24. Twenty-Four
He hated this creepy place. Smuggie cracked his knuckles and hugged himself close to the tree dripping in kudzu vines. A naggingly reoccurring thought needled his brain. He’d been reckless. Careless.
Why?
He’d thought about it for nearly two days now and couldn’t come up with any feasible reason he’d given his name—his real name—to that lady captain. He hadn’t used that name in years. Why had it slipped from his mouth? Sure, he’d known better than to use his nickname. That got thrown around too often to share with anyone outside of their line of work. But in the past, he’d always used a fake name.
How long before Durkin found out? He fingered one of the wide leaves of the invasive kudzu vine. Lot like Durkin, this vine. It hadn’t come from here. Unsuspecting fools had brought it with them as something pretty. Figured it was harmless. Maybe it had been, way back in the early 1800s. Now it took over everything. It hung in vast sheets from the cliff face and covered trees whole. It spread its influence at a devastating rate. Pretty turning to deadly before anyone grew the wiser.
And once it got established, there was no getting rid of it.
The breeze ruffled through the leaves, a ghostly whisper in the still of night. He didn’t like this part of the job. Usually got away with keeping himself out of it. But not this time.
A man’s muffled scream mingled with the breeze and sent a tingle down his spine. When had he grown soft? Sounds of this side of the business didn’t used to bother him.
Hard to be soft in a place called the Devil’s Punchbowl. Crickets sang their lonely song, and in the quiet with nature’s soothing sounds, he could almost forget evil lurked here. Evil that went far back before Durkin and his ilk.
He’d lived under the hill long enough to hear the tales. Stories generations old about river pirates and men like John Murrel and the Harpe brothers who used the hundred-foot gorge sheltered against the bluff as the perfect place to dispose of their victims.
Most of Durkin’s men whispered about the ghost of the mistress. A few had even claimed to have seen her, though likely they saw only what the drink induced. Legend said a bloke named Joseph Hare discovered his mistress had been unfaithful, so he buried her here wearing nothing but the jewels he’d given her. Men with lesser minds claimed to see her walking about in the shadows, offering up her jewels to anyone who would relocate her body to the cemetery’s hallowed ground a half mile away.
Worse than tales of unclad specters were the stories of the ten thousand who died here. He scanned the shadows clinging to the trees but couldn’t tell where so many bodies might have been buried. Surely they couldn’t have all been dumped into the gorge. Even a mystical pit said to have no true bottom until it reached hell would have filled to the brim with that many tortured souls. Story went that the Union army built a walled-off encampment for all the recently freed enslaved folks they found in Natchez. Might have been a good thing, except the army then left the poor people there to die of starvation, tainted water, and smallpox.
The wind tickled over his neck, and he shook his head. Bad night to be thinking of old stories. The modern ones were dreadful enough. As though to punctuate his thoughts, another muffled scream sounded from the hidden grove behind him. Shielded from the river by the crescent arms of the Punchbowl and sheltered by the two-hundred-foot sheer cliff behind, this place had become a lair for the evils of men. And all the old stories did well to keep the locals away.
Stories had a way of doing that. Got under a bloke’s skin and the like. No one ate the abundance of wild peaches growing here for fear of what had fertilized the soil.
Boot steps crunched through the leaves, and he straightened. Didn’t want Bones catching him slacking. He focused on the river, scanning for any intruders. Not that anyone who valued their head poked about out here.
Bones Jenkins kept the big boss’s hands clean. Assuming, of course, one forgot God knew the inner workings of a man. The one who’d ordered evil stood just as guilty as the one who carried it out.
Now where had that thought come from? He hadn’t thought of God since he’d been a boy at his mother’s side in England and she’d filled his head with nonsense about a Creator who existed of light and love and who had so great a mercy as to sacrifice himself for the world.
He shoved aside a sudden rush of longing. If such a Creator existed, he’d surely turned his back on the world. Otherwise, men like Durkin wouldn’t thrive, and boys like him wouldn’t have grown into men who would have broken their mum’s hearts.
