24 Hours

by Greg Iles

  His right eye suddenly blurred, and a pain like the sharp end of a poker woke to life behind it. The prodromal phase of a migraine. The euphoric clarity he’d experienced moments ago began to evaporate like drunken insight in the haze of a hangover. His thirty-minute window was ticking away. Abby’s going to die no matter what. . . .

  He had never felt such desperation. A paralyzing mixture of terror and futility that cornered animals must feel. Abby was his flesh, his blood, his spirit. Her survival was his own. Will had never seen Joe Hickey’s face, but it floated just beyond his blurred vision, dancing like the hooded head of a cobra. The pain behind his eye ratcheted up a notch. He reached into his dop kit and gobbled four Advils. Then he flushed the toilet and opened the bathroom door.

  Cheryl didn’t bother to look away from the television.

  “Was that Joe?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Everything’s cool, just like I said it would be.”

  Will looked at her there, wearing his button-down and the remains of her black cocktail dress. The gun lay beside her.

  Sensing his eyes upon her, she glanced over at him. “What are you looking at? You changing your mind about getting calmed down?”

  “Maybe.”

  She gave him a strange look. A hurt look. “Maybe I changed my mind, too. You said some mean things before.”

  Mean things. This woman had helped kidnap his daughter. Now she was talking about meanness on his part.

  Will walked into the bedroom, his eyes on the gun. But as he neared the bed, something made him continue around it. Past the chair, past the window where he watched the gulf, into the spacious sitting room. Here was the sofa, the wet bar, the desk, the dining table. He looked at his notebook computer on the desk. Eight hours ago he had been running video clips from the hard drive on that machine, proud and self-satisfied, dreaming of stock options and the royalties he would realize on the drug he had worked so hard to develop. What a pathetic joke. What would that money be worth if Abby lay in a coffin beneath the ground? How much time had he spent away from home, away from her, working on the trials for Restorase? How many hours wasted thinking up the stupid name? Fighting with the Klein-Adams marketing people over it? Restorase, Neurovert, Synapticin—

  His rambling train of thought crashed to a halt like a locomotive hitting a wall. His eyes went from the computer case to his sample case. Restorase. He had four vials of the prototype drug inside the case. But more importantly, he had two vials of Anectine. It was all part of the display for the Klein-Adams booth. Doctors would recognize Anectine, which was the trade name for succinylcholine, the depolarizing relaxant Will had developed Restorase to counteract. There was also a package of syringes: two conventional, and two of the special contact syringes the Klein-Adams engineering people had manufactured to Will’s specifications. The compressed gas syringes could deliver a therapeutic dose of Anectine in a half second of skin contact.

  “Succinylcholine,” Will murmured, and a strange chill went through him. With the chill came visions from the clinical trials of the past year, images that would scare the living hell out of a layman.

  “What are you doing in there?” Cheryl called from the bedroom.

  “Thinking.”

  “Don’t strain your brain.”

  He opened the sample case and made sure everything that was supposed to be there was there. Then he closed his eyes and summoned Abby from memory, bringing her to center stage in his mind. Her smiling face and sturdy little body, her beyond-her-years determination, forged during her constant battle with juvenile diabetes. She lived on the knife edge of disaster, yet considered herself far luckier than most children. Will’s pride in her was boundless. Abby was the nourishing flame that burned at the center of his soul. And the woman in the next room had put her life at risk. Dropped her down a black hole of terror. Whatever disadvantages fate had handed Cheryl, she had chosen to help Hickey of her own free will—not once, but six times, by her own admission. Six children put through hell. Twelve parents. Whatever she had to endure now was only what she had asked for.

  He walked back into the bedroom as though everything was fine. But instead of stopping at the chair, he walked to the edge of the bed and looked down at Cheryl, much as he might have at Karen when he wanted to make love with her.

  She looked up, her eyes curious. “What?”

  “I want to kiss you.”

  Her cheeks went pink. “You what?”

  “I want to kiss you.”

