24 Hours

by Greg Iles

  “How do you know so much?”

  Abby shrugged. “I don’t know. My mom and dad are always telling me stuff. People at school say I talk grown-up all the time.”

  “Are you going to be a doctor when you get big?”

  “Uh-huh. A flying doctor.”

  Huey’s eyes got bigger. “You can’t fly, can you?”

  “In an airplane, silly.”

  “Oh.”

  “My tummy still hurts.”

  Huey’s mouth fell open. “You just play here with your doll. I’m gonna make you the biggest bowl of Captain Crunch you ever saw!”

  Before Abby could remind him that she couldn’t eat Cap’n Crunch, the giant got to his feet and walked toward the kitchen. After three steps, he stopped and put his hand to his head as though he had forgotten something.

  “Dumb, dumb, dumb,” he said.

  He came back to Abby, bent down, and picked up the Nokia cell phone he’d left beside her. “Joey said, take this with me everywhere. Don’t leave it anywhere. He gave me a extra battery, too.”

  Abby looked forlornly at the phone. She was thinking about what her mother had said about calling the police.

  “I’ll be right back,” Huey promised. “You just wait.”

  He walked into the kitchen, leaving Abby alone in the front room with his whittling knife and his shapeless chunk of wood. She could see his back as he opened a cabinet. Then he moved out of the doorway, and she couldn’t see him anymore. She heard a sucking sound. A refrigerator door.

  She turned to the cabin window. It was pitch-black outside. She hated the dark, but her mother’s voice was playing in her head. Take the phone and hide. . . . She wouldn’t have said that if she wanted Abby to stay with Huey. But if she went outside, what could she do? She didn’t know the way home, or even how far away home was. And without the phone, she couldn’t call anybody.

  She heard a clink, then Huey humming something. She liked Huey. But he was a stranger, and her daddy had told her over and over how strangers could be bad, even when they seemed nice. She felt sorry for him, but whenever she looked up and saw him watching her, she felt something funny in her stomach. Like a big bubble pressing up against her heart. In a moment he would walk through the door with a bowl of cereal that could kill her. Abby closed her eyes and pictured her mother’s face. What would she say if she could talk to me now?

  Run.

  Abby stood up with her Barbie and took a tentative step toward the door. Looking back toward the kitchen, she saw Huey’s shadow moving on the floor. She walked very fast to the front door, picked up the small ice chest her mother had left, and slipped outside without a sound.

  Joe Hickey took two steps toward Karen, a lopsided grin on his face. She kept her eyes on his and tried to keep the fear out of her voice as she spoke.

  “Will you please wear a condom?”

  “Sorry, babe. Not tonight.”

  A shudder of revulsion ran through her. God only knew what diseases Hickey carried. He had been in prison, and the HIV infection rate behind bars was astronomical.

  “Please,” she implored. “I don’t want to—”

  “I ain’t worn a rubber since junior high, and I ain’t starting now.”

  She fought down a wave of nausea. “I need to use the bathroom.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “For God’s sake. Give me that much privacy.”

  “What’s in the bathroom? Another gun?”

  “My diaphragm, okay? I don’t want to get pregnant.”

  Hickey’s grin returned. “Well, now, I don’t know. You look like you got good genes. Maybe you and me should pro-create. Do the global gene pool a favor.”

  She closed her eyes, praying he wasn’t serious. “May I please use the diaphragm?”

  “What the hell.” He waved his hand. “Hey, maybe I should put it in for you.”

  She struggled to keep her face impassive.

  “Fine. Go do whatever. But when you come out of there, I don’t want to see those panties. It’s Lady Go-diva time.”

  As she walked toward the bathroom, he picked up the Wild Turkey bottle and stretched out on the sleigh bed, his face glowing with anticipation.

  Huey came out of the kitchen carrying a bowl of Cap’n Crunch as big as a colander in his left hand and his cell phone in his right. He looked down at the saddle blanket Abby had been sitting on and blinked in confusion. Then he peered around the room. After several seconds, a grin lighted his face.

