24 Hours

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.

“What’s he doing up there?” Hickey wondered aloud. “He’s a kamikaze, this guy. He must have lost an engine.”

He looked to Karen for a response, but she sat still and silent, staring at the dashboard. If Will was risking his life to land on the interstate, that could only mean one thing. Abby was somewhere up ahead. And she was alive.

“What’s with you?” Hickey said. “You gotta see this. This’ll make CNN tonight.” He punched her on the shoulder. “You sick or something? Why are you…”

He faced forward again and watched the plane drop to the level of the cars ahead, then disappear.

“Son of a bitch,” he said. “Son of a bitch!”He floored the accelerator and started to pass the Cadillac ahead of them.

Karen grabbed the wheel and wrenched it toward her, throwing the Camry into the right lane and driving the Cadillac off the road in a cloud of dust.

“Let go!” Hickey yelled, hammering her head with his fist.

Karen clung to the wheel like a sea captain in a gale. The Camry veered onto the shoulder, which dropped precipitously to the woods below. She didn’t care if they flipped three times and crashed into the trees, so long as it kept Hickey from reaching Abby. She had made that decision hours ago.

“Let go, you crazy bitch!”

He slammed an elbow into her ear and yanked the car back onto the road. Karen blacked out for a moment. She knew she had, because when she came to, her hands had slipped from the wheel, and the Camry’s engine was whining as Hickey streaked past the cars ahead. She saw then that he was steering with only his left hand. His right held Will’s. 38, and it was pointed at her stomach.

“Do it again and I’ll kill you,” he said in a matter-of-fact voice.

She backed against the passenger door.

As the speedometer needle went to ninety, then a hundred, Karen studied the gun in Hickey’s hand. It was somehow more frightening than the idea of a wreck. A wreck at this speed would certainly kill them both, but the gun might kill only her. And Abby was so close-

Hickey cursed and applied the brake. A long chain of flashing red lights had appeared ahead. Brake lights. Something was happening up there. And that something had to be Will’s plane. Hickey swerved across the left lane onto the median shoulder and raced past the braking cars. The hatred in his face was like a sulfurous fire burning beneath his skin.

Fixing an image of Abby in her mind, Karen began to pray. The image she saw was not Abby as she was now, but as an infant, the miracle of flesh and bone and smiling eyes that Karen had given up her career for, that she would give up everything for. A profound sadness seeped outward from her heart, but with it came a peace that transcended her fear. In the silence of her mind, words from Ecclesiastes came to her, heard long ago but never quite forgotten. There is a time to kill, and a time to die. She closed her eyes.

“I love you, Abby,” she said softly. “I’m sorry, Will.”

“What?” Hickey said, fighting to keep the Camry moving past the bumper-to-bumper cars.

Karen curled her fingers into claws and launched herself across the console with murder in her heart.

Hickey fired.

The Baron hit the concrete hard, and Will’s plan instantly began to disintegrate. The driver of the Sable must have slowed, because the Baron was racing toward it far too fast to stop. Will hit the throttles and hopped over the car like a student pilot practicing a touch-and-go landing. When the wheels hit again, he saw that the minivan which had been comfortably ahead of the Sable had also braked, probably because the vehicles ahead of it had slowed or stopped to watch the crisis unfolding behind them.

He pulled up his flaps, cut power, and applied the brakes, but he saw in an instant that he wouldn’t be able to stop in time. He no longer had enough power or distance to skip over the minivan, as he had the Rambler, and his props were spinning with enough force to chop the van into scrap metal. Yet the driver wouldn’t get off the damned road to avoid the crash. Like Will, he was blocked by the wooded hill of the median on the left and the steep drop into woods on the right. But either would be preferable to being hit by an airplane. Then Will saw the group of heads in the back of the van.

Kids.

He swerved left and shut off his mixture, fuel, and master electrical switch. He felt a moment of euphoria as they passed the van, but it turned to horror as his right wingtip clipped the vehicle and they began to spin.

Time decelerated with sickening slowness. Cheryl was shrieking, and at some point in the whirling chaos Will saw a log truck barreling up from behind them. Sitting in front of the log truck like a Matchbox toy was the white Rambler. The Baron’s nose gear crumpled as the plane spun, and one of the props hit the cement in a storm of sparks, sending a blade hurtling off into space. As they came around to face the Rambler again, Will saw the little car suddenly scoot forward out of the log truck’s path, but his relief died as it went over the narrow shoulder and plummeted down the slope toward the trees.

