Greg Iles - The Devils Punchbowl

On the occasion to which Libby is referring, Soren was busted with Lorcet Plus and Adderall. On my advice Libby hired Austin Mackey, a onetime classmate and the former district attorney, to represent him. At Mackey’s suggestion—and against all my better judgment—I used my influence with the present district attorney, Shadrach Johnson, to try to ensure that Soren’s case never went to trial. Mackey turned out to be right. After I promised my old political nemesis enough favors, the drug arrest was removed from Soren’s record altogether. If Libby wasn'’t in love with me by that point in our relationship, the final transformation was completed that day. I can date my ultimate decision that things would not work out between us to that day as well.

“Have you left yet?” Libby asks, the pitch of her voice rising. “Where are you? Are you on your way?”

“Have they booked him?” I ask, glancing at my watch. Twenty-two minutes till midnight. “Have they charged him?”

“I don'’t know! I can’t even think. What will they do to him?”

What they probably should have done last time,

I reply silently. Mackey’s final advice to Libby and Soren was that the boy never get within a hundred yards of an illegal drug while he was in Adams County, because the next time he was caught, Shad Johnson would throw the book at him. That day has come, and I feel Libby grasping at me like a drowning woman. But even if I could somehow blunt Shad’s vindictiveness, I can’t go on enabling Soren to ruin his life, and his mother’s with it.

“Libby, you'’ve got to calm down,” I say in a steady voice. “You can’t help Soren if you can’t hold it together.”

“Tell me you’re on your way,” she says with single-minded urgency. “They’re going to take him to the cell in a minute!”

Damn.

I close my eyes briefly as my car drifts across Franklin Street and heads into the Victorian part of town. “Libby, I want you to listen to me. I will come down there and try to help, but you can’t—”

She gives a plaintive moan that sounds like the preface to an emotional plea, but then without warning the sound shatters into a shrill scream of terror.

“What is it?”

I yell. “What happened?”

There’s a rattle that sounds like Libby’s cell phone skating across a tile floor. I hear confused shouts, several slaps, then a shriek followed by a bellow of rage and anguish. The phone rattles again, and then I hear sobbing. Libby has the phone. After twenty seconds of gulping air, she begs me in a torrent of words to come to the station. I wait until she runs out of air, then ask again what happened.

“They’re beating him up! They

maced

him.”

I try to picture this scene, but I can’t see the Natchez police beating a nineteen-year-old kid without some physical provocation. “Did Soren do something first?”

“He hit one of the cops,” she whispers. “They were dragging him back to the cell, really being rough, and he lashed out at somebody. It was just a reflex! Penn, help me. Please! I'm so scared they'’re going to do something terrible to him, or put him back there with somebody horrible. If you ever cared for me at all, please, come now.”

A minute ago, I would have said nothing could keep me from meeting Tim at the stroke of midnight, but guilt is a powerful motivator. With a silent

Goddamn it,

I wrench the wheel right on Madison Street and speed northward to the police station.

It’s thirteen minutes after twelve when I finally squeal out of the police station parking lot, my hands shaking with anger and fear. Libby is shouting after me, but not as loudly as her son is screaming mindless profanity in the drunk tank. The police found half a pound of grass in the trunk of the car Soren was driving, but I'm almost positive he was high on crystal meth. Soren is essentially a gentle kid, not prone to violence, but when he drinks or ingests any drug but marijuana, his anger at his father surfaces, and he gets unpredictable.

A passenger in the car that he T-boned had to be evacuated by hel

icopter from St. Catherine’s Hospital to University Medical Center in Jackson. Worse than that—for Soren, at least—was the poke he took at the cop who was trying to drag him from the booking area to the cellblock. That blow placed Soren Jensen on the wrong side of a stark line for the Natchez Police Department. The cop required three stitches for the blow to his cheek, and Soren went to the cell with a faceful of pepper spray; but this is merely prologue for what will happen when Shad Johnson gets hold of the case.

All this minutiae drains quickly away as I race westward toward the cemetery. Even if a patrol car doesn’'t stop me for speeding, I'’ll be nearly half an hour late for my rendezvous with Tim.

Flying up Cemetery Road, past the prepossessing silhouette of Weymouth Hall, I realize why Tim chose Jewish Hill for our meetings. The cemetery’s front lower level, which houses the Turning Angel, is bathed in a yellow-orange glow from the sodium streetlights on Cemetery Road. But because of its height, the tabletop of Jewish Hill remains shrouded in darkness.

Is Tim still here? I see no car parked along the cemetery wall, but then I saw none last night either. I still don'’t know how Tim approached me from the back of the cemetery, since the only entrances I know about face Cemetery Road. But an old dopehead like Jessup probably knows a lot of things I don'’t about the deserted areas of the city.

An hour ago I planned to park more secretively than I did last night, but there’s no time for that now. I stop at the foot of Jewish Hill, take my pistol from my briefcase, shove it into my waistband, and leave the car. A quick push takes me through the hedge behind the wall, and then I'm climbing the steep face of the hill, toward the wire bench and the flagpole.

As feared, I find no one waiting at the top. No one was waiting for me last night either, but tonight feels different somehow. There’s a different silence among the stones. The air doesn’'t seem quite still, as though it’s recently been stirred, and the insects are silent. That could be the result of someone approaching, but my instinct says no. I feel a dreadful certainty that Tim has already been here and gone. Turning my back to the river and the moon, I walk deeper into the marble necropolis, scanning the darkness for signs of movement.

Out of the pulse beat of my blood comes a deep, subsurface rumble, almost too low for my ears to detect. It seems to vibrate up from the very ground. Thirty seconds later, I realize I'm hearing the engine of a push boat driving a great string of barges upriver, its massive cylinders propelling an unimaginable weight against the current. Turning, I see the red and green lights on the bow of the foremost barge, a third of a mile forward of the push boat’s stern. The pitch of the engine changes as the boat moves northward, then out of its steady drone a higher hum rises. A blue halogen wash fills the near sky, dimming the bow light on the barge, and I realize a vehicle is passing below me on Cemetery Road. It’s coming from out in the county, from the direction of the Devil’s Punchbowl, heading toward town.

I'm too deep inside the cemetery to see the vehicle. On impulse, I run back along the top of Jewish Hill, but too late. All I see are vertical taillights winking through the leaves of the ancient oaks in the low-lying part of the cemetery where Sarah is buried. The taillights look as if they belong to a truck or an SUV, not Tim’s Sentra.

My watch reads 12:37. The pistol feels awkward in my waistband but not completely unfamiliar. As a prosecutor of major felony cases in Houston, I was sometimes forced to carry a weapon for extended periods. Even after retiring from that position and taking up writing, certain circumstances have required me to carry a gun for protection, and on several occasions I’'ve been forced to use it, sometimes with fatal results.