24 Hours

FOUR

Will ate a bite of redfish and looked out over an audience of close to a thousand people eating the same dish. To his right, at the podium, Dr. Saul Stein was giving a rather digressive introductory speech. At last, like a man making a sudden left turn, he veered back onto the point.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are very lucky to have with us tonight a physician of the first caliber. A man whose pioneering work on the clinical frontiers of anesthesiology will be published in next month’s New England Journal of Medicine.”

A burst of applause stopped Stein for several moments, and he smiled.

“Tonight, we will be treated to a precis of that article, which describes fundamental work carried out at our own University of Mississippi Medical Center. What’s amazing to me is that our speaker-a native Mississippian-entered his field as a second specialty, out of unfortunate necessity. We are very lucky that he did, because-”

A high-pitched beep stopped Stein in midsentence. Five hundred doctors simultaneously reached for their belts, Will included. General laughter rolled through the huge room as most of the physicians remembered that they were on vacation, their pagers back in their hometowns. Will was wearing his, but it had not produced the offending beep. Still, he moved the switch on the SkyTel from BEEP to VIBRATE.

“Who the hell’s on call down here?” Stein barked from the podium. “There’s no getting away from those damn things.” As the laughter died away, he said, “I could easily talk about our speaker for another hour, but I won’t. Dessert is coming, and I want to let Will get started. Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Will Jennings.”

Applause filled the darkened ballroom. Will rose, speech in hand, and walked to the podium, where his notebook computer glowed softly. He sensed the expectation in the crowd.

“They tell me you should begin a speech with a joke,” he said. “My wife tells me I’m not much of a comedian, so I shouldn’t risk it. But flying down here today, I was reminded of a story an old paramedic told me about Hurricane Camille.”

Everybody thought about Camille when they came to the coast. You could still see trees that had been twisted into eerie contortions by the mother of all hurricanes.

“This guy was driving an ambulance down here in sixty-nine, and he was one of the first to go out on call after the storm surge receded. There were dead animals everywhere, and it was still raining like hell. On his second call, he and his partner saw a young woman lying beside the road in a formal dress. They thought she might be one of those fools who tried to ride out the hurricane by throwing a party. Anyway, he figures the girl is dead, but he doesn’t want to let her go without a fight, so he starts CPR, mouth-to-mouth, the whole bit. Nothing works, and he finally gives up. The next day, they’re hearing who died in the hurricane, because relatives of the missing are coming back to view the bodies in the morgue. The EMT asks about the girl he tried to save, but nobody’s come forward to identify her. A week goes by, and he still can’t forget her. Then the word comes down from the morgue. The girl’s mother finally ID’ed her. She’d been dead for two years. The hurricane had washed her up from the cemetery.”

Squeals of revulsion were drowned by a wave of male laughter. No one appreciated morbid humor more than a bunch of docs with a couple of drinks under their belts.

“My presentation will be brief and to the point. The emergency physicians and anesthesiologists should find it provocative, and I hope the rest of you find it interesting. I’m going to try something new tonight, a bit of high-tech wizardry I’ve been toying with.” Will had videotaped his past year ’s clinical work on a Canon XL-1, a broadcast-quality digital video camera that Karen had tried to talk him out of buying. He’d worked dozens of hours on his computer, editing it all down to the program that would accompany tonight’s talk. The finished product was seamless. But any time you worked with hard drives and video, glitches lurked in the wings. “If it doesn’t work,” he added, “at least nobody dies.”

More laughter, wry this time.

“Lights, please.”

The lights dimmed. With a last flutter of nerves, Will clicked a file icon with his trackball, and the 61-inch Hitachi television behind him flashed up a high-resolution image of an operating room. A patient lay unconscious on the table as the OR team prepared for surgery. Wonder lit the faces in the crowd, most of them doctors with minimal computer knowledge. Their ages varied widely, with couples in their sixties seated beside others in their thirties. Some of the younger wives looked a lot like Karen.

Will glanced at his large-font script and said, “This patient looks thoroughly prepped for surgery, doesn’t he? Twenty minutes before this picture was taken, he assaulted a doctor and two nurses with a broken coffee carafe, causing serious injuries.”

