Greg Iles - 24 Hours

“Get out,” Karen said. “Hurry! Before he changes his mind.”

Hickey was sitting in the Camry, talking on the cell phone, checking on Will. At Karen’s urging, he had pulled off the interstate at a deserted exit to let the woman out of the trunk. But the owner of the Camry clearly didn’t understand the chance she was being given, because she wasn’t moving.

“Come on!” Karen hissed. She reached in and pulled the woman up by the arms. Slowly, like a sleepwalker waking, the woman began to jerk her arms, but whether to assist Karen or fight her, Karen couldn’t tell. Somehow she got the woman clear of the trunk and on her feet.

She was a pretty brunette, with a hint of Asian ancestry around her eyes, and she wore a blue skirt suit much like Karen’s. But her eyes were blank.

Karen pushed her toward the trees on the side of the road. “Run! Go on! Run!”

The woman looked around. The only sign of civilization was a boarded-up gas station. “Are you going to leave me here?” she asked.

“You’re safer here than you are with us. Go!”

Like a zoo-bred animal that finds its cage left open, the woman seemed reluctant to leave the familiarity of her car.

“If you don’t run,” Karen told her, “you’re going to die.”

The woman began to cry.

In the switchboard center at the Beau Rivage, the operator was heavy into The Stand. Trashcan Man was hauling his nuclear weapon toward the Dark Man’s stronghold, and trivialities like gainful employment simply could not compete. The young man answered the primary line on autopilot, and when the caller asked for suite 28021, he said, “Just one moment” as he usually did, and made the connection.

Twenty-eight floors above him, the phones in Will’s suite rang, faded, and rang again. The operator read another paragraph of Trashcan Man’s journey, then blinked and raised his head from the page. He was certain that something was wrong, he just couldn’t place what it was. It took a few seconds to realize his mistake, but he thought he still had time to correct it. He was reaching for the keyboard to execute the call-forwarding macro when the phones in 28021 stopped ringing.

“Shit,” he whispered. “Shit.”

Remy Geautreau had promised him a hundred bucks if he’d forward the suite’s calls for the next three hours. He punched a code that connected him to the desk manager’s office.

Remy Geautreau was not in his office. He was standing at the front desk, listening to an irate guest who had left a camcorder battery in his room after checkout. Housekeeping had already checked twice for it, but the guest refused to believe they hadn’t found it. At the first brief pause, a clerk stepped up and said, “Mr. Geautreau? You have a phone call.”

“I want to talk to the maid myself!” bellowed the guest.

Geautreau gave him a syrupy smile. “But of course, Mr. Collins. Do you speak Spanish?”

The man went purple. “Goddamn it!” He took his wife by the arm and stomped toward the grand entrance to make his exit.

“He lost eight thousand last night,” Geautreau said with a bemused smile. “You can always tell the losers.”

He went into his office and picked up the phone. “Hello?”

“I screwed up,” said the operator. “With the call forwarding thing.”

Geautreau’s face darkened.

“A call came in for the suite, and before I could think, I put it through. I tried to catch it, but I was too late. They hung up.”

The manager closed his eyes and hung up. “You just cost me fifteen thousand dollars, you incompetent ass.”

As he closed the door of his office, he wondered whether the doctor would let him keep the thousand dollars of earnest money. Of course he wouldn’t.

The Baron roared northward above Interstate 55 at two hundred knots. Will didn’t think they had covered enough distance to sight Huey’s Rambler yet-if in fact he was driving the Rambler-but he was flying parallel to the southbound lanes just in case. Cheryl was glued to the passenger window. The traffic below was moderate but steady, the cars and trucks humming along at seventy-five miles per hour while Will shot past them at three times that.

He was about to cut his airspeed when the cell phone began ringing again. From habit he reached for the throttles; then he stopped himself. If he cut the engines at three hundred feet, the state police would soon be hosing them off the interstate.

“Who answers it?” Cheryl asked.

“You.”

“Joey already told me where to go. He wouldn’t call again.”

Will considered not answering at all, but he couldn’t risk it. He pulled the throttles back as far as he dared, then picked up the Nokia and hit SEND.

“Hello?”

He heard only the open connection. Then someone said, “Jennings?”

“Joe?”

More silence.

“Joe? Are you there?”

“You wanna tell me how I dialed Cheryl and got you, you clever son of a bitch?”

Will gripped the phone tighter but kept his voice calm. “You must have dialed the wrong number. You thought you were dialing her, but you dialed the hotel instead.”

Hickey didn’t reply.

“Joe?”

“Put Cheryl on the phone.”

Will’s breath caught in his throat. “How do I do that?”

“You hand her the fucking phone, that’s how.”

The coldness of Hickey’s voice was worse than any blast of temper. “Joe, I’m telling you-”

“No, I’m telling you, Doc. I’m gonna let you in on a little secret. You’re never going to talk to your kid again.”

Will’s face went numb.

“It was always going to be that way,” Hickey said. “It had to be. It’s predestination. From the day you murdered my mother. You took what was precious to me, so I gotta take what’s precious to you. You see that, right?”

“Where is she, Joe? Where’s Abby?”

“You don’t need to worry about that. In fact, if I was you, I’d go ahead and slit my wrists, to save myself the hell that’s coming. Going down to a funeral home to pick out that tiny little casket? Facing your wife after going off and leaving her like that? What kind of father does that, huh?”

Hickey’s words cut to the bone, but something more terrible struck Will like a hammer. There was no way Hickey could speak that way if Karen were in the car with him. She would be screaming at the least, possibly even trying to kill him.

“Where’s Karen, Joe? I know she’s not with you. What have you done to her?”

“You don’t need to worry about that either. No point at all.”

The numbness began to spread along his arms. It was like being cut adrift in space, lost in a vacuum without air or sound.

“Wherever you are,” Hickey said, “you might as well just stay there. See if Cheryl will give you a little head while you shoot yourself. She’s good at it. Oh, and tell her I’ll be seeing her soon. Real soon.”

“Joe, you’ve got the wrong idea. I don’t know where Cheryl is. I kept the phone because-”

The phone went dead in his hand.

Will tasted blood. He had bitten through his bottom lip.

“What’s the matter?” Cheryl asked in a fearful voice. “What just happened?”

He couldn’t speak.

“He knows, doesn’t he? He knows we’re together.”

“I think he killed Karen. And he’s going to kill Abby.”

“What? You’re crazy.”

Will’s hands began to shake.

Karen closed the Camry’s trunk and looked back over her shoulder. The woman was moving now, making for the abandoned gas station at an ungainly trot. Karen wished she would turn toward the trees, because Hickey could easily drive over and shoot her if he changed his mind about letting her go. Hopefully he had too much on his mind to worry about that.