The Devil's Punchbowl

CHAPTER 70

Caitlin and I are walking toward the pier at Drew Elliott’s house on Lake St. John. It’s one thirty in the morning. The moon is high, the air is cold, and the lake looks as deserted as it must have when the Mississippi River cut off this wayward bend long ago.

We’re here because Daniel Kelly called me at City Hall three hours ago and asked me to bring Caitlin out here-alone. I was stunned to learn that Kelly had survived-Chief Logan and the Coast Guard had written him off as drowned-but Kelly would give me no details over the phone. When I asked about Quinn, he told me the Irishman was dead. He would explain the rest in person, he said, at Lake St. John, but Caitlin and I must come alone and be absolutely sure we weren’t followed.

It seemed a strange request given all that had happened on the river, and it was difficult to get away from town, even at this late hour. The insanity of the early evening had devolved into a night of phone calls to the state capital and to Washington, meetings with Shad Johnson and the police, visits to the hospital, and a few stolen moments with my family. Annie is staying at my parents’ house, under the watchful eyes of James Ervin, his brother, and my father, who refuses to believe that all danger has passed. We found the lake house locked when we arrived, with no lights on, no cars parked in the driveway, and no sign of Kelly. Unsure what to do, we decided to walk down to the pier and sit by the lake.

“Look,” says Caitlin, pointing to a wooden swing hanging from an oak limb in the backyard. “Let’s just sit here.”

I sit slowly, taking care not to bang my wounded arm on the swing or chain. Dad prescribed pain pills and antibiotics for my injuries, but my head still throbs from Sands’s blows, and my arm burns where his Bully Kutta ripped the skin.

“What do you think Kelly is up to?” she asks, pulling her fleece jacket close around her. “Why bring us all the way out here?”

“It could be anything. The Justice Department might be trying to arrest him. He might need help getting out of the country. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

“He wouldn’t tell you what happened to Quinn?”

“Are we off the record?”

Caitlin nods, her gaze on the mirrorlike surface of the lake beyond the cypress trees.

“Quinn’s dead.”

She sighs deeply, but asks nothing more.

Caitlin has been strangely quiet tonight, especially during the forty-five minute ride from town. The chaos that followed the explosions on the Magnolia Queen meant one of the biggest news stories in the town’s history, but she has acted as if covering it hardly interests her. I think her greatest fear was that I would not survive the near-disaster, which she’d watched from the bluff near the Examiner offices. When I called her cell phone and told her that the Coast Guard had rescued me from the river, something in her gave way, and a sort of delayed shock set in-probably caused by whatever she’d endured while being held prisoner with Linda Church. As we drove through the dark farmland between Natchez and Ferriday, we simply held hands and dwelled in our own thoughts.

There was a lot I didn’t know when I was dragged aboard the Coast Guard river tender that responded to the distress call from the Magnolia Queen. I didn’t know what had happened to the barge itself, or to the passengers, and it took some time for Logan, the Coast Guard, and the fire chief to determine those things.

Jonathan Sands had rigged all the mooring cables with Primacord-a ropelike explosive with a wide range of uses-in case the meeting I had demanded proved to be a trap. The foundering casino would provide the diversion he needed to escape, should it prove necessary. By sheer luck, one of the wireless detonators failed, leaving a single cable intact. This proved strong enough to keep the casino from careening downriver toward the twin bridges a mile downstream. There were 753 people aboard the Queen when the cables snapped, and no lifeboats are required on such a barge. Had the casino collided with the bridge pilings, many lives could have been lost. But that possibility paled compared with what might have happened.

As Sands had claimed in the hold, two unexploded charges remained in the bowels of the barge when he went through the hatch-not Primacord, but C-4. If he had blasted out the bottom of the Magnolia Queen while she was in the main channel of the river, everyone aboard would almost certainly have perished. Despite having a brave crew, the Coast Guard vessel at Natchez doesn’t have the resources to rescue large numbers of people from a fast-sinking ship.

