by Greg Iles
“Doc? You there?”
Karen said to Abby: “I’m going to put you on hold for a few seconds, honey. I’m not hanging up, I’m just going to listen to Daddy for a minute. Okay?”
Abby’s voice rose to a frantic whisper. “Don’t hang up, Mama!”
“I’ll be right back.” She hit the button that switched that phone to the private line.
“You’re screwing up, Doc,” Hickey said to Will. “All you had to do was follow the rules, and you’d have got your kid back in the morning. But now you’re trying to pull a fucking John Wayne. And your old lady thinks she’s Wonder Woman.”
“Sometimes I think she is, too. The simple truth is that I don’t trust you to keep your word.”
“Let me explain something to you, Doc. In some ways tracing a cellular call is easy. ’Cause a cell phone ain’t nothing but a radio. Right?”
“Right.”
“And you can triangulate a radio just like in the old World War Two spy movies. That’s what you’re thinking. You look at the relative signal strengths between towers and figure a location down to yards. The problem, Doc—for you, I mean—is that not many towers are equipped to measure that stuff yet. All this is under legislation right now. People want cell companies to be able to do that kind of tracing, so people making nine-one-one calls can be found before they bleed to death. Great idea, right? The problem is the equipment. And Mississippi’s five years behind the rest of the country. As usual, right? That’s why I feel okay using cell phones in this operation. So, if you think the cops are gonna find your kid before Huey does, you’re out of your mind. And if you’re wondering why I’m telling you this, it’s simple. I still want this thing to work. I still want my money. But if you bring in the cops or the FBI, you’re taking control out of my hands. It’s like bringing divorce lawyers into a marriage. It’s the irrevocable step. There won’t be anything I can do. I’ve got to cut my losses and run. That means when Huey finds the kid, he kills her.”
“But we know who you are,” Will pointed out. “If you kill Abby, you’re opening yourself to murder charges.”
“You’re not thinking, Doc. Kidnapping alone is a death penalty offense. So I’ve got nothing to lose by killing her. And by killing her, I kill any chance that she can identify Huey.”
“My wife saw him, too.”
“Did she? Gee, I don’t recall that.” Hickey smiled at Karen. “You starting to get the picture?”
There was a hissing silence as Will considered his options. Karen was about to switch back to Abby when he said, “Screw you, Joe. Put my wife back on.”
“I’m here,” said Karen. “Abby’s on hold. Let me get her back.” She switched her phone back to the main line. “I’m back, baby. Are you okay?”
“No! I was scared. Don’t get off anymore.”
“I won’t.” She motioned for Hickey to toss his phone back to her. When it landed beside her, it was smeared with dark blood. She wiped it on the comforter, then held it to her mouth. “Go ahead, Will.”
“I already called my guy on the hotel phone. I’m getting an answering machine.”
“No. Oh God.”
“It is after midnight. And they may not have a phone in their bedroom. I’ll keep calling back till they wake up.” He fell silent for a moment. “Look, you saw the guy who was holding Abby, right?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think he would kill her if Joe told him to?”
Images of a giant standing in the dark flashed through Karen’s mind. The startled eyes as she shoved the ice chest into his hands and begged him not to hurt her baby. Hurt your baby? Huey had echoed, as though the idea had never entered his head. But what had he really meant? Had the idea of hurting Abby been so alien that he’d been shocked by the suggestion? Or was Huey just too simpleminded to do anything but repeat what was said to him?
Karen covered the mouthpiece of the phone that connected her to Abby. “I can’t answer that. He’s huge, and he’s simpleminded. Hickey says he gets angry when children run from him, something about the way he was treated growing up. And Abby just ran from him.”
“Jesus. Do you think Abby could hide from him until dawn? Or maybe walk to a road?”
“It’s the middle of nowhere, Will.”
“But you left some insulin with her, right?”
“Yes. Hang on.” She uncovered the mouthpiece of the other phone. “Abby? Do you have your ice chest with you? The one I left with Mr. Huey?”
