The Devil’s Punchbowl

I nod.

Sands puts his hands behind his back and looks down like an officer contemplating a job in progress. A born soldier was my immediate impression of the man when I met him, for his bearing seems altogether military, though somewhat more fluid than that of the regular officers I’ve known. Sands has little skin fat; his face looks like a skull overlaid with the optimum amount of muscle, and little else. He’s losing his hair in front, but his baldness gives no impression of weakness; rather, the heavy brow and blue-gray machine gunner’s eyes give one the feeling that hair was simply an inconvenience better dispensed with. He stands right at six feet, but his trim waist and thickly muscled shoulders give one a much more aggressive perception of his height.

‘I have a problem, Mr Cage,’ he says. ‘I’m here because I want you to solve it for me.’

‘What’s your problem?’

‘Your friend Jessup stole something from his place of employment.’

I blink slowly, a man trying to find an appropriate response.

‘You don’t look surprised enough to suit me, Mr Mayor. Not nearly.’

‘Tim wasn’t exactly a Boy Scout,’ I say as calmly as I can. ‘What did he steal? Money? Drugs?’

The Irishman gives me a tight smile. ‘You know better than that.’

‘What I know about Tim Jessup is that he was a fuckup. And I don’t know what any of this has to do with me.’

Sands takes a deep breath and exhales slowly. ‘I have a decision to make tonight, Mr Mayor. A decision about you. And you’re not helping yourself. Your family either.’

At the word family, something squirms in my belly.

‘The question,’ Sands enunciates softly, ‘is can I trust you? For example, you may already know what Jessup stole from my boat. Do you know that, Mr Cage? Don’t lie. If you lie, I’ll know it.’

By God, I just about believe you. ‘I have no idea.’

The blue eyes don’t waver; this man has spent a lifetime calculating odds. ‘Don’t you now?’

I shake my head deliberately.

After what seems a full minute, Sands says, ‘Would you bet your daughter’s life on that answer?’

An image of Seamus Quinn holding Annie prisoner upstairs fills my mind, and terror compresses my heart. I grab for the door handle, but before I can turn it, something white explodes out of the flower bed, and iron jaws clamp around my wrist, pinning it motionless in the air. I try to jerk away, but the jaws tighten, numbing my fingers as surely as a nerve block.

A white dog more than half my size stands like an apparition between Sands and me, its eyes cold and blue above the wolfish mouth locked around my arm. Hot saliva runs down my tingling fingers, yet I can’t quite accept the evidence of my eyes. No sound preceded this attack, not a growl or a bark or a word of command–only a quick swish of foliage from behind Sands.

‘Easy now,’ he says either to me or to the dog, maybe to both of us. ‘Your daughter’s just fine, Mr Cage. For the moment, at least. She’s sleeping soundly, with your sainted mother beside her in the scratcher. But if you step through that door before we come to an accommodation, that could change very quickly.’

I try to back away from the door, but the dog’s forelegs are braced like white-painted fence posts, its jaw locked like a steel wrench. After a few moments, Sands makes a clicking sound with his tongue. The dog releases my arm, then walks to his master’s side and sits at attention like an obedient soldier. I stare at the animal as I rub the circulation back into my hand. I’ve never seen its like before, not even a similar breed; an oversize pit bull might be its closest cousin, but this dog has a wrinkled face that throws me. White from nose to tail, he has cropped ears and a thickly muscled chest to match his master’s. The animal has an unearthly silence about him, as though spectral and not a thing of blood and flesh, but I can still feel the imprints of his teeth in my muscles; I’ll have blood bruises in the morning.

‘You’re not a stupid man,’ Sands says, rubbing the dog’s head affectionately. ‘Don’t start playing at it now. I make it my business to know who I’m dealing with. I know you put a lot of hard men in prison back in Texas. Rapists. Robbers. Murderers. Aryan fanatics. Got some of them executed too. I also know you’ve taken on men from your own side of the table. That FBI bastard, for example. I only mention this because you need to understand something. Despite your grand experience, you’ve never come across a man like me.’ A smug smile. ‘I’m sure you’ve heard that one before, eh? The innocent man on death row. The whore with a heart of gold. But every now and then you come across a bloke who knows what he’s on about.’ Sands smiles to himself. ‘That would be me. And this is how you know.’

He utters a low whistle, and suddenly the dog is upon me again, rearing on his hind legs and pinning me to my front door with his forepaws. His mass and strength are astounding, and the hot breath in my face triggers a primitive, almost subhuman fear. The dog still hasn’t made a sound, but it’s all I can do not to piss down my leg.

