The Devil's Punchbowl (43 page)

” a woman says with disgust. “There’s kids out here. Why don’t you just get a
room
?”

 

Caitlin closes the door. I click the TALK button on the Star Trek and say, “It’s me.”

 

“We’ve got a problem,” Kelly says in my ear.

 

“Short of a death, it doesn’t matter. I think we’re at the endgame.”

 

“Tell me.”

 

“Not over the air. Not even on these things.”

 

“You found what we’re looking for?”

 

“I know where it is. Can you cover us to the cemetery?”

 

“Screw that. You’re in the store now?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“You have the satphone with you?”

 

“In Caitlin’s purse.”

 

“Walk straight back to the staff area like you own the place, then leave by their private exit door. Use a fire door if you have to. I’ll be waiting out back. If anybody tries to stop you, tell them you’re the fucking mayor. If that doesn’t work, pull your gun. Just get to my car. The game has changed.”

 

When Kelly’s voice gets tense, I know we’re in trouble.

 

“We’re on our way.”

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER
29

 

 

Linda Church sits on a folding chair in the corner of a small kitchen and studies her left knee, which is swollen and blue at the front, and purple in back. The joint doesn’t hurt too bad, but she knows some gristle in it is torn because her skin is stretched tight as a drumhead and the bones slip when she walks. The lower part of her right leg looks worse. There’s a tear in the bruise, and the skin around it feels like it just came out of a microwave oven.

 

She remembers leaping from Quinn’s boat but has no memory of hitting the water—only a white flash coming out of darkness. She awakened in terror that she was drowning, but the sound of a motor in the dark told her she couldn’t afford to splash. Quinn was trolling slowly back the way he’d come, searching for her with a spotlight that lit the fog yellow. She felt sure he would find her since she could hardly swim with the leg, but as the boat drew near, and she prepared to slide under the water, she’d heard something strike the hull—not hard—more like the sound of kicking shoes.

 

Then she remembered Ben Li.

 

The spotlight arced up into the sky, and some sort of commotion broke out on the boat. She heard more hollow impacts, then two shots cracked over the water. The echoes seemed to go on forever, and before they died, the big motor revved up and the boat turned south again.

 

Then God had saved her. She’d had no idea whether she was near the bank or in the center channel of the Mississippi, about to be run down by a barge weighing thousands of tons. But as she floated downstream, thankful for every ounce of body fat she’d cursed until then, she felt her good leg scrape sand. The river was lifting her onto a gently shoaling sandbar as surely as if God himself were holding her in his hand. When she came to rest, her eyes filled with black sky, she felt like Moses in the bulrushes.

 

Unlike Moses, however, no one found her lying by the river. How long she lay there, she had no idea. But sometime before dawn, she got to her feet and started limping toward the levee. Soon the sand had dirt mixed in it, then she was dragging herself over rich soil, the farmland her grandfather used to hold to his nose and smell as if it were pipe tobacco. She’d wanted to scream as she climbed the levee, but she didn’t dare do more than grunt. On top of the levee was a gravel road, and she guessed it ran all the way from New Orleans to Missouri, if not to Minneapolis. The levee made her think of her grandfather too; he’d told her how during the flood of ’27 they’d put the nigras and the cows onto it to save them from the rising water, and kept them there for weeks and weeks.

 

She knew she couldn’t walk on the levee, as bad as she wanted to. There’d be trucks coming down it before dawn, and if Quinn sent even one man along the road to look for her body on the bank, he’d pin her in his headlights like a doomed deer. She couldn’t move well enough to be sure of getting away in time. So she’d slid down the far side of the levee, down to the scrub trees by the borrow pits, from which they’d taken the dirt to build the levees. She limped along the pits until the sun came up, her eyes always on the ground, looking for snakes. She remembered a teenage boyfriend walking along a borrow pit, breaking the backs of moccasins with a heavy branch. Despite this frantic killing, the snakes swirled slowly through the shallows but did not flee to the middle of the pit. This puzzled Linda. Were they lethargic from the suffocating heat? Or was it the poisonous fertilizer chemicals that drained off the fields whenever it rained? Her brother shot snakes with a .22 rifle, but this was different. With their backs broken, the serpents writhed and curled back upon themselves in endless figure eights until they drowned and became meat for the nutrias. Later, when that boy was inside her,
she’d remembered how the snakes had twisted and cracked like whips, and she wondered if they’d been screaming. Could snakes scream? Could they hear each other screaming?

