The Devils Punchbowl

“If anybody asks you tonight, he died instantly. Okay?”

She nods slowly. “I can live with that until tomorrow. I hope it’s the truth too.”

I lean closer and look into her dark eyes, holding her gaze. “Has anybody searched the body?”

“Not since I been here. But you know they did before I got here.” Shouts reverberate along the wall from atop the bluff, and I see drunken spectators peering down at Tim and us.

“We ought to charge admission,” Jewel says bitterly. Seeing my quivering chin, she squeezes my arm above the elbow and says, “Tent’s on the way.”

Her small gesture of compassion cracks the armor plating I buckled over my emotions back at the foot of the ladder. Deep within me, a caustic soup of guilt and rage boils upward, searching for an outlet. Jewel squeezes my arm harder.

“Easy now.”

“We grew up together,” I whisper by way of explanation.

Jewel nods in sympathy. “I imagine this boy had a tough time growing up. I used to work with his daddy some. Never liked Dr. Jessup. Cold as an old-time scalpel.”

Jewel has cut right to the heart of Tim’s family. The corpse lying on the ground was alive for forty-five years, but the soul that occupied it until tonight never managed to escape boyhood.

“Stay in touch?” I ask.

Jewel gives me a sad smile of encouragement. “You know I will.”

I turn and walk back to the dim perimeter of the light, where Chief Logan stands talking to a man in the shadows. As I near the pair, I realize that the newcomer is Shadrach Johnson, Natchez’s district attorney, the man I defeated for mayor two years ago. The scars from our campaigns still sting, but our troubled history predates that election by five years.

“Well, look who we’ve got here,” Shad says with mocking reverence. “You’re out mighty late considering all the mayoral duties you'’ve got this weekend.”

Shad was born in Natchez but moved to Chicago while he was still a boy. He attended college there on scholarship and worked as a big-firm lawyer until he was forty, when he returned to Natchez to run for mayor. His Southern accent waxes and wanes with his moods and motives. As usual, he’s dressed to the nines, wearing an expensive suit and tie on a weekend when most people are dressed like fans at a Jimmy Buffett concert.

“Why don'’t we skip the bullshit tonight?” I ask. “Tim Jessup was a friend.”

“My condolences,” Shad says without empathy. “Seems like an odd friendship to me, the mayor of the city and a no-count blackjack dealer.”

I take a deep breath and focus on Logan. “Could I speak to you alone, Chief?”

Logan starts to step away, but Shad catches hold of his arm. “Not so fast, Chief. You need to finish my briefing here, and that might take a while.”

“I just need a minute,” I add with as much civility as I can muster.

“Well, Mr. Mayor,” Shad says with relish, “you’re just going to have to wait. I know you’re not accustomed to waiting, but I

am

the chief law enforcement officer of Adams County.”

I pointedly ignore Shad, keeping my eyes on Logan. “Did you find anything else on Jessup besides his cell phone?”

The chief shakes his head.

“If somebody stole his wallet, it seems like they’d take his phone too.”

“Seems like,” Logan agrees.

“Could I see his phone?”

“You know that’s a police matter,” Shad interjects. “You expecting them to find something special?”

The anger I felt beside Tim’s body is reaching critical mass, and the DA is too convenient a target. I need to get away from him as fast as possible.

“No, but I'm going to inform the widow in a few minutes. I’d like to be able to answer her questions and pass along any personal effects. Knowing the circumstances of his death would help.”

Logan’s alert gaze is on me again, but he says nothing further. He glances at Shad, who gives a slight nod.

“There were twentysome-odd people up on the balcony at Bowie’s,” the chief says. “Plus a couple over there in the gazebo, making out. There were probably some other people on the bluff too, but we haven'’t got them separated from the mob yet. Thank God, the big doors of the bar were closed to enforce their cover charge. “

“What did the wits see?”

“Different things, of course. Or different versions of the same thing. After listening to everybody, the best I can figure is this. A tan or light-colored SUV, probably a Lincoln Navigator, came down

Broadway from the direction of the Callon building. Nobody was paying much attention at that point. Then about a hundred feet past the gazebo, the SUV skidded to a stop. It squealed loud enough to make people turn. The guy on the gazebo saw Jessup running from Broadway toward the fence. He must have jumped out of the SUV. Then a second guy jumped out of the backseat and started to chase him. The second guy stopped in the grass. Jessup was screaming for help by then. The guy on the bandstand called 911, but we couldn'’t get here fast enough to do anything.”

Logan pauses as if expecting me to question his department’s response time, but I motion for him to continue.

“By this time people on the balcony were looking in that direction, but there are a few trees up there, so they couldn'’t see a lot. It looked like the guy chasing Jessup disappeared under the trees. He must have been getting closer because Jessup climbed over the fence and started running along the ledge toward Silver Street. Nobody’s sure whether the second guy ran up to the fence or not. Half the witnesses figured Jessup and the other guy were just drunks horsing around.”

“But the guy in the gazebo called 911.”

“His wife made him do it,” Logan explains. “Anyhow, for whatever reason, Jessup stopped on the ledge. He was twisting around like he was fighting an invisible man—that’s what the guy in the gazebo said—and then he went over the edge. That'’s it. For now anyway.”

I look up to the ledge forty feet above and try to imagine Tim desperate enough to make that leap voluntarily. If the man chasing him had been torturing him, Tim might have leapt from the ledge in the hope that he could clear the drainage ditch and hit the limbs of the trees beyond it. But the odds of death would still be high. The logical thing would have been to run back toward the tavern, or even down the ledge along Silver Street. Cars travel that hill at all hours, and he might have flagged someone down.

“Did anybody see the plates on the vehicle?”

Logan shakes his head. “The SUV got out of here in a hurry. Nobody’s even sure it had Mississippi plates.”

“Damn. What do you make of all that?” I ask, more to observe Logan’s reaction than to learn anything valuable.

“Could be a lot of things. Jessup was a known drug abuser.”

“He’s been clean for a year.”

Shad Johnson, quiet up to now, snorts in derision. “Jessup rear-ended a friend of mine a couple months back, and my friend swears he was fucked-up at the time.”

Tim was high two months ago?

“Did the police do a blood test?”

Shad shakes his head. “Wasn’t that much damage. And Jessup wasn'’t worth suing. He didn't have anything but debts.”

Logan winces. He doesn’'t like being caught between us.

“This could have resulted from any kind of dispute,” the DA speculates. “Argument over a woman. Jessup’s dealer taking the price of dope out of his ass. I expect we’ll know by Monday or Tuesday.”

“Have you done a grid search around the body?” I ask Logan.

“Best we could. We didn't find anything within throwing distance, but there’s a lot of damn kudzu and trees down there. If he threw something full force from the top of the bluff, it’ll take daylight to find it.” Logan stops speaking, but his engineer’s eyes ask me what I think Tim might have been carrying. “If he threw something with some weight, he might have thrown it all the way to the river.”

“Dope doesn’'t weigh that much,” Shad says. “Not throwing size, anyway. You’ll find his stash in the morning, if the rats and coons don'’t eat it first.”

“What are

you

doing at this crime scene?” I ask pointedly. “You usually stay away from the dirty work.”

Shad’s lips broaden into a smile; he enjoys a fight. “I was at a party a few blocks away. I'm only answering you as a courtesy, of course. You’re not the DA, Penn Cage. No, sir. This investigation is in my hands, and I'’ll decide what gets done and when.”

“You’re in charge, all right. Just remember that with power comes responsibility. You’ll be held to the highest standard, make no mistake about that.” I turn to Logan. “Let’s put a rush on that autopsy, Chief.”

“There he goes again,” says Shad, “giving orders like he’s the district attorney.”

Instead of taking the bait, I turn and stride back toward the ladder. As soon as Shad leaves my field of vision, he leaves my mind. My anger remains unquenched, perhaps even unplumbed, but its

urgency recedes as I climb back up to Silver Street and make my way through the chattering crowd toward my car. Several acquaintances call out, but I brusquely wave them off. A cold heaviness is seeping outward from my heart. I’d rather clean and embalm Tim’s mutilated body than tell Julia Stanton that the father of her baby is dead. But some duties cannot be shirked. If Julia asks why Tim died, I wonder if I'’ll have the courage to tell her the truth? That her husband almost certainly perished because I was late to our meeting.

CHAPTER

11

Tim Jessup’s wife and son live in Montebello subdivision, a cluster of small clapboard homes built in the 1940s to house the employees of the International Paper Company. For most of their history, these structures sheltered generations of working white families, but in the past ten years, quite a few have been taken over by African-American families. Despite the age of the houses and the inexpensive materials with which they were built, most are well kept up, with fresh paint and well-tended lawns. What sticks in your mind when you drive through during the day is the abundance of kids, dogs, bicycles, flowers, lawn ornaments, and glitter-painted bass boats parked on the grass beside the driveways. Tim and Julia bought one of the more run-down houses when she got pregnant, then spent eight months fixing it up for the baby. Montebello is a long way down from the tony subdivision where Jessup grew up, but after he turned thirty, Tim stopped caring about things like that. His father never did. After my return to Natchez, I learned it was better not to mention Tim when I ran into Dr. Jessup. Whenever I did, all I saw in the old surgeon’s eyes was shame and bitterness.

I turn off Highway 61 at the Parkway Baptist Church and take the frontage road down into Montebello. A warren of curving, tree-shaded streets divides the neighborhood into asymmetrical sections, and it’s easy to get lost down here if you haven'’t visited in a while.

After one wrong turn, I find Maplewood and swing around a broad curve through the parked cars and pickups that line both sides of the street.

In less than a minute I will shatter the life of Julia Stanton Jessup, and I'm suddenly aware that my outrage over Tim’s death is an order of magnitude smaller than what she will experience after the initial shock wears off. The explosion might even be immediate. Julia is no shrinking violet. She began life in a coddled existence, but fate soon had its way with her family, and she did not pull through without becoming tough. I still remember kissing her once at a senior party, when she was in the ninth grade. We’'ve never spoken of it since, but the image of her as she was then remains with me, a beautiful girl just coming into womanhood, and unlike Tim she retained the glow of her youth through the hard years. I suspect that tonight’s shock may take that from her at last.

The instant Julia’s house comes into sight, I know something’s wrong. The front door stands wide-open, but there’s no car in the driveway and no one in sight. The doorway appears as a rectangle of faint yellow light coming from deep within the house, though

deep

is not exactly accurate in terms of a house that small. I reach under my seat for the pistol Tim told me to bring to the cemetery meeting. The cold metal is my only comfort as I leave the relative safety of my car and walk through the shallow yard toward the house. I should call Logan for police backup, but Tim’s words from last night keep sounding in my head:

You can’t trust anybody. Not even the police.

The neighborhood is relatively quiet. I hear the thrum of a few air-conditioning units, still laboring hard in mid-October. A couple of TV soundtracks drift through the air, coming from the houses that have opened their windows to the damp, cooling night. I press my back to the wall outside Jessup’s door, then crash through in a crouch, the way a Houston police detective taught me. The last thing I thought I’d be doing tonight was clearing a house, but at this juncture, there’s no point in analyzing my instincts.

As I move from room to room, it becomes obvious that the house has been thoroughly searched. Every drawer and cabinet has been opened, the books pulled from the shelves and rifled, and the mattresses slit to pieces. Even the baby’s mattress was yanked from the crib and slit open.

The house has only six rooms, all clustered around a central bathroom. I call out Julia’s name, half-hoping she might be hiding somewhere. But I'’ll be happier if she’s not. I hope she’s miles away from this place, safely hidden or running for her life. For the state of this house tells me one thing: Whatever evidence of crime Tim was looking for today, he found it. And that discovery cost him his life. The only questions remaining are what did he find, and where is it now?

I lean out the back door, but all I see in the backyard is a plastic playhouse bought from Wal-Mart, looking forlorn and abandoned. I'm raising my cell phone to call Chief Logan when it buzzes in my hand. I jump as though shocked by a wall socket, and this makes me realize how tense I was while I searched the house. The number has a Natchez prefix, a cellular one.

“Penn Cage,” I answer, wondering who might be calling me after 1:00 a.m.

The first sound I hear is something between sobbing and choking, and I know before the first coherent word that Julia Jessup already knows that her husband is dead. She is so hysterically anguished that speech is almost physiologically impossible. Yet still she tries.

“Ih—ih—ih—” The vocalization catches repeatedly in her throat, like an engine trying to start in cold weather. And after a couple of gulps and stutters, the full sentence emerges. “Is Tim dead?”

“Julia—”

“Huh—he-he told me not to kuh-kuh-call you. Unless something hah-

hap

pened. But Nancy Barrett called me from Bowie’s. She said…Tim feh-fell. Off the bluff. I don'’t understand. Tell me the truth, Penn. Tell me right this minute!”

More than anything I want to ask where Julia is, but there’s no way I'm going to do that over a cell phone. Whoever killed Tim may be searching for his wife at this moment, believing she’s in possession of whatever evidence Tim found.

“It’s true,” I say as gently as I can, walking quickly back to my car. “I'm sorry, Julia, but Tim died tonight.”

A scream worthy of a Douglas Sirk melodrama greets this news, then the words pour out in a senseless flood. “

OhmiGodohmiGodoh—oh—oh—

I knew it! I

knew

something was going to happen. He

knew it too. Goddamn it!” Another wail. “Oh my God. After everything I’'ve done to get him clean…. No. No, no, no. It’s not—no, I can’t go there. What am I supposed to do, Penn? Tell me that! How am I supposed to raise this baby?”

“Are you with somebody, Julia?”

“

With

somebody? I'm at—”

“Stop! Don’t tell me where you are. Just tell me if you’re with somebody.”

Even before she answers, I realize I need to get Julia off the phone. Anyone with direction-finding equipment or good hacking skills could triangulate her position. She’s sobbing again, so I speak with as much firmness as I can. “Julia, are you

with someone

? Answer me.”

“Yes,” she whispers.

“Listen to me now. If you’re in a building—a house or a hotel or whatever—I want you to lock the doors. Keep your cell phone with you, but switch it off. Then switch it back on again exactly thirty minutes from now.”

“What? Why thirty minutes?”

“Because I'm going to call you back and give you some instructions. I have to make some arrangements first. Don’t forget to switch off your phone. The people who—who hurt Tim—can use that phone to track you down.”

“Oh, God. Oh…I knew it. I told him not to do anything.”

“Julia! Don’t say anything else. Don’t trust anyone Tim didn't mention specifically. And don'’t come home. Don’t even think about it. I'm there now, and the place has been torn to pieces.” I glance at my watch as Julia whimpers incomprehensibly. “I'’ll call you back at one thirty-five. I'm hanging up now.”

It’s hard to do, but I press END and run for my car. My hand is on the doorknob when two police cars roar around the bend of Maplewood and screech to a stop behind me. A blue-white spotlight hits my face and a harsh voice speaks over the car’s PA system.

“Stop right there! Put your hands up and step away from the vehicle!”

