Greg Iles - 24 Hours

“Why don’t you at least face the truth about something, Will?”

It wasn’t the first time she had used his Christian name, but he still didn’t like it. “What?”

“When you were first giving your speech, and you saw me down there watching you, you were fantasizing about me.”

“You’re wrong.”

“You can’t lie about that. You checked me out from head to toe. Then you stared at my panties when I uncrossed my legs.”

“You made them too obvious to ignore.”

“But you were interested. A lot more interested than you were in your speech. And if it wasn’t for the reason we’re in this room together now, we might be here for another reason.”

“You’re wrong,” he said again, annoyed by the accuracy of her instincts.

“Am I?”

“Yes.”

“What I saw in your face tonight I’ve seen in lots of guys’ faces. Decent guys, I mean. I know you. For a few years now, you’ve been wishing you had someone like me to sleep with. You love your wife, you wouldn’t trade her for anything, but she just doesn’t do it for you. She doesn’t understand what you need. How you need it, and how often. Nothing, really. She’s making a nest, adding twigs, thinking about the little chickadees. You’re helping with the nest, but you miss hunting.”

“Where’d you get that? Cosmo?”

“I don’t remember. But it’s on the money, isn’t it?”

He turned back to the bed, where Cheryl was enacting a fifteen-year-old boy’s dream of paradise. “This isn’t going to happen. You don’t want sex. And you don’t want to ‘relax’ me. What you really want is to somehow make me culpable in what you’re doing.”

“What’s culpable?” She looked genuinely confused.

“You want to make me part of this. To involve me, to pull me down to your level, so that what you’re doing doesn’t seem so horrible. But it is horrible. And you know it.”

Cheryl jerked the bra up over her breasts and stared at the television.

He turned and laid his palms flat on the window-pane. The thick glass was cool from the air conditioner, but he knew there was a warm wind blowing outside. Cool compared to the stagnant air hanging over the scrub and stunted pines growing inland from the beach, but warm compared to the frigid air in the casino suite.

“We never finished our conversation from before,” Cheryl said.

“What are you talking about?”

“When you asked how I wound up doing this. Kidnapping kids.”

“You told me your story.”

“I left out a few things.” She looked the way Abby did when she was trying to conceal some surprise. “After Joey made me stop being a featured dancer, he put me back into Jackson. New Orleans and Jackson. Sometimes the club down in Hattiesburg, but that was down-market. Mostly college kids, lining up to get off in their pants.”

“You should go on Howard Stern.”

“Maybe I should. But you should listen to me, Doc. There’s a lesson here for you.”

“I’m on pins and needles.”

“Joey put me back in the clubs, but not really to dance. He started coming in every night I was on, but not to watch me. He came to talk to the people. The owners, the bouncers, the customers. He bought rounds for everybody. Bought them sofa dances. Pretty soon he got a handle on who was coming in there. And it would blow your mind, Doc. Lawyers, doctors, stockbrokers, aldermen. Ministers, for Christ’s sake. Ministers sneaking in there to get a sofa dance. What a crazy kick. Anyway, Joey got a handle on all these guys. And then we started up a little business on the side.”

“What business was that?”

“Blackmail. These guys got addicted to me, see? I mean, I may not like doing it, but I can give a sofa dance. I took those guys places they’d never even dreamed about. They’re dropping fifty bucks a pop for three minutes, and happy as pigs in slop. Pretty soon they’re offering lots more and asking if I do any after-hours dancing.” She wrinkled her nose. “Dancing, right? So, to the right ones-the rich, married ones-I said, Sure, honey. And I let them take me to a motel after work. A motel run by a guy who was tight with Joey, who had special cameras set up in a certain room. Once we got inside that room, I got those guys to do things they would die before they let their wives or bosses see. They left there with their minds blown and their lives in Joey’s pocket. And you know something? I never felt sorry for them. Not once. Every one of those bastards left his wife and kids at home to come into that club. They took me back to that room to screw me senseless, not giving a damn if I lived or died after. Every one of them begged me to do it without a condom, and most of them wanted… God, I don’t even want to think about it. And these were pillars of the community, you know? So, when you stand there acting like you’re above it, I know it’s bullshit, okay? You play your little game, but I know.”

“I’m not above it,” Will said. “No man is. Or woman, for that matter. It’s called human frailty. It’s pathetic, but it’s the story of life. You don’t have any special knowledge. I think my wife knows everything you just told me, even without experiencing it. She just chooses not to let it touch her.”

“So, she’s above it, huh? Maybe that’s why she isn’t doing it for you in the bedroom.”

“You still haven’t told me how or why you switched from blackmail to kidnapping.”

Cheryl drank off what was left of her rum and Coke. “Blackmail gets messy. You can’t predict what guys will do when you hit them with the pictures. The reality of it. The end of life as they know it. Most of them can’t wait to pay, of course. But you never know. One guy wanted copies to give to his wife and everybody at his office.” She smiled at the memory. “But some of them freak. They run home and confess to their wives, or try to kill Joey, or…”

She trailed off, and in the moments of silence that followed, Will knew what she had not said. “Some of them kill themselves,” he finished. “Right?”

She squinted at the television. “One guy did. It was bad. He left his copy of the tape playing on the VCR when he shot himself. His wife found him. Can you imagine?” She poured more rum into her glass, straight this time. “The cops nearly got us for that one. After that, Joey decided we were going about it the wrong way. The thing to do, he figured, was a small number of jobs, but get the maximum bang for the risk.”

“Kidnapping?”

She nodded. “When he was working the blackmail gigs, he saw that what these guys were most scared of-way more than hurting their wives-was their kids. They couldn’t take the idea that their kids would lose all respect for them. Their kids were what they lived for. So, the way to get the most money was to make the guys pay for their kids.”

“That’s a hell of a lot riskier than blackmail.”

“It is if you do it the way everybody else does it. That’s like asking the FBI to stomp on you with a SWAT team. Joey’s smarter than that. But I don’t have to tell you, do I?”

Will stepped to his left and collapsed into the chair by the window. After all that had happened, it was Cheryl’s last story that brought the full weight of reality crashing down upon him. He wasn’t special. He was merely the latest in a long line of fools victimized by a man who specialized in exploiting human weakness. Hickey had made a profession of it, an art, and Will couldn’t see any way to extricate himself or his family from the man’s web.

“Tell me one thing.”

“What?”

“Did any of the other fathers take you up on your offer?”

Cheryl intertwined her fingers and put her hands behind her head, which showed her implants to best advantage. A strange smile touched her lips. “Two out of five. The others tortured themselves all night. Those two slept like babies.”