The Devil's Punchbowl by Greg Iles Page B

that the federal government promised them. Could you comment on this for our readers?”
     
Caitlin. She is here.
     
I shield my eyes from the glare. “What paper are you with?” I ask innocently.
     
“The Natchez Examiner, ” Caitlin answers with the faintest trace of irony. “Caitlin Masters.”
     
“Well, Ms. Masters, welcome back to Natchez. As for the relief checks, they’re a federal matter and consequently not within my purview. Could someone kill that light, please?”
     
“What about the contention of two of your selectmen?” Caitlin continues, a fine barb of challenge in her voice. “They say there’s been a great deal of fraudulent application for relief by refugees, with some people going through the check line three and four times with one Social Security number.”
     
To my surprise, the spotlight goes dark, but I can’t pick Caitlin’s face from the red afterimage floating before my eyes. “As I said, those relief checks are being issued by the federal government; therefore, fraud in obtaining them falls under federal jurisdiction. I suggest you speak to the FBI or the Department of Homeland Security.”
     
“I intend to.”
     
“Good luck. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Enjoy the festival.”
     
The knot of reporters breaks up quickly, leaving Caitlin and me with two techs packing equipment. My eyes having recovered, I see immediately that she looks as good as she ever did, unique among the women I meet in my daily life. Caitlin’s bone-white skin, her waterfall of jet black hair, and her startling green eyes combine to radiate an almost disconcerting sense of self-possession. This woman is smart, you sense on meeting her, probably too smart for her own good, or anybody else’s.
     
“You want to walk?” she asks.
     
“Sure.”
     
She gives me an easy smile and starts away from Rosalie, walking across the head of Silver Street, the hill road that leads down to one of our casino boats, then toward the bluff proper. Caitlin leads me along the fence, on the asphalt path laid by the Corps of Engineers when they reinforced the bluff. Eighteen inches beyond the fence, the land drops like a cliff to the banks of the river below.
     
“You never were much of a walker,” I comment, “unless you were headed somewhere specific.”
     
She laughs softly. “Maybe I’ve changed.”
     
I murmur in surprise.
     
“So…how’s it going?” she asks, her words banal but her tone something else altogether.
     
When you practically live with someone for six years, you come to know their rhythms the way you know your own. Their way of talking, the way they breathe, sleep, and walk. Changes in those things communicate messages if you pay attention, but as I walk beside my old lover—old in the sense of long experience together—I find that our separation has dulled my perception of her secret language. That is if she means anything beyond her literal words. Maybe in this case a walk is just a walk.
     
“It’s been hard,” I say quietly. It’s tough to admit you were wrong about something, and even harder to admit someone else was right. “Harder than I thought it would be.”
     
“People don’t like change,” she says. “I see it every day, wherever I go.”
     
“You said you’ve changed.”
     
Her green eyes flicker. “I said maybe.”
     
The small park we’ve entered was the main venue for festivals when I was a child, the white gazebo atop the bluff a gathering place for painters and musicians and even ham-radio operators, who came because the ground was the highest for miles around. At the gazebo steps, I let her ascend first, watching the clean line of her shoulders, the graceful curve of her back. God, I’ve missed her. She walks to the rail and looks out into the night sky over the river.
     
“It smells the same,” she says.
     
“Good or bad?”
     
“Both.”
     
Across the river, lines of headlights move east and west on the main highway crossing the hard-shell Baptist country of Louisiana. Twelve miles into that