I feel no fear at this order, only anger and impatience. And curiosity. I haven'’t had time to call the chief and tell him that Jessup’s house was broken into. It might make sense that Logan would send

someone to make sure I’d informed the widow—or even to search Jessup’s house—but to see a brace of squad cars wheeling around Maplewood as though responding to a home invasion is more than a little surprising. Yet all I can think about as two cops approach is how I'm going to get Julia to safety.

“Who are you and what are you doing here?” barks the first cop.

“I'm Mayor Penn Cage. I came here to inform Julia Jessup that her husband was killed tonight. Chief Logan can confirm that, and you’d better call him right now. I don'’t have all night to stand out here talking.”

The cop on my left looks closer at me, then taps his partner on the upper arm. “It’s okay. He’s the mayor.”

“You sure?” asks the second guy.

“What the fuck, am I

sure

? My dad went to school with the guy, dude.”

On another night I would ask the young cop who his father is, but not this time. “Guys, I’'ve got to go. Somebody took that house apart. You need to lock it down. Don’t let anybody inside.”

“The wife’s not here?” asks the young cop.

I answer him while climbing in to my car. “Still trying to find her. I'’ll update the chief later.”

I jerk the Saab into gear and head back to Highway 61. I can be at my house on Washington Street in less than five minutes, and I need a plan of action by the time I get there. Julia could come apart in less time than that, and a wrong move on her part could be fatal. But my options are almost nonexistent. All the resources I would normally use in this kind of situation have been placed out of bounds by Tim’s warnings. Last night I wasn'’t sure his caution was warranted, but after seeing the condition of his body and the state of his house, I have no intention of risking the lives of his wife and son on assumptions.

I’'ve called on other, private resources in extraordinary situations, but none are ready to hand tonight. The man I trust most to help me in a crisis is in Afghanistan, working for a security contractor based in Houston. His company may have some operators Stateside who could help protect Julia, but none would be any closer than Houston—seven hours away by car.

Most people who felt they couldn'’t trust local law enforcement

would probably call the FBI, but that option presents problems for me. Seven years ago I forced the resignation of the Bureau’s director, when I proved that he’d been involved in the cover-up of a civil rights murder in Natchez in 1968. That won me few admirers in the Bureau (open ones, anyway) and made me a liability to the field agents I’d befriended during my successful career as an assistant district attorney in Houston.

“Damn it!”

I shout, pounding the wheel in frustration.

“What the fuck is going on?”

It’s like screaming inside a bell jar, but at least my outburst gives vent to the rage and frustration that have been building since I saw Tim’s body. Closing my right hand into a fist, I pound the passenger seat until my wrist aches. When the national park at Melrose Plantation flashes by, I realize I'm driving eighty—forty miles an hour over the speed limit.

Settle down,

I tell myself, remembering my father, who becomes calmer the more dire the medical emergency. When everything is at risk, good judgment, not haste, makes the difference between life and death.

Panic is the enemy….

My decision to run every stop sign on Washington Street is perfectly rational. They are four-way stops, and unless someone else is doing the same thing I am at exactly the same place and time, I have enough visual clearance to safely jump the intersections.

I park on the street, exit my car, and move toward the house in continuous motion, my mind in flux. Taking the porch steps at a near run, I notice that the cast-iron lamp hanging above me is out. Mom must have inadvertently switched it off. That isn’t like her, but I don'’t have time to worry about personal inconsistencies tonight. I'm slipping my key into the lock when a man’s voice speaks from the shadows to my right.

“That’ll do, Mr. Cage. Stand easy where you are. No need to disturb the women.”

I fight the urge to whirl toward the sound. I’'ve tried too many cases where people were shot because they saw the face of someone who didn't want to be remembered. Yet from the voice alone, I'm almost certain that the man in the shadows is Seamus Quinn, the security chief on the

Magnolia Queen.

I’'ve never heard an Irish accent like Quinn’s outside the movies, and even then only in Irish-made films.

“What do you want me to do?” I ask.

“I want you to listen. It’s all right to turn. I

want

you to see.”

By now my eyes have adapted to the darkness, so when I turn, I see enough to register how wrong I was: The face staring at me out of the shadows belongs not to Seamus Quinn, but to his boss, Jonathan Sands.

Wait,

I think,

the voice is all wrong.

Gone is the refined English accent of the

Magnolia Queen

’s general manager, replaced by a coarse, working-class Irish accent identical to that possessed by Quinn. Then it hits me: I'm looking at Sands, but it was Quinn who spoke.

The Irishman must be standing behind his boss, down in the flower bed.

I glance past Sands, but all I register is something low and pale in the blackness behind him, like a crouching animal.

Sands moves his hand slightly, which pulls my eyes back to him, and then I see his gun, a small but efficient-looking automatic held at waist level.

“Easy now, darlin’,” he says. “I only brought this wee pipe so I don'’t have to lay hands on you.”

With a start I realize it was Sands who spoke the first time. He’s simply speaking with Seamus Quinn’s voice rather than the cultured English accent he doles out for public consumption. I only know about British accents because my sister, Jenny, lives in England. She went to Britain as a visiting professor of literature at Trinity College, dated a Dubliner for several years, then married an Englishman and settled in Bath. For this reason, what would sound like a British accent to most other Southerners sounds like Belfast to me, and it tells me I know a lot less about Jonathan Sands than I thought I did. Tonight he sounds like a cross between Bono and the lead singer of the Pogues.

“You’re not English,” I murmur, trying to get my mind around it. “You’re

Irish.

”

“As Paddy’s goat, Your Honor,” he says, chuckling softly. “But let’s keep that between us, eh?”

While Sands’s eyes flicker with private mirth, the evil that Tim hinted at fills my soul like a squid’s ink. I know without doubt that everything my dead friend suspected must be true.

“What do you want?”

“Your undivided attention. Do I have that, Mr. Cage?”

“Obviously.”

“Before we talk, I'’ll ask you to hand over that weapon you'’ve got in your pocket. Two fingers only.”

Sands materialized so suddenly on my porch that I actually forgot I was carrying a gun. But his ability to spot my concealed pistol in the dark tells me that trying to use it against him would be the last thing I’d do on earth. As directed, I carefully draw the Smith & Wesson and pass it to him, butt first.

With the sure movements of a man accustomed to handling firearms, he slips the gun into his waistband at the small of his back, then gives me a courteous nod. “Fair play to you, Mr. Mayor. I'm going to pay you the compliment of speaking frankly, because this town is full of

cute hoors,

but you’re not one of them. A friend of yours died tonight, and died hard. He died because he stepped over the line into other men’s business. Timmy Jessup thought he was the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike. When the flood rose and rolled over him, he sucked in his breath and kept his finger where it was. Pity, really, because he was all alone. Everyone else in this

culchie

town is swimming in the flood—sunbathing beside it,

windsurfing

on it. Because it’s a flood of money, Mr. Mayor, not water. And if you try to put your finger in the hole Jessup left…Well. What matters now is that he’s dead, and nothing can bring him back.”

As the initial shock of being surprised on my own doorstep begins to fade, my outrage boils over. “You sorry son of a bitch. Are you telling me you killed—”

Sands silences me with an upraised hand. “Quiet now, mate. You’re in more danger than you know.”

CHAPTER

12

My mouth has gone dry. It’s not the screamers who scare me; it’s the men who don'’t let emotion get in the way of what they want. They’re the ones who’ll kill without hesitation. “I'm listening.”

“Grand. Because this is all the talking I'm going to do. After this, I act, immediately and irrevocably. Understood?”

I nod.

Sands puts his hands behind his back and looks down like an officer contemplating a job in progress. A born soldier was my immediate impression of the man when I met him, for his bearing seems altogether military, though somewhat more fluid than that of the regular officers I’'ve known. Sands has little skin fat; his face looks like a skull overlaid with the optimum amount of muscle, and little else. He’s losing his hair in front, but his baldness gives no impression of weakness; rather, the heavy brow and blue-gray machine gunner’s eyes give one the feeling that hair was simply an inconvenience better dispensed with. He stands right at six feet, but his trim waist and thickly muscled shoulders give one a much more aggressive perception of his height.

“I have a problem, Mr. Cage,” he says. “I'm here because I want you to solve it for me.”

“What’s your problem?”

“Your friend Jessup stole something from his place of employment.”

I blink slowly, a man trying to find an appropriate response.

“You don'’t look surprised enough to suit me, Mr. Mayor. Not nearly.”

“Tim wasn'’t exactly a Boy Scout,” I say as calmly as I can. “What did he steal? Money? Drugs?”

The Irishman gives me a tight smile. “You know better than that.”

“What I know about Tim Jessup is that he was a fuckup. And I don'’t know what any of this has to do with me.”

Sands takes a deep breath and exhales slowly. “I have a decision to make tonight, Mr. Mayor. A decision about you. And you’re not helping yourself. Your family either.”

At the word

family,

something squirms in my belly.

“The question,” Sands enunciates softly, “is can I trust you? For example, you may already know what Jessup stole from my boat. Do you know that, Mr. Cage? Don’t lie. If you lie, I'’ll know it.”

By God, I just about believe you.

“I have no idea.”

The blue eyes don'’t waver; this man has spent a lifetime calculating odds. “Don’t you now?”

I shake my head deliberately.

After what seems a full minute, Sands says, “Would you bet your daughter’s life on that answer?”

An image of Seamus Quinn holding Annie prisoner upstairs fills my mind, and terror compresses my heart. I grab for the door handle, but before I can turn it, something white explodes out of the flower bed, and iron jaws clamp around my wrist, pinning it motionless in the air. I try to jerk away, but the jaws tighten, numbing my fingers as surely as a nerve block.

A white dog more than half my size stands like an apparition between Sands and me, its eyes cold and blue above the wolfish mouth locked around my arm. Hot saliva runs down my tingling fingers, yet I can’t quite accept the evidence of my eyes. No sound preceded this attack, not a growl or a bark or a word of command—only a quick swish of foliage from behind Sands.

“Easy now,” he says either to me or to the dog, maybe to both of us. “Your daughter’s just fine, Mr. Cage. For the moment, at least.

She’s sleeping soundly, with your sainted mother beside her in the scratcher. But if you step through that door before we come to an accommodation, that could change very quickly.”

I try to back away from the door, but the dog’s forelegs are braced like white-painted fence posts, its jaw locked like a steel wrench. After a few moments, Sands makes a clicking sound with his tongue. The dog releases my arm, then walks to his master’s side and sits at attention like an obedient soldier. I stare at the animal as I rub the circulation back into my hand. I’'ve never seen its like before, not even a similar breed; an oversize pit bull might be its closest cousin, but this dog has a wrinkled face that throws me. White from nose to tail, he has cropped ears and a thickly muscled chest to match his master’s. The animal has an unearthly silence about him, as though spectral and not a thing of blood and flesh, but I can still feel the imprints of his teeth in my muscles; I'’ll have blood bruises in the morning.

“You’re not a stupid man,” Sands says, rubbing the dog’s head affectionately. “Don’t start playing at it now. I make it my business to know who I'm dealing with. I know you put a lot of hard men in prison back in Texas. Rapists. Robbers. Murderers. Aryan fanatics. Got some of them executed too. I also know you'’ve taken on men from your own side of the table. That FBI bastard, for example. I only mention this because you need to understand something. Despite your grand experience, you'’ve never come across a man like me.” A smug smile. “I'm sure you'’ve heard that one before, eh? The innocent man on death row. The whore with a heart of gold. But every now and then you come across a bloke who knows what he’s on about.” Sands smiles to himself. “That would be me. And this is how you know.”

He utters a low whistle, and suddenly the dog is upon me again, rearing on his hind legs and pinning me to my front door with his forepaws. His mass and strength are astounding, and the hot breath in my face triggers a primitive, almost subhuman fear. The dog still hasn’'t made a sound, but it’s all I can do not to piss down my leg.

“Starting this minute,” Sands says, looking at this watch, “you have twenty-four hours to find the property your friend stole and return it to me. Use any resource at your disposal, but don'’t mention me or my company to anyone. If you do, I'’ll know it, and a penalty

will be exacted. If you talk to the police or the sheriff’s department, I'’ll know. If you contact the FBI, I'’ll find out faster than you’d believe possible. If you talk to the state gaming commission, you’re fucked. You call the governor, a senator, or your old friend the district attorney of Houston, I'’ll know that too. And if I find out you'’ve done any of these things…I'’ll kill the little girl sleeping upstairs.”

Sands moves up beside his dog and drags the cold barrel of his gun along my stubbled jaw. “And I won'’t use a gun. I'’ll use this.”

A needle point of steel pierces the skin just below my navel, sending a shock of fear through my intestines.

“I'm very good with a knife,” Sands says softly. “And I’d take my time about it. Understand? Now”—he presses the gun into a hollow beside my trachea, and the knifepoint digs a little deeper—“

after

your daughter’s dead, you might bring me into a court and try to punish me. But you'’ve dealt with enough victims’ families to know how useless that is. If you executed me five seconds after I killed her, it wouldn'’t bring her back, would it?”

Out of the numbness that has enveloped me like a fog, I shake my head.

As Sands presses his right ear almost against my lips, the knifepoint vanishes; then I feel it burrowing into the skin between two ribs on my left side. “I didn't hear you, Your Honor.”

“I understand.”

“Course you do,” Sands says almost musically. “But that quick mind of yours is already working, trying to squirm out of the trap. Hide the girl, yeah? You’d have to hide your mum and dad too. And of course your sister in Bath, and her husband, and the two brats. I have a lot of mates in England who owe me that kind of favor. Then there’s yer one who owns the local bookstore, and her langer of a son. And let’s not forget the lady newspaper publisher, fresh back from the big city. A mouthy cunt, I'’ll wager, but the prettiest piece of them all. So, let’s put an end to that nonsense. Either you get me back what your friend stole, or you pay the price. There’s no third choice.”

My hands have begun to shake, but whether from fear or rage I don'’t know. “You still haven'’t told me what he stole.”

“And I don'’t intend to, do I? That'’s your job.”

“How can I find something when I don'’t know what it is?”

The knife pierces skin again. I tense, and Sands’s eyes flash. “Give me your best guess.”

“Documents?” I grunt. “Data?”

“Brilliant. It’s a disc, right? A DVD. Started out as one, anyway. The data could have been copied onto something else by now. USB drive, digital tape, hard drive, even a fucking iPod. What the data is, I won'’t tell you, but you’ll know it when you see it.”

“How?”

“It’s encrypted.”

The knifepoint withdraws a fraction of an inch. “Are you a betting man, Mr. Cage?”

“No.”

“Good. That'’s a sign of intelligence. I don'’t gamble either. Because the house always wins. People can’t seem to remember that. But I'm trusting you will.”

The knife again. I wince and try not to cry out.

“I know this is a lot to take in,” Sands says. “You lost a mate tonight, and that’s never easy. But the truth is, you cut yourself loose from Jessup a long time ago. And rightly so. The man was a header. Christ, he got weepy whenever he talked about how you two were lads together, watching the moon shots on the telly.”

