24 Hours

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.

“Thinking.”

“Don’t strain your brain.”

He opened the sample case and made sure everything that was supposed to be there was there. Then he closed his eyes and summoned Abby from memory, bringing her to center stage in his mind. Her smiling face and sturdy little body, her beyond-her-years determination, forged during her constant battle with juvenile diabetes. She lived on the knife edge of disaster, yet considered herself far luckier than most children. Will’s pride in her was boundless. Abby was the nourishing flame that burned at the center of his soul. And the woman in the next room had put her life at risk. Dropped her down a black hole of terror. Whatever disadvantages fate had handed Cheryl, she had chosen to help Hickey of her own free will-not once, but six times, by her own admission. Six children put through hell. Twelve parents. Whatever she had to endure now was only what she had asked for.

He walked back into the bedroom as though everything was fine. But instead of stopping at the chair, he walked to the edge of the bed and looked down at Cheryl, much as he might have at Karen when he wanted to make love with her.

She looked up, her eyes curious. “What?”

“I want to kiss you.”

Her cheeks went pink. “You what?”

“I want to kiss you.”

“I don’t do that,” she said in a flustered voice. “That’s too personal.”

“But I want to.”

She bit her lip. “No kiss.” But then she undid the top four buttons of the dress shirt and slid down a cup of her bra. “You can kiss here.”

He smiled and bent toward her breast.

“What changed your mind?” she asked in a softer voice.

As his cheek brushed her skin, he put his hand across her as though to prop himself on the bed, then closed his hand around the butt of her Walther. When he rose up and pointed the automatic at her face, she blinked with incomprehension.

“What are you doing?”

“Pull up your bra.”

She did.

Will took the pager from his belt and handed it to her. “Read the last message.”

“What?”

An ex-hooker would know all about pagers. “Hit the RETRIEVE button!”

She fumbled with the device, then found the button. He could see the words scrolling on the LCD screen, her eyes narrowing as she read them.

“I just got that message from my wife. Do you understand what it means?”

She shook her head.

“Joe is going to kill my little girl. No matter what I do. Whether he gets the ransom or not.”

“He is not!”

“If Karen says he is, he is.”

“Joey would never let her send this message. This is some kind of mistake.”

“No mistake, Cheryl. Karen is smarter than Joe, and she found a way. It’s that simple. Now, you’re about to tell me where Abby is.”

She blinked at him. “I can’t. I don’t know where she

“For your sake, I hope you do.”

Confidence suddenly returned to her face. “Are you going to shoot me? Come on, Doc. We’ve been over this.”

“I’m not going to shoot you. Not with a bullet, anyway.”

Something in his eyes must have gotten through, because a shadow of fear played over her face. “What do you mean?” she said in a higher voice. “I told you before. Even if I did know, and you made me tell, the cops couldn’t get to her in time. Joey’s going to call back in twenty-five minutes. If I don’t answer, Abby’s dead. It’s that simple. And if I do, and I say one word, the same thing. And you don’t know what that word is. So give me back my gun, and let’s forget this happened.”

A surreal sense of detachment was settling over Will. “Remember when you said there was nothing I could do to you that hadn’t been done before?”

She gave him a blank look. “Yeah?”

“You were wrong about that. Do you remember my presentation last night?”

She bit her lip as she thought back.

“Stand up,” he said.

“Screw you.”

He transferred the Walther to his left hand and grabbed her arm with his right. He was surprised to feel no pain. His brain had to be pumping out endorphins at five times the normal rate.

“Unhook my belt,” he said.

“What?”

“Do it!”

She reached up and unfastened his belt.

“Pull it out.”

“What?”

“The belt, damn it. Pull it out of the loops.”

She did.

“Bring that chair over here.” He pointed not at the French chaise he had been using, but at a straight-backed chair against the wall. “Put it here by the bed and sit down.”

“Why?”

He slapped her face.

A bitterness beyond anything he’d ever seen came into her eyes. But with the bitterness came something else. Familiarity. This was a language she understood. She climbed off the bed, picked up the chair, and brought it back.

“Sit in it.”

She did.

He put down the gun and wrapped the belt around her torso and the chair back, then buckled it. From the bathroom closet he took a terry-cloth robe belt and used it to tie her lower legs to the legs of the chair.

“I’m going to scream,” she said.

“Go ahead. Scream your head off. Then you explain to Joe why he won’t be getting his money in the morning.”

“You’re killing your kid,” she said, as though talking to a man who had lost his reason. “Don’t you get that?”

