24 Hours

by Greg Iles

  “They won’t bite me?”

  “No. They’re more scared of you than you are of them.”

  “One bit Kate’s cat last week.”

  “That’s different.”

  “What if it’s a snake?”

  “It’s not a snake,” Karen assured her, even as she panicked at the thought. “Snakes are sleeping right now.”

  “Uh-uh. Snakes hunt at night. I saw it on Animal Planet.”

  Jesus. “That’s just in other countries, like India. And Sri Lanka. Cobras and things. We don’t have cobras here.”

  “Oh.”

  “Our snakes sleep at night.”

  “Mom, I heard it again.” Her whisper was barely audible now. “Like somebody sneaking up.”

  Karen fought a surge of panic. “You have to be quiet. I want you to stop talking.”

  “I feel better when we talk.”

  “I know, sweetie, but—”

  “Mama—”

  In two nearly silent syllables, utter terror traveled from child to mother. Karen squeezed the phone tight enough to bruise her hand. “Abby? Say something!”

  There was only silence. Then she heard breathing, and she understood what was happening. Abby was sitting motionless in the dark, scared out of her mind. Huey was close. Praying that Abby still had the phone to her ear, Karen whispered, “I’m with you, honey. I’m here. Sit very still. You’re going to be fine. Remember what Daddy said.”

  She listened with every fiber of her nervous system.

  Out of the breathing, she heard a whimper, so soft that Abby had to be fighting a heroic battle to suppress it. Karen was about to reassure her again when a crash like breaking branches came down the line and Abby screamed.

  “I found you, didn’t I?” Huey said loudly.

  Karen’s heart turned to ice. “Abby?”

  “I saw the light,” Huey said, his voice exultant. “Why did you run, Abby?”

  “ABBY!”

  “What is it?” Will shouted in her ear.

  “Joey?” said Huey.

  “Put Abby back on!” Karen demanded. “Please!”

  “Where’s Joey?”

  “Well, well,” said Hickey. He pressed his bloody palms against the carpet and stood. “The worm has turned.”

  Karen grabbed the .38 and pointed it at his chest. “MAKE HIM PUT ABBY BACK ON!”

  Hickey walked fearlessly around the bed. “If you shoot me now, she’s as dead as a hammer. Give me the phone.”

  “Get back!”

  He brushed the gun aside and slapped her face, then stripped the phone from her hand.

  “Huey? This is Joey. If you hear a shot, strangle that brat. Don’t even wait to ask me a question, because I’ll be dead. This bitch already stabbed me. She tried to kill me.”

  Hickey’s face hardened as he listened to his cousin’s reply. “You goddamn retard. I give the orders and you follow them. Period.” He grabbed Karen’s wrist and squeezed until her hand opened of its own accord and she dropped the .38. He bent and picked it up. “Tie the kid and gag her, Huey. I’ll call you back.”

  Without warning, Karen snapped. She flew at Hickey’s face, meaning to claw out his eyes, but before she reached them, he slammed his fist into her sternum. The blow drove the wind from her lungs and dropped her to the floor. As she lay there gasping, he picked up the phone that had connected her to Will and spoke in a savage voice.

  “Huey just found your kid, Doc. I hope you haven’t talked to anybody yet, because if you have, Abby won’t ever see second grade...Calm down. I don’t want you to stroke out on me. I just hope this wildcat you’re married to has learned her lesson.”

  “Please,” Karen pleaded, struggling to her knees. “Don’t let him tie her. Don’t let him hurt her. She—”

  “Shut your mouth.” Hickey hung up. “And stitch up this goddamn leg already.”

  She stared up at him, panting like a winded runner. Tiny points of light danced at the centers of his eyes.

  “I own you,” he said in a quiet voice. “You know that now, don’t you?”

  “I just want my little girl safe. Whatever that takes.”

  “That’s a good answer. But first things first.” He pointed at his lacerated leg. “Get to work.”

  Karen tried to put Abby out of her mind. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t be able to function. Bracing her hand on the bed, she got to her feet, then picked up the forceps she’d dropped earlier and opened Will’s black bag.