The revelation that this meant so much to Tim almost brings tears to my eyes. I steel myself and keep my eyes on Sands’s face to avoid looking into the dog’s eyes.

“Listen to me now,” he says. “Let the rupies investigate Jessup’s death. Do everything you planned to do before Jessup died. Show the visiting CEO the town, give interviews, fly around in the balloons. But while you’re having your

craic,

you find time to find my property. If I find it first, I'’ll let you know. Remember, I'’ll be watching. And listening.” In a blur, he raises the knife and pricks the soft skin beneath my left eye. “Don’t play games with me, mate. Remember the first rule: The house always wins. And I'm the house.”

Sands bends and slips his pistol into an ankle holster, then takes my gun from the small of his back, removes the clip, ejects the remaining round from the chamber, and hands the pistol to me. As he slides the clip into my front pants pocket, his dog pushes off my chest, retrieves the ejected bullet from the flower bed, and drops the

brass into his master’s hand. Sands rubs the dog between its cropped ears, then drops the loose round into my pants pocket.

“One last thing.” Sands kneels at the edge of the porch, reaches down into the shadows behind him, and brings up a black leather briefcase.

“What’s that?”

“A quarter million dollars.”

“Why is it here?”

“Why, it’s the money you asked for.” Sands gives me a theatrical hug, then says sotto voce, “For the cameras, mate.” Then loudly again: “Like you said, you have the biggest job in town, and that’s why we pay you the big bucks.”

“You’re not serious.”

“Just smile and say thank you,” he whispers. “So your daughter keeps breathing.”

Given no choice, I accept it. “Thank you,” I mutter. What else can I do? Seamus Quinn could be upstairs with a knife, waiting for a signal from Sands.

Jonathan Sands pats my arm and walks down the steps as lightly as Fred Astaire, and again I sense the fluid efficiency of his motions. He waves airily.

“I wish you the pleasure of the evening. And I look forward to hearing from you.”

Only now do I realize that his upper-crust English accent has returned. The working-class Irish has vanished like a vapor trail, like it was never there at all.

As I stare after him, he stops and calls, “Oh, if you’re worried about the grieving widow, rest easy. If I wanted her out of the picture, she’d be room temperature already. The lad too.”

My face must betray something, because he adds, “Sure, I heard every word you said to her tonight. I know she doesn’'t have my property, so ring her up and tell her to get a good night’s sleep. In fact, if you find the disc before morning, I'’ll toss in a few quid for the widows and orphans’ fund.” He smiles at the thought, then gives me a parting shot in his native accent. “Have a grand night altogether, now.”

With that, Jonathan Sands strolls off down Washington Street, the massive dog walking at his heel like a royal escort. When Sands

pauses to study the smooth trunks of the crape myrtles in the pink glow of the streetlamps, the dog stops and sits beside him. As I watch, a long, black car glides soundlessly up to him, gathers up him and his dog, and rolls quickly out of sight, making for the river.

As I stare at the blackness where the taillights faded, I realize that I'm shaking uncontrollably. I can hardly grip my key to get it out of the lock.

I'm no stranger to threats. I’'ve confronted dangerous men in my life, some of them psychopaths. A few vowed to avenge themselves upon me for criminal convictions or for the executions of relatives. I once shot a man dead to prevent him from killing my daughter in retribution. But never have I experienced the paralyzing terror I felt while listening to the clear and passionless voice of Jonathan Sands.

God, what Tim must have suffered before he died.

With shaking hands I take out my cell phone and call Julia Jessup. I'm three minutes late, but she answers, sounding like she’s close to hyperventilating. I don'’t know what Sands’s promise to leave Tim’s widow alone is worth, but I must protect my own family now. After instructing Julia to seek refuge with Tim’s parents, I carry Sands’s briefcase inside, lock the door behind me, and race up the stairs to Annie’s door. In the night light’s glow, I see her tucked into the bow of my mother’s larger form beneath the covers. Relief washes over me, but fear quickly burns through it. As I watch my sleeping daughter, a disturbing certainty rises from the chaos in my mind. Tim was right about “Mr. X.” Jonathan Sands is not like anyone I’'ve ever faced before. I’'ve dealt with the man for nearly a year and not once suspected his true nature. But there’s no time for self-recrimination now. Or for doubt. Sands may have convinced himself that I'’ll be like the others he’s bought off or threatened into cooperating with him, but in twenty-four hours he’ll know different. Before I can act, though, I must get my daughter to safety.

Hurrying down the stairs, I lock Sands’s briefcase—which is indeed full of cash—in the safe in my study, mentally ticking off the obvious obstacles:

The house will be watched. My phones will be tapped—cellular and landlines. The house may be bugged or even covered by video cameras, considering that Sands was waiting for me when I got home. He could be checking my e-mail, text mes sages, and any other form of digital communication. So…what options remain?

For some people, mortal danger brings paralyzing confusion. For me—after the first minute of panic—it brings clarity. So it’s with utter certainty that I pick up my kitchen telephone and dial my father’s home number. The phone rings three times, and then a mildly groggy baritone voice answers, “Dr. Cage.”

Even before I speak, something in me arcs out over the wires, instinctively reaching for the protection of blood kin. “Dad, it’s Penn.”

From three miles away, I feel him come alert in the dark. “What’s the matter? Is Annie all right? Is it Peggy?”

I let some anxiety bleed into my voice. “Annie and Mom are fine, but something’s wrong with me. My heart’s racing. I think I'm having a panic attack.”

“Tachycardia? Is it a stress reaction?”

“No, it just started a couple of minutes ago. I'm a little short of breath, and my pulse is about a hundred and ten. I feel like I may throw up. I guess maybe I'm worried about taking that balloon ride in the morning.”

There’s a brief silence. “We’d better go down to my office and get an EKG on you.”

“No, no, I think it’s just anxiety. I had to fly in a goddamn helicopter today. I think I just need some Valium or something.”

“A helicopter? Hmm. Maybe you’re right. Do you have any Ativan there?”

“No. Do you think you could bring me something? I’d come there, but I don'’t want to drive while this is going on.”

I hear him grunt as he heaves himself out of bed. “I'’ll pull on some clothes and get my bag. I want to listen to your chest.”

I press my palm so hard against my forehead that my arm shakes. “Thanks, Dad. I appreciate it. The front door is unlocked. Just walk in. I'’ll be in my bathroom.”

“Okay.”

I should hang up, but I can’t help adding, “Try to hurry, okay?”

“I'm on my way.”

CHAPTER

13

Linda Church hugs the toilet in the ladies’ room of The Devil’s Punchbowl Bar and Grille, shuddering as she retches into the bowl. She’s supposed to be seating patrons, but she can no longer carry out the basic functions of employment. Two minutes ago she received a text message from Tim, but the message made no sense. She wipes her mouth with toilet tissue, then flips open her phone and reads the letters again, being careful to hide it from the hidden camera above.

Thiefwww kllmmommy. Sqrttoo.

The message came from a number she doesn’'t recognize, not even the area code, but this is the strongest proof that Tim sent it. He’s told her that one of his security tactics is to use the phones of strangers when their attention is elsewhere. He’s even stolen cell phones for this purpose. But this message has taken her to the edge of panic. Kllmmommy? Sqrttoo? It almost sounds like an order to kill Julia and the baby.

“No,” she whispers, as the possibility that this message might have been meant for someone else sinks into her bones. “Not possible. He loves that baby. He loves Julia.”

Linda hears footsteps enter the restroom. She grabs the handle and flushes for cover, and cold spray hits her face.

“Linda?” asks a worried voice. “It’s Ashley. Are you okay? Janice said you really look like shit.”

“I'm okay, Ash. Stomach flu, I think. I'’ll be right out.”

“Yuck. I'’ll tell Janice.”

“Thanks.”

Linda frantically plays back the sequence of events that brought her here. Four hours ago, Tim walked past the door of The Devil’s Punchbowl whistling “Walking on the Moon,” by the Police. The song was a coded signal, arranged last night after Tim met with Penn Cage. If Tim had whistled “Every Breath You Take,” it would have meant, “Get out now. Don’t wait for anything.” “Walking on the Moon” meant Linda should work until the end of her shift, then throw her cell phone in the river, get into her car, and drive three hours to New Orleans, to her aunt’s house. Tim would call her in transit using a pay-as-you-go cell phone he’d bought at Wal-Mart, and she would answer with the same type of phone. Hers was in her car now, under the front seat.

“Walking on the Moon” was supposed to signal that everything was going according to plan, but the moment Linda recognized the tune, her insides had started to roil with apprehension. She’d forced herself to keep doing her job, even though she had to remain on the boat an hour after Tim’s shift ended. She’d almost snapped at midnight and simply run down the exit ramp as he left the boat, but that would have busted them for sure.

“I shouldn’t even

be

here,” she says almost silently, ever conscious of the hidden microphones. The Devil’s Punchbowl usually closes at 11:00 p.m., but Sands has ordered all the food service to run on extended hours during the Balloon Festival.

The door bangs open again, and Ashley calls, “Darnell just came by and asked why you weren’t on duty. She’s on the warpath. You’d better get back out there if you can walk.”

Sue Darnell was the personnel manager, a cast-iron bitch from Dallas. “Almost done. I'm just fixing my face.”

“Down there? I'm looking at your heels, girl.”

“I'm coming, Ash! I got vomit on my blouse.”

“It’s your funeral, honey.”

Don’t even think that,

Linda says silently. With a handful of tissue she wipes clammy sweat from her face and forehead, then gets to her feet and checks her uniform for any signs of vomit. She was lucky.

The ladies’ room opens into Slot Group Seven, a jangling circus of

noise filled with smoke and drunk gamblers. The extraction fans don'’t work for shit up here. Linda smooths her skirt against her thighs and tries to walk with something like grace as she moves through the suckers and back toward the Punchbowl.

She’s thirty feet away when she realizes something is wrong. Ashley and Janice are standing by the cash registers, talking to each other without any regard for three patrons waiting to be seated. Ashley’s mouth forms a perfect

O,

then Janice nods and begins chattering. When Ashley catches sight of Linda, she motions her over with a quick wave.

“What is it?” Linda asks, fighting the urge to bolt for the main-deck gangplank.

“Janice just got a text from her ex-husband. He’s up at Bowie’s. He said some guy fell off the bluff up by Silver Street. He was goofing on the other side of the fence or something, and he fell. He’s

dead.

Some people are saying he jumped.”

Linda blinks, trying to absorb this, but a low ringing has begun in her ears.

“Drunk, probably,” Janice says. “Jimmy’s drunk, anyway. You couldn'’t get me on the other side of that fence even if I was toasted. There’s only about a foot of concrete, and then

nothing.”

“A whole lot of nothing,” Ashley agrees. “I wonder who it was.”

“A tourist, I bet,” says Janice. “Somebody here for the race. Wait.” Janice takes a cell phone from her pocket and checks a message. “Now Jimmy says somebody threw the guy off the bluff. Jesus.”

Linda is looking at Janice, but what she sees is Tim flying through the air, head over heels, spinning through the dark—

“Linda?” says Ashley, her voice tinged with real concern. “Are you going to puke again?”

Janice grabs the trash can from behind the register, but Linda ignores it and walks back toward the ladies’ room. The girls say something behind her, but she doesn’'t catch the meaning. She passes the door of the restroom and walks to the thick glass door that leads to the observation deck. The October wind hits her face-on, and she’s glad for the chill. Looking upriver, she sees the lights of the houses on Clifton Avenue, then Weymouth Hall. Somewhere up there, Tim is supposed to be meeting Penn Cage tonight. She doesn’'t

let her mind go any further than that. Tim is there, she says silently. Right now, he’s handing over whatever he got tonight. With this article of faith set in her heart, she slips her personal cell phone from her pocket and flicks it through the rail, toward the river three decks below. She doesn’'t hear the splash, but she sees a spurt of silver rise in the moonlight as the phone goes under. She knows her body was between her hand and the surveillance camera when she threw the phone, because she’s rehearsed this move a dozen times in her mind, just as Tim instructed.

“Keep moving,” she mouths to herself, walking to the companionway used by the service staff to get to the main deck. “Don’t stop long enough to let fear paralyze you.”

She’s quoting Tim now, like a heroine echoing her mentor in her mind. She slips through the gift shop, then past the foot of the escalators. This is the hardest part of her journey. Every atom of instinct is screaming for her to march down the big aisle between the slots, through the main entrance, and right across the broad exit ramp—but she can’t.

She doesn’'t have her car keys.

For one wild moment she considers leaving anyway, breaking into a sprint and racing out to freedom. But if she did that, she’d be cutting herself off from Tim. The TracFone from Wal-Mart is under her car seat, and that’s her only sure link to him now. To reach it, she has to have her keys.

Why didn't you tell me to keep my ignition key in my pocket?

she asks Tim silently.

Why didn't I think of it?

For the first time a blade of raw terror slices through her, cold and true. If Tim didn't think of this contingency, what else did he forget?

Linda grits her teeth and forces herself to breeze past the center aisle without looking at the exit.

Point of no return,

she thinks, spying the service door that leads belowdecks to the restricted area of the boat. Operations, Security, the physical plant of the barge.

She has to show her badge to the security officer at the top of the stairs. He gives it a bored look, then lets her walk down the steps. She can feel his eyes on her backside as she reaches the lower deck.

The smell changes in the lower holds. It’s like entering the service elevator in a hotel by mistake. The illusion of cleanliness and luxury falls away, leaving the sticky floor of reality. The air down here reeks

of bad cafeteria food and other things she can’t quite recognize. Employee resentment…paranoia. Linda quails at the idea of going near the security control area, but she has no choice. The lockers and changing room are aft of the security suite.

Because everyone is still on shift, she’s alone on the lower deck. If the security guys poke their heads out, she’ll tell them she’s puking nonstop and has to get to the emergency room.

A long corridor runs past the door of the security suite, then the off-limits room they call the Devil’s Punchbowl. She makes the length of the passageway on a single held-in breath. Halfway home now. Through the hatch that leads to the changing rooms, past the clock where she punches in, around the corner…and

there.

The employee lockers.

Linda licks her lips, takes a breath, then dials the combination on her locker. The lock clicks. In her mind she sees the yellow Dooney & Bourke purse she bought at Dillard’s in New Orleans, a birthday splurge. And inside the purse, her car keys.

She opens the door and reaches into the locker, but her purse is gone. Withdrawing her hand, she leans back so that more light can get into the space. It’s a mistake, she thinks, feeling the way she does when she somehow loses the milk carton in the refrigerator.

Lying where she left her purse is the black TracFone Tim bought her at Wal-Mart—the phone she last saw before shoving it under the front seat of her Corolla.

“You fucking slag,” growls a male voice filled with rage.

Seamus Quinn.

“Do you have any idea what you’re in for?”

Linda closes her eyes and grips the cold metal edge of the locker door. Without it, she would have fainted to the deck.

Quinn starts to speak again, but the air in the room changes suddenly, and his words become a mute exhalation. Linda hears rapid, shallow breathing that sets her nerves thrumming.

