24 Hours (41 page)

“Are you positive?”

“It was them. I saw Huey’s face. I saw your little girl in the passenger window.”

Will suddenly found it difficult to breathe. He craned his neck to look back, but the spot was far behind them now. Climbing skyward, he pulled the Baron around in a turn so tight the nose could have kissed the tail.

“What are you going to do?” Cheryl asked.

“Make another pass. You make damn sure it’s them. And belt yourself in.”

“Oh my God.”

TWENTY

“Let me tell you something about revenge,” Hickey said.

He and Karen were twenty-five miles south of Jackson, and his mood seemed to improve with every mile. She could see anticipation in the way he leaned into the wheel as he drove. She looked through her window. A long field of cotton was giving way to a field of house trailers. PREFABRICATED HOUSING! blared the banner hanging over the lot’s entrance. GET A DOUBLE-WIDE DELUXE TODAY!

“You remember what you asked me this morning?” Hickey asked.

“What?”

“Would I kill you instead of your kid?”

Karen nodded cautiously. Hickey was fond of games. Like a cruel child teasing a wounded animal, he liked to probe her with a sharp stick and watch her squirm.

“You still want it that way? If somebody has to die, I mean?”

“Yes.”

He nodded thoughtfully, as though considering a philosophical argument. “And you think that would do the trick? Your dying would hurt your husband enough to pay him back for killing my mother?”

“Will didn’t kill your mother.”
But someone should have,
she thought.
Before she birthed you, you son of a bitch.

“See, I don’t think it would,” Hickey said. “Hurt him that much, I mean. And the reason is interesting. See, you’re not his blood.”

She refused to look at him.

“If you died, he might miss you for a while. But the fact is, you’re just his wife. He can get another one. Damn easy, with all the money he’s got. A lot newer model, too. Hell, he might be tired of you already.”

Karen said nothing.

“But your little girl, now, that’s different. That’s blood of his blood. That’s
him,
the same way Mama and me were joined. And nearly six, that’s old enough for him to really know her. He loves that kid. Light of his life.”

At last she turned to him. “What are you telling me? Are you saying you’re going to kill Abby?”

He smiled. “I’m just explaining a concept to you. Hypothetically. Showing you what’s wrong with your idea from this morning.”

“This morning you told me I didn’t need to worry about that. You said nobody was going to die.”
And somebody already has,
she reminded herself, thinking of Stephanie.

Hickey tapped the wheel like a man content. “Like I said. Hypothetically.”

As soon as Will completed his turn and settled the Baron back over the oncoming traffic, he saw the small white car Cheryl had seen. Box-shaped and splotched with primer, it was piddling along compared to the other traffic, constantly being passed on the left. Cheryl was right: it was a Rambler. Will reduced power, slowing the plane until it was practically drifting up the interstate toward the car.

Then he saw it.

A small head in the passenger compartment of the Rambler, sitting close to a huge figure behind the wheel. A figure so large that it seemed to dwarf the car itself. The child was moving in the front seat, and as the Baron closed on the Rambler, Will made out the form and face he would have known by the dimmest candlelight. A relief unlike anything he had ever known rolled through him. Abby was alive. She was alive, and nothing on God’s earth would keep him from her now.

“Hello, Alpha-Juliet,” he said softly. He waggled his wings once, then again.

“What are you
doing?
” Cheryl wailed as the plane rocked left and right like a roller coaster. “I’m going to puke!”

“Waggling my wings,” he said with a smile.

Huey and Abby were singing “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider” when the airplane first appeared. It was flying straight toward them at treetop level, just to the right of the interstate.

“Look!” Huey cried. “A crop duster!”

“He’s not supposed to fly that low,” Abby said in a concerned voice. “I know, because my daddy flies an airplane.”

The plane shot past them. Abby whipped her head around and watched it climb, then vanish beyond her line of sight.

“I rode a airplane once,” Huey said. “When Joey took me to Disneyland.”

“You mean Disney World.”

“No, they got two. The old one’s in California. That’s the one we went to. Joey says they’re both the same, but I think the one in Florida’s bigger.”

