24 Hours

by Greg Iles

  “What about the house Joe took you to that night?” he asked. “By McComb. Anything else come to you?”

  “No.”

  “When the FBI raided the cabin, they found Huey’s truck. That means Huey and Abby probably left in another vehicle. Were there any other cars at the cabin?”

  “I told you, I never went there.”

  “But you must have heard them talking.”

  “There’s a tractor there. I know that. Huey bush-hogs fields for part-time work.”

  Will tried to picture Huey and Abby escaping from a SWAT team on a rusty John Deere. It didn’t seem likely.

  “What else?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Think about Joe’s family. Cars they’ve had. Come on. . . .”

  Cheryl shook her head in exasperation.

  In the switchboard center at the Beau Rivage, a young operator sat reading the unabridged version of The Stand. When the hotel’s main line rang, he answered the way he always did: “Beau Rivage Casino Resort.” But when the caller asked for Suite 28021, he punched Alt-Z on his computer, executing a macro set up at the request of Remy Geautreau, the front desk manager. A digital connection was made and a forwarding number dialed. The operator verified that the macro had executed, then went back to his Stephen King novel.

  Will jumped when the cell phone rang, but he dug it quickly from his pocket and checked his watch.

  “I’m going to answer,” he said. “If it’s Joe, I’ll feel out what he expects and play it by ear. Hold the phone up to my ear, and hit SEND when I tell you.”

  Cheryl held up the phone, but Will said nothing. He had just realized something. At maximum cruise, the Baron’s engines sounded like twin tornadoes, even with the soundproofing. Telling Hickey they were stuck in traffic near the Beau Rivage wouldn’t explain the roar. Hickey might even recognize the distinctive sound of airplane engines.

  The cell phone kept ringing.

  Will had two choices. Throttle the engines back to idle and hope they were quiet enough to be undetectable over the cell phone, or cut them altogether. Cutting the engines was far more dangerous, but only that would guarantee that Hickey wouldn’t hear them.

  “Are you going to answer?” Cheryl asked.

  Thankful that he had not yet dived for the ground clutter, Will pulled back to idle, feathered his props, and killed both engines. In the eerie silence, the plane began to fall.

  “Shit!” Cheryl screamed. “What happened?”

  “Hit SEND.”

  Her face was bone-white. “Are we going to crash?”

  “We’re fine! Hit SEND!”

  He heard a beep, then the hiss of the open connection. “Joe?”

  “How’s it hanging, Doc? You taking a nap up there?”

  Up there? Will’s heart thudded. Then he realized that Hickey meant the hotel suite. He’d assumed Hickey would call Cheryl before he called the Beau Rivage, to verify that she’d gotten the money. But Hickey had clearly expected Will to answer this call. That meant Geautreau had successfully patched the call. It also meant that the “stuck in traffic” excuse was useless.

  “Where’s Abby?” Will asked, trying to picture himself in the suite at the Beau Rivage rather than dropping toward the earth at a thousand feet per minute. “I want to talk to her.”

  “Everything in its season, Doc. I’ll be talking to you soon.”

  The phone went dead. Will dropped it in Cheryl’s lap and began his midair engine-start sequence.

  “Start the engines!” she screamed. “We’re crashing!”

  He felt a rush of exhilaration as the Continentals kicked off. He adjusted the pitch of his props and felt the plane leap forward as the blades bit into the air.

  “Jesus God,” Cheryl whispered, when the nose of the Baron finally came level. “I almost puked.”

  Will began climbing to regain the lost altitude. “Cheryl, I’ve got to know what kind of car Huey’s driving.”

  “If you’d keep the damn engines running, maybe I could think.”

  “You think like you’ve never thought in your life, goddamn it! We’re at seven thousand feet. We can glide for seven minutes without engines before we crash. Unless Joe gets talkative, we’re fine.”

  “Why are you so mean?” she whined, her voice like a child’s. “I’m trying to help you!”

  “Try harder.”

  The cell phone rang in her lap.

  “Who answers this time?” she asked.

  “You. He just called me. He’s calling you to make sure I gave you the money.”