“Close the locker, Linda,” says Jonathan Sands. “We’re a bit pressed for time.”

Tim is dead,

says a voice inside her, the voice that has known it all along. Hot tears slide down her cheeks as she closes the locker door.

“That'’s it, darlin’,” says Sands. “Now turn around.”

Linda wipes her face on her sleeve and turns slowly. Quinn is

leaning against the wall behind her, his shoulder wedged against a flyer that reads NEED HELP MANAGING YOUR 401(K)? Sands stands in the corridor that leads past the security suite, arms folded across his chest, dressed as perfectly as if he were attending a wedding or a funeral in fifteen minutes. His hyperobservant eyes glide over her face and clothing, missing nothing. Beside him sits the huge white dog that sometimes accompanies him on the boat. Sands told her the dog was bred in Pakistan, for fighting and for war. She has never heard the dog make a sound.

Poor Tim,

she thinks in a rush of despair that almost drops her to the floor.

“Can’t trust a fucking cunt,” Quinn mutters. “All the same.”

Linda’s heart flutters like a panicked bird trying to beat its way up through her throat.

Move,

she tells herself.

Run—

“Don’t be a fool,” Sands says. “There’s nowhere to go.”

The wild urge to flight twists inside her.

“Come to me,” Sands says, beckoning her toward the hallway. “We need to ask you some questions about Timothy.”

The last ember of hope dies in her soul.

They know.

CHAPTER

14

The second my father walks into my bathroom with his black bag, I put my finger to my lips and shove a piece of paper into his hands. On it are printed the words:

I'm not sick. Annie is in danger. We all are. House may be bugged. Act like I'm having a panic attack. Follow my lead. We’re going to type messages on the computer on the counter. I'’ll turn on the bath taps to cover the noise of the keyboard.

Dad looks up after reading for only two seconds, but I shake my head and point at the paper, and he goes back to reading. My father is seventy-three years old, and he’s practiced medicine in Natchez for more than forty of those years. He’s the same height I am—an inch over six feet—but the arthritis that’s slowly curling his hands into claws has bowed his spine so that I am taller now. His hair and beard have gone white, his skin is cracked and spotted from psoriasis, and he has to take insulin shots every day, yet the primary impression he radiates is one of strength. Thirty years past triple-bypass surgery, he’s sicker than most of his patients, but they think of him as I do: an oak tree twisted by age and battered by storms, but still indomitable at the core. He licks his lips, looks up slowly from the paper, and says, “Is your heart still racing?”

“I think it’s worse. And the nausea’s worse. I vomited twice after I called you.”

“Wonderful.” Dad glances toward the bathroom counter. Between the two sinks are the articles I assembled while I waited for him: my keys; a black Nike warm-up suit and running shoes; Annie’s MacBook computer, booted up with Microsoft Word on the screen; a Springfield XD nine-millimeter pistol, and a short-barreled .357 Magnum. “I brought you some Ativan,” he says, “but I want to listen to your chest first.”

“Do you mind if I get in the bathtub? I want to clean myself up.”

“That'’s fine. Just get your shirt off.”

I nod and turn on the cold-water tap, then strip off my clothes and pull on the warm-up suit. Dad moves in front of the computer as I pull on the top and pecks out the words

What the hell is going on?

He steps aside for me to type my response, and we begin a sort of waltz in place, during which I explain our dilemma. He always typed much slower than I, but it’s worse now because of his hands; it hurts to watch him struggle to strike the keys.

Tim Jessup was murdered tonight. It has to do with his work at one of the casinos. The man behind his death just threatened to kill Annie. The motive is too complex to explain like this. They threatened Mom’s life, and yours too. Even Jenny, and she’s on the other side of the Atlantic.

Who are these people?

People I misread very badly.

They really killed Jack Jessup’s boy?

I left his body under the bluff an hour ago. I think they tortured him.

Christ. Do the police know?

Yes, but I'm not sure I can trust them. One word in the wrong ear, and these people take or kill Annie. They have a lot to lose.

What about FBI?

First priority is getting Annie and Mom to safety. We’'ve learned that the hard way, haven'’t we?

Dad nods slowly, and I know his memories mirror my own: I see the house that he and my mother lived in for thirty years going up in flames, and the maid who raised me and my sister in agony on a table in the emergency room.

“Take a deep breath,” Dad says in his medical voice, as though

he’s listening to my heart with his stethoscope. “Again…okay…again.”

There’s only one real option,

I type.

I'm going to call Daniel Kelly’s firm in Houston. Blackhawk. With any luck they’ll be able to send a team our way almost immediately. They’ll take Mom and Annie somewhere safe—to an actual safe house, just like the movies.

Dad’s face goes through subtle changes of expression as he absorbs all this, but in a short while he nods and types again.

All right. What about Kelly himself?

He’s in Afghanistan.

Where do the girls go? Houston?

I'm not sure. But wherever it is, you should go with them.

His contemptuous expression tells me his answer to this, but he types:

Kelly’s people will take better care of them than I could, and I have three patients dying right now. One in hospice and two in the hospital. I'm not going anywhere. You haven'’t called Kelly’s people yet?

I have to leave the house for that. Was waiting for you.

Where are you going?

Not far. I should be back within 15 minutes, but don'’t panic unless I'm gone an hour.

He digests this, then types:

What if somebody tries to break in while you’re gone? Is that what the guns are for?

I pick up the big revolver and slip it into his arthritic hands.

Can you still fire a pistol?

He eyes his crooked fingers doubtfully.

If they bust in here, I guess we’ll see. It can’t be any harder than giving a goddamn prostate exam. You don'’t have a shotgun, do you?

Sorry. Wish I did.

He shrugs philosophically.

If someone does come, shoot before you talk. I'’ll come running, and I should get here fast enough to be of help.

Dad sucks his teeth for a few seconds, and I know he’s thinking of options. With a grunt he bends and types:

There are a couple of guys I could call to help out. Old patients. Ex-cops.

Not this time. The bad guys might believe I panicked and called

you for some Ativan, but if anybody else shows up, we’re asking for trouble. We have to do this the old-fashioned way.

Dad shakes his head and types:

Like Matt Dillon and Festus spending the night at the Dodge City jail, by God.

That'’s about the size of it. I figure you’re more Doc Adams than Festus.

I'm older than Milburn Stone ever got on that show, I'm afraid.

I smile, then type:

I still trust you with Annie’s life.

Something hard and implacable comes into my father’s eyes as he reads the words, and I know that the first person who tries to break into my house will take a lethal bullet from a man who knows exactly where to aim.

I'm going now,

I type.

Hope for 10 minutes, but give me an hour.

“You’re heartbeat’s slowing a little,” Dad says. “How do you feel?”

“Better. I think I just want to sit here in the tub awhile.”

He nods understanding. “I'’ll just go watch some TV in the den. If the nausea doesn’'t ease up, give a yell, and I'’ll give you a shot of Vistaril.”

“Thanks, Dad. Jesus, this really scared me.”

“Don’t thank me. You’re not out of the woods yet.”

I start to walk past him, but he grips my arm with startling force, pulls me back to the MacBook, and types:

What if you don'’t come back?

He’s right to ask. If I leave this house, no matter how stealthy I try to be, I might be signing my death warrant.

If I don'’t come back, I'm dead or taken. Call 911 and start screaming there’s a home invasion in progress. Then call every cop you ever treated and put a ring of steel around this house.

I start to leave, but then I add,

And raise Annie like you know I would. Like you raised me.

He stares at the screen for a long time, and I see his jaw muscles flexing. Then he shakes his head and types:

Go fetch the cavalry, Matthew. I'’ll hold the fort.

I use the rear basement window to leave my house. The lower halves of those windows sit in a narrow concrete moat that sur

rounds the house, and I am thankful for it tonight. I see no one as I sneak out of my backyard, but as I prepare to slip across Washington Street two blocks from my house, a cigarette flares at the corner of my block, illuminating the pale moon of a beardless face. Knowing the watcher will be night-blind for a few moments, I dart across the road and into the foliage of a neighbor’s yard.

My destination is Caitlin’s guesthouse, a renovated servants’ quarters that can be opened with the same key that opens her front door. I move carefully between my neighbors’ homes, using my knowledge of pets and gardens to steer clear of problems. When I reach Caitlin’s backyard, I experience a moment of panic, thinking she returned while I was making my way here, but what I thought was her car is simply three garbage cans lined up for collection.

A rush of mildewed air hits me when I open the guesthouse door. Leaving the lights off, I move carefully across the dark den, toward the glowing red light in the kitchenette. With all hope suspended, I lift the cordless phone and press the ON button. A steady dial tone comes to me like a lifeline thrown into a black ocean.

Taking my cell phone from my pocket, I check its memory for the number of Kelly’s employer in Houston, then enter it into the cordless landline. The phone rings twice, then a cool female voice answers, “Blackhawk Risk Management.” She’s wide-awake at two thirty in the morning, and this gives me some confidence.

“This is Penn Cage calling. I was given this number by Daniel Kelly. He’s a personal friend.”

“Yes, thank you. Did Mr. Kelly give you a code word?”

I close my eyes in silent thanks to Kelly. “It’s been some time, but he once told me to say

Spartacus

if I had an emergency and couldn'’t reach him.”

“Thank you, transferring you now. Please remain on the line.”

There’s no hold music, only a hiss cut short by a squawk. A male voice says, “Call me Bill, Mr. Cage. Dan Kelly is on assignment at this time. What is the nature of your emergency?”

“It’s life or death. I wouldn'’t call otherwise.”

Bill seems unfazed by this; he continues speaking with the practiced calm of a fighter pilot. “Are you in danger now?”

“Yes, but I can talk.”

“How can we help?”

“I'm in Natchez, Mississippi. Five fifty Washington Street, a residence. My family has been threatened by men who committed murder tonight. I'm not sure I can trust the police. I need someone to take my mother and daughter to a safe location. Can you do that?”

The pause is brief. “We can do that. We have some operators arriving for Stateside rotation, and we can send a team. What’s the time frame?”

“How soon can they be here?”

“Seven hours by road. Our company planes are committed at this time. If danger is imminent, I can charter a jet, but cost may become a factor to you at that point.”

I think quickly. If Jonathan Sands has somehow overheard this call, he can retaliate even before a jet gets here. Annie’s safety lies in my getting back to my house unseen and playing out my bluff. “Cost is no object, but seven hours will work fine.”

“You’ll have a team at your front door in seven hours or less. Have the packages ready.”

“I will.”

“Should we expect opposition?”

“I think the opposition will be too surprised to act quickly. But your men should be ready just in case.”

“Understood. Mr. Cage, while we were talking, I messaged Dan Kelly via secure digital link. His reply says that if you can remain at your present number, he will call you within thirty minutes.”

I stand and pace the floor of the guesthouse in the dark. “I can do that. But under no circumstances should Kelly try to call my cell phone or home phones. Those are compromised. It’s this line or nothing.”

“Understood. We’ll see you in seven hours. Six, if we can manage it. Stay well.”

I feel a rush of relief so powerful that my face goes hot. “Thank you.”

Waiting in the dark with my hand on the phone, I sense the fragility of those who matter most to me, as though they'’re barely clinging to the planet as it spins through its orbit: my mother and daughter sleeping across the street with only my aging father to pro

tect them; my sister in England, going through her day without even a hint that she could be in danger; Julia Jessup hiding in or near the city, or running for her life with a fatherless child to protect. Swirling around them are people whose paths I can neither control nor predict: the men watching my house, who may realize I'm gone and call their master; Caitlin, who might return at any moment and discover me; Sands himself, who might decide he can’t trust me after all and consign me and mine to Tim Jessup’s fate.

The half hour I must wait for Kelly’s call is measured in clenching heartbeats, rapid-fire eyeblinks, startle reflexes, sudden bowel constrictions, and drops of sweat. When I don'’t see the ghostly white dog peering at me through the guesthouse window, I see images of my friend’s brutalized body, or his wife and young son hiding in terror and grief. Strangest of all is my memory of last night’s dream of Tim on the ice sheet, and the white wolf watching me. How did I dream of an animal I’d never seen before? Or

have

I seen that white dog around town somewhere, perhaps even with Sands, and stored the memory in some reptilian neurons, where they waited to be triggered by Tim’s twisted tale?

When the phone rings, I jerk it to my ear so fast the chirp fades almost before it’s begun.

“Hello? Hello!”

There’s only silence at first. Then Kelly’s voice comes into the receiver as though it’s being transmitted from a distant spacecraft. “What’s happening, man? Somebody threatened Annie?”

“Jesus, Kelly, it’s great to hear your voice. We’re in trouble here. They threatened Annie, my parents, my sister, everybody. They already killed a friend of mine tonight. A guy I went to school with.”

“Slow down. Are you safe where you are?”

“Yeah, but I don'’t have much time. Are you still in Afghanistan?”

“Yeah. The mountains. Look, talk to me. Who’s your problem?”

“The main guy is Irish. He runs one of the casinos here. He pretends to be English, but that’s just a front. He goes by the name of Jonathan Sands. I have no idea who he really is. Paramilitary type, but hiding it in a suit.”

“I don'’t like the sound of that,” Kelly says reflectively. “Ex-IRA, maybe?”

“He definitely knows how to handle weapons.”

“What the hell have you got into?”

“I'm not sure. But I didn't take it seriously enough at first, and a friend died because of it. According to him, I can’t use conventional law enforcement. Sands has got a lot of people on his payroll.”

There’s a long silence. Then Kelly says, “It could take forty-eight hours.”

“What could?”

“Me getting there. The company will get Annie and your mother sorted out, but it could take me two days to get back to the States.”

“Dan…are you sure?”

“Hey, it’s only money.”

“You know I'’ll—”

“Shut the fuck up, okay? Before you embarrass both of us. And try to keep breathing for the next forty-eight hours.”

“I'’ll do my best. Look, you can’t call me, okay?”

“Understood. The Blackhawk team is going to bring you a secure telephone. A satellite phone. You’ll have to decide when it’s safe to use it. Update the company when you can. Just keep using

Spartacus

as your code. They’re also going to bring a gear bag. That'’s for me. I'’ll have them stash it somewhere in town, and you can pick it up if you’re not being tailed.”

“Okay. Daniel—”

“Hold up. If you get in a really tight spot after the team leaves and before I get there, there’s couple of guys in your area I trust. They’re from Athens Point, down the river.”

“Who are they?”

“One’s a young guy, ex-marine. Carl Sims. Met him at the range there. He’s a black guy, a sniper. I don'’t care what you’re mixed up in, use my name, you can trust him.”

“Okay. Who else?”

“There’s a guy used to fly for the sheriff down there at Athens Point. Ex–air force. Name’s McDavitt. He’s the real deal. If you need to get somewhere fast, or get away fast, he’s your man.”

A jolt of synchronicity makes my scalp tingle. “I met McDavitt

today.

No shit. Some corporate big shot hired him to fly us around the city.”

Kelly laughs softly. “You see? Things don'’t look as bad as you thought. Now, you get back to Annie. We’ll take care of things on our end. See you in a couple of days. I'm out.”