The image on the Hitachi smash-cut to a jiggling, handheld shot that looked like something out of a Quentin Tarantino film. A wild-eyed man was jabbing a broken coffee carafe at whoever was behind the camera and screaming at the top of his lungs. “Satan’s hiding inside you, motherfucker!”

The audience gasped.

The man in the video swung the jagged carafe in a roundhouse arc, and the camera jerked wildly toward the ceiling as its operator leaped back to avoid being slashed. Only Will knew that the cameraman had been himself.

“It’s the end times!” the man shrieked. “Jesus is coming! ” In the background, a nurse cried, “Where the hell is security?” The man with the carafe charged her and began weeping and howling at once. “Where’s my Rhelda Jean? Somebody call Rhelda, goddamn it!”

Suddenly the video cut back to the man lying prostrate and prepped in the OR.

“If I were to tell you that this man was subdued in the ER not by police, but by me-using a drug-you might guess this was accomplished with a benzodiazepene, a barbiturate, or a narcotic. You would be wrong. No doctor can hit the vein, or even the muscle, of a PCP-crazed man who is trying to kill him with a coffee carafe, not without grave risk to himself and other staff. The ER docs among you might make a more experienced guess and assume that it was done with a paralyzing relaxant like pancuronium bromide, curate, or succinylcholine. And you’d be right. Nowadays, emergency physicians routinely resort to the use of these drugs, because they sometimes offer the only means of compelling violent patients to accept lifesaving treatment. And though they don’t talk about it much, they sometimes use paralyzing relaxants without first administering sedatives, as a sort of punishment to ‘repeat offenders’-violent addicts and gangbangers who show up in the ER again and again, causing chaos and injury to staff.

“All of you know how dangerous the paralyzing relaxants are, both medically and legally, because they leave patients unable to move or even breathe until they’re intubated and bagged, and their breathing done for them.”

The Hitachi showed a nurse standing over the patient in the ER, working a breathing bag. Will glanced into the crowd. At the first table, a stunning young woman was staring at him with laserlike concentration. She was twenty years younger than most of the women in the audience, except the trophy wives escorted by those doctors who had ditched the loyal ladies who put them through medical school, in favor of newer models. This woman wore a tight black dress accented by a diamond drop necklace, and she seemed to be alone. Older couples sat on either side of her, framing her like bookends. Since she was sitting in front of the first table, Will had an unobstructed view, from her tapered legs and well-turned ankles to her impressive decolletage. The dress was shockingly short for a medical meeting, but it produced the desired effect. She was distracting enough that he had to remind himself to start talking again.

“Tonight,” he said, “I’m going to tell you about a revolutionary new class of drug developed by myself and the Klein-Adams pharmaceutical company, and tested in my own clinical trials at University Hospital in Jackson. This drug, the chemical name of which I must keep under wraps for one more month, can completely counteract the effects of succinylcholine, restoring full nerve conductivity in less than thirty seconds.”

Will heard murmurs of disbelief.

“Beyond this, we have developed special new compressed-gas syringes that allow the safe injection of a therapeutic dose of Anectine-that’s a popular trade name for succinylcholine-into the external jugular vein, with one half second of skin contact.”

The Hitachi showed the screaming man with the broken carafe again. This time, as he charged a female nurse, a tall man in a white coat stepped up behind him with something that looked like a small white pistol in his hand. The white-coated doctor was Will. As the patient jabbed the glittering shard at the brave nurse who had agreed to distract him, Will moved in and touched the side of neck with the white pistol, which was in fact a compressed-gas syringe. There was an audible hiss, and the man’s free hand flew up to his neck. The dramatic fluttering of his eyelids and facial muscles was hard to see in the handheld camera shot, but when he threw up both arms and crossed them over his chest, the audience gasped. As he collapsed, Will caught him and dragged him toward a treatment table, and two nurses hurried over to help.

The ballroom was silent as a cave.

On screen, two nurses restrained the patient with straps. Then Will stepped up and injected him in the antecubital vein with a conventional syringe.

“I am now injecting the patient with Restorase, the first of these new drugs to be approved by the FDA. Now, if you’ll look at your watches, please.”

