24 Hours (16 page)

That thought evaporated as Hickey slid down in the chair so that his legs were fully extended, his hips and thighs stretched like a bridge between the chair and ottoman. “Stand over me,” he said. “Then you sit down and dance. That’s called a sofa dance.”

Sofa dance?

“Hurry,” he said insistently. “Right here.”

He meant his lap. Karen was nearing the limit of her tolerance. She stepped over his outstretched legs but did not sit down. She could no longer dance in any real sense, only sway from the waist up. But Hickey seemed content for the moment.

“Turn around,” he said.

She thought she detected a slur in his pronunciation. She stepped over his legs, then back over them so that she was facing his feet. She had never been more thankful for underwear. She focused on the “L” of light that was her almost-closed bathroom door.

“Damn,” Hickey said softly. “That’s a work of art. Bend over. Slow.”

Karen shut her eyes and bent toward his feet, knowing she was fully exposed now, terrified that he would touch her.

He did. But with paper, not his hand. Another bill. This one slid between her panties and her skin. She shuddered with disgust, thinking of where that money might have been, who might have touched it. Then she realized that her disgust was not even a fraction of what she would feel when he violated her.

“Turn around again.”

She obeyed. To her horror, Hickey had laid a hand in his lap and begun rubbing himself. Her stomach turned a somersault. She was thankful she hadn’t eaten in a while. Or perhaps it would be better if she had. She’d heard that vomiting was a good defense against rape, but she’d never understood how you could do it at the right time. If Hickey touched her now, though, she just might manage it.

“That was a twenty,” he said. “Twenty for the panties.”

She couldn’t do it. She could not remove the last barrier between herself and total nakedness. “We’ve got all night,” she said. “Don’t rush it.”

“Sit!” Hickey commanded, as he would a dog.

Karen tried to steel herself to obey, but it was no use.

He took hold of her hips with powerful hands and yanked her down against him. In the first instant of contact, a torrent of emotions raced through her. Terror first, because now it was real. Whiskey wasn’t going to keep this man from performing. Nothing was, except death, and if she somehow managed to kill him, Abby would die, too. With the terror came dazed disbelief. She had not felt any other man but Will in that place for fifteen years, and only two before him. To be touched there by someone she had not chosen was an affront to her most secret self. But most deeply she felt guilt, for allowing it to go this far. Even though logic told her she had no alternative, her insecurity said there had to be one. One that a braver or more moral woman would have seen without thought. But the only alternative she could see was death for Abby.

As Hickey groaned in rapture, a cold certainty crystallized in Karen’s brain. No matter what Nicole Kidman had done in the movies, she could not endure being raped by this man. By any man. For any reason. Her answer to the eternal female question—would I fight or submit?—was an unequivocal
fight.

Hickey groaned again, and this time the sound pierced her to the marrow. Will sometimes made exactly the same sound during sex. The thought that there was any connection between her marital lovemaking and what was happening now nauseated her. But of course there was. Will was as human as any man, and he wanted sex all the time. Much more often than she did, anyway. And not just lovemaking. He wanted physical sex, an outlet for his drives and frustrations, and she resented that. There had been a time, just before and after their marriage, when she had felt a powerful urge to make love. But that had slowly faded with time. Not that she loved him less. But after she was forced to give up medical school, her desire flatlined. She couldn’t voice the reason to Will, but the fact was that submitting to his sexual desires seemed the ultimate expression of the terrible sacrifice she had made. Because it was sex, at bottom, that had made that sacrifice necessary. And just because Will got an erection every morning and night was no reason she had to wait at his beck and call like some nineteenth-century
hausfrau—

“Get up!” Hickey ordered. “That’s enough fore-play.”

She practically leaped off him and retreated toward the TV cabinet.

He thrust himself to his feet and carried the bottle of Wild Turkey to the bedside table. Then he walked back toward her, pulling off his Polo shirt as he came, revealing a pale, wiry torso. Only his neck was tanned, and his arms from the elbows down. A farmer’s tan, her father had called it. When he reached for his belt, Karen looked at the carpet.

“Watch,” he said, his voice full of pride.