  “I don’t do that,” she said in a flustered voice. “That’s too personal.”

  “But I want to.”

  She bit her lip. “No kiss.” But then she undid the top four buttons of the dress shirt and slid down a cup of her bra. “You can kiss here.”

  He smiled and bent toward her breast.

  “What changed your mind?” she asked in a softer voice.

  As his cheek brushed her skin, he put his hand across her as though to prop himself on the bed, then closed his hand around the butt of her Walther. When he rose up and pointed the automatic at her face, she blinked with incomprehension.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Pull up your bra.”

  She did.

  Will took the pager from his belt and handed it to her. “Read the last message.”

  “What?”

  An ex-hooker would know all about pagers. “Hit the RETRIEVE button!”

  She fumbled with the device, then found the button. He could see the words scrolling on the LCD screen, her eyes narrowing as she read them.

  “I just got that message from my wife. Do you understand what it means?”

  She shook her head.

  “Joe is going to kill my little girl. No matter what I do. Whether he gets the ransom or not.”

  “He is not!”

  “If Karen says he is, he is.”

  “Joey would never let her send this message. This is some kind of mistake.”

  “No mistake, Cheryl. Karen is smarter than Joe, and she found a way. It’s that simple. Now, you’re about to tell me where Abby is.”

  She blinked at him. “I can’t. I don’t know where she

  “For your sake, I hope you do.”

  Confidence suddenly returned to her face. “Are you going to shoot me? Come on, Doc. We’ve been over this.”

  “I’m not going to shoot you. Not with a bullet, anyway.”

  Something in his eyes must have gotten through, because a shadow of fear played over her face. “What do you mean?” she said in a higher voice. “I told you before. Even if I did know, and you made me tell, the cops couldn’t get to her in time. Joey’s going to call back in twenty-five minutes. If I don’t answer, Abby’s dead. It’s that simple. And if I do, and I say one word, the same thing. And you don’t know what that word is. So give me back my gun, and let’s forget this happened.”

  A surreal sense of detachment was settling over Will. “Remember when you said there was nothing I could do to you that hadn’t been done before?”

  She gave him a blank look. “Yeah?”

  “You were wrong about that. Do you remember my presentation last night?”

  She bit her lip as she thought back.

  “Stand up,” he said.

  “Screw you.”

  He transferred the Walther to his left hand and grabbed her arm with his right. He was surprised to feel no pain. His brain had to be pumping out endorphins at five times the normal rate.

  “Unhook my belt,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Do it!”

  She reached up and unfastened his belt.

  “Pull it out.”

  “What?”

  “The belt, damn it. Pull it out of the loops.”

  She did.

  “Bring that chair over here.” He pointed not at the French chaise he had been using, but at a straight-backed chair against the wall. “Put it here by the bed and sit down.”

  “Why?”

  He slapped her face.
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  A bitterness beyond anything he’d ever seen came into her eyes. But with the bitterness came something else. Familiarity. This was a language she understood. She climbed off the bed, picked up the chair, and brought it back.

  “Sit in it.”

  She did.

  He put down the gun and wrapped the belt around her torso and the chair back, then buckled it. From the bathroom closet he took a terry-cloth robe belt and used it to tie her lower legs to the legs of the chair.

  “I’m going to scream,” she said.

  “Go ahead. Scream your head off. Then you explain to Joe why he won’t be getting his money in the morning.”

  “You’re killing your kid,” she said, as though talking to a man who had lost his reason. “Don’t you get that?”

  Will stood back and considered his handiwork. Screaming could become a problem, even if Cheryl didn’t mean for it to. Fear was an unpredictable thing. He went into the other room and brought back a pair of socks with his sample case, then stuffed them into Cheryl’s mouth. Her eyes went wide.

  He dragged the chair against the bed, then bent and flipped Cheryl and the chair up onto the mattress. From there it was simple to rock the chair legs and move her to the middle of the bed. She lay with her legs molded in the shape of the chair, feet sticking into the air like a woman in stirrups.

