24 Hours

by Greg Iles

  “You don’t know what’s going on! It’s not about money. Hickey thinks I killed his mother on the operating table. This is about revenge. He wants to kill Abby. To punish me.”

  There was a brief silence. Then Zwick said, “That’s a disturbing new perspective, Doctor.”

  “You’re goddamn right it is.”

  “Do you know this Hickey? Do you remember him?”

  Will heard another phone ringing. It was the cell phone in his pocket. Cheryl’s phone. “Hang on, I think Hickey’s calling me.” He dug the phone out of his pocket and hit SEND. “Hello?”

  “What’s up, Doc?”

  Will nodded at Chalmers. “I’m in the bank, getting your money.”

  “You’re lying. You called the FBI.”

  “Joe—”

  “Where’s Cheryl?”

  “In the parking lot. I brought the phone in with me.”

  “Why?”

  “So I could tell you what was happening if you called.”

  “Well . . . the plan has changed. Your wife and me are about to take a little airplane ride. And if I see a cop or an FBI agent within a mile of me, I’m going to put one right in her ear. You follow?”

  “Joe, I’m getting your money! Just tell me where you want it!”

  “We’ll work that out later. You just get it all ready to go. And tell your new friends to keep clear of that airport.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about! Joe, where’s my daughter?”

  “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, isn’t it?” Hickey laughed. “Hasta luego, amigo. Just remember, whatever happens, you called the play.”

  The phone went dead. Will felt as though his heart had been ripped out through his chest wall. He picked up the other phone and told Zwick what had transpired.

  The SAC said, “I’m going to pull back my men and let them get into the airport.”

  “Why? Won’t Hickey be harder to stop with lots of people around?”

  “Yes, but it’s possible that this Huey character and your daughter are already inside the airport waiting for him. If we bust Hickey outside, they might just disappear.”

  “Jesus Christ. Okay. But if they are inside, what can you do? How can you stop Hickey then? What’s to keep him from putting a gun to Abby’s head?”

  “The fact that he’s dead.”

  “You mean you’ll shoot him on sight? Can you do that?”

  “Kidnapping is an extraordinary crime, Doctor. The rules of engagement allow for a great deal of discretion. And an airport is a high-security area. I can promise you this. If your little girl is in there, and Hickey makes a move toward her with a weapon, his brain will be removed from his cranium without benefit of anesthetic.”

  “Do you have sharpshooters there?”

  “They’ll be in position before Hickey gets inside the building. Now, I have a lot to arrange, Doctor. Put Agent Chalmers back on the phone.”

  As Will handed over the phone, several thoughts came to him at once. Any logistics that Zwick had to arrange were in Jackson, not Biloxi. Right now he was almost certainly telling Chalmers to make sure Will stayed right where he was, under FBI control. But Will’s primary concern was Hickey. Even now, the man was controlling the movements of everyone involved in the situation. Five times he had pulled off these kidnappings, and the FBI had never even been told about them. At the cabin he had proved he could stay two steps ahead of the SWAT team and laugh while doing it. Opposing his proven brilliance was Frank Zwick, a man Will knew nothing about. He had to assume that Zwick knew his job, but instinct told him that the events of the next few minutes would not be as easy to control as the SAC believed. The FBI did not really know where Huey and Abby were. They might be in the Jackson airport; they might also be sixty miles away. As Chalmers listened to his boss on the phone, Will walked quietly out of the office.

  “Where are you going?” Chalmers called. “Doctor?”

  Will paused in the hall. “To get the ransom money.”

  “It’s no good to you now.”

  “You don’t know that. Hickey said to get it, so I’m getting it. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  He took the stairs two at a time going down.

  Five miles east of downtown Jackson, Hickey turned

  Karen’s Expedition onto the main airport access road.

  “Where are we going?” Karen asked. She was terrified that Hickey would board a flight to Costa Rica without telling her where Abby was being held.

  “You just watch.”

  “We’ve got to get to Abby, Joe. Her sugar’s going up.”

