by Greg Iles
“What are you doing?”
Huey grabbed Peter ’s bound wrists and jerked them away from his body. With a quick jab he thrust the knife between Peter ’s forearms and sawed through the duct tape. Then he reached over and unlocked the passenger door of the truck.
“Your mama’s waiting for you. In the playground. At the McDonald’s.”
Peter looked up at the giant’s face, afraid to believe.
“Go see her, boy.”
Peter pushed open the truck’s door, jumped to the pavement, and started running toward the McDonald’s.
Joe reached across Margaret McDill’s lap and opened the passenger door of the BMW. His smoky black hair brushed against her neck as he did, and she shuddered. She had seen his gray roots during the night.
“Your kid’s waiting in the McDonald’s Playland,” he said.
Margaret’s heart lurched. She looked at the open door, then back at Joe, who was caressing the BMW’s leather-covered steering wheel.
“Sure wish I could keep this ride,” he said with genuine regret. “Got used to this. Yes, sir.”
“Take it.”
“That’s not part of the plan. And I always stick to the plan. That’s why I’m still around.”
As she stared, he opened the driver ’s door, got out, dropped the keys on the seat, and started walking away.
Margaret sat for a moment without breathing, mistrustful as an injured animal being released into the wild. Then she bolted from the car. With a spastic gait born from panic and exhaustion, she ran toward the McDonald’s, gasping a desperate mantra: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want . . . The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want . . . The Lord is my shepherd . . . ”
Huey stopped his green pickup beside his cousin Joe with a screech of eroded brake pads. Two men standing under the roofed entrance of the Barnes & Noble looked over at the sound. They looked like bums hoping to pass themselves off as customers and spend the morning reading the papers on the sofas inside the bookstore. Joe Hickey silently wished them good luck. He’d been that far down before.
When he climbed into the cab, Huey looked at him with the relief of a two-year-old at its returning mother.
“Hey, Joey,” Huey said, his head bobbing with relief and excitement.
“Twenty-three hours, ten minutes,” Hickey said, tapping his watch. “Cheryl’s got the money, nobody got hurt, and no FBI in sight. I’m a goddamn genius, son. Master of the universe.”
“I’m just glad it’s over,” said Huey. “I was scared this time.”
Hickey laughed and tousled the hair on Huey’s great unkempt head. “Home free for another year, Buckethead.”
A smile slowly appeared on the giant’s rubbery face. “Yeah.” He put the truck into gear, eased forward, and joined the flow of traffic leaving the mall.
Peter McDill stood in the McDonald’s Playland like a statue in a hurricane. Toddlers and teenagers tore around him with abandon, leaping on and off the foam-padded playground equipment in their sock feet. The screeches and laughter were deafening. Peter searched among them for his mother, his eyes wet. In his right hand he clutched the carved locomotive Huey had given him, utterly unaware that he was holding it.
The glass door of the restaurant opened, and a woman with frosted hair and wild eyes appeared in it. She looked like his mother, but not exactly. This woman was different somehow. She looked too old, and her clothes were torn. She pushed two children out of the doorway, which his mother would never do, and began looking frantically around the playground. Her gaze jumped from child to child, lighted on Peter, swept on, then returned.
“Mom?” he said uncertainly.
The woman’s face seemed to collapse inward upon itself. She rushed to Peter and crushed him against her, then lifted him into her arms. His mother hadn’t done that in a long, long time. A terrible wail burst from her throat, freezing the storm of children into a still life.
“Oh, dear Jesus,” Margaret keened. “My baby, my baby, my sweet baby . . .”
Peter felt hot tears rolling down his cheeks. As his mother squeezed him, the little wooden train dropped from his hand onto the pebbled concrete. A toddler wandered over, picked it up, smiled, and walked away with it.
TWO
ONE YEAR LATER
Will Jennings swung his Ford Expedition around a dawdling tanker truck and swerved back into the right lane of the airport road. The field was less than a mile away, and he couldn’t keep from watching the planes lifting over the trees as they took off. It had been nearly a month since he’d been up, and he was anxious to fly.
