24 Hours

  Huey Cotton stood outside the Jennings house, nervously rubbing his palms against the legs of his coveralls and peering through Abby’s bedroom window. Abby. Unlike most names, he could remember that one without trouble. His mother had once read letters to a woman named Abby out loud to him. Dear Abby, she would drawl in her cigarette-parched voice, sitting at the kitchen table in her hair-rollers and housecoat. The people who wrote to that Abby never signed their real names. They were embarrassed, his mother said. They signed big words instead of names, and sometimes they signed places, too, like Bewildered in Omaha. He always remembered that one.

  Huey heard the scuff of a heel on wood. He looked up to see his cousin walking through the pink bedroom with the little Abby in his arms. She was fighting, kicking her skinny legs to beat the band. Joey held her at the center of the room so that her feet wouldn’t hit the furniture or the tall bedposts. The kicks got weaker and weaker until finally they were just little jerks, like a hound’s legs when it dreamed of hunting.

  The little girl looked like another of the hundred or so dolls that lay around the room like the sleeping occupants of some fairyland, only bigger. Joey walked to the open window and passed her through it. Huey accepted Abby as gingerly as he would a wounded bird, his mouth open in wonder.

  “You’re a genius,” Joey said, a crooked grin on his face. “I apologize, okay? She’ll be out for two to four hours. Plenty of time.”

  “You’re going to call me, right?” Huey asked.

  “Every thirty minutes. Don’t say anything but ‘hello,’ unless I ask you a question. And shut off the cell phone when you get there. Just cut it on for the check-in calls. And remember the backup plan, right?”

  “I remember.”

  “Good. Now, get going.”

  Huey turned away and started to walk, then stopped and turned back.

  “What’s wrong now?” Joey asked.

  “Can she have one of her dolls?”

  Joey leaned back inside the window, snatched up a gowned Barbie off the bed, and handed it out. Huey took it between Abby’s hip and his little finger.

  “Don’t crank the truck till you hit the road,” Joey said.

  “I know.”

  Carrying Abby with maternal care, Huey turned and lumbered toward the playhouse and his concealed pickup truck, the gold-lamé gown of the Barbie fluttering behind him like a tiny flag.

  Karen stood at the kitchen counter, thumbing through the NEJM in spite of her resentment. Two sweating glasses of iced tea stood on the counter beside her, bright yellow lemon rinds hooked over the rims. Beside the glasses lay a plastic device for pricking Abby’s finger; it looked like a ballpoint pen. Without taking her eyes from the magazine, Karen called: “Abby? You okay, sweetie?”

  There was no answer.

  She took a sip of tea and kept reading, thankful for a few moments of silence before the maddening last-minute details of the flower show would have to be dealt with.

  Beneath the tall, sweet-scented pines behind the playhouse, Huey opened the driver’s door of his pickup and slid Abby’s unconscious body across the bench seat to the passenger side. She lay still as a sleeping angel. Huey watched her for a while. He liked standing on pine needles. They were cushy, like deep carpet. He wished he was barefoot.

  Suddenly, an image of his cousin filled his mind. Joey would be really mad if he messed up. He reached into the truck, shifted it into neutral, and pushed it backward around the playhouse like a normal-sized man pushing a motorcycle. After the truck cleared the playhouse, he stopped, shifted his weight forward, and began pushing again, steering the pickup across the yard toward the steep driveway. The yard had a pitch to it, for drainage, and gravity soon began to help him.

  When the wheels hit concrete the truck gathered momentum, and Huey tried clumsily to climb inside. He got one foot up on the step, but as he tried to pull himself through the open door, his boot slipped. He stumbled forward, trying to keep his feet under him as the old Chevy raced down the hill. Only the strength in his huge hands kept him and the truck joined as it careened down toward Crooked Mile Road.

  Three quarters of the way to the bottom, Huey flexed his wrists with enough power to snap the tendons of a normal man and dragged himself into the cab by main strength. He hit the brakes just before the truck shot into the road, and the vehicle shuddered to a stop. Abby was thrown forward against the dash, but she did not wake up. Huey pulled her back across the bench seat, her head pillowed on his thigh, then put his hand to her mouth to make sure she was breathing.

  After his nerves settled a little, he pulled his door shut, cranked the engine, and turned onto Crooked Mile Road, which led to Highway 463, and from there to Interstate 55. He had a long night ahead.

  Karen’s ears pricked up at the rumble of a starting engine. It seemed out of place at this time of day. Her neighbors’ houses were too far away for her to hear that sort of thing. She glanced through the kitchen window but saw nothing, as she’d expected. Only one curve of Crooked Mile Road was visible from the house, and the height of their hill hid the intersection of the road and the driveway. Maybe it was a UPS truck running late, making a turn in the drive.