I wait until I hear the click, then slowly hang up.

The circuitous trek back to my house doesn’'t seem to take nearly as long this time; I feel Daniel Kelly sitting on my shoulder like one of Odin’s crows. The watcher on the corner is still in place, but I move across Washington as though cloaked in darkness. Just as I slip through the hedges into my backyard, I see a man walking across the parking lot of the bank behind my house. I silently double my pace, drop into the moat beside the basement window, and slide into the relative safety of my home.

My father is standing watch at the top of the stairs. He looks old in the shaft of light falling from my bedroom door, like a monk meditating over a gun he found by chance.

“Don’t shoot,” I hiss from the bottom of the staircase.

“Son of a bitch,” Dad whispers with relief. “I was about a minute from calling 911.”

“I'm feeling a little better now,” I say loudly, hurrying up the stairs.

“I think that was worse than Korea,” Dad whispers, standing slowly and rubbing his lower back. “Except for the frostbite. I took two nitro pills while you were gone. Let’s get to that damned computer so we can talk.”

He follows me into my bathroom, and I bend quickly over Annie’s MacBook.

Kelly called me himself from Afghanistan. I had to wait a half hour, but it was worth it. Blackhawk dispatched a team as soon as I told them we were in danger. They’ll probably come in an armored SUV. I imagine they’ve already left Houston. They’ll be here in less than seven hours.

Dad nods thankfully, then pecks out two words:

And Kelly?

Kelly’s coming himself. 48 hours minimum before he gets here though.

Good. So. What do we do now?

Wait for the cavalry. We should probably stop using the computer. There are lasers that can read keystrokes by the vibrations of window glass. This is sci-fi stuff we’re up against.

As Dad shakes his head slowly, I type:

We’d better stay upstairs. We can pull shifts. One of us by Annie’s bedroom door while the other catches a catnap in my bed.

You think I can sleep a wink after what you told me tonight? Drag a couch out here and we’ll play cards until dawn.

Cards? You don'’t play cards!

A smile that’s almost a grimace makes my father’s eyes squint.

Haven’t since Korea. Bores the hell out of me.

But tonight?

The enemy’s out there. Tonight we play cards.

CHAPTER

15

Linda doesn’'t know whether she’s paralyzed by fear or whether she’s entered a place beyond fear. Her mind has given way to grief or shock, or some mixture of both. They have taken her deep within the bowels of the barge that supports the faux riverboat above her head, to the long hold with black foam on its walls, like the foam in a recording studio. It’s dim, but it doesn’'t stink of mildew as some areas of the lower deck do. This hold smells like a new car. It’s here that Sands brings Linda and his other mistresses when he wants sex during business hours. A sofa bed in the corner faces two large LCD screens that display an ever-changing feed from the security cameras upstairs. On those screens Sands can monitor all areas of the casino, even during sex. This room has other uses too. Here they bring the troublemakers and scam artists who aren'’t lucky enough to be handed over to the police. For these occasions, a single chair stands in the center of the hold, and beside it a shiny cart like a printer trolley. But the square device on the cart is not a printer. It’s smaller, with thin wires coming off it, like the EKG machine at a doctor’s office. It’s that machine that makes the staff refer to this hold as the real “Devil’s Punchbowl.”

As Quinn leads her by her elbow to the chair, Sands following behind—she can feel his presence—Linda sees something against the far wall of the room. It’s a person, a small man with dark skin and

short black hair. She cannot see his face. He’s lying on his side, facing away from her. He’s wearing a T-shirt that says THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS across the shoulders, but his legs are bare. His naked thighs and buttocks look strangely vulnerable, like a boy’s behind, and something dark is smeared across one calf.

“Sit,” Quinn says.

As Linda turns to obey, she sees that the chair is bolted to the floor. This registers like something on a movie screen, not reality; she cannot suspend her disbelief. Before that occurs, before reality breaks through, Quinn has folded thick leather straps over her wrists and ankles and fastened them tight. Quinn’s usual curses and grunts are strangely absent. He’s acting like a pious man in church; he has entered what he feels to be a sacred place. She feels a thick, padded strap tighten around her abdomen, hears the soft rip as Quinn hitches, then rehitches the Velcro that holds it fast.

“Don’t do this,” she whispers.

“Don’t make us,” Sands answers, then steps into her field of vision.

The look in his eyes is terrible to behold. Yet he speaks softly, like a man talking to a child. Behind him the white dog stands alert, awaiting a command. He looks something like a giant pit bull, but his face is wrinkled, and his eyes project a sentience that makes her shiver.

“I need to know some things, girl. And I don'’t have a lot of time.”

She nods quickly, submissively. “Can I ask a question first?”

“One.”

“Is Tim dead?”

Sands inclines his head slowly.

She doesn’'t want to let them see how this hits her, but she shuts her eyes before she’s even aware of it, shuts them the way a little girl does hearing her father has been killed in a car wreck, as hers was when she was nine.

“How did he die?”

“That'’s two questions. We’'ve no time for tears, Linda. Timothy tried to bite the hand that fed him. He stole something from me, and we have to get it back. Answer up the first time. Don’t make me ask twice.”

“I don'’t think I know anything. But I'’ll tell you what I do.”

“Fucking right you will,” Quinn mutters from behind her.

Sands raises a hand to silence him. She has never seen Sands this way. He is more focused now than he is during sex. The pupils of his eyes gleam like scorched motor oil. When he looks at her, she feels her will sapped away, like a bird being hypnotized by a snake.

“What did Timothy tell you he was going to do tonight?”

“He told me he was going to stop you. That'’s all I know. I don'’t know what he was after, exactly. I tried to talk him out of it. I knew he’d never get away with it.”

“Fucking right,” grunts Quinn again.

“What did he want to stop me from doing?”

“The dogs,” she says, trying to think. “He had a thing about dogs. He went to a dogfight on the river. Remember? You must have said he could go. It upset him. Something happened to him there. The dogs…and the girls. He couldn'’t deal with it.”

“The girls?” says Sands.

Quinn laughs. “He was bending you over the aft-deck head while his wife nursed a kid at home. What did he care about some runaway whores?”

Linda shrugs. “He did. He was like that. I don'’t know.”

“There’s more,” Sands says. “A lot more. Give us the rest.”

“There isn’t any more. He wasn'’t complicated.”

“He had a plan. You had the TracFone hidden in your car.”

“That was just so that he could find me afterward.”

“You were running away together?”

“Not like that. We had to leave for a while, he said, until it was safe. He wasn'’t leaving his wife and son, though.”

“How long was it going to be before it was safe?”

She shrugs. “I don'’t know. A few days. A week. He never really said. I don'’t think he knew.”

Sands’s eyes bore into hers like the light the ophthalmologist shines into your eye to see the very back of it, where the blood vessels and the nerve go in. Sands knows she’s concealing something. If Tim could see her now, he would want her to save herself, to spare herself pain. But he wouldn'’t want her to sell out Penn Cage. Penn has a child, and that child needs him.

“Where’s your cell phone?” Sands asks. “Your personal phone.”

“I lost it.” She knows this is stupid even before she finishes speaking.

Quinn makes a mocking sound, but Sands only sighs. “I’'ve known you for seven months and I’'ve never once seen you without your phone. I’'ve read your text messages to Timothy. Everything from ‘I love you, my darling’ to ‘I want you to come in my mouth tonight.’ If he’d known the things you did for me…the boy would’ve gone mad.”

Hot tears streak her face. Sands is right: Tim never got pleasure from degrading her; but Sands lived for it. Worse, he knew that some sick part of her derived pleasure from it as well. Once you’d been wired that way, there was no way to short-circuit those urges and reactions. A harsh voice and a slap made her wet, like Pavlov’s dogs hearing the dinner bell. All you could do was struggle against it, try to drive it out with something else.

“How long has Timothy been talking to Penn Cage?”

Linda blinks but says nothing. Hope has flickered in her breast with religious power. Tim was supposed to meet Penn tonight. Either Tim missed that meeting or he delivered his evidence to Penn. Either way, she has reason to hope. If Tim missed the meeting, Penn will surely turn the town upside down to find him, starting with the

Magnolia Queen.

And if Tim did manage to get him the evidence, Penn, being the mayor, must certainly know by now that his friend is dead. Either way, his first instinct will be to have Sands arrested. That'’s why Sands feels pressed for time. The mayor could be on his way down to the boat with a squad of police at this moment.

You have to stay on the boat,

says a voice. Tim’s voice.

If they take you off this boat, you’re dead. Or lost, because no one will know where to look for you. But as long as you’re here, you can be found. Whatever they do, you have to take it—

A stalling strategy occurs to Linda, one learned so long ago that it feels inborn.

I'’ll give them things in stages,

she thinks.

Lie first, then give up something true. Something to keep them trying. When they feel I'm cooperating, resist again, then give up the next bit.

It was like negotiating with a boy in the backseat in junior high. Let him slide his hand under your shirt, but not your bra. Kiss awhile, then push his hand out and kiss some more. When he’s finally, really angry, let him push up the bra and feel them for real. Then the game begins again with the belt and the snap to your jeans.

Only this was no backseat. And these weren’t junior high boys. Every minute of delay would be bought with pain.

You have to take it,

Tim’s voice says from within her.

Whatever it is—

Sands reaches out and lays a hand on the gleaming metal printer cart. A black rag lies on it. Sands lifts the rag like a magician beginning a trick, and her eyes track to what’s beneath it. The wires end not in EKG leads, but in shiny metal clips.

Alligator clips,

she remembers from a lab in high school. One of the wires is connected to a metal bolt about five inches long. Dried blood coats it.

When Linda recognizes the blood, her mind jumps to the man on the floor with no pants, and the idea she had before—that she was in some place beyond fear—vanishes like water thrown onto a hot skillet. She’s only crossed the threshold of fear. When she first entered this room, her grief over Tim had smothered everything, even her will to live. Now she wants only to keep breathing, to avoid pain.

Sands moves closer, leans down, pushes a strand of hair from her eye. With an intimate caress he wipes a tear from her cheek, then raises his finger to his mouth and licks it.

“Linda, girl,” he says softly, “there are things far worse than death in this world. I’'ve seen people beg to be where Tim is now. There are…appetites. Appetites that fall outside the pale. Quinn is a man of such appetites. I, on the other hand, prefer the shortest path from A to B.”

This statement confounds her.

“In business,” he clarifies, seeing her reaction. “This machine generates electric current, in varying intensity. The clips attach to things that protrude, and the bolt is for…insertion.”

Linda’s stomach heaves.

“Get the bucket,” Sands says.

Quinn moves behind her; a door opens and closes. Then Quinn returns and places a bucket stinking of vomit on the floor. The stench is so primal that it cuts through every last illusion.

They’re not going to stop until they know everything,

she realizes.

Maybe not even then. Because he’ll have to be sure.

Linda has never known such despair. She can protect no one. They’ll find out about Penn Cage, where Julia is hiding—

The generator hums ominously when Sands switches it on, like

the motor in a dentist’s office revving up to drive a drill. At the sound, the dog tenses with arousal. Despite its remarkable discipline, it cannot remain still.

“Where’s your cell phone?” Sands asks.

“I threw it overboard.”

“Why?”

“Tim told me to. He said you could track us with it.”

Sands shoots Quinn a brief glance. “What else? What was on the phone? I can get your records.”

“I got a text message I didn't understand.”

“From who? Timothy?”

She nods quickly. “I think he used a stranger’s phone. He thought that was safer.”

“What did it say? Word for word.”

“It wasn'’t words. Not really. It didn't make sense.”

Sands picks up the bloody bolt on its wire. “It’s very important that you remember, Linda.”

“It was just letters that only half made sense. I thought he meant to send it to someone else.”

“What were they?”

“The first word was

Thief

with a capital

T.”

Then

www,

like for ‘World Wide Web.’”

Quinn takes a small pad from his pocket and begins writing on it.

“What else?” Sands asked.

“‘Kill mommy,’ that was next.”

“Kill mommy?”

“I know, it makes no sense.”

“Was there more?”

“The last said, ‘Squirt too,’ or something like that.”

Sands’s eyes narrow in confusion. “Are you lying to me, Linda?”

“No.”

Sands sighs and nods to Quinn. Quinn steps forward and rips the blouse from her chest, his eyes flashing.

She struggles not to void on the chair. “What do you want to know?”

“Was that a code for something else? Who would Timmy be sending that to?”

“I don'’t know! I swear to God!”

“Wire her up,” Quinn says. “Give her a jolt.”

“I might, just,” said Sands, “depending on how she answers the next question.”

Sands nods toward the corner. “Turn the boy over. Show her his face.”

Linda’s gaze follows Quinn as he walks to the wall. He bends and pulls the bare-bottomed man over on his back. She’s afraid the face will be butchered, but it’s not. She recognizes a young Asian man she has seen a few times on the boat. Ben Li. She only knows who he is because of Tim. Li works in the security area, running the computer accounting system. On paper he’s listed as a gaming consultant, but his real job is working some sort of illegal magic on the computers that track the profits. Tim only found this out because Ben is lonely, and he uses drugs to dull the ache. Unlike the other employees, Li isn’t given monthly drug tests. In the past few weeks, Tim has become Ben’s supplier. That somehow played into Tim’s plan. Linda only learned this last week, and she wasn'’t sure she wanted to know, but it seemed important to Tim to tell her. It was as though by telling her this—information that could get him killed—Tim was proving how much he loved her, trusted her.

“Do you know who that is?” Sands asks.

“Ben Li.”

“Jaysus,” whispers Quinn. “Fucking Jessup.”

“Do you know what he does?”

“Something with computers, that’s all I know. I only found that out a couple of days ago.”

Quinn savagely kicks the body on the floor. Ben Li doesn’'t flinch.

“Is he dead?” Linda asks.

“Not yet,” Sands replies. “Soon.”

Gooseflesh rises on the back of her neck. She tries to shift, but the straps hold her fast to the chair.

“Will you move that bucket?” she asks. “It’s making me sick.”

“Tell me about Penn Cage.”

“What about him?”

“We don'’t have time for this,” Quinn snaps. “Juice the cunt and get it over with. Give me five minutes with the lying

sleeveen.”

“Please,” she whimpers, searching for something human in the

depths of Sands’s eyes. “Please. I'’ll tell you whatever you want to know. Tim is dead. What’s the point in hiding anything?”

Sands’s eyes offer her nothing. “Penn Cage.”

“Tim went to school with him. He worshipped the guy. He called him the Eagle Scout. He said Penn was the only man he knew he could trust to do the right thing.”

“And what did he mean by ‘the right thing’?”

“Arrest you, I guess. Tim was going to steal something that could stop what’s been going on. He wouldn'’t tell me what, and I didn't want to know. I tried to talk him out of it, I swear. He was like a little boy. He had no idea what he was up against.”

“Too fucking right,” says Quinn.

“Look, I don'’t care what you’re doing. You know that. I worked one of those fights, for God’s sake. Remember? That'’s where you first really noticed me. But I didn't tell a soul what happened there. I never have!”

