by Greg Iles
His dark eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about?”
“Abby’s a diabetic. A juvenile diabetic. She’ll die without her insulin.”
“Bullshit.”
“My God . . . didn’t you know that?”
“Talk’s cheap. Let’s see some proof.”
Karen went to a kitchen drawer and pulled out a plastic bag full of orange-capped syringes with 25-gauge needles. She threw the bag onto the table, then opened the refrigerator, where a dozen glass vials waited in compulsively organized rows. She took out a vial of long-acting insulin and tossed it at Hickey.
He caught it and stared at the label. It read: Humulin N. PATIENT: Abigail Jennings. PRESCRIBING PHYSICIAN: Will Jennings, M.D.
“Damn,” Hickey said under his breath. “I don’t believe this.”
“Please,” Karen said in the most submissive voice she could muster. “We must get this medicine to my daughter. She—My God, I didn’t check her sugar when we got home.” Karen felt herself falling again, as though the floor beneath her feet had vanished. “Abby’s due for her shot in an hour. We’ve got to get this to her. How far away is she?”
“We can’t go,” Hickey said in a flat voice.
Karen grabbed the .38 off the table and pointed it at his chest. “Oh, yes, we can. We’re going right now.”
“I told you about that gun.”
She cocked the revolver. “If Abby doesn’t get her insulin, she’s going to die. Now you do what I say!”
Something flickered in Hickey’s eyes. Amusement. Perhaps surprise. He held up his hands, palms toward Karen. “Take it easy, June. I meant we can’t go yet. Abby’s being transported to a safe place. Maybe we can go later. Tell me about her condition. How critical is it?”
“How critical? She could die.”
“How long before she’s in trouble?”
Karen did the math in her head. If Abby ate only normal food before falling asleep—if she could sleep at all—she could make it through the night. But Karen had no intention of taking that risk. What if Hickey’s cousin fed her candy bars?
“Juvenile diabetics are very unstable,” she said. “If Abby eats too much sugar, she could get in trouble very quickly. She’ll get dehydrated. Then comes abdominal pain and vomiting. Then she’ll go into a coma and die. It can happen very fast.”
Hickey pursed his lips, obviously doing some mental math of his own. Then he reached over the little built-in desk where Karen paid the household bills, hung up the cordless phone, and punched in a new number.
Karen stepped up to the desk and hit the SPEAKER button on the phone. Hickey looked down, trying to figure out how to switch it off, but before he could, a deep male voice said: “Joey? Has it been thirty minutes?”
“No. What happened to ‘hello’?”
“Oh, yeah. I’m sorry.” The man’s voice had an incongruous sound, like the voice of a fifty-year-old child. He’s practically a kid himself, Hickey had said.
“How does the kid look?”
“Okay. She’s still sleeping.”
Karen’s heart thudded. She jerked the gun. “Let me talk to her.”
Hickey warned her back with a flip of his hand.
“Who was that, Joey?”
“Betty Crocker.”
“Give me the phone!” Karen demanded.
“Abby can’t talk right now. She’s sedated.”
Sedated? “You son of a bitch! You—”
Hickey half rose and slugged Karen in the stomach. The breath left her in an explosive rush, and she dropped to the kitchen floor, the gun clattering uselessly in front of her.
“Touch the kid’s chest, Huey. She breathing okay?”
“Kinda shallow. Like a puppy.”
“Okay, that’s fine. Look, don’t give her any candy bars or anything like that. Okay? Maybe some saltines or something.”
“She needs fluids,” Karen gasped from the floor. “Plenty of water!”
“Give her some water. Plenty of water.”
“Saltines and water,” Huey echoed.
“I may be coming out to see you tonight.”
Karen felt a surge of hope.
“That’d be good,” Huey said. “I wouldn’t be so nervous.”
“Yeah. Drive slow, okay?”
“Fifty-five,” Huey said dutifully.
“Good boy.”