  She looked back at the hall door and called, “Abby? Do you need help, honey?”

  Still no answer.

  A worm of fear turned in Karen’s stomach. She was compulsive about controlling Abby’s diabetes, and though she hated to admit it, panic was always just one layer beneath the surface. She put down the magazine and started toward the hall. Relief surged through her as she heard footsteps on the hardwood. She was laughing at herself when a dark-haired man of about fifty walked through the hall door and held up both hands.

  Her right hand flew to her heart, and in some sickening subdivision of a second, her mouth went dry, her throat closed, and sweat broke out from the crown of her head to her toes. Almost as quickly, a desperate hope bloomed in her brain. Hope that the stranger’s presence was merely a mistake, some crazy mixup, that he was a workman to whom Will had given a key.

  But he wasn’t. She knew it the way you know about the lump in your breast, an alien thing that shouldn’t be there and isn’t going anywhere soon except by very unpleasant means. Karen had lost a sister that way. And her father—a Korean War veteran—had taught her very young that this was the way fate came at you: out of the blue, without warning, the worst thing in the world appearing with a leer and a ticking clock.

  “Stay calm, Mrs. Jennings,” the man said in a reassuring voice. “Abby’s fine. I want you to listen to me. Everything is o-kay.”

  At the word “Abby,” tears filled Karen’s eyes. The panic that lived beneath her skin burned through to the surface, paralyzing her where she stood. Her chin began to quiver. She tried to scream, but no sound came from her throat.

  THREE

  As Karen stood gaping, the stranger said, “My name’s Joe, Mrs. Jennings. Joe Hickey. I’m going to help you through this thing. And the first thing to remember is that Abby is absolutely fine.”

  The temporary paralysis caused by seeing a strange man where she had expected Abby finally broke, and Karen jerked as though she had taken a physical blow.

  “Abby!” she screamed. “Come to Mama!”

  “Calm down,” the stranger said softly. “Look at me, not the door. I’m Joe Hickey, okay? I’m telling you my real name because I’m not worried that it’s going to matter later. You’re never going to report this, because Abby’s going to be fine. Everybody’s going to be fine. Abby, you, me, everybody. The kid always makes it through. That’s my rule.”

  Absurdly, Karen flashed onto the movie The Jungle Book, which she had watched at least fifty times with Abby. Listening to this man was like listening to Kaa the cobra, who hypnotized you with his voice while he waited for the perfect moment to strike. She shook her head and fixed her mind on Abby’s face, and her fear dissolved in a violent rush, replaced by a fury beyond any she had known. The man before her stood between her and her child. If he wa
nted to keep them apart, he would have to kill her.

  Hickey seemed to sense this. “Abby’s not here, Mrs. Jennings. She’s—”

  Karen charged, batting him aside like an old man as she raced into the hallway. She yanked open the bathroom door and, though she found it empty, cried, “Abby! Abby? Where are you?”

  She stood blinking for a moment; then she tore through the ground floor, checking every room and closet. With each empty space that greeted her, dread settled deeper into her bones. She raced up the back stairs and began searching the second floor. Every room was empty. She ran into the main upstairs guest room, picked up the nearest phone, and dialed 911. Instead of a dispatcher ’s voice, she heard a man speaking in a deep piney woods drawl: “... Preacher Bob’s Fount of Life Church is a Full Gospel church, with no wishy-washy bending of the Word, no newfangled editions of the King James—”

  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?”

  “This operation takes exactly twenty-four hours. I’m talking from the time Huey and me cranked up this morning. A day’s work for a year ’s pay.” Hickey chuckled. “We’ve got about twenty hours left to go.”

  “But why do we have to wait?” The old panic had come back with a vengeance. “If you want money, I’ll get it for you. All you want. Just bring my baby back!”

  Hickey shook his had. “I know you would, Karen. But that’s not the way this operation works. Everything’s set up according to a timetable. That way there’s no surprises.”

  “But we can’t wait twenty hours!”

  “You’d be surprised what you can do for your kid. This is a nice place. We’ll get to know each other a little, have supper, pretend everything’s fine. Abby can watch Huey whittle. Before you know it, I’ll have my money and you’ll have Abby back.”

  “Listen to me, you stupid son of a bitch!”

  Hickey paled. “You want to watch what you’re saying there, Mom. It’s not smart under the circumstances.”

  Karen tried to keep her voice under control. “Sir—Mr. Hickey—if we wait until tomorrow, Abby is going to die.”