“We’ve got to get out!” he shouted, gripping Cheryl’s arm.

The plane had come to rest facing north, and the thirty-ton juggernaut of steel and wood that was the log truck was speeding toward them with the sound of burning brakes. Will unbuckled both seat belts, then leaned over Cheryl and unlatched the door.

“Get out!” he shouted.

But she didn’t. She was trying to look back into the cabin. Will scrambled over her and onto the wing, then pulled her from the cockpit. She was yelling something at him, but he shoved her onto the ground and jumped off after her.

“The money!” she screamed. “We left the money!”

“Forget it!” He grabbed her arm and tried to pull her clear, but she jerked free and jumped back onto the wing.

Will ran for the edge of the road.

As the Rambler hurtled down the grassy slope toward the trees, Huey pumped the brake, but it seemed to have no effect. Abby was screaming in his ear, and he saw the screams like red paint on the air. His mind went blank for a second, but then a thought flashed like a Roman candle. He grabbed Abby with both hands and tossed her into the backseat like a sack of flour.

The Rambler tore through an old fence and crashed into a wall of saplings, hurling Huey’s three-hundred-pound body forward and smashing his head against the windshield. Abby smacked into the back of the front seat and bounced backward.

She couldn’t seem to get her breath, but other than that, she felt okay. She got to her knees and looked over the front seat.

The windshield was smashed to pieces. Huey was bleeding from his forehead, and he wasn’t moving.

“Huey?” she said. “Beast?”

Suddenly he moaned and held his ribs. Abby climbed over the seat and took hold of his right hand. “Wake up, Beast.” She shook the hand again, then pinched it. “Can you talk? Daddy didn’t mean to hurt you!”

A loud boom sounded behind her, followed by a whoomph that made the air around the car glow for several seconds. Terror for her father went through her like a knife.

“Beast! Wake up!”

His right eye blinked, and he groaned in pain. “Run,” he whispered.

“You’re hurt.”

“Run, Jo Ellen,” he said in a raspy voice. “I smell gas. And there’s a bad man coming. Run to Daddy.”

Jo Ellen…? And then she remembered. Huey’s little sister was named Jo Ellen. Abby looked down at the floor. Belle and the carved bear and child lay in a mosaic of shattered glass. She picked up Belle and put her in Huey’s lap, then grabbed the bear and climbed out of the passenger door. She wished she could pull Huey out, but trying to pull Huey would be like trying to pull a mountain. She turned away from the car and looked up the steep hill.

A chill of fear made her shiver.

A tall man was looking down at her out of the sun. She couldn’t see his face, only his silhouette. Then the shape of the man stirred something in her.

“Daddy?” she said hesitantly.

The shadow began running down the hill.

Cheryl crawled off the shoulder and onto the grass of the median. Her knees were cut to pieces. Her hair stank of gasoline, her eyelashes were gone, and her left forearm had a big red blister on it.

But she had the money.

Behind her lay what was left of the plane, a burning mass of twisted metal in the wake of a log truck that had only managed to stop a few seconds ago. A mile-long line of cars had stacked up behind the wrecked plane, and dozens of people were coming forward, gawkers and rubbernecks in the lead.

Cheryl coughed up black smoke, and the spasm hurt like a wire brush raked over the inside of her rib cage. She thought she might have breathed fire during the explosion. What the hell. It was a small price to pay.

She flattened her hands on the grass and got to her feet, then picked up the blackened briefcase and started up into the trees.

Karen lay against the passenger door of the Camry, staring at the small hole in her upper abdomen. Hickey was gone. He’d shot her and left her for dead. She couldn’t tell how badly she was wounded. Abdominal wounds were tricky. They could kill you in five minutes or put you through weeks of hell. In any case, the gunshot had been enough to knock her against the door and keep her off Hickey while he raced after Will’s plane.

Through the windshield she saw cars in front of her and cars behind. But no plane. She’d heard an explosion a few moments before, one she hoped was a car wreck and not Will’s Baron. But it could have been Will. Landing on a busy interstate was Evel Knievel stuff. And if something had happened to Will, Abby might be alone up there with Hickey and the others.

Karen opened the Camry’s glove box, found a wad of Kleenex, and stuffed it into the bullet hole. Then, steeling herself against the pain, she forced herself to turn and pop open the Camry’s door.

