Greg Iles - The Devils Punchbowl

That'’s it, right there,

Linda thinks. No one had ever really cared what anyone did with her. No one but Tim.

“Cunts like this run off all the time,” Quinn says. “With Jessup dead, no one would even ask what happened to her, if it weren’t for the pictures.”

“The pictures sell the story,” Sands says. “Just make sure no one finds her.”

Quinn laughs, dark and low. “Don’t worry. The lads are starving.”

A black curtain falls over the world.

Linda awakens to a cold wind on her face, a sky filled with stars. A silver moon shines down like a pitiless eye, made hazy by fog. She hears a motor, feels herself pitching like someone trying to lie on a trampoline while someone else jumps on it. She tries to brace herself, but her hands are bound with rope. Worse, they'’re numb. On the next bounce, she rolls over and retches on hard, white plastic.

Boat,

she realizes.

I'm in a boat. A

real

boat.

She looks up from the white deck. Seamus Quinn sits behind a steering wheel, the wind blowing his curly black hair wildly behind him. He grins down at her, his eyes flickering like silver points of light.

“Wakey wakey,” he says, mocking an Australian accent. “You’ve got company now, Benny lad.”

Linda turns her neck and looks behind her. Ben Li lies hog-tied on the deck behind her, a strip of duct tape over his mouth. His eyes bulge, and in them she reads a desperate plea for help. As if she could do anything. After the first few moments, he stops straining against his bonds and falls back against the deck. Ben Li graduated from a college called Cal Tech, she remembers. His parents are Chinese immigrants. Tim said Cal Tech was better than any school in the South, when it came to computers. Linda wonders if Ben Li ever imagined he would end up hog-tied in a boat in the Mississippi River.

“Where are we going?” she asks.

Quinn laughs. “You know where. To have some fun.”

“Fun for who?”

He laughs harder, then jerks the speedboat’s wheel as though to avoid an obstacle in the water. “Me first. Then the dogs.”

Linda swallows, trying to block her memory of the one night she worked a dogfight for the company. It was like stripping in Vegas after a fight. All the girls hated it. Boxing earned millions because men were drawn to violence like a drug. But dogfights took it to another level entirely….

It was as if ten thousand years of civilization had been stripped away in an hour. Every guy in the place wanted to fuck or fight, and half didn't care which. If they got you in the VIP room, they wouldn'’t take no for an answer, and if they fought, it hardly mattered who won or lost. They just craved the release.

Fighting was the only way some men could have sex with other men. Men like Quinn. Fighting or sharing a woman. That was what they really wanted, and what she’d narrowly escaped the night of the dogfight. She’d only needed one night to know she’d never go back. How many times had the drunks started chanting,

“Train! Train! Train!”

? She’d finally persuaded Sands to take her to a separate building, and she’d had to service him to get him to do that. But at least she’d escaped what the other girls got. Some had apparently done that kind of thing before, but others hadn'’t. Some had been more afraid than she was—

“I’'ve been watching you for a long time,” Quinn says. “Strutting up and down like the queen. You’ve been off-limits long enough. Tonight I'm going to find out what’s kept the boss interested for so long.”

Linda shivers and watches the moon grow fainter as the fog on the river thickens. She wishes she knew enough about the stars to know whether she’s moving upstream or down. But even if she did, the heavy mist is quickly whiting out everything around the boat.

“I think you got to him,” Quinn says. “Anybody else, he’d have had that bolt up their arse and the juice full on.”

She shakes her head. “No. It’s not in him.”

Quinn laughs. “Don’t be too sure. If Jessup hadn'’t got away, he’d have suffered like a saint.”

Linda looks at Quinn in alarm. “Got away? I thought Tim was dead.”

“That'’s what I mean. Falling off that bluff was the best break that header ever caught. If he’d lived, Sands would have made the crucifixion look like a mild digging. You cross the boss, you get special treatment. Like Benny back there.”

Quinn wants me to talk,

she realizes.

He wants a relationship.

“You ever see anything eaten alive?” he asks, turning the boat slightly to starboard.

Linda doesn’'t answer, but one of her cats used to catch chipmunks and torture them for hours before she killed them. Let the pitiful creature run a few feet, feel a taste of freedom, then pounce and rip its belly open with a claw—

“Nothing like it in the world,” Quinn says, marveling at his insight. “That'’s why the Romans loved the games. That'’s life, right in front of you. Kill or be killed. Eat or be eaten. You’re a predator or you’re prey. And deep down, everybody knows which they are, right from the beginning.”

A huge beam sweeps over the boat, stops, comes back, then arcs away. Linda has an impression of treetops shot with a flashbulb to her right.

“Just like that stupid bastard,” Quinn says, nodding at Ben Li. “Too clever for his own good. He makes more money in a day than his parents earned in ten years, but it wasn'’t enough. Had to fuck it up. Look at him. A genius, they say. By noon tomorrow, a pit bull will be shitting out his brains. Next morning, his bones will be gnawed to powder.”

Linda’s stomach rolls. The night of the dogfight, she’d kept away from the pit as much as possible. The noise alone had sickened her, and the brief glimpses she’d been unable to avoid were burned into her memory. Two blood-soaked, muscle-bound animals locked in nearly motionless combat for an hour, one’s massive jaws buried in the chest of the other, each struggling for advantage while two dozen screaming men goaded them to kill.

“And me?” she forces herself to ask.

Quinn purses his lips like a man figuring a price on something. “The day after, maybe. Depends on how interesting you make things. If you didn't know so fucking much, I’d keep you around for

the weekend. Rent you out. Lots of big boys coming in for the next couple of weeks. They like their business mixed with pleasure.”

The boat leaps free of the water, then smashes back down. Soon it’s bouncing like a tractor over farm rows.

It’s a wake,

Linda realizes.

Now the spotlight makes sense. We must be overtaking a tugboat pushing barges.

“I have to go the bathroom,” she says. “Bad.”

“Go in your pants. You already did it once.”

“No, I mean

really

go. I can’t hold it. I'm sick. You don'’t want it in the boat.”

“Christ on a crutch. There’s an ice chest under the seat behind Benny. Go in that.”

Linda works herself up onto her elbows, which is more difficult than she thought with her hands bound, then crawls back to the stern, where Ben Li looks desperately at her through bloodshot eyes. Putting her mouth beside his ear, she says, “I wish I could help you. I'm sorry.”

She smells fear coming off him like body odor. She remembers her thought back on the

Queen,

that she’d entered a state beyond fear. Then later, in the chair, she’d realized that only the dead are beyond fear. But now, struggling to her feet, using Ben Li as a prop for her bound hands, she isn’t so sure.