“Keep your eyes on the road,” said his wife from the seat beside him.
Karen Jennings was thirty-nine, a year younger than her husband, but much older in some ways.
“Daddy’s watching the airplanes!” Abby chimed from her safety seat in the back. Though only five and a half years old, their daughter never hesitated to interject her comments into any conversation. Will looked at his rearview mirror and smiled at Abby. Facially, she was a miniature version of Karen, with strawberry-blond curls, piercing green eyes, and a light dusting of freckles across her nose. As he watched, she pointed at the back of her mother’s head.
Will laid his right hand on Karen’s knee. “I sure wish my girls would come along with old Dad.” With Abby present, he often referred to himself as “Dad” and Karen as “Mom,” the way his father had done. “Just jump in the plane and forget about everything for three days.”
“Can we, Mom?” cried Abby. “Can we?”
“And what do we wear for clothes?” Karen asked in a taut voice.
“I’ll buy you both new wardrobes on the coast.”
“Yaaayy!” Abby cheered. “Look, there’s the airport!”
The white control tower of the terminal had come into sight.
“We don’t have any insulin,” Karen pointed out.
“Daddy can write me a subscription!”
“Prescription, honey,” Will corrected.
“She knows the right word.”
“I want to go to the beach!”
“I can’t believe you started this again,” Karen said under her breath. “Daddy won’t be spending any time at the beach, honey. He’ll be nervous as a cat until he gives his lecture to all those other doctors. Then they’ll spend hours talking about their days in medical school. And then he’ll tear up his joints trying to play golf for three days straight.”
“If you come,” Will said, “we can beat the bushes around Ocean Springs for some undiscovered Walter Anderson stuff.”
“Noooo,” Abby said in a plaintive voice. She hated their art-buying explorations, which usually entailed hours of searching small-town backstreets, and sometimes waiting in the car. “You won’t be playing golf, Mom. You can take me to the beach.”
“Yeah, Mom,” Will echoed.
Karen cut her eyes at him. Full of repressed anger, they flashed like green warning beacons. “I agreed to chair this flower show two years ago. It’s the sixtieth anniversary of the Junior League, and I don’t know whose brilliant idea it was to have a flower show, but it’s officially my problem. I’ve put off everything until the last minute, and there are over four hundred exhibitors.”
“You got everything nailed down day before yesterday,” Will told her. There wasn’t much use in pressing the issue, but he felt he should try. Things had been tense for the past six months, and this would be the first trip he had made without Karen in a long time. It seemed symbolic, somehow. “You’re just going to agonize until the whole circus starts on Monday. Four nights of hell. Why not blow it off until then?”
“I can’t do it,” she said with a note of finality. “Drop it.”
Will sighed and watched a 727 lift over the tree line to his left.
Karen leaned forward and switched on the CD player, which began to thump out the teen dance groove of Britney Spears. Abby immediately began to sing along. “Hit me baby one more time . . .”
“Now, i
f you want to take Abby by yourself,” Karen said, “you can certainly do that.”
“What did you say, Mom?”
“You know I can’t,” Will said with exasperation.
“You mean you can’t do that and play golf with your med school buddies. Right?”
Will felt the old weight tighten across his chest. “This is once a year, Karen. I’m giving the keynote speech, and the whole thing is very political. You know that. With the new drug venture, I’ll have to spend hours with the Klein-Adams people—”
“You don’t have to explain,” she said with satisfaction. “Just don’t try to make me blow off my obligations when you won’t do the same.”
Will swung the Expedition into the general aviation area. Lines of single- and twin-engine planes waited on the concrete apron, tethered to rings set in the cement, their wheels chocked against the wind. Just seeing them lightened his heart.
“You’re the one who encouraged me to be more social,” Karen said in the strained voice she’d used earlier.