  “Just shut your goddamn mouth for five minutes. I got everything under control.”

  Karen leaned back and looked up through the moonroof. The helicopter was still there. It had stayed practically on top of them all the way from the interstate. Hickey was right. It had to be the police. Or the FBI. She hoped to God Will knew what he was doing.

  The SHORT TERM PARKING sign flashed past. Then ARRIVALS /DEPARTURES.

  “Are we flying somewhere?” she asked. “Do you have a plane here?”

  “Oh, yeah. I got a whole fleet of them.” Hickey glared at her. “You just can’t be quiet, can you? I bet your husband thinks you are one big pain in the ass.”

  She sat back and tried to stay calm. Despite the helicopter overhead, Hickey had not ordered Abby harmed. Unless the “backup plan” was to kill her. Karen gripped the handle on the windshield post as Hickey swerved into the LONG TERM PARKING lane. He stopped at the barrier, took a ticket from the machine, then accelerated into the concrete-roofed garage.

  He rounded the first turn at forty miles an hour. The brakes squealed as they neared the elevator on the terminal side of the building. Hickey seemed to be looking for signs of police. Seeing nothing, he accelerated around the next curve and almost ran over a young woman in a navy blue skirt suit, who was pulling a suitcase from the trunk of a silver Camry. He screeched to a stop, reversed a few feet, then pulled into the parking space beside the Camry.

  “What are you doing?” Karen asked.

  He jumped out and closed the distance to the woman in the time it took Karen to turn and look. As the woman gaped, Hickey smashed Will’s .38 into the side of her head. She dropped like a stone.

  “Get out!” Hickey shouted at Karen. “Help me!”

  A wave of nausea nearly overcame her, but she forced herself to get out and move to the back of the Expedition. Hickey was bent over the prostrate woman, rifling through her purse.

  “What are you doing?”

  He snatched his hand from the purse with a jangle of car keys and hit the UNLOCK button on the ring. “Get in the backseat of the Camry! Move!”

  Hickey grabbed the woman under the arms and heaved her upper body into the Camry’s trunk. There was blood in her hair. The blow from the pistol had torn part of her ear away from her skull. She moaned in pain and confusion, but Hickey took no notice. He stuffed her legs into the trunk, then slammed it shut. When he turned to Karen, his eyes were as cold as any she had ever seen.

  “Get your ass in that car, or you’ll never see Abby alive again.”

  He didn’t wait for her to obey. He jumped into the driver’s seat, cranked the Camry, and backed out of the parking space.

  Snapped from her trance by the realization that he might actually leave without her, Karen leaped forward and began hammering on the back door, which had automatically locked when he cranked the engine. Hickey looked back at her but did not open the door.

  “Please!” she screamed, her heart in her throat. “Open the door! Open it!”

  He waited a few seconds, then unlocked the door. Karen jumped inside and pulled the door shut after her.

  “Get on the floor,” Hickey ordered.

  She lay stomach-down across the carpeted hump behind the front seat. Hickey drove at normal speed through the lines of parked cars.

  “Are we leaving the airport?” she asked.

  “Yes, we are!”
he cried in his Wink Martindale voice. “That nice lady left her parking receipt right here on the drink caddy!”

  Karen couldn’t believe it. Hickey was going to drive right out from under the nose of the helicopter hovering overhead. The strange thing was that she wanted him to succeed. She had seen enough of his personality to know that if he were arrested, he would clam up and smile at the police while Abby died in a diabetic coma somewhere.

  Hickey stopped at the exit booth.

  “How would you like to pay for that, sir?” asked a woman with a Hispanic accent.

  “Cash, chiquita.”

  “One dollar, please.”

  Hickey had the money ready.

  “Sir, the short-term parking lot is much more convenient for brief—”

  “I’d love to chat,” Hickey said, “but you’ve got cars waiting. Hasta la vista.”

  He drove away from the booth and joined the flow of traffic leaving the airport. He drove confidently, neither too fast nor too slow. Karen raised up enough to watch him between the seats.

