The Devil's Punchbowl

CHAPTER 33

As we near the island, I start to ease my kayak along the sandy shore, but Kelly pulls alongside and points. “Farther down. That brush’ll keep the boats out of sight if a patrol comes down to the main bank.”

I nod and wait for him to lead the way. I almost vomited during our sprint downriver from the first stop. Sweat is pouring off me, but not from the eighty-strokes-per-minute pace Kelly set. Not even from the shock of killing the dog, which was an act of mercy by any measure. What has shaken me to the core is that the glimpse of hell I saw under the trees was less than five miles from the place where I grew up. My meditation on the ironies of Tim’s “heroic quest” as Kelly and I paddled down from Natchez has filled me with shame, and any doubt about our purpose tonight has vanished. Standing among the chains and hooks and infernal machines, I felt as though I’d stumbled into a death camp, one designed for animals rather than humans. The eerie whistling of the dog breathing through its skull will haunt me to my grave.

“Penn? You with me?”

“Right behind you.”

Kelly turns his rudder and knifes silently toward the shore. He pulls parallel to an overgrown bank that looks a little steep for my taste-not to mention snaky-then braces his paddle and climbs out of his cockpit. As I pull in behind him and follow suit, Kelly drags his boat behind some kudzu, then unloads his pack and takes out his night-vision scope.

“Come on,” he says, seizing the grab handle on my bow and dragging the Seda into the weeds.

I insert the earbud Kelly gave me for my Star Trek-which I’ve discovered is on the blink-and follow Kelly up the bank. According to Danny McDavitt, no dogs or guards are on the river side of the towhead, only a couple of men by the building that he believes could be the site of tonight’s dogfight.

When I get up to the sandy hump where Kelly stands, I see that we’re in a line of trees beside a marshy field. Across the field, faint yellow light spills from a windowless metal building that looks like a small warehouse, and beyond this stands a black wall of trees.

“Turn off your Star Trek,” Kelly says.

“Why?”

“You’re going to be with me, and we don’t need any noise-pollution accidents. Also, we want Danny to airlift us off the river later, and your radio is our spare batteries.”

Before I obey his order, he lifts his Star Trek and says, “How we looking on sentries, Pave Low?”

Pave Low is McDavitt’s code name for tonight; it’s the model of helicopter he flew in the air force.

“You got a couple of dogs prowling on the far side of the building,” he answers. “Pay attention.”

“What about the field?”

“Nothing. Some deer bedded down in the tree line about seventy meters to the north of you.”

Standing in near darkness, it’s strange to know that Danny McDavitt is looking down on us with a God’s-eye view that sees every warm-blooded creature around us.

“Hold up,” McDavitt says in my ear. “Do you see that?”

Across the field, a horizontal bar of light appears, growing rapidly into a rectangle.

“That’s an overhead door,” says Kelly. “Shit!”

As the rattling whine of a chain drive reaches us, a black SUV roars out of the building, followed by two more just like it. Their headlights flash on when they leave the spill from the open door.

“We’re too late?” Kelly says in disbelief. “What the…?”

“What do you want me to do?” McDavitt asks. “Cover you or go with the vehicles?”

“Go with the SUVs!”

“Ten-four.”

Kelly winces, then looks longingly across the field. “I’m tempted to go into that building and see what they left behind.” He keys his Star Trek. “Did they take the dogs with them?”

“Negative.”

“Okay, we’re bugging out. We’ll see you a couple miles downriver.”

Through the trees I see three pairs of headlights cutting through the dark, moving north at gravel-road speed. Carl Sims’s voice replaces McDavitt’s.

“I can take out those dogs for you, no problem.”

Kelly considers this. “No. We don’t know that we’ll get anything from the building. If you waste the dogs, they’ll know we know about this place. Find out where the SUVs go-that’s all.”

With a last look across the field, Kelly shakes his head. Far to my right, the headlights turn away, and I see taillights that remind me of those I saw on Cemetery Road the night Tim died.

“All this work,” I mutter, “and it’s come to nothing.”

“Maybe not nothing. We’ll see what Danny turns up.”

“Should we just call the Highway Patrol and have them stopped on some pretext?”

“No, they’re clean now, away from the scene. Honestly, I’ll be surprised if the plates on those SUVs are traceable. But we’ll find out who owns this land and see if we can learn something that way.”

As Kelly turns away from the field, a pale shadow flashes across my sight from right to left. I fall backward as Kelly goes down with a thud. Scrambling to my feet, I see a huge white dog mauling his left arm, trying to reach his throat. I yank out my Star Trek and yell, “Danny! Carl! We need help!”

Kelly’s gun is still in his gear bag, and the bag is behind him. As I crab-walk toward it, my eyes on the attacking dog-a Bully Kutta, I see now-the dog whips its head from side to side, trying to rip off Kelly’s blocking arm. Kelly’s struggling to get his right hand under the dog’s belly. Yanking the gear bag clear of the fight, I struggle with the zipper, but before I get it open, the Bully Kutta arches its back, its four paws galloping in midair as it tries to wrench away from Kelly, who is jerking a knife from the dog’s scrotum to its rib cage. When I see a loop of intestine spill out in silence, I know that this dog too has had its vocal cords removed. As the animal rolls on the ground in its death throes, Kelly cinches his belt around his left biceps as a tourniquet.

“Are you okay?” I ask. “I couldn’t get the bag open!”

