The Devil's Punchbowl

CHAPTER 24

Captain Walt Garrity crosses the Mississippi River Bridge at Vidalia, Louisiana, one callused hand on the wheel of his 2004 Anniversary Edition Roadtrek RV and the other wrapped around a thermos of hot coffee. He saw the lights of Natchez long ago, twinkling high on the bluff that towers over the flatland of Louisiana. The last time he crossed the Mississippi here there’d been only one bridge, the one built right before World War Two. He’d been on Ranger business then, coming to pick up a fugitive on a murder warrant. The guy had gotten drunk, cut somebody in Under-the-Hill, and wound up in the Natchez clink. The local cops had treated Walt well, a little hero worship for a Texas Ranger was common in cops who’d been raised on Saturday-matinee westerns as boys. Walt knew better than to expect deference now. These days he rarely mentioned he’d been a Ranger, since some people (mostly Mexicans) tended to make assumptions based on the checkered history of the troop.

He’s been driving for nine straight hours, not counting a stop for gas. Even with the built-in head in the Roadtrek, his first instinct when he feels the need for a bathroom is to piss in a Coke bottle, something he became adept at while racing across long stretches of Texas in the late fifties. It helps to have a long Johnson-or so say the fellows who claim to have one; Walt has to make do with what God gave him, which has always proved sufficient. Not that it matters much lately. At seventy, his pride has gone soft on him. He’s heard a lot about the blue pills, but you can’t take them if you’re on heart medicine, and Walt has been taking nitrates since his bypass a decade ago. Carmelita, the Mexican woman who lives with him, has stayed on in spite of this, despite being ten years his junior. “Tirar isn’t everything,” she always says. Then she winks and adds, “And there’s more than one way to skin a cat.”

At the midpoint of the bridge, it strikes Walt that the last time he crossed here his wife was the woman waiting back in Nacogdoches. Frances would have been about thirty then, shining with the glow of her second pregnancy. But even that glow faded whenever Walt chugged down the long driveway and off to work. Frances was a worrier; his fellow Rangers always said that if worry and prayer could keep you alive, Walt didn’t have a thing to worry about when the bullets started flying. Naturally, it was Frances that fate had taken too soon. Walt shoves down the memories and thinks again of Carmelita. She never worries when he leaves, though she knows some of his recent jobs have gotten hairy. Crime has changed in the past twenty-five years, even in Texas. Whatever code that once kept some sort of restraint operating among the criminal class vanished with the appearance of crack cocaine. Even so, says Carmelita, life is too short to spend it worrying, especially about old dogs like Walt, who always seem to find their way home in one piece.

Walt takes his gaze off the city’s cathedral steeple and looks down to the foot of the bluff, where the riverboat casinos hug the shore like remora fastened to a shark’s side. Two boats north of the bridge, two to the south. Walt chuckles to himself. Mark Twain would roll over in his grave. These “boats” may have been floated down the river to reach their present locations, but they were never meant to go anywhere under their own power; they don’t even have engines. They’re floating entertainment complexes, like something from Walt Disney World. They exist for one reason: to drain money from as wide an area as possible and funnel it to the owners of the casinos, few of whom would deign to cross the borders of a state like Mississippi.

Walt has never been a gambler by constitution. He played some poker in Korea to keep his mind off the cold, and he won enough spending money to visit the clean whores in town rather than the girls hiding in the hills by the camp, all of whom carried exotic strains of VD. He’d also done some gambling in his various undercover roles, both as a Ranger and as a special investigator for the Harris County district attorney-Penn Cage’s old boss. Winning at poker was a matter of judging men quickly and accurately, and that wasn’t much different from Rangering. Walt had found that his emotional detachment from games of chance gave him a significant edge over men who had the itch in their blood.

As the Roadtrek rocks and bounces down off the bridge, he swings left on Canal Street and heads into downtown Natchez. He hasn’t seen Tom Cage in close to ten years, but when you’ve served with a man in combat, the passage of time means nothing. You’re brothers until death-and beyond, if there is such a thing. From what Tom said, they need to work fast, and that means Walt establishing a cover as quickly as possible. He’s traveling under one of his favorite legends-J. B. Gilchrist, a Dallas oilman-and with a little help from the Cages, he’ll embed himself in the fabric of the town, then draw the target to him as surely as honey draws a bear.

It helps that Natchez is an oil town. There isn’t much business left here-mostly workovers being done by men trying to suck the last few barrels from wells drilled in the 1950s and capped in the 1980s-but some big fields were discovered in the old days, and the town enjoyed remarkable prosperity. Quite a few Texas outfits still have interests in the area, and with Tom arranging for a geologist friend to let it out that J. B. Gilchrist has an override on a well being drilled next week, the town’s history will firm up his cover just fine.

Walt turns on Main Street and parks outside the lobby of the Eola Hotel. As he dismounts from the big van, he sees several trailers parked crosswise in the crowded lot, most with colorful balloons painted on their sides. At the back of the lot, a couple of crews seem to be packing suitcases into their trucks rather than unpacking, as Walt would have expected. He brought the Roadtrek because Tom had told him he wouldn’t be able to rent a hotel room during the festival weekend, but Walt senses that the introductory scene he’d planned to play in the lobby might just pay off with a room.

The Eola is a classy hotel from a bygone era, a grand old dame that makes even Walt feel young again. He walks up to the brass cage of the desk and nods to the harried-looking desk clerk whose name tag reads BRAD.