  A sound like a muffled drum suddenly echoed through the car. She thought Hickey had switched on the radio, but he hadn’t. The woman in the trunk was beating on the backseat.

  “I’m glad she didn’t start that shit while we were at the booth,” Hickey said.

  “Help!” screamed the muted voice. “I can’t breathe! Please let me out!”

  Karen shut her eyes and prayed for the woman to be quiet. If she kept screaming, Hickey was liable to pull over and shoot her. The speed and intensity of his acts in her driveway and in the garage had sickened Karen. As a nurse, she had seen the effects of violence, but never the acts that produced the damage. Real violence was so unlike what she’d seen in movies that it was hard to grasp. Slashing Hickey’s thigh had been a reflex, an act of self-preservation. But he acted with a merciless dispatch that made her feel worse about the whole human race. The realization of what she had avoided by stabbing Hickey suddenly came home to her with searing clarity. Those other mothers had actually been raped by the man, had suffered the horror of becoming sexual whipping posts for all his repressed anger and resentment. And they had endured that horror for twenty-four hours. It was unimaginable.

  The knocking behind Karen went on, but the cries decreased in intensity until they became a keening wail, like that of a small child.

  “Traffic update!” Hickey cried.

  “What?”

  “I thought you might like to know, that helicopter ’s still hovering over the airport, three miles back. Amateurs, baby. Amateurs.”

  “Are we going to get Abby now?”

  He laughed. “We’re going somewhere, June Cleaver. That’s one thing you can count on. We got an appointment with destiny!”

  EIGHTEEN

  Despite his belief that Agent Chalmers might try to keep him a virtual prisoner in the bank, Will had returned to the vice president’s office on the second floor. He had the ransom (Moore had personally packed it into the briefcase at his feet), but he could not make a decision about what to do next until he knew the outcome of the FBI’s attempt to arrest Hickey at the airport. If Hickey somehow managed to escape, Will couldn’t trust him to tell the truth about Abby or anything else over a cell phone.

  When the call from SAC Zwick finally came, Agent Chalmers lifted the phone, listened for a few moments, then turned paler than he had when the SWAT team had found nothing at the cabin. In his mind’s eye, Will saw a nightmare scenario: FBI agents drawing down on Hickey on an airport concourse, Hickey putting a pistol to Abby’s head, an FBI sharpshooter shooting wide, Hickey pulling the trigger. Chalmers went on listening to Zwick, but Will couldn’t wait.

  “Tell me!” he demanded.

  Chalmers held up his hand.

  “What happened?”

  “I’m putting you on the speaker, Frank.” Chalmers hit a button on the phone. “Go ahead.”

  “What happened?” Will asked. “Is my wife all right? Was my daughter there?”

  Zwick’s voice came from the bottom of an electronic well. “We think your wife is fine, Doctor.”

  “You think? What about my daughter?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “What do you mean? What happened?”

  “Hickey and your wife pulled into the long-term parking garage, but they never came out. We found your Expedition with one door open. Right now, we don’t know where they are. We’re searching the airport, but it’s just possible they got out of that garage in another car. We have a photo of Hickey from Parchman Prison, and we’re faxing it down for the garage attendants to look at. We got a photo of your wife from the Clarion Ledger, and that’s on its way down, too. We’re also getting the parking lot security camera tapes.”

  “What about your helicopter?”

  “Nothing useful. A lot of cars left that garage during that window of time.”

  “Jesus, you don’t know anything!”

  “Doctor, there’s no way Hickey can—”

  “Can what? It looks like he can do any damn thing he pleases!” Will stood and lifted the briefcase that held the ransom.

  “What are you doing?” asked Chalmers.

  “Going back to the car and waiting for Hickey’s next call. And I want you to stay right here.”

  “That’s not an option, Doctor,” Zwick said from the speakerphone.

  “You want to bet?”

  “The only way you can participate in the resolution of this situation is our way. Otherwise, we’ll have to arrest you.”

  “For what? I haven’t done anything.”