The camera operator moved up to the treatment table and focused on the patient’s face. His eyes were half closed. Every doctor in the audience knew that the man’s diaphragm was paralyzed. He could not move or breathe, yet he was fully conscious of what was going on around him.

Will heard shuffles and whispers as the seconds ticked past. At twenty-five seconds, the patient’s eyes blinked, then opened. He tried to raise his hand, but the arm moved with a floppy motion. He gasped twice, then began to breathe.

“What’s your name, sir?” Will asked.

“Tommy Joe Smith,” he said, his eyes wide.

“Do you know what just happened to you, Mr Smith?”

“Jesus Lord… don’t do that again.”

“Are you going to try to stab anyone else, Mr. Smith?”

He shook his head violently.

The image cut to a shot of drug vials-Anectine and Restorase-sitting beside a compressed gas syringe on a soapstone surface.

“I know how shocking that footage can be,” Will said. “But remember the scene that preceded it.”

On the Hitachi, Tommy Joe Smith charged the nurse again with the shard of glass.

“The potential applications are limited, thank God, but their necessity cannot be argued. In emergency rooms, psychiatric wards, and prison infirmaries, healthcare workers are suffering grave injury at the hands of violent patients. Now their safety can be insured without resorting to greater violence to restrain the out-of-control patient. Very soon, physicians will be able to use depolarizing relaxants without fear of fatal outcomes or costly lawsuits.”

A collective murmur of approval swept through the darkened room, followed by a wave of applause. Will had known the video would disturb them-as it should have-but he also knew they would recognize the enormous potential of the drug. He glanced to his left and saw Saul Stein grinning like a proud parent.

“As you know,” he said, checking to be sure that the Hitachi showed an anatomical diagram of a hand, “the relaxants work primarily at the myoneural junction, interrupting the normal flow of impulses from the brain to the skeletal muscles…”

He continued almost without thought, thanks to the rehearsals he had done with Karen and Abby. The woman in black was still staring from the front table. She wasn’t smiling exactly, but there was a suggestive curve to her lips that signaled interest in more than drug therapy. He tried to make eye contact with several other audience members, but every few seconds his gaze returned to the young woman. And why not? It was natural for a lecturer to pick out an individual and speak directly to him-or her. It eased the nerves and gave the voice an undertone of intimacy. Tonight he would speak to the woman in black.

Whenever he turned back from pointing out something on the Hitachi, she was watching him. She had large eyes that never seemed to blink, and a mane of blond hair that fell to her shoulders in the style of Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not. Blondes had never done much for Will, but this one was different. What struck him-even in the dim spill of light from the big Hitachi-was her remarkable symmetry. His eyes followed the curve of her long legs as they rose to feminine hips, the hips curving into an hourglass waist. Her breasts were not too large, but almost too perfect. The strapless black dress revealed fine collar-bones and strong shoulders. Her neck was long and graceful, her jaw defined, her lips full. But what held him was her eyes. They never left his face, even as he studied her from head to toe.

He turned to the Hitachi to check the video feed, and when he turned back, she shifted in her seat, uncrossed her legs, then recrossed them with the languid grace of a lioness stretching her flanks. The shortness of the cocktail dress gave him a brief but direct sight line between her legs, even from the podium. He felt blood rush to his face. It wasn’t quite Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct-this woman was wearing panties-but she had made sure he could see everything but the brand name on the silk. Those dark panties were a far cry from the white cotton “granny” panties Karen had taken to wearing the past couple of years. As Will dropped his gaze to look at his speech, he realized that he had fallen behind the video. He looked back up and skipped ahead to the proper cue line.

The ghost of a smile touched the woman’s lips.

Huey Cotton stood on the cabin porch, looking into darkening trees as the sun sank behind them. Tiny flashes of greenish-yellow light floated beneath the branches like phosphorescent sparks from an unseen fire.

“Lightnin’ bugs,” he said, his voice filled with pleasure. “I wonder if there’s a mason jar in the kitchen.”

As he watched the little flares winking in the shadows, a soft groan came from inside the cabin. Huey’s smile vanished, replaced by something like fear. He took a deep breath, then turned slowly and looked at the door with trepidation.

“I wish you was here, Mamaw,” he said softly.

The groan came again.