“I’m not joining the Junior League when I grow up,” Abby said from the backseat. “I’m going to be a pilot.”
“I thought you were going to be a doctor,” said Will.
“A flying doctor, silly!”
“Flying doctor sure beats housewife,” Karen said sotto voce.
Will took his wife’s hand as he braked beside his Beechcraft Baron 58. “She’s only five, babe. One day she’ll understand what you sacrificed.”
“She’s almost six. And sometimes I don’t understand it myself.”
He squeezed Karen’s hand and gave her an understanding look. Then he got out, unstrapped Abby from her child seat, and set her on the apron.
The Baron was ten years old, but she was as fine a piece of machinery as you could ask for, and Will owned her outright. From the twin Continental engines to the state-of-the-art avionics package, he had spared neither time nor expense to make her as safe and airworthy as any billionaire’s Gulfstream IV. She was white with blue stripes, and her tail read N-2WJ. The “WJ” was a touch of vanity, but Abby loved hearing the controllers call out November-Two-Whiskey-Juliet over the radio. When they were flying together, she sometimes made him call her Alpha Juliet.
As Abby ran toward the Baron, Will took a suit bag and a large leather sample case from the back of the Expedition and set them on the concrete. He had driven out during his lunch hour and checked the plane from nose to tail, and also loaded his golf clubs. When he reached back into the SUV for his laptop computer case, Karen picked up the sample case and suit bag and carried them to the plane. The Baron seated four passengers aft of the cockpit, so there was plenty of room. As they loaded the luggage, Karen said:
“You’re having pain today, aren’t you?”
“No,” he lied, closing the cabin door as though the fire in his hands did not exist. Under normal circumstances he would have canceled his flight and taken a car, but it was far too late now to reach the Gulf Coast except by air.
Karen looked into his eyes, started to say something, then decided against it. She walked the length of the wing and helped Abby untether it while Will did his preflight walkaround. As he checked the aircraft, he glanced over and watched Abby work. She was her mother’s daughter from the neck up, but she had Will’s lean musculature and length of bone. She loved helping with the plane, being part of things.
“What’s the flight time to the coast?” Karen asked, joining him behind the wing. “Fifty minutes?”
“Thirty-five minutes to the airport, if I push it.” Will was due to give his lecture at the Beau Rivage Casino Hotel in Biloxi at 7:00 P.M., which would open the annual meeting of the Mississippi Medical Association. “I’m cutting it a little close,” he conceded. “That aneurysm ran way over. I’ll call you after my presentation.” He pointed to the beeper on his belt. “If you want me during the flight, use the SkyTel. It’s new. Digital. Hardly any dead spots.”
“Mr. High-Tech,” Karen said, making clear that she wasn’t impressed with what she considered boy toys. “I just type in the message at home and send it like e-mail?”
“Right. There’s a special Web page for it. But if you don’t want to fool with that, just call the answering service. They’ll get the message to me.”
Abby tugged at his hand. “Will you wiggle the wings after you take off?”
“You mean waggle the wings. Sure I will. Just for you. Now . . . who gets the first kiss?”
“Me! Me!” Abby cried.
As Will bent down, she turned aside his kiss and whispered in his ear. He nodded, rose, and walked to Karen. “She said Mommy needs the first kiss today.”
“I wish Daddy were as perceptive.”
He gently took her by the waist. “Thanks for giving me time last night to finish up the video segment. I’d have been laughed out of the conference.”
“You’ve never been laughed at in your life.” Her face softened. “How are your hands? I mean it, Will.”
“Stiff,” he admitted. “But not too bad.”
“You taking anything?”
“Just the methotrexate.” Methotrexate was a chemotherapeutic agent developed for use against cancer, but, in much smaller doses, was used against Will’s form of arthritis. Even small doses could damage the liver.
“Come on,” she pressed.
“Okay, four Advil. But that’s it. I’m fine. Good to go.” He slipped an arm around Karen’s shoulder. “Don’t forget to turn on the alarm system when you get home.”
