24 Hours

by Greg Iles

  “Not mine. Yours! Your life.”

  “For God’s sake, Margaret. The convention started tonight on the coast. We’re not there, and for one reason. Because what happened last year is still controlling us.”

  Her mouth opened in shock. “You wish you were there now? My God!”

  “No. But we were wrong not to go to the police a year ago. And I have a very bad feeling now. That woman told me they’d done it before, and I believed her. She said they’d done it to other doctors. They took advantage of the convention . . . of our separation. Margaret, what if it’s happening again? Right now?”

  “Stop it!” she said in a strangled whisper. “Don’t you remember what they said? They’ll kill Peter! You want to go to the police now? A year after the fact? Don’t you know what would happen? You’re so naive!”

  McDill laid both hands on the dinner table. “We’ve got to face this. We simply cannot let what happened to us happen to another family.”

  “To us? What happened to you, James? You sat in a hotel room with some slut for a night. Don’t you ever think for one minute of anyone but yourself? Peter was traumatized!”

  “Of course I think about Peter! But I refuse to let another child go through what he did because of our cowardice.”

  Margaret wrapped her arms tight around herself and began rocking back and forth in the chair, like schizophrenics McDill had seen in medical school. “If only you hadn’t left us here alone,” she murmured. “All alone . . . Margaret and Peter . . . alone and unprotected.”

  McDill fought the stab of guilt this produced. “Margaret—”

  “Medical convention, my foot,” she hissed, her eyes going narrow. “It was that goddamned car show.”

  “Margaret, please—”

  He fell silent as their eleven-year-old son appeared in the dining room door. Peter was a pale, thin boy, and his eyes never settled in one place long.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked timidly. “Why are you guys yelling?”

  “Just a misunderstanding, son. I had a tough surgery today, and we were discussing some tax problems. I lost my temper. Nothing for you to worry about. What time are you going over to Jimmy’s?”

  “His dad is picking me up in a minute.”

  Margaret took a gulp of wine and said, “Are you sure you want to spend the night over there tonight, darling?”

  “Yeah. Unless . . . unless you don’t want me to.”

  “I like having my baby under this roof,” Margaret cooed.

  “Nonsense,” said McDill. “Go have some fun, son. You’ve been studying too hard this week.”

  A car horn sounded outside.

  Peter looked uncertain. “I guess that’s them.”

  “You’d better run, son. We’ll see you in the morning.”

  Peter crossed the room and kissed his mother. Over his shoulder, Margaret glared at McDill.

  “We’ll be right here if you need us for anything,” she said. “Just call. We’ll be right here. All night.”

  McDill stared dejectedly at his plate. He had lost his appetite.

  The Expedition jounced and jumped along rutted ground beneath black trees, Hickey sitting stiff behind the wheel. Karen gripped the handle on the windshield frame, the ice chest cold between her legs. She was terrified that Hickey would wreck the Expedition before they reached Abby. He had let her remove the blindfold after the last turn, but she felt like she was still wearing it. He refused to use the headlights, and with only the running lights on, she was astonished that he could pick his way through the dense trees. Wherever this place was, Hickey must have spent a lot of time here.

  “We’re going to meet Huey on this road,” he said. “You and I will walk forward with the ice chest. You will not get emotional. You will not freak out. You hear? You can hug your kid long enough to calm her down. Then you take her blood sugar and give her the shot. After that, one last hug, then we go.”

  “I understand.”

  “Be sure you do. She’s going to go crazy when you start to leave, but you’d better tough it out. Just like the first day of school. Huey’s told her he’s baby-sitting her for one night. You reinforce that. Tell her everything’s okay, we’re all friends, and you’re going to pick her up in the morning. If you flip out . . .” Hickey turned to her for an instant, his eyes hard as agates. “If you flip out, I’ll have to hurt you right in front of her. She’ll have nightmares all night. You don’t want that.”

  A pair of headlights flashed out of the dark and speared Karen’s retinas. As she threw up her hand to shield her eyes, Hickey stopped the Expedition and blinked the headlights twice. Then he left them on, creating a long tunnel of halogen light that merged with the dimmer headlights pointing at them.

