Greg Iles - The Devils Punchbowl

Twice in his career, Walt had actually stopped dogfights in progress. It was hard to imagine a more chaotic scene of flight. While

the panicked spectators raced for their trucks or four-wheelers—and sometimes even horses—the handlers would snatch up their dogs and hightail it into the woods, leaving their vehicles behind. The aftermath of those cases was always the same. After tracking a handler or owner to his home, Walt would find dogs chained in such pitiful conditions that he wanted to manacle the owner to one of the poles and let the dogs into the house to live. In one case he’d actually done that, but only for half an hour, while he waited for the state troopers and animal control officers to show up. He’d hoped the experience might give the owner some empathy for his dogs, but it hadn'’t. A year later, the man had been stabbed to death beside a pit during a dispute over whether his dog’s coat had been laced with poison.

“You like fight?” Ming asks, standing on tiptoe to speak in Walt’s ear above the howling crowd.

“Not much.” Walt realizes that he’s hardly paid attention to the dogs since they first exploded out of their corners like projectiles shot from a gun. “This is bush league,” he says, truthfully.

“Bush?” Ming asks, clearly confused.

“Amateur hour. Low-rent. I can’t believe they sent us to this dump.”

Ming’s remarkable eyes narrow in concern. “You no like?”

“No. These dogs are mismatched. The brindle outweighs the black by two and a half pounds.”

“You want go closer? I take you front row.”

“I'm fine right here, hon.” It strikes Walt that Ming may not be as disgusted by the scene as he is. “Do you like the fight?”

The young woman shrugs, then whispers, “No like people.”

Her warm breath in the shell of his ear starts his heart pounding.

“They no like me either,” she adds. “To hell with them, yes?”

Walt chuckles at her frankness. “More than likely, is my guess. You want to leave?”

Ming shrugs, then smiles and runs her finger along his forearm. “Whatever you want, Zhaybee.”

Walt considers the matter. He knows he’s not thinking as clearly as he should. He ought to have been working the crowd for clues to Caitlin Masters’s whereabouts, but he’s just stood beside Ming, like the lazy old fart he’s pretending to be. It’s not the dogfight that’s

messing him up. It’s the girl. But it’s not like it matters tonight. In his gut he knows he will find no clues here.

Sands is testing me,

he thinks.

He has to be. This is how they screen prospective spectators. A thrown-together dogfight like this wouldn'’t attract the kinds of gamblers Jessup had told Penn about. Not even the ones who wanted to go slumming.

No rap star, NFL player, Arab prince, or Chinese billionaire was going to spend five minutes with this pathetic collection of pasty-faced, Skoal-dipping rednecks. They’re still talking about the “kickass” hog vs. dog exhibition that preceded the pit fight.

Who’s watching me?

Walt wonders. Someone in this room was studying him right now, evaluating every reaction. One of the men on the far side of the crowd probably. But the spy could be Ming herself. Sands or Quinn might be planning to question her later and draw out every detail of how he’d behaved during the fight. He’d have to make sure that nothing she said would arouse suspicion.

“You want me call driver?” Ming asks.

Walt stands on tiptoe, pretending to base his decision on what’s happening in the pit. Genghis, the brindle, still has a lock on the foreleg of the black, and Mike has lost a lot of blood. The floor of the pit is viscous with it. Mike’s handler looks worried, and Walt senses that Genghis is about to try for his throat.

“I guess,” Walt says in a bored voice. “Hell, I’d rather be back on the

Queen

than in this dump.”

Ming takes his callused hand in her soft fingers and looks up at him with liquid eyes. “Or in hotel room, maybe?”

Walt swallows hard, trying to conceal how desperately he wants to be alone with her. Ming removes a cell phone from her tiny handbag, presses a key, and puts a finger into her opposite ear. Their driver had told them he couldn'’t wait outside, since a random bust was always possible. If that happened, they were to run into the nearby woods and wait until the police left, then call him on Ming’s cell phone. Because they'’re far out in the woods, Walt figures the limo is at least twenty minutes away.