Will stood back and considered his handiwork. Screaming could become a problem, even if Cheryl didn’t mean for it to. Fear was an unpredictable thing. He went into the other room and brought back a pair of socks with his sample case, then stuffed them into Cheryl’s mouth. Her eyes went wide.

He dragged the chair against the bed, then bent and flipped Cheryl and the chair up onto the mattress. From there it was simple to rock the chair legs and move her to the middle of the bed. She lay with her legs molded in the shape of the chair, feet sticking into the air like a woman in stirrups.

“If you listened to my speech,” he said, “you know a little about paralyzing muscle relaxants.”

Cheryl looked confused. She probably hadn’t listened to his program. She had been trying to seduce him with her eyes, all the time thinking about the moment when she’d have to pull the gun upstairs. Unless she could con him into taking her into his room in the hope of sex, which had probably been her original plan.

Will removed a vial of Anectine and a conventional syringe from his sample case. Cheryl’s eyes locked onto the syringe as he popped off its cap, poked the needle through the rubber seal of the vial, and drew sixty milligrams of Anectine into the barrel. Many people had an irrational fear of needles. It was something you dealt with all the time in anesthesiology.

“This is succinylcholine,” he said in a calm voice. “Shortly after I inject it, your skeletal muscles will cease to function. The skeletal muscles are the ones that move your bones. But your diaphragm is also made of skeletal muscle. So, while you’ll be able to see, hear, and think normally, you won’t be able to breathe. Or move.”

There was more white than color showing in her eyes now.

“You don’t have to go through this,” he said. “All you have to do is tell me where Abby is, and I’ll put this syringe back in the case.”

She nodded frantically.

He leaned over and pulled the socks from her mouth. She gasped for air, then said, “I swear to God, I don’t know! Please don’t stick me with that!”

Will picked up the remote control and raised the volume of the television. The QVC huckster was selling “limited edition” china plates (“only 150 firing days!”) bearing likenesses of Ronald and Nancy Reagan. As he shoved the socks back into Cheryl’s mouth, she tried to bite his hand. He climbed onto the bed and sat on her rib cage. Her upraised thighs held his back like the back of a chair.

“You can scream,” he said. “But the sound won’t last five seconds after I stick you. Listen to me, Cheryl. I first saw this drug used as an intern. An ER doctor used it to restrain a crack addict who’d stabbed a cop in the emergency room. It was awful. I’ve seen murderers turned into whimpering babies by this stuff. They lay there paralyzed, soiling themselves, turning blue. Then you bag them and breathe for them, but the whole time they know that if you stop pumping that bag, their brain is going to shut off like a cheap lightbulb. It must be like being buried alive.”

Cheryl fought the restraining belts like a mad-woman, rocking Will and the chair in her attempt to get loose. He jabbed the point of the needle into her external jugular vein, and she stopped instantly.

“You have a choice. You can help me save my little girl. Or you can find out what it’s like to be dead.”

She closed her eyes, then opened them again. Tears ran from their corners down into her ears. “I nono!” she choked through the socks. “I sweahta gaa!”

“You know something.”

She shook her head violently.

Will depressed the plunger of the syringe.

“Helll,” Cheryl screamed. “Someodeee-”

The scream died in her throat. Her eyelids began to flutter, and her facial muscles twitched far too rapidly to be controlled by conscious thought. Her arms flew up and across her chest; then her body went rigid as the signals reaching its muscle fibers became a garbled storm of misfiring electrochemicals. The smell of human waste reached him, a common side effect of Anectine. It was all familar to Will, though the context was alien. He’d seen this happen to mice, pigs, rhesus monkeys, and homo sapiens, but always in a controlled environment. Cheryl’s eyes were frozen open, filled with limitless horror.

He pulled the socks from her mouth, then climbed off her chest and sat beside her. “I know it’s bad. Maybe you feel as scared as my little girl feels right now.”

Cheryl lay as still as a stone angel on a grave. An angel with screaming eyes.

“We’re going to do this over and over until you tell me where Abby is, so you’d do well to tell me everything as soon as you can.”

Her face was going gray. He checked her fingernails for cyanosis. Hypoxia was taking its toll, and consciousness would soon wink out. In the time it took him to reach down to the sample case for a vial of Restorase, Cheryl’s skin took on a bluish cast. Loading the contact syringes would take more time than he had, so he drew fifty milligrams into a conventional syringe and shot the drug into the antecubital vein at the crook of her elbow. Twenty seconds later, her eyelids fluttered. She blinked, and then her lacrimal glands began draining tears again.

