24 Hours

ELEVEN

Huey stumbled through the dark with Abby in his arms and fear bubbling from his heart. The no-color was all around, flooding in from the edges of his sight, leaving only the glowing cabin windows swirling in the dark. Abby shrieked endlessly, so long and so loudly that he didn’t know how she was breathing. He wished to God he could put his hands over his ears, but he needed them to carry her.

Her screams were like water he had to run through. And the fear in them was the same fear he had known as a little boy. It set something vibrating in his chest, like a bell struck with a hammer. Joey had said to tie her up, but Huey didn’t want to tie her up. Joey said to strangle her if he heard a shot, and Huey thanked Jesus he hadn’t heard one. The only way he could hurt Abby was if he saw another face on top of her face, some other girl’s face. An older girl had once taken him into the woods and showed him things, then asked him to pull down his pants. After he did, she yelled to a dozen boys who came running out of the trees, laughing and jeering at him. He wanted to twist that girl’s head around and around until it came right off, like a chicken’s.

Huey had never felt so twisted up inside, but he knew one thing. He couldn’t live without Joey. Life before Joey was a fearful blur, and the idea of life without him would not even fit into Huey’s head. Creatures like Abby were like lanterns in the dark, but he could never keep them. In the end, Joey was all he had.

Midnight had passed, and the Jenningses’ Victorian house stood dark and silent on its hill. Crickets cheeped in the pine trees; a truck droned out on the interstate; but the house itself was silent.

A scream pierced the night.

Inside the master bedroom, Karen crouched over Hickey’s wounded thigh on the sleigh bed. Naked but for a towel she had lain across his midsection, Hickey held the bottle of Wild Turkey in his left hand and a halogen lamp from Will’s study in his right. He aimed the light wherever she told him to, keeping silent during most of the work, but occasionally yelling when the needle pierced his unanesthetized flesh.

Karen worked the U-shaped suture needle with almost careless speed, mating the edges of the wound, tying knots, moving on. It was amazing how much damage one slash with a good scalpel could do. Hickey hadn’t lost enough blood to threaten his life, but he’d bled enough to scare the hell out of someone unused to trauma. Karen was grateful to see that she had in fact nicked the base of his penis with her panicked stroke (a wound that required two stitches) and hoped this would discourage him from trying to force her to finish what she’d begun earlier.

“How many to go?” he asked in a taut voice.

“We’re only half done. You should have taken that lidocaine.”

He gulped another slug of Wild Turkey as she jabbed the needle through his skin. “This is all the shot I need. Just hurry it up.”

She sewed five more stitches, then paused to stretch her wrists. As she did, something that had been bothering her from the beginning slipped out. “Why us?” she said softly.

“What?”

“I said, ‘Why us?’”

Hickey reached out with the bottle and forced her chin up, so that she was looking at his face. “Are you that dumb? Are you that fucking dumb?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why not you? Huh? You think because you live out here in this suburban palace, you’re immune to pain? My mother had throat cancer. That’s the worst, man. ‘Why me?’ she’d rasp all the time. ‘Dear Jesus, why me?’ I’d ask the same thing. Why my mother? Why not my shit-for-brains old man? I’d look at the ceiling like God was up there listening and ask why. Then I finally figured it out. The joke was on me.” Hickey shook his bottle, spilling amber fluid on Karen’s knee. “The joke’s on you, too, June Cleaver.”

“Why?”

“You’re a human being, that’s why. So why not you, okay? Why not you?”

Karen bit her lip and gazed intently at Hickey. Bitterness was etched in every line of his face, and his eyes were like black wells with a film of oil floating on them. “It must be awful to be you,” she said.

“Sometimes,” he conceded. “But tonight it’s worse to be you.”

Will stood at the picture window of the bedroom, staring out over the Gulf of Mexico. The Cypress suite, despite its luxurious appointments, had begun to close around him like a prison cell, and the knowledge that the dark gulf stretched south to the Yucatan somehow calmed him.