“No. I picked it up when I first ran. But when I went back inside for the phone, I forgot it.”
“That’s all right. You’re doing great. I’m talking to Daddy.”
“Are ya’ll coming to get me?”
“Yes. We’re figuring it out right now. Where’s Mr. Huey?”
“I’m still getting the answering machine,” Will said.
“I don’t know,” said Abby. “He stopped yelling.”
A shiver ran through Karen. “Don’t make a sound, baby.” She covered the phone again. “She doesn’t have the insulin. She doesn’t know how to inject herself even if she had it.”
“I think she could do it if she had to. I just don’t know if she’d know she was in trouble in time.”
“She’s only five years old, Will. Do we have any alternatives?”
“Abby gives herself up and we trust Joe to give her back after he gets the money.”
Karen looked across the bed at Hickey’s glittering eyes, his prison tattoo, the bleeding leg. “No. We’ve got to try to save her now.”
“Let me talk to him again,” Hickey said.
Karen threw the phone across the bed.
“Doc? Let me tell you a quick story. Me and Huey are cousins. We grew up in different states, but our mamas were sisters. They both married sons of bitches, only Huey’s daddy was the leaving kind of son of a bitch, and mine was the ass-whipping kind. After Huey’s little sister died, he had to move down to Mississippi with us. He’d got in some trouble up there trying to talk to little girls after that. Hurt some of their parents. Anyhow, my old man could be okay when he wasn’t drunk—which wasn’t often. He was nice to Huey, but when he was loaded he’d lay into him over being useless. Then he’d whale on me, just for kicks.”
Karen wanted to hear Will’s responses, but she knew Abby might break down if she was put on hold again. She hoped Will was still ringing the president of CellStar.
“So, Pop takes us deer hunting one day,” Hickey said. “We didn’t let Huey carry a gun, of course, but we always took him. You couldn’t beat him for hauling dead deer out of the woods. Anyhow, I was climbing through this bobwire fence, and my gun went off. Pop was drunk, and he started yelling how he’d felt the bullet pass his cheek. He threw down his rifle and started whalin’ on me right there in the woods. I was about thirteen. Huey was twelve. He was a big boy, though. So, Pop whales on me till he runs out of wind, then he stops to rest. I try to go for my rifle on the ground, but soon as I do, he gets between me and it. Then he takes a sip from his flask and starts whalin’ on me again. Huey has this funny look on his face. Then, real slow like, he walks up behind Pop and grabs him around the arms, like he’s hugging a tree. And he just holds him there. Pop goes crazy. He’s kicking and screaming how he’s gonna kill us both when he gets loose. I pick up my rifle and point it at him. I know when he gets loose he’s gonna tear me to pieces. But I can’t shoot him too easy with Huey holding him, except point-blank in the head, which wouldn’t look right.”
Karen made sure her palm was sealing the phone Abby waited on.
“So Huey gets this scared look on his face and says, ‘I just wanted him to stop hitting you, Joey. I don’t want to hurt him none.’ I say, ‘He ain’t ever gonna stop. Not till he’s dead. You kill him, Buckethead, and we’ll be done with it. We’re blood brothers, boy, you gotta listen when I tell you something.’ So Huey thinks for a minute. Then he picks Pop up where his legs won’t touch the ground and carries him over to this big rock and lays him down an
d smashes his head against it till he stops wiggling. He carries the body the top of a ridge, just like I tell him to, and drops him down onto the creek rocks. Like he fell there.”
Karen closed her eyes, praying for Abby with all her being.
“Now, Huey didn’t want do that, Doc. But he did it. He won’t want to hurt your little girl, either. But if I tell him to, he will. ’Cause he can’t envision a world without cousin Joey in it. And if he thinks your little girl living means me going to Parchman, she’ll die sure as old Pop did.” Hickey winked at Karen as he spoke into the phone. “He could break Abby’s neck without even meaning to. Like dropping a china vase.”
Hickey listened to whatever Will said, then laid the phone near the middle of the bed, a confident smile on his face. Karen picked it up.
“What are we going to do?” she asked.