Sands gives her a chiding smile. “You told Timothy.”

She closes her eyes in surrender.

“How many times did he talk to the mayor?”

“Just once that I know of. Last night.”

“And he was going to meet him tonight?”

“Yes.”

Sands reaches out with the bloody bolt and touches its tip to the hollow of her neck. The cold metal alone seems to shock her. “One more question,” he says, dragging the bolt down and across her chest, stopping at her left nipple. “The most important one.”

“What?”

“Did Tim say anything about making copies of what he stole?”

“No.”

Sands circles her aureole with the head of the bolt. “Not so fast. Think about it, Linda. Tim was smarter than I gave him credit for. And a smart man would know that he might not make it off the boat with a disc. Did he mention hiding a copy anywhere?”

“No. He didn't tell me anything about a disc. He didn't want to put me in danger.”

Sands smiles. “But he did, didn't he?”

Dropping the bolt on the cart, Sands picks up one of the alligator clips. “Hold her head,” he says mildly.

Quinn moves behind the chair and locks his forearm around her neck, cutting off all air.

Sands forces open the clip, then attaches it to her upper lip, just beneath her nose. Quinn gives her neck a hard squeeze, then releases her head. Sands steps back and rubs his stubbled chin, regarding her without emotion.

“Did he ever sneak a notebook computer on board?”

“Not that I know of.”

“He never talked about trying to transmit what he stole while he was on the boat?”

“No. He didn't tell me anything like that.”

Sands lets his hand fall on a black dial atop the generator.

“Don’t,” she pleads softly. “I’'ve told you everything. If I ever meant anything to you, don'’t do this.”

“Your word’s not enough. I have to know if you’re holding back. Last chance to come clean.”

She shakes her head. “didn't I always do what you wanted? Did I ever say no?”

“No, you didn't. But you lied, Linda. It’s not that you fucked him, you understand? You’re as human as the next woman. But you tried to help him take me down.”

Her brain is transmitting a speech signal when the current hits her, scrambling every impulse in her body. She flails her head, trying to escape the blowtorch burning her lip, but it follows wherever she goes. The pain arcs up her nose to a point between her eyes, which feel as if they’ll explode if the electricity doesn’'t stop.

Then it stops.

“Pissed herself,” Quinn observes. “Should have made her go beforehand.”

Linda is sobbing in the chair, with relief that the pain has ended, with terror of the agony to come. The white dog shivers from the effort of remaining still.

“Tell me the rest,” Sands says patiently. “You don'’t want any more of that, do you?”

She shakes her head hopelessly.

“Quinn will put that clip anywhere I tell him, and he’ll run the generator all night long. He’d like nothing better.”

“Nothing,” Quinn says simply. “I think she wants the bolt, mate.”

A sharp ringing startles them all. It’s a telephone, Linda realizes, not a cellular, but a hard line. It must be lying on the floor in the corner. Quinn curses and walks to the corner, then crouches to answer the phone. After speaking softly, he hangs up and says, “They want you up in the cashier’s cage.”

Sands sniffs, then shoots his cuffs and pats the dog’s head. “Take the clip off.”

Quinn blinks in confusion. “What?”

“Get it off.”

While Quinn reluctantly obeys, Sands reaches under the top shelf of the cart and brings out a paper cup.

“Drink this,” he says, offering it to Linda.

“What is it?”

“Just drink it and be thankful.”

“Will it kill me?”

“No. It will make you sleep.”

She sniffs the cup. The clear fluid inside smells like Sprite. “Will it hurt?”

“No. It’s a drug called Versed. It’s like Valium. It’s what they give children before they sew them up in the casualty ward.”

“Casualty ward?”

“Emergency room.”

A faint memory of a kind doctor stitching her knee long ago brings fresh tears to Linda’s eyes. For some reason, she is suddenly sure the doctor was Penn Cage’s father, Tom Cage. With a silent prayer that Penn and his daughter will be all right, she nods to Sands and opens her mouth. The fluid tastes just the way it smells. Sprite, gone half-flat. She coughs as she swallows, but it all goes down. She half believes the drink will kill her, but she’s past caring. She cannot endure the clips or the bolt.

Sands walks forward and gives her a strange smile. “You gave a good ride, I'’ll say that. One of the best. Quinn’s been itching to have a go at you from the beginning. Now he’ll get his chance, I guess.”

She shakes her head slowly. “Don’t leave me with him. Please. Give me enough of that stuff to finish it. Please.”

Quinn’s eyes flash behind Sands. “Now where’s the fun in that?

Linda feels herself fading already. The hum of the generator is the brightest thing in the room.

“Where are you taking them?” Sands asks. “The farm or the island?”

“The farm. I’d just as soon stay out there tonight, if you’re okay with it?”

Sands’s voice is tight. “I don'’t care what you do with her, if that’s what you’re asking.”

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.

For a moment the fog breaks, and she can see the shore, lone treetops whipping past fifty yards to her right. To her left she sees only mist. A hundred yards in front of them, a tugboat churns the river into a maelstrom. Quinn is running fast enough to pull a half dozen water-skiers.

“Can you slow down a little?” she calls.

“Just do your business! Christ.”

Bending carefully at the waist, Linda pulls the edge of the rear seat up with her bound hands. She marvels at the bright white lid of the Igloo. The logo brings tears to her eyes. She remembers picnics and parties from years long past, reaching down with a sweating arm and pulling a wine cooler from the ice—

“I thought you had to go,” Quinn shouts, looking back at her with annoyance. “Take your bloody pants down. Give us a preview, eh?”

Linda glances down at Ben Li. Before, his eyes had been pleading,

but now they watch her with a strange fascination, waiting to see if she’ll take down her pants. It is all about power, she knows. Ben Li heard Quinn talking about him and the dogs. He knows he’ll be the first to die, and all he can do is lie there watching, waiting, probably praying for some kind of miracle, or even just a diversion before death.

Around the boat the fog has thickened again, turning the night a deeper shade of black.

Linda straightens up. From deep within her, so deep that she’s forgotten it was there, something begins to rise. The density of it fills her as it expands. It’s love, she realizes. Or whatever you call the thing that huddles in the last dark closet you'’ve locked against the world, waiting to find something like itself. Linda has never known why she let herself go so far with Tim. She knew all along that he wouldn'’t leave his family. She wouldn'’t have asked him to, though she wanted it desperately. But now—standing almost in the river Tim died within sight of—she knows.

She wanted a child.

Over thirty and she’d never even been pregnant. But she was still young enough. And Tim wouldn'’t have had to leave Julia to give her that. Tim was the closest thing Linda had ever had to a child of her own, a big little boy who wanted the world to be better than it was. Now he was gone, and with him her hope of a child.

“He loved me,” she says aloud, once, for all the times she’d yearned to say it to the people around her.

This knowledge surges in her breast, filling her so profoundly that a faint radiance shimmers from her skin. She feels like the Madonna in the old Italian painting printed in her grandmother’s Bible. All of this she gives to Ben Li in a single downward glance, one long look that holds a woman’s infinite mercy.

“Do you have to go or not, you crazy cunt?”

Seamus Quinn’s angry voice pierces night and fog, but not the light that shines from Linda Church.

“Yes,” she says. “I have to go.”

With the grace of a bird taking flight, she steps onto the lid of the Igloo and leaps into the river.

CHAPTER

16

If physicists want to develop a time machine, they should explore fear. Fear dilates and compresses time without limit. For desperate people awaiting rescue, every instant stretches into unendurable agony; for those awaiting death by cancer, the earth spins relentlessly, shortening the days until they pass like fanned pages in a book. Trapped in our bodies, perception is all, and the engine of perception is hunger for life.

Before tonight, I could not have imagined playing a six-hour card game with my father. Yet here we sit, betting matchsticks without expression, occasionally searching each others’ eyes or looking with disbelief at the guns lying between us on the sofa. I'm not much of a cardplayer, so it’s been a one-sided contest. We’'ve spoken enough to persuade whoever might be listening that we’re passing a long night while Dad waits to see that my heart is all right, and typed enough that Dad is fully caught up on the circumstances surrounding Tim’s murder. I'm fairly confident that there’s no video surveillance of my upper hallway—ditto any keystroke-sensing technology around the house—for our desultory computer conversations would surely have earned us a call from Jonathan Sands by now.

“Ante,” Dad says.

“Sorry.” I push a red-tipped matchstick across the tatted surface of the sofa cushion.

“You keep playing like this, I'm going to own this house before the sun comes up.”

“Sorry I'm distracted. I keep thinking I feel my heart starting up again.”

“Let me worry about that. You play poker.”

We have not been without interruptions. Libby Jensen called twice, nearly catatonic with panic about what might happen to her son in jail. I did what I could to reassure her, but in truth the time has come for Soren to pay a price for his misbehavior. Looking at life through cell bars for a few weeks will probably do more than any treatment center to convince him that he’s had all the drugs he needs for a while. During her second call, Libby asked if she could come over, but I shot that idea down immediately, in a voice that brooked no appeal.

Two minutes after we hung up, I heard an engine stop in the street before my house. Thinking Libby had come anyway, I got up and walked to the front window. A Chevy Malibu with rental tags was parked in front of Caitlin’s house. The passenger door popped open, and Caitlin got out laughing. She said something to someone in the car, then ran up to her front door and waved back at the car. The bohemian filmmaker I’d met earlier got out and walked lazily—perhaps drunkenly—up to the porch and followed her inside. I heard their laughter even through my closed window. Pathetically, I hoped the car was still running, but it didn't seem to be. I stood looking down at the car until I sensed my father standing at my shoulder.

“What is it?” he whispered.

“Caitlin.”

“Huh.”

“She already went in.” I gave it a moment. “Not alone.”

Dad thought about this, then sighed, squeezed my arm, and walked back to the couch. I should have followed, but I stood there stubbornly, stupidly, waiting for the light in her bedroom to click on and destroy whatever hope remained that she had somehow returned to town for me, and not for a quick party with her new playmate.

My breath fogged the glass, faded, fogged it again. A dozen times? A hundred? Then I heard a bang, and Caitlin ran back out of the house. She was still laughing, and the filmmaker seemed to be

chasing her. She carried a wine bottle in one hand, and she held it up as though she meant to brain him with it. This time she jumped into the driver’s seat, and the man—Jan, I remember now—barely got himself folded into the passenger side before she sped up Washington Street toward the bluff and the river, never once looking at my house.

I walked back to the sofa, trying to dissociate myself from the anger rising in me. In the wake of Tim’s murder, Caitlin’s laughter seemed obscene. Surely, I thought, she must know about his death by now. Tim wasn'’t a close friend of hers, but she’d known him, and she knew we’d been close friends as boys. But all she seemed to be thinking about was getting drunk and finding a good time.

Two hours after the wine-scavenging trip, her car drew me to the window again. This time the Malibu pulled into Caitlin’s driveway. She emerged unsteadily but alone and walked to the side door. For a brief moment she glanced across the street, up toward my window, but by then I was far enough behind the curtain that she couldn'’t see me. She turned away and vanished into the house.

“I want to look up something on Medline,” Dad says. “I might want to prescribe you something.” With a groan he picks the MacBook off the floor, pecks out a long message, then pushes it over the matchsticks to me.

I’'ve been thinking about Tim’s story. This isn’t the first time we’ve had that kind of thing around here. And I'm not talking about the flatboat days, either. I mean the 1960s and 70s. Just down the river on the Louisiana side, at Morville Plantation. They had a big gambling operation and some white slavery too. Literally. They had taken girls from God-knows-where and were holding them against their will, using them as whores. The sheriff ran the whole parish and took a cut of all the action. I’'ve heard horror stories from patients, and I had a couple of brushes with the place myself. My point is, the situation was the same as now, in that the people who were supposed to stop those problems were making money off them instead.

I read his message carefully, then type

I’'ve been thinking too. Corruption doesn’'t have to be widespread to serve its purpose. All it takes is one well-placed cop, one sheriff’s deputy, one FBI agent, one selectman, or one assistant in the governor’s office etc. to keep

Sands informed. The spider pays off a dozen of the right people, and he has his web. And God knows the casinos have the money to buy anybody.

Dad motions for me to give him back the computer.

You need somebody from the outside, Son. Way outside. Somebody with experience handling this kind of thing. I’'ve been thinking all night, and I keep on coming back to Walt Garrity.

The name brings me up short, but two seconds after I read it, I sense that Dad’s onto something. Walt Garrity is a retired Texas Ranger I met while serving as an assistant DA in Houston. He was the chief investigator on a capital murder case I was working, and when he heard I was from Mississippi, he asked if I knew an old Korean War medic by the name of Tom Cage. That brought about the reunion of two soldiers who’d served in the same army unit in Korea decades earlier and also started a new friendship for me, one that lasted through several cases. I haven'’t talked to Garrity in a couple of years (since I last pumped him for information while researching a novel set in Texas), but my memory of him is undimmed. He’s a cagey old fox who seems reticent until you get him talking; then you realize he has a dry sense of humor and long experience dealing with human frailty in all its forms. Walt Garrity is the kind of lawman who’ll try almost anything before resorting to gunplay but, once pushed to that extreme, is as dangerous as any man on the right side of the law can be.

Dad takes back the computer and types,

Walt helped take on the big gambling operation in Galveston in the fifties and sixties, when he first became a Ranger. I know that sounds like a long time ago, but vice doesn’'t change much.

This reminds me of Mrs. Pierce’s warning—“Vice is vice, whatever cloak it wears”—but I'm not sure that’s true, given the technology of the digital age. Still, I can’t deny that the thought of Walt Garrity gives me some comfort. Walt may be over seventy and officially retired, but I’'ve heard he still takes on occasional undercover jobs for the Harris County DA’s office.

You might have something there,

I type.

But I can’t risk calling Walt until I have a secure line of communication.

You leave Walt to me,

Dad types.

I'’ll set it up. And don'’t warn me to be careful, goddamn it. I know how to sneak around.

As if summoned by my dad’s assertion about sneaking around, my mother’s voice floats down the hall. “What are you doing here, Tom?” she asks in the stage whisper common to grandmothers who don'’t want to wake sleeping children.

Dad and I look up simultaneously, startled by the image of Mom gliding up the hallway in her housecoat, her eyes fully alert. The Deep South still boasts a few women like Peggy Cage, “society” ladies in their seventies who spent their childhoods on subsistence farms during the Great Depression, and who, by virtue of backbreaking work and sacrifice, managed to attend college, marry a man with an ironclad work ethic, and rise to a level their parents never dreamed of. My mother may look at home in a Laura Ashley dress and know which fork to use, but she picked cotton all the way through college. If World War Three broke out tomorrow, she could plant a truck garden and start raising hogs the next day. As I heard her tell one of my biology teachers at school, “Once you twist the head off a chicken, you never really forget how to do it.”

“Penn had a little panic attack,” Dad says, motioning her over to the computer.

My mother freezes where she is, her eyes moving from my father’s face to mine, then to the computer. She moves forward and kneels before the sofa.

