24 Hours

by Greg Iles

  “You think he’s tearing up all your precious paintings or something? That’s not Joey.”

  Will pulled a chair over beside the bed. “I want you to tell me everything you know that is Joe, Cheryl. Start talking.”

  “I’m not telling you shit. You’ll find out more than you want to know when he calls back and I tell him what you did.”

  Another black wave of rage rolled through him. “If you can talk.”

  She laughed outright. “There’s nothing you can do to me that hasn’t been done before, Doctor. I mean nothing.” She tossed the pillow aside, exposing her breasts and the relief map of bruises. “Face it. Joey’s got you beat, right down the line.”

  In an upstairs bathroom of the McDill mansion, Margaret McDill sat at a vanity table, taking off her makeup with cold cream. She looked into the mirror at her husband, who hovered in the door behind her like an accusing ghost.

  “I refuse to discuss it,” she said. “How many times do I have to tell you that?”

  Dr. McDill gave a long sigh. “I just want to—”

  “What? Drive me back to a bottle a day?” She threw a mascara-stained Kleenex onto the floor. “I can’t stand this, James. It’s sadistic!”

  “Margaret, for God’s sake. I’m just trying to understand.” He took a deep breath and pushed into forbidden territory yet again. “Is there something more? Something I don’t know about?” He’d asked this before and been rebuffed. Tonight he would press it. He had to. “Did this man hurt you?”

  “Hurt me?” Her lips tightened to white. “Did he hurt me?”

  “I’m your husband, Margaret. I only want to help you.”

  She whirled from the mirror, her eyes wild. “All right! All right! You want to know why I won’t report it? Because he raped me.”

  McDill flinched.

  “He raped me, James. Do you feel better now? Is that what you wanted to hear? What you want to tell the police? All the gory details?”

  McDill stared openmouthed at his wife.

  “He told me to take off my clothes and I did. He told me to kiss him and I did. He told me I’d have to do things I’d never done before”—she covered her face with her hands—“and I did. I did. And I’d do it again! All I could think of was Peter. They had my baby!”

  She exploded into unintelligible screams, thrashing her head and arms until McDill rushed forward and, oblivious to the blows he was taking, hugged her so tightly that she couldn’t move. He spoke in a reassuring voice as she continued to shriek.

  “It’s all right, Margaret...It’s going to be all right. You didn’t do anything wrong. You did nothing wrong.” Tears stung his eyes. “God help me, I thought it might be something like this. It’s all right. . . .”

  As her screams subsided, Margaret descended into a near catatonic state.

  “Can you hear me?” asked McDill. “Margaret?”

  She nodded like an Alzheimer’s patient.

  “I’m afraid the same thing is happening again. Do you understand? To another family. Another mother. Another child.” He took her firmly by the shoulders and peered into her eyes. “We can’t let that happen. It wouldn’t be Christian. Would it?”

  Margaret slowly shook her head, her eyes glassy.

  “I’m going to call the FBI,” McDill said. “But we don’t have to tell them anything about what happened to you. You understand? It’s irrelevant to the situation.”

  His wife’s only response was fresh tears sliding down her cheeks.

  “I love you, sweetheart,” he assured her. “More than I ever have.”

  McDill pulled her close. When he squeezed her shuddering body, something inside him came loose. Something came loose and a fearful darkness poured out. James McDill read the Bible every night, no matter how tired. He went to church every week, taught Sunday school to his son’s class. He spent every day but Sunday bringing people back from the edge of death with his hard-earned skills. But when he thought of the faceless man who had brutalized the girl he had loved since high school—the mother of his child—something deeper than reason spoke from within him. Something deeper even than God. When he opened his mouth, what emerged was a whispered vow.

  “I am going to kill that son of a bitch.”

  SIX

  Being forced to leave Abby behind had shattered Karen. She sat in the Expedition in a sort of detached haze, like a disembodied brain floating in ether. She was wearing the blindfold again, but she sensed that there was little traffic. The whooshes of cars passing were far apart.

