24 Hours

She shook her head. “Not by myself. It was too dark and too long ago. It’s up by McComb somewhere, but that’s all I know.”

“You’ve got to try! Huey and Abby might be there right now.”

“I have tried! Look, you’ve got the name of the motel and the general area of the house. Just give that to the FBI and let me go. They’ll find your little girl.”

“Not in time, they won’t.”

“Okay, listen. Joey calls in a minute and tells me to go to the backup plan. I’ll say, ‘Fine, see ya soon.’ The motel’s a hundred and fifty miles north of here. The house must be a hundred and twenty. That gives you guys plenty of time to set something up. I don’t know what you’re doing anyway. If you want to save your kid, why are you running from the FBI?”

Will sighed. “The FBI wants to bust Joe, okay? And you. And Huey. I don’t care anything about that. I just want Abby back alive. And my wife. The FBI already spooked Joe twice. If he sees them anywhere close again, he might tell Huey to kill Abby. If he hasn’t already.”

Cheryl pulled at her hair. “But you can’t do anything by yourself. Joey’s closer to both places than we are. A lot closer.”

“Not necessarily.”

“What do you mean?”

Will pointed through the windshield. A Continental Airlines 727 was settling over Interstate 10 as it landed at the nearby airport.

Cheryl’s mouth fell open. “Jesus… your plane. But there’s nowhere to land up there. Not at the house.”

“Let me worry about that.” Will had once lost an engine over the Mississippi Delta and set down on a deserted stretch of Highway 61. To save Abby, he would land the Baron on a driveway if he had to. “One hour of acting, Cheryl. One hour, and you’re free forever.”

She covered her face with her hands. “You’re making it too complicated! I told you, I don’t know where the house is!”

“You know more than you think. You might-”

The ringing cell phone silenced him. There was no more time for persuasion. He pulled onto the shoulder and shoved the Nokia toward her hand.

She refused to take it.

“Answer it,” he said.

She shut her eyes and shook her head.

“Answer it!”

Abby was walking through tall trees toward a gravel road when she saw Huey toss the flat tire into the trunk of the white car. He slammed the lid and looked up at her, then grinned and waved like a little boy waving at a train. Abby raised her hand to wave back. She felt like she was raising it through water.

She had seen amazing things in the last few minutes. When it was time to leave the cabin, Huey had picked up Belle and her ice chest and led her out to the green pickup truck. But instead of getting in, he opened the lid over the motor and lifted out a big black thing he said was a battery. It didn’t look like any battery Abby had ever seen, but he carried it over to the white car sitting on the concrete blocks and set it on the ground. Then he opened the lid over the white car’s motor and put the battery inside. While he was doing that, Abby had to run into the trees and tee-tee. Ever since she woke up, she’d had to go a lot, and that meant her sugar was going up fast.

After Huey got the battery into the white car, he went around to the driver ’s door and tried to start the motor. It didn’t work at first, but he worked under the lid for a minute, and the car started, rattling and puffing smoke. He looked at Abby and laughed, then went back inside the cabin. She followed. In the kitchen, he took his cell phone from his pocket, turned it on, and set it on the counter. Then he lifted Abby like she was still a baby and carried her out to the porch steps.

The white car was still running, but it couldn’t go anywhere because it was sitting a foot off the ground. Huey walked to the back of the car, put his huge hands under the bumper, and started pulling on it. His face turned red, then purple. The porch steps shook under Abby’s behind when the back of the car tipped off the blocks and the tires hit the ground. Huey laughed like crazy. He helped Abby into the front seat, then put his hands on the steering wheel and drove right off the blocks in front.

The car lurched forward and stopped. Huey drove backward and forward, grinding the motor and jerking the wheel left and right until the car broke loose and started across the grass. Soon they were riding under big trees whose trunks were hardly far enough apart for the car to fit between them. Huey kept saying how “NaNa’s car” was going to save them, how smart Joey was, and how pretty soon they were going to hit a road.

Pretty soon they did. Two mossy ruts through the dirt. Then the ruts hit a gravel road, which got Huey laughing again until they had the flat. It didn’t boom the way flat tires did on TV. Something just started flopping and grinding on the right side of the car, and Huey pulled over. He told Abby it wouldn’t take long to change it, but it took long enough that she had to run into the trees to tee-tee again.