24 Hours

  “Who’s that man, Daddy?”

  “Shh, punkin.” Will had thought he might remember Hickey from the time of his mother’s operation, but the man’s face was a cipher. It was hard to comprehend, facing a total stranger who hated you enough to kill you and your children.

  “Where’s my money, Doc?” Hickey asked, his eyes smoldering like coals.

  Will pointed at the burning plane. “In there.”

  “You’d better be lying.”

  “I’m too tired to lie.”

  “Where’s Cheryl?”

  “I don’t know.” He wasn’t so tired that he couldn’t lie a little. He wasn’t going to tell Hickey that his wife had burned up in the plane with the ransom money.

  Keeping his gun trained on Will and Abby, Hickey backed to the edge of the shoulder and looked down.

  “That’s the way, Huey!” he shouted. “Come on, boy! You can do it!”

  Will looked around for signs of help, but he saw none.

  “You know what happens now?” Hickey asked, focusing on Will and Abby again.

  “What?”

  “This.”

  He fired, and Will felt his right leg buckle. He almost collapsed, but he managed to keep his feet long enough to set Abby down and move in front of her. She was screaming in terror. He considered telling her to run for it, but he doubted she would, and any such move might cause Hickey to shoot again. He felt her clutching his pants from behind.

  “Shot by your own gun,” Hickey said. “How does it feel?”

  Will looked down. The bullet had caught him in the meat of the thigh, but on the lateral side, away from the femoral artery.

  Hickey yelled back over his shoulder: “Come on, Buckethead! Train’s leaving! Show me you’re not a wheelie-boy!”

  “Get out of here while you can, Joe,” Will said.

  Hickey laughed darkly. “Oh, I’ll be gettin’ on soon. But you and me got an account to settle. And that little girl behind you is the legal tender.”

  He took a step closer, then another. Will was about to snatch Abby up and try to run for it when a female voice stopped Hickey in his tracks.

  “I got the money, Joey!”

  Cheryl was standing on the far side of the road, by the median. The smile on her face was as forced as an Avon lady’s on a poor street, but she was making an effort. “Let’s get out of here, Joey. Come on!”

  “Well, well,” Hickey said. “The prodigal slut.” He shook his head. “Gotta finish what you start, babe.”

  Her smile cracked, then vanished. “There’s no reason to hurt that little girl, Joey. Not anymore.”

  “You know there is.”

  “Killing her won’t bring your mama back.”

  His eyes blazed. “He’ll feel some of what I’ve felt!” Hickey lowered his aim to Will’s legs, which hardly shielded Abby at all.

  “Joey, don’t!” Cheryl opened the ransom briefcase, took out her Walther, and aimed it at Hickey’s chest. “It wasn’t even his fault! Let’s go to Costa Rica. Your ranch is waiting!”

  Hickey looked at Will and laughed bitterly. “Turned her against me, didn’t you? Well . . . she always was a stupid cow.”

  He turned casually toward Cheryl and fired, blowing her back onto the median and spilling hundred-dollar bills across the grass. Then his gun was on Will again, his aim dancing from head to chest to legs. As he played his little game, a strange beating sound echoed over the slab of the interstate. Will recognized it first: the whup-whup-whup of rotor blades. Hickey soon understood its meaning, but instead of bolting, he took two steps closer to Will.

  “What do I want with a ranch in Costa Rica? I can’t stand spics anyhow. This is what I came for. What goes around comes around, Doc.”

  Will felt a hard tug on his pants. “Daddy, look.”

  As Hickey steadied his aim, Will threw himself on top of Abby. Then, just as Cheryl had done before the crash, he turned and looked death full in the face.

  He expected a muzzle flash, but what he saw was a bloody forearm the size of a ham slip around Hickey’s neck and lift him bodily into the air.

  “You can’t hurt Abby, Joey,” Huey said. “You can hurt Huey, but you can’t hurt Abby. She’s my Belle.”

  Hickey’s eyes bulged with surprise. He tried to bring his pistol far enough back to shoot his cousin, but the first shot didn’t come close. The bloody forearm just lifted him higher, closing off his windpipe like a clamp. Hickey’s legs kicked like a badly hanged man’s, and his gun barked harmlessly into the sky. He somehow managed to choke out four words, but they were poorly chosen.

