The Devil’s Punchbowl. Greg Iles

15

       Linda doesn’t know whether she’s paralyzed by fear or whether she’s entered a place beyond fear. Her mind has given way to grief or shock, or some mixture of both. They have taken her deep within the bowels of the barge that supports the faux riverboat above her head, to the long hold with black foam on its walls, like the foam in a recording studio. It’s dim, but it doesn’t stink of mildew as some areas of the lower deck do. This hold smells like a new car. It’s here that Sands brings Linda and his other mistresses when he wants sex during business hours. A sofa bed in the corner faces two large LCD screens that display an ever-changing feed from the security cameras upstairs. On those screens Sands can monitor all areas of the casino, even during sex. This room has other uses too. Here they bring the troublemakers and scam artists who aren’t lucky enough to be handed over to the police. For these occasions, a single chair stands in the center of the hold, and beside it a shiny cart like a printer trolley. But the square device on the cart is not a printer. It’s smaller, with thin wires coming off it, like the EKG machine at a doctor’s office. It’s that machine that makes the staff refer to this hold as the real ‘Devil’s Punchbowl.’