 

Linda walked until the skin on the back of her neck felt like it would split from sunburn, dragging her throbbing leg behind her, but by then she’d climbed the levee again and figured out where she was—and where she was going. She was on Deer Park Road, and while there were only a couple of farmhouses for many miles, she knew about a church that stood alone at the edge of the cotton fields, and this confirmed God’s participation in her survival. She got so thirsty she licked the sweat from her arms, and this made her smile. Yankees whined about the heat and the humidity, but it was the humidity that made the heat bearable. Louisiana wasn’t like the barren hills outside Las Vegas, a place so dry you hardly saw the sweat leave your skin. Here there was almost as much water in the air as in your body, and the sweat beaded on your skin like water on a car that had just been waxed.

 

The last time she’d climbed the levee, she’d seen the church. In her mind it was white and clean and straight, rising from a green ocean of soybeans, but in truth it lay beside an empty cotton field like an oversize box thrown carelessly from a truck. The bright tin roof she remembered was a mosaic of rust and primer, and the steeple looked like a doghouse someone had squashed onto the apex of a roof. But even so, even with the crucifix atop it looking like a broken TV antenna, she’d seen deliverance. Pastor Simpson was alone behind the building, walking from the back shed to the main building with two boxes under his arms.

 

Linda had wept with joy.

 

She’d never been to services at that church, but she’d gone to Pastor Simpson’s old church for years. Linda’s father had been strict Assembly of God, but Linda had discovered Pastor Simpson when a friend had taken her to the Oneness Branch of the church. The Oneness people believed God couldn’t be split into three, but the main thing was, they hated the hypocrisy of the mainliners. Pastors preaching against television while buying big sets for their lake houses, where they thought nobody would see them. But while Linda was in Las Vegas, Pastor Simpson had splintered off from the
Oneness people too and had formed something called the Wholeness Church. It wasn’t official, but he had a small congregation of forty or fifty hard-core believers, and they’d gotten together to renovate the old church by the river. She’d heard about it when she got back to town and went to work on the boat.

 

When Linda limped down off the levee, she hadn’t known what Pastor Simpson’s argument with the Oneness people was, nor had she cared. All she knew was that for years Simpson had been a good pastor and tried to help people, especially the poor. There’d been some talk about him and a couple of the young girls in the congregation, but she’d never had any trouble with him.

 

He’d recognized Linda almost immediately, and he’d taken her into the church and washed her wounds with water from the sink in the one bathroom they had. She hadn’t told him the truth of course—not because she didn’t trust him, but because she was afraid she might bring terrible harm down onto him or his followers. He’d sat there for half an hour with his silver hair and red skin and sympathetic eyes while she told him a lie about getting involved with a man she’d met on the gambling boat, a man who’d been in prison, who had almost killed her with a beating, and who would kill her if he found her. No, she couldn’t go to the police, she said, because the man had friends in the police, on both sides of the river. Pastor Simpson had shaken his head and promised to do all he could to help, including getting her out of town. And he’d stood by his word, so far. When she’d written out the long note for Mayor Cage, Simpson had called one of the girls in his church to come out from town and pick it up, a girl named Darla, and Darla had promised to deliver it, and to make sure the mayor had no idea where any of them were, or even who she was.