  “If you listened to my speech,” he said, “you know a little about paralyzing muscle relaxants.”

  Cheryl looked confused. She probably hadn’t listened to his program. She had been trying to seduce him with her eyes, all the time thinking about the moment when she’d have to pull the gun upstairs. Unless she could con him into taking her into his room in the hope of sex, which had probably been her original plan.

  Will removed a vial of Anectine and a conventional syringe from his sample case. Cheryl’s eyes locked onto the syringe as he popped off its cap, poked the needle through the rubber seal of the vial, and drew sixty milligrams of Anectine into the barrel. Many people had an irrational fear of needles. It was something you dealt with all the time in anesthesiology.

  “This is succinylcholine,” he said in a calm voice. “Shortly after I inject it, your skeletal muscles will cease to function. The skeletal muscles are the ones that move your bones. But your diaphragm is also made of skeletal muscle. So, while you’ll be able to see, hear, and think normally, you won’t be able to breathe. Or move.”

  There was more white than color showing in her eyes now.

  “You don’t have to go through this,” he said. “All you have to do is tell me where Abby is, and I’ll put this syringe back in the case.”

  She nodded frantically.

  He leaned over and pulled the socks from her mouth. She gasped for air, then said, “I swear to God, I don’t know! Please don’t stick me with that!”

  Will picked up the remote control and raised the volume of the television. The QVC huckster was selling “limited edition” china plates (“only 150 firing days!”) bearing likenesses of Ronald and Nancy Reagan. As he shoved the socks back into Cheryl’s mouth, she tried to bite his hand. He climbed onto the bed and sat on her rib cage. Her upraised thighs held his back like the back of a chair.

  “You can scream,” he said. “But the sound won’t last five seconds after I stick you. Listen to me, Cheryl. I first saw this drug used as an intern. An ER doctor used it to restrain a crack addict who’d stabbed a cop in the emergency room. It was awful. I’ve seen murderers turned into whimpering babies by this stuff. They lay there paralyzed, soiling themselves, turning blue. Then you bag them and breathe for them, but the whole time they know that if you stop pumping that bag, their brain is going to shut off like a cheap lightbulb. It must be like being buried alive.”

  Cheryl fought the restraining belts like a mad-woman, rocking Will and the chair in her attempt to get loose. He jabbed the point of the needle into her external jugular vein, and she stopped instantly.

  “You have a choice. You can help me save my little girl. Or you can find out what it’s like to be dead.”

  She closed her eyes, then opened them again. Tears ran from their corners down into her ears. “I nono!” she choked through the socks. “I sweahta gaa!”

  “You know something.”

  She shook her head violently.

  Will depressed the plunger of the syringe.

  “Helll,” Cheryl screamed. “Someodeee—”

  The scream died in her throat. Her eyelids began to flutter, and her facial muscles twitched far too rapidly to be controlled by conscious thought. Her arms flew up and across her chest; then her body went rigid as the signals reaching its muscle fibers became a garbled storm of misfiring electrochemicals. The smell of human waste reached him, a common side effect of Anectine. It was all familar to Will, though the context was alien. He’d seen this happen to mice, pigs, rhesus monkeys, and homo sapiens, but always in a controlled environment. Cheryl’s eyes were frozen open, filled with limitless horror.

  He pulled the socks from her mouth, then climbed off her chest and sat beside her. “I know it’s bad. Maybe you feel as scared as my little girl feels right now.”

  Cheryl lay as still as a stone angel on a grave. An angel with screaming eyes.

  “We’re going to do this over and over until you tell me where Abby is, so you’d do well to tell me everything as soon as you can.”

  Her face was going gray. He checked her fingernails for cyanosis. Hypoxia was taking its toll, and consciousness would soon wink out. In the time it took him to reach down to the sample case for a vial of Restorase, Cheryl’s skin took on a bluish cast. Loading the contact syringes would take more time than he had, so he drew fifty milligrams into a conventional syringe and shot the drug into the antecubital vein at the crook of her elbow. Twenty seconds later, her eyelids fluttered. She blinked, and then her lacrimal glands began draining tears again.