As for why Sands blew the cables when he did, Chief Logan sussed this out in short order, much to his chagrin. A member of Logan’s handpicked team had called Seamus Quinn’s cell phone just as Quinn and Sands emerged from the elevator after our meeting. This was the call I’d seen Quinn take before the cables blew. Alerted by the traitor, Quinn simply leaned into Sands’s ear and repeated the news he’d just heard: that we’d planted recording devices on the boat, and Logan’s team was about to retrieve them. Sands had known then that, no matter what happened to Edward Po, I intended to make sure the casino manager spent the rest of his life in a Mississippi prison.

Chief Logan blamed himself for the leak. He’d kept our plan to himself until the penultimate moment, but as he waited at the head of the escalator for me to appear, his nerves got the better of him, and he confided their true mission to his men. There were twelve cops on that detail, and eleven proved loyal. The biblical symbolism of the numbers escaped no one. After reporting this betrayal to me by phone, Chief Logan drove to City Hall and handed me his letter of resignation. I tore it up while he watched, then told him to get back to work.

The status of Edward Po remains unknown. Just before Logan arrested William Hull on the riverbank, the lawyer took a call from the NSA, informing him that Po’s jet had turned back for Spain six minutes after Sands blew the cables. Improbable as it seems, Po was apparently bound for Louisiana in the belief that the planned gladiatorial spectacle would take place. Had Logan’s traitor not caused Sands to panic, Hull’s plan to capture the Chinese crime lord might actually have worked.

I’ve wondered privately whether Jiao-who also watched the explosions from the bluff-might have warned her uncle that he hadn’t chosen the best day for a visit to the United States. But I suspect it was one of the young Chinese prostitutes aboard the Queen. Jiao has not fled the city, as I feared she might, and she has reaffirmed her intent to sign a plea agreement and provide a full description of the stunning variety of criminal activities overseen by Jonathan Sands.

Sands himself was plucked unconscious from the river by Carl Sims, who was hanging from a skid on Danny McDavitt’s helicopter. By then the sheriff’s department rescue boat and chopper had arrived, so McDavitt airlifted Sands to St. Catherine’s Hospital. There he was stabilized, then sent north to the University Medical Center in Jackson, where he lies chained to a bed under round-the-clock guard by the Mississippi State Police. The legal wrangling over his case has scarcely begun, but like me, Shad Johnson intends to make sure that Sands spends the rest of his life at Parchman Farm.

The only real mystery of the night was the disappearance of Kelly and Quinn. The sheriff’s department and the Coast Guard combed both sides of the river for hours but turned up nothing. By ten p.m., a consensus was building that the river had taken both men, as it had so many before them. Knowing Kelly as I do, I wasn’t as quick to write him off, but even I was relieved to hear his voice on the phone when he called my office three hours ago.

“Look,” says Caitlin, pointing out toward the lake. “Did you see that?”

“What?”

“A light. There.”

Out over the water, probably at the end of Drew’s pier, a yellow flashlight beam flashes twice in quick succession.

“That’s got to be him,” I say, getting to my feet. “Come on.”

“What if it’s not?” Caitlin asks. “What if it’s Quinn?”

I start to say this is ridiculous, but something stops me. “Quinn’s dead. Kelly told me himself.”

“Still. I don’t like this. Did you bring a gun?”

“In the car. Should I go back and get it?”

The light flashes again, then stays lit, shining upward. In the haze of its beam I see the glint of long blond hair. Then I hear a high, keening whistle that I’ve only ever heard from the lips of Daniel Kelly.

“That’s him! Come on.”

As we trot down to the pier, the light vanishes. Our feet make hollow bangs on the sun-warped boards, but as we reach the end of the dock, the rumble of an engine rolls over the water.

“Down here!” Kelly calls. “In the boat. Get in.”

Peering down from the platform, I see Kelly sitting behind the wheel of Drew Elliot’s newest toy. Drew’s old boat was the Bayrider parked in the metal building where we met Walt and Carl and Danny. This is a thirty-foot Four Winns, with an enclosed cuddy cabin below the forward deck. It’s really too much boat for this lake, but Drew sometimes takes it out on the Mississippi, or even down to the Gulf to fish with his wife and son.

