The Devil's Punchbowl

CHAPTER 37

Linda Church crouches naked and shivering in the corner of the kennel stall, praying for deliverance to a God she has almost given up on. There’s a dog collar around her neck, and a heavy chain runs from the collar to a steel post anchored in cement. The kennel is a long, low building with a tin roof, hidden entirely beneath a tall shed so that it can’t be seen from the air. The two rows of gated stalls are made of Cyclone fencing, with an office and a storeroom made of plywood at one end. There’s a barred window in her room, but she doesn’t dare try to break out of it. The kennel is surrounded by a high fence, and a half dozen ravenous pit bulls roam free between the outer wall and the fence.

That’s why Quinn feels confident leaving her alone here. Even if she could somehow get the chain off, Linda couldn’t leave the kennel. But the truth is, she hasn’t the strength for any of that.

When someone is hurting you and you beg them to stop-and they don’t stop-something breaks inside you. Linda learned that very young, and she’s lived most of her life trying to escape that feeling, to heal what was broken inside her. Tim was the first man who ever really helped her with that, and Quinn killed him. He’s already admitted that. The first time Quinn raped her in the kennel, he described Tim’s last minutes on earth, the desperate attempt to make them think he had wrecked his car, his flight into the woods near the Devil’s Punchbowl. But Tim hadn’t counted on Sands’s dog. The Bully Kutta had run him down in minutes and savaged him before the men could pull him off.

Linda shuts her eyes and tries not to think about last night, but it’s impossible. On top of her infected leg and torn knee, she’s getting a urinary-tract infection. The pain is almost unbearable when she pees, like a razor blade in her urethra, and she shivers for two or three minutes after she’s finished. She stopped drinking water to keep from having to endure any more pain, but that seemed to make it worse. She can’t understand why a man would want to have sex with a woman in the shape she’s in, but Quinn does. Maybe the pain arouses him; maybe that’s the whole point.

She’s cried until she has no tears left. She believed with all her being that her escape from the boat had been divine providence, that she was really going to get clear as a reward for her bravery on the boat-which had in reality been a willingness to accept death, if necessary. To take that step and then be betrayed by the very servant of God, or one who put himself up as that…this had broken her. She feels valueless. Doomed. Like the altar boy must feel when he realizes that the priest who is using him doesn’t love him, doesn’t care for him at all, but sees him only as a means to an end.

Linda has never truly wished for death, despite enduring very hard times. She’s known girls who committed suicide, but she could never believe that they hadn’t had some better choice, if only they had looked hard enough. But here, in this place, she sees no hope of deliverance. Only more rape, more pain, and a terrible death in the end. Quinn has told her he means to feed her to the dogs when he tires of her, and she knows he will do it. He has hated her for being Sands’s favorite, and thus unavailable to him. Quinn would sometimes come sniffing around the Devil’s Punchbowl, but he couldn’t risk it often because the cameras were always on, and Sands might see him from the security suite or the interrogation room. Still, she always felt Quinn’s eyes creeping over her body whenever he was near. She’d turned to find him staring at her so many times that she’d come to think of his hungry gaze as she did the hairy black caterpillars she’d feared as a child, the ones that injected an anesthetic as they stung you. By the time you looked down and saw one of the revolting things on your leg, you knew it had been there for a long time, injecting its poison. And half an hour later the burning would begin.

Now Quinn is free to do with her what he will. Linda has never seen so much hatred and anger knotted up inside a man, but she knows she will bear the brunt of it until she can bear no more. So she prays hopelessly for she knows not what, while the wind rattles the fences and the dogs prowl the dirt beyond the plywood wall.

“Please, Lord, help me,” she whimpers in the dead air of the kennel. “Please send me an angel. I’m too sick to help myself. I can’t do no more.”