ALSO BY GREG ILES
Third Degree
True Evil
Turning Angel
Blood Memory
The Footprints of God
Sleep No More
Dead Sleep
24 Hours
The Quiet Game
Mortal Fear
Black Cross
Spandau Phoenix
SCRIBNER
A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright Š 2009 by Greg Iles
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
SCRIBNER and design are registered trademarks of The Gale Group, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, Inc., the publisher of this work.
The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com [http://www.simonspeakers.com].
Library of Congress Control Number: 2008049551
ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-9463-5
ISBN-10: 1-4165-9463-9
Visit us on the Web:
http://www.SimonandSchuster.com [http://www.SimonandSchuster.com]
For
Madeline and Mark
Who pay the highest price for my writing life.
Thank you.
No man in the wrong can stand up against a fellow thats in the right and keeps on a comin.
Captain Bill McDonald, Texas Ranger
Youre an animal.
No, worse. Human.
Runaway Train
THE DEVILS PUNCHBOWL
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
CHAPTER 57
CHAPTER 58
CHAPTER 59
CHAPTER 60
CHAPTER 61
CHAPTER 62
CHAPTER 63
CHAPTER 64
CHAPTER 65
CHAPTER 66
CHAPTER 67
CHAPTER 68
CHAPTER 69
CHAPTER 70
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CHAPTER
1
Midnight in the garden of the dead.
A silver-white moon hangs high over the mirror-black river and the tired levee, shedding cold light on the Louisiana delta stretching off toward Texas. I stand among the luminous stones on the Mississippi side, shivering like the only living man for miles. At my feet lies a stark slab of granite, and under that stone lies the body of my wife. The monument at its head reads:
SARAH ELIZABETH CAGE
19631998
Daughter. Wife. Mother. Teacher.
She is loved.
I havent sneaked into the cemetery at midnight to visit my wifes grave. Ive come at the urgent request of a friend. But I didnt come here for the sake of friendship. I came out of guilt. And fear.
The man Im waiting for is forty-five years old, yet in my mind he will always be nine. Thats when our friendship peaked, during the Apollo 11 moon landing. But you dont often make friends like those you make as a boy, so the debt is a long one. My guilt is the kind you feel when someone slips away and you dont do enough to maintain the tie, all the more painful because over the years Tim Jes
sup managed to get himself into quite a bit of trouble, and after the first eight or nine times, I wasnt there to get him out of it.
My fear has nothing to do with Tim; hes merely a messenger, one who may bear tidings I have no wish to hear. News that confirms the rumors being murmured over golf greens at the country club, bellowed between plays beside high school gridirons, and whispered through the hunting camps like a rising breeze before a storm. When Jessup asked to meet me, I resisted. He couldnt have chosen a worse time to discover a conscience, for me or for the city. Yet in the end I agreed to hear him out. For if the rumors are trueif a uniquely disturbing evil has entered into my townit was I who opened the door for it. I ran for mayor in a Jeffersonian fit of duty to save my hometown and, in my righteousness, was arrogant enough to believe I could deal with the devil and somehow keep our collective virtue intact. But that, Im afraid, was wishful thinking.
For months now, a sense of failure has been accreting in my chest like fibrous tissue. Ive rarely failed at anything, and I have never quit. Most Americans are raised never to give up, and in the South that credo is practically a religion. But two years ago I stood before my wifes grave with a full heart and the belief that I could by force of will resurrect the idyllic town that had borne me, by closing the racial wounds that had prevented it from becoming the shining beacon I knew it could be, and bringing back the prosperity it deserved. Halfway through my four-year term, Ive learned that most people dont want change, even when its in their best interest. We pay lip service to ideals, but we live by expediency and by tribal prejudice. Accepting this hypocrisy has nearly broken me.
Sadly, the people closest to me saw this coming long ago. My father and my lover at the time tried to save me from myself, but I would not be swayed. The heaviest burden I bear is knowing that my daughter has paid the highest price for my illusions. Two years ago, I imagined I heard my dead wifes voice urging me onward. Now all I hear is the empty rush of the wind, whispering the lesson so many have learned before me:
You cant go home again.
My watch reads 12:30 a.m. Thirty minutes past the appointed hour, and theres still no sign of Tim Jessup among the shoulder-high stones between me and Cemetery Road. With a silent farewell to my wife, I turn and slip between the monuments, working my way back
up toward Jewish Hill, our rendezvous point. My feet make no sound in the dewy, manicured grass. The names chiseled on these stones Ive known all my life. They are the towns history, and mine: Friedler and Jacobs and Dreyfus up on Jewish Hill, whose stones read
Bohemia, Bavaria, Alsace;
the Knoxes and Henrys and Thornhills in the Protestant sections; and finally the Donnellys and Binellis and OBanyons back on Catholic Hill. Most of the corpses in this place had white skin when they were alive, but as in life, the truth here is found at the margins. In the areas marked Colored Ground on the cemetery map lie the trusted servants and favored slaves who lived at the margins of the white world and earned a patch of hallowed earth in death. Most of these were interred without a marker. You have to go farther down the road, to the national cemetery, to find the graves of truly free black people, many of them soldiers who lie among the twenty-eight hundred unknown Union dead.
Yet this cemetery breathes an older history. Some people buried here were born in the mid-1700s, and if they were resurrected tomorrow, parts of the town would not look much different to them. Infants who died of yellow fever lie beside Spanish dons and forgotten generals, all moldering beneath crying angels and marble saints, while the gnarled oak branches spread ever wider above them, draped with cinematic beards of Spanish moss. Natchez is the oldest city on the Mississippi River, older even than New Orleans, and when you see the dark, tilted gravestones disappearing into the edges of the forest, you know it.
I last came here to view a million dollars in damage wreaked by drunk vandals on the irreplaceable wrought iron and statuary that make this cemetery unique. Now all four gates are chained shut at dusk. Tim Jessup knows that; its one reason he chose this trysting place. When Jessup first called, I thought he was proposing the cemetery for his convenience; he works on one of the riverboat casinos at the foot of the bluffthe