I help Caitlin down the ladder, then follow her into the boat. After giving Kelly a long hug, she sits in the padded passenger seat behind the windshield. I sit behind her. Kelly gives me a little salute, then pushes the throttle forward. The boat glides away from the pier with a softly churning wake behind it.

St. John is much larger than Lake Concordia, where Chris Shepard has his summer house. When we’re fifty yards from the pier, Kelly pushes the throttle again, and the big Volvo engine propels the bow up out of the water. In seconds we’re racing over the glassy surface, headed to the western end of the oxbow lake. Kelly looks pretty good, considering what he’s been through. His blond hair flying in the wind gives him a deceptively youthful cast.

“Where are we going?” Caitlin asks, leaning back to me. “Seriously.”

“I don’t know. With Kelly, you just have to be patient.”

Thirty seconds of silence is all she can manage. “Danny McDavitt’s going to drop out of the sky and pick him up, isn’t he? We’re here to take the boat back.”

“I truly have no idea.” Reaching out with my foot, I touch Kelly’s hip. “What are we doing?” I call over the whipping wind.

“Getting closure,” he replies.

Caitlin looks curiously at me, but Kelly offers nothing further.

He’s steering toward the far end of the lake-the shallow end, as Tim referred to it on the night we first met in the cemetery. The boat is really moving now, hydroplaning with perfect trim, the sensation as close to flight as you can get without lifting completely off the water. We’re making more noise than I’d like, and Kelly is running without navigation lights, but he seems unconcerned. The houses thin out on this end of the lake, and there’s zero chance of a patrol boat this late.

Caitlin turns her captain’s chair sideways and takes my hand in hers. Normally, I’d expect her to be chattering about what happened to the Magnolia Queen, or badgering Kelly about our destination, but she seems withdrawn, even depressed. For the first time it strikes me that she might not be thinking about the recent past, but the future. About leaving Natchez again.

Leaving me.

As I ponder this reality, Kelly pulls back on the throttle, and the bow settles into the water. Except for our collapsing wake, the lake is perfectly still, with thin fog hovering low over the surface. As we glide forward at a fraction of our former speed, thick cypress trunks close around us. The bellow of bullfrogs is startlingly loud, and a chorus of chirping insects joins in. The smell of decay is claustrophobic, like the floor of a swamp, thick with rotting vegetation and dead fish, burping methane. As the trunks come within a few feet of the boat on both sides, the cypress limbs arch into a ceiling above us, blocking out the moon in some places.

“You’re going too fast,” I say. “There are fallen trees under the water here. You don’t want to hole out down on this end.”

“No?” he says, staring into the darkness ahead of him.

“Take my word for it.”

Now and then there’s a wet sound as of something heavy sliding into the water. Caitlin squeezes my hand tighter. I wouldn’t want to be driving this boat with only moonlight to steer by, and I don’t feel particularly safe even with Kelly at the wheel.

“Dude,” I say, “there’s nothing down here but an old fishing camp. What’s the mission?”

He pulls back on the throttle until we’re barely moving, but he’s too late. A second later the boat shudders as though we’ve struck a granite boulder. I feel nausea as it rebounds and floats backward.

“What are we doing?” Caitlin asks, looking up at the overhanging limbs. “Didn’t you tell me water moccasins hang off of those limbs and drop into fishing boats?”

“Sometimes,” I admit. “If it happens, don’t jump out of the boat. We’ll be all right.”

Kelly carefully reverses direction, eases forward, then puts the engine in neutral. The cypresses surround us like ranks of giant soldiers in the night, stretching back to muddy banks thick with undergrowth. Switching on his flashlight, Kelly shines it onto the deck, reflecting enough light upward to see our faces.

“Everybody good?”

“No,” says Caitlin. “Enough with the mystery. Let’s do whatever we came to do.”

“We’re about to. But before we do, I want to show you something.”

Kelly sweeps the yellow beam along the waterline at the base of the cypress trunks. There, among the smooth wooden knees, dozens of red eyes reflect the light back to us with chilling effect.