  “No needles,” Hickey said, as she removed a vial of lidocaine and a syringe. “I don’t trust you far as I can throw you.”

  “Fine with me. Forty stitches without anesthetic will burn like the hinges of hell.”

  Hickey laughed. “You should enjoy it, then. But don’t worry, babe. I’m gonna pay you back for every stitch.”

  ELEVEN

  Huey stumbled through the dark with Abby in his arms and fear bubbling from his heart. The no-color was all around, flooding in from the edges of his sight, leaving only the glowing cabin windows swirling in the dark. Abby shrieked endlessly, so long and so loudly that he didn’t know how she was breathing. He wished to God he could put his hands over his ears, but he needed them to carry her.

  Her screams were like water he had to run through. And the fear in them was the same fear he had known as a little boy. It set something vibrating in his chest, like a bell struck with a hammer. Joey had said to tie her up, but Huey didn’t want to tie her up. Joey said to strangle her if he heard a shot, and Huey thanked Jesus he hadn’t heard one. The only way he could hurt Abby was if he saw another face on top of her face, some other girl’s face. An older girl had once taken him into the woods and showed him things, then asked him to pull down his pants. After he did, she yelled to a dozen boys who came running out of the trees, laughing and jeering at him. He wanted to twist that girl’s head around and around until it came right off, like a chicken’s.

  Huey had never felt so twisted up inside, but he knew one thing. He couldn’t live without Joey. Life before Joey was a fearful blur, and the idea of life without him would not even fit into Huey’s head. Creatures like Abby were like lanterns in the dark, but he could never keep them. In the end, Joey was all he had.

  Midnight had passed, and the Jenningses’ Victorian house stood dark and silent on its hill. Crickets cheeped in the pine trees; a truck droned out on the interstate; but the house itself was silent.

  A scream pierced the night.

  Inside the master bedroom, Karen crouched over Hickey’s wounded thigh on the sleigh bed. Naked but for a towel she had lain across his midsection, Hickey held the bottle of Wild Turkey in his left hand and a halogen lamp from Will’s study in his right. He aimed the light wherever she told him to, keeping silent during most of the work, but occasionally yelling when the needle pierced his unanesthetized flesh.

  Karen worked the U-shaped suture needle with almost careless speed, mating the edges of the wound, tying knots, moving on. It was amazing how much damage one slash with a good scalpel could do. Hickey hadn’t lost enough blood to threaten his life, but he’d bled enough to scare the hell out of someone unused to trauma. Karen was grateful to see that she had in fact nicked the base of his penis with her panicked stroke (a wound that required two stitches) and hoped this would discourage him from trying to force her to finish what she’d begun earlier.

  “How many to go?” he asked in a taut voice.

  “We’re only half done. You should have taken that lidocaine.”

  He gulped another slug of Wild Turkey as she jabbed the needle through his skin. “This is all the shot I need. Just hurry it up.”

  She sewed five more stitches, then paused to stretch her wrists. As she did, something that had been bothering her from the beginning slipped out. “Why us?” she said softly.

  “What?”

  “I said, ‘Why us?’”

  Hickey reached out with the bottle and forced her chin up, so that she was looking at his face. “Are you that
dumb? Are you that fucking dumb?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why not you? Huh? You think because you live out here in this suburban palace, you’re immune to pain? My mother had throat cancer. That’s the worst, man. ‘Why me?’ she’d rasp all the time. ‘Dear Jesus, why me?’ I’d ask the same thing. Why my mother? Why not my shit-for-brains old man? I’d look at the ceiling like God was up there listening and ask why. Then I finally figured it out. The joke was on me.” Hickey shook his bottle, spilling amber fluid on Karen’s knee. “The joke’s on you, too, June Cleaver.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re a human being, that’s why. So why not you, okay? Why not you?”

  Karen bit her lip and gazed intently at Hickey. Bitterness was etched in every line of his face, and his eyes were like black wells with a film of oil floating on them. “It must be awful to be you,” she said.

  “Sometimes,” he conceded. “But tonight it’s worse to be you.”