The first seconds after he realized that Huey had recaptured Abby had been hellish. Even armed with a pistol, Cheryl had felt compelled to lock herself in one of the marble bathroms for protection, so terrible had been his rage. He could have killed Hickey at that moment, if the man had appeared before him. But of course he hadn’t. Hickey had designed his Chinese box precisely so that this scenario would never occur.

Even as Will’s rage dissipated, his frustration grew. There was so much he didn’t know. How had Karen gotten the drop on Hickey? Probably by sneaking the. 38 from the top of their closet. But even so, why would Hickey respond to her threat? He had control over Abby, and so long as he did, a gun would do Karen no good. But apparently it had. Or something had. Before Hickey hung up the telephone, Will had heard him yell something about being stabbed. Had Karen stabbed him? Had she snapped under the stress and tried to kill him? No. Karen never lost control. That was axiomatic. Her father, the master sergeant, had drilled into his daughter a self-discipline that was unnerving. Whatever had happened, Will had no way to discover it. He would just have to wait.

The only lights on the gulf now belonged to a lone freighter sailing west, probably to off-load coffee or bananas or God-knew-what-else in New Orleans. There were men sleeping on that ship, a full crew less than three miles away, men who knew nothing of his problem and could do nothing to help him if they did. There were several hundred doctors in this very hotel, many of whom Will knew personally-yet none could help him. He was trapped in an unbreakable cage constructed by a madman named Joe Hickey.

No, he thought. Madman is probably inaccurate. True madness was rare, if you barred disorders caused by organic disease. During his psychiatry rotation in medical school, Will had treated patients at the state mental hospital at Whitfield, several of them classified as criminally insane. After a while, he had come to the conclusion that some of the men were quite sane. They had pursued their goals and desires with the single-minded drive of men who succeeded in business or the arts or politics. It was simply that society found itself unable to admit that their chosen goals could be the goals of sane men. But Will knew different. All men had atavistic desires, sometimes savage ones. Some were merely better at suppressing them than others. And Hickey did not belong in the first category. He acted on his impulses, regardless of law or danger. His overt motive was simple enough: money. But it seemed to Will that if a man was willing to flout the law, there were easier and less risky ways to steal large amounts of money. Hickey’s plan was constructed to satisfy deeper urges than money. And Will needed to figure out what those were. Very soon.

He was having trouble keeping his mind on track. He remembered the ride to the airport that morning, when he’d asked Karen to bring Abby to the convention at the last minute. He’d had a bad feeling about her refusal. A premonition. Nothing melodramatic, just a feeling that if Karen wasn’t with him on this trip, their lives might skew farther apart than they already had. In his wildest flights of paranoia, he could not have imagined something like this. But he had imagined that without Karen at his side this weekend, he might find himself in one of those situations he’d experienced many times before. Situations in which he had always chosen to spend the night alone rather than accept an offer of female company. But during the ride to the airport, something had been whispering below the level of consciousness, a voice born during long months of miscommunication and silent rejections, whispering that a channel for release was presenting itself. And a part of him had heeded that voice. That knowledge now ate like acid at his heart.

It was a cliche of a cliche. You never knew what you had until it was gone. The idea that Abby could be murdered was so paralyzing that Will did not allow himself to consider it a real possibility. He would get her back, no matter what it cost him. Money. Blood. His life. But even with the best possible outcome, something irrevocable had already occurred. He had left his wife and child alone. Exposed. It was nothing that millions of fathers didn’t do every week, but in this case, some part of him had wanted to be alone on this trip. He could have pushed Karen harder-and earlier-really convinced her that he wanted her with him on this weekend. But he hadn’t. It wasn’t solely his fault. Organizing the Junior League’s sixtieth anniversary flower show was comparable to planning double-blind trials for a new drug, and missing the event itself would be Junior League suicide for the chairperson. But deep down, Will suspected, Karen wanted to commit Junior League suicide. And he had not done enough to help her.

“What are you thinking about over there?” asked Cheryl.