He reached out and opened the screen door, then pushed open the main door and walked inside.

Hickey sat at Karen’s kitchen table, eating a huge muffaletta sandwich and drinking iced tea.

“Damn, that’s good,” he said, wiping his mouth. “You got the dressing just right. Reminds me of New Orleans. That grocery store down in the Quarter.”

“Are you from New Orleans?” Karen asked. She was standing at the island, opposite the refrigerator, packing syringes and insulin into a small Igloo ice chest.

“You hear a New Orleans accent?”

“Not really.” She couldn’t classify Hickey’s speech. There was some Mississippi in it, but other inflections, too. He had to have spent some time outside the South. In the service, maybe.

“We’ll just skip over my biography for now,” he said, chewing another bite of the big sandwich. “Maybe we’ll get into it later.”

Karen was closing the ice chest when the garage doorbell rang.

Hickey was instantly on his feet, Will’s gun in his hand. “Who’s that?” he asked, his eyes flicking around the room as though a SWAT team might burst in. “You expecting somebody?”

Karen shook her head. She had no idea who it could be.

“Don’t answer it. We’ll just let them go on their merry way.” He took a step toward the pantry. “Which door are they at?”

“The garage,” she whispered, shocked by the sense of conspiracy she felt with Hickey. But the last thing she wanted was someone disrupting his carefully organized plan while Abby was under his control.

The bell rang twice more. The urgency of the ringer was like a finger poking Karen in the side.

“How come I didn’t hear a car?” Hickey asked.

“Sometimes we don’t.” As she spoke the words, she realized who the visitor might be. Stephanie Morgan, the co-chair of the Junior League flower show. Stephanie drove a Lexus that ran so quietly Karen never heard it pulling up the driveway. And of everyone she knew, Stephanie had the most reason to drop by over the next couple of days.

She and Hickey jumped when the kitchen window rattled. Karen turned and saw Stephanie Morgan’s face pressed against the glass. She was shaking a reprimanding finger, and beside her was the little moon face of her eleven-month-old son, Josh.

“Open the door,” Hickey said in a flat voice.

“Hide,” Karen told him.

“I can’t. She’s looking at me right now.” He slid the gun behind his right leg. “Go open it.”

Karen didn’t want to invite Stephanie into her nightmare, but if she refused to open the door now, Steph would throw a fit, and Hickey’s plan would come apart. She held up her hand and motioned toward the garage. Stephanie nodded and disappeared from the window.

“Let me handle this,” Karen told him. “Please.”

He looked skeptical. “Let’s see if you can.”

When Karen opened the door, Stephanie pushed right past her with Josh in her arms, talking as she went. “Karen, you’ve got to come down to the Colisseum in the morning. I mean first thing. I’ve been down there all day, and the place is a wreck. They were supposed to have those livestock people out of there by lunch today, but there are still cows on the floor. Cows, Karen.”

Stephanie had reached the kitchen. “Hello,” she said to Hickey. “Are you Karen’s secret lover? I always knew she had one. It’s the quiet ones you have to watch out for.”

Karen stepped into the kitchen and rubbed Josh’s arm. The little guy was obviously exhausted from his day at the flower show venue, and he was resting his head on his mother’s shoulder. Or had he sensed something frightening in Joe Hickey?

“Stephanie, this is Joe, my second cousin. He’s from Washington State. Joe, Stephanie Morgan, Junior League soccer mom.”

“Puh-lease,” Stephanie said, giving Hickey a little wave and turning back to Karen. She obviously hadn’t seen the gun. “I want to know why you didn’t answer that doorbell.”

Hickey was watching Karen over Stephanie’s shoulder. His eyes had gone dead the moment she turned away from him. “I had some Mormons around before,” Karen said. “I thought they’d come back for another try.”

Stephanie pulled a wry face. With her overdone makeup, it made her look like a circus clown. “Likely story. I know what you’re doing. Hiding from me. But I’ve got news for you, honey. You can’t. You’re the queen bee of this show, and I need you. When I saw those cows on that floor, I said, ‘There’s only one woman in the Junior League for this job, and that’s Karen Jennings. She’ll have those damn bovines out of here before another cow patty hits the floor.’”

