The Devils Punchbowl

“What are you

doing

?”

“Rabies,” he grunts without looking up. The spinal column slows him down for a few seconds, but Kelly’s obviously field-dressed a lot of game in his time. “I don'’t know if this fucker’s had his shots or not. You gotta get the brainstem and everything for that test.” When the head tears free, Kelly lifts it by its wrinkled face and stuffs it into his gear bag. Then he straps on his pack, heaves the dog’s carcass over his right shoulder, and stands with a groan. “What are you waiting for? Pick up the other one.”

“Where are we going?”

“To throw them in the river.”

With a strange buzzing in my head, I kneel beside the black dog, lever my right arm under it, then wrestle it over my shoulder in an awkward fireman’s carry. The damn thing must weigh a hundred pounds, and it stinks. I'm winded before I cover twenty yards, but Kelly’s already far ahead.

This is one time I should have let him do the job alone.

When I reach the river’s edge, the white carcass is already spinning slowly downstream under the stars, and Kelly is stuffing the dog’s head into the rear cargo hold of his kayak. With the last of my strength, I stagger downstream from the boats and heave my burden into the current. The Bully Kutta disappears with a splash, then bobs to the surface.

“They actually went after my sister,” I say with breathless disbelief. “I haven'’t heard my dad sound that upset since Ruby died.”

Kelly squats and rinses his wounded forearm with river water. “I'’ll tell you what I think,” he says softly, scrubbing the half-clotted blood from his skin.

“What?”

He looks up, his mild blue eyes like those of a choirboy. “I think Jonathan Sands has become a one-bullet problem.”

CHAPTER

34

“A one-bullet problem?” Caitlin asks, echoing Kelly’s repeated phrase. “You mean you want to kill Sands? In cold blood?”

Kelly looks around the circle of faces in the room. Along with Kelly and Caitlin, Carl Sims, my father, and I are seated in chairs in the den of a lake house owned by Chris Shepard, my father’s youngest partner. Because it’s after Labor Day, most of the houses used as second homes by Natchezians are empty now. As I drew the curtains over the broad glass doors on the far wall, I saw the narrow black line of Lake Concordia, the oxbow lake that carries the name of the parish, behind the house. I also saw James Ervin, who’s guarding us from the lake side, while his brother Elvin guards the road entrance. Danny McDavitt is sitting in the chopper across the lake road, in the cotton field where we landed.

“Actually,” says Kelly, “my blood is still pretty hot at this point.”

“Mine too,” says my father. “Gutless bastards.”

While my father dressed Kelly’s wounded arm, we listened to his account of Jenny being attacked on the highway (not even the British police believe it was an accident), then brought Dad up to speed on the events on the river. While we talked, Carl tied the Bully Kutta’s severed head in a trash bag, then stored it in the refrigerator, so that its brain can be examined by the path lab in the morning. Coming after the events beside the river tonight, this scene was so surreal that

I could scarcely separate thought from emotion. Kelly’s assertion that the time has come to kill Jonathan Sands seems perfectly natural to me, given the situation. I can tell by Caitlin’s hard-set face that she doesn’'t agree. She doesn’'t want to antagonize my father, but she’s not going to be silent when the matter at hand is assassination.

“Look, I want the guy to go down,” she says. “He’s scum, okay? No question. But you can’t just kill him. I mean, if it’s all right for you to decide who lives and dies, the same goes for everyone else. Who empowered you? If you’re free to do that, where does it end? Back in the cave, that’s where.”

Kelly listens patiently until she stops. “Let me tell you a secret, Caitlin. We’re still in the cave. It’s just bigger, and we wear nicer clothes. We make alliances and try to be civil, we save the weak instead of leaving them out in the cold to die. But guys like Sands, Quinn, Po…they play by the ancient rules. To them, life is a zero-sum game. You win or lose, live or die. And the most important rule of all is, you take everything you can, when you can, until somebody draws a line and says, ‘No more.’”

“Is that your view of life?”

“If it were, I wouldn'’t be offering to kill a man in front of witnesses. You probably studied existentialism in college, right? Survey of philosophy course? I'm not trying to patronize you, okay? But I

am

an existentialist. A soldier. Asleep or awake, in uniform or out. There’s war in Afghanistan, but there’s war here too. When Sands threatened to kill Penn’s child, he opened hostilities and declared the rules of engagement. We know from Linda Church’s note that Sands probably murdered Ben Li, or else ordered it done. It’s a miracle Linda isn’t dead too—

if

she’s still alive, which we don'’t know for sure. I'm sure they'’re hunting for her as we speak.”

Caitlin shivers at this thought.

Kelly nods with certainty. “Given where things stand now, we have only one practical solution. Remove Sands from the equation.”

“You’re willing to do that?” Dad asks. “If we say here and now that that’s what we want…then Sands will die?”

Kelly nods soberly. “Quinn too, I think. Unavoidable.”

Caitlin shakes her head in amazement. “And you’ll go back to Afghanistan and never lose a night’s sleep over it?”

“I'’ll sleep better.”

What strikes me most about Kelly’s cool assertion is that a couple of hours ago, he was unwilling to put a dying dog out of its misery. But that mystery will have to wait. I look at my father, who’s rubbing his white beard with arthritically curled hands.

“It’s tempting,” Dad says. “When I think of Jenny rolling over in that car, I could do it myself.”

“I'm sorry to be a drag here, guys,” Caitlin says. “But this is

way

over the line. What does killing Sands even accomplish? If Edward Po is the problem, who’s to say he won'’t carry on the vendetta and send men here to kill Penn and every member of his family?”

“She’s got a point,” Carl says. “You’d be crazy not to consider that.”

“I’'ve considered it,” Kelly says. “Edward Po is a businessman. Whatever he’s up to here, he ultimately views it in terms of profit and loss. You can’t go around murdering government officials in small-town America. It draws the wrong kind of attention. That'’s bad business. Sands is Po’s cat’s-paw, his control mechanism for Golden Parachute. If Sands dies, Po will simply order Craig Weldon to put someone else in that job.”

“Yet you’re arguing that Sands

will

murder government officials,” Caitlin points out. “Or their families.”

“I think he’s proved that he will. I don'’t think Sands is motivated primarily by money.”

“You don'’t know that Po is either. You’re ignoring the question of face. If Po is a criminal, can he afford to let other criminals know that his lieutenants can be killed without reprisals?”

“I considered face,” Kelly says patiently. “Also

guanxi.

I think killing Sands is actually the most elegant solution to our problem—and not just for us. If Sands is killed, I suspect Po will claim credit for the murder—unofficially, of course. Competitors will assume that Po had Sands murdered for interfering with his niece, Jiao, whom Po vowed to protect from people like Sands.”

Everyone is silent, not least because Kelly seems two steps ahead of us all.