  “What if you’re wrong?”

  “If he sounds surprised, tell him you came back to the hotel.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “I shorted you on the money.”

  She nodded.

  “And try like hell to find out what Huey’s driving.”

  “Okay.”

  “Wait till I cut the engines.”

  “Sweet Mary . . .”

  Once again, Will pulled the engines back to idle, feathered his props, and starved the engines into silence.

  Cheryl hit SEND as the plane began to glide earth-ward. “Joey? . . . Yeah, I’ve got it.” She gave Will a thumbs-up. “Three hundred and fifty thousand,” she said. “He tried to bribe me with it...Yeah. No problem. I think he’s about wasted by the whole thing... I’m on 110 now, headed up toward the interstate. Am I still going to the motel?”

  Will heard a squawk from the phone, but he couldn’t distinguish words.

  “Yeah, I remember...Uh-huh...What about Huey and the little girl? . . . Joey, you’re not going to hurt that kid, are you?” She jerked the phone away from her ear. “I’m sorry...I know. I will. I’m on my way.”

  She clicked off.

  Will restarted the engines, and once again the Baron began to climb.

  “What did he say about Abby?”

  “He told me not to talk about it on the phone.”

  “What else did he say?”

  “Go to Paco’s place.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A club. It’s on the county line near Hattiesburg. I danced there for a while. They’ve got rooms out back for the girls.”

  “He said the name of the club on the phone?”

  “No. The name of the club is Paradise Alley. Paco just works there. He’s tight with Joey.”

  Will pulled out a map. He knew Mississippi like the back of his hand, but he wanted to visualize vectors as accurately as he could. I-55 was the main north/ south artery, and it bisected the state. Jackson sat in the middle, with Hazlehurst, Brookhaven, and McComb straight south of it. Hattiesburg was on a diagonal, southeast of Jackson, down Highway 49. It was much closer to their present position, but there was no way he could cover both I-55 and Highway 49. And the fact that Cheryl had been told to go to Paco’s place didn’t mean Hickey was going straight there, or that Huey had been given the same instructions.

  “Son of a bitch,” Cheryl said.

  “What?”

  “The Rambler!”

  “What?”

  She was smiling at something. “Joey’s mom had an AMC Rambler. An old white thing with push-button gears. It was the club that made me think of it. Paradise Alley. Joey’s mom got to where she couldn’t drive, and one night Joey showed up at Paradise Alley in her car. When we tried to leave, it broke down. We had to hitch. It supposedly sat up on blocks for a couple of years, but I never saw it. I was with Huey once when he went to Auto Shack to buy parts for it. Maybe the Rambler was at the cabin.” She shook her head. “I haven’t thought about that car in three years!”

  Will couldn’t suppress his excitement anymore. At last, he had something. A white Rambler. And Abby might be in it. But where was it? “The FBI found a cell phone and a landline at the cabin,” he reasoned aloud. “The landline was Joe’s backup for Huey. So, unless Huey had two cell phones, Joe can’t contact him while he’s on the road.”

  “I’m pretty sure Huey only had one,” Che
ryl said. “But the Rambler could have a phone, couldn’t it?”

  “It could. Does Huey know about Paradise Alley? Has he ever been there?”

  She laughed. “Are you kidding? You can’t take Huey to a titty bar. One glimpse of a naked woman, he blows a gasket. Joey brought him to see me dance once, and he jumped up on stage trying to throw his coat over me. It took four bouncers to get him down.”

  “But that wasn’t Paradise Alley.”

  “No.”

  “Has Huey ever met this Paco guy?”

  “No way. Joey keeps him away from all that stuff.”

  “Has he spent any time in or around Hattiesburg?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Then Huey isn’t headed for Paco’s place. He’s probably going wherever he was supposed to go according to the original backup plan. Joe changed your instructions on the fly, but I don’t think he’d do that to Huey. So, what was Huey’s original backup destination? Where would Joe have told him to go if there was a problem?”

