24 Hours

Will cut his airspeed and dropped to four hundred feet. The vehicles below were moving between seventy and eighty miles per hour. At ninety knots, he was rapidly overtaking them, but also moving into position to land in front of the Rambler. As he approached the congested line of cars, he lowered his landing gear and went to full flaps. This further reduced his speed, bringing him more in line with the speed of the vehicles below, though he was still overtaking them.

When he descended to a hundred feet, fear announced itself in the pit of his stomach. This was no deserted stretch of Delta highway. This was I-55, where cars and trucks managed to slam into each other every day without the help of rogue airplanes. He could smell the exhaust of the big diesel trucks below. From this altitude they looked like aircraft carriers on a concrete sea.

Airspeed was eighty-five knots, still too fast. He would have given a lot for a cold winter day, good dense air for the propellers to bite into and to keep his stall speed low. This was the worst weather for what he was about to do. Cheryl leaned forward, watching the concrete rise toward them and endlessly repeating Hail Marys. Apparently, if she was going to die, she wanted to see it coming. A perverse instinct, perhaps, but a human one.

“Can you do it?” she asked softly.

A brief crosswind tried to push the tail around, but Will corrected for it. “We’re about to find out.”

She pointed through the windshield. “There they are!”

He shut everything out of his mind but the scene ahead. In the right lane: the white Rambler, moving slowly, seeming to pull an endless chain of cars along behind it, cars which were actually trying to whip into the left lane so that they could pass the cars holding them back. In the left lane: the fast movers, cars and trucks racing up and passing the sideshow in the right lane at eighty miles per hour. In front of the Rambler, where he needed to set down, were the speeding cars in the left lane and a couple of dawdlers in the right. A Mercury Sable about sixty yards ahead of the Rambler, and a minivan some distance ahead of that. An intricate ballet of mechanical dancers that would remain in their present relationships for a very brief time.

It was now or never.

He centered the Baron on the broken white line and dropped toward the roof of the Rambler at eighty-two knots. He couldn’t see what was happening behind him, but he felt sure that the sight of a twin-engine plane dropping toward the road with its gear and flaps down and a wingspan as wide as the interstate had sent a lot of feet to a lot of brake pedals.

The Baron overtook the Rambler with a speed differential of thirty miles per hour. Will flew half the distance to the Mercury Sable, then eased the yoke forward and and reduced power further. The Baron seemed to stutter in midair, as though he had applied the brakes to a car.

Then it fell like a stone.

Three miles behind the Baron, Hickey gaped and pointed through the windshield of the stolen Camry.

“Look at that crazy son of a bitch! If he’s got to crash, the least he could do is get off the highway to do it.”

Karen said nothing. The instant the Baron had dropped out of the sky and lined itself up over the interstate, her heart had jumped into her throat. It had to be Will. It had to be.

“What’s he doing up there?” Hickey wondered aloud. “He’s a kamikaze, this guy. He must have lost an engine.”

He looked to Karen for a response, but she sat still and silent, staring at the dashboard. If Will was risking his life to land on the interstate, that could only mean one thing. Abby was somewhere up ahead. And she was alive.

“What’s with you?” Hickey said. “You gotta see this. This’ll make CNN tonight.” He punched her on the shoulder. “You sick or something? Why are you…”

He faced forward again and watched the plane drop to the level of the cars ahead, then disappear.

“Son of a bitch,” he said. “Son of a bitch!”He floored the accelerator and started to pass the Cadillac ahead of them.

Karen grabbed the wheel and wrenched it toward her, throwing the Camry into the right lane and driving the Cadillac off the road in a cloud of dust.

“Let go!” Hickey yelled, hammering her head with his fist.

Karen clung to the wheel like a sea captain in a gale. The Camry veered onto the shoulder, which dropped precipitously to the woods below. She didn’t care if they flipped three times and crashed into the trees, so long as it kept Hickey from reaching Abby. She had made that decision hours ago.

“Let go, you crazy bitch!”

He slammed an elbow into her ear and yanked the car back onto the road. Karen blacked out for a moment. She knew she had, because when she came to, her hands had slipped from the wheel, and the Camry’s engine was whining as Hickey streaked past the cars ahead. She saw then that he was steering with only his left hand. His right held Will’s. 38, and it was pointed at her stomach.

“Do it again and I’ll kill you,” he said in a matter-of-fact voice.