by Greg Iles
“I’m gonna kill you,” he said in a matter-of-fact voice. “You and your kid.”
She pushed the scalpel point deeper, drawing blood.
“Stop!” he shouted, his face contorted in terror. His skin had gone as white as that of a man on his deathbed.
“You’re bleeding, Joe. So listen very closely. You’re going to pick up that telephone, call your cousin, and tell him to bring my daughter back here.”
Hickey’s eyes flicked from the blade to her face. “You won’t do it. If you do, your kid dies.”
“Oh, I’ll do it.” Karen’s heart felt like it was beating at random, firing off drum rolls between dangerous silences. She had to hold her nerve. “I’ll do it, and if you live through it, you’ll be peeing through an indwelling catheter for the rest of your life. No more making women walk bowlegged for a week. No more banging tonsils.”
She thought she saw a flicker of fear, but Hickey covered it quickly.
“Your hand’s shaking,” he said. “Feel it?”
“Pick up the phone!”
“Goddamn women. You ain’t got the guts.”
Something in his voice ignited an anger so deep that Karen had never even attempted to express it. She squeezed him with all the power in her left arm, and his skin went purple.
“I was a surgical nurse for six years, Joe. I’ll castrate you with no more regret than slicing a chicken neck. And it won’t be like that Bobbitt guy. No sewing it back on. Because while you’re spurting blood all over my percale sheets, I’ll throw it in the garbage disposal and flip the switch. Now pick up that fucking phone!”
“Take it easy!” Hickey grabbed the phone off the bedside table. “I’m dialing!” He punched wildly at the keypad. “What do you want me to say?”
Karen struggled to rein in her anger. The fierce pleasure she felt at seeing him broken had her muscles twitching like they did after four sets of tennis. Some primal part of her wanted to cut him.
“Tell him you already have the ransom money. Tell him to put Abby in the truck and drive her back here.”
“He won’t do it. We’ve never done it that way. He’ll know something’s wrong.”
“You told me he always does everything you say!”
Puzzlement came into Hickey’s face. “He’s not answering.”
“You didn’t dial it right!”
“I swear to God I did!”
“Then why hasn’t he answered?”
“How do I know?”
“Dial it again!” She pressed the blade deeper. There was a steady stream of blood now.
“Shit! Wait!” He hung up and redialed the number, then waited for an answer.
Karen’s nerves were fraying fast. Despite her immediate control over Hickey, she had put herself in an untenable position if Huey didn’t answer the phone.
“He’s not picking up,” Hickey said, looking worried enough for it to distract him from his immediate peril. “What the hell?”
“He hasn’t missed a call yet! Why this one?”
Hickey shrugged. “How do I know? He’s a damn retard. Now get that knife away from me, will you? We’ve got to figure out what’s happening up there.”
“Shut up,” Karen snapped. “Let me think.”
“What are you going to do? You can’t sit like that all night.”
“I said, ‘Shut up!’”
“Okay. But why don’t you go ahead and give me that blow job while you’re deciding?”
Karen blinked in amazement, and Hickey slammed the telephone into the side of her head.
Huey had circled back around the cabin, poking at bushes and trying to scare Abby, but now his voice had faded to almost nothing as he worked his way along the dirt road leading away from the cabin.
She crouched in the dark, her head filled with images of snakes curling and uncurling like whips in the weeds around her. During the last few minutes, beetles had crawled over her feet, and fat mosquitoes had feasted on her exposed arms and face. She was afraid to swat them, because Huey might hear the sound and come running back. Part of her wanted to find a tree and climb it, but that would surely make too much noise. Besides, snakes could climb. She didn’t think they slept in the trees, though.
As she squashed a mosquito bloody against her forearm, a faint ringing sounded in her ears. She tried to focus on it, but it disappeared. Then it came again—louder, she thought—or maybe it just seemed louder because she was listening for it. Her heart thumped.
It was a telephone.
