24 Hours

Karen and Hickey knelt three feet apart on the bed. Karen was holding the scalpel up defensively; Hickey clutched a pillow to his groin. His face was a mask of rage and agony.

“You’ve got to get to a hospital!” she told him. “You could bleed to death.”

He lifted the pillow away from his skin and looked down, then laughed maniacally. “You missed! You missed. Look at that!”

He lifted the pillow higher, and his smile vanished. His right thigh had been laid open from groin to knee. Blood was pulsing out at an alarming rate.

“Oh God,” he whispered. “Oh God.”

“You did it!” Karen told him. “You hit me with the phone!”

“Your kid is dead, bitch. Dead!”

Her heart turned to stone. She had gambled and failed. As Hickey tried to stanch the flow of blood with the pillow, she jumped off the bed and scrabbled under it for the gun. She had to keep him from bleeding to death, but she didn’t want to be at his mercy while he was in a fit of rage.

“Go in the bathroom!” she said, getting to her feet with the pistol. “Tie a towel just above the laceration. You’ve got to slow the arterial flow.”

“Look what you did!” he screamed, his eyes wide with shock.

She was going to have to tend to the wound, but she didn’t think she could bring herself to touch him yet. She didn’t even want to get close to him.

“Get a towel!” she yelled. “Hurry! Make a tourniquet!”

Hickey hobbled into the bathroom with the pillow pressed to his thigh, groaning and whining and cursing at once. Karen grabbed the bedsheet and wiped his blood off her thighs, then pulled her discarded blouse over the teddy, went to the bathroom door, and held the gun on Hickey while he tied a towel around his thigh. He was doing a fair job, good enough to slow the bleeding anyway.

“Why didn’t Huey answer?” she asked. “Why aren’t they at the cabin? Has he taken Abby somewhere?”

Hickey looked up, his face red with strain. “You don’t need to worry about that. No point at all. You just bought yourself a world of pain, lady. A world of pain.”

“What do you expect? You steal my child and try to rape me, and I’m supposed to lie down and take it?”

He shook a bloody washrag at her. “Look at this goddamn leg! I’m bleeding to death here!”

“You need a hospital.”

“Bullshit, I need a hospital. I need some stitches is all. You were a nurse, you said. You do it.”

“It would take fifty stitches to close that.” She was exaggerating. A butcher could bring the edges of the wound together with ten.

“So get the stuff! Your husband’s got a black bag or something, right? To take care of the neighborhood brats?”

Will did keep a bag at home for Abby’s soccer games, but Karen didn’t want to get it. She didn’t want to hold the gun or look at Hickey’s nakedness or anything else any more. She just wanted Abby locked tight in her nurturing arms.

“Why are you doing this?” she screamed. “Why my little girl? lt’s not fair! It’s not right-”

Hickey slapped her. Then, his jaw set tight against the pain, he said through clenched teeth: “Lady, if you don’t get your shit together and sew me up, Huey will snap your little girl’s spine like a twig. One phone call will do it. One fucking call.”

“You can’t even get him on the phone!”

“I’ll get him.”

Karen stood shaking in the aftermath of her fit. Blood was soaking through her blouse from the teddy beneath, and Will’s gun quivered in her hand. She had to keep herself together. Or Abby wouldn’t make it.

“Move your ass!” Hickey yelled. “Get the bag!”

She nodded and hurried out of the bathroom.

Abby thought she’d heard Huey outside again, so she crept into the little shed behind the cabin. There was a tractor in it, like the one her daddy used to cut the grass at home, only bigger. She climbed up onto its seat and started pressing numbers on the cell phone’s lighted keypad. She began with “1,” then moved on to the area code of Mississippi. “Six-oh-one,” she said as she dialed. Then she pressed the other seven numbers, hit SEND, and prayed that the answering service wouldn’t answer.

The phone began to ring.

Karen was rummaging through Will’s medical bag when the phone rang on Will’s side of the bed. Hickey was still in the bathroom, loosening the towel tourniquet as she had advised. Though the caller was almost surely Hickey’s wife, Karen answered, hoping against hope that her desperate act had somehow paid off.

“Hello?”

“Tell her to give me a minute,” Hickey called from behind the half-closed bathroom door.

“Mama?”

Karen’s hands began to shake as if with palsy. “Abby?”

“Mama!”

Karen had to swallow before she could continue. “Honey, are you all right? Where are you?”

Abby’s voice disintegrated into sobs before she could answer. Karen heard her hiccupping and swallowing, trying to control herself enough to speak.

“Take your time, baby. Tell me where you are.”

“I don’t know! I’m in the woods. Mama, come get me! I’m scared.”