Karen didn’t know what to say. The only thing in her mind was getting Stephanie and Josh out as quickly as possible. She felt a frightening energy radiating from Hickey, a sort of survival desperation. It was in his eyes, in the set of his shoulders and mouth. Something he’d developed in prison, maybe. If he perceived Stephanie as a threat, he would kill her. And eleven-month-old Josh? Karen didn’t want to think about that.

Josh began to cry. Stephanie gave his back a perfunctory pat and began rocking on the balls of her feet.

“I’ll be down there in the morning,” Karen promised. She took Stephanie by the arm and began walking her back toward the pantry. “But Joe’s father passed away recently, and he’s down here to work out some estate problems with me. We only have tonight and the morning to do it.”

“Karen.” Stephanie planted her feet at the kitchen door. “You know how important this is. Lucy Childs is just waiting for us to screw this up.”

Good God, Karen thought. Junior League politics. Could anything in the world be less important? She kept moving Stephanie toward the door. “I’ll take care of the cows. You take Josh home and get him some supper. Where’s Caroline?”

The second she asked, she wished she hadn’t. Because Stephanie would now ask where Abby was.

“With my mother,” Stephanie replied. “Which is another reason I’m so stressed. Mom was all set to get her highlights done this afternoon, and then she had to cancel to keep Caroline. Guilt trip from hell, of course. Where’s Abby?”

“With Will’s mother, in the Delta.” They had reached the laundry room. Karen looked back and saw Hickey silhouetted in the kitchen door. Her eyes searched for the outline of the gun.

“Nice meeting you, Joe!” Stephanie called.

“Yeah,” he said.

Karen pushed her into the garage. Sure enough, Stephanie’s white Lexus was parked just behind the Expedition.

“Your cousin looks interesting,” Stephanie said, her eyes twinkling. “A little rough, maybe, but interesting. You sure I didn’t just stumble onto a tryst?”

Karen forced a laugh. “Positive. Joe can’t stand me. He’s just here to settle the estate.”

“Well, I hope you get some money out of it.” She pointed at the Avalon parked beside the Expedition. “You need to upgrade your transportation, girl.”

“I’ll see you in the morning, Steph. I may be a little late.”

Stephanie had leaned down to strap Josh into his car seat. “Don’t you dare. I cannot handle cow shit, okay? That is not in my contract.”

Karen forced another laugh. Stephanie got into the Lexus, started it, and backed around to go down the hill.

Something brushed Karen’s shoulder. Hickey was standing beside her, and she hadn’t even realized it. He waved at the Lexus. Stephanie honked her horn in reply, then disappeared over the lip of the drive.

“Not bad, Mom,” Hickey said. “That skinny bitch owes you her life, and she doesn’t even know it.”

Karen realized she was shaking.

Hickey slapped her lightly on the behind, exactly the way Will would have. “Let’s get back inside. My muffaletta’s getting cold.”

Will’s lecture was nearly done. The first susurrant sounds of dresses shifting on seats had reached his ears from the floor of the darkened ballroom. He had timed the program just right. Behind him, the Hitachi showed a maternal-fetal medicine specialist injecting Restorase into a fetus still in the womb. The fetus had been paralyzed before undergoing a blood transfusion to save its life. Restorase would bring it out of paralysis in a tenth of the time it would normally take.

“And while this particular injection required a good deal of comment,” Will said, “I think this last shot is pretty self-explanatory.”

The pregnant woman’s belly was replaced by a wide-screen sequence of Will teeing off at the Annandale golf course, one recognized by most doctors in the audience. With creative editing, he had made his perfect drive appear to conclude with a stunning hole-in-one. When the ball hit the pin and dropped into the cup-to the accompaniment of Tex-Mex music from Kevin Costner’s Tin Cup-a wild whoop went up from the dark (probably from the throat of Jackson Everett) and enthusiastic applause followed. The lights came up and revealed a laughing, exhilarated audience.

“I’ll be at the Klein-Adams booth for two hours tomorrow afternoon,” Will said. “I’ve brought samples of Restorase with me, as well as some of the gas-injection systems I’ve discussed tonight. I look forward to speaking with all of you.”

