The Devils Punchbowl

Linda looks at Quinn in alarm. “Got away? I thought Tim was dead.”

“That'’s what I mean. Falling off that bluff was the best break that header ever caught. If he’d lived, Sands would have made the crucifixion look like a mild digging. You cross the boss, you get special treatment. Like Benny back there.”

Quinn wants me to talk,

she realizes.

He wants a relationship.

“You ever see anything eaten alive?” he asks, turning the boat slightly to starboard.

Linda doesn’'t answer, but one of her cats used to catch chipmunks and torture them for hours before she killed them. Let the pitiful creature run a few feet, feel a taste of freedom, then pounce and rip its belly open with a claw—

“Nothing like it in the world,” Quinn says, marveling at his insight. “That'’s why the Romans loved the games. That'’s life, right in front of you. Kill or be killed. Eat or be eaten. You’re a predator or you’re prey. And deep down, everybody knows which they are, right from the beginning.”

A huge beam sweeps over the boat, stops, comes back, then arcs away. Linda has an impression of treetops shot with a flashbulb to her right.

“Just like that stupid bastard,” Quinn says, nodding at Ben Li. “Too clever for his own good. He makes more money in a day than his parents earned in ten years, but it wasn'’t enough. Had to fuck it up. Look at him. A genius, they say. By noon tomorrow, a pit bull will be shitting out his brains. Next morning, his bones will be gnawed to powder.”

Linda’s stomach rolls. The night of the dogfight, she’d kept away from the pit as much as possible. The noise alone had sickened her, and the brief glimpses she’d been unable to avoid were burned into her memory. Two blood-soaked, muscle-bound animals locked in nearly motionless combat for an hour, one’s massive jaws buried in the chest of the other, each struggling for advantage while two dozen screaming men goaded them to kill.

“And me?” she forces herself to ask.

Quinn purses his lips like a man figuring a price on something. “The day after, maybe. Depends on how interesting you make things. If you didn't know so fucking much, I’d keep you around for

the weekend. Rent you out. Lots of big boys coming in for the next couple of weeks. They like their business mixed with pleasure.”

The boat leaps free of the water, then smashes back down. Soon it’s bouncing like a tractor over farm rows.

It’s a wake,

Linda realizes.

Now the spotlight makes sense. We must be overtaking a tugboat pushing barges.

“I have to go the bathroom,” she says. “Bad.”

“Go in your pants. You already did it once.”

“No, I mean

really

go. I can’t hold it. I'm sick. You don'’t want it in the boat.”

“Christ on a crutch. There’s an ice chest under the seat behind Benny. Go in that.”

Linda works herself up onto her elbows, which is more difficult than she thought with her hands bound, then crawls back to the stern, where Ben Li looks desperately at her through bloodshot eyes. Putting her mouth beside his ear, she says, “I wish I could help you. I'm sorry.”

She smells fear coming off him like body odor. She remembers her thought back on the

Queen,

that she’d entered a state beyond fear. Then later, in the chair, she’d realized that only the dead are beyond fear. But now, struggling to her feet, using Ben Li as a prop for her bound hands, she isn’t so sure.

For a moment the fog breaks, and she can see the shore, lone treetops whipping past fifty yards to her right. To her left she sees only mist. A hundred yards in front of them, a tugboat churns the river into a maelstrom. Quinn is running fast enough to pull a half dozen water-skiers.

“Can you slow down a little?” she calls.

“Just do your business! Christ.”

Bending carefully at the waist, Linda pulls the edge of the rear seat up with her bound hands. She marvels at the bright white lid of the Igloo. The logo brings tears to her eyes. She remembers picnics and parties from years long past, reaching down with a sweating arm and pulling a wine cooler from the ice—

“I thought you had to go,” Quinn shouts, looking back at her with annoyance. “Take your bloody pants down. Give us a preview, eh?”

Linda glances down at Ben Li. Before, his eyes had been pleading,

but now they watch her with a strange fascination, waiting to see if she’ll take down her pants. It is all about power, she knows. Ben Li heard Quinn talking about him and the dogs. He knows he’ll be the first to die, and all he can do is lie there watching, waiting, probably praying for some kind of miracle, or even just a diversion before death.

Around the boat the fog has thickened again, turning the night a deeper shade of black.

Linda straightens up. From deep within her, so deep that she’s forgotten it was there, something begins to rise. The density of it fills her as it expands. It’s love, she realizes. Or whatever you call the thing that huddles in the last dark closet you'’ve locked against the world, waiting to find something like itself. Linda has never known why she let herself go so far with Tim. She knew all along that he wouldn'’t leave his family. She wouldn'’t have asked him to, though she wanted it desperately. But now—standing almost in the river Tim died within sight of—she knows.

She wanted a child.

Over thirty and she’d never even been pregnant. But she was still young enough. And Tim wouldn'’t have had to leave Julia to give her that. Tim was the closest thing Linda had ever had to a child of her own, a big little boy who wanted the world to be better than it was. Now he was gone, and with him her hope of a child.

“He loved me,” she says aloud, once, for all the times she’d yearned to say it to the people around her.

This knowledge surges in her breast, filling her so profoundly that a faint radiance shimmers from her skin. She feels like the Madonna in the old Italian painting printed in her grandmother’s Bible. All of this she gives to Ben Li in a single downward glance, one long look that holds a woman’s infinite mercy.

“Do you have to go or not, you crazy cunt?”

Seamus Quinn’s angry voice pierces night and fog, but not the light that shines from Linda Church.

“Yes,” she says. “I have to go.”

With the grace of a bird taking flight, she steps onto the lid of the Igloo and leaps into the river.

CHAPTER

16

If physicists want to develop a time machine, they should explore fear. Fear dilates and compresses time without limit. For desperate people awaiting rescue, every instant stretches into unendurable agony; for those awaiting death by cancer, the earth spins relentlessly, shortening the days until they pass like fanned pages in a book. Trapped in our bodies, perception is all, and the engine of perception is hunger for life.

Before tonight, I could not have imagined playing a six-hour card game with my father. Yet here we sit, betting matchsticks without expression, occasionally searching each others’ eyes or looking with disbelief at the guns lying between us on the sofa. I'm not much of a cardplayer, so it’s been a one-sided contest. We’'ve spoken enough to persuade whoever might be listening that we’re passing a long night while Dad waits to see that my heart is all right, and typed enough that Dad is fully caught up on the circumstances surrounding Tim’s murder. I'm fairly confident that there’s no video surveillance of my upper hallway—ditto any keystroke-sensing technology around the house—for our desultory computer conversations would surely have earned us a call from Jonathan Sands by now.