“While Hickey was telling his story, I called CellStar and tried to find out if Ferris is even in town. I told them it was a medical emergency. Their security department said he should be at home.”
“But you’re still getting the machine?”
“Yes, but I’m going to keep ringing it. Somebody’s bound to wake up eventually. I want to talk to Abby right now. I need to hear her voice. Can you hold the phones together?”
Karen raised the gun to Hickey’s face. “Sit on the floor by the wall.”
“Why?
“Sit!”
He backed to the wall and slid down it, keeping both hands pressed to his lacerated thigh. Karen laid the .38 on the comforter, then inverted one of the phones and held them together.
“Punkin?” Will said, sounding like a transistor radio. “This is Daddy. Are you all right?”
Karen heard Abby sobbing. It made her want to pick up the gun and blow a hole in Hickey’s heart.
“I’m coming to get you, baby,” Will said, his voice cracking with emotion. “But what I need now is for you to stay hidden. It’s just like the Indian Princess camp-out. Just another game. It may take a little while, but Daddy’s going to be there. Do you hear me?”
“Yes.” The voice sounded tiny and alone.
“I want to ask you a question. Has there ever been a time when you really needed me and I didn’t come?”
“No.”
“That’s right. And there never will be. I swear that on the Bible.”
“You’re not supposed to swear on the Bible.”
“If it’s real important, you can. I’m coming to get you, baby. If you get scared, you just remember that. Daddy’s coming.”
“Okay.”
“I need to talk to Mom again. I love you, baby.”
“Please hurry, Daddy.”
Karen separated the phones. “Will?”
“It would be good if we could get Abby to shut off that phone for a while,” he said, “to conserve the batteries. But I don’t think she could handle it. Just keep her calm and quiet. I’m doing everything I can.”
“Hurry, Will.”
Huey Cotton paused in the rutted road leading to the cabin and looked up at the sky. His heart was full of sadness, and his eyes felt fuzzy from staring into the dark trees. Huey experienced much of the world as colors. A doctor had questioned him about it once. Like the woods. The woods had a green smell. Even at night, when you couldn’t see the green, you could smell and taste it. The clean green of the oak leaves overhead. The thick jungly green of the vines tugging at his pant legs.
Joey was two colors. Sometimes he was white like an angel, a guardian who floated at Huey’s shoulder or walked in his shadow, ready to reveal himself when needed. But there was red in Joey, too, a hard little seed filled with dark ink, and sometimes it burst and bled out into the white, covering it completely. When Joey turned red, bad things happened, or had already happened, or were coming down the road. When Joey turned red, Huey had to do things he didn’t like to do. But by doing them, he helped the red fade away, like blood on a shirt in a wash bucket.
Sometimes he couldn’t see color at all. There was a shade between brown and black (“no-color,” he called it) that hovered at the edges of everything, like a fog waiting to blot out the world. He saw it when he stood in line to order a hamburger and heard people whispering behind him because he couldn’t make up his mind about what he wanted. The order-taker seemed to float in a tiny, faraway circle at the center of his vision, and all he could keep in his head was what the people behind him were saying, not whether he wanted pickles or onions. He knew they said mean things because they couldn’t see inside him, past how big he was, but whenever he tried to explain that, he scared people. And the more afraid they got, the more the no-color seeped in from the edges.
School was the worst. He had tried with all his might to forget the things children had said to him at the school in Missouri. But he couldn’t. They lived inside his head, like termites in the support beams of a house. Even when he got so big that teenage boys wouldn’t stand toe-to-toe with him, they teased him. Teased him and ran before he could make them pay for it. Girls teased him, too. Retard, retard, retard. In his dreams they still ran from him, and he never caught them. In real life, though, he caught one once. A teenage boy. That was one reason he’d had to come to Mississippi to live. His mother never told his aunt about it. She was afraid her sister wouldn’t take him. But Huey had told Joey. And Joey had understood.