“I think so, too.” Abby patted Belle in her lap. “I met the real Belle there. And the real Snow White.”

“The real ones?”

“Uh-huh. And I got dresses just like they had.”

Huey’s smile disappeared. He reached into the side pocket of his coveralls, fished around, then brought out his empty hand.

“If I made you something,” he said softly, “would you like it?”

“Sure I would.”

“It probably wouldn’t be near as nice as all the things you got at home.”

“Sure it would. Presents you make are always better than ones you buy.”

He seemed to weigh her sincerity about this. Then he reached back into the pocket and brought out what he had spent the previous night carving.

Abby opened her mouth in wonder. “Where did you get that?”

“I made it for you.”

“You
made
that?”

What had been a chunk of cedar the day before had been transformed by Huey’s knife into a figure of a bear holding a little girl on its lap. The fine detail made Abby’s Barbie look like a bland store mannequin. The little girl on the bear’s lap had hair falling to her shoulders like Abby’s, wore a jumper like hers, and held a small doll in her hands. But what riveted Abby’s attention was the bear itself. It wore no clothes, but on its face sat a pair of heavy glasses, just like Huey’s. The bear was clearly watching out for the little girl.

“You really made that?” she asked again.

Huey nodded shyly. “Beauty and the Beast. You said it was your favorite. I tried to make it as pretty as I could. I know you like pretty things.”

She took the carving from his hand. The wood was still warm from Huey’s pocket. But more than that, it felt
alive
somehow. Hard and soft at the same time. As though the bear and the little girl might move in her hands at any moment.

“I love it,” she said. “I
love
it.”

Huey’s eyes lit up. “You do?”

Abby nodded, her eyes still on the figures.

“Maybe you’ll remember me sometimes, then.”

She looked up at him with curiosity in her eyes. “Of course I will.”

Huey suddenly cried out and hit the brake pedal. Abby grabbed the dashboard, fearing they were about to smash into something.

“He’s going to crash!” Huey yelled.

The airplane was back, only this time it was right over the road and zooming straight at them. The cars ahead were slowing down, some even pulling onto the shoulder. The plane skated to Abby’s right, toward the trees, but it was getting larger every second. As she stared, its wings rocked up and down: first the right wing, then the left, then both again.

A strange thrill went through her. “He wiggled his wings!”

The plane’s engines began to overpower the sound of the car. Its pilot rocked the wings again, as though waving right at Abby, then rocketed over the car. She clapped her hands with delight.

“My daddy does that! Just the same way! My daddy . . .”

Her face suddenly felt hot, and she had to squeeze her legs together to keep from wetting herself. Her daddy was in that plane. She knew it. And nothing in her life had ever felt quite the way that knowing that did. She reached out and touched Huey’s arm.

“I think everything’s going to be okay now.”

As the Baron blasted past the Rambler, Will saw Abby’s face pressed to the glass of the passenger window. Tears temporarily blinded him.

“I told you!” Cheryl cried. “You saw them?”

“Yes,” he said, wiping his eyes with his sleeve.

“What are you going to do now?”

“I’m going to land.”

“On the
road?
”

“Absolutely.”

Cheryl’s face went so white that Will thought she might pass out.

“Tighten that seat belt.”

As she scrabbled at her belt, Will climbed to five hundred feet and took the Baron to a hundred and eighty knots.

“Where are you going? You said you were going to land. You’re leaving them behind.”

“We’ve got something to do first. I want you to watch for a silver Camry.”

Cheryl’s hand flew to her mouth. She had heard Zwick on the radio, and she knew who was driving a silver Camry.

“Keep it together,” Will said. “Everything’s fine.”

He hated to let the Rambler out of his sight for even one minute, but he could cover five miles of interstate in ninety seconds, and if Hickey was close enough to give him problems on the ground, he needed to know.

“When you land,” Cheryl said, “what about the cars and stuff? I mean, there’s eighteen-wheelers down there.”

“I’ll try not to hit them.”

“Jesus Christ. How did I get here?”