Ming stands on tiptoe again, and he leans down. “Driver come back fifteen minutes,” she says. “Okay, Zhaybee?”

“That’ll do. This fight will be over by then, anyway. The black’s about had it.”

Ming peeks between some people in front of her. “Yes.”

Now all Walt has to do is pretend to be excited about cruelty and slaughter for fifteen minutes.

The black’s handler is shouting at Genghis to break off the fight. The other handler looks angry about this, but the fight’s being conducted under “Cajun Rules,” a code that strictly governs all aspects of a fight from the washing, weighing, and handling of the dogs to what constitutes a turn and a scratch—even the duties of the referee and timekeeper. Any dog handler with experience ought to know that Cajun Rules allow the handlers to yell at both dogs.

To Walt’s surprise, a sharp cry from Mike’s handler finally distracts Genghis, and Mike tears himself free, twisting away in a move that warrants a cessation of the fight. As Mike limps back to his corner on three legs, the referee calls a turn, signaling that the black has tried to break off the battle. Mike’s handler straddles his gasping dog, rubbing him vigorously after only a cursory check of the injured leg, which is almost surely broken.

“Get ready, Mike!” he yells, tossing a bloody towel aside. “You ain’t out of it yet. You got your second wind now. Get ready to scratch, boy!”

To scratch, Mike will have to limp across a line in the dirt four feet in front of him—within two seconds of the referee’s signal—then voluntarily engage Genghis, whose handler is struggling to hold him in his corner. Walt tries to imagine a boxing trainer encouraging a human fighter to continue with a broken, mangled shoulder. They don'’t even do that in UFC fighting.

“Let go!” shouts the referee, and the timekeeper begins counting. Before the second syllable dies in his throat, Mike limps out of his handler’s grasp and hobbles across the scratch line. Half the crowd whoops with approval. Across the pit, Genghis strains in his handler’s arms, almost mad to finish the battle. Mike hesitates at the center of the pit, then tucks his tail between his legs and starts to turn away.

“Goddamn it, don'’t you turn!” screams his handler. “Hit him! Hit! Hit!”

Mike looks back across the pit, then lowers his square head, charges across the bloody dirt and lunges at Genghis, seizing the brindle’s nose in his jaws. When Genghis’s handler releases him, Mike

tries to roll him over, but the broken leg prevents his getting enough leverage to do it. As the churning dogs wheel to one side, Genghis rips his nose free and darts out of Mike’s reach, then hurls himself bodily into the smaller dog, knocking him onto his back. Genghis leaps for Mike’s exposed throat, but Mike twists his trunk at the last instant, and the massive jaws bite deep into his chest instead. The crowd roars and stomps the floor in approval.

Genghis thrashes his head from side to side, grinding his jaws, widening the wound. A rush of blood soaks Mike’s ribs, glistening on the black coat, and for a moment both dogs stop moving. Genghis seems content to rest in this dominant position, his jaws locked in Mike’s chest, his tail held high. Mike gazes back at his handler with cloudy eyes, like a boy who has disappointed his father.

“Get up!” the handler screams. “You goddamn worthless sack of meat!”

At this furious cursing, Mike jerks weakly, his back legs paddling the air as he tries to wrestle free from the terrible jaws, but his effort only spurs Genghis to drive deeper into the wound. The brindle whips his head back and forth with monstrous power, flinging Mike bodily across the pit, and the crowd shouts in manic anticipation of the kill.

“Finish him!” yells a woman from the throng.

“Kill him, G! Gut that black cur!”

Walt’s stomach heaves, unable to tolerate the mixture of anger and disgust flooding through him. This is like standing in a room where prisoners are forced to fight or copulate for the pleasure of their guards. The Nazis did that, and the Japanese, and probably the jailers of all nations in all epochs of history. Walt knows men who have done it; he witnessed such a fight once at an army stockade. The specter of Abu Ghraib rises in his mind. The terrible truth is that brutality is part of human nature, and all the laws in the world can’t neuter it. That'’s the accursed nub of the thing. Some people in this barn probably think

he’s

obscene—a geezer on the wrong side of seventy with a delicate beauty hardly past twenty. Of course, they don'’t know that being with Ming is simply part of his job, just as being with Nancy had been. Although…the two aren'’t quite the same. Being with Nancy felt like work. Being with Ming feels like the first rush after a good shot of whiskey, dilated into a constant

state of euphoria. Ming is one of those rare women who draws every eye wherever she goes. Every man wants her, and every woman hates her because they can’t be her. Her very existence is an affront to other women’s efforts to attract the opposite sex.

