24 Hours

Cheryl chewed her bottom lip as she considered the question. “Joey wouldn’t want him driving too far. Not with your little girl along. Too much chance of the highway patrol stopping him.”

“Did Joe say anything about Huey during that last call?”

“Just that he would be fine.”

“I think Huey’s going to the motel in Brookhaven. It’s only twenty minutes from Hazlehurst, which makes it less than an hour from the cabin. Joe could get there from Jackson in fifty minutes, pick up Huey and Abby, then head east to Hattiesburg to meet you.”

“Makes sense to me.”

“If I’m right, Joe is driving south on I-55 right now. Huey is, too. They’re probably twenty minutes apart in the southbound lanes. To hell with Highway 49.”

Will gripped the yoke with both hands and put the Baron into a steep dive. He would turn west after he dropped below radar level. He wanted to be over I-55 as soon as possible, but he didn’t want any curious air-traffic controllers to see him getting there.

Karen looked into the trunk of the Camry and put her hand to her mouth. The woman Hickey had carjacked had beaten her hands bloody in her attempts to get out of the trunk. Several fingers were broken. The left side of her head was swollen from the pistol blow, and her eyes had the dull sheen of shock. She looked up at Karen like she expected to be raped and left for dead.

“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.