  Cheryl chewed her bottom lip as she considered the question. “Joey wouldn’t want him driving too far. Not with your little girl along. Too much chance of the highway patrol stopping him.”

  “Did Joe say anything about Huey during that last call?”

  “Just that he would be fine.”

  “I think Huey’s going to the motel in Brookhaven. It’s only twenty minutes from Hazlehurst, which makes it less than an hour from the cabin. Joe could get there from Jackson in fifty minutes, pick up Huey and Abby, then head east to Hattiesburg to meet you.”

  “Makes sense to me.”

  “If I’m right, Joe is driving south on I-55 right now. Huey is, too. They’re probably twenty minutes apart in the southbound lanes. To hell with Highway 49.”

  Will gripped the yoke with both hands and put the Baron into a steep dive. He would turn west after he dropped below radar level. He wanted to be over I-55 as soon as possible, but he didn’t want any curious air-traffic controllers to see him getting there.

  Karen looked into the trunk of the Camry and put her hand to her mouth. The woman Hickey had carjacked had beaten her hands bloody in her attempts to get out of the trunk. Several fingers were broken. The left side of her head was swollen from the pistol blow, and her eyes had the dull sheen of shock. She looked up at Karen like she expected to be raped and left for dead.

  “Get out,” Karen said. “Hurry! Before he changes his mind.”

  Hickey was sitting in the Camry, talking on the cell phone, checking on Will. At Karen’s urging, he had pulled off the interstate at a deserted exit to let the woman out of the trunk. But the owner of the Camry clearly didn’t understand the chance she was being given, because she wasn’t moving.

  “Come on!” Karen hissed. She reached in and pulled the woman up by the arms. Slowly, like a sleepwalker waking, the woman began to jerk her arms, but whether to assist Karen or fight her, Karen couldn’t tell. Somehow she got the woman clear of the trunk and on her feet.

  She was a pretty brunette, with a hint of Asian ancestry around her eyes, and she wore a blue skirt suit much like Karen’s. But her eyes were blank.

  Karen pushed her toward the trees on the side of the road. “Run! Go on! Run!”

  The woman looked around. The only sign of civilization was a boarded-up gas station. “Are you going to leave me here?” she asked.

  “You’re safer here than you are with us. Go!”

  Like a zoo-bred animal that finds its cage left open, the woman seemed reluctant to leave the familiarity of her car.

  “If you don’t run,” Karen told her, “you’re going to die.”

  The woman began to cry.

  In the switchboard center at the Beau Rivage, the operator was heavy into The Stand. Trashcan Man was hauling his nuclear weapon toward the Dark Man’s stronghold, and trivialities like gainful employment simply could not compete. The young man answered the primary line on autopilot, and when the caller asked for suite 28021, he said, “Just one moment” as he usually did, and made the connection.

  Twenty-eight floors above him, the phones in Will’s suite rang, faded, and rang again. The operator read another paragraph of Trashcan Man’s journey, then blinked and raised his head from the page. He was certain that something was wrong, he just couldn’t place what it was. It took a few seconds to realize his mistake, but he thought he still had time to correct it. He was reaching for the keyboard to execute the call-forwarding macro when the phones in 28021 stopped ringing.

  “Shit,” he whispered. “Shit.”

  Remy Geautreau had promised him a hundred bucks if he’d forward the suite’s calls for the next three hours. He punched a code that connected him to the desk manager’s office.

  Remy Geautreau was not in his office. He was standing at the front desk, listening to an irate guest who had left a camcorder battery in his room after checkout. Housekeeping had already checked twice for it, but the guest refused to believe they hadn’t found it. At the first brief pause, a clerk stepped up and said, “Mr. Geautreau? You have a phone call.”

  “I want to talk to the maid myself!” bellowed the guest.

  Geautreau gave him a syrupy smile. “But of course, Mr. Collins. Do you speak Spanish?”

  The man went purple. “Goddamn it!” He took his wife by the arm and stomped toward the grand entrance to make his exit.

  “He lost eight thousand last night,” Geautreau said with a bemused smile. “You can always tell the losers.”

  He went into his office and picked up the phone. “Hello?”