But Walt doesn’'t want Ming for the reason these rednecks thinks he does. She’s beautiful, yes, and she radiates sensuality like a magnetic field. But for him the girl is a living door to the past: a time when he felt more alive to love than at any other time in his life. He can’t bear to think about Kaeko in this obscene place, but the pain of being forced to leave her in Japan returns with even the faintest memory. Walt had been so despondent that he’d gone half out of his head. He’d stopped thinking right, stopped paying attention, and that got men killed in Korea. If it hadn'’t been for Tom Cage, Walt would have died during the retreat from Chosin Reservoir.

Ming touches his arm, stands on tiptoe, and says, “We must go, Zhaybee. Now.”

“Is the driver here?”

She hands him her cell phone and points to a text message on its LCD screen. It reads GET OUT NOW. HELICOPTER SEARCHING FIVE MILES AWAY. HIDE IN WOODS. WILL CALL SOON.

As Walt reads these words, the referee calls a turn, which silences the puzzled crowd. There’s been no turn. Genghis is standing over Mike with his head still buried in the black’s chest.

“Folks,” cries the ref, “we may be about to get a visit from the sheriff. I designate location number four as the site to finish this battle, if Mike’s still game.”

The crowd begins to swirl around the pit like water around a drain, as people pick up coats, gather children, and toss beer bottles at the overflowing trash cans.

The ref looks at Mike’s handler. “Is your dog still game?”

“Hell, no,” the man mutters. “Sumbitch is good as dead. You call it. Collins can have the purse.”

At this concession, the crowd explodes into motion. Walt feels like he’s in an ant pile some kid stomped on. Wads of cash change hands as people make for the doors, and nearly everyone has a cell phone jammed against his ear.

“We go now!” Ming says, real fear in her eyes.

“No, we don'’t,” says Walt.

Engines roar to life outside, shaking the barn. Dirt and gravel hammer the walls as the vehicles flee.

“Yes, yes. Must go now!”

“Take it easy. After these yahoos clear out with their dogs, we’ve got nothing to worry about.”

“Helicopter coming!”

The barn is empty now, save for Walt and Ming and a pile of black fur in the pit. Mike’s handler has left him behind. Walt steps down into the pit, kneels beside the valiant bulldog. Thankfully, Mike is dead. Walt closes his eyes for a moment, thinking of soldiers he’d known who died just as uselessly as Mike did.

“You want go to jail?” Ming cries.

Walt isn’t worried about jail. He’s almost certain that the helicopter is being flown by Danny McDavitt. Still, if some gung-ho sheriff’s deputy were to show up on a random raid, Walt would either have to blow his cover to get out of it or spend the night in some parish shithole. With a heavy sigh he stands and climbs out of the pit, then takes Ming by the hand and leads her to the barn door.

“You crazy man?” Ming asks gravely.

Walt thinks of the howling crowd and the bleeding dogs and wonders how he wound up in the middle of nowhere while the real action went down somewhere else.

“Maybe so,” he says wearily.

The limousine waits outside like a long black hearse, its engine purring in the dark. When the driver jumps out and opens the rear door, Walt helps Ming in, then settles back into the leather seat beside her.

“Any sign of that chopper?” he asks.

“It moved off toward the river,” says the driver.

“Good.”

“Are we going back to the boat?”

Ming clenches his hand and puts her lips against his ear. “Hotel now. Make you forget dogs. Yes?”

Walt draws back and looks into her bottomless eyes. Back on the

Queen,

outside the Devil’s Punchbowl, they had seemed opaque, but now he feels he could lose himself in their depths.

He looks up and sees the driver watching them in his rearview mirror, smug judgment in his eyes.