She came out of the bathroom and climbed back into the bed, using the oversized pillows to prop herself against the headboard. The torn cocktail dress was tied around her waist. She wore the black bra as though it were a Madonna-style bustier. Will supposed that to a girl who had turned tricks in cars behind a strip club, wearing only a bra in front of a stranger was no big deal.

“Not speaking to me?” she asked.

Cheryl was the kind of person who couldn’t tolerate silence. Will shrugged and turned back to the lights of the freighter.

“Look, you’re going to get your daughter back,” she said. “It’s just a waiting game. You pay some money-which you don’t give a shit about compared to your little girl-and you get her back in the morning. You ought to try to sleep. I’ve got to take the calls from Joey, so I have to stay awake. But you should crash. I’ll wake you up when it’s time.”

“You think I can sleep with this going on?”

“You need to. You’re going to be a basket case in the morning if you don t.

“I can’t.”

“Yes, you can.”

“Leave me alone, okay?”

“Look, you’re just standing there blaming yourself and trying to figure out a way to rescue your little girl. That’s what they all do. But you can’t. You’re not Mel Gibson, for Christ’s sake. Mel Gibson isn’t even Mel Gibson, you know? You save your little girl by paying Joey the money. It’s that simple.”

“I should trust Joe?”

“Joey’s got a motto on this deal, Doc. You know what it is?”

“What?”

“The kid always makes it.”

Will turned from the window.

“I’m serious,” she said. “He’s said it a hundred times. That’s how we’ve managed to keep on doing this. That’s how we made all our money.”

“And every child you’ve done this to has lived? Been returned to its parents?”

“Good as new. I’m telling you, you’ve got to chill.” She barked a laugh that gave the lie to the classic beauty of her face. “You gotta chill, Will!” she sang out, delighted by the rhyme. “You’re going to give yourself a stroke.”

He turned back to the window. Cheryl’s reassurances didn’t mesh with the voice on the other end of the phone. There was hatred in Hickey’s voice, a resentment so deep that Will could not see it stopping short of the maximum pain it could inflict. Yet in the other cases, it had. If Cheryl and Hickey could be believed.

“You want me to help you calm down?” Cheryl asked.

He looked at her reflection in the window. She had taken a brush from her purse and was pulling it through her blond hair. “How?” he asked. “Drugs?”

“I told you, I’m clean now. But I can chill you out. Whatever, you know. Back rub?”

“No, thanks.”

“Front rub?”

He turned to her, unsure he had heard correctly. She stopped brushing her hair.

“It’s no big deal,” she said. “You’ll sleep like a baby. All guys do.”

“Are you kidding?”

She smiled knowingly. “Don’t worry. Wifey won’t ever know about it.”

“I said no, okay? Jesus.”

“I was just trying to help you relax. I know you’re upset.”

“What’s the deal here, Cheryl? Is sex the only way you know how to relate to men?”

She turned to the television, her lower lip pooched out like an angry child’s. “Not quite, Oprah.”

“A while ago you gave me your sob story about how terrible it was to be a whore. Now you’re acting like one.”

“Hey, I was just trying to make this easier on you.”

“Do you make the same offer to all your victims?”

The word “victim” didn’t sit well with her. “I saw you looking at me during the speech, and I knew you were interested.”

“Bullshit.”

She cut her eyes at him, and they held a disturbing knowledge. “My mistake, I guess. What do I know? I’m just a dumb stripper, right?” She picked up the remote and flipped through some channels, finally settling on the Home Shopping Network.

Will turned back to the window. As he searched for the tiny lights of the freighter, he saw movement in the reflection of the room. Focusing on it, he saw Cheryl remove her bra. He didn’t turn, but he saw her settle deeper on the pillows and begin slowly stroking her breasts. He tried to watch the freighter, but he couldn’t concentrate. It was absurd. This woman had helped kidnap his daughter; now she was coming on to him as if they’d just met in the casino downstairs. Cheryl moaned softly, drawing his eyes to her reflection again. Her movements were impossible to ignore.

“Why are you doing that?”

“To show you you’re no different than the rest. And that it’s okay.”

“Put your bra back on.”