Dad types,

We have a problem and we can’t discuss it out loud. You and Annie are in danger. Your lives have been threatened. We have people coming from Houston to take you to a safe place.

I watch my mother process this information. She looks shocked, then angry. Then she types,

How serious are these threats?

Dad responds,

Jack Jessup’s boy has already been murdered.

Mom closes her eyes and sighs deeply.

When are they getting here?

An hour or less.

What about school?

I shake my head and type,

Think Ray Presley times ten,

referring to a man my mother thought of as evil incarnate.

If you want to take Annie’s textbooks along and work with her, that’s great, but safety is the priority. We’'ve learned that the hard way.

Mom nods with resignation.

I'’ll get Annie’s things ready,

she

types,

but if we can’t discuss this, I don'’t want to wake her until the last minute. I'’ll tell her it’s a surprise vacation just for us.

I nod agreement and start to type a reply, but as my fingers touch the keyboard, I hear the sound of the downstairs television rise. Dad and I left it on to distract any listeners, but I'm positive the audio track has suddenly doubled in volume. My father lost most of his high-frequency hearing long ago, but even he notices the amplitude change. He’s already holding the .357 snubnose in his hand.

I lean down to Mom’s ear and whisper, “Get back to Annie’s room. If you hear a shot, call 911.”

She looks longingly at the pistol on the sofa, but I motion for her to move to the bedroom. Dad is already moving toward the head of the stairs, but I catch up to him and pull him back.

“I'm going down first,” I whisper. “You back me up. If there’s more than one target, I'’ll hit the deck and fire low, you shoot high.”

“Could it be Kelly’s friends?”

I glance at my watch. “Not unless they drove eighty-five all the way.”

Dad nods and moves aside so that I can reach the stairs. I slip off my shoes, then step on the top tread and move quickly downward, staying close to the wall to minimize the creaks.

Halfway down, I see a well-dressed man standing in my front hall holding a sign in his hands like a limo driver in an airport. My finger tightens on the trigger, but the word BLACKHAWK printed in red at the top of the sign stops me.

I hold up my hand to stop Dad, then read the words below the company name: YOU’RE SAFE NOW. WALK FORWARD. With relief surging through me, I look back upstairs and give Dad the OK sign. After he lowers his gun, I move up and whisper, “The cavalry’s here. Get Mom and Annie ready.”

He turns without a word and moves up the stairs with what for him is dispatch.

When I reach the ground floor, the Blackhawk operator sets the poster aside and gives my hand a businesslike shake. He’s wearing a black sport coat with a gray polo shirt beneath it, and he obviously chose his position because it’s not visible from the street. Like Daniel Kelly, he looks about thirty-five, but his hair is cut military-style,

where Kelly has the blond locks of a tennis pro. Before I can speak, the operator passes me a handwritten note and a typed sheet of paper. The note reads,

I'm Jim Samuels. There were two men watching your house. They’re alive but neutralized. We took their guns and cell phones. We need to get the packages moving in under ten minutes. Are they ready?

I nod, then hold up my hand and splay my fingers to indicate five minutes. Leaning up to his ear, I whisper, “How did you guys get here so fast?”

Samuels smiles briefly, then whispers, “Dan Kelly called me and told me to gun it all the way.”

While I say a silent thank-you to Kelly, Samuels points to the typed sheet in my hand. It reads,

Daniel Kelly should arrive Natchez in approximately 40 hours. We’'ve rented room 235 at the Days Inn. Kelly’s gear bag is waiting for him there. There’s a satellite phone in your kitchen pantry, detailed instructions with it. There’s a number programmed into the phone that you can call for updates on your mother and daughter. We’ll be encrypted on our end, but be careful where you use the phone. Kelly told us to make absolutely sure that you don'’t want to come with us and wait until he gets here before you proceed with anything.

I look up and shake my head, and the Blackhawk man acknowledges with a sober nod. Leaning forward again, I whisper, “Do you feel confident about getting out of town safely?”

Samuels gives me a thumbs-up with such assurance that I suddenly wish I were going with them. Then he leans in close and says, “We were gentle with your watchers, to minimize reprisals against you. You’ll have to decide how best to handle the situation. We left them behind the house.”

It takes a moment to absorb that. “May I have their cell phones?”

Samuels digs in his pocket and brings out two identical BlackBerrys. I lay them on the side table. “Thanks.”

“We can get you the phone records on those numbers, if you like.”

“I’d appreciate it. What about their guns?”

He shrugs. “It’s your call. They’re going to be pretty angry at whoever they see next.”

“I'm better off giving the guns back, I think.”

Samuels goes to my kitchen and returns with two Glock automatics. For a puzzled moment, I watch him crouch quickly and slip the guns into the side table’s bottom drawer. Then I realize my mother is escorting Annie down the stairs.

Annie’s wearing the clothes she had laid out to wear to the balloon race, and she’s carrying the “grandma’s house” suitcase that she packs for weekends with my parents. My mother has put on slacks and a light sweater, and her gray hair is pinned up in a bun.

I'm not quite sure how to handle this situation, but Samuels walks right up to my mom and introduces himself calmly and quietly. It’s easy to believe these guys spend their days guarding traveling CEOs and foreign heads of state. After a few seconds, Samuels breaks away from Mom and speaks quietly beside my ear.

“In sixty seconds, our escape vehicle will pull onto the sidewalk in front of your door. My partner’s in your kitchen now, covering our flank. We’ll take your mother and daughter out in a quick rush, then my partner will return for the bags. If we have any problems, we’ll leave the bags and buy whatever they need at the destination. Understood?”

“Yes.”

Dad steps up beside me, but before he can speak, Samuels gives us both a look of surprising empathy. “You’ve only got twenty seconds to say good-bye,” he says. “Don’t show any fear. They’re going to be as safe as the crown jewels. Give them a smile to remember until they see you again.”

Dad moves quickly to Mom and Annie, but my mother steps past him and looks at me with utter clarity. “I know whatever you’re doing must seem important, but please remember this. You are the only parent that little girl has left. She’s the most important thing in this family. Tom and I are old now. She needs you. Nothing matters more than Annie, Penn.

Nothing.

Not honor or justice or anything you learned in school. Your flesh and blood.” Mom reaches up and touches my cheek. “I'm only saying what Sarah would if she were alive. Sometimes men forget what’s important. Don’t.”

“I won'’t,” I promise, knowing that despite my best intentions, I have done so before. But that’s why I'm acting decisively now.

“Time,” says Samuels.

“Daddy?”

I step past Mom and sweep Annie up into my arms. At eleven, she’s no longer a little girl, but I could still carry her five miles if I had to. Her eyes are crusted with sleep, but even now they project the perception I know so well.

“Where are we going?” she asks.

“It’s a surprise. I'm coming to see you soon, though. Will you take care of Gram?”

Annie smiles. “You know I will. I sure hate to miss the races. I wanted to fly in a balloon.”

“When you get back, I'’ll get Mr. Steve to take us up. As many times as you want. Okay?”

She nods, but balloon races aren'’t what’s on her mind. She pushes her mouth close to my ear and says, “Will you tell Caitlin I’'ve been missing her?”

I close my eyes and force down the emotion welling up from within.

“Mr. Cage, our ride’s coming up the block. We’'ve got to move.”

I hug Annie tight and murmur, “I'’ll tell her,” in her ear. Then I hand her to Jim Samuels, who carries her to the front door while Annie stares back at me over his shoulder.

Another hard shoulder brushes past me, and Samuels’s partner joins him at the door. He’s wearing an earpiece, and he seems to be receiving updates from it. He and Samuels communicate with hand motions; then Samuels tells my mother something, and she nods. He looks back at me, raises his hand to indicate five seconds, and ticks his fingers down one by one.

My heart tries to race ahead of itself, then the door is open and the Blackhawk men are rushing Mom and Annie across the open space like the royal family through a tunnel of paparazzi. I glimpse a big black Suburban before the door slams, then the growl of a modified V-8 roars loudly enough to shake my front wall and wake everyone on the street. With a screech of rubber the Suburban blasts up Washington Street like an Abrams tank heading off to war.

“Good God,” Dad says, still staring at the front door. “What now?”

“You go to work.”

“What are you going to do?”

I take the confiscated guns from the side table and shove them into my waistband. “Return some personal effects.”

“Who do those belong to?”

“The men who were watching the house. The Blackhawk guys took them.”

“Jesus. Don’t you want me to come with you?”

“Nope. I'm just going to give them a friendly message for their boss.”

Dad studies me for some time, then takes his keys from the tabletop. “I have my cell phone. Call me if you need me.”

I give him a smile of gratitude. “I did.”

He smiles back. “I guess you did. Okay. I'’ll take care of that other thing.”

I'm puzzled for a moment, but by the time Dad says, “The medicine for your heart,” I’'ve remembered:

Walt Garrity.

With three guns in my waistband, I grab a paring knife from the kitchen, then walk out my back door, wondering what I'’ll find.

The previous owners installed a stone fountain on my back patio, and this morning two men wearing dark windbreakers are sitting on the bricks, leaning back against the fountain’s basin. Their hands and feet are bound with plastic restraints, and their mouths are covered with black tape. When they see me, their eyes bulge with anger, but fear as well.

I walk slowly toward them, making sure they see the guns in my belt. Both men have the thin legs and overdeveloped upper physiques of bodybuilders. The right breasts of their windbreakers read MAGNOLIA QUEEN. Above the letters is an embroidered paddle wheeler; above this a pair of dice. I squat before the men and smile.

“Surprised to see me?”

The guy on the left nods meaningfully, silently promising revenge. He has hair like black steel wool, and his sweat smells of alcohol.

“Here’s the deal,” I tell him. “Option one, I give you back your guns and phones, and you take a message to your boss for me. Option two, I call Sands and have him drive down here and see you like this. Now, I'm going to take the tape off your partner here, and he can make the choice.”

I reach out and rip off the tape with one fast jerk. The second man gasps in pain.

“Best way, really,” I tell him. “I’'ve experienced it myself.”

“You are

soooo

fucked,” he says. “I wouldn'’t trade places with you for a million bucks.”

I smile and start to reapply the duct tape. “I guess that’s option two.”

“Wait!” he says, all bravado gone. “No matter what message you give us, he’ll send us back to bring you to him. You might as well come with us now.”

My watch reads 6:51 a.m. I'm scheduled to fly in the first race at 7:15, but I have no desire to do so. Hans Necker will be disappointed if I don'’t show, and the selectmen will go batshit, but maybe that’s a good thing. At least I can promise Sands that if he kills me this morning, half the town will be searching for me in less than an hour.

With two quick jerks of the knife, I free both men’s legs. They hold out their bound hands, but I shake my head, wondering if either of these men was present when Tim was tortured.

“I don'’t think so, guys. Let’s go see the boss man.”

CHAPTER

17

Julia Jessup awakens to the crying of her son. She blinks crusty eyes, rolls onto her husband’s thigh. Groaning in exhaustion, she reaches down to shove Tim’s leg, to tell him to go get the bottle—

—and freezes where she lies. Her hand is not on Tim’s leg. It’s on the baby’s belly.

For a few blessed moments she’d forgotten. Now, in the span of a closing synapse, the infinite weight of death and grief returns, pressing her into the mattress.

He left you,

says her father, dead almost twenty-five years now.

Alone,

says her mother, who followed him not long afterward.

Who’ll help you now? Who cares whether you live or die?

Julia rolls all the way over and sees faint light showing through the curtain. This is Daisy’s house. It was the only place she could think to run, the last place anyone would look. Daisy took care of Julia when she was a baby, before her father lost it, when they still had money to pay for a maid. Daisy’s house is old, not even a house really. A shotgun shack, like the ones in New Orleans. The floor is rotted through in places, and when the wind blows hard, the holes whistle and the bedclothes sway.

The baby’s cry grows louder, more insistent. Tim junior is hungry. He doesn’'t care that his father is gone. He knows only the ache in his belly. But Julia knows. Her father killed himself when she was

eighteen, and she’s missed him every day since. So many times she’s needed him, or someone. God, how different everything would have been had he lived. And how different will life be for her baby? His childhood will be a struggle against want, his mother always away, struggling in vain to keep ahead of the bills. This dark foreknowledge is like a festering mass in her stomach. Tim left nothing behind him but a mortgage. It wasn'’t his fault, really. He had nothing to leave—

“Now, now, I hear that baby cryin’,” sings a chiding voice. “He just a bawlin’, and you lyin’ in bed like Miss Astor.”

Daisy is close to eighty now, but she still gets around like a woman of sixty-five, despite her arthritis. Her flower-print dress crinkles as she sits on the bed and gives the baby a bottle to suck. Tim junior’s eyes go wide and blue as urgency changes into bliss, and he grips the bottle with one strong hand. Daisy tries to take the other in hers, but the child will not be led.

“I used to look at you like that,” Daisy says wistfully.

“I know,” Julia whispers. “I wish I was back there again.”

Daisy shakes her head, her eyes on the baby. “Everybody wish that sometime. But there ain’t no going back.”

Julia closes her eyes. The smell of her own breath sickens her. She ran out of the house without even a toothbrush.

“You hungry yet?” Daisy asks.

“No.”

“You gotta eat sometime. Can’t take care of no baby without getting something down yourself.”

There’s a sound of horsehair rope being stretched, and Julia knows that’s Daisy turning her head. She looks up into the yellowed eyes and says, “Thanks for letting me stay here. I didn't have anywhere else to go.”

Daisy smiles. “Well, I think you gon’ be here a while yet.”

Julia goes still. “Why is that?”

“Well, there was something in the newspaper this morning. I hate to say nothing about it, but I guess there’s no point hiding it.”

“What was it? Something about Tim?”

Daisy’s crinkled lips curl around her dentures like dark papier-mâché. Julia’s glad Daisy put her teeth in. Last night, the old woman looked one step away from the grave. “I can’t read too good no more,” she says, “but it didn't sound good.”

“Where is it?” Julia asks, sitting up in alarm. “What did they say?”

“On the kitchen table.”

Julia bounds out of bed and runs for the kitchen.

CHAPTER

18

The guard at the gatehouse of Jonathan Sands’s home stands gaping at the two bound men in the backseat of my Saab.

“I said I want to see Mr. Sands.”

“Does he know you’re coming?”

“No. I have a trespassing problem I’d like to discuss with him.”

“Just a minute.” The guard vanishes into his hut. Like the men in the backseat, he is American, not Irish, but the brief look he gave my passengers told them all they need to know about the trouble coming their way.

“Are you armed?” the guard asks, reappearing at my window.

I point down at my waistband, where the butts of three handguns jut from my waistband.

“You need to leave those with me.”

“I go in like this, or I drive away now.”