  “Come on,” he said, shutting off the engine. “Bring your stuff.”

  Karen picked up the ice chest and climbed out. When she got to the front of the Expedition, Hickey grabbed her arm and said, “Start walking.”

  Night mist floated through the headlight beams as they walked along them, and the humidity was heavy on Karen’s skin. She was straining for a sight or sound of Abby when a giant form blotted out the other pair of headlights.

  The silhouette was about thirty yards away, and it looked like the outline of a grizzly bear. Karen stopped in her tracks, but Hickey pushed her on. Suddenly a squeal cut through the night.

  “Mama? Mama!”

  Karen rushed forward, stumbling in the ruts, picking herself up, going on. She fell to her knees and embraced the tiny shadow that had emerged from behind the massive one.

  “I’m here, honey!” she said, squeezing Abby as tight as she dared and choking back a wave of tears. “Mama’s here, baby!”

  Abby keened and cried and screeched all at once. She wanted to speak, but each time she tried, her little chest heaved and caught, and she kept repeating the same syllable over and over.

  “Wh—wh—wha—”

  Karen kissed her cheeks and nose and forehead and hair. Abby was almost hyperventilating, mucus and tears running down her face, sheer panic in her eyes.

  “It’s okay, baby. Take your time. Mama’s here. I can hear you, baby.”

  “Wh-why did you leave me here, Mama? Why?”

  Karen forced herself to appear calm. She couldn’t let Abby see how terrified she was. “I had to, honey. Daddy and I have an important meeting. One we forgot about. It’s only for grown-ups, but it won’t last long. It’s only for tonight.”

  “Are you leaving again?” The confusion in Abby’s eyes was the most wrenching sight Karen had ever seen. Terror of abandonment was something she had known herself, and seeing it in her daughter made her bones ache.

  “Not for a while yet,” she said. “Not for a while. We need to check your sugar, baby.”

  “Nooooo,” Abby wailed. “I want to go home!”

  “Is Mr. Huey being nice to you?” Karen looked fearfully at the huge shadow standing a few yards away.

  Abby was too upset to answer.

  Karen opened the ice chest and took out the springloaded finger-stick device, which she had already loaded with a needle. Abby halfheartedly fought her, but when Karen took firm hold of her hand, she let her middle finger be immobilized. Karen pressed the tip of the pen to the pad of the finger and popped the trigger. Abby yelped, though the pain was negligible, and Karen wiped off the first drop of blood and forced out another. She wiped that against a paper test strip, which she fed into a small machine containing a microchip. After fifteen seconds, the machine beeped.

  “Two hundred and forty. You need your shot, sweetie.”

  Karen drew three units of short-acting insulin from one vial, then, using the same syringe, added five units from the long-acting vial. This was more than usual, but she suspected that Abby would sleep little during the night, and would probably be given food of some kind.

  “Has Mr. Huey fed you anything, sweetie?”

  “Just some crackers.”

  “That’s all?”

&n
bsp; Abby looked at the ground. “And a peppermint.”

  “Abby!”

  “I was hungry.”

  Karen started to pull up Abby’s jumper to inject the insulin into her stomach, but with Huey standing so near, she decided to inject it right through the material. She pinched up a fold of fat and shot the insulin into it. Abby whimpered softly and locked her arms around Karen’s neck. Karen threw the used syringe into the woods and lifted Abby into her arms. There, on her knees in the dirt, she rocked her daughter back and forth like an infant, singing softly Abby’s favorite childhood rhyme.

  The eensy-weensy spider climbed up the water spout.

  Down came the rain and washed the spider out.

  Out came the sun and dried up all the rain,

  And the eensy-weensy spider climbed up the spout again.

  “I love you, punkin,” she murmured. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

  She felt Hickey brush past her as he walked forward to speak to Huey.

  “Keep singing, Mama,” Abby said.

  Karen started the song again, but as she sang, she tuned her ears to the male voices drifting back to her on the night air.

  “You doing okay?” Hickey asked.

  “Uh-huh,” said a much deeper voice. Deeper but more tentative. “She’s nice.”