Caitlin leaps from her seat and seizes my arm. “What the hell is that? Penn? What are they?”

Another thud comes from below, but this time the boat doesn’t shudder.

“Did we hit something else?” Caitlin asks anxiously.

In answer, Kelly sweeps the light along the waterline on both sides of the boat, then aims it into the cypresses again. The red eyes glow in pairs, some only a couple of inches apart, others more widely spaced.

“What are those things?”

“Alligators,” I say. “Locals call this place Alligator Alley.”

As she shakes her head in disbelief, a loud slapping sound reverberates over the lake.

“They’re headslapping,” Kelly says. “Warning us to get out.”

“I want to go back,” Caitlin says anxiously. “This is crazy.”

“This is karma,” Kelly says enigmatically. “We’ve all been through a lot this past week, but nobody more than you. Nobody who lived, anyway.”

She looks back at him in confusion. “And?”

“You remember that talk we had at that other lake house? About Sands being a one-bullet problem?”

Now he has her attention. “Yes.”

“Tom told you it wasn’t up to you, only to him and Penn.”

“I remember.”

“Well, this time you get a vote.”

“A vote?” She glances at me, then looks back at Kelly. “On what?”

He passes the flashlight to me, then steps down and opens the door to the forward cabin.

“What’s he doing?” Caitlin asks.

Kelly disappears into the cabin and pulls the door shut behind him.

“I’m not sure.” Even as I say this, I know it’s a lie. I’ve known Kelly too long to be surprised. Now I know what he means by closure.

I hear muted ripping sounds, some scuffling, and then the cabin door opens and Kelly drags a human form up onto the deck. When I shine the light down onto it, Caitlin gasps.

Seamus Quinn lies on the deck carpet, bound and gagged with duct tape, both eyes blackened and burning with virulent hatred. He’s wearing dark pants, a bloodstained white T-shirt, and one shoe. His other ankle and foot are too grossly swollen to fit inside the other.

Why has he done this? I wonder. Kelly and I have come to this fork in the road before, and I chose the rule of law. Why would he think I’d decide any different now? My decision to assassinate Sands was defensive; killing Quinn would be revenge. Also, stupid. We need Quinn as a witness against Sands. Although, I reflect, if Jiao continues to cooperate with Shad, Quinn’s testimony would be superfluous.

There’s something going on here that I don’t understand. Could Kelly simply be flirting with an idea that he knows I’ll never agree to, but one I might push far enough to teach a murderer a lesson he’ll never forget? No. He wouldn’t waste his time hazing somebody. He’s hard-core, all the way. But whatever he’s up to, one thing is sure: He won’t kill Quinn unless Caitlin and I tell him to do it.

“I thought this guy was dead,” I say.

Kelly shrugs. “As far as anybody knows, he is.”

After a few seconds of dazed comprehension, Caitlin breaks away from me and kicks the Irishman savagely in the ribs. He grunts but doesn’t attempt to defend himself. Caitlin draws back her foot and kicks him again, harder this time. When Quinn shows no sign of terror, she throws the flashlight at his head, then hammers her foot into his arm, his neck, and his head. Quinn rolls away from the blows, but the bulkhead stops him. After that, he absorbs the kicks with resignation, like a man accustomed to beatings. Caitlin, by contrast, is crying and whining as she struggles to make Quinn feel some fraction of the pain he inflicted on Linda Church.

Caitlin stops after half a minute, probably because she’s winded. I too am breathing hard, as though I participated in the assault. But my distress is emotional. Never have I seen Caitlin lose complete control, much less become violent. Even now she seems poised to begin kicking Quinn again. Her chin is quivering, and her eyes are wild. What I thought might be a reflexive discharge of pent-up fury seems to be only the first flicker of an unquenchable anger. What, I wonder, would it take to drive her into such a state?

