24 Hours (26 page)

“Yes, ma’am. This sounds like a real emergency.”

“It is. Wait, I want to add something. Add ‘Confirm receipt by e-mail.’ ”

“I don’t take many messages like this, Mrs. Jennings. Shouldn’t you maybe call nine-one-one?”

“No! I mean, that’s not appropriate in this case. This is a little girl with liver cancer. Will’s working with the transplant team, and things are very dicey right now.”

“Lord, lord,” said the operator. “I know about livers. I got a brother with hepatitis C. I’ll get this entered right away.”

“It’s got to go to his SkyTel. It’s a brand-new pager.”

“I’ve got that noted on my screen. Don’t you worry. If he’s got the pager on, he’ll get the message. I think those SkyTels can even access missed messages.”

“Thank you.” Another thought struck Karen. “If he doesn’t call you to confirm that he’s received this message, would you call his room at the Beau Rivage in Biloxi and give it to him?”

“Yes, ma’am. The Beau Rivage. Half our doctors are down there right now.”

“Thank you. Thank you so much.” Karen hung up the phone, her hand shaking. The concern in the operator ’s voice had been like salve on a burn. She’d wanted to pour out the whole horrible story to her, tell her to call the police and—

“That doesn’t smell half bad.”

Karen froze.

Hickey was standing in the kitchen door in his bloody towel. He looked into her eyes for a moment, then past her. His eyes went cold. “What are you doing by that phone?”

She felt a fist crushing her heart. To avoid Hickey’s gaze, she turned and looked at the phone. Tacked and taped around it were greeting cards, photographs, and Post-it notes. She reached into the midst of them and pulled a small photo off the wall.

“I was looking at Abby’s school picture. I still can’t believe this is happening.”

The microwave beeped loudly. She went to it and took out the étouffée, then spooned it into the rapidly firming omelet. She sensed Hickey moving closer, but she didn’t look up. With shaking hands she folded the egg over the crawfish.

His fingers fell on her forearm, sending a shock up her spine. “Look at me,” he said in a hard voice.

She did. His eyes were preternaturally alert, the eyes of a predator studying its prey.

“What?” she said.

Hickey just stared, registering each movement of her facial muscles, every pulse beat in her neck.

“It’s going to burn,” she said, pulling her arm away and reaching for the spatula. As she slid it under the omelet, he slipped his arms around her waist, as though he were a loving husband watching his wife make breakfast. His touch made her light-headed, but she forced herself to continue the motion, lifting the omelet from the pan and turning to drop it onto a plate. Hickey stayed with her as she moved.

After the omelet hit the plate, he said, “You’re a little wildcat, aren’t you?”

She did not reply.

“I still own you. Don’t forget that.”

She looked him full in the face at last. “How can I?”

His expression hardened, and she had a sudden premonition that he was going to push her to her knees. She didn’t know what she would do if he did.

“Bring the food back to the bed,” he said finally. Then he let his hands fall. “And bring a bottle of Tabasco with it.”

He turned and limped up the hallway.

She had no idea how long she’d been holding her breath, but it must have been a while, because after she exhaled, she couldn’t seem to get enough oxygen. Her legs became water. She gripped the counter to hold herself up, but it wasn’t enough. She had to lie across the Corian and grab the top of the splashboard to keep from falling.

THIRTEEN

Will sat in the chair by the bed, facing Cheryl. She was still propped against the headboard—gun beside her, QVC chattering in the background—but she had finally slipped on one of Will’s white pinpoint button-downs. For an hour he had probed her about Hickey, but to no avail. She had given him all the biography she felt safe giving, and beyond that she would only discuss her own interests, such as aromatherapy and Reiki.

Cheryl had somehow got it into her head that the jump from sofa dancing and prostitution to the laying on of hands required in Reiki energy therapy was a natural one. Will tried to lull her into carelessness by telling her about the success of certain alternative therapies with his arthritis, but once he got her on that subject, he couldn’t turn her back to what mattered.

He changed his tack by asking about Huey instead of Joe, but suddenly something buzzed against his side. He jumped out of the chair, thinking it was a cockroach, but when he looked down he realized it was the new SkyTel. The pager was still set to VIBRATE mode from the keynote dinner.

“What’s with you?” Cheryl asked.

“Something crawled over me.” He made a big show of looking under the chair cushion. “A damn roach or something.”

She laughed. “I wouldn’t be surprised. Hey, this brochure over here says they close the swimming pool at eight p.m. That’s kind of cheap, isn’t it?”

“They don’t want you swimming, they want you gambling in the casino downstairs.”