Falling half onto the road, she decided to let her legs follow. After they did, she rolled onto her stomach and lay there, annoyed by the numbness of her midsection. Getting up seemed a theoretical impossibility, like surpassing the speed of light. Then the smell of burning aviation fuel reached her, and she changed her mind.

Will angled down the hill toward Abby, pumping his legs like an extreme skier in a barely controlled fall. Abby took several steps up the shoulder, her eyes bright.

“I knew you’d come, Daddy!”

He snatched her up and hugged her as tight as he dared.

“Where’s Mom?” she asked. “Is Mom with you?”

He had no answer. “Come on, sweetie. Let’s find her.”

“Wait. Huey’s hurt.”

“What?”

“He’s stuck in the car. He’s bleeding!”

Will didn’t especially want to help Abby’s kidnapper, but he moved close enough to the Rambler to see that the man was badly hurt. The tang of gasoline was in the air. If the car caught fire, he’d be burned alive.

“Help him, Daddy!”

Will set Abby down and ran to the driver ’s door. It had not been jammed shut in the crash, but Huey was most definitely jammed behind the wheel. He weighed over three hundred pounds, and Will could scarcely budge him.

“Huey!” he yelled. “Help me! Move!”

The man’s left forearm was like a ham. Will grabbed it with both hands and pulled with all his strength. With a groan like an annoyed bull, Huey twisted in the seat and heaved himself out onto the ground. There was just enough slope for Will to roll him down and away from the car. That was all he could do.

“Let’s go find Mom!” Abby called.

He had told Abby they would do that, but he really wasn’t sure what to do. The smart thing would probably be to duck into the woods and wait for the police to show up. But what if Hickey had been in that silver Camry? And what if Karen was still with him after all? She might be bound and gagged in the backseat, or lying wounded in the trunk. He wished he had Cheryl’s pistol, but there was no point in wishing. The gun had exploded with the plane.

He scooped Abby into his arms and looked up the shoulder. A dozen people stood along the crest, looking down at him. There were probably hundreds of cars backed up already. A world-class traffic snarl. If Hickey was up there with them, so be it. Somebody up there would have a gun. This was Mississippi, after all. They might all have guns. He hitched Abby up on his hip and started up the shoulder.

Cheryl sat down in the trees on the ridge that divided the northbound and southbound lanes and tried to catch her breath. The scene below was like something out of a Spielberg movie. It was like watching a parade from the roof of a building. Cheryl had done that once as a child. With her real father. But this parade had gone terribly wrong.

The doctor ’s plane was still burning, throwing up a column of black smoke like a refinery fire. The driver of the log truck was stumbling back toward the fire, to see the damage his truck had done, she supposed. Cars were lined up behind the plane as far as she could see, and hundreds of people were beginning to get out of them. By the plane, though, there were still only a few, as if the spectators sensed that the show might not be quite over. At least the little girl was okay. Cheryl had seen the doctor carry her up onto the road.

She needed to get moving, if she wanted to stay out of jail. Her best bet was probably to go down to the northbound lanes and hitch a ride with some horny salesman. She probably looked rough after the crash, but the truth was, men didn’t care. Not when you were twenty-six and had a body tailor-made for the Victoria’s Secret catalog.

Cheryl was standing up when when she saw Joey rise from behind a parked car and walk toward the knot of people that had gathered around Dr. Jennings and his little girl.

Will was stunned by the reaction of the people on the shoulder. They all talked at once, and he could only catch fragments of their conversations. A couple of guys slapped him on the back, but another yelled, “Where’s the stupid son of a bitch who was flying that plane? Somebody needs to arrest his ass!”

Will just held Abby tight and asked someone-anyone-to call the state police and the FBI. Three men detached themselves from the crowd and trotted back toward the line of cars, presumably to use their cell phones.

“Daddy, your plane,” said Abby, pointing at the mangled wreck.

Will heard himself laugh. “That old girl did what I needed her to do. That’s all that matters.”

“Look at my bear, Daddy. Huey made it.”

Abby held out an intricately carved figure of a bear holding a little girl. Will was no art expert, but he was an experienced collector, and there was something in the little figure that moved him deeply.

“Everybody back!” screamed a male voice.

Will thought it was a cop until the men around him began to scatter, half of them sliding down the shoulder behind him, the other half running back to their cars. Among the running bodies, his eyes picked out a man standing still as a pole, thirty feet away. He had dark hair and black eyes, and one of his pant legs was soaked with blood from groin to ankle. As Will watched, he raised his arm. A revolver gleamed blue-black in the sun.

