Greg Iles: 24 Hours

She clicked the disconnect button, but the voice droned on. Hickey must have dialed the prayer line from the kitchen phone and left it off the hook. She slammed down the phone, ran around the bed and picked up the private line. This time a female voice that sounded like an android was speaking.

“… the satellite farm forecast is made possible by a grant from the ChemStar corporation, maker of postemergent broad-spectrum herbicides-”

Karen dropped the phone and stood staring at herself in the bureau mirror. Her eyes were frantic, blanked out like those you saw in the ERs after motor vehicle accidents. Relatives. Victims. Walking wounded. She needed to calm down, to try to think rationally, but she couldn’t. As she struggled to gain control, an image came into her mind with the power of a talisman.

She ran to the back stairs again, but this time she crept down the carpeted steps. When she reached the first floor, she swept up the hallway on tiptoe and darted into the master bedroom, locking the door behind her.

Her heart thumped as though to make up for the beats it had skipped when the stranger first appeared. She put her hands on her cheeks, which felt deathly cold, and took three deep breaths. Then she walked into the closet and stood on the inverted wooden box that gave her access to the top shelf.

Her hand barely reached over the edge, but she felt what she wanted: Will’s. 38 revolver. She had pleaded with him a hundred times not to keep the pistol in the house with Abby. Now she thanked God he hadn’t listened. She pulled down the gun and opened the cylinder, as her father had taught her long ago. A gun is just a tool, hon, like an axe or a drill… The. 38’s hammer rested on an empty chamber, but five rounds filled the others.

Karen snapped the cylinder home and walked to the bedroom door, steeling herself with each step, clenching the pistol’s checked grip like a lifeline. She was about to face the man who had taken Abby, and she would do whatever was necessary to make him give her back. There was no room for hesitation. Or for mercy.

She quietly opened the door, then edged along the hallway toward the rectangle of light that was the kitchen door. Her breath coming in little pants, she stopped just outside the door and peered into the kitchen.

Joe Hickey was sitting calmly at the kitchen table, drinking from one of the glasses of tea. The realization that she had made that tea for Abby brought a lump to Karen’s throat. She stepped into the kitchen, raised the gun, and aimed it at his face.

“Where’s my daughter?”

Hickey swallowed some tea and slowly set down the glass. “You don’t want to shoot me, Karen. Can I call you Karen?”

She shook the. 38 at him. “Where’s my little girl!”

“Abby is perfectly safe. However, if you shoot me, she’ll be stone-dead within thirty minutes. And there won’t be a thing I can do about it.”

“Tell me what’s happening!”

“Listen carefully, Karen. This is a kidnapping-for-ransom. Okay? It’s about money. M-O-N-E-Y. That’s all. So, the last thing I want is for anything to happen to your precious little girl.”

“Where is Abby right now?”

“With my cousin. His name’s Huey. Right after you got here, I passed her outside and Huey drove her off in his pickup truck. He’s got a cell phone with him…”

Hickey kept talking, but Karen couldn’t make sense of the words. She couldn’t get past the image he’d just described. Abby alone with a stranger. She’d be whimpering in terror, crying for her mother. Karen felt as though she had been pushed from a great height, her stomach rolling over and over as she went into free fall.

“Are you listening, Karen? I said, if I don’t call Huey every thirty minutes, he’ll kill her. He won’t want to, but he will. That’s rule number two. So don’t get any crazy ideas about calling the police. It would take them an hour just to get me fingerprinted and into lockup, and by the time I saw a pay phone, Abby would be lying dead beside the highway.”

Karen snapped out of her trance.

“But that’s not going to happen,” Hickey said, smiling. “You’re a smart girl. And Huey’s a good boy. Loves kids. He’s practically a kid himself. But he’s a little slow. Since I’m the only person who was ever nice to him, he always does exactly what I tell him. So you want to be real careful with that gun.”

Karen looked at the weapon in her hand. Suddenly it seemed more of a threat to Abby than to the man in front of her.

“You pick things up real quick, I can tell,” Hickey said. “So keep paying attention. This is a kidnapping-for-ransom, like I said. But it’s not like you’ve seen on TV or in the movies. This isn’t the Lindbergh baby. It’s not some Exxon executive, buried-alive bullshit. This is a work of art. A perfect crime. I know, because I’ve done it five times before and I haven’t been caught yet. Not even a whiff of Johnny Law.”

Karen pointed to Hickey’s left arm, where the poorly inked needlework showed below the band of his sleeve. An eagle holding an iron cross in its talons. “Isn’t that a prison tattoo?”

Hickey’s face tightened, then relaxed. “They busted me for something else. How’d you know that was done in the joint?”

“I don’t know.” Karen had seen several tattoos like it on surgical patients in the OR. “I just know.”

“You’re smarter than the average June Cleaver, aren’t you? Well, it won’t help you any. I own you, lady. And your little girl. You need to remember that.”

Karen forced back fresh tears, unwilling to give Hickey the satisfaction of seeing them. The gun wavered in her hand. She steadied it.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “What happened to the kids those other five times, right?”

She nodded slowly.

“Right this second, every one of them is living a carefree life, watching Barney or Rugrats or swimming in their private freakin’ swimming pool. You know why? Because their mamas didn’t shoot me and their daddies were calm and methodical after the first few minutes. Just like you’re going to be.” He took another slow sip of tea. “Needs sugar. I can tell you weren’t raised in the country.”

Karen had been raised on rural army bases, but she saw no reason to correct Hickey’s impression.

“If that gun happens to go off by accident,” he said, “Abby will be just as dead as if you shot her. The bullet in that chamber will kill two people, Karen. Something to think about.”

She didn’t want to put down the gun, but she saw no choice. She tossed it onto the table beside Hickey, cracking one of the white tiles of its surface.

“Good girl,” he said, leaving the. 38 where it had fallen. “Yes, ma’am, that’s exactly what a good mother does in a situation like this. I hope your husband’s as smart as you are.”

New fear gripped Karen. “Where’s Will? What have you done with him?”

Hickey made an elaborate show of looking at his watch, which he wore on the inside of his wrist, like certain military officers, as though time were his province alone, and not to be shared with anyone else. “Right about now, hubby’s winged most of his way to Biloxi’s beautiful Beau Rivage Casino Resort.”

Hickey said this with the exaggerated enthusiasm of a game show huckster, but it was the level of his knowledge that crystallized the fear in Karen. He knew their lives, their plans, their exact schedules-

“After hubby gets checked in, we’re going to let him shower up and give his little speech. Then he’s going to get a visit from a partner of mine, and he’ll find out where things stand. The way you just did. Then we’re all going to wait out the night together.”

Terror ballooned in Karen’s chest. “Wait out the night? What are you talking about?”