  “I screwed up,” said the operator. “With the call forwarding thing.”

  Geautreau’s face darkened.

  “A call came in for the suite, and before I could think, I put it through. I tried to catch it, but I was too late. They hung up.”

  The manager closed his eyes and hung up. “You just cost me fifteen thousand dollars, you incompetent ass.”

  As he closed the door of his office, he wondered whether the doctor would let him keep the thousand dollars of earnest money. Of course he wouldn’t.

  The Baron roared northward above Interstate 55 at two hundred knots. Will didn’t think they had covered enough distance to sight Huey’s Rambler yet—if in fact he was driving the Rambler—but he was flying parallel to the southbound lanes just in case. Cheryl was glued to the passenger window. The traffic below was moderate but steady, the cars and trucks humming along at seventy-five miles per hour while Will shot past them at three times that.

  He was about to cut his airspeed when the cell phone began ringing again. From habit he reached for the throttles; then he stopped himself. If he cut the engines at three hundred feet, the state police would soon be hosing them off the interstate.

  “Who answers it?” Cheryl asked.

  “You.”

  “Joey already told me where to go. He wouldn’t call again.”

  Will considered not answering at all, but he couldn’t risk it. He pulled the throttles back as far as he dared, then picked up the Nokia and hit SEND.

  “Hello?”

  He heard only the open connection. Then someone said, “Jennings?”

  “Joe?”

  More silence.

  “Joe? Are you there?”

  “You wanna tell me how I dialed Cheryl and got you, you clever son of a bitch?”

  Will gripped the phone tighter but kept his voice calm. “You must have dialed the wrong number. You thought you were dialing her, but you dialed the hotel instead.”

  Hickey didn’t reply.

  “Joe?”

  “Put Cheryl on the phone.”

  Will’s breath caught in his throat. “How do I do that?”

  “You hand her the fucking phone, that’s how.”

  The coldness of Hickey’s voice was worse than any blast of temper. “Joe, I’m telling you—”

  “No, I’m telling you, Doc. I’m gonna let you in on a little secret. You’re never going to talk to your kid again.”


  Will’s face went numb.

  “It was always going to be that way,” Hickey said. “It had to be. It’s predestination. From the day you murdered my mother. You took what was precious to me, so I gotta take what’s precious to you. You see that, right?”

  “Where is she, Joe? Where’s Abby?”

  “You don’t need to worry about that. In fact, if I was you, I’d go ahead and slit my wrists, to save myself the hell that’s coming. Going down to a funeral home to pick out that tiny little casket? Facing your wife after going off and leaving her like that? What kind of father does that, huh?”

  Hickey’s words cut to the bone, but something more terrible struck Will like a hammer. There was no way Hickey could speak that way if Karen were in the car with him. She would be screaming at the least, possibly even trying to kill him.

  “Where’s Karen, Joe? I know she’s not with you. What have you done to her?”

  “You don’t need to worry about that either. No point at all.”

  The numbness began to spread along his arms. It was like being cut adrift in space, lost in a vacuum without air or sound.

  “Wherever you are,” Hickey said, “you might as well just stay there. See if Cheryl will give you a little head while you shoot yourself. She’s good at it. Oh, and tell her I’ll be seeing her soon. Real soon.”

  “Joe, you’ve got the wrong idea. I don’t know where Cheryl is. I kept the phone because—”

  The phone went dead in his hand.

  Will tasted blood. He had bitten through his bottom lip.

  “What’s the matter?” Cheryl asked in a fearful voice. “What just happened?”

  He couldn’t speak.

  “He knows, doesn’t he? He knows we’re together.”

  “I think he killed Karen. And he’s going to kill Abby.”

  “What? You’re crazy.”

  Will’s hands began to shake.

  Karen closed the Camry’s trunk and looked back over her shoulder. The woman was moving now, making for the abandoned gas station at an ungainly trot. Karen wished she would turn toward the trees, because Hickey could easily drive over and shoot her if he changed his mind about letting her go. Hopefully he had too much on his mind to worry about that.