“Yeah.” Her eyes brightened. “You like gambling?” Will was dying to check the pager. He wasn’t on call, so the message had almost certainly come from Karen. The only other people who would be able to persuade his service to page him at this hour would be his partners, most of whom were at the convention. “Not really,” he said, trying to remember the thread of the conversation. “Life’s uncertain enough without that.”

“Party pooper.”

“Do you mind if I use the bathroom?”

Cheryl shrugged and returned her attention to a display of Peterboro baskets on QVC. “Hey, if you got to go . . .”

Will walked into the bathroom with the Jacuzzi and closed the door, then whipped the pager off his belt and punched the retrieve button. The green backlit screen scrolled:

YOU’VE GOT TO DO SOMETHING BEFORE
MORNING. ABBY IS GOING TO DIE NO MATTER
WHAT. KAREN. CONFIRM BY E-MAIL.

He scrolled the message again, staring in shock at the words as they trailed past.
Abby is going to die no matter what.
What did that mean? Was Abby having some sort of diabetic crisis? Karen had given her eight units of insulin in the early evening, and that should hold her until morning. Had Karen learned something new about Hickey’s plan?

You’ve got to do something before morning.
What the hell could he do without risking Abby’s life? But the answer to that question was contained within the message.
Abby is going to die no matter what.
Karen
had
learned something. And her meaning was clear: he would have to risk Abby’s life to save her life.

He looked around the bathroom as though something in it could help him. The only potential weapon he saw was a steam iron. As he stared at the thing, the phone beside the toilet rang. He looked at his watch. 3:00 A.M. Hickey’s regular check-in call. He heard Cheryl’s muffled voice through the bathroom door. A few words, then silence again. Or rather the droning chatter of the television. He turned on the hot water tap and waited for steam to rise from the basin.

Wetting another washcloth, he wrung it out and pressed it to his face. As the blood came into his cheeks, something strange and astonishing happened. His mental perspective simultaneously contracted and expanded, piercing the fog that had blinded him for the past hours. He suddenly saw three separate scenes with absolute clarity: Abby held hostage in the woods, Karen trapped in their house at Annandale, and himself standing in the marble-floored bathroom. He saw these scenes like a man in the first row of a theater, yet at the same time he saw the relationships between them as though from satellite altitude: visible and invisible filaments connecting six people in time and space, a soft machine with six moving parts. And burning at the center of his brain was awareness of a single fact: he had exactly thirty minutes to save Abby. That was all he would ever have. The thirty minutes between check-in calls. Whether it was this half hour or the next, that was the window of opportunity Hickey had left him.

He threw the washrag into the basin. He had to know what Cheryl knew.
Everything
she knew. There was a chance that she’d lied before, that she knew exactly where Abby was being held. But probably she didn’t. None of the previous fathers had dragged it out of her, and he was sure some had tried. How would they have tried? The gun was the obvious tool. But Abby gave Cheryl immunity to the gun, and to everything else. Because the effectiveness of any threat—torture with a steam iron, say—lay in the victim’s belief that his tormentor would follow through. And while they had the children, no one could.

Even if he somehow broke Cheryl, it wouldn’t be enough for her to spill what she knew. She would have to cooperate until Abby was found. Play her role for Hickey during the check-in calls—at least three of them, probably more. What could possibly persuade her to do that? The bruises on her body proved she could take punishment, and God alone knew what horrors Hickey had visited upon her in the past. Yet she stayed with him. She felt a loyalty that Will would never understand. And yet . . .

Her eyes had shone when she told him about the contact she’d had with Hollywood producers, the contact Hickey had acted so decisively to terminate. And she hadn’t tried to make it more than it was. She admitted the potential roles were soft-core porn, late-night cable stuff. But that had been fine with her. It was a step up, and Cheryl had known it. It was also a step away from Joe Hickey, and on some level she must have known that, too. Known it, and believed she’d been born for more than prostitution and crime.

But to betray Hickey, she would have to believe she could escape him. And that would take money. Enough to not merely run, but to vanish. To become someone else. She might like that idea. Leaving Cheryl the sofa dancer in the ashes of the past. But by the time Will got his hands on that much money, the final act would be playing itself out, and by Hickey’s rules. Earlier, while Cheryl made a trip to the bathroom, he had called downstairs and asked about cashing checks. The casino used TelChek, and that company had a $2,500 limit over ten days. Given his credit rating, he could probably persuade the casino manager to take a promissory note for a larger cash advance, but only if he intended to gamble that money in the casino.

“You okay in there?” Cheryl called.

“Fine.” Maybe he could take the $2,500, max out his credit cards at the ATM, and then parlay that stake into the kind of money he needed—

“Dumb,” he muttered at his reflection. The only games he knew how to play were blackjack and five-card-stud, and he hadn’t played either since medical school.

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.