  “You—god—damn—retard—”

  Will watched in fascination as Huey choked the life out of his cousin, his face as placid as that of a mountain gorilla at rest. Hickey’s last bullet tore off part of Huey’s ear, but then the gun clicked empty. By the time the sharp snap of cervical vertebra reverberated across the road, Hickey’s face was blue-black.

  His limbs went limp as rags, and his gun clattered onto the concrete. After a few seconds, Huey set him gently on the side of the road, sat beside him, and began to pet his head. Then he shook him gently, as if he might suddenly wake up.

  “Joey? Joey?”

  The beating of the helicopter was much louder. Will rolled off Abby and unbuckled his belt, wrapped it around his wounded thigh, and tied it off.

  “Look,” Abby said in a small voice. “Huey’s crying.”

  Huey had knelt over Hickey and put a hand over his mouth to feel for breath. When he felt none, he started mewling like a baby.

  “Why’d you want to hurt Belle?” he sobbed. “It’s not right to hurt little girls. Mamaw told us that.”

  “We’ve got to help him, Daddy.” Abby started across the road, but Will limped after her and brought her back.

  “I need you here, baby. We’ve got to find Mom.”

  “I’m right here,” someone said from behind them.

  Will turned. Karen was standing on the median side of the road, an automatic pistol in her hand. It was Cheryl’s Walther. She was pointing it at its owner, while Cheryl crawled over the grass stuffing loose packets of hundred-dollar bills back into the briefcase. Both women looked like air-raid survivors, dazed beyond reason but still trying to function, their brains pushing them down logical paths without any larger perspective.

  Abby started to run to Karen, but Will caught her arm and pulled her back. Karen was not herself. If she was, she would have run to Abby as soon as she sighted her.

  “Bring me the gun, Karen,” he said.

  She seemed not to have heard. She kept pointing the Walther at Cheryl’s head, which was only two feet from its barrel. For her part, Cheryl seemed not to notice. She just kept stuffing bills into the briefcase. Will saw blood on her shoulder, but apparently the bullet had not done major damage.

  He limped to within three feet of his wife. “Karen? May I please have the gun? I need it.”

  “She’s one of them!” Karen cried suddenly. “Isn’t she?”

  “It’s over,” he said, holding out his hand. “Hickey’s dead. And she’s not going anywhere.”

  Karen jerked the Walther out of his reach. As she did, Will saw a large bloodstain on her upper abdomen.

  “What happened?”

  “He shot me,” she said, still following Cheryl with the gun.

  “DROP THE WEAPON!” shouted a male voice. “STATE POLICE! DROP THE GUN AND LIE DOWN ON THE GROUND!”

  Will turned and saw two uniformed state troopers pointing long-barreled revolvers at Karen.

  “Hold your fire!” he yelled. “She’s in shock!”

  “DROP THAT WEAPON!” one trooper shouted again.

  Karen turned toward them but did not drop the gun. Will knew they might fire at any moment. He stepped forward and put his body between their guns and Karen, but even as he did, a fierce wind sprang up, driving gravel and cinders across the road in a punishing spiral.

  A Bell helicopter with “FBI” stenciled in yellow o
n the fuel tank flared over the road and set down near the dwindling fire that had been Will’s plane. Two men in business suits leaped out of the cockpit and ran toward the state troopers, their wallets held out in front of them. A hurried conversation resulted in one of the troopers lowering his gun, but the other did not seem impressed by FBI credentials. One of the agents interposed himself between the stubborn trooper and Karen, and addressed himself to Will.

  “Are you Dr. Jennings?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Frank Zwick, Doctor. I’m glad to see you alive.”

  “I’m damn glad to see you. Can you help us? My wife has been shot, and she’s disoriented.”

  “Can you get her to put down the gun?”

  Will turned to Karen and held up his hands. “Honey, you’ve got to give me the gun. These people are here to help us. You can’t—”

  Karen wobbled on her feet, then crumpled forward onto the ground.

  Will ran forward and knelt beside her. Her radial pulse was weak. As carefully as he could, he rolled her over and unbuttoned the bloodsoaked blouse. The bullet had struck her in the left upper abdomen, probably in the spleen. He leaned over and put his ear to her mouth, listening and feeling for breath, watching her chest expansion. Her airway was open, and her lungs probably okay, but he could already see some distension in her belly from internal bleeding.