“See anything?” Bones wiped a long blade on a cloth as he stepped into the moonlight at Smuggie’s side.
“All’s quiet. Not even a ghost this night.”
Bones chuckled. “There’ll be another soul to add to those tales soon enough. Help me toss him in.”
Smuggie’s stomach churned. “I have lookout duty. Get Erickson to help you.”
An owl let out a screech, and Bones snickered when Smuggie jumped. “This place give you the willies, eh? How ’bout you smuggle me a crate of that Irish whiskey I heard you scored, and I won’t tell nobody you got a yellow belly.”
“Deal.” The word shot out of him before he could catch it. He’d saved his fingers once. He wouldn’t be able to do so again. But Bones didn’t need to know that. If the big boss made good on his promise to deliver a free crate, then he could pass the bottles along to Bones. And if he didn’t, well, that’d be a problem for another day.
Bones chuckled again and took two steps away. Tension leaked from Smuggie’s spine, only to ratchet back into place when the man spoke.
“Oh, forgot to tell you. Boss wants you to bring them folks you been trailing to see me.”
Ice trickled down his back. “He wants me to capture them?”
“How else you think folks get here?” Bones guffawed. “Ain’t none of our guests here by choice.”
“But I thought he wanted me to follow them and see if they found the treasure they were looking for.” Why the sudden change in plans? When methodical murderers shifted tactics, something had to be afoot.
Bones shrugged. Pale moonlight glinted off the blade he held up to the light, inspecting it for lingering blood. “How should I know? I’m not paid to ask questions.”
Implication perfectly clear, Smuggie grunted to cover up the thickness in his throat.
“Do it quick, yeah? I got the feeling this here thread needs to be snipped real soon before it starts causing trouble none of us want.”
“Understood.” Smuggie pivoted toward the bank and his escape out of this devil’s den. “I’ll take care of it.”
Bones’s laughter followed him like one of the Punchbowl’s ghosts. Mouth dry, he avoided the shadows and clung to the faint reflection of light from above.
For the first time since he’d been a lad, he wished he remembered how his mother had taught him to pray. Probably wouldn’t help none for a sad sod like him, but if there was any justice in the world, then maybe it would do some good for that kindhearted little bloke who was going to lose his uncle just like he’d lost his dad.
Smuggie jammed his hands into his coat pocket and searched around for a cigarette. He’d need a few tonight. And a full bottle of the good stuff. If he was lucky, he might even get to listen to the angel sing.
Maybe if he tried hard enough, he’d be able to smother the unnerving pressure begging him to find a way to escape his life as the puppet king under the hill.
“That boy don’t deserve this fate. He’s better than me.” He tipped his head to the full moon. “Don’t blame you for turning your back on me. But if you can do anything to help that kid…”
He bit off the words and shook his head. What a fool, talking to nothing and hoping it would help some boy he didn’t even know. Just some little sucker who’d been naive enough to try to feed a hard-hearted criminal slinking in an alley. Not worth risking his neck for.
“Soft.” He spat the word at the dusky ground. He’d grown too soft. Worse, he couldn’t even nail down why his long-lost conscience had started prodding him.
The ghostly wind screeched through the trees, carrying with it the tortured cries of the innocent. It jammed cold fingers under his hat and sent it flying toward the pit he’d planned to avoid. The derby bounced over the dead leaves and leaped toward its demise.
He didn’t try to catch it. Feet clamped to the ground by the eerie whistle slithering through the trees, he watched as his hat took a suicidal plunge. At the end of all of this, would he follow it down? Lose not only his fingers, but join the dozens he’d turned a blind eye to on their way to see the devil?
He’d earned no less. But that little boy with the big heart who wanted to make sure a stranger never went hungry deserved better.
Smuggie set his teeth and headed toward Natchez. Even if it sent him swimming in the Punchbowl sooner than he’d like, he’d make sure he got that boy out.
And maybe this time God would toss a crumb of mercy to someone more worthy than the rebellious lad from London who’d abandoned the one person who’d given him the only bit of light he’d ever had.