This time the applause was more sedate, but also more sustained. Saul Stein stood and patted him on the back. Will shook Stein’s hand, then began disconnecting his computer while the MMA president waited for the applause to die. Stein gushed over the presentation, then moved on to announcements regarding the next day’s seminars. Will zipped up his computer case and stepped down from the podium.

He was immediately swallowed by a congratulatory mob that swept him out of the Magnolia Ballroom and into the atrium area. A visual echo of the woman in black remained in his mind, but he saw no sign of her among the smiling faces. For fifteen minutes he shook hands and accepted compliments, but before the real gabbers could trap him, he made for the escalators.

Like all casino hotels, the Beau Rivage made sure its guests had to pass through a carnival of slot machines and gaming tables on their way to and from the meeting rooms. Will’s joints were giving him trouble, but he walked briskly. He wanted to get up to the room and take some more Advil.

He had planned to use the VIP elevators, but as he passed the main elevators, Jackson Everett reached out and pulled him into the waiting area. Everett had another drink in his hand, and the smell of rum came off him like Caribbean perfume. He opened his mouth to say something to Will, but just then an elevator opened and disgorged an elderly woman holding a cigar box full of quarters.

“Take ’em to the cleaners, Grandma!” he yelled. “Break the bank!”

The woman grinned and hurried toward the lobby. Everett pushed Will into the elevator, then followed him. Two more doctors wearing name tags stepped in after them, and the door began to close.

“Hold the door!” cried a female voice.

Will’s right arm shot out to stop the sliding door, despite the pain the sudden move caused him. As the door retracted, the blond woman in the black dress stepped into the elevator.

“Thanks,” she said. Her cheeks were flushed as though she had been running.

“You’re welcome,” Will replied.

The woman immediately turned and faced the closing doors, leaving him to study the wave of Lauren Bacall hair. The elevator was lined with mirrors and burled wood. Will looked to his right and studied her reflection in profile. The first thing he noticed was Everett and the other two doctors staring at her behind. She clutched her small handbag and looked at the floor, seemingly oblivious to the men behind her. Everett’s gaze was openly lascivious.

“Did you set up that video display, Jennings?” asked one of the docs, whom Will vaguely recognized. “Or did you get some talented secretary to do it?”

“Karen probably did it,” interjected Everett.

“No, I did it. It’s easier than you think.”

“Maybe,” said the first man. “But where do you get the time?”

“I don’t have Jack’s bad habits.”

“Hah,” said Everett. “That from the guy who just developed the ultimate date-rape drug.”

The men fell uncomfortably silent, and the elevator stopped on the eighth floor. The doctors waited, giving the woman time to exit first, but she didn’t move. The one who’d spoken to Will excused himself and brushed past her. Everett reached down and made as if to squeeze her exquisitely round derriere, then laughed and followed the other man out. Instead of walking to his room, he turned back to the elevator and pointed at Will.

“Come on to the casino with us! You’ll love it. And even if you don’t, we’re going to take in a little dancing later. Know what I mean?”

The woman stiffened.

“I’ve got to call Karen,” Will said, before Everett could get more explicit. “And I’m getting up early for golf. You guys knock the walls out.”

“We always do.” Everett smirked and flicked his eyebrows up and down like Groucho Marx.

Will leaned forward and hit the CLOSE DOOR button.

“Thanks,” the woman said as the doors slid shut.

“He’s okay, really. Just a little drunk.”

She nodded and gave Will a look that told him she was used to such things. The elevator began to ascend. Between floors, Will caught himself staring at her trim figure again. When he looked up, her reflected face was watching him. He blushed and looked at the floor.

Someone behind Will cleared his throat. He’d forgotten the other doctor was still aboard. The elevator stopped again, this time on the thirteenth floor. The stranger got out, but the woman stayed put.

“What’s your floor?” she asked.

“I’m sorry?”

“There’s no floor button lit.”

“Oh. I forgot to hit it. Still nervous, I guess. Twenty-eight, please.”

“You’ve got a Cypress suite? So do I.” She half-turned to him and smiled. “Your program was great, by the way. I can’t believe you were nervous.”

“Are you a physician?” he asked. He didn’t like to think he believed in stereotypes, but he’d never met a woman doctor who looked like this.

