The Devils Punchbowl

ALSO BY GREG ILES

Third Degree

True Evil

Turning Angel

Blood Memory

The Footprints of God

Sleep No More

Dead Sleep

24 Hours

The Quiet Game

Mortal Fear

Black Cross

Spandau Phoenix

SCRIBNER

A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Copyright © 2009 by Greg Iles

For

Madeline and Mark

Who pay the highest price for my writing life.

Thank you.

No man in the wrong can stand up against a fellow that?s in the right and keeps on a comin?.

??Captain Bill McDonald, Texas Ranger

?You?re an animal.?

?No, worse. Human.?

??Runaway Train

THE DEVIL?S PUNCHBOWL

CHAPTER

1

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 haven'?t sneaked into the cemetery at midnight to visit my wife?s grave. I?'ve come at the urgent request of a friend. But I didn't come here for the sake of friendship. I came out of guilt. And fear.

The man I'm waiting for is forty-five years old, yet in my mind he will always be nine. That'?s when our friendship peaked, during the Apollo 11 moon landing. But you don'?t 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 don'?t 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 wasn'?t there to get him out of it.

My fear has nothing to do with Tim; he?s 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 couldn'?t 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 true?if a uniquely disturbing evil has entered into my town?it 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, I'm afraid, was wishful thinking.

For months now, a sense of failure has been accreting in my chest like fibrous tissue. I?'ve rarely failed at