The Devils Punchbowl

She clicks the trackball again, and a photo of Sands having sex with a different woman fills the screen.

“Ben Li couldn'’t have taken these, could he?” asks Kelly.

“No. He must have hacked into Sands’s private computer and copied whatever he found. Keep going. Skip down a ways.”

“There’s a

lot

more folders,” Caitlin says, scrolling through the contents of the disc. “They’re mostly pictures too.”

I'm beginning to understand. “Ben Li shot the cell phone pictures that Tim showed me in the cemetery that first night. I'’ll bet those pictures are in here too. Stuff from the dogfights. I think Ben Li liked pictures.”

“I don'’t get this,” Caitlin says in a puzzled voice.

“What?”

“If Ben Li had all these pictures of Sands, why didn't he use them to save his life? Why sit there and be tortured and yell elliptical clues? It doesn’'t make sense.”

“Think about it,” I tell her, having solved this riddle during my drive back from Li’s burned house. “He has these pictures stashed. When he wakes up and figures out Tim has been using him, he calls Sands or Quinn and reports what happened, probably thinking he has no choice. Next thing he knows, they’ve got him strapped in a chair with an electrode up his behind. Aside from the obvious stupidity of calling Quinn, this kid was a genius. Simply telling Sands

and Quinn that he had these pictures—or anything else that might be on these discs—wasn'’t going to save him. They’d just retrieve the discs from the birdhouse and kill him anyway. He needed to figure out a way to barter the discs for his life. He probably passed out while he was trying to do that. And he was high as a kite, remember, from whatever Tim had given him. He probably didn't wake up until he was in Quinn’s boat.”

Caitlin is nodding slowly. “And when he tried to stop Quinn from getting Linda, Quinn shot him.”

“Right. So the discs stayed hidden.”

Caitlin lowers her head for a few moments, then raises it and clicks on another thumbnail image. Now we’re looking at a well-known local attorney—a very married attorney—having sex with a Chinese girl who looks barely sixteen.

“Is that who I think it is?” asks Caitlin.

“It is.”

“Jesus.”

“Keep going. This is important, but it’s not what we need.”

She clicks through several more images of people having sex, mostly Sands with a variety of women. But several familiar local faces pop up, as well, most of them of people with political or financial influence.

“What are we looking for here?” Kelly asks.

“How about this?” asks Caitlin, pulling up an image of a group of men gathered around two bloody dogs savaging each other in a pit.

She clicks through this sequence, which depicts what appears to be three or four different dogfights. The dogs and the people change in the pictures, but here too I recognize quite a few locals. When one image pops up, I seize Caitlin’s shoulder. It’s the photo I saw on Shad Johnson’s wall yesterday: Shad and Darius Jones standing beside a dead boar hog hanging from a hoist.

“I see him,” Caitlin says. “Son of a bitch.”

“Keep going,” I tell her, my hand flexing with hopeful tension.

Three more shots of Shad and the wide receiver follow. Two show the hog, while in the third the two men stand arm in arm with drunk grins on their faces. But Caitlin gasps when the next photo fills the screen. In it, a blood-soaked pit bull hangs from its neck from a tree branch while three men look on. The dog’s spine is bowed from

the animal jerking its hindquarters away from something in one of the men’s hands. A cattle prod. The man holding it is Darius Jones. But to Jones’s right, staring with what appears to be primal fascination, is District Attorney Shadrach Johnson.

“Holy God,” Caitlin breathes.

I squeeze her shoulder again. “That'’s it.

That'’s

what we needed.”

“Do you know what that is?” she says in a stunned voice.

“What?” asks Kelly.

“That'’s two black men at a lynching. Only they'’re not the ones being lynched.”

I'm shaking my head in disbelief, but after so many days of feeling helpless, a bracing surge of power is rising in me.

“You

own

Shad Johnson,” Caitlin says. “The question is…what are you going to buy with that picture?”

“Anybody want to guess?”

“Thumb drive,” says Kelly.

I smile and nod with satisfaction. “For a start.”

CHAPTER

65

I'm staring at Shad Johnson across the compulsively neat surface of his antique desk. The district attorney looks as though he hasn’'t slept since our meeting yesterday, and having seen the contents of Ben Li’s secret files, I'm not surprised.

“You look a little green around the gills, Shad.”

“Skip the bullshit, okay?”

I glance to my right, to his Wall of Respect. The picture of Shad and Darius Jones with the dead hog is conspicuously absent. In its place hangs a framed photo of Shad sitting beside a state senator at a political banquet.

“Looks like you’re missing a photograph.”

“I said cut the bullshit,” snaps Johnson. “Why are you here?”

I give him my most cordial smile. “You know what they say about a career in Mississippi politics, don'’t you?”

“What’s that?”

“The same thing they say about Louisiana politics. The only way to truly end your career is to get caught with a dead woman or a live boy.”

Shad licks his lips as his gaze flicks to the window. His political instincts are well-honed; he knows something’s coming, only he doesn’'t know what. Taking a manila envelope from inside my wind

breaker, I remove an eight-by-ten printout of the dog-lynching photo and slide it faceup across his desk.

“I think that picture is the exception to the rule.”

Shad hesitates before looking down, knowing that after he does, his life will never be the same. At last his chair creaks and he leans forward, lowering his eyes to the image on the paper. Shad is a light-skinned black man, but he perceptibly lightens another shade.

“Looks a little bit like you and Darius with the hog, doesn’'t it? Only it’s a little different. Especially when considered from a legal perspective.”

Shad seems to have lost his voice altogether.

“You’re a smart man, Shad. So I know there’s no misunderstanding about where we stand now.”

“What do you want?” he asks hoarsely.

“You already know. The USB drive. I know you'’ve got it, and I know how you got it. But if you hand it over now and come up with a plausible story, I'm willing to run with that. You’re not who I'm after.”

The district attorney clears his throat, then speaks in his professional voice. “I was about to call you about that drive, Mr. Mayor. As a matter of fact, someone slid a sealed envelope underneath my door last night.”

“Is that so?” I smile to let him see that I'm willing to play along.

“Sure did. Even in this day and age, you’ll find a Good Samaritan doing whatever he can to help the cause of law and order.”

“I’d like to see that envelope.”

Shad reaches into his pocket, takes out a key, then unlocks his bottom desk drawer. He looks down into it for a long time, and for a couple of seconds I have a crazy feeling that he’s about to pull a pistol. I'm sure he’d like nothing better, if he could get away with it, but when he straightens up, he’s holding a sealed, bone-white envelope. He tosses it across the desk.

Ripping the envelope open, I tilt the torn side to my palm. A small, gray Sony thumb drive falls into it, no heavier than a child’s LEGO block.

“Do you know what’s on it?” I ask.

“How could I? I never even opened the envelope.”

I give him a hard look. “What’s on it, Shad?”

He shrugs, then sighs. “No idea. It’s encrypted. I couldn'’t get into it.”

I slip the thumb drive into my pants pocket and stand.

“What are you going to do with that?” Shad asks.

“I'm going to run those Irish bastards out of town. Do you know why you’re still sitting here, and not in a jail cell?”

He swallows audibly. “Why?”

“Because you could have turned that drive over to them, and you didn't. I know you didn't do that from a noble motive—probably just self-preservation. But whatever the reason, you didn't do the worst thing you could have done.”

“So, what now? Is this the end of it?”

“Oh, no. Today’s a big day, my friend. A red-letter day. I'’ll be in touch about what I need from you.”

Shad rises behind his desk as I move toward the door.

“Whatever you want, Penn. You can count on me one hundred percent.”

“Oh, I know that.”

He clears his throat. “What about the original of that photo? The negative, or the disc or whatever?”

“Let’s see how things go. I'’ll make my decision later.”

I turn and walk through the doorway, then stop and poke my head back through it. Shad is studying the photograph like a man being forced to peer into the darkest corner of his soul.

“One more thing,” I say quietly.

“What?” he says without looking up.

“Soren Jensen. You just pled him down to probation and a drug treatment program. He doesn’'t spend one more day in jail.”

“He’s out on bail now.”

“Say it,” I tell him.

“Done. Probation.”

“Stay by your phone. I'’ll be in touch.”

CHAPTER

66

Caitlin is sitting at the kitchen table, poring over the Po file like a novel she can’t put down. One hour ago, Kelly sent a copy of the data on the USB thumb drive to his Signal Corps friend, who warned us that it could take longer to crack than the SD cards. In the meantime, Kelly and I have been discussing how best to use the results, should they prove to be as incriminating as we believe they will be.

“Let’s just assume,” Caitlin says, abruptly dropping the file and joining our conversation, “that the thumb drive is what you think it is. Conclusive proof of systematic money laundering by Golden Parachute Gaming Corporation, and that it incriminates both Sands and Po.”

“Okay.”

She smiles like a woman with a secret. “Proof is no longer our problem. Chief Logan could arrest Sands at that moment for money laundering. He could arrest him right now for dogfighting based on Ben Li’s pictures, and the district attorney to boot.”

“Keep going.”

“The problem is Edward Po.”

“How so?”

“What is your worst fear at this point?”

I think about this for a few seconds. “Legally, I guess the worst

scenario would be for Po to actually show up for the sting, and for Hull to grant Sands immunity in exchange for his testimony. Hull might grab Sands and keep him out of our reach for a long time using national security as a justification.”

“Hull has made that deal already, right? I mean, would Sands lure Po here without a signed plea agreement? Something Hull can’t renege on?”

“No. You’re right.”

“On the other hand, if Po doesn’'t show up for this Roman-spectacle freak show they have planned, Hull will likely take down Sands as a consolation prize, right?”

“If he can. Hull has tolerated enough of Sands’s crimes that Sands may have significant leverage over him.”

“Can Hull stop the State of Mississippi from pursuing murder charges against Sands?”

“Hard to imagine,” I say thoughtfully.

“Not for me,” says Kelly. “Post-9/11? Hull’s task force is part FBI, part Homeland Security, remember?”

“Yes.”

“What if they designate Sands as some kind of special informant to the task force? Hell, they could put him on the payroll of the CIA. They could say he’s been working for them all along. You’ve got to think about how the world has changed, Penn. I mean, Sands could disappear, and you’d never even know where he was. They could do it.”

“

That'’s

my worst fear. Sands walks away from both murders and never suffers a day for all the hell he brought down on this town.”

Caitlin threads her fingers together, then twists her arms inside out to stretch. Through a grimace of pain, I see the gleam of satisfaction in her eyes. “So the person you really need to be able to control is—”

“William Hull,” I finish. “The real architect of this clusterfuck.”

“How do you get that?”

I sigh heavily. “Hull has definitely pushed the envelope, but given the nature of his target, the government may sweep a lot of that under the rug. You have to get guys like Hull to hang themselves.”

“By?”

“Wearing a wire. You get them somewhere they feel safe, lead

them into saying things, and let them convict themselves. But he won'’t do that with me.”

“So, what’s your plan?”

“Hull is probably in town already, prepping for tonight’s sting. I'm going to demand a meeting with him and find out the details of his plea agreement with Sands.”

“Using the thumb drive for leverage?”

“If it’s what I think it is. I can threaten to arrest Sands based on that evidence and blow Hull’s Po operation, unless he modifies the plea agreement.”

“But if he calls your bluff, and you blow the operation, Po walks away. Right?”

“Right.”

“And you told me yourself he’s the bigger target. The greater of two evils.”

“Yes. I just want Sands more.”

Caitlin’s smile vanishes. “So do I.”

“I'm also going to demand that two Natchez plainclothes detectives remain in Sands’s presence right up until the moment of the sting. That way, if Po doesn’'t show, we can bust Sands before he has a chance to flee.”

“But if Po does show—and the plea agreement remains unchanged—you have your original problem. Sands vanishes into the federal system, and we might never see him again.”

“Right.”

