The Devils Punchbowl

She opens the door and freezes.

“What is it?” I ask, trying to pull the gun from my pocket.

“I'm helping him get the things fitted,” Caitlin says awkwardly.

“It’s

Sunday,

” 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.