And that’s when I realize that Kelly’s decision to bring us here has nothing to do with me. He’s done this for Caitlin’s sake. Because he knows something you don’t, says a childlike voice within me. Something awful. My throat tightens as I perceive something huge and dark beyond the surface of things, like a misshapen form behind a curtain I’ve been unwilling to pull back. Did Quinn’s bruises and blackened eyes result from his fight on the Magnolia Queen? Or when Kelly uprooted every detail of his crimes from the toxic soil of his memory? Kelly knows what happened in the dog kennel, says the voice. And whatever it was, he thinks she needs to witness this kind of punishment to exorcise it.

Kelly has laid his hands on Caitlin’s shoulders, as though to hold her back. Without knowing why, I kneel and rip the tape from Quinn’s mouth.

“You going to drown me, Your Honor?” the Irishman asks, working his lower jaw up and down as though to relieve a cramp. “That the plan?”

“That’s up to the lady,” Kelly says softly. “What do you figure your odds are?”

“Drownin’s not so bad,” Quinn says philosophically. “I’ve drowned many a runt for the good of the litter. There’s worse ways to go.”

Kelly smiles appreciatively. “You’re right about that, ace.”

Caitlin looks warily from me to Kelly, then back to me again. “Is he serious?”

“Oh, he’s serious, all right.”

The Caitlin I thought I knew would be yelling for us to take Quinn back to Natchez and hand him over to the police. But the woman before me is not doing that. Instead, she takes the flashlight from me and shines it around the boat in a slow circle, watching the reptilian eyes watch her.

I try to catch Kelly’s eye, but he’s gazing at Caitlin like a knight awaiting a decision from his queen. Christ. When I first saw Quinn lying on the deck, I thought Kelly had chosen a cruel path by exposing Caitlin to such a situation. But now I understand that she’s already far down a road I wouldn’t have expected her to set foot on before tonight. She’s no longer the woman I knew before she was taken prisoner. She is sister to a thousand women I knew and tried to serve as an assistant DA in Houston. She’s a victim: violated, bereft, forever changed. A rush of emotions too powerful to understand swells in my chest, making it difficult to breathe.

Kelly was clever to choose this place. It’s difficult to step outside the law when you’re surrounded by all its tangible expressions. But here, in this prehistoric darkness under the cypress trees, it’s easy to ask why we should bother taking Seamus Quinn back to the world of cops and lawyers and plea bargains. Intellectually, I know the answer to that, of course. But the shape behind the curtain is becoming clearer to me, even as I try to hold the curtain shut.

“What the fuck’s she gawkin’ at?” Quinn asks.

Caitlin swings the beam away from the red eyes and aims it down at Quinn. Then she switches off the flashlight and covers her face with a shaking hand. Five minutes ago I thought of Caitlin’s period of captivity as a transient nightmare she had miraculously managed to escape. Now I know she might never escape it. Thinking this is like cracking the gate to hell.

“Stand him up,” she says. “Let him see.”

Kelly grabs Quinn under the arms and heaves him up onto one of the seats. The Irishman looks out, but all is darkness around the boat. Then Caitlin shines the light toward the cypress knees, and the red eyes gleam like rubies in its beam.

“Bloody hell,” says Quinn, his voice in a higher register. “What’s that?”

The satisfaction I feel at the sound of fear in his voice cannot be denied. “American alligator,” I inform him. “Alligator mississippiensis. I’m sure you’ve seen them on TV.”

As Quinn slowly draws back his head, a throaty bellow blasts out of the dark at unbelievable volume. His bound feet scrape against the deck, but he has nowhere to run.

“You’re a big fan of people fighting animals,” Caitlin says. “You told me all about the Romans and their games, how they made animals rape girls.”

Reaching out my right hand, I touch her shoulder softly. “Caitlin…? What did he do?”

She looks back at me, her eyes wet with tears. “It’s what he didn’t do.”

“What didn’t he do?”

“He didn’t stop. It was…unforgivable.”

Anger like corrosive acid burns the lining of my heart.

“Where’s your Christian mercy, darlin’?” Quinn asks mockingly, but his eyes are those of a cornered animal-desperate and calculating. He looks at Kelly. “It’s always the women. The most bloody-minded creatures ever the Lord made.”