Caitlin sets aside the file in her lap and lets the blanket fall away from her shoulders. She’s wearing one of my dress shirts and nothing else, but at this moment, even Kelly is looking only at her eyes, which gleam with intensity.

“What if I could tell you a way to get both Sands and Hull on tape, discussing all the shit that Sands has pulled this past week?”

“Is this a trick question?” Kelly asks.

Caitlin shakes her head, then picks up the stack of pages she’s been reading the past few hours. “There’s a direct pipeline into the heart of Sands’s operation. One that’s never even crossed his paranoid mind.”

“Quinn?” says Kelly. “We’'ve thought of that. Hull certainly has too. If Po doesn’'t show, he’ll flip Quinn against Sands.”

“Not Quinn,” she says, smiling with supreme confidence. “Jiao.”

“Jiao?” Kelly echoes. “The girl?”

“Yes.”

“The one who let Walt live?”

“Exactly. Jiao Po.”

“You think she’d turn against Sands?” I ask.

Caitlin leans over and holds up a printout of Sands giving Linda Church oral sex. “Don’t you?”

Kelly sucks his bottom lip, thinking hard. “Okay, I get it. But still…”

“Jiao has been living in New Orleans the whole time Sands has been in Natchez. Even before that, when he was opening other casinos along the river. She only moved up here after Hurricane Katrina forced her out of her house down there. I don'’t think she has any idea what Sands’s been up to all that time. Not as far as the women, anyway. The dogfighting she may not mind, since her uncle’s always done it.” Caitlin looks at me. “You talked to her the morning your balloon was shot down, right? You saw them together. How did they seem?”

I think back to that morning in Sands’s drug-lord-style mansion. “She walked in on her own. He wasn'’t expecting her. He let her do some of the talking, but he seemed annoyed that she’d come in.”

Caitlin nods knowingly.

“She threatened me too, though. Subtly, but she left no doubt about what she meant.”

“That doesn’'t surprise me. Women will go to amazing lengths to protect their family unit, or what they perceive as that. When women kill, it’s usually to protect. Right, Mr. Prosecutor?”

“You’re right.”

“I’'ve seen that in war zones,” Kelly says. “Okay, I'm buying it. If Jiao got angry enough at Sands, that same instinct might make her try to take him down.”

“I think this girl is very confused,” Caitlin says. “She’s only twenty-seven. And she’s about to stand by while her lover delivers the uncle who practically raised her to the American government. If I can shake her faith in Sands, I think we might be surprised at what she might do.”

“Whoa,” I say, seeing where this is going at last. “What do you think you’re about to try?”

“I'm just going to talk to her. Face-to-face. A little girl talk.”

“Caitlin—”

“I like it,” says Kelly. “Shit, where’s the harm?”

“Are you serious? Caitlin would be risking her life. The sting’s tonight. What can we really hope to get this girl to do, even if you turn her?”

Caitlin smiles. “Wear a wire, of course.”

Now Kelly shakes his head. “That, I can’t see. Jiao’s been around these guys a long time. She knows what would happen if they caught her wearing a wire.”

“But they won'’t! They won'’t even

check

her. That'’s the beauty of this.”

I hold up both hands, trying to calm Caitlin down. “You’ve got a good idea, but it won'’t work that way. Jiao won'’t know how to steer the conversation. She doesn’'t know what we need in a legal sense.”

“A discussion of murder? What’s hard about that?”

“Between Hull and Sands? How does she engineer that? I think I’'ve got a better idea. Thanks to your inspiration.”

Caitlin looks skeptical. “What is it?”

“I knew this cop in Houston. He told me about a sting they pulled on a mob guy once. Superparanoid. Nobody could get close to him with a wire, swept his houses all the time. But they took their time and got an informant close to him, and he got a feel for the guy’s habits. Based on that, they prewired several outdoor spots he liked to visit when he needed to talk to somebody. And the night before they knew a big discussion was going down, they wired them all. They used two dozen recorders, all told, but they got him.”

“How does that relate to Jiao?” Caitlin asks.

“We don'’t need two dozen recorders. We only need two.”

Caitlin is shaking her head, but Kelly is nodding, his tactical sense kicking in.

“I'm going to demand the meeting I told you about a few minutes ago. But not just with Hull. I'm going to demand that Sands be there too. He won'’t want to come, but if the thumb drive is what we think it is, I can make it happen. I pressure Hull, Hull pressures Sands.”

Caitlin’s listening now.

“There’s only one place Sands is going to feel safe in a meeting like that,” Kelly says.

She blinks in silence. “The

Magnolia Queen

?”

“You got it,” I say. “And so far as I know, there are only two places on that casino boat not being recorded by surveillance equipment twenty-four hours a day. The first is Sands’s office, where Kelly and I talked to him. And the second is—”

“The torture room,” Caitlin says. “The Devil’s Punchbowl. Jesus.”

“If Jiao will hide voice-activated recorders in those two rooms, I can do the rest. Fifteen minutes alone with Hull and Sands, and I'’ll have them both by the balls.”

“And you know what happens then,” Kelly says, watching Caitlin like a hopeful teacher.

She smiles. “Their hearts and minds will follow.”

Kelly laughs and looks at his watch. “Right now, Jiao Po is taking a PiYo class at Mainstream Fitness.”

“Are you kidding?” I ask.

Kelly shakes his head. “Hell, no. She’s like a Mafia wife. People are dying left and right, and she’s worried about her cellulite.”

“She doesn’'t have any,” Caitlin says. “I’'ve seen the pictures. Is that where I approach her?”

Kelly shakes his head. “She likes to go down to the coffee bar on Franklin Street after her workout, for green tea and a bran muffin.”

“That'’s it,” I say, squeezing my right hand into a fist.

“I have a feeling,” says Caitlin, “that her muffin won'’t be going down so well today.”

CHAPTER

67

Caitlin is sitting at a small, round table in the Natchez Coffee Bar, a long, narrow space downtown, not far from the club where Jiao Po takes her PiYo class. Jiao sits across the table, not an arm’s length away, her eyes deep and remote. People have often told Caitlin that her skin resembles porcelain, but Jiao’s skin is perfect, without blemish. She radiates a self-possession that Caitlin finds intimidating, and her light eyes seem startlingly alive in the Chinese face. The coffee bar is almost empty, but when Caitlin asked to sit with Jiao, the woman did not object. Only when Caitlin identified herself did Jiao’s eyes rise to take her in.

“Is anyone watching you?” Caitlin asks. “Any of Sands’s men, I mean?”

Kelly has already assured Caitlin that Jiao isn’t being tailed, but Caitlin wants to make sure.

“What do you want?” Jiao asks, regarding her coolly. “A human interest story for your newspaper?”

“No. I want to show you something. A photograph.”

Jiao rises from the table.

“You stayed in New Orleans too long,” Caitlin says quickly. “I know you must suspect about the women.”

The girl slows almost imperceptibly.

“I know you went to Cambridge, Ms. Po. I know you don'’t miss

much. But sometimes we blind ourselves intentionally to things we don'’t want to see.”

Jiao stops and looks back, her body utterly motionless. “What does this photograph show?”

Caitlin shakes her head. “You have to see it. Either you have something to fear or you don'’t. I'm not here to hurt you. Only people you trust can do that.”

Jiao steps back to the table with regal poise and gives Caitlin an impatient look. “Well?”

“Will you sit down?”

Jiao sighs lightly, then takes her seat again. “Show me.”

Caitlin takes a five-by-seven manila envelope from her bag and removes the bathroom-mirror photograph of Sands screwing Linda Church. With an eerie sense of detachment, she slides the photo across the table, just as Penn told her he did with Shad Johnson.

Jiao doesn’'t flinch or even blink. After a few seconds, Caitlin can’t tell if the woman’s breathing.

“Is this the only one?” Jiao asks at last.

“No.”

“Show me.”

Caitlin removes five more photographs, each showing Sands having sex with a different woman, every one an employee on the

Magnolia Queen.

Jiao must have seen many of these women over the past few weeks. The final photo shows only a male organ entering a woman’s anus, but Caitlin is sure that Jiao knows whose penis she’s looking at. Her doll-like lips purse for a few seconds, then without lifting her eyes from the top image, she says, “Do you have money?”

“Do you need money?” Caitlin asks, confused. Perhaps Jiao has been cut off by her uncle and fears she can’t survive without Sands’s support.

A fleeting smile crosses Jiao’s face, and the aquamarine eyes rise to Caitlin’s. “No, I mean, were you raised with money?”

“Yes.”

“My father made little, but my uncle saw that we never went without. Father wouldn'’t touch that money for himself, but we children got the necessities. After he died, I lacked for nothing. But I found that whether women have money or not, we look for men

who are strong enough to be providers. Strong enough to protect us, yes? But with that strength comes things we do not want so much. A wandering eye, aggressiveness, even cruelty. Yet the men who would always be faithful, the ones who worship us, we ignore or kick away. Do you find this to be true?”

“I’'ve made mistakes like that. But some men are both strong and kind.”

Jiao’s eyes move over Caitlin’s face. “I think my father was like your lover. He was a professor. He taught law in Communist China. What could be more absurd? When I was young, I thought he was a fool. After he died, I attended school in England, as you said. But during breaks I went to Macao, to live under my uncle’s protection. He didn't want me there, but I insisted. I was seduced by his power, his money, the unimaginable wealth. And I fell in love with Jonathan Sands. He seemed a glamorous figure to me, an Irishman who could carve out a place for himself among my uncle’s henchmen. He was white, yet my uncle respected him. And of course, my mother was a Scot.”

The coffee bar’s single waitress walks toward them. Caitlin lays the manila envelope over the explicit photos as the woman passes and goes to the restroom. “You must have been very young when you fell for Sands.”

Jiao shrugs. “Older than my mother when she married. But, yes, I was young. Too young to see what I was to him. A way to rise in the hierarchy, to reach the inner circle. He was playing a role from the beginning, I think.”

Caitlin is impressed by the girl’s sangfroid, but it makes her doubt the soundness of her plan. Without an angry Jiao, nothing of value will be accomplished here.

“I'm curious about something. Did they let you see the violent part of what they did?”

Jiao takes a quick breath, then expels it. “They tried to insulate me from that, my uncle especially. But everyone has a primal fascination with violence. At that point in my life I was curious. But my curiosity was quickly satisfied. Death holds no mystery for me. I think women are interested in life, men in death. What do you think?”

Jiao’s genuine interest in her opinions takes Caitlin off guard. This

meeting reminds her of conversations during college. “I think there’s some truth in that.”

Jiao toys with what’s left of the muffin on her plate. “At first I thought violent sport was something that came along with male strength. They admired in others what they aspired to in themselves.”

She slides the envelope off the picture and stares clinically at her lover fucking another woman. “I saw much dogfighting in Macao. My uncle lives for it. He and his friends. Breeding the dogs, training them—most of all fighting them. But what I learned watching those men was this: They prized the dogs that would fight to the death, beyond all hope of survival. The ones too weak to do that, they killed. In the end, though, all the dogs died.” Jiao looks earnestly into Caitlin’s eyes. “They prized some dogs, you see, but they

loved

none of them.”

This insight silences Caitlin for a while. “Is Sands like that?”

Jiao ignores the question, her gaze still on the photograph. “They see us the same way,” she whispers.

“How do you mean?”

The girl’s eyes rise to Caitlin’s. “You’re a beautiful woman, Ms. Masters. Don’t protest, please, you know you are. It’s a fact, like strength or height. All your life you'’ve benefited from this attribute, as I have.”

Caitlin can feel herself blushing. “Yes. I have.”

“Men prize beautiful women, they pursue us with all their power, shower us with wealth. They settle for those of medium attractiveness, and the ugly ones they treat as slaves.”

Caitlin isn’t sure what to say. “That might be a little extreme.”

“Do you think so? I do not.”

“Well—”

Jiao silences her with an upraised finger. “We all lose our beauty one day, Ms. Masters. All of us. Never forget that.”

“That day is a long way off for you.”

