Greg Iles: 24 Hours

“I finished it while you was sleeping,” he said. “I like trains. I rode one once. When I was little. From St. Louis, after Mamaw died. Joey rode up by hisself on the train and got me. We rode back together. I got to sit in front with the rich people. We wasn’t supposed to, but Joey figured a way. Joey’s smart. He said it was only fair. He says I’m good as anybody. Ain’t nobody no better than nobody else. That’s a good thing to remember.”

Peter stared at the little locomotive. There was even a tiny engineer inside.

“Whittlin’s a good thing, too,” Huey went on. “Keeps me from being nervous.”

Peter closed his eyes. “Where’s my mom?”

“I liked talking to you. Before you ran, anyway. I thought you was my friend.”

Peter covered his face with his hands, but he kept an eye on Huey through a crack between his left cheek and palm. Now that he knew where he was, he thought about jumping out. But Huey was faster than he looked.

Huey dug into his coveralls again and brought out his pocketknife. When he opened the big blade, Peter pressed himself into the passenger door.

“What are you doing?”

Huey grabbed Peter ’s bound wrists and jerked them away from his body. With a quick jab he thrust the knife between Peter ’s forearms and sawed through the duct tape. Then he reached over and unlocked the passenger door of the truck.

“Your mama’s waiting for you. In the playground. At the McDonald’s.”

Peter looked up at the giant’s face, afraid to believe.

“Go see her, boy.”

Peter pushed open the truck’s door, jumped to the pavement, and started running toward the McDonald’s.

Joe reached across Margaret McDill’s lap and opened the passenger door of the BMW. His smoky black hair brushed against her neck as he did, and she shuddered. She had seen his gray roots during the night.

“Your kid’s waiting in the McDonald’s Playland,” he said.

Margaret’s heart lurched. She looked at the open door, then back at Joe, who was caressing the BMW’s leather-covered steering wheel.

“Sure wish I could keep this ride,” he said with genuine regret. “Got used to this. Yes, sir.”

“Take it.”

“That’s not part of the plan. And I always stick to the plan. That’s why I’m still around.”

As she stared, he opened the driver ’s door, got out, dropped the keys on the seat, and started walking away.

Margaret sat for a moment without breathing, mistrustful as an injured animal being released into the wild. Then she bolted from the car. With a spastic gait born from panic and exhaustion, she ran toward the McDonald’s, gasping a desperate mantra: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want… The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want… The Lord is my shepherd… ”

Huey stopped his green pickup beside his cousin Joe with a screech of eroded brake pads. Two men standing under the roofed entrance of the Barnes amp; Noble looked over at the sound. They looked like bums hoping to pass themselves off as customers and spend the morning reading the papers on the sofas inside the bookstore. Joe Hickey silently wished them good luck. He’d been that far down before.

When he climbed into the cab, Huey looked at him with the relief of a two-year-old at its returning mother.

“Hey, Joey,” Huey said, his head bobbing with relief and excitement.

“Twenty-three hours, ten minutes,” Hickey said, tapping his watch. “Cheryl’s got the money, nobody got hurt, and no FBI in sight. I’m a goddamn genius, son. Master of the universe.”

“I’m just glad it’s over,” said Huey. “I was scared this time.”

Hickey laughed and tousled the hair on Huey’s great unkempt head. “Home free for another year, Buckethead.”

A smile slowly appeared on the giant’s rubbery face. “Yeah.” He put the truck into gear, eased forward, and joined the flow of traffic leaving the mall.

Peter McDill stood in the McDonald’s Playland like a statue in a hurricane. Toddlers and teenagers tore around him with abandon, leaping on and off the foam-padded playground equipment in their sock feet. The screeches and laughter were deafening. Peter searched among them for his mother, his eyes wet. In his right hand he clutched the carved locomotive Huey had given him, utterly unaware that he was holding it.

The glass door of the restaurant opened, and a woman with frosted hair and wild eyes appeared in it. She looked like his mother, but not exactly. This woman was different somehow. She looked too old, and her clothes were torn. She pushed two children out of the doorway, which his mother would never do, and began looking frantically around the playground. Her gaze jumped from child to child, lighted on Peter, swept on, then returned.

“Mom?” he said uncertainly.

The woman’s face seemed to collapse inward upon itself. She rushed to Peter and crushed him against her, then lifted him into her arms. His mother hadn’t done that in a long, long time. A terrible wail burst from her throat, freezing the storm of children into a still life.

“Oh, dear Jesus,” Margaret keened. “My baby, my baby, my sweet baby…”

Peter felt hot tears rolling down his cheeks. As his mother squeezed him, the little wooden train dropped from his hand onto the pebbled concrete. A toddler wandered over, picked it up, smiled, and walked away with it.

Will Jennings swung his Ford Expedition around a dawdling tanker truck and swerved back into the right lane of the airport road. The field was less than a mile away, and he couldn’t keep from watching the planes lifting over the trees as they took off. It had been nearly a month since he’d been up, and he was anxious to fly.

“Keep your eyes on the road,” said his wife from the seat beside him.

Karen Jennings was thirty-nine, a year younger than her husband, but much older in some ways.

“Daddy’s watching the airplanes!” Abby chimed from her safety seat in the back. Though only five and a half years old, their daughter never hesitated to interject her comments into any conversation. Will looked at his rearview mirror and smiled at Abby. Facially, she was a miniature version of Karen, with strawberry-blond curls, piercing green eyes, and a light dusting of freckles across her nose. As he watched, she pointed at the back of her mother’s head.

Will laid his right hand on Karen’s knee. “I sure wish my girls would come along with old Dad.” With Abby present, he often referred to himself as “Dad” and Karen as “Mom,” the way his father had done. “Just jump in the plane and forget about everything for three days.”

“Can we, Mom?” cried Abby. “Can we?”

“And what do we wear for clothes?” Karen asked in a taut voice.

“I’ll buy you both new wardrobes on the coast.”

“Yaaayy!” Abby cheered. “Look, there’s the airport!”

The white control tower of the terminal had come into sight.

“We don’t have any insulin,” Karen pointed out.

“Daddy can write me a subscription!”

“Prescription, honey,” Will corrected.

“She knows the right word.”

“I want to go to the beach!”

“I can’t believe you started this again,” Karen said under her breath. “Daddy won’t be spending any time at the beach, honey. He’ll be nervous as a cat until he gives his lecture to all those other doctors. Then they’ll spend hours talking about their days in medical school. And then he’ll tear up his joints trying to play golf for three days straight.”

“If you come,” Will said, “we can beat the bushes around Ocean Springs for some undiscovered Walter Anderson stuff.”

“Noooo,” Abby said in a plaintive voice. She hated their art-buying explorations, which usually entailed hours of searching small-town backstreets, and sometimes waiting in the car. “You won’t be playing golf, Mom. You can take me to the beach.”