  “You taken a vow of silence or what?” asked Hickey.

  Karen let her mind reach into the starless night beneath the blindfold.

  “Hey. I’m talking to you.”

  The voice was like a face obscured by fog.

  “You’re upset, I know. But it had to be that way. You’ll get over it.”

  “I’m not sure I will.”

  “See? You can talk.”

  She heard him light another cigarette. The smell of burning tobacco filled the air.

  “You can take off the blindfold now.”

  “I prefer it on.”

  “I prefer it off.”

  Karen unwrapped the scarf. The dash lights shone like a coastal city viewed from the sea. Glancing up, she saw that the digital compass between the visors read “E” for east. That was information she could use. They were on a two-lane road, and she knew by the speed and sound of the outgoing trip that they had driven on an interstate for at least half an hour after leaving Jackson. That left two options: they were still on I-55, which ran north and south, or they had turned onto I-20, which ran east and west. That meant Abby was being held somewhere south of Jackson and west of I-55, if Hickey had taken that interstate. If he’d taken I-20, it was harder to make assumptions. But if he left the blindfold off, she might soon know for sure. She decided to make an effort to keep him in a good mood.

  “Thank you for letting me give Abby the shot.”

  Hickey rolled down his window a crack and blew cigarette smoke outside. “That’s what I like to hear. Gratitude. You don’t see much of it these days. It’s a forgotten courtesy. But you’re an old-fashioned girl. I can tell. You know how to show appreciation for a good deed.”

  Karen waited a moment, then looked left. Hickey’s profile was like a wind-eroded boulder. Heavy brows, the nose a bit flat, the chin like an unspoken challenge. It looked like a face that could take a lot of punishment, and probably had.

  “We’ve got a whole night to kill,” he said, glancing away from the road long enough to find her eyes in the dark. “Why make it like breaking rocks, you know? Let’s be friends.”

  Her internal radar went to alert status.

  “You’re a beautiful woman. You got that red hair, but not the coarse kind, you know? Strawberry blond, I guess they call it. And I’m not a bad-looking guy, am I?”

  “Look, I don’t know what you’ve done in the past, but—”

  “I want to see that bush, girl.” Hickey’s eyes glinted in the dash lights. “I know you got a good one.”

  The words shocked and frightened Karen more than she would have believed possible. She didn’t want to show fear, but she had already pressed herself against the door.

  “You got some good tan lines, too, I bet. With that pool out back.”

  She stared straight ahead, her cheeks burning.

  “I’ve got something for you, too, Karen. A lot more than you’re used to, I bet.”

  With every remark she left unanswered, she felt Hickey’s confidence growing. “I wouldn’t count on that,” she said. “My husband got lucky with those genes.”

  Hickey gave a self-assured laugh, “That right? Somehow I don’t picture old Will having the goods. Seems like the tennis player type to me. Mr. Average in the showers. See, that’s why I never back off. On that elemental level, I got what it takes.” He threw his cigarette butt out of the window and pressed the dashboard cigarette lighter. “I heard this story about LBJ once. During
the Vietnam thing, MacNamara was giving him some shit about how Ho Chi Minh has this, Ho Chi Minh has that. LBJ unzips his fly, whips out his Johnson and says, ‘Has old Ho got anything like this?’”

  He broke up laughing.

  “Right there in the freakin’ Oval Office. Hey, I wonder if that’s why they call it a Johnson?”

  “LBJ lost that war, didn’t he?”

  Hickey stopped laughing. “Get those jeans off. You’re gonna be walking bowlegged for a week.”

  A ball of ice formed in Karen’s chest.

  “You think I’m kidding? We’ve done this gig five times, and every time the wives and me had a little party. A little bonus for the executive in the operation, and nobody the wiser.”

  “No party tonight, Joe.”

  “No?” He laughed again. “In thirty minutes I’m gonna be banging on your tonsils, lady. Get those jeans off.”

  “Here?”

  “Like you never done it in a car before?”