Jiao smiles. “In the eyes of the man I thought I wanted, it has already come and gone. I sensed it long ago. I’'ve tried to deny it. I have been a fool.”

Caitlin says nothing.

“What do you want me to do?”

CHAPTER

68

It’s 6:00 p.m. as Kelly and I drive down Pierce’s Mill Road toward the

Magnolia Queen,

the flaming sun beginning to set above the bridges behind us. I wanted the meeting earlier, but I was lucky to get it at all. Had the thumb drive not turned out to contain the legal dynamite I’d hoped it would, Hull would have told me to go to hell. As it was, he tried to sidestep my intent by offering a quick meeting between the two of us, but I demanded that Sands be present, and despite Sands’s resistance, Hull forced him to accede to my wishes. What gave me the boost of confidence I feel now was Sands’s insistence that the meeting take place aboard the

Queen.

I’d worried that I might have to insist on this venue myself, but as I’d anticipated, Sands considered it a victory to force his home territory on us.

“What are you thinking?” Kelly asks, braking his 4Runner as we descend the long hill.

“I'm not.”

“Bullshit.”

To my left, the Mississippi River blazes orange under the falling sun, and five hundred hundred yards below us, the fake smokestacks of the

Magnolia Queen

suggest the opening shot of a Technicolor version of

Huckleberry Finn.

“Seriously. Whenever I had to go into court for a summation, or even a critical cross-examination, I

winged it. I figured if I didn't already know everything I needed to, I was lost anyway.”

“I don'’t know if that makes me feel better or worse about this.”

“Everything depends on Hull. I envisioned a bow-tied Beltway tight-ass, but the more I’'ve talked to him, the more I’'ve realized he’s a pro. He’s just been working this case too long. I can’t imagine what trying to run a guy like Sands as a CI would be like. They’re probably like two scorpions in a bottle by now.”

Kelly laughs wickedly. “That I don'’t doubt.”

“Hull and I will be a little like that. More like boxers, maybe. The wire idea was genius. That'’s what’s going to make him let his guard down.”

“Nothing increases the odds of victory more than letting the enemy think he’s already taken your secret weapon.”

Hidden in my belt is a digital transmitter Kelly brought along in his Blackhawk gear bag. Given Kelly’s flint-knife surprise in Sands’s office, we feel sure that Quinn will search every nook and cranny of our bodies before allowing us near Sands. When his search turns up the wire, that should convince our marks that we have no other way to record the conversation. After that everything depends on Sands’s steering us to his office or to the interrogation room below deck.

“You know what I'm wondering?” Kelly says.

“What?”

“Did Jiao really hide those recorders in there?”

“You mean where she was supposed to?”

He gives me a sidelong glance. “I mean at all.”

“She did. Don’t even think about it.”

“Why are you so sure?”

I turn to him, a slight smile showing. “Hell hath no fury, brother. It’s a law of the universe. Like gravity.”

The grade levels out at last, and Kelly pulls the 4Runner alongside the massive barge with the faux steamboat built atop it. The structure dwarfs everything around it, and only the steel cables running above our heads that moor the casino to the shore betray that it’s a vessel and not a building. A red-coated valet approaches the 4Runner, but Kelly rolls down his window and waves him off, then raises the window with a whir.

“Listen,” he says, all levity gone from his voice. “No matter how you look at this, we’re about to walk into hostile territory. Indian country. I don'’t know if Po is coming to this party later or not, but you can bet that Sands, Hull, and Quinn have contingency plans in case things don'’t go their way. At a certain point, every situation becomes every man for himself. Understand?”

“You’re saying if it goes to shit, I'm on my own?”

“No. I'm saying those guys won'’t hesitate to fuck each other or anyone else who gets in their way. Trust does not exist among these people. Not even Quinn and Sands, who probably grew up together. But Sands’s biggest fear is

you.

You’re the loose cannon on his deck. While he had Caitlin, he felt he had you under control, but now…I don'’t think he’d hesitate to kill you if he thought you were going to have him arrested.”

“I get you.”

“After you, his fear is Hull. If Po doesn’'t show, Hull’s going after Sands’s scalp. So Sands has to have an exit strategy in that event too. Just keep all that in mind while you’re ‘winging it.’”

“I will.”

Kelly grins at last. “We’'ve been here before, bro. If the wheels come off, hit the deck and listen for me. I'’ll be right with you.”

“I know you will.”

Kelly looks to his left, over the long gangplank that leads to the main deck of the

Queen.

“There’s our buddy,” he says, lifting a hand to wave at Seamus Quinn. “I'm gonna give you one for Linda Church before we’re done, you mick bastard.”

“Aren’t you Irish too?”

“Sure. What?”

“Nothing. Just take it easy. We didn't come to fight.”

“I'm easy, baby. Let’s do it.”

As we walk across the broad gangplank, I lean toward Kelly. “You think it’ll be Sands’s office or belowdecks?”

“Interrogation room,” he whispers. “The Devil’s Punchbowl.”

“Why there?”

He laughs loudly, as though I’'ve just told a joke. “In case they decide to shoot us. Easier to dump the bodies.”

I can’t tell if he’s kidding or not, and before I have time to think

about it, we’re through the main door of the casino, where a doorman with gold-braid epaulets and a captain’s cap greets us in an “Ol’ Man River” bass.

“This way, gents,” Quinn says from behind him in a surprisingly professional voice. We’re within earshot of fifty customers playing the slot machines, so some rudimentary courtesy is called for. Quinn leads us down the length of the three-hundred-foot-long saloon. The sunset has lit the skylights a brilliant orange with purple shading, and for a moment this sight behind the glittering chandeliers makes me dizzy. A second later, though, I see Chief Don Logan standing at the head of the escalator that leads to the

Queen

’s upper or “hurricane” deck.

Logan and a handpicked team of plainclothes police detectives are here to take charge of the recorders planted by Jiao as soon as we vacate the room where the meeting is held. Logan will kill time playing slots on the hurricane deck, and when I appear afterward—either from Sands’s office or from the interrogation room in the bowels of the barge—I'’ll signal the chief by touching the top of my head, and he and his men will move to retrieve the appropriate recorder.

“What did I tell you?” Kelly says softly.

Quinn has walked us behind a partition three-quarters of the way down the saloon, where a brass-plated elevator waits discreetly for staff with business belowdecks.

Quinn punches a nine-digit code into a keypad beside the doors, and they open with a soft whir. The elevator is surprisingly spacious, and Kelly stands unnecessarily close to Quinn during the brief descent.

“Stand back, queer boy,” Quinn says, now that we’re away from the paying customers.

Kelly laughs but doesn’'t move.

When the doors open, three security men in black coats stand waiting for us, wands in hand.

“Assume the position,” Quinn says, gesturing at the wall to our left.

Kelly and I flatten our hands on the wall and spread our legs, though Kelly mutters under his breath for effect. As per the terms set for this meeting, neither of us is carrying a weapon, but as strong

hands pat and probe me, Quinn says, “I’'ve half a mind to poke a light up Ponytail’s arse, to make sure he hasn’'t got one o’ them knives stuck up it.”

Kelly mocks a girlish squeal. “That'’s just the excuse you need to check out what you been craving since you saw me, isn’t it?”

Quinn is cursing when one of the wands stops and hovers at my belly button, beeping softly.

“What is it?” asks Quinn.

“Probably my belt buckle,” I say, straightening up.

“Not so fast,” says Quinn, gripping my upper arm. “Take your belt off.”

“What for?”

“Jaysus, just do it.”

With obvious reluctance I remove my belt. The guard wands my belly while Quinn feels his way along the belt. His hand stops, then with a chiding smirk he draws a knife from his boot and slices the leather on the inside of the belt. One flick of the knifepoint exposes a thin wire antenna, and he rips out the transmitter with a laugh.

“Sneaky bastard. Wouldn’t have thought it of you, Your Honor.”

Quinn uses this find as an excuse to have the men go over Kelly again, but they discover nothing. Telling the guards to stay where they are, Quinn leads us down a narrow corridor. The barge really feels like a ship down here, with hatches dividing the compartments instead of doors. Suddenly Quinn stops, then twists the wheel on a hatch, pushes it open, and motions for us to follow him.

Kelly enters first, and I follow him into a long, dim room. The walls are black, but two large TV screens in a far corner to my right glow with changing images of the casino decks above. Three chairs have been placed in a rough triangle near the hatch, facing inward. Two are occupied, the nearest by Jonathan Sands, who’s wearing a business suit, and the other by a man who must be William Hull, who looks nothing like I imagined. He has a lean, well-muscled frame, and his face is long and angular. The bureaucrat I imagined vanishes, replaced by this figure who looks more like a Cold War–era military officer.

Deeper into the room stands a single, more substantial chair. With a roll of my stomach I realize this is the chair where Ben Li and Linda Church were tortured. Beside it stands the cart that held the

electrical generator. Inside this cart, Jiao is supposed to have planted one of the microrecorders.

“You a furniture aficionado?” Hull asks with his faint trace of Southern accent. South Carolina, maybe.

Beyond the torture chair, against what must be the hull of the barge, a metal staircase leads up to a hatch near the ceiling of the room.

An escape hatch?

At some level I register that we must be below the level of the river. “I was just thinking about something that happened in that chair.”

“Nothing’s ever happened in that chair,” Sands says, looking up at me with unnerving intensity. The skin of his balding head seems stretched even tighter over his skull, if that’s possible, and his cheeks look hollow. Apparently not even Jonathan Sands is immune to the effects of stress.

“Why are we down here?” I ask.

“Privacy,” says Hull.

“We never shut off the security cameras on the boat,” says Sands. “If we were anywhere but in here or my office, you could subpoena our hard drives.”

“Look what I found on Hizzoner,” says Quinn, handing the small transmitter to Sands. “Bastard was planning to tape the whole meeting.”

Hull gives a theatrical frown, then looks up at me. “Is there any further point to this meeting, Cage? If this was just an excuse for you to entrap us, you should let us get on with our business.”

“The tape wasn'’t the point,” I say. “I’'ve just never seen a government attorney act with such cavalier disregard for the law, and I wanted some kind of record.”

“Sorry to disappoint. Sit down and speak your piece.”

As I take my chair, I realize there’s a man standing in the shadows behind Hull. He looks more like a Green Beret than an FBI agent. Quinn closes the door behind us, leaving six of us in the room. With an almost antiquated feeling of symmetry, Kelly stands behind me, Quinn behind Sands, and the Green Beret behind Hull.

“Well?” says Hull.

“I want to know the terms of your plea agreement with Sands. What happens to him after tonight, if the Po sting is successful?”

“He testifies against Po in federal court.”

“In exchange for?”

Hull shakes his head. “I'm not at liberty to disclose that.”

“Mr. Hull…that’s why we’re here. I think you’d do just about anything to get Po’s scalp, at this point. For instance, you might promise to let Sands keep his interest in Golden Parachute. You might even try to use some Homeland Security, national-interest bullshit to keep the State of Mississippi from prosecuting him on other charges. I'm here to make sure that doesn’'t happen.”

Sands looks expectantly at Hull, but Hull doesn’'t deliver the withering broadside Sands apparently expects.

“That'’s what I figured,” I say. “Well, it’s not going to happen.”

Hull sighs. “What exactly do you want?”

“I want to know that Sands isn’t going to vanish into federal custody the second Po is in your hands.”

“And how do I prove that to you? You want a letter of agreement?”

I chuckle at this. “I want plainclothes Natchez police detectives beside Sands from now until five minutes before Po’s expected touchdown, and within sight of him until the moment you take Po into custody.”

“He’s out of his fucking mind,” says Sands, not even deigning to look at me.

Hull gestures for the Irishman to be silent.

“That could create practical difficulties,” the lawyer says calmly. “If Po has anyone watching Sands—and he well may—then seeing men like that might spook him. Small-town police detectives don'’t have the training to blend into the scene I foresee tonight.”