  Will stood at the picture window of the bedroom, staring out over the Gulf of Mexico. The Cypress suite, despite its luxurious appointments, had begun to close around him like a prison cell, and the knowledge that the dark gulf stretched south to the Yucatan somehow calmed him.

  The first seconds after he realized that Huey had recaptured Abby had been hellish. Even armed with a pistol, Cheryl had felt compelled to lock herself in one of the marble bathroms for protection, so terrible had been his rage. He could have killed Hickey at that moment, if the man had appeared before him. But of course he hadn’t. Hickey had designed his Chinese box precisely so that this scenario would never occur.

  Even as Will’s rage dissipated, his frustration grew. There was so much he didn’t know. How had Karen gotten the drop on Hickey? Probably by sneaking the .38 from the top of their closet. But even so, why would Hickey respond to her threat? He had control over Abby, and so long as he did, a gun would do Karen no good. But apparently it had. Or something had. Before Hickey hung up the telephone, Will had heard him yell something about being stabbed. Had Karen stabbed him? Had she snapped under the stress and tried to kill him? No. Karen never lost control. That was axiomatic. Her father, the master sergeant, had drilled into his daughter a self-discipline that was unnerving. Whatever had happened, Will had no way to discover it. He would just have to wait.

  The only lights on the gulf now belonged to a lone freighter sailing west, probably to off-load coffee or bananas or God-knew-what-else in New Orleans. There were men sleeping on that ship, a full crew less than three miles away, men who knew nothing of his problem and could do nothing to help him if they did. There were several hundred doctors in this very hotel, many of whom Will knew personally—yet none could help him. He was trapped in an unbreakable cage constructed by a madman named Joe Hickey.

  No, he thought. Madman is probably inaccurate. True madness was rare, if you barred disorders caused by organic disease. During his psychiatry rotation in medical school, Will had treated patients at the state mental hospital at Whitfield, several of them classified as criminally insane. After a while, he had come to the conclusion that some of the men were quite sane. They had pursued their goals and desires with the single-minded drive of men who succeeded in business or the arts or politics. It was simply that society found itself unable to admit that their chosen goals could be the goals of sane men. But Will knew different. All men had atavistic desires, sometimes savage ones. Some were merely better at suppressing them than others. And Hickey did not belong in the first category. He acted on his impulses, regardless of law or danger. His overt motive was simple enough: money. But it seemed to Will that if a man was willing to flout the law, there were easier and less risky ways to steal large amounts of money. Hickey’s plan was constructed to satisfy deeper urges than money. And Will needed to figure out what those were. Very soon.

  He was having trouble keeping his mind on track. He remembered the ride to the airport that morning, when he’d asked Karen to bring Abby to the convention at the last minute. He’d had a bad feeling about her refusal. A premonition. Nothing melodramatic, just a feeling that if Karen wasn’t with him on this trip, their lives might skew farther apart than they already had. In his wildest flights of paranoia, he could not have imagined something like this. But he had imagined that without Karen at his side this weekend, he might find himself in one of those situations he’d experienced many times before. Situations in which he had always chosen to spend the night alone rather than accept an offer of female company. But during the ride to the airport, something had been whispering below the level of consciousness, a voice born during long months of miscommunication and silent rejections, whispering that a channel for release was presenting itself. And a part of him had heeded that voice. That knowledge now ate like acid at his heart.

  It was a cliché of a cliché. You never knew what you had until it was gone. The idea that Abby could be murdered was so paralyzing that Will did not allow himself to consider it a real possibility. He would get her back, no matter what it cost him. Money. Blood. His life. But even with the best possible outcome, something irrevocable had already occurred. He had left his wife and child alone. Exposed. It was nothing that millions of fathers didn’t do every week, but in this case, some part of him had wanted to be alone on this trip. He could have pushed Karen harder—and earlier—really convinced her that he wanted her with him on this weekend. But he hadn’t. It wasn’t solely his fault. Organizing the Junior League’s sixtieth anniversary flower show was comparable to planning double-blind trials for a new drug, and missing the event itself would be Junior League suicide for the chairperson. But deep down, Will suspected, Karen wanted to commit Junior League suicide. And he had not done enough to help her.