  Hickey took out a cigarette and lit it. The match flared like a bonfire in the blackness.

  “I thought you quit, Joey.”

  “Give me a freakin’ break.”

  The orange eye of the cigarette waxed and waned like a little moon. Karen knew Hickey was watching her, transfixed in the headlight beams with her child, as vulnerable as a deer under the hunter’s gun. She put her mouth to Abby’s ear.

  “Do you remember what I taught you about calling the police? What numbers to call?”

  “Nine?” Abby thought aloud. “Nine-nine-one?”

  “Nine-one-one.”

  “Oh. I know. When I’m nervous I forget. I know our phone number.”

  “Good, honey. Don’t be nervous, now. Mr. Huey has a cell phone. If he goes to the bathroom, he might forget it. If he does, you use it to call nine-one-one. Run and hide outside with it, tell them you’re in trouble, and then hide the phone. Don’t hang it up. If you can do all that, people will come and bring you home to Mommy and Daddy early. Do you understand?”

  Abby’s eyes were wide. “Will the policeman hurt Huey?”

  “No, baby. But don’t even try it unless you can call without him knowing. Okay? It’s like a game.”

  Tears shone in Abby’s eyes. “I’m scared, Mom. I want to go home with you.”

  “Listen to me, honey. If you have to do number two, you wipe yourself. Don’t ask Mr. Huey for help. Even if he’s nice. You don’t know him well enough.”

  Hickey dropped his cigarette and stubbed it out with his foot. “Old home week’s over,” he called. “Let’s mount up.”

  Abby screamed and grabbed Karen’s neck.

  “Let’s go,” said Hickey, walking toward her. “Tell princess bye-bye.”

  “Nooo!” Abby wailed. “Noooooooo!”

  Karen looked over her shoulder at Hickey, her eyes pleading. “I’m begging you. Let me stay here with her until morning. What can it possibly matter?”

  “I told you about this crap.” He held out his arms. “Hand her over.”

  Karen backed away, clutching Abby in her arms. She knew it would do no good, but the decision was not hers to make. Two million years of evolution would not let her voluntarily give up her child. Hickey lunged forward and grabbed Abby under the arms, then yanked at her as if pulling on a sack of feed. Abby shrieked like she was being flayed alive.

  “Stop!” Karen yelled at Hickey. “Stop it! You’re hurting her!”

  “Then let go, goddamn it!”

  With a cry of desolation, Karen let go.

  A heart-wrenching scream burst from Abby’s lips.

  Karen snatched up the ice chest, then ran to Huey and hooked the handle of the Igloo around his huge fingers. There were more syringes inside, and five vials of insulin, including one of Humalog. “Please keep this! If Abby gets sick or passes out, call me and I’ll tell you what to do!”

  The giant’s face was a mask of bewildered fear. “Yes, ma’am. I—”

  “Shut up!” Hickey shouted. “Get the kid back inside, retard!”

  Karen laid both hands against Huey’s chest. “I know you’re a good Christian man. Please don’t hurt my baby!”

  Huey’s mouth fell open, exposing his yellow teeth. “Hurt your baby?”

  Hickey thrust Abby into Huey’s arms, then grabbed Karen by the elbow and dragged her toward the Expedition.

  “I’ll be back in the morning, Abby!” Karen promised. “I’ll be the first thing you see tomorrow!”

  Abby continued to shriek with air-raid intensity, so loudly that Karen finally put her hands over her ears to blunt the agony of hearing her child’s terror. But even that didn’t work. Ten yards from the Expedition, she slammed her right elbow into Hickey’s head and charged back toward the other pair of headlights.

  She was halfway there when Hickey cracked her on the back of the head with what felt like a hammer, sending her sprawling onto the hard dirt. She heard a door slam, then the squeal of a loose fan belt as Huey’s truck backed slowly down the road.

  High in the Beau Rivage Hotel in Biloxi, the phone rang in suite 28021. Will grabbed it before Cheryl could.

  “Joe?” he said. “Is this Joe?”

  “Will?” said an uncertain voice.

  “Karen!”