She didn’t stop moving her hands. “You’re saying that, but you’d rather I left it off.”

“Put it back on, Cheryl.”

“They look good, don’t they?”

He turned toward the bed at last. “If you like implants.”

She laughed. “Sure they’re implants. But they’re good. Not like the local junk you see around here. Joey flew me out to L.A. to have it done, when I was a featured dancer. I got the same doctor that did Demi. He said mine looked just as good.” She cupped them in her palms. “Just as good.”

They did look like perfect male fantasies, but they did not look natural. As a doctor, Will had seen more breasts than he cared to think about, and Cheryl’s Penthouse-style showpieces had almost nothing in common with the female form in its natural state.

“Cover yourself,” he said.

“Are you sure?”

“I don’t care what you do.” He turned back to the window.

“Why don’t you at least face the truth about something, Will?”

It wasn’t the first time she had used his Christian name, but he still didn’t like it. “What?”

“When you were first giving your speech, and you saw me down there watching you, you were fantasizing about me.”

“You’re wrong.”

“You can’t lie about that. You checked me out from head to toe. Then you stared at my panties when I uncrossed my legs.”

“You made them too obvious to ignore.”

“But you were interested. A lot more interested than you were in your speech. And if it wasn’t for the reason we’re in this room together now, we might be here for another reason.”

“You’re wrong,” he said again, annoyed by the accuracy of her instincts.

“Am I?”

“Yes.”

“What I saw in your face tonight I’ve seen in lots of guys’ faces. Decent guys, I mean. I know you. For a few years now, you’ve been wishing you had someone like me to sleep with. You love your wife, you wouldn’t trade her for anything, but she just doesn’t do it for you. She doesn’t understand what you need. How you need it, and how often. Nothing, really. She’s making a nest, adding twigs, thinking about the little chickadees. You’re helping with the nest, but you miss hunting.”

“Where’d you get that? Cosmo?”

“I don’t remember. But it’s on the money, isn’t it?”

He turned back to the bed, where Cheryl was enacting a fifteen-year-old boy’s dream of paradise. “This isn’t going to happen. You don’t want sex. And you don’t want to ‘relax’ me. What you really want is to somehow make me culpable in what you’re doing.”

“What’s culpable?” She looked genuinely confused.

“You want to make me part of this. To involve me, to pull me down to your level, so that what you’re doing doesn’t seem so horrible. But it is horrible. And you know it.”

Cheryl jerked the bra up over her breasts and stared at the television.

He turned and laid his palms flat on the window-pane. The thick glass was cool from the air conditioner, but he knew there was a warm wind blowing outside. Cool compared to the stagnant air hanging over the scrub and stunted pines growing inland from the beach, but warm compared to the frigid air in the casino suite.

“We never finished our conversation from before,” Cheryl said.

“What are you talking about?”

“When you asked how I wound up doing this. Kidnapping kids.”

“You told me your story.”

“I left out a few things.” She looked the way Abby did when she was trying to conceal some surprise. “After Joey made me stop being a featured dancer, he put me back into Jackson. New Orleans and Jackson. Sometimes the club down in Hattiesburg, but that was down-market. Mostly college kids, lining up to get off in their pants.”

“You should go on Howard Stern.”

“Maybe I should. But you should listen to me, Doc. There’s a lesson here for you.”

“I’m on pins and needles.”

“Joey put me back in the clubs, but not really to dance. He started coming in every night I was on, but not to watch me. He came to talk to the people. The owners, the bouncers, the customers. He bought rounds for everybody. Bought them sofa dances. Pretty soon he got a handle on who was coming in there. And it would blow your mind, Doc. Lawyers, doctors, stockbrokers, aldermen. Ministers, for Christ’s sake. Ministers sneaking in there to get a sofa dance. What a crazy kick. Anyway, Joey got a handle on all these guys. And then we started up a little business on the side.”

“What business was that?”