Huey lowered his head and breathed deep. He could smell people sometimes, the way he smelled animals. Some smelled bad, others nothing special. Abby smelled like a towel fresh out of the clothes dryer. Cleaner than anything he’d ever smelled. And she sparkled. He didn’t understand why he couldn’t find her in the dark, because she was silver and gold, and should be reflecting the moonlight.
Maybe the no-color was hiding her. It had been seeping into his eyes since the moment he realized she’d run away. He had tried hard not to be scary, but he’d seen the fear in her eyes. Maybe she couldn’t help it. She was so tiny. Joey said she was six years old, but her head was smaller than Huey’s hand.
“Abby?” he called halfheartedly.
Nothing.
He walked back toward the cabin, sniffing and listening, but nothing registered. Cutting around the cabin, he looked into the tractor shed. The clean towel smell hovered around the tractor. He leaned down and sniffed the seat.
Abby had sat there.
He crept out of the shed and looked into the dark mosaic of foliage, straining his eyes. Some greens looked gray at night. The tree trunks looked silver-black. Moonlight dripped down the black leaves and hanging branches. He relaxed his eyes, which was a trick he had learned while hunting with Joey. Sometimes, if you let your eyes relax, they picked up things they never would if you were trying to see. As he looked into the shadows, something yellowy and far dimmer than a lightning bug winked in the darkness.
His heartbeat quickened. He focused on the spot, but the yellowy light was gone. He relaxed his eyes again.
The light winked and disappeared.
He was close. The light was important, but something else had stirred the blood in his slow veins. The green smell had changed.
Twenty yards from the tractor shed, Abby crouched in the sweltering darkness, clenching the cell phone as hard as she could. The thick branches of the oak above blocked the moonlight. She couldn’t see anything beyond the bushes that shielded her. She wished she was still up on the tractor seat. It was dry and safe there, not itchy like the briars clawing at her now. She had no idea where Mr. Huey was. There were too many noises around her to tell anything. Only the reassuring glow of the phone’s readout panel kept her from bolting toward the lights of the cabin. It was like looking at the kitchen window of her house when she was playing outside after supper.
A soft squawk from the phone startled her, and she put it to her ear.
“Abby?” said her mother.
“What?” she whispered back.
“Are you okay?”
“I guess so.”
“Where’s Mr. Huey?”
/> “I don’t know.”
“You haven’t heard him?”
“He stopped yelling a while ago. Maybe he’s gone.”
“Maybe. But we don’t know that for sure. You have to stay down.”
“I’m sitting on my knees.”
“That’s good. Daddy’s calling a man right now who’s going to help us find you. Do you know how he’s going to do that?”
“No.”
“The phone in your hand is like a radio. As long as it stays on, the police can find you. It’s the same as if you were standing there yelling, ‘Mama, Mama.’”
“Do you want me to stand up and yell? I can yell loud.”
“No! No, honey. The phone is yelling for you, okay? People can’t hear it, but computers can.”
“Like a dog hearing a whistle?”
“Exactly like that. Now—Hang on, Daddy’s talking to me.”
“Okay.”
Abby held the phone against her ear so hard it hurt. She wanted to hear her father’s voice again.
Hickey was still sitting against the bedroom wall. Despite his wounded leg, he watched Karen like a hyena waiting for its chance to strike.
“You going to sew me up or what?” he asked, holding up his bloody palms.
“I haven’t decided.”
“I’m getting exactly nowhere,” Will said in her ear, his voice tight with frustration. “Goddamn answering machine. I can’t believe the president of a cellular phone company doesn’t have a service.”
“Maybe we should call the police. Or the FBI.”
“I don’t think we can risk that. If Huey—”
“Mama?” Abby said in her other ear.
“What is it, baby?”
“I think I heard something.”
Karen’s heart fluttered. “Whisper, honey. What did you hear?”
“I don’t know.” Abby’s voice was a thin filament stretched over a vast chasm of fear. “How long till you get here?”
“Not long. Has the noise stopped?”
“I don’t hear it right now. I’m scared it’s a possum.”
Karen felt a hysterical relief. “It’s okay if it’s a possum. They won’t hurt you.”