  “I didn’t like doing that,” he said. “But you forced me to. Joe forced me to.” He patted her upper arm, then used his sleeve to wipe away her tears. “I know you don’t want to go through it again. So, talk to me.”

  “You buh . . . bastard,” Cheryl whispered. “You made me mess myself. You’re worse than Joey. Worse than any of them!”

  “Where’s Abby, Cheryl?”

  “I told you I don’t know!”

  “You know more than you’re telling me. You couldn’t have pulled this off five times before without knowing something. Where’s the pickup? Where are you going to meet Joe to give him the money?”

  “A motel,” she said. “Near Brookhaven.”

  Brookhaven was fifty minutes south of Jackson.

  “You see?” he said. “That’s something I didn’t know before. That’s a good start. Keep talking.”

  “That’s all I know.”

  “You know a lot more than that. What’s the name of the motel?”

  “The Truckers’ Rest.” She shook her head. “Please don’t do it again. I’m begging you.”

  Will steeled himself against pity. She sounded like a child herself, a little girl begging not to be hurt by a monster. Was he a monster? Abby might be begging the same way right now, pleading not to be hurt. And that was partly the fault of the woman before him. An image came to him from somewhere, a man waiting in an airport for a defendant to be escorted through by deputies. He stood at a pay phone, pretending to talk, then drew a pistol from his coat, a pistol that had lain in a cabinet in his home for twenty years, waiting for the day when it would be used to kill a man who had molested a little boy. Will didn’t know if he could commit murder out of revenge. But he could kill to prevent a murder. He could torture to spare his daughter pain.

  With the coldness of a Nazi doctor he stuffed the socks back into Cheryl’s mouth and injected her with seventy milligrams of Anectine. He looked straight into her eyes as her face began to twitch and her muscles turned to stone. The terror in them predated human consciousness by millions of years. It was like watching someone drown from six in
ches away. He loaded another dose of Restorase and watched Cheryl’s fear race up an unimaginable scale, then slow and fade as her brain cells slowly starved of oxygen. She was blue when he shot the Restorase into her arm, and when she came out of the paralysis, her entire body was shivering.

  “Where is Abby?” he asked. “Right this minute?”

  Cheryl seemed to be trying to speak. He pulled the socks from her mouth.

  “Wuh . . . water,” she croaked.

  Will went to the sink and moistened a clean washcloth, then came back and squeezed a few drops into her mouth. “Careful.”

  “More,” she begged, coughing violently.

  He squeezed a few more drops from the cloth.

  Deep sobs racked her chest. Cheryl had seen a glimpse of hell few people ever would, and the experience had shattered her.

  “If I tell you anything,” she said, “Joey will kill me.”

  “Joe is two hundred miles away. I’m right here. If you tell me where Abby is, the needle goes back into the case, and you can have all the money you need to start over somewhere else. Anyplace you want.”

  “You’ve forgotten something, Doctor. When Joey calls back, I can kill your kid with one word. And I think I’m going to, for what you did.”

  Will kept his face calm. “You don’t want Abby to die. I sensed that before, when we were talking about kids. About being pregnant.”

  She looked away.

  “And you don’t want to die yourself. If you kill Abby, you will. One way or another. It’s one thing to talk about death, or to flirt with it when you’re depressed. But you’ve got a taste of it now. And it’s bad. Isn’t it?”

  She closed her eyes.

  “You think that because nothing happened to the kids those other times, nothing will happen to Abby. But you’re wrong. There’s something different about this time. And Karen found out what it is. That’s why she sent me that message. What is it, Cheryl? What’s different about this time?”

  “Nothing.”

  He reached out and pulled her chin over until she faced him. “Open your eyes and tell me why this time is different. Don’t make me inject you again. To be honest, it’s getting dangerous.”