  “What’s wrong with Mom?” Abby wailed. “Daddy, what’s the matter?”

  “She’s all right,” he assured her, though the wound could be fatal if not treated quickly in an operating room.

  “We’ve got paramedics about five miles out,” Zwick said. “They’re coming up the shoulder in an ambulance. I’d estimate fifteen to twenty minutes.”

  “I want her in your chopper,” Will told him. “You can have her on the helipad at University Hospital in ten minutes.”

  “That’s not an air ambulance, Doctor. It’s just a row of seats.”

  “It beats waiting. Make it happen, Frank.”

  The SAC nodded and ran over to talk to his pilot.

  “Abby?” said Karen, her eyes fluttering.

  “We’re all here,” Will said.

  “Where’s Abby?” Karen struggled to rise. “Where’s my baby?”

  “Right here, Mom.” Abby knelt beside her mother.

  Karen seized her hand, then raised her head, looking right and left like a lioness guarding her cubs. “Where’s Hickey?”

  “Dead,” Will told her again. “We’re all safe, babe.”

  It took a few moments for this to register, but at last Karen sighed and closed her eyes again. Will estimated her blood pressure by checking her various pulses, carotid, femoral, and radial. Then he checked her nail perfusion. She was going into shock. They needed to get moving.

  “Daddy’s going to make you all better, Mom.”

  Karen smiled a ghostly smile. “I know, baby.”

  “Does it hurt a lot?”

  “With you holding my hand, nothing hurts.”

  Abby laughed through tears.

  “All set,” Zwick said, coming over from the chopper. “Ready to move her?”

  “I’m a little under the weather,” Will told him.

  “My dad got shot in the leg,” Abby said proudly. “He was trying to save me.”

  “Whose money is this?” called a state trooper from the median. He was holding up the ransom briefcase. Beside him, his partner was cuffing Cheryl’s hands behind her back.

  “Mine,” Will said. “That woman was shot in the shoulder, and she was in a fire. Put her aboard that ambulance as soon as it gets here.”

  “That’s my money!” Cheryl yelled. She pointed at Will. “Ask him!”

  “Take it with you,” Will told the trooper. “We’ll sort it out later.”

  “How much is in here?”

  “Three hundred and fifty thousand.”

  The trooper whistled long and low.

  “You lying bastard!” Cheryl yelled at Will. “I knew it!”

  “I won’t forget what I said,” he told her. “I’ll come to court and tell them what you did to help us.”

  “Bullshit! You’ll forget about me in five minutes!”

  He shrugged and turned back to Zwick. “Let’s get Karen into the chopper.”

  Zwick motioned for the troopers and the pilot to help.

  “What about Huey?” Abby asked. “Can he come, too?”

  Will pointed at the spectacled giant, who was still trying to rouse Joey from his permanent slumber. “That one isn’t for the county jail. He needs a psychological evaluation. If you’ll take him to University, I’ll get him onto the ward.”

  The trooper holding the briefcase nodded.

  Will tried to help Zwick and the others lift Karen, but his leg buckled again. “What’s the radio frequency of the ER at University?” he asked the trooper.

  “One hundred fifty-five point three-forty.”

  “Thanks.”

  Someone had made a pallet of blue FBI windbreakers on the floor of the chopper, and they laid Karen on it. Zwick rode up front. Will was thankful for the gesture. He knew the SAC would like nothing better than to grill him for the next eight hours, but the man was demonstrating some decency.

  As the chopper tilted forward and beat its way into the sky, Will went forward and contacted the attending physician in the UMC emergency room. He outlined Karen’s case, then requested a trauma surgeon that he knew had not gone to Biloxi for the convention, a crusty old Vietnam vet who knew how to cut and clamp and get the hell out.

  When he returned to the cabin, Karen’s eyes were open. She said something he couldn’t hear above the noise of the rotors, so he leaned down to her mouth.

  “Family,” she whispered. “Again.”

  “We’re a family again!” cried Abby, looking at Will with wide eyes. “That’s what she said!”

  “That’s what she said, all right,” he agreed. Suddenly something broke loose in him, and waves of grief and joy rolled through his heart.

