Greg Iles - 24 Hours

The old planks groaned beneath his weight. He paused before the screen door, then bent at the waist, hooked his sausagelike pinkie in the door handle, and shuffled backward until the screen opened enough for him to thrust his bulk between it and the main door. The main door yielded to one shove of his size-16 Redwing boot. He carried Abby through it, and the screen door slapped shut behind him with a bang.

Will landed the Baron behind a vintage DC-3 he would have loved to get a look at, but today he didn’t have the time. He taxied to the general aviation area and pulled into the empty spot indicated to him by a ground crewman. The Gulfport-Biloxi airport housed units of the Army and Air National Guard. There were fighter jets and helicopters stationed around the field, and the resulting high security always gave Will a little shock.

He had radioed ahead and arranged to have his rental car waiting at U.S. Aviation Corp., which handled the needs of private pilots. As soon as the props stopped turning, he climbed out and unloaded his luggage from the cabin. Hanging bag, suitcase, sample case, notebook computer case, golf clubs. Schlepping it all to the blue Ford Tempo made his inflamed sacroiliac joints scream, even through the deadening layer of ibuprofen.

A security guard told him that Interstate 10 East had been closed due to a jackknifed semi-truck, so he would have to take the beachfront highway to Biloxi. Will hoped the traffic was not too bad between the airport and the casino. He had less than an hour to reach the meeting room, and he needed to shower and shave before he took the podium before five hundred physicians and their wives.

It took him five minutes to reach U.S. 90, the highway that ran along the Gulf of Mexico from Bay Saint Louis to the Alabama border and Mobile Bay. The sun was just starting to fall toward New Orleans, sixty miles to the west. It would still be light when he began his lecture. Bathing-suited families walked and flew kites along the beach, but Will saw no one in the water. There were no waves to speak of, and the “surf” here had always been brown and tepid. The gulf didn’t turn its trademark emerald green until you hit Destin, Florida, two hours to the east.

Will didn’t particularly like the Mississippi Gulf Coast. He never had. The place had a seedy, transient air. A peeling, tired-out atmosphere that drifted over the trucked-in sand and brown water like a haze of corruption. In 1969, Hurricane Camille had torn through the beachfront communities at two hundred miles per hour, and after that things were the same, only worse. There was a pervasive sense that the best times had come and gone, never to return.

But two decades after Camille’s fearsome passage, casino gambling changed everything. Glittering palaces rose off the beach like surrealistic sand castles, employing thousands of people and pollinating all sorts of service industries, particularly pawn shops and “Cash Quick” establishments where you could cash your social security check or hock your car title for money to blow at the craps table. But at night you didn’t see all that. You only saw the line of sparkling towers, their Vegas-style signs blazing over the night waters of the gulf as thousands of cars crawled up the coast highway, filled with the desperate and the gullible.

Will felt strange being by himself, away from home. Having the simple freedom to stop anywhere he chose, to take an unplanned turn without having to explain or to answer to anyone. Of course, that freedom was illusory. There were people waiting for him, and he was late already. He pressed down the accelerator, figuring it was worth the risk of a ticket.

As he neared the casino, traffic slowed to a crawl, but he was already in sight of the words BEAU RIVAGE glittering high in the fading sunlight. He turned off the highway and pulled up into the tasteful entrance of the casino resort, thankful for the bellboys who stood waiting to take his bags. Keeping the computer and sample cases for himself, he gave his keys to a valet and walked through the massive doors.

The interior of the Beau Rivage was built on the colossal scale of post-mafia Las Vegas casinos. A fantasy re-creation of the antebellum South, with full-size magnolia trees growing throughout its lobby, the casino hotel struck Will as a cross between Trump Tower and Walt Disney World. He picked his way through the gamblers in the lobby and walked over to the long check-in desk. When he gave his name, the hotel manager came out of an office to the left and shook his hand. He was tall and too thin, and his name tag read GEAUTREAU.

“Your colleagues have been getting a little nervous, Dr. Jennings,” he said with a cool smile.

“I had a long surgery this afternoon.” Will tapped his computer case. “But I’ve got my program ready to go. Just get me to a shower.”

Geautreau handed over an envelope containing a credit card key. “You’ve got a suite on twenty-eight, Doctor. A Cypress suite. A thousand square feet. Dr. Stein instructed me to give you the red carpet treatment.” Saul Stein was the outgoing president of the Mississippi Medical Association. “Are you sure I can’t have a bellman take those cases up for you?”

Will strained to maintain his smile as he realized that his privacy had been violated. He could hear Dr. Stein telling the hotel manager about his arthritis, warning Geautreau not to let Will carry a single bag upstairs. All with the best of intentions, of course.

“No, thanks,” he said, tapping his case again. “Sensitive cargo here.”

“Our audio-video consultant is waiting for you in the Magnolia Ballroom. You’ll find the VIP elevators past the jewelry store and to the right. Don’t hesitate to call for anything, Doctor. Ask for me by name.”

“I will.”

As Will crossed the lobby, making for the elevators, a heavyset man in his forties shouted from an open-air bar to his left. It was Jackson Everett, an old medical school buddy. Everett was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and held an umbrella drink in his hand.

“Will Jennings!” he boomed. “It’s about damned time!” Everett shouldered his way across the lobby and slapped Will on the back, sending a sword of pain down his spine. “I haven’t seen you since the scramble at Annandale, boy. How’s it hanging? Where’s Karen?”

“She didn’t make it this trip, Jack. Some Junior League thing. You just get here?”

Everett laughed. “Are you kidding? I flew in two days ago for some early golf. You’re giving the speech tonight, I hear.”

Will nodded.

“Hey, without Karen, you’ll have to hit the casino with me. High rollers, stud!”

“I’d better pass. I had a long surgery, and then the flight. I’m whipped.”

“Pussy-whipped, more like,” Everett complained. “You gotta live a little, son.”

Will gave an obliging laugh. “Let’s get a beer tomorrow and catch up.”

“How are your hands? Are you up for eighteen holes?”

“I brought my clubs. We’ll just have to see.”

“Well, I hope you can. Hey, don’t put us to sleep tonight, okay?”

“But that’s my specialty, Jack.”

Everett groaned and walked off gulping his drink.

As Will waited for an elevator, he saw a few more faces he recognized across the lobby, but he didn’t make an effort to speak. He had twenty-five minutes to get dressed and down to the meeting room, where he would still have to set up the notebook computer for his video presentation.

On the twenty-eighth floor, he opened the door to his suite and found his bags and golf clubs waiting for him. The manager had not exaggerated. The suite was large enough for permanent residence. He set his cases on the sitting-room sofa, then walked into the marble-floored bathroom and turned on the hot water. As the bathroom filled with steam, he unzipped his suit bag, hung a blue pinstripe Land’s End suit in the closet, and unpacked a laundry-boxed shirt, which he laid out on the coffee table. Then he stripped to his shorts and lifted his sample case onto the bureau beside the television. From it he removed a bound folder and laid it on the desk. The title on the cover read: “The Safe Use of Depolarizing Paralyzing Relaxants in the Violent Patient.” The paper summarized three years of work in the laboratory and in clinical trials, as well as in the conference rooms of pharmaceutical companies. The culmination of that work-a drug that would trade under the name Restorase-represented potential profits on a vast scale, enough to make Will a truly wealthy man.