She shook her head in a way that conveyed several emotions at once: concern, irritation, and somewhere in there, love. “I never forget. Say good-bye, Abby. Daddy’s late.”
Abby hugged his waist until at last he bent and picked her up. His sacroiliac joints protested, but he forced a smile.
“I’ll be back Sunday night,” he said, and kissed her on the forehead. “You take care of Mom. And don’t give her any trouble about your shots.”
“But it doesn’t hurt as much when you do it.”
“That’s a fib. Mom’s given a lot more shots than I have.”
He set her down with a muffled groan and gently pushed her toward her mother. Abby walked backward, her eyes locked on Will until Karen scooped her up.
“Oh!” Karen said. “I forgot to tell you. Microsoft is going to split again. It was up twelve points when I left the house.”
He smiled. “Forget Microsoft. Tonight starts the ball rolling on Restorase.” Restorase was the trade name of a new drug Will had helped develop, and the subject of his presentation tonight. “In thirty days, Abby will be set for Harvard, and you can start wearing haute couture.”
“I’m thinking Brown,” Karen said with a grudging laugh.
It was an old joke between them, started in the days when they had so little money that a trip to Wendy’s Hamburgers was a treat. Now they could actually afford those schools, but the joke took them back to what in some ways had been a happier time.
“I’ll see you both Sunday,” Will said. He climbed into the Baron, started the twin engines, and checked the wind conditions with ATIS on the radio. After contacting ground control, he waved through the Plexiglas, and began his taxi toward the runway.
Outside, Karen backed toward the Expedition with Abby in her arms. “Come on, honey. It’s hot. We can watch him take off from inside the truck.”
“But I want him to see me!”
Karen sighed. “All right.”
Inside the Baron, Will acknowledged final clearance from the tower, then released his brakes and roared up the sunny runway. The Baron lifted into the sky like a tethered hawk granted freedom. Instead of simply banking to his left to head south, he executed a teardrop turn, which brought him right over the black Expedition on the ground. He could see Karen and Abby standing beside it. As he passed over at six hundred feet, he waggled his wings like a fighter pilot signaling to friendly ground troops.
On the concrete below, Abby whooped with glee. “He did it, Mo
m! He did it!”
“I’m sorry we couldn’t go this time, honey,” Karen said, squeezing her shoulders.
“That’s okay.” Abby reached up and took her mother’s hands. “You know what?”
“What?”
“I like arranging flowers, too.”
Karen smiled and lifted Abby into her seat, then hugged her neck. “I think we can win the three-color ribbon if we give it half a try.”
“I know we can!” Abby agreed.
Karen climbed into the driver’s seat, started the Expedition, and drove along the line of airplanes toward the gate.
Fifteen miles north of the airport, a battered green pickup truck with a lawn tractor and two Weed Eaters in back rattled along a curving lane known for over a hundred years as Crooked Mile Road. The truck slowed, then stopped beside a wrought-iron mailbox at the foot of a high wooded hill. An ornamental World War I biplane perched atop the mailbox, and below the biplane, gold letters read: Jennings, #100. The pickup turned left and chugged slowly up the steep driveway.
At the top, set far back on the hill, stood a breath-taking Victorian house. Wedgwood blue with white gingerbread trim and stained-glass windows on the second floor, it seemed to watch over the expansive lawns around it with proprietary interest.
When the pickup truck reached the crest of the drive, it did not stop, but continued fifty yards across the St. Augustine grass until it reached an ornate playhouse. An exact replica of the main house, the playhouse stood in the shadow of the pine and oak trees that bordered the lawn. The pickup stopped beside it. When the engine died, there was silence but for birdcalls and the ticking of the motor.
The driver’s door banged open, and Huey Cotton climbed out. Clad in his customary brown coveralls and heavy black eyeglasses, he stared at the playhouse with wonder in his eyes. Its roof peaked just above the crown of his head.
“See anybody?” called a voice from the passenger window of the truck.
