24 Hours (17 page)

Splashing water on her face, she reached down for a hand towel and froze. Standing in a ceramic cup by the sink were three toothbrushes. But beside their blue and orange handles, a different sort of handle stuck up. A thinner one. She reached down and lifted it out of the glass. It was a disposable scalpel, its thin blade shielded by a plastic sheath. As she studied it, an arc of instinct closed, completing the circuit begun when Hickey dropped his pants.

“
Christ, how long can it take
?” he complained.

Hickey sounded like he was right outside the door. Dropping a washrag over the scalpel, Karen yanked off her panties, sat on the commode, and watched the doorknob.

It didn’t move.

She got up and took the scalpel from beneath the rag, then removed the clear protective sheath from the blade. Its edge was twice as bright as its side, honed to a sharpness that could lay open the human dermis like the skin of a peach. She straightened before the mirror and looked at herself. Was the scalpel concealable? After a moment’s thought, she raised it point-first toward her forehead and slid it neatly into her hair.

It vanished.

She turned her head right and then left, to see whether the scalpel was visible. It wasn’t. She felt her hair to see how obvious it was. Too obvious. If Hickey held her head for any reason, he would instantly discover the blade.

She pulled the scalpel from her hair and looked at it again. Six inches of plastic and surgical steel, flatter than a key and lighter than a pencil. The Papillon solution was not an option. She turned away from the mirror and looked back over her shoulder. She could see down to the upper cleft of her buttocks. For the first time in her life, she was glad to be carrying a few extra pounds. Using the mirror as a guide, she slid the scalpel, handle first, down between her cheeks. It felt cold and alien, but only the silver tip of the blade was visible at the base of her spine.

It would have to do.

All she could hope for now was to stack the odds a little in her favor. She opened the dirty clothes cabinet and stood on tiptoe. In the top section were two shelves she used to store clothes she rarely wore. She reached up and dug through them with feverish intensity.

There.

She wriggled into the claret-colored teddy Will had bought at the mall last year, a garment she’d never even tried on. The top half must have been designed by Wonder Bra, because it lifted and pressed her modest breasts together until the cleavage reminded her of the beach bunnies on
Baywatch.
The bottom half was ridiculously tight, with a sheer lace triangle over the crotch, leaving her fully exposed.

She looked like a French whore.

Perfect.

Crouching in a lightless thicket, Abby watched Huey lumber past her in the moonlight.

“Abby?” he called. “Why did you run away? You’re scaring me.”

She looked down at her doll, which she had laid across the ice chest to keep it out of the briars. She was trying hard not to make a sound, but her shins had already been scratched bloody, and they stung like a thousand paper cuts. She hadn’t wanted to go far from the lights, but she knew Huey would find her if she didn’t get into the dark.

He paused twenty feet to her left, looking into the wall of trees. “Abby? Where are you?”

She wondered how long she could wait here. The woods didn’t scare her. Not usually, anyway. Their house was in the middle of the woods. But she’d never spent the night in them, at least not alone. Only with her dad, at the Indian Princess camp-out. Already she’d heard sounds that made her shiver. Scuttling in the undergrowth, like armadillos, or maybe possums. There was a possum that kept eating the cat’s food at Kate Mosby’s house up the road. Abby had seen the cat fight it once, and the long, needlelike teeth of the possum as it hissed at the cat. If a possum came close now, she wouldn’t be able to sit still.

The other thing was her sugar. She felt like it was okay, but her mother wasn’t there to measure it, and if she started to “go south,” as her daddy put it, she would need a shot. She had never given herself a shot before.

“Come out!” Huey yelled, sounding really mad now.

Abby watched him pick up a big stick and poke some bushes with it. Then he moved off farther to her left, going along the line of trees.

She looked at the cabin, the lovely yellow light streaming from the windows. She wished she could wait inside, where there were no animals or bugs. Huey’s voice floated back to her on the wind.

“There’s bad things in the woods at night! Wolves and bears and things! You need Huey to look out for you!”

She hugged herself and tried not to listen. There might be bears in these woods, but she didn’t think so. And certainly not wolves. There weren’t any more wolves.

“There’s snakes, too,” Huey called. “Creepy crawly snakes looking for warm bodies in the dark.”

A chill shot up Abby’s spine. There were snakes in Mississippi, all right. Bad ones. She’d learned about them at Indian Princesses. Copperheads and cotton-mouths and ground rattlers and coral snakes. They’d seen a coral snake on one camp-out, sunning itself on a rock by the creek. The fathers didn’t even try to get close enough to kill it. They said if it bit you, you could die before you got to the hospital. Her dad had taught the Princesses a rhyme to help them tell the difference between a coral snake and a scarlet king snake, which looked almost exactly like it:
If red touches yellow, it can kill a fellow.

“If the snakes get you, it won’t be my fault!” Huey yelled, beating the bushes off to her left.

Abby shut her eyes and tried not to cry.

When Karen emerged from the bathroom wearing the teddy, she saw Hickey lying under the covers in the middle of the bed. The only light came from the lamp on the end table. He gave a long, low wolf whistle.