“That’s why you treat them with respect, Seamus.”

Another hard slap rebounds over the water, and Caitlin whips the beam over to the cypress trees. Quinn can’t tear his gaze away from the glowing eyes. When Kelly claps him on the back, the Irishman jumps in terror.

“Ready, tough guy? Here’s your chance to prove what a badass you are. Ultimate Fighting Challenge times fifty.”

“Ah, you’re bluffin’,” Quinn says, turning back from the water and smiling like a man who can appreciate being the butt of a good joke. “Cage is a lawyer. He won’t have any part of this. He can’t.”

“Do you remember what I told you outside Sands’s house?” I ask.

Quinn nods. “Sure. This isn’t Northern Ireland. You were right about that.”

“‘Stay away from my family.’ That’s what I told you. Well, Caitlin is family. And this is Mississippi. You remember what I told you about that?”

“Cage, listen-”

“I said, ‘We know how to play rough too.’ But you didn’t believe me. And now here we are, with you telling me about the law.”

Recognizing the steel in my voice, Kelly eases the throttle forward, and we begin creeping through the narrow chute. Caitlin shines the light over the bow to assist him, and Quinn stares along the beam as though hypnotized by the unblinking eyes that surround us. After a couple of minutes, the chute opens into a wide pool. The old fishing camp stands somewhere in the trees to our left, but I can’t see it. The place is deserted now, and there’s nothing else down this way. The water’s too shallow and dangerous for people to build here. With seemingly infinite patience, Kelly turns the boat and heads back up the chute.

Quinn’s naturally pale skin looks as white as a movie vampire’s in the moonlight. Fear has drained the blood from his face. This man has fed human beings to dogs. He may even have imagined what it might be like to suffer such a death. But he has never contemplated the fate Daniel Kelly has set before him. Kelly has appointed himself the instrument of the karma he believes in, and for him the terror Quinn suffers now is as important as his dying.

“I’ve heard a lot of guys brag about the biting strength of pit bulls,” Kelly says in an offhand tone. “But I’ll tell you something. A gator could bite a chunk out of a car fender.”

“Alligators don’t usually attack people,” I recall aloud. “It’s usually by mistake, or if one feels threatened.”

“This is a unique situation,” Kelly says with relish. “Lots of gators out there tonight. Protective females, territorial males.” He glances back at Quinn. “They don’t need to see you, man. They smell you. Which reminds me…”

Motioning for me to take the wheel, Kelly lifts a seat cushion and opens the lid of an ice chest. A rotten smell instantly permeates the boat.

“That’s awful!” cries Caitlin, holding her nose. “What is it?”

“I’m not sure. Got it out of the Dumpster behind the Mexican restaurant.”

Kelly reaches across me and shifts the engine into neutral, then pulls on a gardening glove and reaches into the ice chest. I pinch my nostrils shut as he tosses something heavy into the trees. The splash silences the frogs, but they soon resume their dissonant chorus.

No one speaks. Something primitive holds us spellbound. Then I hear a single, powerful swish, like a sound effect from a horror movie: a heavy, armored tail moving water. A primitive grunt comes from the dark, then a choked bellow. More swishes follow. Too many to count.

“Feeding time,” says Kelly. He pulls a knife from a sheath on his ankle. Quinn jerks in his seat when Kelly leans down and slices the duct tape binding his ankles. After a few seconds, Quinn stands erect on his good foot and holds out his wrists, but Kelly shakes his head.

“Come on!” says Quinn. “Jaysus, give a man a chance. Give me something to work with.”

I point at Quinn’s feet. “He just did.”

Caitlin turns the flashlight on Quinn. “More of a chance than you gave Linda Church.”

“The water’s only four feet deep here,” I offer. “Kind of tough to run in that, but I know you’ll give it all you’ve got.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” Kelly advises. “I’d swim for it. Real slow. Alligators have some kind of organ that picks up vibrations in the water.”

Quinn’s dark eyes are bulging. “You’re wired, right?” he says in a hyperexcited voice. “You want a confession? Fine. Let’s start with Jessup.”