“I didn’t like doing that,” he said. “But you forced me to. Joe forced me to.” He patted her upper arm, then used his sleeve to wipe away her tears. “I know you don’t want to go through it again. So, talk to me.”

“You buh… bastard,” Cheryl whispered. “You made me mess myself. You’re worse than Joey. Worse than any of them!”

“Where’s Abby, Cheryl?”

“I told you I don’t know!”

“You know more than you’re telling me. You couldn’t have pulled this off five times before without knowing something. Where’s the pickup? Where are you going to meet Joe to give him the money?”

“A motel,” she said. “Near Brookhaven.”

Brookhaven was fifty minutes south of Jackson.

“You see?” he said. “That’s something I didn’t know before. That’s a good start. Keep talking.”

“That’s all I know.”

“You know a lot more than that. What’s the name of the motel?”

“The Truckers’ Rest.” She shook her head. “Please don’t do it again. I’m begging you.”

Will steeled himself against pity. She sounded like a child herself, a little girl begging not to be hurt by a monster. Was he a monster? Abby might be begging the same way right now, pleading not to be hurt. And that was partly the fault of the woman before him. An image came to him from somewhere, a man waiting in an airport for a defendant to be escorted through by deputies. He stood at a pay phone, pretending to talk, then drew a pistol from his coat, a pistol that had lain in a cabinet in his home for twenty years, waiting for the day when it would be used to kill a man who had molested a little boy. Will didn’t know if he could commit murder out of revenge. But he could kill to prevent a murder. He could torture to spare his daughter pain.

With the coldness of a Nazi doctor he stuffed the socks back into Cheryl’s mouth and injected her with seventy milligrams of Anectine. He looked straight into her eyes as her face began to twitch and her muscles turned to stone. The terror in them predated human consciousness by millions of years. It was like watching someone drown from six inches away. He loaded another dose of Restorase and watched Cheryl’s fear race up an unimaginable scale, then slow and fade as her brain cells slowly starved of oxygen. She was blue when he shot the Restorase into her arm, and when she came out of the paralysis, her entire body was shivering.

“Where is Abby?” he asked. “Right this minute?”

Cheryl seemed to be trying to speak. He pulled the socks from her mouth.

“Wuh… water,” she croaked.

Will went to the sink and moistened a clean washcloth, then came back and squeezed a few drops into her mouth. “Careful.”

“More,” she begged, coughing violently.

He squeezed a few more drops from the cloth.

Deep sobs racked her chest. Cheryl had seen a glimpse of hell few people ever would, and the experience had shattered her.

“If I tell you anything,” she said, “Joey will kill me.”

“Joe is two hundred miles away. I’m right here. If you tell me where Abby is, the needle goes back into the case, and you can have all the money you need to start over somewhere else. Anyplace you want.”

“You’ve forgotten something, Doctor. When Joey calls back, I can kill your kid with one word. And I think I’m going to, for what you did.”

Will kept his face calm. “You don’t want Abby to die. I sensed that before, when we were talking about kids. About being pregnant.”

She looked away.

“And you don’t want to die yourself. If you kill Abby, you will. One way or another. It’s one thing to talk about death, or to flirt with it when you’re depressed. But you’ve got a taste of it now. And it’s bad. Isn’t it?”

She closed her eyes.

“You think that because nothing happened to the kids those other times, nothing will happen to Abby. But you’re wrong. There’s something different about this time. And Karen found out what it is. That’s why she sent me that message. What is it, Cheryl? What’s different about this time?”

“Nothing.”

He reached out and pulled her chin over until she faced him. “Open your eyes and tell me why this time is different. Don’t make me inject you again. To be honest, it’s getting dangerous.”

She opened her eyes. For the first time, he thought about their color. They were grayish blue, not the cornflower you expected to go with her hair. “Tell me,” he said.

“You killed Joey’s mother.”

Will blinked. “What are you talking about?”

“Last year, Joey’s mother died during an operation. The doctor who did the surgery told Joey it was your fault. He said you weren’t paying attention. You weren’t even in the room.”

“What?” He thought back over the past year ’s cases. Some were clear, others a blur. He did about eight hundred fifty a year, but he almost always remembered the deaths. “Was her name Hickey?”

“No. She’d remarried. Simpkins was her name.”

“Simpkins… Simpkins?”

“Joey said you wouldn’t remember it. That’s how little it mattered to you. But it matters to him.”

“I do remember! The SCD case.”

“The what?”

“SCDs. Sequential compression devices. The surgeon operated without them, and Mrs. Simpkins developed a pulmonary embolus.”

