilots and Katrina refugees. I plan to take Annie with me, but two minutes after I make the promise, we walk right into Libby Jensen, and something goes tight in my chest.

“Libby! Libby!” Annie cries, running forward and giving her a hug. “Aren’t the balloons

awesome

?”

“Yes, they are,” Libby agrees, smiling cautiously at me above Annie’s head.

Libby is a Natchez native who went to law school in Texas, married a partner at her Dallas firm, had a child by him, then divorced him after discovering that he’d kept a series of mistresses during the first decade of their marriage. She liked practicing law about as much as she liked being cheated on, so she brought her son back home and used her settlement to open a bookstore. Her charisma and sharp business sense have made the shop a success, and several author friends of mine stop to sign books there when making the literary pilgrimage from Oxford to New Orleans. After Caitlin left town, Libby and I found that our friendship quickly evolved into something that eased the loneliness we both felt, and that mutual comfort carried us through most of a year. But her son, Soren, has some serious anger issues—not to mention a drug problem—and Libby and I disagreed about how best to handle that. In the end, that disagreement drove us apart.

Tonight is the first time we’ve found ourselves together since ending our relationship, and I’'ve worried it would be awkward. But Libby’s soft brown eyes shine as she hugs Annie, and in them I see an acknowledgment that the sadness she feels is in part her own choice.

“Where’s Soren?” Annie asks, reminding me that Tim said he’d seen Libby’s son down on the

Magnolia Queen,

looking high as a kite.

Libby rolls her eyes to disguise the anxiety that’s her constant companion. “Oh, running around with his friends, complaining

about the bands they booked this year. Where are you guys headed?”

“Daddy has an

interview,

” Annie says, obviously not enthused by the idea of standing by while I play talking head.