“Save your breath,” mutters Kelly.

“Wait a second,” I say. “What about Ben Li?”

Quinn shakes his head angrily. “That kid attacked me on the boat! That crazy Linda jumped into the river, and when I turned around to find her, the chink went crazy. He was kicking me and screaming nonsense. I had to shoot him to try to save Linda.”

Caitlin looks incredulous. “You killed Ben Li to save Linda? So that you could rape her later?”

Panic arcs from Quinn’s eyes.

“Do you have any idea what she went through?” Caitlin asks. “She hanged herself because of what you did.”

“There you go!” he cries. “She killed herself. That’s not murder!”

“Enough of this,” says Kelly. “Let’s get it done.”

He turns to Caitlin as though for final permission, but her eyes are locked on Quinn.

“Linda begged you to stop,” she says. “She begged you, but you kept on. She was sick. She was in pain. But you wouldn’t stop.”

“I was only doing what Sands ordered me to do!”

“Liar! He beat you for it.”

“What do you think that was but show?” Quinn barks a hysterical laugh. “He did that in case he had to let you go later. So you could tell everyone what a merciful bastard he is.”

Caitlin turns to me, her eyes luminous in the half dark. “How long would Quinn spend in prison?”

I lower my voice. “I can’t answer that without knowing what happened. Everything that happened.”

She closes her eyes. “Beyond a reasonable doubt,” she says instantly. “That’s the standard for murder, right?”

“Yes.”

“He’s guilty, Penn.”

“I know.”

“Come on then, ya fuckin’ cunt!” Quinn roars, dropping his mask of submission. “Stop asking for absolution. Kill me if you’ve got the guts!”

She turns and takes a step toward him. “You think I won’t?”

“No. You’ll have your hard boy there do it.” Quinn leers at Caitlin like an uncle with a dirty secret. “But why don’t you tell them the real reason? Eh? You don’t want your man to know what really happened in the kennel.”

Caitlin raises the flashlight as though to strike him.

“Go on,” Quinn says, grinning. “Tell him. Nothing to be ashamed of, lass. Tell him what you did for me, yeah?”

When she doesn’t speak, Quinn looks over her shoulder at me. “She sucked me like a ten-dollar whore, Cage. Didn’t think twice about it. They’ll do anything for a little extra food and toilet paper. Swallowed it all too-”

Caitlin throws the flashlight, but Quinn deflects it with his bound forearms.

“That’s it!” he says, laughing. “That’s my little wildcat. Katie likes it rough, gents.” He winks at me. “But then you know that already, don’t you?”

I want to smash my fist into his windpipe, but something keeps me rooted where I stand.

“Or do you?” Quinn looks back at Caitlin and raises an eyebrow. “You play the lady for him, eh? That’s the way of it?” He laughs crudely, then begins describing Caitlin’s naked body-accurately-and how she serviced him in the kennel in exchange for certain privileges.

Kelly watches Caitlin and me with animal alertness, waiting for a signal that we’ve had enough. One word from either of us would send Quinn into the lake. This knowledge feels like a loaded gun in my hand.

Caitlin stands like a sapling against the torrent of sewage coming from Quinn’s mouth, but her hands are quivering at her sides. If she had a gun, she might shoot him. With no more than six feet of deck separating her from Quinn, she could probably hit him. Kelly’s probably thinking the same thing. But no matter how Caitlin feels right now, she would never be able to live with herself if she did that. The three of us stand like judges being taunted by a madman we have the power to silence at any moment, but who lack the last measure of will to do so.

Quinn rants on, like a man driving a car a hundred miles an hour along a cliff edge. “She took it in every hole, mate! She was scared at first, but I went deeper than you ever have. And she loved it. She told me that. She’ll never forget it, and you won’t either. No matter what you do to me tonight, you’ll lie awake thinking how I filled her up-”

Caitlin snaps first, lunging for him with outstretched hands, and only then do I realize what he’s wanted throughout his tirade.

A hostage.

