Greg Iles - 24 Hours

“Closer,” Hickey said.

Karen danced nearer the chair, but jerked back as Hickey’s hand reached toward her.

“It’s just money,” he said.

He was telling the truth. In his hand was a folded one-dollar bill.

“Come over here.”

She danced closer, and he stuffed the bill into the front pocket of her jeans.

“That means you gotta take something off,” he said, as though explaining the rules of a game.

She hesitated, then slowly unbuttoned her blouse until it hung from her shoulders.

“Shake it off.”

She did. Goose bumps raced across her back and shoulders.

“Those aren’t half bad,” Hickey said, staring at her bra.

Karen focused on the wall and kept swaying to the music, but her mind was spinning. How fast could the Wild Turkey dull his senses? How long could she distract him from what he really wanted?

“Lean over,” he ordered.

She bent slightly at the waist, and he rose up and stuffed a dollar bill into her bra.

“You know what that means, babe.”

She unsnapped her jeans, but Hickey shook his head. “The bra. The bra next.”

She almost stopped dancing. Part of her-the part that took no nonsense from anyone, man or woman-wanted to scream, If you’re going to rape me, just get it over with! But a wiser part of her knew that would be a mistake. Anything could happen between now and the moment he actually forced himself on her. Miracles could happen. Her bra hooked in front. Dancing a little more enthusiastically, she reached up and undid the catch, then threaded her fingers under the shoulder straps and slid off the cups with exaggerated sensuality.

“That’s better,” Hickey intoned. “Jesus, you look good. For a mother, I mean. You ought to get some implants, though.”

I don’t want any damn implants! she screamed silently. But she let the music penetrate further into her, and gave more of herself to it.

“Yeah,” he encouraged, holding up another bill. A five this time. She danced closer, close enough for him to slide the five into her pocket, but he shook his head.

“Lean over. And don’t use your hands.”

It took her a moment to figure out what he wanted, but it was simple enough. She bent over and used her upper arms to bring her breasts together, creating a soft niche for Hickey to stuff his five-dollar bill into. He immediately made use of it.

“Now the jeans.”

She unzipped the jeans but left them on. As she spun slowly, he took another slug of Wild Turkey and stared mesmerized at her chest. The effect was almost comical, one that Karen had never really understood. Men stared at naked breasts the way LSD trippers stared at the sun, as though mammary glands held the secret of the universe. As Hickey stared, she saw that his dazed fascination gave her a certain amount of control. Instead of removing her jeans, she licked her forefinger and brought it down to her right nipple, then traced a small circle around it. When it responded, Hickey’s nostrils flared and his eyes widened. He took another long pull from the bottle.

She raised both arms and began swaying to “Hold Me Now” by the Thompson Twins. She thought she must look like a go-go girl in one of those hanging cages from the sixties. Hickey was nodding in time to the beat, gripping the bottle by its neck and drinking from it every few seconds. His eyes looked darker than before, if that was possible. No longer bottomless pools, but flat disks of slate. Shark’s eyes. No knowledge in them, only hunger. A vast, insatiable appetite.

“Come on,” he rasped. “Let’s see the goods.”

She didn’t want to take off her jeans. The vulnerability she had felt without them was dehumanizing. But she couldn’t afford to make him truly angry. Then she would lose any semblance of control. She had to keep him drinking, convince him that she was going along. She let the jeans ride down her hips, then lifted her knees one at a time and kicked her feet out of them. That she managed this without falling on her butt was a miracle in itself-she hoped not the only one of the night.

That thought evaporated as Hickey slid down in the chair so that his legs were fully extended, his hips and thighs stretched like a bridge between the chair and ottoman. “Stand over me,” he said. “Then you sit down and dance. That’s called a sofa dance.”

Sofa dance?

“Hurry,” he said insistently. “Right here.”

He meant his lap. Karen was nearing the limit of her tolerance. She stepped over his outstretched legs but did not sit down. She could no longer dance in any real sense, only sway from the waist up. But Hickey seemed content for the moment.

“Turn around,” he said.

She thought she detected a slur in his pronunciation. She stepped over his legs, then back over them so that she was facing his feet. She had never been more thankful for underwear. She focused on the “L” of light that was her almost-closed bathroom door.

“Damn,” Hickey said softly. “That’s a work of art. Bend over. Slow.”

Karen shut her eyes and bent toward his feet, knowing she was fully exposed now, terrified that he would touch her.

He did. But with paper, not his hand. Another bill. This one slid between her panties and her skin. She shuddered with disgust, thinking of where that money might have been, who might have touched it. Then she realized that her disgust was not even a fraction of what she would feel when he violated her.

“Turn around again.”

She obeyed. To her horror, Hickey had laid a hand in his lap and begun rubbing himself. Her stomach turned a somersault. She was thankful she hadn’t eaten in a while. Or perhaps it would be better if she had. She’d heard that vomiting was a good defense against rape, but she’d never understood how you could do it at the right time. If Hickey touched her now, though, she just might manage it.

“That was a twenty,” he said. “Twenty for the panties.”

She couldn’t do it. She could not remove the last barrier between herself and total nakedness. “We’ve got all night,” she said. “Don’t rush it.”

“Sit!” Hickey commanded, as he would a dog.

Karen tried to steel herself to obey, but it was no use.

He took hold of her hips with powerful hands and yanked her down against him. In the first instant of contact, a torrent of emotions raced through her. Terror first, because now it was real. Whiskey wasn’t going to keep this man from performing. Nothing was, except death, and if she somehow managed to kill him, Abby would die, too. With the terror came dazed disbelief. She had not felt any other man but Will in that place for fifteen years, and only two before him. To be touched there by someone she had not chosen was an affront to her most secret self. But most deeply she felt guilt, for allowing it to go this far. Even though logic told her she had no alternative, her insecurity said there had to be one. One that a braver or more moral woman would have seen without thought. But the only alternative she could see was death for Abby.

As Hickey groaned in rapture, a cold certainty crystallized in Karen’s brain. No matter what Nicole Kidman had done in the movies, she could not endure being raped by this man. By any man. For any reason. Her answer to the eternal female question-would I fight or submit?-was an unequivocal fight.

Hickey groaned again, and this time the sound pierced her to the marrow. Will sometimes made exactly the same sound during sex. The thought that there was any connection between her marital lovemaking and what was happening now nauseated her. But of course there was. Will was as human as any man, and he wanted sex all the time. Much more often than she did, anyway. And not just lovemaking. He wanted physical sex, an outlet for his drives and frustrations, and she resented that. There had been a time, just before and after their marriage, when she had felt a powerful urge to make love. But that had slowly faded with time. Not that she loved him less. But after she was forced to give up medical school, her desire flatlined. She couldn’t voice the reason to Will, but the fact was that submitting to his sexual desires seemed the ultimate expression of the terrible sacrifice she had made. Because it was sex, at bottom, that had made that sacrifice necessary. And just because Will got an erection every morning and night was no reason she had to wait at his beck and call like some nineteenth-century hausfrau-