24 Hours

Midnight had passed, and the Jenningses’ Victorian house stood dark and silent on its hill. Crickets cheeped in the pine trees; a truck droned out on the interstate; but the house itself was silent.

A scream pierced the night.

Inside the master bedroom, Karen crouched over Hickey’s wounded thigh on the sleigh bed. Naked but for a towel she had lain across his midsection, Hickey held the bottle of Wild Turkey in his left hand and a halogen lamp from Will’s study in his right. He aimed the light wherever she told him to, keeping silent during most of the work, but occasionally yelling when the needle pierced his unanesthetized flesh.

Karen worked the U-shaped suture needle with almost careless speed, mating the edges of the wound, tying knots, moving on. It was amazing how much damage one slash with a good scalpel could do. Hickey hadn’t lost enough blood to threaten his life, but he’d bled enough to scare the hell out of someone unused to trauma. Karen was grateful to see that she had in fact nicked the base of his penis with her panicked stroke (a wound that required two stitches) and hoped this would discourage him from trying to force her to finish what she’d begun earlier.

“How many to go?” he asked in a taut voice.

“We’re only half done. You should have taken that lidocaine.”

He gulped another slug of Wild Turkey as she jabbed the needle through his skin. “This is all the shot I need. Just hurry it up.”

She sewed five more stitches, then paused to stretch her wrists. As she did, something that had been bothering her from the beginning slipped out. “Why us?” she said softly.

“What?”

“I said, ‘Why us?’”

Hickey reached out with the bottle and forced her chin up, so that she was looking at his face. “Are you that dumb? Are you that fucking dumb?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why not you? Huh? You think because you live out here in this suburban palace, you’re immune to pain? My mother had throat cancer. That’s the worst, man. ‘Why me?’ she’d rasp all the time. ‘Dear Jesus, why me?’ I’d ask the same thing. Why my mother? Why not my shit-for-brains old man? I’d look at the ceiling like God was up there listening and ask why. Then I finally figured it out. The joke was on me.” Hickey shook his bottle, spilling amber fluid on Karen’s knee. “The joke’s on you, too, June Cleaver.”

“Why?”

“You’re a human being, that’s why. So why not you, okay? Why not you?”

Karen bit her lip and gazed intently at Hickey. Bitterness was etched in every line of his face, and his eyes were like black wells with a film of oil floating on them. “It must be awful to be you,” she said.

“Sometimes,” he conceded. “But tonight it’s worse to be you.”

Will stood at the picture window of the bedroom, staring out over the Gulf of Mexico. The Cypress suite, despite its luxurious appointments, had begun to close around him like a prison cell, and the knowledge that the dark gulf stretched south to the Yucatan somehow calmed him.

The first seconds after he realized that Huey had recaptured Abby had been hellish. Even armed with a pistol, Cheryl had felt compelled to lock herself in one of the marble bathroms for protection, so terrible had been his rage. He could have killed Hickey at that moment, if the man had appeared before him. But of course he hadn’t. Hickey had designed his Chinese box precisely so that this scenario would never occur.

Even as Will’s rage dissipated, his frustration grew. There was so much he didn’t know. How had Karen gotten the drop on Hickey? Probably by sneaking the. 38 from the top of their closet. But even so, why would Hickey respond to her threat? He had control over Abby, and so long as he did, a gun would do Karen no good. But apparently it had. Or something had. Before Hickey hung up the telephone, Will had heard him yell something about being stabbed. Had Karen stabbed him? Had she snapped under the stress and tried to kill him? No. Karen never lost control. That was axiomatic. Her father, the master sergeant, had drilled into his daughter a self-discipline that was unnerving. Whatever had happened, Will had no way to discover it. He would just have to wait.

The only lights on the gulf now belonged to a lone freighter sailing west, probably to off-load coffee or bananas or God-knew-what-else in New Orleans. There were men sleeping on that ship, a full crew less than three miles away, men who knew nothing of his problem and could do nothing to help him if they did. There were several hundred doctors in this very hotel, many of whom Will knew personally-yet none could help him. He was trapped in an unbreakable cage constructed by a madman named Joe Hickey.