  “What are you thinking about over there?” asked Cheryl.

  She came out of the bathroom and climbed back into the bed, using the oversized pillows to prop herself against the headboard. The torn cocktail dress was tied around her waist. She wore the black bra as though it were a Madonna-style bustier. Will supposed that to a girl who had turned tricks in cars behind a strip club, wearing only a bra in front of a stranger was no big deal.

  “Not speaking to me?” she asked.

  Cheryl was the kind of person who couldn’t tolerate silence. Will shrugged and turned back to the lights of the freighter.

  “Look, you’re going to get your daughter back,” she said. “It’s just a waiting game. You pay some money—which you don’t give a shit about compared to your little girl—and you get her back in the morning. You ought to try to sleep. I’ve got to take the calls from Joey, so I have to stay awake. But you should crash. I’ll wake you up when it’s time.”

  “You think I can sleep with this going on?”

  “You need to. You’re going to be a basket case in the morning if you don t.

  “I can’t.”

  “Yes, you can.”

  “Leave me alone, okay?”

  “Look, you’re just standing there blaming yourself and trying to figure out a way to rescue your little girl. That’s what they all do. But you can’t. You’re not Mel Gibson, for Christ’s sake. Mel Gibson isn’t even Mel Gibson, you know? You save your little girl by paying Joey the money. It’s that simple.”

  “I should trust Joe?”

  “Joey’s got a motto on this deal, Doc. You know what it is?”

  “What?”

  “The kid always makes it.”

  Will turned from the window.

  “I’m serious,” she said. “He’s said it a hundred times. That’s how we’ve managed to keep on doing this. That’s how we made all our money.”

  “And every child you’ve done this to has lived? Been returned to its parents?”

  “Good as new. I’m telling you, you’ve got to chill.” She barked a laugh that gave the lie to the classic beauty of her face. “You gotta chill, Will!” she sang out, delighted by the rhyme. “You’re going to give yourself a stroke.”

  He turned back to the
window. Cheryl’s reassurances didn’t mesh with the voice on the other end of the phone. There was hatred in Hickey’s voice, a resentment so deep that Will could not see it stopping short of the maximum pain it could inflict. Yet in the other cases, it had. If Cheryl and Hickey could be believed.

  “You want me to help you calm down?” Cheryl asked.

  He looked at her reflection in the window. She had taken a brush from her purse and was pulling it through her blond hair. “How?” he asked. “Drugs?”

  “I told you, I’m clean now. But I can chill you out. Whatever, you know. Back rub?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Front rub?”

  He turned to her, unsure he had heard correctly. She stopped brushing her hair.

  “It’s no big deal,” she said. “You’ll sleep like a baby. All guys do.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  She smiled knowingly. “Don’t worry. Wifey won’t ever know about it.”

  “I said no, okay? Jesus.”

  “I was just trying to help you relax. I know you’re upset.”

  “What’s the deal here, Cheryl? Is sex the only way you know how to relate to men?”

  She turned to the television, her lower lip pooched out like an angry child’s. “Not quite, Oprah.”

  “A while ago you gave me your sob story about how terrible it was to be a whore. Now you’re acting like one.”

  “Hey, I was just trying to make this easier on you.”

  “Do you make the same offer to all your victims?”

  The word “victim” didn’t sit well with her. “I saw you looking at me during the speech, and I knew you were interested.”

  “Bullshit.”

  She cut her eyes at him, and they held a disturbing knowledge. “My mistake, I guess. What do I know? I’m just a dumb stripper, right?” She picked up the remote and flipped through some channels, finally settling on the Home Shopping Network.

  Will turned back to the window. As he searched for the tiny lights of the freighter, he saw movement in the reflection of the room. Focusing on it, he saw Cheryl remove her bra. He didn’t turn, but he saw her settle deeper on the pillows and begin slowly stroking her breasts. He tried to watch the freighter, but he couldn’t concentrate. It was absurd. This woman had helped kidnap his daughter; now she was coming on to him as if they’d just met in the casino downstairs. Cheryl moaned softly, drawing his eyes to her reflection again. Her movements were impossible to ignore.