“It’s okay. Find me a rock.”

“A rock?”

“A rock! Half an inch thick-flat, if possible.”

Three feet away I find a flat pebble smoothed round by the river. Kelly takes it and wedges it under his tourniquet, against the artery, I guess. Both sides of his forearm show puncture wounds, and the flesh is ripped near his inner elbow.

“This isn’t good,” he says, staring at the wounds. “I don’t even know-”

A sound like running hoofbeats makes us whirl. This time the flying shadow is black, not white. Before I can even backpedal, I hear a bullwhip crack, and the wolf-size dog slides harmlessly to my feet, a quivering pile of muscle and bone. I leap backward, but Kelly just shakes his head and holds up his wired earpiece.

“That dog knocked it out of my ear,” he says.

“What just happened?” I ask, trying to get my breath. “Did you shoot that dog?”

“Hell no.” Kelly pulls his pistol from the gear bag and shows it to me. “Carl shot it from the chopper.”

Kelly inserts his earpiece and says, “Thanks, buddy. You cut that kind of close.”

“You’re lucky I even saw the damn thing,” Carl replies. “I missed with my first shot. That was the second.”

McDavitt’s voice cuts through the chatter. “What’s the situation down there, Delta? You want me to follow the vehicles or do you need a hospital? My partner says it looks like a dog got to one of you.”

“We’re fine,” Kelly lies. “We need to ID those vehicles.”

“I already got a license plate.”

“I want to know where they’re headed.”

“Okay.”

“Are there any more of these monster dogs out there? That old Ranger sure was right. I didn’t hear a damned thing till it hit me.”

“The two dogs by the building are still there. I don’t know where those came from.”

Kelly chuckles darkly. “I think they’re the ‘deer’ you thought you saw bedded down. They’re big, man.”

“Penn? Penn, are you there?”

Kelly looks sharply at me as the new voice breaks into the conversation, but I recognize the tone immediately. It’s my father.

“I’m here,” I tell him. “What’s the matter?”

“Jenny was just run off the road in Bath. Her car flipped.”

I swallow hard as an image of my sister lying dead beside an English motorway flashes through my mind. “Is she alive?”

“Yes. She called me from the hospital, and I spoke to her doctor. She’s in mild shock, but she could easily have been killed.”

“When did it happen?”

“About an hour ago. She’d dropped the kids with a friend and was on her way to the university.”

A wave of heat rushes over my face as guilt suffuses me. “Where are you?”

“On my way to the safe house.” Kelly insisted that we have an empty house within ten miles of the operation to review any evidence we collected without having to go to a place Sands could know about. “Caitlin’s with me,” adds my father.

“Doc?” Kelly cuts in. “I know you’re upset, but go easy on the names, okay?”

“Fuck that,” says my father. “I’ve had it with these sons of bitches.”

“How soon will you reach the house?” Kelly asks, his eyes moving right and left like those of a man thinking fast.

“Twenty minutes. And I want you there. I want everybody there.”

Kelly looks down at the corpse of the white dog. His left hand is balled into a fist, probably against pain, but I sense that he’s weighing the possibility of progress against the immediate crises. His entire posture communicates frustration; he looks as though he’s about to kick the dead dog.

“Pave Low?” he says into the Star Trek.

“Here.”

“Come get us.”

“Ten-four. You want me to set down right where you are?”

“No. We can’t be sure that building’s empty. We’ll find a sandbar downstream. A mile, maybe.”

“I’ll be flying right over the water, coming upstream. Out.”

I key my Star Trek again. “Dad, we’re on the way.”

“I heard. Don’t waste any time.”

As I shove the walkie-talkie into my pocket, the sound of my father angrily carving a Sunday roast makes me turn. But it’s a trick of the mind. Kelly has the Bully Kutta’s head wedged between his knees, and he’s sawing through the lower part of its neck like a man being paid for piecework, not by the hour.

“What are you doing?”

“Rabies,” he grunts without looking up. The spinal column slows him down for a few seconds, but Kelly’s obviously field-dressed a lot of game in his time. “I don’t know if this fucker’s had his shots or not. You gotta get the brainstem and everything for that test.” When the head tears free, Kelly lifts it by its wrinkled face and stuffs it into his gear bag. Then he straps on his pack, heaves the dog’s carcass over his right shoulder, and stands with a groan. “What are you waiting for? Pick up the other one.”

“Where are we going?”

“To throw them in the river.”

With a strange buzzing in my head, I kneel beside the black dog, lever my right arm under it, then wrestle it over my shoulder in an awkward fireman’s carry. The damn thing must weigh a hundred pounds, and it stinks. I’m winded before I cover twenty yards, but Kelly’s already far ahead.

This is one time I should have let him do the job alone.

When I reach the river’s edge, the white carcass is already spinning slowly downstream under the stars, and Kelly is stuffing the dog’s head into the rear cargo hold of his kayak. With the last of my strength, I stagger downstream from the boats and heave my burden into the current. The Bully Kutta disappears with a splash, then bobs to the surface.

“They actually went after my sister,” I say with breathless disbelief. “I haven’t heard my dad sound that upset since Ruby died.”

Kelly squats and rinses his wounded forearm with river water. “I’ll tell you what I think,” he says softly, scrubbing the half-clotted blood from his skin.

“What?”

He looks up, his mild blue eyes like those of a choirboy. “I think Jonathan Sands has become a one-bullet problem.”