“Man
alive.
That’s better than naked. Talk about getting with the program.”

As Karen moved toward the bed, she saw Will’s .38 lying on the floor by the dust ruffle. That was how confident Hickey was in the diabolical cage of circumstance he had constructed.

He patted the side of the bed.

As she moved toward him, she slid the gun under the bed with her foot, then turned her back to him and slipped under the covers, being careful to keep her legs together as she moved. She tried not to stiffen as her hip and shoulder touched Hickey’s side, but she knew that her tension would be transmitted to him in a thousand subtle ways.

“Damn, you’re cold,” he complained.

“Sorry.” He smelled like a stale ashtray. She stared up at the ceiling as though she had nothing in her mind but enduring what was to come with stoicism. “What do you want me to do?”

“You’re not gonna whine about it?”

“Not if it keeps you from hurting Abby.”

“Thank God for small favors.” He turned sideways and propped himself on an elbow, and she felt him press against her hip. A deep shudder rippled through her.

“Are you ready down there?” he asked.

Unbelievable.
How could he possibly think that an impending rape could arouse a woman? She had to distract him from his immediate goal. “Is that what you want first? Straight to business? I thought you’d want something else.”

“Like what?” He reached up and cupped her left breast with a sweaty hand.

Every fiber of instinct told her to jerk away from the offending touch, but she forced herself to lie still and turn her face toward his. “Something you fantasize about when you see women like me in the grocery store.”

He squeezed the breast. “Like what?”

“Lie back and relax. You’ll see.”

A slow smile spread his lips. “Oh, man . . .”

She rolled onto her stomach, pulled the covers over her shoulders, and slid down toward Hickey’s midsection. She hoped he would leave the comforter where it was, but he lifted it so that he could watch what he believed was to come. She was foolish to have expected anything else.

“I’m cold,” she said, looking up.

“You’ll warm up.” His black eyes were bright. “And don’t think you’re going to get out of anything by doing this.”

She swallowed her revulsion, then straddled his legs and took hold of him with her left hand.

“Mmm,” he moaned.

She had to get him to look away. Closing her eyes, she worked her left hand a little, the way Will liked it. Hickey groaned but did not look away. He wouldn’t, she realized, until she progressed much further. This was what he got off on: watching a “society” woman pleasure him.

“Good,” he murmured. “Good girl.”

She slid her right hand down beneath her stomach.

“Yeah,” he said. “I want to see you do that.”

“After you finish,” she said, feeling sweat break out on her face. It was hot in the bedroom, but it was fear, not the temperature that had brought moisture to her skin.

He groped for the back of her head.

Panic shot through her. “I know what to do. Lie back and relax. You don’t want it to be over too fast.”

“Yeah.” After a moment, his head lolled back, and his eyes rolled up toward the ceiling.

She quickly slid her right hand up around her hip. Her forefinger touched the scalpel blade. Very carefully, she felt her way down the plastic handle, which was slick with perspiration. Closing her first and second fingers around the handle, she drew the scalpel from its place of concealment and set it firmly in her fist, the flat of the blade wedged between the pad of her thumb and her forefinger.

“Come
on,
” Hickey urged, his voice brimming with impatience.

She brought the blade smoothly along her right side and underneath her right breast. When it was beneath her chin, she slid her knees up under her chest, as though to position herself for oral sex.

“Finally,” he grunted.

She had to get between his legs. Straddling him this way, he could easily buck her off in the initial moment of panic. Without breaking her rhythm, she lifted one knee and wedged it between his thighs, then followed with the other.

“Go for it,” he said.

Karen gripped him as hard as she could with her left hand and pressed the blade against his urethra with her right, anchoring the point in a few millimeters of skin. It would take several seconds for him to register the pain of the puncture.

“Look down, Joe,” she said in a cold voice. “And don’t make any sudden moves.”

“What?”

“If you move, you’re going to lose this organ you’re so proud of.”

She felt his abdomen tighten as he raised his head to look. “What? Hey, whatever you’re doing, it hurts.”

“I’m holding a scalpel against your penis, Joe.” She prepared herself for a reflex jerk of panic. “You
really
don’t want to move, okay?”

His eyes went from blank confusion to shock in less than a second. At last he had seen and understood the scalpel. His whole body went rigid, but his pelvis didn’t move an inch.

“
What the—
” he blurted in a stage whisper.

He raised his hand to strike her, but didn’t have the courage to do it. Karen looked straight into his eyes. Fear crackled there like electricity. The power was intoxicating. She had gone from helpless supplicant to total dominance in seconds. If she had held the gun to Hickey’s head, he would have laughed in her face. But the threat to his manhood paralyzed him. She could almost feel his heart squirming in his chest.

“This is a Bard-Parker Number Ten scalpel,” she said. “We keep them around to take out splinters, stuff like that. But it’ll take off your equipment just as easily. I bet you’d hardly even feel it. Just a quick sting.”

“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.