“I'm not negotiating, Hull. I'm telling you what I need in order to give you the time you need to bust Po. Otherwise, we take Sands now. I’'ve got police standing by to arrest him, and I’'ve got the district attorney ready to take him before a grand jury in the morning.”

Sands shifts in his seat like a man preparing to spring to his feet. Quinn looks even more tense.

“Shad Johnson’s no longer playing for your team,” I tell Sands. “I’'ve got the evidence to bury you right now, and Shad knows it.”

Hull holds up his hands to calm his informant, and in this moment I sense the frightening tension between them. “Penn, you'’ve got to be reasonable here. You’ve got to try to see the larger picture.”

“I’'ve tried to do that, William. I honestly have. As a former prosecutor, I have a lot of empathy for your position. But the crimes your informant has committed in the past week alone—”

“Were part of the very operation that’s about to take place. The dogfighting—”

“Dogfighting doesn’'t even register on the scale he’s established in the past few days.”

Hull looks at his steel watch and winces. “Edward Po’s a well-known breeder of fighting dogs. Sands had to use whatever bait he could to lure Po onto U.S. soil.”

“That doesn’'t change the fact that every instance of it is a felony.”

“Christ, Cage, you can’t be

that

much of a Boy Scout. You worked in Houston for twelve years. You dealt with major crimes.”

“Mostly murder. Not this pseudo-spook stuff. That'’s why this case sticks in my craw. Jonathan Sands murdered or ordered the murders of Tim Jessup, Ben Li, and Linda Church, all employees of the

Magnolia Queen,

all of whom were in a position to supply enough evidence to put him in state prison for the rest of his life. He also ordered the kidnapping of Caitlin Masters. All those crimes are capital offenses in Mississippi. Tim Jessup was a friend of mine, but even if he weren’t, this man would not go unpunished. I don'’t give a damn what federal authority you try to invoke, once you have Po, this son of a bitch is going to jail. Either he does hard time as part of your plea with him, or Shad Johnson sends him to Parchman for murder and kidnapping.”

Sands leans in from my left and laughs in my face. “You don'’t get it, mate. If I don'’t cooperate, Hull doesn’'t get Po. And I don'’t cooperate unless I'm guaranteed immunity from prosecution.

Full

immunity. End of story.”

“Not quite,” I say. “If Edward Po doesn’'t show up for your little Roman spectacle tonight—and I’d lay ten-to-one odds that he won'’t—do you really believe that Hull’s going back to Washington empty-handed? After all the time and money he’s spent on this? No. In that case Quinn’s going to get the free pass, and

you’ll

wake up as the most vicious criminal in America. I can see the headlines now: ‘Irish mob man kills defenseless dogs, launders money for the Chinese triads. Possible links to terrorism.’”

As Quinn glares at me from behind Sands’s head, I see that Sands has obviously considered this possibility.

“After all,” I go on, “all we’re sure Seamus did is rape Linda Church and kill a few dogs. Maybe he killed Tim Jessup, maybe he didn't. But he can tell us everything

you

did. And without Po in hand, you’re the big fish everyone’s going to want to fry.”

“Why the fuck are we even listening to this?” Sands snaps, getting to his feet so fast that Quinn jumps back to get clear.

“Because I have evidence, Mr. Sands” I say evenly. “Hard evidence. I can bust you for money laundering right now. Chief Logan is standing by on the shore, and all the FBI agents in the world can’t stop him.” I lean back and look up at Sands with all the hatred in my heart flowing through my eyes. “This is still the United

States

of America, asshole.

That'’s

why you’re listening.”

Hull looks worried. “You don'’t have cops where somebody could see them, do you?”

“Take it easy, William. I want Po busted almost as badly as you do. I understand the priorities here. But I don'’t think he’s coming. And I'm making sure that in the heat of the moment, this psycho doesn’'t slip away to a fairy-tale ending.”

While Sands flexes his fists like a man preparing to beat down a door, Hull stands, turns his chair around, then straddles it and looks at me like a sergeant about to dress down his troops. I probably already have enough audio evidence to ruin Hull’s career, but I have a feeling we’re headed into serious criminal territory.

“Let me give you the facts of life,” the lawyer says in a stern voice. “Sands may be a psychopath, but who really gives a fuck? Do you think I’d be wasting my time with him if he couldn'’t deliver? The NSA confirmed that Po’s Dassault Falcon lifted off from Madrid Barajas Airport in Spain five hours ago. He was directly observed loading three Tosa Tokens aboard, and—”

“Tosa Tokens?”

“Fighting dogs, Cage! Po thinks he’s bringing them here to fight a man.”

The reality that Edward Po might actually be falling for Hull’s trap hits me for the first time, and the force of the realization shocks me. “How long till he gets here?”

“Barring unforeseen delay—like this absurd bullshit—three to four hours.”

Sands looks down at Hull. “You’d better straighten this bastard out, Will.”

“He’s seeing the light. Cage, do you know who you are in all this? I’'ve read your file from cover to cover. You think you’re Atticus Finch and Thomas Jefferson rolled into one, but I'’ll tell you who you are. Barney Fife. Barney fucking Fife, with one bullet in your gun, aimed straight at your own foot. I'm fighting for the national security of this nation, and you’re busting my balls over collateral damage that doesn’'t add up to one day’s casualties in Iraq or Afghanistan. Do you read me?”

“Loud and clear. But we’re not in Iraq. And the laws of this country apply to you as well as to Sands. When you gave me the proof of life I asked for yesterday, you proved yourself an accessory to kidnapping.”

Hull laughs outright. “You’re joking, right? Do you seriously think you’ll be able to trace that text message back to me? There are so many cutouts between those communications…shit, you won'’t even be permitted to access the records.” He gets to his feet and kicks over the chair he was straddling. “This meeting’s over.”

I stand also, knowing I’'ve got more evidence than I’d hoped for.

“All right,” I say with seeming resignation. “If Po is really coming, take your best shot at getting him. I want you to get him. But I want Natchez cops standing by within a half mile of the sting.”

Hull shakes his head. “We can’t risk it. I give you my word, Sands will still be on U.S. soil tomorrow. That'’s the best I can do.”

“You gave me your word that Caitlin Masters would be safe last night, but she was nearly killed by your informant’s attack dogs, and the woman she was being held with died as Sands’s prisoner. Your word means nothing to me. I'm calling in my cops.”

“We can’t let you do that.”

“How are you going to stop me? If I don'’t walk off this boat under my own power, Logan’s men come aboard. If we have a shoot-out, or even a standoff, Po’s jet is heading back to Spain.”

Hull looks at Sands, then back at me. “One man,” he says finally. “You can put one detective with us tonight.”

“No,” says Sands, feeling the tide turn against him.

“It makes no difference,” Hull says, looking hard at the Irishman.

“It does to me.”

“Well, that’s the way it is. Who do you want, Cage? Whoever it is, make sure he has a nice suit.”

“Kelly,” I say without hesitation.

“No fucking way,” blurts Quinn.

Sands, too, is shaking his head.

“Anybody else is like no guard at all,” I say. “Sands could put down a city cop without breaking stride. I want someone who can control him.”

“Kelly it is,” says Hull. “Does he own a suit?”

“He’ll have one in fifteen minutes.”

“Then we’re done here.” Hull nods at the door, and the Green Beret steps forward and opens it. Quinn and Sands look like they'’re on the ragged edge of making a move, but Hull’s bodyguard projects the feeling that he wasn'’t party to the firearms prohibition governing this meeting.

Kelly’s hand is in the small of my back, pushing me through the hatch. He clearly doesn’'t want the two of us left in the room with Sands and Quinn. As I pass into the corridor, I'm acutely conscious that I'm leaving behind the taped evidence that will give me control of William Hull, but there’s nothing to be done about this, short of fighting the two Irishmen for it. I'’ll have to trust that Logan and his men can get down here and retrieve the recorder without trouble.

What fills my mind as we move up the passageway behind Hull is the real possibility of nailing Edward Po. I never quite believed that the billionaire would risk stepping onto U.S. soil, but maybe Hull knew his prey well, and did what was required to draw him into the net.

At the elevator we all bunch up again as we wait for Quinn to arrive and punch in the security code. The other three guards have gone, but when the elevator arrives and the doors open, it’s all we can do to fit the six of us inside the car.

Seldom have I felt more free-floating testosterone than I do in this elevator. Sands and Kelly, predictably, have gained the back wall, but I have to stand with Quinn’s chest pressing into my back. I half expect the knife he used to slice open my belt to slide between my kidneys.

“Fifteen minutes,” Hull says, as the car stops on the main deck. “You don'’t have Kelly a suit by then, we’re leaving without him.”

“He’ll have it,” I say, my mind on the recorder downstairs as the doors open.

Hull and his man are first out. When they step around the partition, Hull beckons Kelly forward. As Kelly moves past me, I feel a hand grab my shirt and pull me backward, then a man’s breath in my ear. “Remember that night on your porch?” Sands whispers. “You make all the agreements you want with Hull, mate. Just remember this. Nothing in my world gets resolved on paper.

Nothing.

”

As I pull away, he twists a piece of flesh on my side hard enough to pop blood vessels, but nothing matters at this point. Nothing but signaling Chief Logan to get the recorder from below. Kelly fades back to me with a curious look, as though sensing that something has transpired, but I shake my head and push him forward.

Rounding the partition, I look up to the head of the escalator, but Logan isn’t there. A large crowd is upstairs, and I try to pick the chief from the moving mass of bodies as Kelly takes my wrist and tugs me forward.

The ring of a cell phone behind me makes me turn. When I do, I see Seamus Quinn holding his phone close to his ear, trying to hear above the jangling noise of the casino. I'm about to turn forward again when Quinn’s eyes go wide, and he grabs the arm of Jonathan Sands, who’s two feet to his right. Sands looks annoyed, but Quinn jerks him sideways and speaks urgently into his ear.

Every instinct tells me something has gone horribly wrong. Without even sighting Logan, I raise my hand to the top of my head and pat it three times. Sands’s eyes lock onto mine from a distance of ten feet, the malice in them absolute. For a brief time we are joined by mutual hatred, then his hand darts into his pocket, my eyes scarcely able to follow the swift movement.

A burst of white lights the night outside the casino, then a staccato blast like fireworks rattles the windows. The crowd falls into a shocked hush, and then the whole casino lurches away from the shore, sending hundreds of people reeling. As a collective scream of

panic fills the saloon, Sands gives me a savage grin, then turns and races toward the stern of the barge, Quinn close behind him.

“Get off the boat!”

Kelly shouts, knocking me aside as he flies past in pursuit.

“Go, go, go! I'’ll get the tape!”

CHAPTER

69

Water cascades from the sprinkler system, and alarms ring shrilly while a recorded voice directs people to the exits with absurd calm. The bow of the barge seems to be drifting away from the riverbank, slowly but with increasing speed, like a log being pulled into a flooding river. The sensation is eerie, as though a huge hotel ballroom had begun to spin on its axis.

A scream of terror draws my gaze to the escalator. Chief Logan stands at its head, shouting for calm. Below him, a surging mass of gamblers has clogged the motorized staircase. Many have fallen, and people higher up are trampling them in their headlong flight to reach the main deck. Logan tries to stop the stampede, but the crowd swells over him like a tide, everyone with a single thought in mind—reaching the main exit.

Whirling from the mob scene, I look for Kelly, but I can’t find him in the seething mass of bodies. Then, to my right, I see his blond ponytail disappearing through a service door disguised as a section of wall. Maybe the elevator has stopped working.

I charge through the door where Kelly disappeared and immediately hear footsteps on the staircase below. Leaning over the rail, I see the top of his head as he crashes through a fire door. Taking the stairs two at a time, I follow. Are Sands and Quinn somewhere ahead? Or is Kelly only after the tape? All I know is that whatever happened to

this vessel was triggered by Jonathan Sands. Someone phoned Quinn with information, he relayed it to Sands, and Sands triggered the explosions.

