The Devil's Punchbowl (34 page)

 

 

Caitlin is watching from one of her front windows as I pull up. She opens the front door with only her face showing, as though she’s just gotten out of the shower, then motions for me to come in, but I wave her out to the car. She extends a bare foot and calf, points to the foot, then disappears inside. I get out and walk halfway to her door. A moment later she comes out wearing shorts, sandals, and a white linen top, a puzzled look on her face.

 

“To what do I owe this honor?”

 

“We need to talk,” I whisper, “and it can’t be in our houses or cars. Is there a car at the newspaper office we can use?”

 

She’s looking at me strangely, but she answers quietly. “Yes. Are you going to drive us over there?”

 

When I nod, she walks back and locks her door, then comes out to my car.

 

Caitlin never needs to be told anything twice, unless it’s to keep her nose out of something. She doesn’t speak as we drive across town; she’s content to study me from the passenger seat. I look toward her a few times, but it’s difficult to do that without making eye contact, and there’s too much unsaid between us to endure that for long. It’s easier to study her legs, which are long and toned and surprisingly tawny, given her pale skin. She must have spent some time in the lower latitudes recently.

 

“Antigua,” she says, reading my mind.

 

“Alone?”

 

“No.” After letting me suffer for a few moments, she says, “A corporate retreat.”

 

“I’ve never really understood what happens at those.”

 

“Depends on the company. Some put you through a week of New Age sermons on the gospel of wealth. Others encourage you to kill large mammals and screw beautiful ethnic prostitutes.”

 

After the awful tension at the rectory, this makes me laugh. “I spent a lot of my career dealing with men who’d rather screw large mammals and kill beautiful ethnic prostitutes.”

 

This brings a real laugh from Caitlin. In the closed car the sound rings bright and true. “Or writing about them,” she says.

 

I nod but don’t continue our old conversational rhythm, and the sparkle dies in her eyes. As I start to pull into the newspaper parking lot, she points to the side of the building, which I assume means I should park behind it. When I get to the back, I see six cars parked in a row beside a glass door.

 

As soon as we’re inside, she says, “Are you sure you don’t just want to talk here?”

 

“Can you get us total privacy? I don’t want everyone in the building knowing I’m here.”

 

“If you don’t mind sitting on the floor of a supply room.”

 

“Fine. Perfect.”

 

A little way up the hall, she leads me into a room lined with metal shelves and boxes, then locks the door behind us. After a quick survey of the shelves, she pulls down two boxes of legal-size copy paper and makes a seat. I pull down two more, and soon we’re facing each other, separated by three feet of harshly lit space.

 

“You look bad,” she says bluntly. “How long has it been since you slept?”

 

“That doesn’t matter right now.”

 

She considers this for a few seconds. “You know, you acted like a total shit to me today.”

 

“You asked for it. You acted like you expected me to take you into my confidence as though we’re still together. We’re not together.”

 

She looks away. “I just wanted you to have a civil conversation with me.”

 

“No. You wanted a story. The inside story. And I couldn’t give you that. No one would have benefited from that.”

 

“Is that for you to decide?”

 

“In this case it is.”

 

“You spoke in the past tense. Why are you here now?”

 

“Because you’re in danger. The deeper you look into Tim Jessup’s death, the more likely it is you’ll be hurt.”

 

I see disbelief in her eyes, but not because she doubts the danger. “You know I’ve worked stories like that before.”

 

“This is different. I’ve worked dangerous cases. But these people will kill without hesitation.”

 

“What people?”

 

“We may get to that. But you need to know that you can’t trust your phones—not your cell or the landlines at home. I’m not sure about the newspaper phones.”

 

Now she doubts me. “Who are you talking about? Who can tap landlines? Bad cops? The FBI again? Who?”

 

“It’s complicated. You also have to realize that people like Julia Jessup tell other people you’ve questioned them. They say that on open phone lines. And the wrong thing in the wrong ear will get you dead.”

 

“Where’s Annie?” Caitlin asks, ignoring my warnings.

 

I shake my head.

 

“Is she even in town? Your house never looked so empty.” Caitlin thinks for a moment. “You sent her away, didn’t you? Penn, what’s going on?”

