The Devil's Punchbowl (77 page)

 

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.