The ringing was coming from the cabin. Huey must have left his phone inside when he went looking for her! She got up to run to the cabin, then stopped. What if he had gone back to the cabin without her seeing him? What if he was inside now? No. The phone was still ringing, and if Huey was inside, he would have answered it. She grabbed her doll and the ice chest and raced out of the trees toward the glowing windows.
White light exploded in Karen’s brain. As her thoughts scattered into meaningless electrochemicals, her cerebellum executed the impulse her cerebral cortex had been holding in check for the past minute. Like a frog’s leg touched by an electrode, the hand holding the scalpel jerked back toward her stomach.
Hickey shrieked like a hog having its throat cut.
The white light shattered into stars, then faded to an unstable image of a screaming man. Karen looked down.
All she saw was blood.
Abby couldn’t find the phone. It wasn’t on the table or the broken old couch. But it was still ringing.
She looked at the floor. There was a big puddle of spilled milk and Cap’n Crunch by the bedroom door. The phone was lying half under the upside-down salad bowl Huey had put the cereal into. Abby darted to the puddle and reached for the wet cell phone, but even as she did, she knew something wasn’t right. The phone’s numbers and window were dark. She pressed SEND and put the phone to her ear.
She heard only silence. “No,” she keened, terrified that her mother had hung up.
The phone rang again.
“Hello? Hello! Mama?”
The ringing bell sounded again. It wasn’t coming from the cell phone. It was coming from the bedroom. She ran in and looked around. An old-timey black phone sat on the floor on the far side of the bed. It rang again.
She grabbed the receiver. “Hello? . . . Hello!”
She heard a dial tone.
“Hello?”
The phone did not ring again. She stared at it in disbelief. How could her mother stop ringing, just when she was about to pick up? Shaking with fear, she stared at the rotary dial and spoke softly as she tried to remember. “Nine-nine-one? Nine . . . nine-one-one. Nine-one—”
“Abby?” Huey’s voice floated into the bedroom. “Don’t run away from Huey! You’re going to get me in trouble. Big trouble.”
She froze.
The voice sounded close, but she didn’t hear footsteps. She was too afraid to peek outside the bedroom door. She grabbed the Barbie and the cell phone off the bed and ran flat-out for the back door.
Outside, she ran past a small shed and crouched beside a tree. There was just enough moonlight to see the POWER button. “Nine-one-one,” she said with certainty. She switched on the phone, carefully punched in 911, pressed SEND, and put the phone to her ear.
“Welcome to CellStar,” said a computer voice. “You are currently in a nonemergency-service zone. Please—”
“Is this the police?” Abby cried. “I need a policeman!”
Tears formed in her eyes as the voice refused to acknowledge her. She hit END and began to dial the only number she could think of: home.
“Six-oh-one,” she whispered. “Eight-five-six-four-seven-one-two.”
She hit SEND again.
A man’s voice answered this time, but it was a computer, too. “We’re sorry,” it said. “You must first press a one or zero before making this call. Thank you.”
“Press one first?” Abby echoed, feeling panic in her chest. “Press one first. Press one first.
. . .”
Karen and Hickey knelt three feet apart on the bed. Karen was holding the scalpel up defensively; Hickey clutched a pillow to his groin. His face was a mask of rage and agony.
“You’ve got to get to a hospital!” she told him. “You could bleed to death.”
He lifted the pillow away from his skin and looked down, then laughed maniacally. “You missed! You missed. Look at that!”
He lifted the pillow higher, and his smile vanished. His right thigh had been laid open from groin to knee. Blood was pulsing out at an alarming rate.
“Oh God,” he whispered. “Oh God.”
“You did it!” Karen told him. “You hit me with the phone!”
“Your kid is dead, bitch. Dead!”
Her heart turned to stone. She had gambled and failed. As Hickey tried to stanch the flow of blood with the pillow, she jumped off the bed and scrabbled under it for the gun. She had to keep him from bleeding to death, but she didn’t want to be at his mercy while he was in a fit of rage.
“Go in the bathroom!” she said, getting to her feet with the pistol. “Tie a towel just above the laceration. You’ve got to slow the arterial flow.”