The guard vanishes again. I check my watch. The first balloons should be taking off any minute. Judging from the treetops, the wind looks to be gusting seven to ten miles per hour, which is enough to stop many pilots from launching. During the drive over from Washington Street, I received a text from Paul Labry, informing me that the balloons would be taking off from a vacant lot just off Highway 61 South. The destination of this morning’s “race” is predetermined, but the launch point varies according to the direction of the

wind, with various pilots making complex calculations and jockeying for takeoff positions in spaces just big enough to accommodate a launch without hitting power lines or other lethal obstacles. I texted Paul that a family emergency would prevent me making the launch in time and that he should fly in my place. Labry has already sent four anxious text messages in reply, asking what the problem is. I’'ve responded by begging him to trust me and to try to keep Hans Necker from getting too upset.

I'm receiving yet another message from Labry when a black Jeep thunders up behind my Saab and skids to a stop. In my side mirror, I see Seamus Quinn jump out and march toward my car. The Irishman must have driven all the way over from the

Magnolia Queen.

I roll down my window, allowing an endless stream of curses into the car.

“What the fuck do you want, just?” he growls. Quinn is a darkly handsome man with bad teeth and eyes that glint like polished metal.

“I want to talk to your boss. It won'’t take long.”

Quinn plants both hands on the side of my car and glares into the backseat. “You fuckers banjaxed it, did you?”

In my rearview mirror the two bruisers hunch in the backseat like toddlers dreading a spanking. Quinn stares in amazement as I take two Glocks from my waistband and hand them to him butt-first. “I'm already late for something, and if I don'’t show, people are going to come looking.”

The glinting eyes narrow, but Quinn finally waves me forward with a guarded smile. “I'’ll follow you in, your lordship.”

As he walks away, the gate rattles open on its electric chain, and I drive through under the watchful eye of a video camera mounted on a pole to my right. Is Sands watching from his bedroom? I wonder as my car tops a low rise, and I see the casino manager’s house for the first time. In a city famed for Greek Revival, Spanish, and Italianate mansions dating to before the Civil War, Sands has chosen the closest thing to a Miami drug lord’s palace as his residence. The linked boxes of white stucco may overlook the river, but they look like alien spacecraft that landed in the antebellum South by mistake, crushing an acre of pink azaleas when they set down.

“Why does Sands live here?” I ask the guys in the backseat.

“Why not?” one says sullenly.

“There’s concrete and steel under that stucco,” says the other. “He won'’t sleep in a house that won'’t stop a bullet. I think it’s an Irish thing.”

“Must be.”

“You are

sooo

fucked,” the second guy says for the tenth time. “I can’t believe you’re driving into this place. If I had the keys, I’d be halfway to Mexico by now.”

“I'm not the one who banjaxed it” is my reply. “Whatever that means.”

Sands’s driveway is a long ellipse, and the river shows to great advantage, for the bluff is lower here than in town and steps down gently to the water. As I brake to a stop behind an Aston Martin Vanquish—an automobile beyond the reach of any honest casino manager—it occurs to me that the best way to go after these guys might be to put the IRS on their tails.

Quinn skids to a stop behind me, jumps out, and opens my door. “Here we are, guv’nor,” he says, his voice dripping mockery. “Let’s go see the man.”

“If you’re waitin’ on me, you’re walkin’ backwards.”

Quinn’s eyes become slits. “Eh?”

“Never mind.”

The Irishman opens the back door and motions for his two thugs to get out. After some effort one of the guys manages to work his way out of the small backseat with his bound hands. Quinn regards him silently for about ten seconds. Then he takes something out of his pocket and fits it over his right hand. I catch the gleam of brass just as Quinn swings, a powerful uppercut delivered with such speed that it would have taken a stop-action camera to capture it. The snap of bone shatters whatever illusions of security I might have had.

“That'’s battery,” I say stupidly.

Quinn gives me a grin that’s close to a leer. “You’re seeing things, Mr. Mayor. He fell down.” He extends a hand toward the mansion. “After you.”

Jonathan Sands awaits me at his kitchen table in a white terry-cloth robe, a steaming cup of coffee and the

Natchez Examiner

laid out before him. The kitchen looks like an operating theater: The cabinets

are white, the appliances steel, the countertops architectural concrete. The only raw touch in the room is the owner’s unshaven face. Sands’s sniper’s eyes rake left and right as he scans the

Examiner,

but he says nothing.

Before entering the front door of the house, I was hand-searched, scanned by two electronic wands, and had my gun and personal cell phone taken away, along with the BlackBerrys belonging to the unfortunate men sent to watch me.

“I'm told you have a message for me,” Sands says in his artificial accent, not lifting his eyes from the newspaper.

Why,

I wonder,

does he preserve the illusion of Englishness here?

“That'’s right. I sent my mother and daughter away this morning. I wanted you to know that.”

Sands sniffs, sips from the steaming cup, then looks up, his eyes devoid of everything but irritation. “That wasn'’t part of our agreement.”

We have no agreement,

I think. “I realize that. But you need to understand something about me. I’'ve come close to losing my daughter before, and I can’t function if I have to worry about her safety. So I took her off the board. I'm still clear about what you want. I don'’t care about the money you left with me, so you might as well take it back. But I will try to locate what Tim stole from you, and I will give it back to you if I find it.”

After a long silence Sands says, “I find that difficult to believe, Mr. Cage.”

“Which part?”

“That you’ll return my property to me.”

“You shouldn’t. I might look to you like some Dudley Do-Right with a savior complex—and maybe I used to be that way, a bit—but I'm cured of that. When I first took this job, I was full of fire. My priority was to fix the school system, because all progress flows from that. It took about a year to realize that was never going to happen. I wanted to bring industrial jobs back to this town, and I lost my best chance of that when Toyota pulled out. I got your boat instead. The truth is, I’'ve been thinking about stepping down for some time. My priority is my little girl, not this town. So, if you want to rake a little extra money out of the local yokels’ pockets, it’s fine by me. I'm ready to get out, and I mean

out.

”

A lopsided smile has lightened Sands’s face. His teeth are perfectly straight and startlingly white; much too perfect for a working-class Irishman.

He wears dentures,

I realize.

Before he can reply, a door to my left opens, and I go rigid, half-expecting the eerie white dog to enter the kitchen. Instead, a brown-skinned Asian woman of startling beauty glides into the room with grace so effortless the most cultured belle would be hard put to match it. Scarcely five feet tall, she radiates a self-possession that seems to affect Sands as profoundly as it does me. When she takes the chair nearest me and gazes up at me, her eyes take my breath away. They are aquamarine, but they shine from the perfect archetype of a Chinese face. I'm put in mind of some English smuggler who spread his seed during the Opium Wars or the Boxer Rebellion and left half-caste beauties like this one behind to suffer the fate of mixed-blood children.

“We have not yet been introduced,” she says, and in those six words I hear the pure source of the English accent Sands mimics so well. The woman looks no more than twenty, but she must be older.

“I'm Penn Cage.”

She grants me the slightest of smiles. “I’'ve seen your photograph in the newspaper. I am Jiao. I did not mean to interrupt. Please continue.”

Jiao’s unexpected appearance has jarred my sense of purpose. “I’'ve already said what I came to say,” I say awkwardly. “My only concern is the safety of my family.”

Sands’s lopsided grin has returned. “And your friend? Jessup? What about him?”

“Whatever Tim did to you, he was on his own. I'm sorry he’s dead, but I warned him not to do anything stupid. When you stick your nose in other people’s business, you get hurt sometimes.”

“Just so,” Jiao says gravely. “In business and politics, casualties are a fact of life.”

I incline my head toward her.

“It’s rare for an American to understand this,” she says.

“Oh, we understand it. We just don'’t like to admit it in public.”

Sands laughs softly, but only the memory of a smile is on his lips. With almost affected care, he takes a cigarette and a gold lighter

from the deep pocket of his robe, touches a hissing jet of butane to the tobacco, and draws deeply. An acrid scent fills the room.

“Mr. Mayor,” he says, exhaling purplish blue smoke. “Did you know that when you line people up in front of a pit to shoot them, ninety-nine out of a hundred kneel meekly and wait for the bullet?”

Jiao’s eyes remain on me; Sands’s bizarre question seems not to have shocked her, or even registered at all.

Sands exhales the rest of the smoke, then leans his chair back on two legs, which creak under his weight. “Down the line walks the executioner. The shots grow louder, the bodies fall, but still the prisoners wait their turn. It’s beyond me, really, but that’s human nature. Once in a while, though, you get a man—or a woman—who won'’t wait. Sometimes they run, or leap into the pit after someone they knew. But rarest of all is the man who turns and fights. He hasn’'t a gun or a knife or even a club, but when he hears those shots getting closer, something in him knots tight and says, ‘By God, I'’ll not go down like that,’ and he turns with his teeth bared and his nails raking and goes for the man come to kill him.” Sands grins. “I’'ve cheered those bastards every time.”

Jiao watches me with grave attention.

“Is there a point to this story?” I ask.

Smoke drifts up from the tip of Sands’s cigarette, and his eyes smolder with apparent fascination. “You know there is, mate. That'’s

you.

You’re the one in a hundred. Jessup was a fool, but you’re a bloody scrapper.”

Holding Annie’s face in my mind’s eye, I stare back with impassive eyes, as though Sands has shot far wide of the mark. “I used to be that guy,” I say with seeming reluctance. “And in the right circumstances—given something worth fighting for, like my family—I still would be. But this is about money. I have all the money I need. If I lose it, I can earn more. I already lost my wife to cancer, okay? I can’t replace my little girl.”

Sands’s eyes narrow, but he says nothing. Jiao turns to him as though for help in understanding some obscure mammal, but Sands suddenly slaps his knee and laughs out loud. Behind me, Quinn permits himself a chuckle. Still laughing, Sands points at me as if to say,

Listen to this guy. Isn’t he something?

“Why don'’t you let me in on the joke?”

Sands is belly-laughing now, even though his laughter seems to annoy Jiao.

“I too am confused,” she says finally.

Sands wipes his eyes on the sleeve of his robe, then sets down the front legs of the chair, leans forward, and points a thick forefinger at me. “You can’t fool me, Cage. Go on! You’ve made a career out of sticking your nose into other people’s business. You’re coming after me. Of course you are. I should have seen it last night. You never even had a choice. It’s your nature.”

“Is this true?” Jiao asks, her translucent eyes on me.

“Course it is,” says Sands. “That'’s why he sent his kid out of town. And his sainted mother.”

“I told you why I did that.”

“Bollocks! Whoever picked up your kid blew through this town like the fuckin’ Secret Service. They iced Quinn’s men like they were corner boys. If you wanted out of this town, you’d be

gone.

But you’re still here, aren'’t you?”

I shrug. “This is the biggest weekend of the year for the city. I have obligations.”

Sands pulls a mocking face. “I thought you didn't care about the job.”

“I'm still a man of my word.”

“My point exactly. You must have taken an oath when they swore you in. I'’ll have to get a copy of that.” Sands’s levity disappears like bubbles in a tube of blood. “Who got your women out of town, Mr. Mayor? The FBI?”

I shake my head. “No. Those men work for a private security company I’'ve dealt with in the past. They have no government or law enforcement connection whatever. They’ll guard anybody for the right price. Even you.”

Jiao rises silently and takes two steps toward me. A scent like warm caramel reaches my nostrils. “Please do not involve yourself in our business. I can see that you care about your family. It would be unfortunate for everyone if you allowed your priorities to become confused.”

“I haven'’t,” I tell her, trying to blot out the memory of Tim’s mutilated corpse. “I promise you that.”

“We very much want our property back.”

Yeah, I got that.

With her feline gaze still on my face, Jiao reaches out and takes hold of my hand. Then she looks down, turns my palm up, and traces out the lines that curve across my skin. Her exotic face becomes somber, as though a cloud has passed over a terra-cotta figure. She looks over her shoulder at Sands, then back at me. I try to penetrate the blue-green portals of her eyes, but I can’t. At last she drops my hand, murmurs something softly in a foreign language, then leaves by the same door she entered through.

“What was that about?” I ask.

Sands raises his eyebrows. “Who knows? I'm guessing she saw something linking the two of us. Or thinks she did, anyway.”

“What did she say?”

“I have no idea. Nor do I give a fuck.” With his flint-hard eyes on me, the Irishman stubs out his cigarette, then lights another, drawing deeply. When he leans forward and speaks, exhaling smoke with every word, I'm reminded of how Tim characterized him in the cemetery. “Listen to me, mate. I’'ve done things for kicks you wouldn'’t do to save your own life. I’'ve lived in places where nightmares are scenery, killed too many people to remember. Man, woman, child—it makes no difference. After you'’ve gone where I have, you understand: There are no civilians. Not on this stinking planet. Now, I gave you the rules last night. You cross me, I act—immediately and irrevocably.”

“I haven'’t crossed you. I’'ve only done what any father would do.”

“Father,” Sands echoes thoughtfully. “I suppose

your

father could serve as de facto hostage for now. While we see where you really stand.”

“I can live with that,” I say with apparent resignation, even as my heart begins to race. “You don'’t mean as a prisoner?”

Quinn laughs behind me.

“No need for that,” says Sands. “We know where to find him.”

“All right. Look—”

“Tell him about the USB drive,” Sands says.

“Jessup made a copy of the DVD he stole,” Quinn says. “Part of it, anyway. He made it while he was still on the boat. We need you to find that too.”

“Why didn't you tell me that last night?”

“We didn't know last night, did we?” Quinn says angrily. “We’'ve been going over the computer logs, and we just found it. He copied nearly two gigabytes of data from the DVD drive to something attached to a USB port. It was probably a thumb drive, but we don'’t know. You just keep your fucking eyes peeled.”

Real exasperation enters my voice. “How am I supposed to find this stuff? I don'’t even know what I'm looking for. How do you know he didn't e-mail a copy of the data to a dozen people?”

Sands shakes his head slowly. “He couldn'’t access the Internet from where he was. It would have set off an alarm.”

“Plus there’s no record of that in the logs,” Quinn says.

“He could have done it from his car, couldn'’t he? From a notebook computer.”

“If he had done, he would have e-mailed it to

you.

Do you have my property, Mr. Mayor?”

“No!”

“Then stop worrying about things we’re not worried about.”

“Okay. Fine. If that’s all, I have somewhere to be.”

Sands looks at his watch. “The first race? You’ve already missed it.”

“I should still make an appearance.”

The Irishman makes a clucking sound with his tongue. “What you

should

do is start looking for my property. While everyone else is busy. I’d start in the city cemetery.”

So Tim did make it that far last night.

“Maybe I will.”

Sands picks up the newspaper from the kitchen table. “Yer one from the

Examiner

wrote a story about Jessup’s death. They must have held the presses for that one.”

I have no idea what he’s talking about. My

Examiner

is still lying beside my front porch where the paperboy threw it this morning.

“See that she sticks to the script, right? And not too loud with it. Wouldn’t want anything to happen to her. You might want to go back to banging her one day. If she’ll have you.”

As I bite off a stinging reply, Sands cuts his eyes at Quinn. “Take him back to Bedford Falls, Seamus.”

Without another look at me, Sands exits through the same door Jiao used, his muscular calves rippling beneath the hem of the robe.

Quinn grins but says nothing while I follow him down the long, tiled hall to a stone portico, then out to my Saab.