She took a deep breath and looked up as Hickey’s khakis hit the floor. A tingling numbness began to creep outward from some place deep within her. The act would be bad, she knew, but the anticipation was worse. The knowing—while you were still intact—that absolute suffering was inevitable. That the place you had protected all your life was about to be violated. That no help would come. There was only Hickey. And Abby. Abby hanging over her head like a sword, enforcing every command he gave.

The numbness continued to spread through her, and the temptation was to let it come, like a freezing person giving in to the cold.
Let it penetrate into my bones,
she thought.
Into my heart and soul, so that whatever happens will be unfelt, a crime committed upon another person, an insensate body. A cadaver.
And yet, if she let the numbness that far in, could she ever get it all out again?

As Hickey stared at her with his stupid schoolboy grin, something stirred deep within her. Not quite a thought, but the seed of one. A tiny spark of awareness, smoldering and darkly feminine. A ruthless, chthonic knowledge of male vulnerability.

Her moment would come.

EIGHT

Huey sat across from Abby on the linoleum floor of the cabin, whittling slowly. He had dragged an old saddle blanket in from the bedroom and set her on it, so she wouldn’t have to sit on the bare floor. She clutched the Barbie in her little hands like a talisman.

“Do you feel better now?” asked Huey.

Abby nodded. “A little bit.”

“Are you hungry? I’m hungry.”

“Kind of. My tummy hurts.”

A knot of worry formed in Huey’s stomach. “What do you like? I got baloney. You like Captain Crunch? I love Captain Crunch.”

“I have to eat Raisin Bran.”

“You can’t eat Captain Crunch?”

“No.”

“How come?”

Her lips puckered and moved to one side as she thought about it. “Well, when you eat, the food puts sugar in your blood. And you’ve got stuff in your body to make the sugar go away. But I don’t have any. So, the sugar gets more and more until it makes me sick. And if I get too sick, I’ll go to sleep. Sleep and maybe never wake up.”

Fear passed into Huey’s face like a shadow falling over a rock. He rubbed his hands anxiously across his puttylike cheeks. “That happened to my sister. Jo Ellen. I wish I could give you some of my blood to make your sugar go away.”

“That’s what’s in my shots. Stuff to make the sugar go away. I don’t like needles, but I don’t like being sick, either. It hurts.”

“I hate needles,” Huey said forcefully. “Hate, hate, hate.”

“Me, too.”

“
Hate
needles,” Huey reasserted.

“There are big ones and little ones, though,” Abby said. “My shots have the littlest kind. Some shots have really big ones. Like when they take your blood. And sometimes my dad has to stick people in the back. In the spine cord. Or in the nerves sometimes. That hurts the worst. But he does it to make a bigger hurt go away.”

“How do you know so much?”

Abby shrugged. “I don’t know. My mom and dad are always telling me stuff. People at school say I talk grown-up all the time.”

“Are you going to be a doctor when you get big?”

“Uh-huh. A flying doctor.”

Huey’s eyes got bigger. “You can’t fly, can you?”

“In an airplane, silly.”

“Oh.”

“My tummy still hurts.”

Huey’s mouth fell open. “You just play here with your doll. I’m gonna make you the biggest bowl of Captain Crunch you ever saw!”

Before Abby could remind him that she couldn’t eat Cap’n Crunch, the giant got to his feet and walked toward the kitchen. After three steps, he stopped and put his hand to his head as though he had forgotten something.

“Dumb, dumb, dumb,” he said.

He came back to Abby, bent down, and picked up the Nokia cell phone he’d left beside her. “Joey said, take this with me everywhere. Don’t leave it anywhere. He gave me a extra battery, too.”

Abby looked forlornly at the phone. She was thinking about what her mother had said about calling the police.

“I’ll be right back,” Huey promised. “You just wait.”

He walked into the kitchen, leaving Abby alone in the front room with his whittling knife and his shapeless chunk of wood. She could see his back as he opened a cabinet. Then he moved out of the doorway, and she couldn’t see him anymore. She heard a sucking sound. A refrigerator door.

She turned to the cabin window. It was pitch-black outside. She hated the dark, but her mother’s voice was playing in her head.
Take the phone and hide. . . .
She wouldn’t have said that if she wanted Abby to stay with Huey. But if she went outside, what could she do? She didn’t know the way home, or even how far away home was. And without the phone, she couldn’t call anybody.