Hickey.

There was nowhere to run. He and Abby were caught between the burning plane and the steep shoulder. If he made a dash down the hill with Abby in his arms, Hickey could simply take a few steps and shoot them as they tried to reach the trees.

“Who’s that man, Daddy?”

“Shh, punkin.” Will had thought he might remember Hickey from the time of his mother’s operation, but the man’s face was a cipher. It was hard to comprehend, facing a total stranger who hated you enough to kill you and your children.

“Where’s my money, Doc?” Hickey asked, his eyes smoldering like coals.

Will pointed at the burning plane. “In there.”

“You’d better be lying.”

“I’m too tired to lie.”

“Where’s Cheryl?”

“I don’t know.” He wasn’t so tired that he couldn’t lie a little. He wasn’t going to tell Hickey that his wife had burned up in the plane with the ransom money.

Keeping his gun trained on Will and Abby, Hickey backed to the edge of the shoulder and looked down.

“That’s the way, Huey!” he shouted. “Come on, boy! You can do it!”

Will looked around for signs of help, but he saw none.

“You know what happens now?” Hickey asked, focusing on Will and Abby again.

“What?”

“This.”

He fired, and Will felt his right leg buckle. He almost collapsed, but he managed to keep his feet long enough to set Abby down and move in front of her. She was screaming in terror. He considered telling her to run for it, but he doubted she would, and any such move might cause Hickey to shoot again. He felt her clutching his pants from behind.

“Shot by your own gun,” Hickey said. “How does it feel?”

Will looked down. The bullet had caught him in the meat of the thigh, but on the lateral side, away from the femoral artery.

Hickey yelled back over his shoulder: “Come on, Buckethead! Train’s leaving! Show me you’re not a wheelie-boy!”

“Get out of here while you can, Joe,” Will said.

Hickey laughed darkly. “Oh, I’ll be gettin’ on soon. But you and me got an account to settle. And that little girl behind you is the legal tender.”

He took a step closer, then another. Will was about to snatch Abby up and try to run for it when a female voice stopped Hickey in his tracks.

“I got the money, Joey!”

Cheryl was standing on the far side of the road, by the median. The smile on her face was as forced as an Avon lady’s on a poor street, but she was making an effort. “Let’s get out of here, Joey. Come on!”

“Well, well,” Hickey said. “The prodigal slut.” He shook his head. “Gotta finish what you start, babe.”

Her smile cracked, then vanished. “There’s no reason to hurt that little girl, Joey. Not anymore.”

“You know there is.”

“Killing her won’t bring your mama back.”

His eyes blazed. “He’ll feel some of what I’ve felt!” Hickey lowered his aim to Will’s legs, which hardly shielded Abby at all.

“Joey, don’t!” Cheryl opened the ransom briefcase, took out her Walther, and aimed it at Hickey’s chest. “It wasn’t even his fault! Let’s go to Costa Rica. Your ranch is waiting!”

Hickey looked at Will and laughed bitterly. “Turned her against me, didn’t you? Well… she always was a stupid cow.”

He turned casually toward Cheryl and fired, blowing her back onto the median and spilling hundred-dollar bills across the grass. Then his gun was on Will again, his aim dancing from head to chest to legs. As he played his little game, a strange beating sound echoed over the slab of the interstate. Will recognized it first: the whup-whup-whup of rotor blades. Hickey soon understood its meaning, but instead of bolting, he took two steps closer to Will.

“What do I want with a ranch in Costa Rica? I can’t stand spics anyhow. This is what I came for. What goes around comes around, Doc.”

Will felt a hard tug on his pants. “Daddy, look.”

As Hickey steadied his aim, Will threw himself on top of Abby. Then, just as Cheryl had done before the crash, he turned and looked death full in the face.

He expected a muzzle flash, but what he saw was a bloody forearm the size of a ham slip around Hickey’s neck and lift him bodily into the air.

“You can’t hurt Abby, Joey,” Huey said. “You can hurt Huey, but you can’t hurt Abby. She’s my Belle.”

Hickey’s eyes bulged with surprise. He tried to bring his pistol far enough back to shoot his cousin, but the first shot didn’t come close. The bloody forearm just lifted him higher, closing off his windpipe like a clamp. Hickey’s legs kicked like a badly hanged man’s, and his gun barked harmlessly into the sky. He somehow managed to choke out four words, but they were poorly chosen.

