The Devil’s Punchbowl
The shocking new thriller from the king of southern gothic.When he was a prosecuting attorney Penn Cage sent hardened killers to death row. But it is as mayor of his hometown - Natchez, Mississippi - that Penn will face his most dangerous threat.Urged by old friends to restore the town to its former glory, Penn has ridden into office on a tide of support for change. But in its quest for new jobs and fresh money, Natchez has turned to casino gambling. Five fantastical steamboats float on the river beside the old slave market like props from Gone With the Wind. But one boat isn't like the others. Rumour has it that the Magnolia Queen has found a way to pull the big players from Las Vegas. And with them comes an unquenchable taste for one thing: blood sport, and the dark vices that go with it.When a childhood friend of Penn's who brings him evidence of these crimes is brutally murdered, the full weight of Penn's failure to protect this city hits home. So begins his quest to find the men responsible. But it's a hunt he begins alone, for the local authorities have been corrupted by the money and power of his hidden enemy. With his family's life at stake, Penn realizes his only allies in his one-man war are those bound to him by blood or honour.
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GREG ILES
The Devilâs Punchbowl
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the authorâs imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Harper An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF
Copyright © Greg Iles 2009
Cover layout design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2014
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Greg Iles asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Ebook Edition © 2009 ISBN: 9780007317486
Version: 2018-07-16
ForMadeline and MarkWho pay the highest price for my writing life. Thank you.
No man in the wrong can stand up against a fellow thatâs in the right and keeps on a cominâ.
â Captain Bill McDonald, Texas Ranger
âYouâre an animal.â
âNo, worse. Human.â â Runaway Train
Contents
Midnight in the garden of the dead.
A silver-white moon hangs high over the mirror-black river and the tired levee, shedding cold light on the Louisiana delta stretching off toward Texas. I stand among the luminous stones on the Mississippi side, shivering like the only living man for miles. At my feet lies a stark slab of granite, and under that stone lies the body of my wife. The monument at its head reads:
SARAH ELIZABETH CAGE
1963-1998 Daughter. Wife. Mother. Teacher. She is loved.
I havenât sneaked into the cemetery at midnight to visit my wifeâs grave. Iâve come at the urgent request of a friend. But I didnât come here for the sake of friendship. I came out of guilt. And fear.
The man Iâm waiting for is forty-five years old, yet in my mind he will always be nine. Thatâs when our friendship peaked, during the Apollo 11 moon landing. But you donât often make friends like those you make as a boy, so the debt is a long one. My guilt is the kind you feel when someone slips away and you donât do enough to maintain the tie, all the more painful because over the years Tim Jessup managed to get himself into quite a bit of trouble, and after the first eight or nine times, I wasnât there to get him out of it.
My fear has nothing to do with Tim; heâs merely a messenger, one who may bear tidings I have no wish to hear. News that confirms the rumors being murmured over golf greens at the country club, bellowed between plays beside high school gridirons, and whispered through the hunting camps like a rising breeze before a storm. When Jessup asked to meet me, I resisted. He couldnât have chosen a worse time to discover a conscience, for me or for the city. Yet in the end I agreed to hear him out. For if the rumors are trueâif a uniquely disturbing evil has entered into my townâit was I who opened the door for it. I ran for mayor in a Jeffersonian fit of duty to save my hometown and, in my righteousness, was arrogant enough to believe I could deal with the devil and somehow keep our collective virtue intact. But that, Iâm afraid, was wishful thinking.
For months now, a sense of failure has been accreting in my chest like fibrous tissue. Iâve rarely failed at anything, and I have never quit. Most Americans are raised never to give up, and in the South that credo is practically a religion. But two years ago I stood before my wifeâs grave with a full heart and the belief that I could by force of will resurrect the idyllic town that had borne me, by closing the racial wounds that had prevented it from becoming the shining beacon I knew it could be, and bringing back the prosperity it deserved. Halfway through my four-year term, Iâve learned that most people donât want change, even when itâs in their best interest. We pay lip service to ideals, but we live by expediency and by tribal prejudice. Accepting this hypocrisy has nearly broken me.