  “Are you playing hide-and-go-seek? Is that what you’re doing?”

  He carried the cereal and the phone into the bathroom. Finding it empty, he checked the bedroom. He had to set the bowl on the mattress and lie prone to look under the old iron frame bed, groaning as he squeezed his oversized body between the side rail and the wall. There was nothing under the bed but what his mother used to call “slut wool.”

  He got to his feet again, picked up the cereal bowl, went to the bedroom door, and stared at the empty saddle blanket again. Then he cocked his head and listened hard.

  “Abby?”

  His voice sounded lonelier than it had when she was in the room. The silence just swallowed it up.

  “Abby?”

  The screen door banged softly in the wind.

  Huey looked to his right and saw the door hanging open. His face went slack. After a long sequence of thought, doubt, and realization, he dropped the bowl and the cell phone and charged onto the porch.

  The second Karen closed the bathroom door, her survival instinct kicked into overdrive. She turned on the sink taps, then opened the cabinet behind the mirror, revealing bottles of vitamins, drugs, facial cleansers, gauze bandages, and all the other sundries of a doctor ’s home medicine cabinet. On the bottom shelf was a stack of Lo-Ovral birth control pills. She grabbed them and threw them into the cabinet under the lavatory so Hickey wouldn’t see them if he came in.

  She scanned the drugs in the cabinet. Zithromax, an antibiotic. Naproxen for Will’s arthritis. Methotrexate. Stuck behind the gauze bandage pack was a small brown prescription bottle. Her heart quickened as she picked it up and read the label: Mepergan Fortis. Demerol. But when she opened it, she saw only two red pills in its bottom. Not enough to put Hickey out quickly, even if she found a way to slip them into the Wild Turkey bottle. Raking frantically through the cabinet, she saw nothing that could help her. As she closed the door, she caught her reflection in its mirrored surface. She looked like a ghost of herself.

  Splashing water on her face, she reached down for a hand towel and froze. Standing in a ceramic cup by the sink were three toothbrushes. But beside their blue and orange handles, a different sort of handle stuck up. A thinner one. She reached down and lifted it out of the glass. It was a disposable scalpel, its thin blade shielded by a plastic sheath. As she studied it, an arc of instinct closed, completing the circuit begun when Hickey dropped his pants.

  “Christ, how long can it take?” he complained.

  Hickey sounded like he was right outside the door. Dropping a washrag over the scalpel, Karen yanked off her panties, sat on the commode, and watched the doorknob.

  It didn’t move.

  She got up and took the scalpel from beneath the rag, then removed the clear protective sheath from the blade. Its edge was twice as bright as its side, honed to a sharpness that could lay open the human dermis like the skin of a peach. She straightened before the mirror and looked at herself. Was the scalpel concealable? After a moment’s thought, she raised it point-first toward her forehead and slid it neatly into her hair.

  It vanished.

  She turned her head right and then left, to see whether the scalpel was visible. It wasn’t. She felt her hair to see how obvious it was. Too obvious. If Hickey held her head for any reason, he would instantly discover the blade.

  She pulled the scalpel from her hair and looked at it again. Six inches of plastic and surgical steel, flatter than a key and lighter than a pencil. The Papillon solution was
not an option. She turned away from the mirror and looked back over her shoulder. She could see down to the upper cleft of her buttocks. For the first time in her life, she was glad to be carrying a few extra pounds. Using the mirror as a guide, she slid the scalpel, handle first, down between her cheeks. It felt cold and alien, but only the silver tip of the blade was visible at the base of her spine.

  It would have to do.

  All she could hope for now was to stack the odds a little in her favor. She opened the dirty clothes cabinet and stood on tiptoe. In the top section were two shelves she used to store clothes she rarely wore. She reached up and dug through them with feverish intensity.

  There.

  She wriggled into the claret-colored teddy Will had bought at the mall last year, a garment she’d never even tried on. The top half must have been designed by Wonder Bra, because it lifted and pressed her modest breasts together until the cleavage reminded her of the beach bunnies on Baywatch. The bottom half was ridiculously tight, with a sheer lace triangle over the crotch, leaving her fully exposed.

