not what you think, bro. I’ve just been carrying this stuff around in my head for a while, and sometimes I get the shakes.’
He’s crying, I realize with amazement. He’s wiping tears from his eyes. I squeeze his knee to comfort him.
‘I’m sorry,’ he whispers. ‘We’re a long way from Mill Pond Road, aren’t we?’
Mill Pond Road is the street I grew up on. ‘We sure are. Are you okay?’
He stubs out his cigarette on a gravestone and leans forward, his eyes burning with passion I thought long gone from him. ‘If I tell you more, there’s no going back. You understand? I tell you what I know, you won’t be able to sleep. I know you. You’ll be like a pit bull yourself. You won’t let it go.’
‘Isn’t that why you asked me here?’
Jessup shrugs, his head and hands jittery again. ‘I’m just telling you, Penn. You want to walk away, do it now. Climb over that wall and slide back down to your car. That’s what a smart man would do.’
I settle against the cold bricks and consider what I’ve heard. This is one of the ways fate comes for you. It can swoop darkly from a cloudless sky like my wife’s cancer; or it can lie waiting in your path, obvious to any eyes willing to see it. But sometimes it’s simply a fork in the road, and rare is the day that a friend stands beside it, offering you the safer path. It’s the oldest human choice: comfortable ignorance or knowledge bought with pain? I can almost hear Tim at his blackjack table on the Magnolia Queen: ‘Hit or stay, sir?’ If only I had a real choice. But because I helped bring the Queen to Natchez, I don’t.
‘Let’s hear it, Timmy. I don’t have all night.’
Jessup closes his eyes and crosses himself. ‘Praise God,’ he breathes. ‘I don’t know what I would have done if you’d walked away. I’m way out on a limb here, man. And I’m totally alone.’
I give him a forced smile. ‘Let’s hope my added weight doesn’t break it off.’
He takes a long look at me, then shifts his weight to raise one hip and slides something from his back pocket. It looks like a couple of playing cards. He holds them out, palm down, the cards mostly concealed beneath his fingers.
‘Pick a card?’ I ask.
‘They’re not cards. They’re pictures. They’re kind of blurry. Shot with a cell phone.’
With a sigh of resignation I reach out and take them from his hand. I’ve viewed thousands of crime-scene photos in microscopic detail, so I don’t expect to be shocked by whatever Tim Jessup has brought in his back pocket. But when he flicks his lighter into flame and holds it over the first photo, a wasplike buzzing begins in my head, and my stomach does a slow roll.
‘I know,’ he says quietly. ‘Keep going. It gets worse.’
Linda Church lies beneath the man who pays her wages and tries to hide the fear behind her eyes. As he drives into her, his eyes burning, his forehead dripping sweat, she imagines she’s a stone figure in a cathedral, with opaque eyes that reveal nothing. Linda reads fantasy novels during her off hours, and sometimes she imagines she’s a character in a book, a noblewoman forced by a cruel twist of fate to do things she never thought she would. Things like that happened to heroines all the time. All her life (or since she was four years old and played the princess in her nursery-school play) Linda has searched for a real prince, for a gentle man who could lead her out of the thorny maze that’s been her life ever since the other kind of man had his way with her. When she first met the man using her now, she believed that magical moment had finally come. Only a year shy of thirty (and with her looks still holding despite some rough treatment), Linda had finally been placed by fate in the path of a prince. He looked like a film actor, carried himself like a soldier, and best of all actually talked like a prince in the movies her grandmother used to watch. Like Cary Grant or Laurence Olivier or…somebody.
But not even Cary Grant was Cary Grant. He was named Archie Leach or something, and though he was probably an okay guy, he wasn’t who you thought he was, and that was the truth of life right there. Nothing was what you thought it was, because no one was who they pretended to be. Everybody wanted something, and men mostly wanted the same thing. If her prince had turned into a frog, she would at least have had the comfort of familiarity. But this story was different; this false prince had morphed into a serpent with needle-sharp fangs and sacs of poison loaded behind them. Linda now knew she was only one of twenty or thirty women he’d slept with on the Magnolia Queen, and was probably still screwing, no matter what he claimed. With good-paying work so hard to find, who could afford to say no to him?
‘What’s your problem tonight?’ he grunted, still going at her without letup. ‘Squeeze your pissflaps, woman, and give the lad something to work with.’
She hates his voice most of all, because the beautiful way he speaks in public is just another cloak he wears to hide what lies beneath his skin, and behind those measuring eyes. He really is like a character in one of her books, but not a hero. He’s a shape-shifter, a demon who knows that the surest way into the souls of normal people is to appear to be exactly what they most want, to make them believe he sees them exactly as they wish to be seen. That was how he’d snared Linda. He’d made her believe her most secret fantasies about herself, just long enough to make her willingly give herself, and then…the mask had come off.
The horror of that night is graven on her soul like scar tissue. In the span of a few minutes, she saw what she’d allowed inside her, and something in her withered away forever. It happened in this very room, a cavernlike hold in the bowels of the Magnolia Queen, one of the only two rooms on the casino boat without security cameras. Linda works upstairs in the bar called The Devil’s Punchbowl, but the women on the Queen call this off-limits room the real Devil’s Punchbowl. For it’s here that the demon inside her conducts all business that cannot stand the light of day. Here he brings card counters and other troublemakers, to strap them into the chair bolted to the floor in the middle of the room. Here he brings the women who endure what Linda suffered that night after the mask came off….
After he’d gone, while she put herself together as best she could, she’d told herself she would quit the boat. But when it came to it, she hadn’t had the nerve. Partly it was the money, of course, and the insurance benefits. But it was also the mind’s ability to lie to itself. A familiar voice began telling her that she was mistaken, that she’d misinterpreted some of the things he’d done, that she had in fact asked for those things, if not verbally then by her actions. But each new visit brought further confirmation of her warning instincts, and the fear in her had grown. She wanted desperately to stop, to flee the Queen and the city, yet she didn’t. This demon seemed to have–no, he had—some strange power over her, so much that she was afraid to mention her predicament to anyone else. In rational moments, this made her furious. Surely she had an open-and-shut case for sexual harassment. Of course, he might argue that the relationship was consensual. She’s given him enthusiastic sex in several places on the boat, and except for his office and this room, every inch of the casino is covered by surveillance cameras–even the bathrooms, no matter what the law says.
She’s thought about asking some other girls to go to a lawyer with her, but that would be riskier than laying all her money down on one of the table games upstairs. Linda only knows about the other girls because she’s
