The Devil’s Punchbowl

The ladies’ room opens into Slot Group Seven, a jangling circus of noise filled with smoke and drunk gamblers. The extraction fans don’t work for shit up here. Linda smooths her skirt against her thighs and tries to walk with something like grace as she moves through the suckers and back toward the Punchbowl.

She’s thirty feet away when she realizes something is wrong. Ashley and Janice are standing by the cash registers, talking to each other without any regard for three patrons waiting to be seated. Ashley’s mouth forms a perfect O, then Janice nods and begins chattering. When Ashley catches sight of Linda, she motions her over with a quick wave.

‘What is it?’ Linda asks, fighting the urge to bolt for the main-deck gangplank.

‘Janice just got a text from her ex-husband. He’s up at Bowie’s. He said some guy fell off the bluff up by Silver Street. He was goofing on the other side of the fence or something, and he fell. He’s dead. Some people are saying he jumped.’

Linda blinks, trying to absorb this, but a low ringing has begun in her ears.

‘Drunk, probably,’ Janice says. ‘Jimmy’s drunk, anyway. You couldn’t get me on the other side of that fence even if I was toasted. There’s only about a foot of concrete, and then nothing.’

‘A whole lot of nothing,’ Ashley agrees. ‘I wonder who it was.’

‘A tourist, I bet,’ says Janice. ‘Somebody here for the race. Wait.’ Janice takes a cell phone from her pocket and checks a message. ‘Now Jimmy says somebody threw the guy off the bluff. Jesus.’

Linda is looking at Janice, but what she sees is Tim flying through the air, head over heels, spinning through the dark—

‘Linda?’ says Ashley, her voice tinged with real concern. ‘Are you going to puke again?’

Janice grabs the trash can from behind the register, but Linda ignores it and walks back toward the ladies’ room. The girls say something behind her, but she doesn’t catch the meaning. She passes the door of the restroom and walks to the thick glass door that leads to the observation deck. The October wind hits her face-on, and she’s glad for the chill. Looking upriver, she sees the lights of the houses on Clifton Avenue, then Weymouth Hall. Somewhere up there, Tim is supposed to be meeting Penn Cage tonight. She doesn’t let her mind go any further than that. Tim is there, she says silently. Right now, he’s handing over whatever he got tonight. With this article of faith set in her heart, she slips her personal cell phone from her pocket and flicks it through the rail, toward the river three decks below. She doesn’t hear the splash, but she sees a spurt of silver rise in the moonlight as the phone goes under. She knows herbody was between her hand and the surveillance camera when she threw the phone, because she’s rehearsed this move a dozen times in her mind, just as Tim instructed.

‘Keep moving,’ she mouths to herself, walking to the companion-way used by the service staff to get to the main deck. ‘Don’t stop long enough to let fear paralyze you.’

She’s quoting Tim now, like a heroine echoing her mentor in her mind. She slips through the gift shop, then past the foot of the escalators. This is the hardest part of her journey. Every atom of instinct is screaming for her to march down the big aisle between the slots, through the main entrance, and right across the broad exit ramp–but she can’t.

She doesn’t have her car keys.

For one wild moment she considers leaving anyway, breaking into a sprint and racing out to freedom. But if she did that, she’d be cutting herself off from Tim. The TracFone from Wal-Mart is under her car seat, and that’s her only sure link to him now. To reach it, she has to have her keys.

Why didn’t you tell me to keep my ignition key in my pocket? she asks Tim silently. Why didn’t I think of it? For the first time a blade of raw terror slices through her, cold and true. If Tim didn’t think of this contingency, what else did he forget?

Linda grits her teeth and forces herself to breeze past the center aisle without looking at the exit. Point of no return, she thinks, spying the service door that leads belowdecks to the restricted area of the boat. Operations, Security, the physical plant of the barge.

She has to show her badge to the security officer at the top of the stairs. He gives it a bored look, then lets her walk down the steps. She can feel his eyes on her backside as she reaches the lower deck.

The smell changes in the lower holds. It’s like entering the service elevator in a hotel by mistake. The illusion of cleanliness and luxury falls away, leaving the sticky floor of reality. The air down here reeks of bad cafeteria food and other things she can’t quite recognize. Employee resentment…paranoia. Linda quails at the idea of going near the security control area, but she has no choice. The lockers and changing room are aft of the security suite.

Because everyone is still on shift, she’s alone on the lower deck. If the security guys poke their heads out, she’ll tell them she’s puking nonstop and has to get to the emergency room.

A long corridor runs past the door of the security suite, then the off-limits room they call the Devil’s Punchbowl. She makes the length of the passageway on a single held-in breath. Halfway home now. Through the hatch that leads to the changing rooms, past the clock where she punches in, around the corner…and there. The employee lockers.