  She looked like a French whore.

  Perfect.

  Crouching in a lightless thicket, Abby watched Huey lumber past her in the moonlight.

  “Abby?” he called. “Why did you run away? You’re scaring me.”

  She looked down at her doll, which she had laid across the ice chest to keep it out of the briars. She was trying hard not to make a sound, but her shins had already been scratched bloody, and they stung like a thousand paper cuts. She hadn’t wanted to go far from the lights, but she knew Huey would find her if she didn’t get into the dark.

  He paused twenty feet to her left, looking into the wall of trees. “Abby? Where are you?”

  She wondered how long she could wait here. The woods didn’t scare her. Not usually, anyway. Their house was in the middle of the woods. But she’d never spent the night in them, at least not alone. Only with her dad, at the Indian Princess camp-out. Already she’d heard sounds that made her shiver. Scuttling in the undergrowth, like armadillos, or maybe possums. There was a possum that kept eating the cat’s food at Kate Mosby’s house up the road. Abby had seen the cat fight it once, and the long, needlelike teeth of the possum as it hissed at the cat. If a possum came close now, she wouldn’t be able to sit still.

  The other thing was her sugar. She felt like it was okay, but her mother wasn’t there to measure it, and if she started to “go south,” as her daddy put it, she would need a shot. She had never given herself a shot before.

  “Come out!” Huey yelled, sounding really mad now.

  Abby watched him pick up a big stick and poke some bushes with it. Then he moved off farther to her left, going along the line of trees.

  She looked at the cabin, the lovely yellow light streaming from the windows. She wished she could wait inside, where there were no animals or bugs. Huey’s voice floated back to her on the wind.

  “There’s bad things in the woods at night! Wolves and bears and things! You need Huey to look out for you!”

  She hugged herself and tried not to listen. There might be bears in these woods, but she didn’t think so. And certainly not wolves. There weren’t any more wolves.

  “There’s snakes, too,” Huey called. “Creepy crawly snakes looking for warm bodies in the dark.”

  A chill shot up Abby’s spine. There were snakes in Mississippi, all right. Bad ones. She’d learned about them at Indian Princesses. Copperheads and cotton-mouths and ground rattlers and coral snakes. They’d seen a coral snake on one camp-out, sunning itself on a rock by the creek. The fathers didn’t even try to get close enough to kill it. They said if it bit you, you could die before you got to the hospital. Her dad had taught the Princesses a rhyme to help them tell the difference between a coral snake and a scarlet king snake, which looked almost exactly like it: If red touches yellow, it can kill a fellow.

  “If the snakes get you, it won’t be my fault!” Huey yelled, beating the bushes off to her left.

  Abby shut her eyes and tried not to cry.

  When Karen emerged from the bathroom wearing the teddy, she saw Hickey lying under the covers in the middle of the bed. The only light came from the lamp on the end table. He gave a long, low wolf whistle.

  “Man alive. That’s better than naked. Talk about getting with the program.”

  As Karen moved toward the bed, she saw Will’s .38 lying on the floor by the dust ruffle. That was how confident Hickey was in the diabolical cage of circumstance he had constructed.

  He patted the side of the bed.

  As she moved toward him, she slid the gun under the bed with her foot, then turned her back to him and slipped under the covers, being careful to keep her legs together as she moved. She tried not to stiffen as her hip and shoulder touched Hickey’s side, but she knew that her tension would be transmitted to him in a thousand subtle ways.

  “Damn, you’re cold,” he complained.

  “Sorry.” He smelled like a stale ashtray. She stared up at the ceiling as though she had nothing in her mind but enduring what was to come with stoicism. “What do you want me to do?”

  “You’re not gonna whine about it?”

  “Not if it keeps you from hurting Abby.”

  “Thank God for small favors.” He turned sideways and propped himself on an elbow, and she felt him press against her hip. A deep shudder rippled through her.