  The sound of weeping came down the line, and it nearly unmanned him. It took a lot to make Karen Jennings cry.

  “Did you see Abby?” he asked through the lump in his throat. “Did you get her the insulin?”

  “Will, she’s so scared! I gave her eight units and left some extra vials and syringes. It was awful—”

  Karen screamed; then her voice was replaced by Hickey’s. “You can calm down now, college boy. Your kid got her medicine. It’s sayonara for now.”

  “Wait!”

  Will was shouting at a dead phone. He exhaled slowly, trying to control the wild anger swelling in his chest. It was simply not in his nature to endure anguish and frustration without acting.

  “Hey,” said Cheryl. “Everything’s gonna be okay. It is.” She reached out to touch his shoulder.

  Will slammed the phone into the side of her head. As she fell across the bed, he tried to wrench the gun from her hand, but she held it tight. They wrestled over the bedspread, clawing and fighting for the weapon. Will’s joints shot fire through his limbs and trunk, but they kept functioning. Cheryl was clutching the gun beneath her breasts with both hands. Abandoning caution, he grabbed it blindly with both hands and yanked as hard as he could.

  Something ripped, Cheryl screamed, and the gun came away in his hands. He jumped up and pointed it at her. She was cradling her bloody right hand.

  “What the hell?”

  Cheryl’s dress had torn, exposing her from the waist up. She wore a sheer black bra, but Will wasn’t looking at her breasts. He was staring at a blue and green montage of bruises that covered her abdomen and ribs like stains, one of which continued up into the bra.

  “What happened to you?”

  She backed against the ornate headboard, the movement instinctive, animallike. “Nothing.”

  “That’s not nothing. That’s a beating.”

  She picked up a pillow and covered her chest. “It’s nothing. And you just screwed up big-time.”

  After venting his rage in the attack, Will found himself puzzled about what to do next. “I want to ask you something, Cheryl.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Are you committed to this kidnapping?”

  She said nothing.

  “Because I have a feeling you’re not. I have a feeling this kind of thing is what Joe gets off on, but not you. I think you tried to talk him out of it. That’s why you got the b
eating, isn’t it?”

  Her face was as closed as a tribal mask. “Don’t need no reason for a beating,” she said, all her earlier elocution gone. “Ain’t never no reason.”

  Will flashed back to his days as a resident, working the Jackson ERs. He’d seen more physical abuse in six months than he’d thought existed in the world at the time. And many of the responses he got from women sounded exactly like Cheryl’s. Sullen, angry, resigned. But he couldn’t solve her marital problems in one night. He couldn’t even solve his own. With that thought, a new idea entered his mind. And with it a new fear.

  “Why are you here with me?” he asked.

  Cheryl looked blank.

  “I mean, why isn’t Joe here with me? He obviously resents the hell out of me. If he was here, he could piss on me all night, beat the hell out of me. I’d have no choice but to take it. But he passed up that chance.” Will lowered the gun and stepped closer to the bed. “It doesn’t make sense, Cheryl. Why not man-man, woman-woman? You know? A man has a lot more chance of controlling an angry father than a woman does. Has Joe done it this way every time? Is he always with the wife?”

  She wiped her bloody hand on the pillow. “Putting me with the husband avoids the whole macho thing. A type A jerk like you doesn’t feel as threatened by a woman. You’re less likely to blow up and do something stupid.” She gingerly tested her right wrist. “Only you just did. You hurt me, you bastard.”

  “What do you expect? You kidnapped my daughter. Don’t worry about your hand. I can fix it.”

  “You stay the hell away from me.”

  “Whatever you say.” He walked over to the window and looked out over the gulf. There were more lights now, ships making steady headway, oblivious to the drama unfolding in the glittering tower on the beach.

  “That’s Joe talking,” he said, thinking aloud. “About who stays with whom, I mean. I’ve talked to him less than five minutes, but I know one thing about him. He loves the macho thing. He’d like nothing better than to be here rubbing my face in it. That’s half the point of all this. So, if he’s not here . . . he’s somehow rubbing my face in it more by being there.” Will turned back to Cheryl, who jerked up the pillow. “How could he be doing that?”