“Can I help you?” asks the young man, not meeting Walt’s eye.

“J. B Gilchrist, checking in.”

“Yes, sir. Do you have a reservation?”

“Course I do. Check your screen there. It’s G-I–L, then the name of our Lord. You follow?”

Brad looks perplexed. “Sir, ah…I’m checking under G, but I don’t show a Gilchrist. Could the reservation be under another name?”

“How could it be under another name?” Walt asks, upping his volume enough to turn a few heads. “I only got one name, son. Big Jim Gilchrist. And I’m tired from a damn long drive. Now, I was happy when I walked in. Why don’t you get me fixed up so I can stay happy?”

“Sir, I’m afraid this is one of the most crowded weekends of the year, and-”

Walt cuts the boy off with a withering glare. “Listen, son, let’s skip the formalities and get your supervisor in on this, so we can have an executive decision. Hotels always keep a couple rooms on standby for when they make mistakes, like you’re making now. You just tell your boss to release one of ’em, and everything will be fine.”

“Mr. Gilchrist, I don’t think you understand the-”

“Supervisor,” Walt cuts in. “Boss man, jefe-are you reading me? Call whoever you got to call to make this right.”

Walt turns away from the desk and walks toward a long, black grand piano that looks like an idling limousine awaiting a driver. He begins hammering out “Chopsticks,” drawing curious and annoyed glances from the guests in the lobby.

“Mr. Gilchrist?” Brad calls. “Sir?”

Walt doesn’t stop banging the keys, but he cuts his eyes toward the desk. “I’ll bet you’ve got some good news for me.”

“Well, actually, it turns out that we do have an unexpected checkout. If you don’t mind a room that hasn’t been made up yet?”

Walt laughs good-naturedly. “Son, before I struck it big, I stayed in places a cockroach would have run from. You just print me out a key. I’m ready to get down to one of them boats and lose some money.”

“Yes, sir. Right away.”

Walt looks around and sighs expansively. “Seems like a lot going on for this town. This ain’t Pilgrimage month, is it?”

“No, sir. It’s the Balloon Festival. The only reason this room is free is because we had a problem this morning with the flight.”

Walt’s inner sentry goes on alert. “What kind of problem?

“Well, someone took a shot at one of the balloons.”

“I’ll be dogged. Kill anybody?”

“No, sir. But they did have to crash-land the balloon. And the mayor was in it.”

“The mayor?” Walt barks a laugh as he thinks this through. If Penn had been badly hurt, Tom would have called despite instructions not to save in dire emergency. “No kidding? He make it?”

“He’s fine. They just had a hard landing.”

“He must have pissed somebody off, huh? Wrote the wrong ordinance or something. I’ve known a couple mayors I wouldn’t have minded shooting.”

“They think it was squirrel hunters.”

“I’ll be dogged,” Walt says again. “Balloons flying tomorrow?”

“Yes, sir, Sunday too. But everybody’s nervous, and some of the pilots have left town. It’s a pilot’s room you’re taking tonight.”

“Sounds like I owe the lone gunman a favor. Otherwise I wouldn’t have a room in this fine establishment.”

The clerk slides a form toward him. “If you’ll just initial here, and here, and sign at the bottom. Please note the fine for smoking in the room.”

“Hell, I’ll just pay you now.”

Brad frowns. “It’s two hundred and fifty dollars, Mr. Gilchrist.”

Walt laughs like a man for whom $250 is a minute’s pay, then signs his name with a flourish. “Just pulling your chain, Brad.”

As the clerk tries to pull back the form, Walt leans in close. “Say, what’s the action like around here?”

Brad looks confused. “The casinos are all beneath the bluff. Our concierge can help you with anything else, but he’s busy right now.”

Walt slides a $100 bill across the desk. “I’m talking about girls, Brad. I know where the gambling is, but that’s only half the party. I’ve been hankering for a colored girl, to tell you the truth. Been a while, you know? This seems like the right town for that. They got girls on the boats or what?”

Obviously offended, the clerk lets his voice take on a haughty tone. “I’m sure I don’t know, sir.”

“What about cockfighting? I know you got some of that around here. That’s the kind of action I’m talking about. Blood sport.”

Brad straightens up and squares his shoulders. “Sir, if you don’t mind, there are people waiting.”

Walt snatches back the bill. “You’re in the wrong job, sonny. You say the concierge is busy? You got an elevator man? Somebody around a hotel has to know what’s what.”

The clerk’s cheeks are red. “Will you be needing help with your luggage?”

“I need a bellboy who can earn that C-note with some useful information, that’s what I need.”

“Perhaps someone can help you on one of the boats.”

Walt walks away muttering loudly, “I never heard of a deskman in an oil town who don’t know nothin’ ’bout the local trim.” He turns and shouts, “Send a bottle of Maker’s Mark up to my room from the bar. You know what that is, don’t you?”

“A full bottle?”

“Jesus, Brad, where’d they find you? I want whiskey, and if you’ve got a pretty maid who can bring it up, send her up with it.”

There was a time when the way he’d behaved in the last five minutes wouldn’t have shocked any hotel man in the South, and not many around the country. I guess times do change, Walt thinks. But not that much. The clerk would gripe to somebody about the old asshole he’d had to deal with, then repeat what Walt had asked for, and soon enough, like ripples in the proverbial pond, word would reach the proper ear. It was simply a matter of waiting.

Any fisherman could tell you that.