“No. I’m with the casino company.”

“Oh. I see. Hey, what’s your floor? There’s no button lit but twenty-eight.”

“I’m twenty-eight, too. Most of the Cypress suites are up there.”

He nodded and smiled politely, but when the woman turned away he gave her a hard look. A hooker? he wondered. The desk manager had told him Saul Stein said to give him the red carpet treatment. Did that include a beautiful call girl?

The elevator opened on twenty-eight.

“Bye,” the woman said. She got off and walked briskly down the hallway to the left. Will got off and watched her seductive motion, then turned left and counted the numbers down to suite 28021. He was inserting his credit card key when a female voice called, “Dr. Jennings?”

He looked up the long corridor. The blonde in the black dress was walking hesitantly toward him, gripping her small handbag in front of her.

“Can I help you?” he asked.

She fidgeted with her bag, then stopped as a door opened opposite Will. A heavyset man wearing a plaid sport coat came out and hurried toward the elevators.

“My key doesn’t work,” the woman said, after he’d passed. “Could you try it for me?”

“I doubt I can do any better than you. I’ll give it a shot, though.”

“No pun intended?”

Will laughed, then put his computer case inside his room and followed her past the heavyset man waiting for the elevators.

The elevator bell dinged as Will inserted her card key and watched for green LED lights. But when he removed the key, only one LED flashed-red-and there was no click of tumblers. He tried again, seating the card squarely and firmly, but no matter what he did, the lock refused to open.

“I think you’re out of luck,” he told her.

“Looks like it. Would you mind if I used your phone to call the desk?”

He started to say he didn’t mind, but something stopped him. A sense of something out of place, not quite logical. “I think there’s a house phone by the VIP elevators. I’ll be glad to wait with you.”

She looked momentarily confused, but after a moment she smiled. “That’s right. I appreciate you waiting with me. You never know who’s creeping around the casino. My name’s Cheryl, by the way.”

Will accepted her proffered hand, which was cool, almost to the point of coldness. It felt like the hand of an anxious patient, someone terrified of needles. He dropped her hand and escorted her back toward the elevators, walking a little ahead.

The heavyset man was gone. Will glanced into the waiting area and saw what he was looking for: a cream-colored house telephone.

“Here it is,” he said, turning back to her. “They’ll have a new key up here in no-”

The words died in his throat. Cheryl was pointing an automatic pistol at his chest. She must have taken it from her handbag. Her eyes were resolute, but there was something else in them. Fear.

“What is this?” he asked. “I’ve only got a few bucks on me, but you’re welcome to it. Credit cards, whatever.”

“I don’t want your money,” she said, looking anxiously at the elevators. “I want you to go in your room.”

“What for?”

“You’ll find out. Just hurry up.”

Something in Will’s mind hardened to resistance. He wasn’t going to start blindly obeying orders. If you did that, the next thing you knew, you were lying facedown on some dirty bathroom floor while they shot you in the back of the head.

“I’m not going anywhere. Not until you tell me what’s going on. In fact”-he stepped toward the phone-“I’m going to call the front desk and have them call the police.”

“Don’t touch that.”

“You’re not going to shoot me, Cheryl.” He picked up the telephone.

“If you call the police, Abby is going to die. And there’s nothing I can do to stop it.”

His arm froze. “What did you say?”

“Your daughter was kidnapped two hours ago, Doctor. If you want her to live, take me into your room right now. If you call the police, she’ll die. I’m serious as a heart attack.”

A paralyzing numbness was spreading from deep within Will’s chest. It was disbelief, or perhaps the brain’s attempt at disbelief in the face of knowledge too terrible to accept.

“What are you talking about?”

Cheryl glanced at the elevator again. He sensed the fear inside her metamorphosing into panic.

“Doctor, if somebody gets out of that elevator and sees me with this gun, the whole thing’s going to come apart. Abby’s going to die, okay? And I don’t want that to happen. I’ll tell you everything you want to know, but you’d better get me into your goddamn room right now.”

Will heard a squawk and realized the phone was still in his right hand. He brought it slowly to his mouth.

“Talk, and you put a bullet in Abby’s brain.”

He hung up.