“You-god-damn-retard-”

Will watched in fascination as Huey choked the life out of his cousin, his face as placid as that of a mountain gorilla at rest. Hickey’s last bullet tore off part of Huey’s ear, but then the gun clicked empty. By the time the sharp snap of cervical vertebra reverberated across the road, Hickey’s face was blue-black.

His limbs went limp as rags, and his gun clattered onto the concrete. After a few seconds, Huey set him gently on the side of the road, sat beside him, and began to pet his head. Then he shook him gently, as if he might suddenly wake up.

“Joey? Joey?”

The beating of the helicopter was much louder. Will rolled off Abby and unbuckled his belt, wrapped it around his wounded thigh, and tied it off.

“Look,” Abby said in a small voice. “Huey’s crying.”

Huey had knelt over Hickey and put a hand over his mouth to feel for breath. When he felt none, he started mewling like a baby.

“Why’d you want to hurt Belle?” he sobbed. “It’s not right to hurt little girls. Mamaw told us that.”

“We’ve got to help him, Daddy.” Abby started across the road, but Will limped after her and brought her back.

“I need you here, baby. We’ve got to find Mom.”

“I’m right here,” someone said from behind them.

Will turned. Karen was standing on the median side of the road, an automatic pistol in her hand. It was Cheryl’s Walther. She was pointing it at its owner, while Cheryl crawled over the grass stuffing loose packets of hundred-dollar bills back into the briefcase. Both women looked like air-raid survivors, dazed beyond reason but still trying to function, their brains pushing them down logical paths without any larger perspective.

Abby started to run to Karen, but Will caught her arm and pulled her back. Karen was not herself. If she was, she would have run to Abby as soon as she sighted her.

“Bring me the gun, Karen,” he said.

She seemed not to have heard. She kept pointing the Walther at Cheryl’s head, which was only two feet from its barrel. For her part, Cheryl seemed not to notice. She just kept stuffing bills into the briefcase. Will saw blood on her shoulder, but apparently the bullet had not done major damage.

He limped to within three feet of his wife. “Karen? May I please have the gun? I need it.”

“She’s one of them!” Karen cried suddenly. “Isn’t she?”

“It’s over,” he said, holding out his hand. “Hickey’s dead. And she’s not going anywhere.”

Karen jerked the Walther out of his reach. As she did, Will saw a large bloodstain on her upper abdomen.

“What happened?”

“He shot me,” she said, still following Cheryl with the gun.

“DROP THE WEAPON!” shouted a male voice. “State police! Drop the gun and lie down on the ground!”

Will turned and saw two uniformed state troopers pointing long-barreled revolvers at Karen.

“Hold your fire!” he yelled. “She’s in shock!”

“DROP THAT WEAPON!” one trooper shouted again.

Karen turned toward them but did not drop the gun. Will knew they might fire at any moment. He stepped forward and put his body between their guns and Karen, but even as he did, a fierce wind sprang up, driving gravel and cinders across the road in a punishing spiral.

A Bell helicopter with “FBI” stenciled in yellow on the fuel tank flared over the road and set down near the dwindling fire that had been Will’s plane. Two men in business suits leaped out of the cockpit and ran toward the state troopers, their wallets held out in front of them. A hurried conversation resulted in one of the troopers lowering his gun, but the other did not seem impressed by FBI credentials. One of the agents interposed himself between the stubborn trooper and Karen, and addressed himself to Will.

“Are you Dr. Jennings?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Frank Zwick, Doctor. I’m glad to see you alive.”

“I’m damn glad to see you. Can you help us? My wife has been shot, and she’s disoriented.”

“Can you get her to put down the gun?”

Will turned to Karen and held up his hands. “Honey, you’ve got to give me the gun. These people are here to help us. You can’t-”

Karen wobbled on her feet, then crumpled forward onto the ground.

Will ran forward and knelt beside her. Her radial pulse was weak. As carefully as he could, he rolled her over and unbuttoned the bloodsoaked blouse. The bullet had struck her in the left upper abdomen, probably in the spleen. He leaned over and put his ear to her mouth, listening and feeling for breath, watching her chest expansion. Her airway was open, and her lungs probably okay, but he could already see some distension in her belly from internal bleeding.

“What’s wrong with Mom?” Abby wailed. “Daddy, what’s the matter?”

“She’s all right,” he assured her, though the wound could be fatal if not treated quickly in an operating room.