“Embolus,” Cheryl said. “That’s it. A blood clot.”

“Viola Simpkins,” Will said.

“That’s her.”

It was all coming back now. The surgeon had been a visiting professor, and the accident had caused a big rift between UMC and his institution. “I had nothing to do with that death. It was a terrible mistake, but it wasn’t my responsibility.”

“The surgeon told Joey it was.”

“Well, I’ll tell him it wasn’t. I’ll make the damn surgeon tell him.”

“That might be tough. He’s dead. Joey killed him.”

Will suddenly felt cold. Hickey had murdered a surgeon because his mother died on an operating table? “Karen must have found this out,” he thought aloud. “That’s why she sent the message. And that’s why Joe is going to kill Abby. To punish me.”

“He never told me that,” Cheryl insisted.

“Because he knew you might not go along.” Will gripped her arms. “Cheryl, you’ve got to tell me where Abby is. Joe’s going to murder her. She’s only five years old!”

She looked him dead in the eye. “I told you. I-don’t-know-where-she-is.”

Will drew seventy milligrams of Anectine into the syringe and climbed back onto her chest. She began to fight beneath him.

“Please, please,” she begged. “Don’t do it!”

Streaks of blood marked the previous puncture sites on her neck and arm. Will moved the needle toward her neck and pressed it against her flesh.

“She’s somewhere west of Hazlehurst!” Cheryl cried. “Do you know where that is?”

He kept the needle against her vein. “Where Highway 28 crosses I-55?”

She nodded violently. “That’s it! There’s a shack ten or fifteen miles up that road.”

“Ten miles? Or fifteen?”

“I don’t know! I’ve never been there. It’s not on the main road. You go down two or three logging roads before you get to it.”

“That’s useless. There are a hundred logging roads through those woods. Hunting camps, everything.”

“That’s all I know! For Christ’s sake, I’m trying to help you!”

“How is Joe calling Huey?”

“What?”

“Is Huey using a landline or a cell phone?”

“Cellular. There’s no regular phone out there.”

“What else?”

She shook her head. “That’s all I know! I swear to God!”

Cheryl was exhausted, that was plain. But there was still a private knowledge in her eyes. Something she was holding back. He considered injecting her again, but he didn’t really want to risk it. He had never put a human being through three consecutive cycles, and he needed her alive and cooperative for Hickey’s next call. The important thing was to get a cellular trace started around Hazlehurst, if it was possible. He took the torn sheet of hotel stationery from his pocket and dialed Harley Ferris’s number yet again.

“Are you going to leave me like this?” Cheryl asked.

“I’ll untie you in a second.” Ferris’s phone rang four times. Then the answering machine began its spiel. Will had expected it, but even so, it was like someone slamming a door in his face at the moment he saw a way out. He hung up and redialed, taking care to enter every number correctly.

“Joey’s going to be calling in a couple of minutes,” Cheryl said.

Will’s watch read 3:26 A.M. By the time Ferris’s phone began ringing, he was practically hyperventilating. Three rings. Four. The answering machine clicked and began speaking. Will’s finger was on the disconnect button when he heard a click, then a clatter.

“Hello?” said a male voice. “Hello! I’m here.”

“Is this Harley Ferris?”

“Yes. Who’s this?”

“Thank God. Mr. Ferris, this is Dr. Will Jennings. This is an emergency. I want to you listen very carefully.”

“Oh my God. Oh no. Is it one of my kids?”

“No, sir. It’s not your family. It’s mine.”

“What?”

“Do you remember me, Mr. Ferris? I was the anesthesiologist on your wife’s gallbladder surgery. She requested me.”

“I know you,” Ferris said. “We played in that scramble at Annandale a few months back. But it’s three-thirty in the morning, Doctor. What the hell’s going on?”

“My daughter’s in trouble. Desperate trouble. You can help her. But before I tell you anything, you’ve got to promise not to call the police.”

“The police? I don’t understand.”

Will decided to go for broke. “Mr. Ferris, my daughter was kidnapped yesterday evening. I can’t go to the police because the kidnappers will kill her if I do. Do you understand?”

There was a delay as Ferris processed this information. “I heard you,” he said finally. “I’m not sure I understand you.”

“I’m in a casino hotel in Biloxi right now. The Beau Rivage. My wife’s at home in Annandale. One of the kidnappers is with her. My daughter is being held at a third location. Somewhere in the woods around Hazlehurst, Mississippi. Every thirty minutes, the leader of the kidnappers calls the location where my daughter’s being held. I know they’re using a CellStar telephone. You’re the president of CellStar. Can you trace that call for me?”