Linda licks her lips, takes a breath, then dials the combination on her locker. The lock clicks. In her mind she sees the yellow Dooney & Bourke purse she bought at Dillard’s in New Orleans, a birthday splurge. And inside the purse, her car keys.

She opens the door and reaches into the locker, but her purse is gone. Withdrawing her hand, she leans back so that more light can get into the space. It’s a mistake, she thinks, feeling the way she does when she somehow loses the milk carton in the refrigerator.

Lying where she left her purse is the black TracFone Tim bought her at Wal-Mart–the phone she last saw before shoving it under the front seat of her Corolla.

‘You fucking slag,’ growls a male voice filled with rage. Seamus Quinn. ‘Do you have any idea what you’re in for?’

Linda closes her eyes and grips the cold metal edge of the locker door. Without it, she would have fainted to the deck.

Quinn starts to speak again, but the air in the room changes suddenly, and his words become a mute exhalation. Linda hears rapid, shallow breathing that sets her nerves thrumming.

‘Close the locker, Linda,’ says Jonathan Sands. ‘We’re a bit pressed for time.’

Tim is dead, says a voice inside her, the voice that has known it all along. Hot tears slide down her cheeks as she closes the locker door.

‘That’s it, darlin’,’ says Sands. ‘Now turn around.’

Linda wipes her face on her sleeve and turns slowly. Quinn is leaning against the wall behind her, his shoulder wedged against a flyer that reads NEED HELP MANAGING YOUR 401(K)? Sands stands in the corridor that leads past the security suite, arms folded across his chest, dressed as perfectly as if he were attending a wedding or a funeral in fifteen minutes. His hyperobservant eyes glide over her face and clothing, missing nothing. Beside him sits the huge white dog that sometimes accompanies him on the boat. Sands told her the dog was bred in Pakistan, for fighting and for war. She has never heard the dog make a sound.

Poor Tim, she thinks in a rush of despair that almost drops her to the floor.

‘Can’t trust a fucking cunt,’ Quinn mutters. ‘All the same.’

Linda’s heart flutters like a panicked bird trying to beat its way up through her throat. Move, she tells herself. Run—

‘Don’t be a fool,’ Sands says. ‘There’s nowhere to go.’

The wild urge to flight twists inside her.

‘Come to me,’ Sands says, beckoning her toward the hallway. ‘We need to ask you some questions about Timothy.’

The last ember of hope dies in her soul.

They know.

14 (#ulink_595f2ba9-a436-51a4-b6c1-df734aae8589)

The second my father walks into my bathroom with his black bag, I put my finger to my lips and shove a piece of paper into his hands. On it are printed the words:

I’m not sick. Annie is in danger. We all are. House may be bugged. Act like I’m having a panic attack. Follow my lead. We’re going to type messages on the computer on the counter. I’ll turn on the bath taps to cover the noise of the keyboard.

Dad looks up after reading for only two seconds, but I shake my head and point at the paper, and he goes back to reading. My father is seventy-three years old, and he’s practiced medicine in Natchez for more than forty of those years. He’s the same height I am–an inch over six feet–but the arthritis that’s slowly curling his hands into claws has bowed his spine so that I am taller now. His hair and beard have gone white, his skin is cracked and spotted from psoriasis, and he has to take insulin shots every day, yet the primary impression he radiates is one of strength. Thirty years past triple-bypass surgery, he’s sicker than most of his patients, but they think of him as I do: an oak tree twisted by age and battered by storms, but still indomitable at the core. He licks his lips, looks up slowly from the paper, and says, ‘Is your heart still racing?’

‘I think it’s worse. And the nausea’s worse. I vomited twice after I called you.’

‘Wonderful.’ Dad glances toward the bathroom counter. Between the two sinks are the articles I assembled while I waited for him: my keys; a black Nike warm-up suit and running shoes; Annie’s MacBook computer, booted up with Microsoft Word on the screen; a Springfield XD nine-millimeter pistol, and a short-barreled .357 Magnum. ‘I brought you some Ativan,’ he says, ‘but I want to listen to your chest first.’

‘Do you mind if I get in the bathtub? I want to clean myself up.’

‘That’s fine. Just get your shirt off.’

I nod and turn on the cold-water tap, then strip off my clothes and pull on the warm-up suit. Dad moves in front of the computer as I pull on the top and pecks out the words What the hell is going on?

He steps aside for me to type my response, and we begin a sort of waltz in place, during which I explain our dilemma. He always typed much slower than I, but it’s worse now because of his hands; it hurts to watch him struggle to strike the keys.

Tim Jessup was murdered tonight. It has to do with his work at one of the casinos. The man behind his death just threatened to kill Annie. The motive is too complex to explain like this. They threatened Mom’s life, and yours too. Even Jenny, and she’s on the other side of the Atlantic.