She heard a clink, then Huey humming something. She liked Huey. But he was a stranger, and her daddy had told her over and over how strangers could be bad, even when they seemed nice. She felt sorry for him, but whenever she looked up and saw him watching her, she felt something funny in her stomach. Like a big bubble pressing up against her heart. In a moment he would walk through the door with a bowl of cereal that could kill her. Abby closed her eyes and pictured her mother’s face.
What would she say if she could talk to me now?

Run.

Abby stood up with her Barbie and took a tentative step toward the door. Looking back toward the kitchen, she saw Huey’s shadow moving on the floor. She walked very fast to the front door, picked up the small ice chest her mother had left, and slipped outside without a sound.

Joe Hickey took two steps toward Karen, a lopsided grin on his face. She kept her eyes on his and tried to keep the fear out of her voice as she spoke.

“Will you please wear a condom?”

“Sorry, babe. Not tonight.”

A shudder of revulsion ran through her. God only knew what diseases Hickey carried. He had been in prison, and the HIV infection rate behind bars was astronomical.

“Please,” she implored. “I don’t want to—”

“I ain’t worn a rubber since junior high, and I ain’t starting now.”

She fought down a wave of nausea. “I need to use the bathroom.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“For God’s sake. Give me that much privacy.”

“What’s in the bathroom? Another gun?”

“My diaphragm, okay? I don’t want to get pregnant.”

Hickey’s grin returned. “Well, now, I don’t know. You look like you got good genes. Maybe you and me should
pro
-create. Do the global gene pool a favor.”

She closed her eyes, praying he wasn’t serious. “May I please use the diaphragm?”

“What the hell.” He waved his hand. “Hey, maybe I should put it in for you.”

She struggled to keep her face impassive.

“Fine. Go do whatever. But when you come out of there, I don’t want to see those panties. It’s Lady Go-diva time.”

As she walked toward the bathroom, he picked up the Wild Turkey bottle and stretched out on the sleigh bed, his face glowing with anticipation.

Huey came out of the kitchen carrying a bowl of Cap’n Crunch as big as a colander in his left hand and his cell phone in his right. He looked down at the saddle blanket Abby had been sitting on and blinked in confusion. Then he peered around the room. After several seconds, a grin lighted his face.

“Are you playing hide-and-go-seek? Is that what you’re doing?”

He carried the cereal and the phone into the bathroom. Finding it empty, he checked the bedroom. He had to set the bowl on the mattress and lie prone to look under the old iron frame bed, groaning as he squeezed his oversized body between the side rail and the wall. There was nothing under the bed but what his mother used to call “slut wool.”

He got to his feet again, picked up the cereal bowl, went to the bedroom door, and stared at the empty saddle blanket again. Then he cocked his head and listened hard.

“Abby?”

His voice sounded lonelier than it had when she was in the room. The silence just swallowed it up.

“Abby?”

The screen door banged softly in the wind.

Huey looked to his right and saw the door hanging open. His face went slack. After a long sequence of thought, doubt, and realization, he dropped the bowl and the cell phone and charged onto the porch.

The second Karen closed the bathroom door, her survival instinct kicked into overdrive. She turned on the sink taps, then opened the cabinet behind the mirror, revealing bottles of vitamins, drugs, facial cleansers, gauze bandages, and all the other sundries of a doctor ’s home medicine cabinet. On the bottom shelf was a stack of Lo-Ovral birth control pills. She grabbed them and threw them into the cabinet under the lavatory so Hickey wouldn’t see them if he came in.

She scanned the drugs in the cabinet. Zithromax, an antibiotic. Naproxen for Will’s arthritis. Methotrexate. Stuck behind the gauze bandage pack was a small brown prescription bottle. Her heart quickened as she picked it up and read the label:
Mepergan Fortis.
Demerol. But when she opened it, she saw only two red pills in its bottom. Not enough to put Hickey out quickly, even if she found a way to slip them into the Wild Turkey bottle. Raking frantically through the cabinet, she saw nothing that could help her. As she closed the door, she caught her reflection in its mirrored surface. She looked like a ghost of herself.