Beyond the fire door, I see Kelly sprinting down a narrow passage that seems to run the length of the lower deck. It’s the same corridor we were in only a minute ago. Ten yards past Kelly, Seamus Quinn veers right and disappears, and I realize he’s back in the room we just left—the torture room nicknamed the Devil’s Punchbowl.

Could Quinn know about the tape? Did someone betray the presence of the recorder?

Kelly darts though the hatch where Quinn disappeared. Before I can follow, the boat abruptly stops drifting, and I crash to the floor. Either the barge has hit something or it’s reached the limit of any mooring cables that remain intact. Scrambling to my feet, I move through the hatch after Kelly.

The interrogation room is lit only by red emergency lights. Kelly stands thirty feet from me on the landing of the metal stairs by the far wall, his back braced against a steel hatch. One arm is locked around Quinn’s neck, the other pins one of the security chief’s arms. Jonathan Sands crouches two steps down from the landing, both hands raised, his fingers curled inward. There’s blood on the side of his face. He seems to want to get to the hatch, but when he lunges toward it, Kelly flicks out a lightning kick, driving him back.

“Where’s the recorder?” I shout. “Did they get it?”

“I don'’t know!” Kelly answers, wrenching his arm tighter around Quinn’s neck.

The cart at the center of the room looks undisturbed. Before I can reach it, the boat shifts again, and a thunderous rumble rolls through the barge. Then a vibration like thousands of running feet rattles the hull. On the monitor screens to my right, I see screaming passengers trying frantically to escape the upper deck.

As Sands rushes the hatch once more and Kelly drives him back, I snatch open the lower door of the cart and probe with my hand, unwilling to take my eyes off Kelly. Feeling several hard objects, I rake everything onto the floor. The recording device is there, amid rolls of wire and duct tape, but I have to blink before I can take in what also lies beside the recorder: a tiny, antique-looking pistol with a leather string attached to its curved butt.

Walt Garrity’s derringer.

Jiao…

Sands’s lover obviously feared that he’d never be taken as easily as we’d thought. Scooping up the recorder, I stand without reaching for the gun. There’s no need for it.

“Kelly, let them go! I’'ve got it! Don’t risk your life!

They can’t get away!

”

Sands looks back at me and laughs, then makes another try for the hatch. Kelly drives him off with a kick, but as he does Quinn shifts in his grasp, and Kelly almost loses him.

“Danny and Carl are out there!” I shout. “It’s time to get off the boat! Carl can blow them away if they go through that hatch!”

“Sands still has the detonator!”

Kelly screams. “Call Logan! We need cops down here!”

As the significance of

detonator

hits me, Quinn smashes an elbow into Kelly’s chin, stunning him long enough for Sands to kick him away from the hatch. While Quinn engages Kelly, Sands spins the hatch wheel, then seizes the heavy metal door and throws it to the foot of the stairs with a clang. I drop to my knees, grabbing for the derringer, but too late. Kelly twists like a cat, flinging Quinn bodily over his shoulder in a judo throw. The Irishman’s legs slam the rim of the open hatch, and I hear the crack of bone. I'm running forward with the gun when Quinn snatches Kelly’s shirt from behind and yanks him backward with all his strength. Sands kicks out at the same moment, and Kelly tumbles through the open hatch, snatching Quinn after him as he falls out of the barge.

Sands and I are alone.

I stop at the foot of the stairs, aiming the derringer up at the Irishman’s back. He’s standing in the hatch, staring down at what must be Kelly and Quinn fighting in the water. Certain that Kelly can handle himself against Quinn, I'm tempted to run for the main deck, but I can’t leave Sands with a detonator in his hand—not if any unexploded charges remain aboard.

“Back away!” I yell. “Get back! We’re going up to the main deck!”

Sands looks over his shoulder and laughs again. “Look at those screens! Do you want to be trampled to death? Do you want to drown under a thousand people?”

The monitor screens are blinking erratically, but I can still see that the grand saloon is teeming with panicked gamblers who have nowhere to run. Sands is right. Trying for the main exit at this point would be crazy. And the likelihood that Logan and his squad can impose any kind of order on that mob is minuscule. Climbing the first two steps, I steady the tiny derringer in my right hand and aim between Sands’s shoulder blades.

“Look at me, damn it! Give me the detonator!”

Sands turns from the hatch and raises his right hand, turning a small metal box in the red light. “What are you going to do with that peashooter? You need to press that against a man’s belly to be sure of hitting him.”

I take another step upward, and Sands’s grin disappears. He looks out the hatch, curses, then turns back to me.

“That first charge was nothing. Primacord on the mooring cables. I can blow the bottom out of this tub anytime. You might hit me if you shoot, but that pimp gun won'’t kill me. Not before I push the button.”

Come on, Kelly,

I think, wishing the commando would catapult back through the hatch like a ninja assassin. The river can’t be more than three feet below the hatch, if that.

“They’re gone,” Sands says, reading my mind. “You got what you wanted, Cage. You threw a wrench into the works. You queered my deal with Hull and cost me my fucking casino. Jiao helped you, didn't she? She planted the recorder.”

“If you step through that hatch, a sniper’s going to blow your head off.”

Holding the detonator tight, Sands crouches and looks out over the darkening river. “I don'’t think so.”

“He’s got a night-vision scope.”

“Oh, I'm sure. But where is he?”

“Helicopter.”

“Well, then. You’re going to call him off.”

“Why would I do that?” I move one step higher.

Sands wields the detonator like a Taser. “Because if you don'’t, I'’ll send this bitch to the bottom. I’'ve got seven or eight hundred hostages in my hand.”

“You can’t destroy this boat while you’re still on it.”

Sands gives me a defiant sneer and presses the remote.

The

Magnolia Queen

shudders like a bell being pounded with a sledgehammer. When the reverberations subside, the sound of screams reaches my ringing ears. Whether they'’re coming from the speakers or from other parts of the casino I don'’t know, but I'm certain Sands has mortally wounded the barge.

“If they don'’t seal the forward hold in sixty seconds,” he says, “this tub is going to the bottom. Call off your sniper, Cage. I have two more charges left.”

The barge shifts beneath my feet, wallowing in the river.

“Okay! I'’ll do it.” I take out my cell phone and pretend to make a call, but there’s no way I can let Sands leave this hold. If he gets twenty feet from the hull, he’ll blow every charge he has left just for spite.

“Call him off,” Sands says, scanning the river from the hatch. “I'm leaving. You can stay and die with the white trash and niggers you love so dearly.”

Walt’s derringer spits flame as I pull the trigger.

Sands’s eyes register an instant of terror, but his fear fades into a smirk when the ricochet pings off against the steel wall.

“What did I tell you?” he cries, laughing. “One shot left.”

“No. I’'ve got four left, thanks to a good friend. And your old lover.”

Sands’s arrogance twists into rage before my eyes. He whistles shrilly, then spins toward the hatch as I fire again. A bloom like a red paintball round blossoms on his right shoulder blade, then he drops through the hatch.

No splash,

I'm thinking when I hear metal scrape behind me. Whirling, I see only a blur of white against the red wash of emergency lights.

I twist away, but too late.

The jaws of Sands’s Bully Kutta clamp down on my left upper arm, then hurl me bodily off the steps and slam me to the deck. Releasing my arm to go for my throat, the dog opens its maw and lunges downward, digging into my shoulder and neck. With the speed of blind reflex I whip my gun hand under its jaw and pull the derringer’s trigger. There’s a muffled pop, then the Bully Kutta lurches and topples onto its side, paws paddling the air as it voids its bladder and bowels on the deck.

The sound of a revving outboard motor echoes through the room. Scrambling up to the hatch, I look down and see Sands seated three feet below me in a gray Zodiac raft. Bright red blood covers his back and right side, but his right hand still holds the detonator, which has several buttons on its face. With his left hand, he’s struggling to unmoor the raft from a cleat mounted on the barge’s side. Bracing myself in the hatch, I point the derringer down at him.

“Turn off the motor!”

The Irishman looks up in exhausted surprise, then holds up the detonator like a cross against a vampire. “Do you really want to die here, Cage?”

“No more than you! That sniper’s an ex-marine. The same one who shot your dog on the island. He can put a round through your brainstem before you push your buttons.”

Sands looks over the darkening river, then winces in pain. “I'’ll take my chances. I’'ve still got a few lives left.”

As he struggles to free the line with his good hand, I swing Walt’s derringer to the left and fire a round through the Zodiac’s side.

Sands screams in rage at the hiss of escaping air, but the Zodiac’s line is almost free of the cleat. Though part of the raft is deflating, it still looks seaworthy. And while Carl is out there somewhere, he has no idea what’s happening in this small recess in the barge’s side. He and McDavitt are probably trying to rescue people from the deck of the sinking casino—or from the river itself.

I'm on the verge of firing at Sands’s head when I see riverbank twenty yards behind him. What I should see is three-quarters of a mile of water and the Louisiana shore. The

Queen

’s stern must have broken away from the bank and now must be pointing downstream. The three huge ramps providing egress from the boat must be hanging in the main channel of the river. Escape for the passengers is truly impossible. If Sands gets clear of the barge and blows the remaining charges, hundreds will drown in the fast-moving water of the cut bank.

Sands shouts in triumph as the line comes free.

Afraid of missing with a headshot, I aim at the center of his chest and fire. The shock of the impact jolts him. He looks down at his chest, then up at me in amazement. While his eyes bulge with incomprehension, I leap for the bloody hand holding the detonator.

My momentum topples us both into the river. The cold water shocks me, but I scrabble for his hand, my only thought to submerge the detonator long enough to short it out. The metal box goes under, but Sands drives his arm upward and gets it clear again, just out of reach. To keep it there, he clings to a length of cable on the barge’s side with his good arm, while I cling to him. He’s wheezing with every breath, but hatred still burns like molten glass in his eyes.

I must have hit a lung, not his heart….

Unable to reach the detonator, I climb Sands’s bloodied body like a drowning man, and my weight begins to push him down. Using the cable for leverage, he snaps up both knees and almost jars me loose. The powerful current tugs at my body, and I wonder briefly where Kelly is.

Sands brings up his knees again, but this time I'm ahead of him, clawing at his chest, searching for the bullet hole. When my forefinger finds the opening, I drive it deep into the hole and tear at the muscle, hoping to find his heart.

It’s all he can do to stay afloat,

I think, but as I turn to look for the detonator, Sands slams his forehead into my right ear. There’s a flash of white, and my hands go limp, but as the river begins to pull me away, I feel his shirtsleeve tangled in my fingers, and I yank it down with all my strength.

This time the detonator goes under and stays there. Sands bellows and tries to fight, but his strength is failing. His lung must be filling with blood. I'm riding his arm now, leverage on my side, the detonator wedged against my groin.

With his last reserve of strength, Sands releases the cable and smashes his good hand into my face. So powerful is this blow that I nearly lose consciousness, but one thought glows in my fading mind:

Hang on to the detonator.

He pounds the side of my head again and again, but each blow carries less force than the last, until the beating ceases and the arm in my hands goes limp. Then I'm clinging not to Sands, but to the crumpling Zodiac, and Sands is spinning out into the river.

CHAPTER

70

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

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

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

the driveway, and no sign of Kelly. Unsure what to do, we decided to walk down to the pier and sit by the lake.

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

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

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

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

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

“Are we off the record?”

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

“Quinn’s dead.”

She sighs deeply, but asks nothing more.

Caitlin has been strangely quiet tonight, especially during the forty-five minute ride from town. The chaos that followed the explosions on the

Magnolia Queen

meant one of the biggest news stories in the town’s history, but she has acted as if covering it hardly interests her. I think her greatest fear was that I would not survive the near-disaster, which she’d watched from the bluff near the

Examiner

offices. When I called her cell phone and told her that the Coast Guard had rescued me from the river, something in her gave way, and a sort of delayed shock set in—probably caused by whatever she’d endured while being held prisoner with Linda Church. As we drove through the dark farmland between Natchez and Ferriday, we simply held hands and dwelled in our own thoughts.