Hickey hung up and squatted before Karen. “Here’s the deal. Before we do anything, we have to let my partner make contact with your husband. We’ve got to make sure old Will’s on the same page with us before we move. Because those first few minutes are the shocker. Nobody knows that better than you, right? And with this diabetic thing, he might just flip out. I hope not, because if he does, all the insulin in the world won’t save Abby.” Hickey stood. “We’ll take care of your little girl. It’s just going to take a couple of hours. Now, get up off that floor.”
He offered his hand, but Karen ignored it. She got her knees beneath her and used the edge of the table to pull herself to her feet. The gun remained on the floor.
He walked past her to the opposite wall of the kitchen, where a four-foot-wide framed silk screen hung. It was a semi-abstract rendering of an alligator, brightly colored like a child’s painting, but with the unmistakable strength of genius in it.
“You’ve got paintings by this guy all over your house,” he said. “Right?”
“Yes,” Karen replied, her thoughts on Abby. “Walter Anderson. He’s dead.”
“Worth a lot of money?”
“That silk screen isn’t. I colored it myself. But the watercolors are valuable. Do you want them?”
Hickey laughed. “Want them? I don’t give a shit about ’em. And by morning, you’re going to hate every one. You’re never going to want see another one again.”
He turned from the painting and smiled.
Forty miles south of Jackson, a small, tin-roofed cabin stood in a thick forest of second-growth pine and hardwoods. An old white AMC Rambler rested on cinder blocks in the small clearing, blotched with primer and overgrown by weeds. A few feet away from the Rambler stood a rusting propane tank with a black hose curled over the valve mechanism. Birdcalls echoed through the small clearing, punctuated by the rapid-fire pock-pock-pock of a woodpecker, and gray squirrels chased each other through the upper branches of the oaks.
The animals fell silent. A new sound had entered the woods. A motor. An old one, its valves tapping from unleaded gasoline. The noise grew steadily until the green hood of a pickup truck broke from beneath the trees into dappled sunlight. The truck trundled down the rutted lane and stopped before the cabin porch.
Huey Cotton got out and walked quickly around the hood, the Barbie still sticking out of his pocket. He opened the passenger door and lifted Abby’s limp body off the seat. Cradling her like an infant in his massive arms, he closed the truck’s door with his hip and walked carefully up the porch steps.
The old planks groaned beneath his weight. He paused before the screen door, then bent at the waist, hooked his sausagelike pinkie in the door handle, and shuffled backward until the screen opened enough for him to thrust his bulk between it and the main door. The main door yielded to one shove of his size-16 Redwing boot. He carried Abby through it, and the screen door slapped shut behind him with a bang.
Will landed the Baron behind a vintage DC-3 he would have loved to get a look at, but today he didn’t have the time. He taxied to the general aviation area and pulled into the empty spot indicated to him by a ground crewman. The Gulfport-Biloxi airport housed units of the Army and Air National Guard. There were fighter jets and helicopters stationed around the field, and the resulting high security always gave Will a little shock.
He had radioed ahead and arranged to have his rental car waiting at U.S. Aviation Corp., which handled the needs of private pilots. As soon as the props stopped turning, he climbed out and unloaded his luggage from the cabin. Hanging bag, suitcase, sample case, notebook computer case, golf clubs. Schleppi
ng it all to the blue Ford Tempo made his inflamed sacroiliac joints scream, even through the deadening layer of ibuprofen.
A security guard told him that Interstate 10 East had been closed due to a jackknifed semi-truck, so he would have to take the beachfront highway to Biloxi. Will hoped the traffic was not too bad between the airport and the casino. He had less than an hour to reach the meeting room, and he needed to shower and shave before he took the podium before five hundred physicians and their wives.
It took him five minutes to reach U.S. 90, the highway that ran along the Gulf of Mexico from Bay Saint Louis to the Alabama border and Mobile Bay. The sun was just starting to fall toward New Orleans, sixty miles to the west. It would still be light when he began his lecture. Bathing-suited families walked and flew kites along the beach, but Will saw no one in the water. There were no waves to speak of, and the “surf” here had always been brown and tepid. The gulf didn’t turn its trademark emerald green until you hit Destin, Florida, two hours to the east.
