24 Hours (12 page)

“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?”

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 beating, 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?”

“You think he’s tearing up all your precious paintings or something? That’s not Joey.”

Will pulled a chair over beside the bed. “I want you to tell me everything you know that
is
Joe, Cheryl. Start talking.”

“I’m not telling you shit. You’ll find out more than you want to know when he calls back and I tell him what you did.”

Another black wave of rage rolled through him. “If you
can
talk.”

She laughed outright. “There’s nothing you can do to me that hasn’t been done before, Doctor. I mean
nothing.
” She tossed the pillow aside, exposing her breasts and the relief map of bruises. “Face it. Joey’s got you beat, right down the line.”

In an upstairs bathroom of the McDill mansion, Margaret McDill sat at a vanity table, taking off her makeup with cold cream. She looked into the mirror at her husband, who hovered in the door behind her like an accusing ghost.

“I refuse to discuss it,” she said. “How many times do I have to tell you that?”

Dr. McDill gave a long sigh. “I just want to—”

“What? Drive me back to a bottle a day?” She threw a mascara-stained Kleenex onto the floor. “I can’t stand this, James. It’s sadistic!”

“Margaret, for God’s sake. I’m just trying to understand.” He took a deep breath and pushed into forbidden territory yet again. “Is there something more? Something I don’t know about?” He’d asked this before and been rebuffed. Tonight he would press it. He had to. “Did this man hurt you?”

“Hurt me?” Her lips tightened to white. “Did he
hurt
me?”

“I’m your husband, Margaret. I only want to help you.”

She whirled from the mirror, her eyes wild. “All right! All
right!
You want to know why I won’t report it? Because he raped me.”

McDill flinched.

“He raped me, James. Do you feel better now? Is that what you wanted to hear? What you want to tell the police? All the gory details?”

McDill stared openmouthed at his wife.

“He told me to take off my clothes and I did. He told me to kiss him and I did. He told me I’d have to do things I’d never done before”—she covered her face with her hands—“and I did. I
did.
And I’d do it again! All I could think of was Peter.
They had my baby!
”

She exploded into unintelligible screams, thrashing her head and arms until McDill rushed forward and, oblivious to the blows he was taking, hugged her so tightly that she couldn’t move. He spoke in a reassuring voice as she continued to shriek.

“It’s all right, Margaret...It’s going to be all right. You didn’t do anything wrong. You did nothing wrong.” Tears stung his eyes. “God help me, I thought it might be something like this. It’s all right. . . .”

As her screams subsided, Margaret descended into a near catatonic state.

“Can you hear me?” asked McDill. “Margaret?”

She nodded like an Alzheimer’s patient.

“I’m afraid the same thing is happening again. Do you understand? To another family. Another mother. Another child.” He took her firmly by the shoulders and peered into her eyes. “We can’t let that happen. It wouldn’t be Christian. Would it?”