“We’ve got paramedics about five miles out,” Zwick said. “They’re coming up the shoulder in an ambulance. I’d estimate fifteen to twenty minutes.”

“I want her in your chopper,” Will told him. “You can have her on the helipad at University Hospital in ten minutes.”

“That’s not an air ambulance, Doctor. It’s just a row of seats.”

“It beats waiting. Make it happen, Frank.”

The SAC nodded and ran over to talk to his pilot.

“Abby?” said Karen, her eyes fluttering.

“We’re all here,” Will said.

“Where’s Abby?” Karen struggled to rise. “Where’s my baby?”

“Right here, Mom.” Abby knelt beside her mother.

Karen seized her hand, then raised her head, looking right and left like a lioness guarding her cubs. “Where’s Hickey?”

“Dead,” Will told her again. “We’re all safe, babe.”

It took a few moments for this to register, but at last Karen sighed and closed her eyes again. Will estimated her blood pressure by checking her various pulses, carotid, femoral, and radial. Then he checked her nail perfusion. She was going into shock. They needed to get moving.

“Daddy’s going to make you all better, Mom.”

Karen smiled a ghostly smile. “I know, baby.”

“Does it hurt a lot?”

“With you holding my hand, nothing hurts.”

Abby laughed through tears.

“All set,” Zwick said, coming over from the chopper. “Ready to move her?”

“I’m a little under the weather,” Will told him.

“My dad got shot in the leg,” Abby said proudly. “He was trying to save me.”

“Whose money is this?” called a state trooper from the median. He was holding up the ransom briefcase. Beside him, his partner was cuffing Cheryl’s hands behind her back.

“Mine,” Will said. “That woman was shot in the shoulder, and she was in a fire. Put her aboard that ambulance as soon as it gets here.”

“That’s my money!” Cheryl yelled. She pointed at Will. “Ask him!”

“Take it with you,” Will told the trooper. “We’ll sort it out later.”

“How much is in here?”

“Three hundred and fifty thousand.”

The trooper whistled long and low.

“You lying bastard!” Cheryl yelled at Will. “I knew it!”

“I won’t forget what I said,” he told her. “I’ll come to court and tell them what you did to help us.”

“Bullshit! You’ll forget about me in five minutes!”

He shrugged and turned back to Zwick. “Let’s get Karen into the chopper.”

Zwick motioned for the troopers and the pilot to help.

“What about Huey?” Abby asked. “Can he come, too?”

Will pointed at the spectacled giant, who was still trying to rouse Joey from his permanent slumber. “That one isn’t for the county jail. He needs a psychological evaluation. If you’ll take him to University, I’ll get him onto the ward.”

The trooper holding the briefcase nodded.

Will tried to help Zwick and the others lift Karen, but his leg buckled again. “What’s the radio frequency of the ER at University?” he asked the trooper.

“One hundred fifty-five point three-forty.”

“Thanks.”

Someone had made a pallet of blue FBI windbreakers on the floor of the chopper, and they laid Karen on it. Zwick rode up front. Will was thankful for the gesture. He knew the SAC would like nothing better than to grill him for the next eight hours, but the man was demonstrating some decency.

As the chopper tilted forward and beat its way into the sky, Will went forward and contacted the attending physician in the UMC emergency room. He outlined Karen’s case, then requested a trauma surgeon that he knew had not gone to Biloxi for the convention, a crusty old Vietnam vet who knew how to cut and clamp and get the hell out.

When he returned to the cabin, Karen’s eyes were open. She said something he couldn’t hear above the noise of the rotors, so he leaned down to her mouth.

“Family,” she whispered. “Again.”

“We’re a family again!” cried Abby, looking at Will with wide eyes. “That’s what she said!”

“That’s what she said, all right,” he agreed. Suddenly something broke loose in him, and waves of grief and joy rolled through his heart.

“You’re shaking, Daddy,” Abby said.

“I’m okay. It’s been a long day.”

She smiled uncertainly, searching his eyes for the invincible father she had always known, for signs that everything would soon return to normal. Will took her free hand in his, just as she held Karen’s. Together they formed a circle that he vowed would never again be broken. He had made such vows before, usually after seeing some tragic death in the hospital, but eventually the grind of daily existence dulled his awareness of the central truth of life. Chaos was working beneath everything, and death always waited in the wings, watchful as a crow. This time he would not forget how precious was the time he shared with the women who loved him. This time he would keep that knowledge close in his heart.

This time…