There was a lot I didn't know when I was dragged aboard the Coast Guard river tender that responded to the distress call from the

Magnolia Queen

. I didn't know what had happened to the barge itself, or to the passengers, and it took some time for Logan, the Coast Guard, and the fire chief to determine those things.

Jonathan Sands had rigged all the mooring cables with Primacord—a ropelike explosive with a wide range of uses—in case the

meeting I had demanded proved to be a trap. The foundering casino would provide the diversion he needed to escape, should it prove necessary. By sheer luck, one of the wireless detonators failed, leaving a single cable intact. This proved strong enough to keep the casino from careening downriver toward the twin bridges a mile downstream. There were 753 people aboard the

Queen

when the cables snapped, and no lifeboats are required on such a barge. Had the casino collided with the bridge pilings, many lives could have been lost. But that possibility paled compared with what might have happened.

As Sands had claimed in the hold, two unexploded charges remained in the bowels of the barge when he went through the hatch—not Primacord, but C-4. If he had blasted out the bottom of the

Magnolia Queen

while she was in the main channel of the river, everyone aboard would almost certainly have perished. Despite having a brave crew, the Coast Guard vessel at Natchez doesn’'t have the resources to rescue large numbers of people from a fast-sinking ship.

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

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

The status of Edward Po remains unknown. Just before Logan

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

I’'ve wondered privately whether Jiao—who also watched the explosions from the bluff—might have warned her uncle that he hadn'’t chosen the best day for a visit to the United States. But I suspect it was one of the young Chinese prostitutes aboard the

Queen.

Jiao has not fled the city, as I feared she might, and she has reaffirmed her intent to sign a plea agreement and provide a full description of the stunning variety of criminal activities overseen by Jonathan Sands.

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

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

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

“What?”

“A light. There.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That'’s him! Come on.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Getting closure,” he replies.

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

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

Caitlin turns her captain’s chair sideways and takes my hand in hers. Normally, I’d expect her to be chattering about what happened to the

Magnolia Queen,

or badgering Kelly about our destination, but she seems withdrawn, even depressed. For the first time it strikes me that she might not be thinking about the recent past, but the future. About leaving Natchez again.

Leaving me.

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

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

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

“Take my word for it.”

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

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

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

“What are we

doing

?” Caitlin asks, looking up at the overhanging limbs. “didn't you tell me water moccasins hang off of those limbs and drop into fishing boats?”

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

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

“Everybody good?”

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

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

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

Caitlin leaps from her seat and seizes my arm. “What the hell is

that

? Penn? What are they?”

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

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

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

“What

are

those things?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now he has her attention. “Yes.”

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

“I remember.”

“Well, this time you get a vote.”

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

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

“What’s he doing?” Caitlin asks.

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

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

closure.

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

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

Why has he done this?

I wonder. Kelly and I have come to this fork in the road before, and I chose the rule of law. Why would he think I’d decide any different now? My decision to assassinate Sands was defensive; killing Quinn would be revenge. Also, stupid. We need Quinn as a witness against Sands.

Although,

I reflect,

if Jiao continues to cooperate with Shad, Quinn’s testimony would be superfluous.

There’s something going on here that I don'’t understand. Could Kelly simply be flirting with an idea that he knows I'’ll never agree to, but one I might push far enough to teach a murderer a lesson he’ll never forget?

No.

He wouldn'’t waste his time hazing somebody. He’s hard-core, all the way. But whatever he’s up to, one thing is sure: He won'’t kill Quinn unless Caitlin and I tell him to do it.

“I thought this guy was dead,” I say.

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

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

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

And that’s when I realize that Kelly’s decision to bring us here has nothing to do with me. He’s done this for Caitlin’s sake.

Because he knows something you don'’t,

says a childlike voice within me.

Something awful.

My throat tightens as I perceive something huge and dark beyond the surface of things, like a misshapen form behind a curtain I’'ve been unwilling to pull back. Did Quinn’s bruises and blackened eyes result from his fight on the

Magnolia Queen

? Or when Kelly uprooted every detail of his crimes from the toxic soil of his memory?

Kelly knows what happened in the dog kennel,

says the voice.

And whatever it was, he thinks she needs to witness this kind of punishment to exorcise it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, he’s serious, all right.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The satisfaction I feel at the sound of fear in his voice cannot be denied. “American alligator,” I inform him. “

Alligator mississippiensis.

I'm sure you'’ve seen them on TV.”

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

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

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

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

“What didn't he do?”

“He didn't

stop.

It was…unforgivable.”

Anger like corrosive acid burns the lining of my heart.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Cage, listen—”

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

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

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

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

car fender.

”

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

“This is a unique situation,” Kelly says with relish. “

Lots

of gators out there tonight. Protective females, territorial males.” He glances back at Quinn. “They don'’t need to see you, man. They

smell

you. Which reminds me…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I wouldn'’t do that,” Kelly advises. “I’d swim for it.

Real

slow. Alligators have some kind of organ that picks up vibrations in the water.”

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

“Save your breath,” mutters Kelly.

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

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

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

Panic arcs from Quinn’s eyes.

“Do you have any idea what she went through?” Caitlin asks. “She

hanged

herself because of what you did.”

“There you go!” he cries. “She killed her

self.

That'’s not murder!”

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

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

“Linda

begged

you to stop,” she says. “She begged you, but you kept on. She was

sick.

She was in pain. But you wouldn'’t stop.”

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

“

Liar!

He beat you for it.”

“What do you think that was but

show

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

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

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

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

“Yes.”

“He’s guilty, Penn.”

“I know.”

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

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

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

really

happened in the kennel.”

Caitlin raises the flashlight as though to strike him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quinn rants on, like a man driving a car a hundred miles an hour along a cliff edge. “She took it in every hole, mate! She was scared at first, but I went deeper than you ever have. And she

loved

it. She told me that. She’ll never forget it, and you won'’t either. No matter what you do to me tonight, you’ll lie awake thinking how I filled her up—”

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

A hostage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Do you see him?” I ask.

“No.”

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

“Weren’t we?” Kelly asks.

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

“You believe me, don'’t you?”

“Of course.”

What else can I say?

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

“I know.”

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

Caitlin stiffens. “What’s happening?”

“It’s starting,” says Kelly. “Jesus.”

“He’s dead, isn’t he?”

A shriek of terror pierces the night.

“Guess not.”

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

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

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

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

“I need light.”

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

“My God,” breathes Caitlin.

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

“We should go too.”

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

“Let’s

go,

” Caitlin pleads. “I want to forget this.”

I nod, thinking,

You never will.

EPILOGUE

FIVE DAYS LATER

The season has turned at last. Before we even got off Lake St. John, a wall of rain rolled out of the west and covered the land for twelve hours before moving on. Behind the rain came a cold wind that took the last illusions of summer with it. The leaves on most trees are still green, some so dark they'’re almost black, but now the bluff is splashed with orange and yellow sprays of autumnal color.

Caitlin and I are on the river again, this time in Drew Elliott’s old Bayrider, which I borrowed from his storage building. We’'ve come to spread Linda Church’s ashes. We chose the river because it was the place where Tim and Linda found each other. On shore, Tim belonged to his wife and son. But on the

Magnolia Queen,

where he went to work as a sort of penance for his squandered birthright, he found another lost soul who might have become much more, had she been born with Tim’s advantages.

Caitlin and I haven'’t spoken much since the night Quinn died on Lake St. John. I’'ve spent most of my private time with Annie and my parents, mulling over the past and wondering about our future, but the aftermath of what happened on the

Magnolia Queen

has kept Caitlin busy day and night. In addition to writing stories and fending off requests from other media, she has funded and overseen the effort to rescue the fighting dogs Sands kept on both sides of the

river, and also to return the many stolen pets to their owners. Some of the fighting dogs had to be put down, but others will be adopted. So far, twenty-three dogs and cats have been returned to homes as far away as Little Rock, Arkansas. I suspect that this whirlwind of activity has helped distract Caitlin from the aftermath of what we did on the lake that night.

Kelly left town the morning after Quinn died. We walked down to the bluff together and watched the big diesel boats push barges up and down the river for a while. The

Magnolia Queen

had already been towed to a refitting yard for repairs, so once again Pierce’s Landing Road led only to an empty stretch of water. Leaning on the fence near the gazebo, Kelly told me that he’d spent the previous night reading a copy of Mark Twain’s

Life on the Mississippi

that my father had lent him. It seemed an odd choice after what we’d done at the lake, but I supposed Kelly needed a way to come down from all that had happened that final day.

“You know,” he said, “if you count the Missouri as the main channel of this river, the Mississippi was the longest river in the world until army engineers shortened it by three hundred miles. Longer than both the Nile and the Amazon.”

“I didn't know that.”

“Me either. In 1811, there was an earthquake so big that part of the river flowed backward for hours.”

“I have heard that story. New Madrid, right?”

Kelly nodded. “Created a hole so big that the lower Mississippi flowed backward until the hole filled up. There’s a lake there now. It’s in Tennessee.”

Kelly rarely chatters to hear his own voice, so his musings prompted a question. “Why do I get the feeling there’s a message here? Are you going Zen on me?”

“Maybe so, grasshopper.

Change.

That'’s the message. Man wants to control this river, but the river wants to go where it will. And in the end, it will.”

“I still don'’t get it. Beyond the obvious, I mean.”

“Look out there,” he said, gesturing with his arm to take in the great sweep of the river. “River pilots like Sam Clemens had to learn everything about the Mississippi. Every bend, cut, crossing, chute, island, hill, sandbar, and snag along thirteen hundred miles.

Then they had to learn it all over again on each passage, because the river changed that fast. Not many men had the brains to do that, and even fewer had the guts to risk the lives of a boat full of people at every turn. Steamboats wrecked all the time.”

“Uh-huh. And?”

“Well…I could see how a river pilot might start feeling like his job was futile—even absurd. There certainly were easier ways to make money.”

I suddenly saw where he was going. “Like writing, for instance?”

“Well, Twain did a little writing, yeah. But he did his share of piloting too. And he was proud of it.”

“How much piloting did he do?”

“I'm not sure.” Kelly turned to me, his blue eyes as mild as ever. “But I know one thing. He never walked off a boat halfway down the river, leaving his passengers stranded in a storm.”

I nodded to show that I’d taken Kelly’s point, but my thoughts weren’t on local politics. Despite my promise to Caitlin, Seamus Quinn’s final raving words had been preying on my mind since the last night on the lake.

“What’s wrong?” Kelly asked. “Something’s eating you, man. Cough it up.”

“Do you think Caitlin was telling the truth? About Quinn?”

His face darkened. “You think she’d lie about being raped?”

“Maybe. To protect me. So I’d never have to think about it. I want to believe her, but…she was ready to have you throw Quinn out of the boat. She wouldn'’t have done that unless he’d done something terrible to

her

—personally.”

Kelly shook his head. “I disagree. For some people, seeing somebody suffer an atrocity can be as bad as it happening to them. Worse, sometimes. They feel impotent, you know? Guilty because they stood by and did nothing.”

Uncertainty must have shown on my face, because Kelly put his hand on my shoulder and said, “I'm telling you, that’s what happened with Caitlin and Linda. Quinn didn't rape Caitlin.”

“He described her naked body.”

Kelly sighs heavily. “Bro. I was alone with him for a long time before you guys showed up. There’s

nothing

I don'’t know about that cocksucker. He saw her naked, yeah, but Sands showed up and

made him give her clothes back. Quinn never raped her, Penn. He wanted to. But if he had, Sands would have killed him. You can let go of that.”

I felt shamed by the rush of relief that coursed through me after this assurance, but the idea that Caitlin might have chosen to suffer something so terrible alone rather than let me try to help her had been more than I could bear. “Thanks,” was all I could manage.