  “You’re shaking, Daddy,” Abby said.

  “I’m okay. It’s been a long day.”

  She smiled uncertainly, searching his eyes for the invincible father she had always known, for signs that everything would soon return to normal. Will took her free hand in his, just as she held Karen’s. Together they formed a circle that he vowed would never again be broken. He had made such vows before, usually after seeing some tragic death in the hospital, but eventually the grind of daily existence dulled his awareness of the central truth of life. Chaos was working beneath everything, and death always waited in the wings, watchful as a crow. This time he would not forget how precious was the time he shared with the women who loved him. This time he would keep that knowledge close in his heart.

  This time . . .

  Please turn the page

  for a preview of the electrifying

  new novel from Greg Iles

  Dead Sleep

  available in hardcover from

  G.P. Putnam’s Sons

  I stopped shooting people six months ago, just after I won the Pulitzer Prize. People were always my gift, but they were wearing me down long before I won the prize. Still, I kept shooting them, in some blind quest that I didn’t even know I was on. It’s hard to admit that, but the Pulitzer was a different milestone for me than it is for most photographers. You see, my father won it twice. The first time in 1966, for a series in McComb, Mississippi. The second in 1972, for a shot on the Cambodian border. He never really got that one. The prizewinning film was pulled from his camera by American marines on the wrong side of the Mekong River. The camera was all they found. The thirty-six-frame roll of Ilford HP5 made the sequence of events clear. Shooting his motor-drive Nikon F2 at five frames per second, my dad recorded the brutal execution of a female prisoner by a Khmer Rouge soldier, then captured the face of her executioner as the pistol was turned toward the brave but foolish man pointing the camera at him. I was twelve years old and ten thousand miles aw
ay, but that bullet struck me in the heart.

  Jonathan Glass was a legend long before that day, but fame is no comfort to a lonely child. I didn’t see my father nearly enough when I was young, so following in his footsteps has been one way for me to get to know him. I still carry his battle-scarred Nikon in my bag. It’s a dinosaur by today’s standards, but I won my Pulitzer with it. He’d probably joke about the sentimentality of my using his old camera, but I know what he’d say about my winning the prize: Not bad, for a girl.

  And then he’d hug me. God, I miss that hug. Like the embrace of a great bear, it swallowed me completely, sheltered me from the world. I haven’t felt those arms in twenty-eight years, but they’re as familiar as the smell of the sweet olive tree he planted outside my window when I turned eight. I didn’t think a tree was much of a birthday present back then, but later, after he was gone, that hypnotic fragrance drifting through my open window at night was like his spirit watching over me. It’s been a long time since I slept under that window.

  For most photographers, winning the Pulitzer is a climactic triumph of validation, a momentous beginning, the point at which your telephone starts ringing with the job offers of your dreams. For me it was a stopping point. I’d already won the Capa Award twice, which is the one that matters to people who know. In 1936, Robert Capa shot the immortal photo of a Spanish soldier at the instant a fatal bullet struck him, and his name is synonymous with bravery under fire. Capa befriended my father as a young man in Europe, shortly after Capa and Cartier-Bresson and two friends founded Magnum Photos. Three years later, in 1954, Capa stepped on a land mine in what was then called French Indochina, and set a tragic precedent that my father, Sean Flynn (Errol’s reckless son), and about thirty other American photographers would follow in one way or another during the three decades of conflict known to the American public as the Vietnam War. But the public doesn’t know or care about the Capa Award. It’s the Pulitzer they know, and that’s what makes the winners marketable.

  After I won, new assignments poured in. I declined them all. I was thirty-nine years old, unmarried (though not without offers), and I’d passed the mental state known as “burned out” five years before I put that Pulitzer on my shelf. The reason was simple. My job, reduced to its essentials, has been to chronicle death’s grisly passage through the world. Death can be natural, but I see it most often as a manifestation of evil. And like other professionals who see this face of death—cops, soldiers, doctors, some priests—war photographers age more rapidly than normal people. The extra years don’t always show, but you feel them in the deep places, in the marrow and the heart. They weigh you down in ways that few outside our small fraternity can understand. I say fraternity, because few women do this job. It’s not hard to guess why. As Dickey Chappelle, a woman who photographed combat from World War II to Vietnam, once said: This is no place for the feminine.