The devil's punchbowl by Greg Iles

Author:Greg Iles
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Homicide, Mississippi, Murder, Wilderness areas, Fiction, Gambling and crime, Treasure troves, Suspense fiction, Natchez (Miss.), Large type books, Thrillers, Suspense, General, Mississippi - Race relations, Wilderness areas - Mississippi
ISBN: 9780743292511
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2009-01-06T05:00:00+00:00

I find Kelly splayed out on the couch in my den, the Styrofoam cup in his lap, his eyes nearly closed. The television's playing an old Sydney Pollack film, Three Days of the Condor, very low.

"Hey?" I say. "You okay?"

Kelly's head slides forward in what might be a nod. I'm about to turn and go upstairs when he says, "That didn't take long. I guess it didn't go so good, huh?"

"Understatement of the millennium."

"Don't worry about it. She's just young. Still got a few illusions left. Give her time."

I know he's right, but I hate to think I'm waiting for Caitlin to become as jaded as Kelly and I about human nature and the legal process. "Maybe she's right. Maybe we should just go public with the whole stinking mess."

"No way. Then Po skates for sure. I just wish we'd wasted Sands before we knew the bigger picture. Then we could say. 'Uh-oh,' and go about our business." Kelly laughs softly, but for once his dark sense of humor strikes a dissonant note.

I walk deeper into the den and look down at him. "You say that so easily. Like killing Sands would be no big deal. But last night you wouldn't even kill that dying dog."

Kelly's red eyes open momentarily, but he doesn't look up. "I told you…we had to leave that place like we found it."

"There was more to it than that. Were you testing me or something?"

His chest rises as he takes a long breath. Then he sighs heavily, the sound almost like a snore. "You got it done, man. Just let it go."

"I want to know."

He scowls, then sips from his cup, swallows audibly. "When I went into Delta training, I was ready. Ninety-seven percent of the volunteers wash out, and they come from elite units to begin with. Then there's the mental shit they put you through. I got through that just fine. But later on, after I was in, they put me in a rotation called dog lab."

One eye opens and seeks me out, trying to see if I've heard of this. I shrug.

"The idea," he says, "is to prepare you to handle the kinds of wounds you might encounter in the field. I mean, we didn't have medics along on our ops. We were our own medics."

"So what was dog lab?"

"Well…it's pretty simple. The army takes some stray dogs and shoots them,or 'inflicts missile wound trauma',usually with the kinds of rounds you're likely to be hit by in the field. AK-47s, shit like that. Then they give you the wounded dogs. You have your medical kit. You're supposed to stabilize the dog, then nurse it back to health. Every guy gets his own dog. They're in shock when you get them, of course, like that dog last night. Bleeding out fast, panicked eyes, howling in pain. You start an IV, do everything you'd do for a human being. And that's when you realize that textbook training doesn't mean shit. In the field, it's different. So all you do for a week, ten days, is try to save your dog.

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