 

Linda wished time would speed up. She’s going to have to move soon because there’s an evening service coming, and the pastor told her to be hiding in the shed well before the first car pulled up. She dreads that fifty-foot walk like nothing in a long time, but she’ll do it somehow. Because after the service, the pastor’s nephew is going to drive her to Shreveport, to stay with another group of Wholeness worshippers. There she will be safe from the “convict” who is hunting her. Linda lifts her shirt and wipes the sweat from her
brow, which is burning like the skin around her torn leg. She needs a doctor, but she can hold out another few hours. They might even have a doctor in the church in Shreveport, she thinks. No matter how bad things look, God has taken her into his blessed hands. To know that’s true, all Linda has to do is think about Ben Li.

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER
30

 

 

“You can talk in here,” Kelly says, gunning the 4Runner and heading out of the parking lot. “No bugs, guaranteed.”

 

“We’re going to the cemetery.”

 

“Okay. Why?”

 

“The disc is there. Not only that—Linda Church is alive.”

 

Kelly looks at me. “How do you know that?”

 

I quickly relate what happened at the Ramada and describe the contents of the tape and the note. Caitlin supplements my account from the backseat.

 

“Wait a minute,” says Kelly, turning onto Homochitto Street. “Two different people approached you at this one event?”

 

“Yeah, I figured you saw them.”

 

“I saw a girl watching you early on, but I was looking for males. I’m thinking of the coincidence.”

 

“I know, but remember what you asked me early this morning? Everyone in town knew I would be at that event. It was published in the newspaper. Both Jewel and that girl knew they could talk to me without seeming to try to. It could look accidental. But what about you? You said we have a problem.”

 

“One thing at a time. Do you know where Linda is?”

 

“No, but she’s safely hidden, and her note says she’s leaving town.”

 

“You didn’t recognize the girl who gave you the note?”

 

“You said she looked familiar,” Caitlin reminds me.

 

“I could say that about almost everyone in this town. Do you know how many people I’ve spoken to since becoming mayor? And during the campaign? I think the part of my brain that connects names and faces has been short-circuited.”

 

“I wouldn’t mind having Linda Church in our back pocket,” Kelly says. “I think you’re going to need her as a witness before this mess is through.”

 

“What the hell’s going on? What’s the problem you talked about?”

 

“Blackhawk got a bounceback on Jonathan Sands.”

 

“A bounceback?”

 

“A return query. Rebound request. Someone in Washington wants to know who’s asking about Sands.”

 

Caitlin’s eyes meet mine. “Washington?” she says. “
Who
in Washington?”

 

“They wouldn’t tell me, and that’s not a good sign. The company says they’re covering for me, but I’ve got to be straight with you. Seventy-five percent of Blackhawk’s revenues come from the Defense Department, and that number goes up every month. If Washington demands something, sooner or later the company’s going to cave. They value my services, but in the end I’m just a grunt.”

 

A wave of fear rolls through me. “Are you saying Blackhawk might give up Annie’s location if the government pushed hard enough?”

 

“No, no. But they might give up my name, and maybe yours. Sands could find out I’m involved and figure you’re trying to bust him, not help him.”

 

“I see.”

 

Kelly gives me a sidelong glance. “What
are
you going to do with that disc, if you find it?”

 

The truth is, I’m not sure, but I keep that to myself. “I hope you’re about to find out.”

 

“So how did you figure out the clues?” Kelly asks.

 

“He hasn’t even told me that,” Caitlin says with pique.

 

“When I searched the cemetery yesterday, I searched the graves of everyone Tim and I both knew. Classmates we’ve lost, people from
St. Stephen’s who died young. I even searched all the famous graves I knew. But I left out one grave. It never even
occurred
to me that Tim would use it.”

 

“Whose was it?”

 

“A high school senior who was killed by a drunk driver in 1979.”

 

Caitlin leans up between the seats. “Why didn’t you think of him the other day?”

 

“Because Tim Jessup was the driver who killed him.”

 

“My God. But how did the clue make you think of him?”

 

“The boy’s name was Patrick McQueen.”

 

Kelly smiles after a moment, but Caitlin shrugs. Sometimes a ten-year age gap causes issues.

 

“The Great Escape?”
I prompt. “Steve McQueen…? He ran from the Nazis on a motorcycle? Crashed into barbed wire at the end?”

 

“Oh…okay, I get it.”