 

“Just wait a second. Do you remember the agreement we used to have about cases like this?”

 

“Of course.”

 

“What was it?”

 

She rolls her eyes. “We tell each other all we can, but we don’t use anything the other says has to stay secret.”

 

Right, so far.
“And…?”

 

She sighs in exasperation. “I don’t publish anything until you clear it. And you don’t put anything in your novels that I want to save for myself.”

 

“Okay. Can we go forward with that understanding?”

 

She purses her lips as though trying to judge whether I might be trapping her in some way, but at length she relents. “All right. Deal.”

 

“I need your help, Caitlin. That must be obvious, since I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

 

This seems to wound her. “What kind of help? I’m here, okay?”

 

“For how long?”

 

“You mean how long will I be in Natchez? You know me. That’s open-ended. What exactly do you need? You don’t want to manipulate the newspaper, do you?”

 

“No. I need physical cover.”

 

“Translate that.”

 

“I need a girlfriend.”

 

“A
girlfriend
?” Wry amusement touches her mouth. “Didn’t you just get rid of one?”

 

“I’m not kidding. The people I’m dealing with have very sophisticated surveillance equipment and enough time to watch me around the clock, if they want to. I need an excuse to disappear sometimes. Like into your house. Or to go on a drive. They already know who you are, and they know we have a past. It’s a credible cover.”

 

“I see. And what do I get out of this arrangement? Are you proposing a friends-with-benefits kind of deal?”

 

The look in my eyes must be all the answer she needs, because she immediately holds up both hands in apology.

 

“What did you always get out of this arrangement?” I ask.

 

“Stories.”

 

“
Big
stories.”

 

“Okay, okay. I’m in. I just wanted to be sure. So what’s the story? Crystal meth in the Deep South? I really hope not.”

 

“What do you know about dogfighting?”

 

“
Dog
fighting?”

 

“Yes.”

 

Her face goes blank. “Nothing. Less than nothing.”

 

“Time to learn.”

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER
24

 

 

Captain Walt Garrity crosses the Mississippi River Bridge at Vidalia, Louisiana, one callused hand on the wheel of his 2004 Anniversary Edition Roadtrek RV and the other wrapped around a thermos of hot coffee. He saw the lights of Natchez long ago, twinkling high on the bluff that towers over the flatland of Louisiana. The last time he crossed the Mississippi here there’d been only one bridge, the one built right before World War Two. He’d been on Ranger business then, coming to pick up a fugitive on a murder warrant. The guy had gotten drunk, cut somebody in Under-the-Hill, and wound up in the Natchez clink. The local cops had treated Walt well, a little hero worship for a Texas Ranger was common in cops who’d been raised on Saturday-matinee westerns as boys. Walt knew better than to expect deference now. These days he rarely mentioned he’d been a Ranger, since some people (mostly Mexicans) tended to make assumptions based on the checkered history of the troop.

 

He’s been driving for nine straight hours, not counting a stop for gas. Even with the built-in head in the Roadtrek, his first instinct when he feels the need for a bathroom is to piss in a Coke bottle, something he became adept at while racing across long stretches of Texas in the late fifties. It helps to have a long Johnson—or so say the fellows who claim to have one; Walt has to make do with what
God gave him, which has always proved sufficient. Not that it matters much lately. At seventy, his pride has gone soft on him. He’s heard a lot about the blue pills, but you can’t take them if you’re on heart medicine, and Walt has been taking nitrates since his bypass a decade ago. Carmelita, the Mexican woman who lives with him, has stayed on in spite of this, despite being ten years his junior.
“Tirar
isn’t everything,” she always says. Then she winks and adds, “And there’s more than one way to skin a cat.”