An hour after this conversation, Danny McDavitt picked Kelly up at the Natchez airport and flew him to Baton Rouge. By now he’s back in the mountains of Afghanistan, working for an outfit I never heard of, but almost certainly some version of Blackhawk Risk Management. The last thing Kelly said to me was “Spartacus.” Then he handed me a scrap of paper with a phone number on it. I embraced him, shook hands with McDavitt, and drove back to my house on Washington Street to try to sort out my feelings.

Each day since then has brought more developments, some surprising, others predictable. Jiao has cooperated with Shad Johnson’s office, but not yet with the FBI. Most of her testimony up to this point has implicated Jonathan Sands, but not her uncle in Macao. I can’t fault the woman for her survival instincts. Edward Po is not someone you want angry at you.

No one knows this better than Jonathan Sands. The former general manager of the

Magnolia Queen

seems quite content to be tried in Mississippi for murder rather than in federal court on money-laundering charges. Without William Hull to protect him—and with Po at large in the world, rather than in custody—Sands would be a fool to implicate the crime lord in even a misdemeanor. Sands may hope to escape Po’s legendary vengeance by remaining silent, or he may simply be posturing to lure the Justice Department into offering him protective custody in exchange for his testimony. Either way, I don'’t think he has much chance of living out the year. The State of Mississippi has no intention of turning Sands over to federal authorities without a fight, and Edward Po’s arm is very long.

As a powerful Chinese national, Po will not be extradited to the U.S. even if Sands survives to testify against him. But under the broad powers of the Patriot Act, he will be declared a terrorist and stripped of his U.S. assets. Since Po legally owns less than five percent of the Golden Parachute Gaming Corporation, Craig Weldon,

the California entertainment lawyer, will finally gain control of the company he naďvely thought was his in the first place. The Golden Parachute casino boats will run as legitimate businesses now, and continue to pump much needed money into Mississippi’s struggling economy.

William Hull’s days as a rogue lawyer are over, but I doubt he’ll spend a day in prison. Like the men he pursued, Hull was the type to maintain detailed records of all he did in the service of his masters. Such is the currency of politics, and Hull was, if anything, a political creature. This was verified when Shad Johnson received a call from the Director of Homeland Security, asking that Hull be released into federal custody. To Shad’s credit, he called to ask my opinion before he agreed. After some thought, I decided that I had no moral authority to judge Hull. Last week, I almost ordered Kelly to assassinate Jonathan Sands without even the semblance of due process. As for what happened on Lake St. John…though I'm loath to admit it, the difference between Hull and myself is one of degree rather than kind.

No one has learned the fate of Seamus Quinn. Perhaps those who rolled over in their beds during the wee hours of that night on Lake St. John have an inkling that something happened, but gunshots are common there, and it would take a small skirmish to warrant a call to the sheriff’s department. The ignorance of the public doesn’'t mean Quinn is forgotten. Kelly will remember him as one more face in the shadow gallery of those who saw him last upon the earth. For Kelly, the existentialist, there is no moral issue: The deed is done, today is a new day. For Caitlin and me, however, the thing is more complex. Here in this place where the past is never dead, or even past, Quinn rises between us at odd moments, most often when we moralize or make the easy generalizations that we as “liberals” tend to make. Caitlin now knows that all the fine words spoken down the centuries mean nothing when you have watched someone remorselessly brutalize a member of your tribe—even if that tribe includes all the women of the world. When offered a choice between certain death for the transgressor or a fair trial with the prospect of acquittal, she came close to choosing death. I did also. Moreover, she did not shy from delivering blows herself. The temptation we felt that night haunts us both and makes us question all we’d stood for until last week.

The awful philosophical musings that Quinn shared with Caitlin and Linda in the kennel are partly true, and they echo what Kelly told Caitlin in Chris Shepard’s lake house:

We’re still in the cave.

As with the dogs that Sands twisted into killers, there are urges in the blood that that no amount of socialization will ever remove. Lies and cruelty and murder are in us all.

All.

“Is that it?” Caitlin asks, pointing to a deep seam in the overgrown riverbank.

“Maybe,” I say, throttling back and getting to my feet in the gently rocking boat. “I just don'’t know.”

The “it” she’s referring to is the Devil’s Punchbowl. The real one. We figured that since the great defile lies north of town, it would be a good landmark to use for spreading Linda’s ashes on the water. From there they would drift down past the remaining casinos, then under the bridges and past the old plantations where Sands imprisoned dogs and women alike, as other men had done before him. Three or four days later, what’s left of Linda Church would flow through New Orleans and out into the Gulf of Mexico.

“I don'’t think we’re going to find it without a GPS,” I confess. “The bank’s still too overgrown.”

Caitlin shrugs. “It doesn’'t matter. We’re far enough north. Let’s do it out in the main channel.”

I turn the boat to port and push the throttle forward. When we’re midway between Mississippi and Louisiana, I kill the engine. I don'’t like doing that in the middle of the river, but given the occasion, it seems necessary. Caitlin removes a simple bronze urn from beneath one of the seats and rests it on the gunwale.

“Should we say something?” I ask.

“Anything we say now is too late.”

Squinting into the sun, she looks back at Natchez high on the bluff, then across at the levee on the Louisiana side. I don'’t know what she’s thinking, but I don'’t intend to disturb her. The extremity of what she endured with Linda in the kennel remains unknown to me. And while I take Kelly at his word that Quinn never raped Caitlin, the few details she has revealed were enough to convince me that Seamus Quinn deserved an express ticket to hell. Whatever

really happened, it inspired Caitlin to pay for Linda’s cremation and memorial service, which was attended by a handful of cocktail waitresses and no one else.

“I'’ll never forget her,” Caitlin says, still looking westward toward the place of their captivity.

“She’d be glad to know that.”

“She would. She had a high opinion of me, for some reason. She taught me how lucky I was to have the childhood I had. I'm not a poor little rich girl anymore. Linda gets the credit for that.”

I smile at this rare display of self-deprecation.

“You want to know a secret?” she says, removing the lid from the urn. The breeze catches some dust from the opening and sends it dancing over the water like a swarm of gnats.

“Sure.”

Caitlin raises her eyes until we’re looking directly at each other. “I sprinkled some of this over Tim’s grave this morning.”

“Did you really?”

“I couldn'’t see the harm. Julia will never know, and it would have meant the world to Linda.”

“To Tim too.” I can’t help but smile. “Just when I start believing you’re a real cynic, you show your romantic streak.”

Caitlin turns back to the water. “I’'ve always been a romantic. You know that. Here goes nothing.”

Lifting the urn by its base, she flings the ashes far over the orange-red water. A hiss like falling rain reaches the boat, and then only a small cloud of dust hangs over the river, dissipating slowly in the wind.

“How long till she gets to New Orleans?” Caitlin asks.

“That depends on a lot of things. No more than a week. Maybe sooner.”

She watches the ashes drift away from the boat. “The other day, you asked me if I’d learned anything about Tim’s last minutes while I was with Linda. I did, actually. Quinn told her about it between the rapes. To torment her.”

“Christ.”

“I'm going to tell you, but I don'’t ever want to talk about it again. Nothing about Quinn.”

“All right.”

Caitlin sits on one of the padded seats and crosses her legs. She tugs at the end of her ponytail as she speaks, her gaze on the fiberglass deck. “When Tim stole the DVD from the

Magnolia Queen,

there was already a homing device on his car. Quinn tracked him sometimes to see if he was at Linda’s apartment. Ben Li woke up and called Quinn to warn him just after Tim left the casino. Quinn and a couple of goons tracked Tim up to the cemetery in a security van. Then they switched on a cell phone jammer and started hunting. They found Tim’s car right away. They left one guy guarding it, then fanned out through the graveyard. Tim must have been hiding the DVD in the tree about then.”

“Because he couldn'’t find me.”

Caitlin pauses, then nods in sober agreement. “After he hid the disc, Tim somehow got back to his car and overpowered the guard, then took off for town. But Quinn had already called for help. The second vehicle blocked the road, so Tim turned and headed out Cemetery Road as fast as he could.”

“That'’s when he made the voice memo in his phone.”

“Right. The plan he mentioned in his memo was simple. He ran his car off the cliff into the Devil’s Punchbowl and dived out at the last second. He was trying to make them think he’d spun out and killed himself.”

“Why didn't it work?”

“Think about it.”

This takes only a moment. “Dogs.”

“

Dog, singular. The backup team had brought Sands’s Bully Kutta in the second vehicle. Tim hid in the woods across the road from the Punchbowl, but he didn't have a chance with that monster hunting him.”

“My God,” I whisper, remembering the massive white dog pinning me to the wall of my house.

Caitlin closes her eyes. Recounting this is obviously a struggle for her. “The dog mauled Tim pretty badly, as you saw. But the real torture happened in the backseat of the SUV. They were taking him back to the Queen to question him with electricity, but naturally Quinn couldn'’t wait. He beat Tim with a club to subdue him, then started on him with a cigarette.” She wrings her hands as though unsure what to do with them. “Quinn told Linda a lot of horrible

things, but I think he was just trying to make her suffer. Tim was only in the SUV for a couple of minutes. At least I hope he was.”

“A couple of minutes of fire is more pain than most people can imagine.”

Caitlin pulls her jacket tighter around her. “Tim had passed out by the time they reached the bluff—or so they thought. But just as they passed Bowie’s Tavern, he exploded off the seat and started hitting everyone in sight. Then he grabbed his cell phone and jumped out of the SUV.”

“Where the witnesses first saw him.”

“I doubt Tim even knew where he was when he started running.”

My throat constricts when I think of Tim giving his last reserves of strength to escape his torturers. By then he must have been thinking only of Julia and his son. But now I remember Logan telling me that Tim tried to call me just before he went over the bluff. This memory brings blood to my face and tears to my eyes.

“It was Quinn who chased him?” I whisper.

“Yes. I think Quinn panicked. They switched on the jammer to stop Tim from calling anybody, but Quinn wasn'’t sure he could get Tim back into the vehicle before a crowd gathered. That'’s why he shot him.”

“They would have killed him in the end anyway.”

“Yes.” Caitlin reaches out and touches my hand. “Penn, there’s a reason I told you this story. I wouldn'’t want you to have that stuff in your head unless I thought it was necessary.”

“What do you mean?”

“You blame yourself for Tim’s death. I know it. I don'’t think you could have done what we did at the lake unless you did.”

My throat is so tight that breath can hardly pass through it. She’s right. When Kelly shoved Quinn off the boat, I didn't protest because I had focused all my guilt and self-disgust on him. But Quinn’s death has not lightened my guilt—or eased my suffering.

“Look at me,” Caitlin says. “Sit down and look at me.”

I do.

“You think Tim died because you were late for that meeting.”

“didn't he?”

“No. He died because he put himself into a situation he didn't understand, with some very bad people. Only one thing would be

different today if you had showed up at the cemetery on time. You’d be dead too.”

“You don'’t know that. I had a gun with me.”

Caitlin shakes her head. “Don’t kid yourself. You and Tim were no match for Quinn, his gang, and that dog. You were lucky to get off the

Queen

alive the other day, and you were only fighting Sands.”

She’s right again. “I know that. My real mistake was letting Tim go forward at all. I knew what could happen when—”

“Stop,” she says sharply. “You have to stop. You’ll drive yourself crazy. Do you want me to spend the rest of my life torturing myself for not saving Linda?”

“You couldn'’t have—” “

Stop.

You have to let go, Penn. Now, out here, today. And I mean all of it. Tim, Quinn, everything. When you start this boat again, we’re going to leave it behind us, in the river.”

She stands and comes to my seat, then pulls my head against her abdomen and runs her fingers through my hair. I haven'’t been this way with her in so long that a dizzying feeling comes over me.

“Are you still planning to resign?” she asks softly.

When I don'’t answer, she says, “Paul Labry must have mentioned your talk with him to someone before he died, because the rumor’s already spreading.”