  She sat rigidly in the seat, refusing to acknowledge the remark.

  Hickey shook his head and tapped a finger on the cell phone. “Lose the jeans. Or I reach out and touch your precious princess.”

  Karen held out for another few seconds. Then she unsnapped her jeans, arched in the seat, and pulled them off.

  “Happy now?”

  “Getting there. Keep going.”

  A cold trickle of sweat ran down her rib cage. “Not in the car.”

  He looked down and punched a number into the Expedition’s cell phone.

  “Don’t!”

  He cut his eyes at her. “Still dressed?”

  She folded her jeans and laid them in her lap, then slid the panties off and put them on top of the jeans.

  Hickey laughed and hit END on the phone, then picked up the cotton panties and knocked her jeans to the floor. “Not exactly Victoria’s Secret. You trying to discourage interest with these things?”

  She felt an irrational prick of guilt. As Hickey laughed, she arranged the tail of her blouse so that it fell into her lap. But no sooner had she done this than he reached up and hit the passenger reading light switch, flooding her side of the interior with yellow light. She felt as she had as a little girl, playing hide-and-seek with her older male cousins. She’d hidden in the basement once, at the house at Fort Leavenworth, and as she heard them approach, she backed deeper and deeper into the dark recesses of the mildewed room. Yet no matter how far she went, the footsteps followed. And in the dark basement, far from the adults, she knew what they would do. Pressure her into “show-me” games, whether she wanted to play or not.

  “Nice legs,” Hickey said. “Far as they go.”

  She shivered in the air conditioning. “Why are you doing this?”

  He sniffed and reached down for the cigarette lighter, then shook another Camel from the pack in his shirt pocket and ignited the tip. A stream of smoke clouded the windshield like dissipating fog.

  “Does there always have to be a why?”

  “Yes.” She felt his gaze on her lap like the heat from a lamp.

  “We’ve got time for all that. Slide that shirttail over.”

  She wanted to refuse. But how could she? She breathed slowly and deeply, trying not to let him rattle her. “Are you going to leave the light on all the way back? It seems dangerous.”

  “I gotta admit, I’m tempted. But it wouldn’t be too smart, would it?” He reached out and traced a fingernail along her outer thigh. “Like I said, we’ve got all night. What the hell.”

  He flicked off the light, and the protective blanket of night closed around her again. But she was not safe. Nowhere close. Of course, safe didn’t really matter, not in the usual sense. What mattered was survival. For once in her life, it was that simple. There was only one priority: Abby. Other mothers had walked through fire for their children; she could do the same. She could endure the worst that an animal like Hickey could dish out, and be there to hug Abby when it was over. But that didn’t mean she would stop looking for a way to fight back. Because Hickey was arrogant. And arrogant men made mistakes. If he did make one, God and all his angels wouldn’t be able to help the son of a bitch who made Abby Jennings suffer pain.

  Another hope burned in her heart, small but steady. Wherever Will was, he was thinking. And not the way Karen was. She had outscored her husband by five percentile points on the MCAT test, and she could balance a checkbook twice as fast as he could. But there was another kind of intelligence, and Will had it in spades. It was speed of thought, and not just down one pathway, but several simultaneously. Karen thought logically, examining each option from beginning to end, then accepting or rejecting it before moving on. Will could look at a situation and see the endpoints of a dozen possible choices in the blink of an eye, then from instinct choose rightly. He wasn’t always able to explain his choices, but they were almost inevitably correct. He told her once that they weren’t correct in any objective sense. Sometimes, he said, simply making a choice—any choice—and following through with absolute commitment made it the right choice.

  That’s the kind of brain I need now, she thought.

  At that moment, Will was staring at the telephone in the bedroom of his suite. It had just rung, and though he was holding Cheryl’s Walther in his hand, he knew it was useless. If she told Hickey he had assaulted her, anything could happen. Yet if he didn’t let her answer, Hickey would assume things were not as they should be, and he might retaliate against Abby.