 

At the midpoint of the bridge, it strikes Walt that the last time he crossed here his wife was the woman waiting back in Nacogdoches. Frances would have been about thirty then, shining with the glow of her second pregnancy. But even that glow faded whenever Walt chugged down the long driveway and off to work. Frances was a worrier; his fellow Rangers always said that if worry and prayer could keep you alive, Walt didn’t have a thing to worry about when the bullets started flying. Naturally, it was Frances that fate had taken too soon. Walt shoves down the memories and thinks again of Carmelita. She never worries when he leaves, though she knows some of his recent jobs have gotten hairy. Crime has changed in the past twenty-five years, even in Texas. Whatever code that once kept some sort of restraint operating among the criminal class vanished with the appearance of crack cocaine. Even so, says Carmelita, life is too short to spend it worrying, especially about old dogs like Walt, who always seem to find their way home in one piece.

 

Walt takes his gaze off the city’s cathedral steeple and looks down to the foot of the bluff, where the riverboat casinos hug the shore like remora fastened to a shark’s side. Two boats north of the bridge, two to the south. Walt chuckles to himself. Mark Twain would roll over in his grave. These “boats” may have been floated down the river to reach their present locations, but they were never meant to go anywhere under their own power; they don’t even have engines. They’re floating entertainment complexes, like something from Walt Disney World. They exist for one reason: to drain money from as wide an area as possible and funnel it to the owners of the casinos, few of whom would deign to cross the borders of a state like Mississippi.

 

Walt has never been a gambler by constitution. He played some poker in Korea to keep his mind off the cold, and he won enough
spending money to visit the clean whores in town rather than the girls hiding in the hills by the camp, all of whom carried exotic strains of VD. He’d also done some gambling in his various undercover roles, both as a Ranger and as a special investigator for the Harris County district attorney—Penn Cage’s old boss. Winning at poker was a matter of judging men quickly and accurately, and that wasn’t much different from Rangering. Walt had found that his emotional detachment from games of chance gave him a significant edge over men who had the itch in their blood.

 

As the Roadtrek rocks and bounces down off the bridge, he swings left on Canal Street and heads into downtown Natchez. He hasn’t seen Tom Cage in close to ten years, but when you’ve served with a man in combat, the passage of time means nothing. You’re brothers until death—and beyond, if there is such a thing. From what Tom said, they need to work fast, and that means Walt establishing a cover as quickly as possible. He’s traveling under one of his favorite legends—J. B. Gilchrist, a Dallas oilman—and with a little help from the Cages, he’ll embed himself in the fabric of the town, then draw the target to him as surely as honey draws a bear.

 

It helps that Natchez is an oil town. There isn’t much business left here—mostly workovers being done by men trying to suck the last few barrels from wells drilled in the 1950s and capped in the 1980s—but some big fields were discovered in the old days, and the town enjoyed remarkable prosperity. Quite a few Texas outfits still have interests in the area, and with Tom arranging for a geologist friend to let it out that J. B. Gilchrist has an override on a well being drilled next week, the town’s history will firm up his cover just fine.

 

Walt turns on Main Street and parks outside the lobby of the Eola Hotel. As he dismounts from the big van, he sees several trailers parked crosswise in the crowded lot, most with colorful balloons painted on their sides. At the back of the lot, a couple of crews seem to be packing suitcases into their trucks rather than unpacking, as Walt would have expected. He brought the Roadtrek because Tom had told him he wouldn’t be able to rent a hotel room during the festival weekend, but Walt senses that the introductory scene he’d planned to play in the lobby might just pay off with a room.

 

The Eola is a classy hotel from a bygone era, a grand old dame
that makes even Walt feel young again. He walks up to the brass cage of the desk and nods to the harried-looking desk clerk whose name tag reads BRAD
.

 

“Can I help you?” asks the young man, not meeting Walt’s eye.

 

“J. B Gilchrist, checking in.”

 

“Yes, sir. Do you have a reservation?”

 

“Course I do. Check your screen there. It’s
G-I-L,
then the name of our Lord. You follow?”

 

Brad looks perplexed. “Sir, ah…I’m checking under
G,
but I don’t show a
Gilchrist.
Could the reservation be under another name?”

 

“How could it be under another name?” Walt asks, upping his volume enough to turn a few heads. “I only got one name, son. Big Jim Gilchrist. And I’m tired from a damn long drive. Now, I was happy when I walked in. Why don’t you get me fixed up so I can stay happy?”