“Hurry,” she said. “If I don’t make a phone call soon, she’s going to die anyway.”

He stared at her for another few seconds, looking for options. He had none. He walked down to his door, unlocked it, and held it open for her.

Cheryl walked past him, holding the gun close against her, as though she expected Will to try to take it. Once inside, she walked all the way across the sitting room and into the bedroom. He closed the door and followed her.

Cheryl put the bed between herself and Will. She was still pointing the gun at him, but he walked to the edge of the bed anyway. His fear for Abby was burgeoning into an anger that would brook no delay.

“Get back!” she cried. “Stay back until I explain!”

“Tell me about my little girl!”

“This is a kidnapping-for-ransom,” she said, like a grammar-school girl reciting from memory. “Right now my partner is with your wife, at your house in Madison County. Someone else is holding Abby at a third location. This is what’s going to happen from this point on…”

Will listened like a man being given a clinical description of a disease that would shortly kill him. His disbelief quickly gave way to horror at the way his family’s lives had been studied and deconstructed, all in preparation for a plan designed to separate him from two hundred thousand dollars.

“Listen to me,” he interrupted. “We don’t have to wait twenty-four hours. I’ll get you the money right now-”

“The banks are closed.”

“I’ll find a way.” He tried to keep panic out of his voice. “I can make it happen. The casino has money. I’ll call down-”

“No. It doesn’t work that way. It has to be tomorrow. Now, let me finish.”

He shut up and listened, his brain working frantically. Whoever was behind this plan knew his business. He-or she-had turned the normal mechanics of a kidnapping inside out, creating a situation in which any aggressive response was impossible. Cheryl’s gun was only there to control Will’s initial panic. The real coercion was Abby. He could pick up the telephone and call the police right now. But if they came and arrested Cheryl, and she didn’t call her partner on their thirty-minute schedule, Abby would die.

“If I do what you want,” he said, “what guarantee do I have that we’ll get Abby back?”

“No guarantee. You have to trust us.”

“That’s not good enough. How are we supposed to get her back? Tell me the details. Don’t think! Tell me right this second.”

Cheryl nodded. “Abby and your wife will be driven to a public place and set free within sight of each other.”

She sounded like she believed it. And she’d told him they’d carried out the same plan five times before. He thought back over the past few years’ headlines in Mississippi. He didn’t remember hearing about any kidnapped children who were found murdered. Not kidnappings-for-ransom, anyway. And that would definitely have made headlines across the state.

“What’s to keep me from going to the police after you let Abby go?” he asked.

“The fact that two hundred thousand dollars is nothing to you. And because if the police start looking for us, we’ll know. We’ll know, and my partner will come back and kill Abby. In the playhouse in your backyard, at her school, after church… anywhere. Believe me, he’ll do it. We’ve done this to five other doctors just like you, and none of them have reported it. Not one. You won’t, either.”

He turned away from her in frustration. Through the bedroom’s picture window, he saw the lights of a freighter out on the darkening gulf, plying its way westward. He had never felt so impotent in his life. One simple dictum had carried him through many life-or-death situations: There’s always a way. Another option. Drastic, maybe, but there. But this time there didn’t seem to be one. The trapped feeling made him crazy with rage. He whirled back to Cheryl.

“I’m supposed to just sit here all night while some stranger holds my little girl prisoner? Scared out of her mind? Lady, I will rip your head off before I let that happen.”

She jerked the gun back up. “Stay back!”

“What kind of woman are you? Don’t you have any maternal feelings?”

“Don’t you say anything about my feelings!” Cheryl’s face reddened. “You don’t know anything about me!”

“I know you’re making a child suffer pure terror.”

“That can’t be helped.”

He was about to respond when a thought burst into his mind like a starshell. “Oh Jesus. What about Abby’s insulin?”

Cheryl’s face was blank. “What?”

“Abby’s a juvenile diabetic. You didn’t know that? You didn’t plan for that?”

“Calm down.”

“You’ve got to call your partner. I’ve got to talk to him right now. Right now!”

The telephone beside the bed rang loudly.

They stared at it. Then Cheryl walked to the phone and laid her free hand on the receiver.

“You want to talk?” she said. “Here’s your chance. But be cool, Doctor. Very cool.”