  “I’ll have the Gulfport police arrest you for reckless driving. You’ve got a hooker in your car. How about prostitution?”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “By now Agent Chalmers has some special equipment at his disposal downstairs. A tracking device, which you can carry in your pocket, and which will allow us to follow you from a very discreet distance. We can wait for Hickey to arrange an exchange, then be ready to take him down at the safest possible moment. We also have an undetectable wire. With the wire, we’ll know just when that moment is, and we’ll also have everything Hickey says on tape.”

  “Undetectable, my ass. A wire helps you guys at trial, but it doesn’t do squat for my wife and daughter. And they’re my only priority.”

  “This is nonnegotiable, Doctor.”

  “You think so?” Will reached into his pocket and brought out Cheryl’s pistol. “Ask Agent Chalmers if it’s negotiable.”

  “Bill?” said Zwick.

  “He’s holding a gun on me, Frank. Looks like a Walther automatic.”

  “You just committed a felony, Doctor,” Zwick informed him. “Don’t make this worse for yourself.”

  Will laughed outright. “Worse? Are you out of your mind?” He backed toward the door. “You guys had your chance. Two chances. And you blew it both times. It’s my turn now.”

  Agent Chalmers held up both hands to show that he had no intention of going for Will’s gun or his own. “At least take the tracking device. Forget the wire. I wouldn’t wear it either.”

  “Shut up,” Zwick snapped.

  “Where is it?” Will asked.

  “I’ll call downstairs and have it waiting for you.”

  Zwick said, “Agent Chalmers, as soon as he leaves that room, you will call downstairs and order the agents down there to arrest him.”

  Chalmers looked into Will’s eyes. “They’ll have to shoot him to stop him, Frank. I say we let him go.”

  “Goddamn it.” The speakerphone crackled for a moment. “All right, just give him the tracker. Jennings, you’re making the biggest mistake of your life. But if you’re dead set—”

  “I’m out of here,” Will said. “Please don’t try any cowboy stuff. I’ll call you if you can help.”

  He aimed the gun at Chalmers all the way to the stairs. Then he gave the FBI agent a salute, turned, and bounded down the steps.

  In the lobby, he made a beeli
ne for the door. The secretary who’d led him up to Moore’s office saw the gun and screamed, but a business-suited man by the front doors held up his wallet and yelled: “FBI! Everyone stay calm! It’s all right!”

  As Will neared the door, the FBI agent held out a small black box with a blinking red LED on it. “GPS,” he said. “Military grade. We can track you down to the square foot you’re standing on. Don’t lose it.”

  Will stuck the unit in his pocket, went through the automatic doors, and raced for the Tempo. When he hit the driver’s seat, Cheryl said, “Where the hell have you been? I’m peeing prune pits out here.”

  “You’ve got a real way with words, you know?” He cranked the Ford, backed up, then pulled out of the lot and onto Highway 90. Traffic was heavy, but he didn’t see any obvious pursuit vehicles.

  “Where are we going?” Cheryl asked, her voice jittery from the speed she’d taken earlier.

  “That’s up to Joe. Right now, we’re headed up to I-10. Wherever the meet is, it’s going to be north.”

  Will swung into the right lane and started around a dawdling pickup truck. As he came alongside it, he rolled down his window, tossed the GPS device into the bed of the truck, and sped past.

  “What was that?” Cheryl asked.

  “A pig trail for the FBI to follow.”

  “The FBI? Was the FBI in the bank?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh shit. Oh God . . .”

  “The FBI raided the cabin, but Huey and Abby weren’t there. All they found was the green truck and Huey’s cell phone.”

  “Shit. I was right about the truck, though. I told you.”

  He turned and gave her a hard look. “They also found a regular phone. A landline. You told me there was no regular phone service at the cabin.”

  “I didn’t know there was! I told you I never went there.”

  He lifted the briefcase from the floor and set it in her lap. “Open it.”

  “Is the money in here?”

  “Yes.”

  She hefted the case. “It doesn’t feel right. It’s too heavy. Is there a dye pack in here or something?”

  “No dye pack. Open it.”