“Not without a court order, I can’t.”

“My daughter will be dead long before anyone gets a court order.”

“Jesus. Is this some sort of prank? Is this really Will Jennings?”

“I wish it were a joke. But it’s not. On the soul of my daughter, it’s not.”

“Are both parties using cell phones?”

“The man on the receiving end is using one. There’s no landline where he is. He’s ten or fifteen miles west of Hazlehurst, down some logging road. That’s all I know at this point.”

“There’s not much activity around there this time of night,” Ferris said. “We’ve only got one tower down that way, an older one. Our coverage is pretty thin around there, to be honest. I’d have to get a vehicle down there to trace it, and I don’t know where our vans are right now.”

“Where could they be?”

“Anywhere in the state.”

“How many do you have?”

“Two.”

“Harley, if we don’t find that phone, my five-year-old daughter will be dead by morning. Even if I pay the ransom.”

“How much are they asking for?”

“Two hundred thousand.”

“That doesn’t seem like much.”

“That’s part of their plan. It’s not really the money they want. They want to hurt me. Can you help?”

“Doctor, it sounds to me like we should call the FBI.”

“No! They’ve thought of that. Planned for it.”

“But for a job like this-”

“This isn’t a job, Harley! This is my kid. Remember how you felt when you thought I was calling because one of your kids was in a wreck? Think back two minutes.”

More silence. “Goddamn it. Okay. I’ll see what I can do.”

“I need your word that you won’t call the FBI. Your word of honor.”

“I’ll keep quiet until morning. But if I get a trace on that phone, we’re calling in the FBI. Agreed?”

“You find that phone, I’ll be begging for a SWAT team.”

“Where are you now?”

“You have a pen?”

“Just a second. Okay, go ahead.”

“I’m at the Beau Rivage Casino, suite 28021. Call as soon as you know anything, but not on the hour or half hour. That’s when the kidnappers make their check-in calls. The next one’s coming in less than two minutes.”

“I can’t do anything about that one, except maybe confirm that they’re using the tower near Hazlehurst. I’ll call as soon as I know something. Hang tough, Doctor. We’ll figure something out.”

“Thank you. Hey-why did you suddenly answer your phone?”

“My prostate,” Ferris replied. “We don’t keep a phone in the bedroom. I got up to take a leak and decided I was hungry. I heard the machine in the kitchen.”

“Thank God you did. I’ll talk to you soon.”

Will hung up, his heart pounding. “Joe’s going to call any second.” He turned to Cheryl. “What are you going to tell him?”

“Wait and see, you son of a bitch. You’d better untie me.”

Letting Cheryl answer Hickey’s next call could be the biggest mistake he ever made. But he had no choice. He had crossed the Rubicon. There was no retreat now. He could hold the needle against Cheryl’s neck as she answered, but instinct told him to show some faith. He reached out and unbuckled the belt that bound her chest.

“I don’t think you want my little girl to die. You’re not that far gone. You were a little girl once, too. Not so long ago, either.”

She refused to look at him.

As he untied the terry-cloth belt that held her legs, the phone began to ring. The sound constricted Will’s chest. “My daughter’s life is in your hands. Help her, and anything I have is yours. All the money you’ll ever need.”

“You’d better answer that phone, Doctor.”

He took a deep breath, then picked up the phone, handed it to Cheryl, and leaned down to listen.

“Yeah?” she said.

“Everything okay?” Hickey asked.

She looked at Will, her eyes inches away. As he tried to read them, an old memory flashed into his mind, the eyes of a secretary to a bank loan officer. She had kept him waiting for an hour even though she knew his loan application would be denied, reveling in the only power she would ever have over someone like him. Cheryl had a thousand times that power now. Would she exercise it to pay him back for the terror he’d forced her to endure?

“Yeah,” she said finally. “Everything’s cool.”

He felt light-headed. He was squeezing her arm with gratitude when Hickey said, “What’s the matter? You don’t sound right.”

The son of a bitch was clairvoyant.

Cheryl looked at Will. “I’m getting tired,” she said.

“It’s not too much longer now. Take one of the pills I gave you. I need you sharp.”

“I know. I’ll talk to you in a half hour.”

Will heard the click as Hickey hung up. With shaking hands he took the phone from Cheryl and set it in its cradle. “Thank you,” he said. “You just started earning your first million.”

She scowled and rolled off the bed. “Fuck you very much. Now what?”

“Now we wait for the phone trace. And pray.”