My thought is far ahead of my muscles. Even as I fling out my arms to pull Caitlin back, Quinn’s eyes flash with triumph, and he grabs her left arm with his bound hands, twisting her into him. They’re almost one form when a blast of flame lights them like a flashbulb, and a deafening report echoes across the water.

Caitlin cries out, backpedaling away from Quinn and falling against me. Quinn staggers like a boxer who’s taken a blow to the solar plexus, then looks down at the black hole between his shoulder and his heart. Clawing at the T-shirt, he grunts in disbelief, then looks up openmouthed at Kelly, his eyelids pinned back over bulging eyes. Kelly reaches out with his free hand and pushes Quinn backward, flipping him over the gunwale into the lake.

The splash barely registers in my ringing ears, but I feel Caitlin panting against me. She’s hyperventilating.

“Are you hit?” I ask, lifting her to her feet and pulling off her fleece jacket.

“She’s not hit,” Kelly says, sliding his pistol into a storage slot in the boat’s dash panel.

“Is he dead?” Caitlin asks, leaning on the gunwale and looking out into the dark.

“If he is, he got off easy. A bullet’s a lot better than what’s waiting out there.”

“People had to hear that shot. Oh, my God.”

“It’s all right,” I assure her, even as my heart bangs against my chest wall. “People shoot snakes and armadillos all the time up here.”

“It’s almost deer season,” Kelly says. “Already bow season. Folks will figure it’s poachers trying to get a jump on a big buck. There might be a game warden out this way, but twenty minutes from now, there won’t be anything left to find.”

Caitlin shivers in the wind. As I pick up her jacket and help her into it, Kelly eases the boat thirty yards up the chute. When he puts the engine in neutral again, the rumble of the engine quiets, and a heavy swish of water reaches us. Kelly removes a monocular night-vision scope from his pocket and pans across the water.

“Do you see him?” I ask.

“No.”

Caitlin turns from the gunwale, walks to me, and splays her palm on my chest. “He was lying,” she says, looking into my eyes with steady intensity. “About raping me. He was just trying to hurt you. He thought…we were really going to kill him.”

“Weren’t we?” Kelly asks.

She glances back at him, but Kelly keeps the scope trained on the surface of the water. Caitlin pushes her palm deeper into my chest.

“You believe me, don’t you?”

“Of course.” What else can I say?

“If you ever worry about what he was saying, then Quinn got what he wanted.”

“I know.”

Her anxious eyes remain on mine for several seconds; then she hugs her cheek against my chest. As I stroke her hair, three quick splashes come out of the dark.

Caitlin stiffens. “What’s happening?”

“It’s starting,” says Kelly. “Jesus.”

“He’s dead, isn’t he?”

A shriek of terror pierces the night.

“Guess not.”

“Have they got him?” she asks, squeezing my wrist tight enough to cut off my circulation.

The next scream is defiant, like that of a hiker shouting at a grizzly bear to forestall an attack. Sound can carry for miles over water, and from this distance it’s as though the nightmare is playing out only a few feet from us. Wild splashing echoes over the lake, as though a dozen kids are leaping into it from tree limbs. Then a high wail rolls out of the dark, rising in pitch until a glottal squawk cuts it off, and I know without looking that Quinn’s head was just dragged beneath the surface. The sound of thrashing water makes my skin crawl.

“I can’t listen,” Caitlin says, shuddering against me. “Do something, Kelly. Make it stop.”

Keeping the night-vision scope trained on its target, Kelly reaches back blindly toward the dashboard. I step around Caitlin and give him his pistol from the storage slot. He raises it quickly with his right hand, aiming along a path parallel to the scope held against his eye.

“I need light.”

I scoop the flashlight from the aft deck and point it along the path of his aim, but I see neither man nor beast in its beam, only a churning maelstrom of water like a sand boil behind a saturated levee.

“My God,” breathes Caitlin.

“He’s gone,” Kelly says with finality.

“We should go too.”

Kelly lowers his pistol, but he doesn’t take his eyes from the slowly subsiding frenzy.

“Let’s go,” Caitlin pleads. “I want to forget this.”

I nod, thinking, You never will.