“Look what you did!” he screamed, his eyes wide with shock.
She was going to have to tend to the wound, but she didn’t think she could bring herself to touch him yet. She didn’t even want to get close to him.
“Get a towel!” she yelled. “Hurry! Make a tourniquet!”
Hickey hobbled into the bathroom with the pillow pressed to his thigh, groaning and whining and cursing at once. Karen grabbed the bedsheet and wiped his blood off her thighs, then pulled her discarded blouse over the teddy, went to the bathroom door, and held the gun on Hickey while he tied a towel around his thigh. He was doing a fair job, good enough to slow the bleeding anyway.
“Why didn’t Huey answer?” she asked. “Why aren’t they at the cabin? Has he taken Abby somewhere?”
Hickey looked up, his face red with strain. “You don’t need to worry about that. No point at all. You just bought yourself a world of pain, lady. A world of pain.”
“What do you expect? You steal my child and try to rape me, and I’m supposed to lie down and take it?”
He shook a bloody washrag at her. “Look at this goddamn leg! I’m bleeding to death here!”
“You need a hospital.”
“Bullshit, I need a hospital. I need some stitches is all. You were a nurse, you said. You do it.”
“It would take fifty stitches to close that.” She was exaggerating. A butcher could bring the edges of the wound together with ten.
“So get the stuff! Your husband’s got a black bag or something, right? To take care of the neighborhood brats?”
Will did keep a bag at home for Abby’s soccer games, but Karen didn’t want to get it. She didn’t want to hold the gun or look at Hickey’s nakedness or anything else any more. She just wanted Abby locked tight in her nurturing arms.
“Why are you doing this?” she screamed. “Why my little girl? lt’s not fair! It’s not right—”
Hickey slapped her. Then, his jaw set tight against the pain, he said through clenched teeth: “Lady, if you don’t get your shit together and sew me up, Huey will snap your little girl’s spine like a twig. One phone call will do it. One fucking call.”
“You can’t even get him on the phone!”
“I’ll get him.”
Karen stood shaking in the aftermath of her fit. Blood was soaking through her blouse from the teddy beneath, and Will’s gun quivered in her hand. She had to keep herself together. Or Abby wouldn’t make it.
“Move your ass!” Hickey yelled. “Get the bag!”
She nodded and hurried out of the bathroom.
Abby thought she’d heard Huey outside again, so she crept into the little shed behind the cabin. There was a tractor in it, like the one her daddy used to cut the grass at home, only bigger. She climbed up onto its seat and started pressing numbers on the cell phone’s lighted keypad. She began with “1,” then moved on to the area code of Mississippi. “Six-oh-one,” she said as she dialed. Then she pressed the other seven numbers, hit SEND, and prayed that the answering service wouldn’t answer.
The phone began to ring.
Karen was rummaging through Will’s medical bag when the phone rang on Will’s side of the bed. Hickey was still in the bathroom, loosening the towel tourniquet as she had advised. Though the caller was almost surely Hickey’s wife, Karen answered, hoping against hope that her desperate act had somehow paid off.
“Hello?”
“Tell her to give me a minute,” Hickey called from behind the half-closed bathroom door.
“Mama?”
Karen’s hands began to shake as if with palsy. “Abby?”
“Mama!”
Karen had to swallow before she could continue. “Honey, are you all right? Where are you?”
Abby’s voice disintegrated into sobs before she could answer. Karen heard her hiccupping and swallowing, trying to control herself enough to speak.
“Take your time, baby. Tell me where you are.”
“I don’t know! I’m in the woods. Mama, come get me! I’m scared.”
Karen glanced at the bathroom door. “I’m going to come, honey, but—” She paused, unsure what to say. How much reality could a five-year-old absorb and still function? “Baby, Mama doesn’t know how to get to where you are. Are you still at the place where I gave you the shot?”
“Uh-huh. I ran outside the cabin. I was hiding in the woods and Mr. Huey yelled that there’s snakes and bears. Then I heard the phone inside.”
