The Devils Punchbowl

“I'’ll pray for you, then.”

“I don'’t want a prayer. I want you with me.”

“I can’t run no more!”

Caitlin can’t sustain the deception any longer. “Linda, if you don'’t run, you’re going to die. You’re right. Quinn means to kill you. It’s only twenty feet to that fence. I'’ll help you across the space, and I'’ll boost you up.”

There’s a long silence. “I can’t let you do that,” Linda says finally. “It wasn'’t meant to be. This is my time, that’s all. If you’re really going to do it, just go.”

“I won'’t. Not without you.”

“Yes, you will. Don’t feel bad about it either. You’re a good person, Caitlin. Not stuck-up like I would have thought. I wish we could’ve been friends. I haven'’t had a good girlfriend since grade school.”

“We

can

be friends. We

are

friends. You’re a good person too, and you deserve a long, happy life!”

This time the silence drags. “I done some bad things in my life,” Linda says. “Stuff I wouldn'’t want my mama to know about.”

“We all have, Linda. Trust me on that.”

“Maybe. I don'’t imagine you'’ve seen the world from some of the places I have. But at least I can say this. I never took money for it.”

Outside, the truck engine rumbles to life, and two doors slam.

“That'’s it,” Caitlin says, jumping to her feet. “Get those bars off your windows. I'm going to the storeroom. When Quinn gets back, he’s not going to find anything but empty stalls!”

She grabs her window bars and starts her skin-the-cat inversion, but stops before pushing up the tin sheet above her. “Linda?” she says. “Linda?”

She hears nothing but the receding truck at first, then the rattle of the chain next door.

“Are you working on them?” she calls, as the blood pools in her head.

“Uh-huh. It hurts.”

“No pain, no gain. Get them off!”

“Caitlin?”

“What?”

“Thanks for getting my clothes back.”

“You’re welcome. I'’ll see you in a few minutes, okay?”

“Okay.”

“No more Quinn, right?”

“Right. No more.”

Caitlin almost rejoices in the pain as she kicks the tin sheet upward, then drops to the floor and climbs onto the windowsill, bent nearly double. In one smooth motion she straightens her legs

and catches hold of the outside roof, then raises herself through the hole by main strength. When the cool breeze hits her face, it feels like freedom, and when the four Bully Kuttas gather below her, their upturned faces watching her with unmistakable malice, she leans out just a little and speaks softly.

“Let’s see who’s smarter, eh? Dogs or women?”

CHAPTER

57

Despite our enthusiasm when we climbed aboard Danny McDavitt’s helicopter, it didn't take long to figure out that even with the first-class equipment aboard the Athens Point JetRanger—and Kelly’s proficiency at reading a FLIR screen—the mathematics of our mission are going to kill us. Even assuming that Caitlin’s “rivers” clue meant the Mississippi River, and confining our search to the sixty miles of river between Natchez and DeSalle Island (the site of the hunting camp where Shad Johnson had his picture taken with Darius Jones), we’re conducting the equivalent of a single-aircraft search for a lifeboat over a small sea. Actually, our situation is worse, because at least on the ocean, it’s a matter of sighting a boat on empty water. Moreover, my sixty-mile figure was calculated as the crow flies. Flying the tortuous bends of the river easily doubles that distance, while covering both banks doubles that again. If we try to search more than a half mile deep into Mississippi or Louisiana, the square-miles numbers go stratospheric.

Compounding this, we’re flying at night, using infrared radar to see through the darkness. Because FLIR sees everything with a temperature warmer than the earth, Kelly is having to sort through the thousands of living creatures moving or sleeping on the ground below the chopper, hoping to find something that looks suspicious. We’'ve landed seven times already, checking out groups of dogs that

seemed to be kenneled in out-of-the-way places. In almost every case we found ourselves in hunting camps, and in one case were almost shot at by an irate landowner. McDavitt feels sure that complaint calls have already been made, and if anyone wrote down our registration number, the pilot could be in deep trouble. Nevertheless, he hasn’'t asked to return the ship to the airport. Like the rest of us, he knows that we may be Caitlin’s only chance.

We’re flying at fifteen hundred feet, our speed sixty knots, which Major McDavitt and Kelly agree is ideal for FLIR work. It keeps the chopper out of the “dead man’s curve” (high enough to perform an emergency autorotation in case of engine failure), but low enough for good FLIR imaging. Kelly also told us that fifteen hundred feet is high enough to present a difficult target for small arms at night. The former Delta operator is sitting in the left cockpit seat, his eyes glued to the screen before him. McDavitt’s in the right seat, flying the ship and holding position whenever Kelly says he wants to take a closer look at something. I'm sitting in the cabin with Carl Sims, listening to Kelly and McDavitt work the land below, and thinking about the afternoon’s events.

Per my instructions, Kelly searched Shad Johnson’s house while Shad was at work, and his office immediately afterward, but Kelly didn't find the thumb drive. He also searched Ben Li’s yard for signs that anything had been buried or unburied recently, and found nothing. Finally, Kelly spent a couple of hours trying to track down Sands or Quinn, hoping that one or the other might lead him to Caitlin. While he’d seen plenty of Jiao, her daily routine as regular as clockwork, he hadn'’t found a trace of either Irishman.

While Kelly was busy with this, I had Chief Logan trace the license plate that Carl picked up in his rifle scope on Sunday night. It had been stolen off a similar make of vehicle from a parking lot in Baton Rouge. The SUV’s owner hadn'’t missed it. I personally checked out the owners of the land where Kelly and I had made our kayak landings, but both were absentee landlords who leased to hunting clubs and had little idea what might be happening on their property.

The one positive development of the afternoon was that Jewel Washington had located a hospital aide that she believed had removed the thumb drive from Tim Jessup’s rectum prior to his body being transported to Jackson for the autopsy. The aide didn't

admit this outright, but Jewel thinks he will for the right price, and that he might crack under aggressive police questioning. I wasn'’t prepared to tell Logan to arrest the man yet, but I did call Shad and tell him I was now positive he had the thumb drive, and that if he destroyed it, I would make good on my threat to send him to prison, one way or another.

I’'ve brought along the file on Edward Po that Peter Lutjens sent to my father’s house, but despite my having taken Dramamine before we took off, efforts to read the dense type by the cabin lights have twice brought me to the point of vomiting. All I know at this point is that the file summarizes a shocking maze of criminal activities and associations spanning the globe, with personal and psychological profiles of Po and his associates that trivialize the Blackhawk bio Kelly gave us when he arrived. The one thing my limited study of the file has made clear is why William Hull and his task force are so aggressively pursuing the crime lord.