Will didn’t particularly like the Mississippi Gulf Coast. He never had. The place had a seedy, transient air. A peeling, tired-out atmosphere that drifted over the trucked-in sand and brown water like a haze of corruption. In 1969, Hurricane Camille had torn through the beachfront communities at two hundred miles per hour, and after that things were the same, only worse. There was a pervasive sense that the best times had come and gone, never to return.
But two decades after Camille’s fearsome passage, casino gambling changed everything. Glittering palaces rose off the beach like surrealistic sand castles, employing thousands of people and pollinating all sorts of service industries, particularly pawn shops and “Cash Quick” establishments where you could cash your social security check or hock your car title for money to blow at the craps table. But at night you didn’t see all that. You only saw the line of sparkling towers, their Vegas-style signs blazing over the night waters of the gulf as thousands of cars crawled up the coast highway, filled with the desperate and the gullible.
Will felt strange being by himself, away from home. Having the simple freedom to stop anywhere he chose, to take an unplanned turn without having to explain or to answer to anyone. Of course, that freedom was illusory. There were people waiting for him, and he was late already. He pressed down the accelerator, figuring it was worth the risk of a ticket.
As he neared the casino, traffic slowed to a crawl, but he was already in sight of the words BEAU RIVAGE glittering high in the fading sunlight. He turned off the highway and pulled up into the tasteful entrance of the casino resort, thankful for the bellboys who stood waiting to take his bags. Keeping the computer and sample cases for himself, he gave his keys to a valet and walked through the massive doors.
The interior of the Beau Rivage was built on the colossal scale of post-mafia Las Vegas casinos. A fantasy re-creation of the antebellum South, with full-size magnolia trees growing throughout its lobby, the casino hotel struck Will as a cross between Trump Tower and Walt Disney World. He picked his way through the gamblers in the lobby and walked over to the long check-in desk. When he gave his name, the hotel manager came out of an office to the left and shook his hand. He was tall and too thin, and his name tag read GEAUTREAU.
“Your colleagues have been getting a little nervous, Dr. Jennings,” he said with a cool smile.
“I had a long surgery this afternoon.” Will tapped his computer case. “But I’ve got my program ready to go. Just get me to a shower.”
Geautreau handed over an envelope containing a credit card key. “You’ve got a suite on twenty-eight, Doctor. A Cypress suite. A thousand square feet. Dr. Stein instructed me to give you the red carpet treatment.” Saul Stein was the outgoing president of the Mississippi Medical Association. “Are you sure I can’t have a bellman take those cases up for you?”
Will strained to maintain his smile as he realized that his privacy had been violated. He could hear Dr. Stein telling the hotel manager about his arthritis, warning Geautreau not to let Will carry a single bag upstairs. All with the best of intentions, of course.
“No, thanks,” he said, tapping his case again. “Sensitive cargo here.”
“Our audio-video consultant is waiting for you in the Magnolia Ballroom. You’ll find the VIP elevators past the jewelry store and to the right. Don’t hesitate to call for anything, Doctor. Ask for me by name.”
“I will.”
As Will crossed the lobby, making for the elevators, a heavyset man in his forties shouted from an open-air bar to his left. It was Jackson Everett, an old medical school buddy. Everett was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and held an umbrella drink in his hand.
“Will Jennings!” he boomed. “It’s about damned time!” Everett shouldered his way across the lobby and slapped Will on the back, sending a sword of pain down his spine. “I haven’t seen you since the scramble at Annandale, boy. How’s it hanging? Where’s Karen?”
“She didn’t make it this trip, Jack. Some Junior League thing. You just get here?”
Everett laughed. “Are you kidding? I flew in two days ago for some early golf. You’re giving the speech tonight, I hear.”
Will nodded.
“Hey, without Karen, you’ll have to hit the casino with me. High rollers, stud!”
“I’d better pass. I had a long surgery, and then the flight. I’m whipped.”
“Pussy-whipped, more like,” Everett complained. “You gotta live a little, son.”
Will gave an obliging laugh. “Let’s get a beer tomorrow and catch up.”