“Blackmail. These guys got addicted to me, see? I mean, I may not like doing it, but I can give a sofa dance. I took those guys places they’d never even dreamed about. They’re dropping fifty bucks a pop for three minutes, and happy as pigs in slop. Pretty soon they’re offering lots more and asking if I do any after-hours dancing.” She wrinkled her nose. “Dancing, right? So, to the right ones-the rich, married ones-I said, Sure, honey. And I let them take me to a motel after work. A motel run by a guy who was tight with Joey, who had special cameras set up in a certain room. Once we got inside that room, I got those guys to do things they would die before they let their wives or bosses see. They left there with their minds blown and their lives in Joey’s pocket. And you know something? I never felt sorry for them. Not once. Every one of those bastards left his wife and kids at home to come into that club. They took me back to that room to screw me senseless, not giving a damn if I lived or died after. Every one of them begged me to do it without a condom, and most of them wanted… God, I don’t even want to think about it. And these were pillars of the community, you know? So, when you stand there acting like you’re above it, I know it’s bullshit, okay? You play your little game, but I know.”

“I’m not above it,” Will said. “No man is. Or woman, for that matter. It’s called human frailty. It’s pathetic, but it’s the story of life. You don’t have any special knowledge. I think my wife knows everything you just told me, even without experiencing it. She just chooses not to let it touch her.”

“So, she’s above it, huh? Maybe that’s why she isn’t doing it for you in the bedroom.”

“You still haven’t told me how or why you switched from blackmail to kidnapping.”

Cheryl drank off what was left of her rum and Coke. “Blackmail gets messy. You can’t predict what guys will do when you hit them with the pictures. The reality of it. The end of life as they know it. Most of them can’t wait to pay, of course. But you never know. One guy wanted copies to give to his wife and everybody at his office.” She smiled at the memory. “But some of them freak. They run home and confess to their wives, or try to kill Joey, or…”

She trailed off, and in the moments of silence that followed, Will knew what she had not said. “Some of them kill themselves,” he finished. “Right?”

She squinted at the television. “One guy did. It was bad. He left his copy of the tape playing on the VCR when he shot himself. His wife found him. Can you imagine?” She poured more rum into her glass, straight this time. “The cops nearly got us for that one. After that, Joey decided we were going about it the wrong way. The thing to do, he figured, was a small number of jobs, but get the maximum bang for the risk.”

“Kidnapping?”

She nodded. “When he was working the blackmail gigs, he saw that what these guys were most scared of-way more than hurting their wives-was their kids. They couldn’t take the idea that their kids would lose all respect for them. Their kids were what they lived for. So, the way to get the most money was to make the guys pay for their kids.”

“That’s a hell of a lot riskier than blackmail.”

“It is if you do it the way everybody else does it. That’s like asking the FBI to stomp on you with a SWAT team. Joey’s smarter than that. But I don’t have to tell you, do I?”

Will stepped to his left and collapsed into the chair by the window. After all that had happened, it was Cheryl’s last story that brought the full weight of reality crashing down upon him. He wasn’t special. He was merely the latest in a long line of fools victimized by a man who specialized in exploiting human weakness. Hickey had made a profession of it, an art, and Will couldn’t see any way to extricate himself or his family from the man’s web.

“Tell me one thing.”

“What?”

“Did any of the other fathers take you up on your offer?”

Cheryl intertwined her fingers and put her hands behind her head, which showed her implants to best advantage. A strange smile touched her lips. “Two out of five. The others tortured themselves all night. Those two slept like babies.”

Despite his speech about human frailty, Will couldn’t believe that fathers whose children were in mortal danger would have sex with one of their kidnappers. It seemed incomprehensible. And yet, he knew it was possible. “You’re lying,” he said, trying to reassure himself.

“Whatever you say. But I know what I know.”

Special Agent Bill Chalmers thanked a black homicide detective named Washington and closed the door of the police interrogation room. Dr. McDill and his wife had followed the FBI agent’s car the few blocks from the Federal Building to police headquarters, and what they had come for now lay on the metal table in front of them. A stack of mug books two and a half feet high.

“I know it’s not great,” Chalmers said. “But it’s more private than the squad room.”