“Listen, honey. Do you remember how to call nine-one-one? If you do that, the police can come get—”
“I already did that. The lady wouldn’t listen! Mama, help me.”
“What the hell are you doing? Give me that goddamn phone!” Hickey was coming through the bathroom door, trying to move quickly but not wanting to put too much weight on his injured leg.
“Mama?” cried Abby.
“Give me the phone!” Hickey roared.
Karen grabbed the .38 off the bed, pointed it at him, and fired.
Hickey hit the floor like a soldier under incoming artillery and covered his head with both hands.
“TELL ME WHERE MY BABY IS, YOU SON OF A BITCH!”
“Mama? Mama!”
Hickey didn’t speak or move. Karen fired into the floor, missing him by inches. “ANSWER ME, GODDAMN IT!”
“Stop shooting!” he screamed. “If you kill me, your kid is dead!”
“RIGHT ALONG WITH YOU! GET IT?” Karen tried to speak calmly into the receiver. “Stay on the phone, baby. Mama’s fine, but she’s busy. Are you in the cabin now?”
“I’m in a little shed outside. I’m on a tractor.”
Abby’s captor was certain to focus on any structures as he hunted for her, no matter how simpleminded he was. It was like looking for your car keys under the streetlight.
“I want you to go back outside, Abby, into the woods. Make sure Mr. Huey isn’t around, then sneak out of the shed, get down in some bushes, and stay down.”
“But it’s nighttime.”
“I know, but tonight the dark is your friend. Remember Pajama Sam? No need to hide when it’s dark outside?”
“That’s on the computer. That’s not real.”
“I know, baby, but the woods are the safe place for you now. Do you understand?”
“I guess so.”
“Do you think your sugar ’s okay?”
“I guess.”
“Don’t you worry, sweetie. Mama’s going to come get you.”
“You promise?”
“I promise. Now, I want you to look outside, and then run into the woods. Take the phone with you, and stay on the line. Don’t hang up, okay? Don’t hang up.”
“Okay.”
Karen covered the phone with her hand and pointed the gun at Hickey’s head. “Get up, you bastard.”
He
looked up, his eyes bright with anger. Maybe with surprise, too, she thought.
“I SAID, ‘GET UP’!”
Hickey flattened his hands on the floor and raised himself slowly, then leaned against the frame of the bathroom door for support.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he asked.
She gave him a cold smile. “I’m changing the plan.”
NINE
Dr. James McDill and his wife sat across from Special Agent Bill Chalmers, a bland-faced, sandy-haired man in his early forties. Agent Chalmers’s tie was still neatly tied despite the fact that it was 11:30 P.M. McDill had called the Jackson Field Office of the FBI a few minutes after Margaret’s mini-breakdown, and that call had resulted in this meeting.
He had planned to come to the Federal Building alone, but Margaret had insisted on accompanying him. Chalmers met them in the empty lobby, escorted them through the unmanned security post and up to the FBI floor. They arrived to find most of the office complex empty and dark: a government-issue cube farm lit by glowing computer screens. Chalmers led them back to the office of the SAC, or Special Agent-in-Charge. A nameplate on the desk read FRANK ZWICK.
The Jackson FBI office had a distinguished or notorious history, depending on what part of the country you were from. It had been established by J. Edgar Hoover himself during the terrible civil rights summer of 1967.
“I’m not quite clear about some of the things you said on the phone,” Chalmers said from behind his boss’s desk. “Do you mind if I ask some questions?”
“Fire away,” said McDill.
“We’re talking about a kidnapping-for-ransom, correct? And wire fraud, it sounds like.”
“Yes, to the first question. To the second, I imagine so.”
“And this happened one year ago today?”
“Give or take a few days. It happened during the same annual medical convention that’s going on right now in Biloxi.”
Chalmers pursed his lips and gazed through the window, toward the old Standard Life Building, illuminated now by cold fluorescent light. After a few moments’ thought, he looked the heart surgeon directly in the eye.