“I know. Drew asked me about it when I called to borrow this boat.”

Caitlin steps backward and looks down expectantly. “Well?”

She’s waiting for me to say yes. Hoping for it. I can see that as plainly as the sun over the river. But from the moment Kelly gave me his Mark Twain speech on the bluff, I’'ve been questioning my decision. Surprisingly, my father gave me his blessing only a day after Kelly left. The two had evidently discussed my dilemma, and Dad was aware that my reluctance to disappoint him had already kept me in office longer than I might have stayed otherwise. He told me that, considering all that had happened, he wouldn'’t think less of me if I felt I had to step down. I don'’t know if he meant that, but he said it, and he said it knowing that if I resigned, I would probably move Annie to a new town far away. But yesterday, as I watched two black men in overalls lower Paul Labry’s casket into the earth not far

from Tim’s grave, I knew with utter certainty that if I resigned, I would think less of myself for the rest of my life.

“It would be wrong to quit now,” I say in a shaky voice. “I wish that weren’t the case. But I made a commitment to the town. I made promises, and people believed me. If Paul were still alive, I might feel differently. But now…as badly as I want to go away with you, I don'’t feel I should leave the job in the hands of those most likely to get it.”

Caitlin’s eyes narrow for a few seconds, then she turns to her right, looking out over the water. She’s hiding tears.

“Was that a no?”

Despite my best intentions, the truth emerges when I speak. “No. No matter what it costs me, I can’t lose you again. I can’t do it.”

She raises a hand to her face and wipes her eyes. “Then I'’ll stay.”

The words don'’t quite register at first. “You don'’t mean that.”

She turns to face me, her green eyes wide and filled with resolve. “I do. I'’ll stay until the end of your term. For two years, I'’ll use all my power to make this town worthy of Tim’s death, and of what you'’ve worked for. I'’ll fight to make it a place where I can feel good about Annie living and going to school.”

Blinking in disbelief, I feel the first rush of euphoria that comes with the knowledge that life is granting you the grace of a dream realized. “Caitlin, you don'’t—”

“Wait a second. I have one condition.”

“What? We leave town after my term is up?”

Her face tightens with irritation. “Would you let me talk?”

“Sorry.”

Holding up two fingers, she gestures at me like the beautiful schoolteacher of some little boy’s dreams. “After two years, we look hard at what we’ve accomplished, then reassess where we are.”

“Of course. Absolutely.”

“That wasn'’t my condition. That'’s a given.”

“Oh.”

She lowers her hand and squares her shoulders like a woman about to walk to the end of a very high diving platform. “My condition is that you marry me.”

At first I think she’s joking, but I’'ve never seen her look more serious.

“Don’t fall down with joy,” she says.

“I'm shocked, that’s all. The way you'’ve been acting for the past few days—”

“Penn, you’re the dumbest smart man I’'ve ever met. Annie needs a mother, not a girlfriend hanging around year after year.”

The depth of her commitment hits me like a sudden pitch of the boat. “I agree,” I say softly.

“She needs a sister too. Or a brother, if that’s the best we can do. I'm thirty-five, and I'm not getting any younger.”

The laughter I hear is mine. “You’re moving pretty fast, aren'’t you?”

“Have you ever known me to move any other way?”

“No.”

“Well, then,” she says, her face still severe. “You should probably kiss me now.”

Reaching out, I take her hand and pull her toward me. For the first time in a year and a half, this intimacy is not a dream or a memory, but real. She hesitates, then spreads her palm flat on my chest and smiles with such intensity that her eyes shine.

“I’'ve missed you,” she says. “I’'ve missed you so much.”

“Why didn't you let me know?”

“Because it was everything or nothing. It had to be.”

Before I can speak again, she leans forward and brushes her lips against mine. This close, her scent is overwhelming. Taking her in my arms, I kiss her as I longed to the first time we were ever alone, and she melts against me. When she finally pulls back, her cheeks are flushed, her eyes bright and wet.

“Do you remember our first time?” she asks.

“The party at that surgeon’s house. In the garden. Before the Del Payton case broke.”

“Does it feel the same to you?”

“Yes. No. As good as that was, this is better.”

She closes her eyes as though saying a silent prayer. “Was that your first kiss after your wife died?”

“Yes.”

“I’'ve always wondered that.”

“You must have known.”

She opens her eyes and touches my right cheek with her finger. “I thought it was. I wanted to think it. That'’s why I never asked.”

Over Caitlin’s shoulder, I see a long string of barges pushing around the north bend of the river. “When can we tell Annie?” I ask, moving behind the wheel and starting the engine.

“Today. It’s long overdue.”

“What about asking your father’s permission, all that?”

“We’re pretty old for that, aren'’t we? He’d love it, of course.”

“It’s the right thing. In this case, anyway.”

Spying the barges, Caitlin stows the empty urn, then sits in the passenger seat. “Do whatever you want about that. But I'm about to surprise you.”

“Oh, God. Are you pregnant? With a little filmmaker?”

She smacks me on the shoulder hard enough to bruise. “It’s about the wedding.”

“Let me guess. No fuss, no church, just a quick trip to Fiji or somewhere.”

“Boy, you

are

dumb. I want the church, the dress, engraved invitations, a string quartet, the whole thing. I know it’s all bullshit, but I want it anyway.”

“I literally can’t believe that.”

She smiles broadly, elated at having surprised me. “If I'm going to stay in Mississippi, I'm taking the good with the bad. Come on, let’s go before that barge runs us over.”

Putting the boat into gear, I push the throttle forward, make a wide turn, and head downstream.

“The day we get married,” she says above the roar of the wind, “I'm going to pour a glass of champagne into this river. Don’t let me forget.”

“I won'’t.”

“I mean it.” She takes my hand, then pulls out her ponytail holder and lets the wind fling her dark veil of hair behind her. “Do you know how lucky we are?”

“Yes.”

She intertwines her fingers in mine.

The ski boat skims the surface of the river, bouncing gently as we make for the distant landing at Silver Street. High above us, the city stretches along the rim of the bluff from the homes of Clifton Avenue to the gazebo where a kissing couple watched Tim die. Past the highway cut and the bridges stands the Ramada and the Briars, where Jefferson Davis was married, and then the land descends to the lumber mill and the sandbar near the old Triton Battery site, where Hans Necker will someday build his recycling plant.

We’re less than a mile from the landing when my cell phone vibrates in my pocket. Expecting Annie, I'm surprised to see my mother’s cell number on the LCD screen. She only uses the thing in emergencies, so my pulse quickens at the sight.

“Hello?”

“Penn, it’s Mom.”

The way she said my name reveals the stress she’s under. “What is it? What’s happened?”

“Are you driving?”

“Mom, what’s the matter?”

“Your father had a heart attack.”

I close my eyes, preparing for the worst. “Is he alive?”

Caitlin clenches my hand, and I tell her what’s happened.

“He’s at St. Catherine’s Hospital,” Mom goes on. “I'm on my way there now. Drew used the office defibrillator on him. Tom probably would have died without it.”

“Is he conscious?”

“Yes.”

“Is Annie still with the babysitter?”

“Yes. I didn't want to scare either one of them.”

“Caitlin and I are on the river, but we’ll pick up Annie and get to the hospital as fast as we can. Thirty minutes, max.”

“Hurry, Penn. I talked to him for a few seconds. Tom said he has something important to tell you. He was very emphatic.”

“What’s that about?”

“I have no idea. He wasn'’t completely coherent, but he sounded like he doesn’'t think he’s going to make it.”

My father always hides pain, and my mother doesn’'t exaggerate. This is not good news.

“Just hurry so he won'’t be anxious about whatever it is.”

“I'm on my way, Mom. You pay attention to the road. We’ll be there before you know it.”

“Be careful.” When she clicks off, I press END and shove the throttle to the wall. The Bayrider leaps forward, then planes out and

begins to bounce on the river, jumping and smacking down like some great porpoise. “Damn it!” I curse.

Caitlin points toward Natchez Under-the-Hill. “We’re almost there. We’ll just tie up and run straight for the car.”

I nod, but I’d already made that decision, though it means risk for Drew’s boat. There’s no real dock at Silver Street, only a steep ramp. I'’ll tie the thing to the Evangeline casino if I have to. Boiling with frustration, I slam my hand against the wheel. “It’s always something, you know?”

“What do you mean?” Caitlin asks.

“Whenever life gets too good, whenever fate hands you something wonderful, something else gets taken away.”

She squeezes my shoulder and shakes her head. “Stop thinking like that. For one thing, life hasn’'t been that great lately. And for another, your dad’s not going to die.”

It’s a nice sentiment, but she has no idea what shape my father is in right now. He could be dead already. “You don'’t think this could have something to do with what we just went through, do you? With Sands or Po?”

“No. Absolutely not. This is just life, okay? But it’s going to be all right this time. I know it, Penn. We’re together again, and Tom’s not going to die on us.”

“He seems to think he is. He told Mom that he has something important to tell me.”

Caitlin absorbs this in silence. “Well, we have something important to tell him too. We’ll tell him before we tell Annie. You know how that news will make him feel.”

“You’re right,” I admit, picturing the scene. My father wanted me to marry Caitlin a week after he met her. “He’ll be the happiest, apart from Annie.”

“He will. Now, keep thinking that.” Caitlin hugs me tightly from the side. “Okay?”

“Okay.” With shaking hands, I turn the wheel and point the boat toward the Silver Street landing.

Toward home.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

None of my novels could be written without the generous help of many friends and acquaintances. Mimi Miller of the Natchez Historic Foundation and Stanley Nelson of The Concordia Sentinel were especially helpful this time around. Stanley is a fine local historian, and some of his articles are available online. Natchezians are always happy to help with my research, even though the fictional city that sometimes results seems a less than desirable place to live. We who live here know the truth, and wouldn'’t live anywhere else. This time around, I want to thank: Judge George Ward; Sally Durkin; Mayor Jake Middleton; former mayor Tony Byrne; Chief Mike Mullins; Major Jody Waldrop; Keith Benoist; Kevin Colbert; Billy Ray Farmer; Jim Easterling; Don Estes; Mike Wheelis, M.D.; and helicopter pilot John Goodrich.

Thanks to the usual suspects on the personal support side: Jerry Iles, M.D.; Betty Iles; Geoff Iles; Jane Hargrove; and Courtney Aldridge.

Thank you, Ed Stackler, for midwifing most of this one into being during a long and stressful October. Thanks to novelist Charlie Newton for his Las Vegas expertise. My warm gratitude also goes out to a few good people who shall remain nameless.

For being patient with this book, my heartfelt thanks to the crew at Simon & Schuster: Carolyn Reidy, Susan Moldow, Louise Burke, Colin Harrison, Dan Cuddy, and my buddy Gene Wilson out in Texas. Thanks also to Wayne Brookes at HarperCollins UK, and to the gang at S&S Canada, for a good time at Niagara Falls and great support year round.

Finally, thanks to Aaron Priest, Lucy Childs, and Lisa Erbach-Vance for holding down the left-brain stuff for right-brain guys like me.

To those readers who took the trouble to read this page: Penn Cage will be back next year. That wasn'’t my intent, but what was originally meant to be half of this book grew into something far too important to be only part of a novel. So, enjoy!

For those considering a trip to Natchez, please be aware that at this time the city has only one riverboat casino in operation. During the writing of this novel, two more casinos were in the works, but the changing economy has affected those plans. I know that many of my readers travel to Natchez to see some of the sights depicted in my books, and I urge you to search the Web for accurate tourism information, which can vary quite a bit from the fictional world I’'ve created for Penn Cage. That said, Natchez is a beautiful and mysterious place, and well worth the trip. The annual hot-air balloon festival is one of the highlights of the year, and while I have taken dramatic license with the scheduling of certain events, the three-day festival is truly spectacular.

Finally, all mistakes in this novel are mine.