“There must be thousands of photos here,” McDill said.

“Easily. I’ll be outside, accessing the National Crime Information Center computer. I’ll check all past records of kidnappings-for-ransom in the Southeast, then hit the names ‘Joe,’ ‘Cheryl,’ and ‘Huey’ for criminal records under actual names and aliases. ‘Joe’ is common as dirt, but the others might ring a bell. Also, I talked to my boss by cell phone on the way over. We may see him down here before long. Right now he’s waking up some bank officers to set up flags on large wire transfers going to the Gulf Coast tomorrow morning.” Chalmers looked at his watch. “I guess I mean this morning.”

McDill sighed. “Could we have some coffee or something?”

“You bet. How do you take it?”

“Black for me. Margaret?”

“Is it possible they might have tea?” she asked in a soft voice.

Chalmers gave her a smile. “You never know. I’ll check.”

After he went out, Margaret sat down at the table and opened one of the mug books. The faces staring up from the page belonged to people the McDills used all their money and privilege to avoid. The faces shared many features. Flash-blinded, dope-fried eyes. Hollow cheeks. Bad teeth. Nose rings. Tattoos. And stamped into every one, as though dyed into the skin, a bitter hopelessness that never looked further than the next twenty-four hours.

“Are we doing the right thing?” Margaret asked, looking up at her husband.

McDill gently squeezed her shoulder. “Yes.”

“How do you know?”

“The right thing is always the hardest thing.”

Abby sat scrunched in the corner of the ratty sofa, crying inconsolably, her Barbie held tight against her. Huey sat on the floor six feet away, looking stricken.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said. “I just did what Joey told me to. I have to do what Joey says.”

“He stole me from my mom and dad!” Abby wailed. “You did, too!”

“I didn’t want to! I wish your mama was here right now.” Huey squeezed his hands into fists. “I wish my mama was here.”

“Where is she?” Abby asked, pausing in mid-wail.

“Heaven.” Huey said it as though he didn’t quite believe it. “How come you ran away? It’s because I’m ugly, isn’t it?”

Abby resumed crying, but she shook her head.

“You don’t have to say it. I know. The kids in my school ran too. Nobody liked me. But I thought we was friends. All I wanted to do was be nice. But you ran. How come?”

“I told you. You stole me away from my mom.”

“That’s not it. You don’t like me because I look like a monster.”

Abby fixed her swollen eyes on him. “What you look like doesn’t matter. Don’t you know that?”

Huey blinked. “What?”

“Belle taught me that.”

“Who?”

Abby rubbed her eyes and held out her gold-lamegowned Barbie. “This is Belle. Beauty and the Beast Belle. She’s my favorite Disney princess because she reads books. She wants to be something someday. Belle says it doesn’t matter what you look like. It only matters what you feel inside. In your heart. And what you do.”

Huey’s mouth hung slack, as though he were staring at a magical fairy risen from the grass.

“You never saw Beauty and the Beast?” Abby said incredulously.

He shook his head.

“Let’s pretend I’m Belle, and you’re Beast.”

“Beast?” He looked suddenly upset. “I’m a beast?”

“Good Beast.” Abby wiped her runny nose. “Beast after he turns nice. Not mean like at first.”

She slid off the couch and held Belle out to him. “Say something Beast says in the movie. Oh, I forgot. You missed it. Just say something nice. And call me ‘Belle,’ remember?”

Huey was at a loss. Tentatively, he said, “I’m not going to let anything happen to you, Belle. I’m going to keep you safe till morning comes, and your mama comes to get you.”

Abby smiled. “Thank you, Beast. And if the villagers come and try to kill you, me and Mrs. Potts and Chip will make them go away. They won’t get you!”

Huey swallowed, his eyes bright.

“Now you say, ‘Thank you, Belle.’”

“Thank you, Belle.”

Abby petted the doll’s hair. “Do you want to brush her hair? Just pretendlike.”

Huey reached out shyly and petted Belle’s hair with his enormous hand.

“Good, Beast,” Abby murmured. “Good Beast.”