“How are your hands? Are you up for eighteen holes?”
“I brought my clubs. We’ll just have to see.”
“Well, I hope you can. Hey, don’t put us to sleep tonight, okay?”
“But that’s my specialty, Jack.”
Everett groaned and walked off gulping his drink.
As Will waited for an elevator, he saw a few more faces he recognized across the lobby, but he didn’t make an effort to speak. He had twenty-five minutes to get dressed and down to the meeting room, where he would still have to set up the notebook computer for his video presentation.
On the twenty-eighth floor, he opened the door to his suite and found his bags and golf clubs waiting for him. The manager had not exaggerated. The suite was large enough for permanent residence. He set his cases on the sitting-room sofa, then walked into the marble-floored bathroom and turned on the hot water. As the bathroom filled with steam, he unzipped his suit bag, hung a blue pinstripe Land’s End suit in the closet, and unpacked a laundry-boxed shirt, which he laid out on the coffee table. Then he stripped to his shorts and lifted his sample case onto the bureau beside the television. From it he removed a bound folder and laid it on the desk. The title on the cover read: “The Safe Use of Depolarizing Paralyzing Relaxants in the Violent Patient.” The paper summarized three years of work in the laboratory and in clinical trials, as well as in the conference rooms of pharmaceutical companies. The culmination of that work—a drug that would trade under the name Restorase—represented potential profits on a vast scale, enough to make Will a truly wealthy man.
Nervous compulsion made him check the other contents of the sample case: a video-adapter unit, which would allow his computer to interface with the hotel convention room’s projection TV, several drug vials, some of which contained prototype Restorase; and some high-tech syringes. Will counted the vials, then closed the case and hurried into the steamy bathroom, pulling off his underwear as he went.
Hickey and Karen sat facing each other across the kitchen table. A few moments before, Karen had picked up the .38, and he had made no move to stop her. She pointed it at his chest as they talked.
“That gun makes you feel better?” Hickey said.
“If you tell me we’re not taking the insulin to Abby, it’s going to make me feel a lot better. And you a lot worse.”
He smiled. “The Junior League princess has guts, huh?”
“If you hurt my baby, you’ll see some guts.
Yours.”
Hickey laughed outright.
“I don’t understand why we have to wait until tomorrow,” she said. “Why don’t you just let me empty our accounts and give you the money?”
“For one thing, the banks have closed. You can’t come close to the ransom with automated withdrawals. Even if the banks were open, just pulling out the money would cause a lot of suspicion.”
“What will be different tomorrow morning? How do you plan to get the ransom money?”
“Your husband is going to call his financial advisor here—Gray Davidson—and tell him a great little story. He’s just discovered the missing centerpiece of Walter Anderson’s largest sculpture. It’s a male figure with antlers called ‘Father Mississippi.’ Only one photograph of it exists, and many people believe it was stolen from Anderson’s house. The value is—”
“Higher than any painting he ever did,” Karen finished. “Because he didn’t do much sculpture.”
Hickey grinned. “Pretty good, huh? I do my home-work. These goddamn doctors, I tell you. Every one of ’em collects something. Cars, boats, books, whatever. Look at this kitchen. Every gadget known to man. I bet you got eighty pairs of shoes upstairs, like that Filipino hog, Imelda Marcos. You can’t believe the money these guys piss away. I mean, how many freakin’ gallbladders can you take out in a month?”
“Will’s not like that.”
“Oh, no, he doesn’t spend more money on paintings every year than he pays all his employees put together. These guys . . . a slip of the knife, somebody dies, and it’s ‘Gee, sorry, couldn’t be helped. Wish I could stick around, but I’ve got a two o’clock tee time.’”
Karen started to argue, but she sensed that it wouldn’t help her situation. Hickey knew a lot about their lives, yet there were huge gaps. Abby’s diabetes. Will’s work. Will didn’t even use a scalpel. He was an anesthesiologist. He used gases and needles. She watched Hickey closely, trying to get a handle on the man beneath the bluster. One thing she knew already: he carried a chip on his shoulder the size of the Rock of Gibraltar.