  The phone rang again.

  “What are you going to do now, smart-ass?” Cheryl asked. She was leaning against the headboard of the bed, her torn dress around her waist, the road map of bruises on her torso left exposed like a silent “go to hell.”

  He tossed the gun into her lap.

  She laughed and picked it up, then answered the phone. After listening for a few moments, she said, “It is now. The doc flipped out...He hit me and took my gun. Just like the guy from Tupelo...Okay.” She held out the receiver to Will. “He wants to talk to you.”

  Will took the phone. “Joe?”

  “Doc, you screw up again, and the biggest piece you find of your little girl will fit in a thimble.”

  “I hear you, Joe.”

  “You hit my old lady?”

  “It doesn’t look like I was the first.”

  Silence. Then, “That ain’t your business, is it?”

  “No.”

  “You remember what I said about your little girl.”

  “I understand. I made a mistake. I just want my daughter back.”

  The phone went dead.

  “You’re pathetic,” Cheryl said. “Like some kid stopped by a highway patrolman. Totally submissive.”

  “You know all about that, don’t you? Submission.”

  She shrugged. “So he smacks me around sometimes. You never smacked your wife?”

  “No.”

  “Liar.”

  Will saw no point in arguing. “Those bruises weren’t caused by a couple of smacks. I see signs of systematic abuse.”

  “You don’t argue with your wife?”

  “We argue. We don’t hit each other. What did you and Joe argue about last? Was it about going through with this kidnapping?”

  “Hell no. We’ve done this lots of times.”

  “Maybe you’re tired of it.” He let that simmer for a few moments. “I can see how you would be. Realizing how much pain you’re putting people through. Especially the kids.”

  She looked away. “Talk all you want. You know what I was doing before Joe found me?”

  “What?”

  “I was a bar girl in a truck stop. A full-service bar girl.”

  “You mean like—”

  “Yeah, like that.”

  “How did you end up there?”

  “You sound like some frat-boy john. ‘Oh, Cheryl, you’re so sweet, how’d ever you end up doing this?’ Well, I ain’t blaming nobody. My stepfather, maybe, but he’s dead now. My mother had it worse than I did.
”

  “Being a whore is a lot more respectable than what you’re doing now.”

  “You ever been a whore?”

  “No.”

  “Then you don’t know. Every time I see a hooker in a movie, I want to throw something at the screen. When I saw Pretty Woman, I wanted to puke. You know the part in that movie when Richard Gere’s friend tries to make Julia Roberts do him? The guy from Seinfeld? It’s like the only uncomfortable part of that whole movie.”

  “I remember.”

  “That’s what being in the life is like all the time. Except no movie star busts in to save you from his friend. He probably bought you for his friend.” Her eyes burned into Will’s with disturbing intensity. “Think about sitting somewhere all day, all night, available to any scummy, shit-breath, disease-ridden son of a bitch who walks in the door with the price of admission. That’s being a hooker.”

  “You didn’t have any choice about clients?”

  “Clients?” She barked a little laugh. “I wasn’t a lawyer, okay? It’s johns. And, no, I didn’t have any choice. ’Cause if I said no, I didn’t get the good thing.”

  “The good thing. Cocaine?”

  “My pimp used to say we were just trading crack for crack.”

  “Joe got you out of that life?”

  “That’s right. He got me clean. It was the hardest thing either of us ever did. So, if you think you’re gonna talk me into betraying him, or bribe me into it, think again. If he smacks me around now and then, you think I care?”

  “Yes, I do. Because you know that’s not love. You don’t owe Joe a life of servitude because he got you off crack. You deserve to be as happy as anybody else.”

  She shook her head like someone listening to a salesman. “My stepfather always said everybody gets what they deserve.”

  “He sounds like an asshole.”

  A bitter laugh. “You got that right. You ever go to a hooker?”

  “No.”

  “What guy admits it, right? I believe you, though. You’re one of those one-in-a-million guys who were meant to be husbands, aren’t you?”