  “Are you ready down there?” he asked.

  Unbelievable. How could he possibly think that an impending rape could arouse a woman? She had to distract him from his immediate goal. “Is that what you want first? Straight to business? I thought you’d want something else.”

  “Like what?” He reached up and cupped her left breast with a sweaty hand.

  Every fiber of instinct told her to jerk away from the offending touch, but she forced herself to lie still and turn her face toward his. “Something you fantasize about when you see women like me in the grocery store.”

  He squeezed the breast. “Like what?”

  “Lie back and relax. You’ll see.”

  A slow smile spread his lips. “Oh, man . . .”

  She rolled onto her stomach, pulled the covers over her shoulders, and slid down toward Hickey’s midsection. She hoped he would leave the comforter where it was, but he lifted it so that he could watch what he believed was to come. She was foolish to have expected anything else.

  “I’m cold,” she said, looking up.

  “You’ll warm up.” His black eyes were bright. “And don’t think you’re going to get out of anything by doing this.”

  She swallowed her revulsion, then straddled his legs and took hold of him with her left hand.

  “Mmm,” he moaned.

  She had to get him to look away. Closing her eyes, she worked her left hand a little, the way Will liked it. Hickey groaned but did not look away. He wouldn’t, she realized, until she progressed much further. This was what he got off on: watching a “society” woman pleasure him.

  “Good,” he murmured. “Good girl.”

  She slid her right hand down beneath her stomach.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I want to see you do that.”

  “After you finish,” she said, feeling sweat break out on her face. It was hot in the bedroom, but it was fear, not the temperature that had brought moisture to her skin.

  He groped for the back of her head.

  Panic shot through her. “I know what to do. Lie back and relax. You don’t want it to be over too fast.”

  “Yeah.” After a moment, his head lolled back, and his eyes rolled up toward the ceiling.

  She quickly slid her right hand up around her hip. Her forefinger touched the scalpel blade. Very carefully, she felt her way down the plastic handle, which was slick with perspiration. Closing her first and second fingers around the handle, she drew the scalpel from its place of concealment and set it firmly in her fist, the flat of the blade wedged between the pad of her thumb and her forefinger.

&
nbsp; “Come on,” Hickey urged, his voice brimming with impatience.

  She brought the blade smoothly along her right side and underneath her right breast. When it was beneath her chin, she slid her knees up under her chest, as though to position herself for oral sex.

  “Finally,” he grunted.

  She had to get between his legs. Straddling him this way, he could easily buck her off in the initial moment of panic. Without breaking her rhythm, she lifted one knee and wedged it between his thighs, then followed with the other.

  “Go for it,” he said.

  Karen gripped him as hard as she could with her left hand and pressed the blade against his urethra with her right, anchoring the point in a few millimeters of skin. It would take several seconds for him to register the pain of the puncture.

  “Look down, Joe,” she said in a cold voice. “And don’t make any sudden moves.”

  “What?”

  “If you move, you’re going to lose this organ you’re so proud of.”

  She felt his abdomen tighten as he raised his head to look. “What? Hey, whatever you’re doing, it hurts.”

  “I’m holding a scalpel against your penis, Joe.” She prepared herself for a reflex jerk of panic. “You really don’t want to move, okay?”

  His eyes went from blank confusion to shock in less than a second. At last he had seen and understood the scalpel. His whole body went rigid, but his pelvis didn’t move an inch.

  “What the—” he blurted in a stage whisper.

  He raised his hand to strike her, but didn’t have the courage to do it. Karen looked straight into his eyes. Fear crackled there like electricity. The power was intoxicating. She had gone from helpless supplicant to total dominance in seconds. If she had held the gun to Hickey’s head, he would have laughed in her face. But the threat to his manhood paralyzed him. She could almost feel his heart squirming in his chest.

  “This is a Bard-Parker Number Ten scalpel,” she said. “We keep them around to take out splinters, stuff like that. But it’ll take off your equipment just as easily. I bet you’d hardly even feel it. Just a quick sting.”