“Joe Hickey put you here. It’s that simple.”

“I see a Camry! It’s silver. It’s the old kind, the swoopy one that looks like a Lexus.”

Zwick had said the car Hickey stole was a ’92 model. Will was pretty sure the ’92 Camry was the “swoopy” one, not the more generic model. He climbed quickly to a thousand feet. He would have liked nothing better than to descend and see whether Karen was in that car, but if he got close enough to see her, Hickey could spot him. The silver Camry below might not be the one Hickey had stolen—there were a lot of silver Camrys in the world—but it could be. He needed to get on the ground fast.

He executed a teardrop turn, pointed the Baron south at two hundred knots, and began to consider the task he had set himself.

There was really only one way to stop a car with an unarmed airplane. Land in front of it. That left him two choices. He could fly past the Rambler, then turn and land against oncoming traffic, which would greatly increase the odds of killing himself and a lot of other people. Or he could fly along with the flow of traffic—as he was doing now—match his speed to that of the cars below, and drop down into the first open stretch he saw ahead of the Rambler.

“There it is!” Cheryl said, pointing through the windshield.

She had good eyes. About a mile and a half ahead, a long line of cars had backed up behind a slow-moving vehicle in the right lane, while faster moving traffic shot past them on the left.

Will cut his airspeed and dropped to four hundred feet. The vehicles below were moving between seventy and eighty miles per hour. At ninety knots, he was rapidly overtaking them, but also moving into position to land in front of the Rambler. As he approached the congested line of cars, he lowered his landing gear and went to full flaps. This further reduced his speed, bringing him more in line with the speed of the vehicles below, though he was still overtaking them.

When he descended to a hundred feet, fear announced itself in the pit of his stomach. This was no deserted stretch of Delta highway. This was I-55, where cars and trucks managed to slam into each other every day without the help of rogue airplanes. He could smell the exhaust of the big diesel trucks below. From this altitude they looked like aircraft carriers on a concrete sea.

Airspeed was eighty-five knots, still too fast. He would have given a lot for a cold winter day, good dense air for the propellers to bite into and to keep his stall speed low. This was the worst weather for what he was about to do. Cheryl leaned forward, watching the concrete rise toward them and endlessly repeating Hail Marys. Apparently, if she was going to die, she wanted to see it coming. A perverse instinct, perhaps, but a human one.

“Can you do it?” she asked softly.

A brief crosswind tried to push the tail around, but Will corrected for it. “We’re about to find out.”

She pointed through the windshield. “There they are!”

He shut everything out of his mind but the scene ahead. In the right lane: the white Rambler, moving slowly, seeming to pull an endless chain of cars along behind it, cars which were actually trying to whip into the left lane so that they could pass the cars holding them back. In the left lane: the fast movers, cars and trucks racing up and passing the sideshow in the right lane at eighty miles per hour. In front of the Rambler, where he needed to set down, were the speeding cars in the left lane and a couple of dawdlers in the right. A Mercury Sable about sixty yards ahead of the Rambler, and a minivan some distance ahead of that. An intricate ballet of mechanical dancers that would remain in their present relationships for a very brief time.

It was now or never.

He centered the Baron on the broken white line and dropped toward the roof of the Rambler at eighty-two knots. He couldn’t see what was happening behind him, but he felt sure that the sight of a twin-engine plane dropping toward the road with its gear and flaps down and a wingspan as wide as the interstate had sent a lot of feet to a lot of brake pedals.

The Baron overtook the Rambler with a speed differential of thirty miles per hour. Will flew half the distance to the Mercury Sable, then eased the yoke forward and and reduced power further. The Baron seemed to stutter in midair, as though he had applied the brakes to a car.

Then it fell like a stone.

Three miles behind the Baron, Hickey gaped and pointed through the windshield of the stolen Camry.

“Look at that crazy son of a bitch! If he’s got to crash, the least he could do is get off the highway to do it.”

Karen said nothing. The instant the Baron had dropped out of the sky and lined itself up over the interstate, her heart had jumped into her throat. It had to be Will. It
had
to be.