‘Starting this minute,’ Sands says, looking at this watch, ‘you have twenty-four hours to find the property your friend stole and return it to me. Use any resource at your disposal, but don’t mention me or my company to anyone. If you do, I’ll know it, and a penalty will be exacted. If you talk to the police or the sheriff’s department, I’ll know. If you contact the FBI, I’ll find out faster than you’d believe possible. If you talk to the state gaming commission, you’re fucked. You call the governor, a senator, or your old friend the district attorney of Houston, I’ll know that too. And if I find out you’ve done any of these things…I’ll kill the little girl sleeping upstairs.’

Sands moves up beside his dog and drags the cold barrel of his gun along my stubbled jaw. ‘And I won’t use a gun. I’ll use this.’

A needle point of steel pierces the skin just below my navel, sending a shock of fear through my intestines.

‘I’m very good with a knife,’ Sands says softly. ‘And I’d take my time about it. Understand? Now’–he presses the gun into a hollow beside my trachea, and the knifepoint digs a little deeper–‘ after your daughter’s dead, you might bring me into a court and try to punish me. But you’ve dealt with enough victims’ families to know how useless that is. If you executed me five seconds after I killed her, it wouldn’t bring her back, would it?’

Out of the numbness that has enveloped me like a fog, I shake my head.

As Sands presses his right ear almost against my lips, the knifepoint vanishes; then I feel it burrowing into the skin between two ribs on my left side. ‘I didn’t hear you, Your Honor.’

‘I understand.’

‘Course you do,’ Sands says almost musically. ‘But that quick mind of yours is already working, trying to squirm out of the trap. Hide the girl, yeah? You’d have to hide your mum and dad too. And of course your sister in Bath, and her husband, and the two brats. I have a lot of mates in England who owe me that kind of favor. Then there’s yer one who owns the local bookstore, and her langer of a son. And let’s not forget the lady newspaper publisher, fresh back from the big city. A mouthy cunt, I’ll wager, but the prettiest piece of them all. So, let’s put an end to that nonsense. Either you get me back what your friend stole, or you pay the price. There’s no third choice.’

My hands have begun to shake, but whether from fear or rage I don’t know. ‘You still haven’t told me what he stole.’

‘And I don’t intend to, do I? That’s your job.’

‘How can I find something when I don’t know what it is?’

The knife pierces skin again. I tense, and Sands’s eyes flash. ‘Give me your best guess.’

‘Documents?’ I grunt. ‘Data?’

‘Brilliant. It’s a disc, right? A DVD. Started out as one, anyway. The data could have been copied onto something else by now. USB drive, digital tape, hard drive, even a fucking iPod. What the data is, I won’t tell you, but you’ll know it when you see it.’

‘How?’

‘It’s encrypted.’

The knifepoint withdraws a fraction of an inch. ‘Are you a betting man, Mr Cage?’

‘No.’

‘Good. That’s a sign of intelligence. I don’t gamble either. Because the house always wins. People can’t seem to remember that. But I’m trusting you will.’

The knife again. I wince and try not to cry out.

‘I know this is a lot to take in,’ Sands says. ‘You lost a mate tonight, and that’s never easy. But the truth is, you cut yourself loose from Jessup a long time ago. And rightly so. The man was a header. Christ, he got weepy whenever he talked about how you two were lads together, watching the moon shots on the telly.’

The revelation that this meant so much to Tim almost brings tears to my eyes. I steel myself and keep my eyes on Sands’s face to avoid looking into the dog’s eyes.

‘Listen to me now,’ he says. ‘Let the rupies investigate Jessup’s death. Do everything you planned to do before Jessup died. Show the visiting CEO the town, give interviews, fly around in the balloons. But while you’re having your craic, you find time to find my property. If I find it first, I’ll let you know. Remember, I’ll be watching. And listening.’ In a blur, he raises the knife and pricks the soft skin beneath my left eye. ‘Don’t play games with me, mate. Remember the first rule: The house always wins. And I’m the house.’

Sands bends and slips his pistol into an ankle holster, then takes my gun from the small of his back, removes the clip, ejects the remaining round from the chamber, and hands the pistol to me. As he slides the clip into my front pants pocket, his dog pushes off my chest, retrieves the ejected bullet from the flower bed, and drops the brass into his master’s hand. Sands rubs the dog between its cropped ears, then drops the loose round into my pants pocket.

‘One last thing.’ Sands kneels at the edge of the porch, reaches down into the shadows behind him, and brings up a black leather briefcase.

‘What’s that?’

‘A quarter million dollars.’