24 Hours

No, he thought. Madman is probably inaccurate. True madness was rare, if you barred disorders caused by organic disease. During his psychiatry rotation in medical school, Will had treated patients at the state mental hospital at Whitfield, several of them classified as criminally insane. After a while, he had come to the conclusion that some of the men were quite sane. They had pursued their goals and desires with the single-minded drive of men who succeeded in business or the arts or politics. It was simply that society found itself unable to admit that their chosen goals could be the goals of sane men. But Will knew different. All men had atavistic desires, sometimes savage ones. Some were merely better at suppressing them than others. And Hickey did not belong in the first category. He acted on his impulses, regardless of law or danger. His overt motive was simple enough: money. But it seemed to Will that if a man was willing to flout the law, there were easier and less risky ways to steal large amounts of money. Hickey’s plan was constructed to satisfy deeper urges than money. And Will needed to figure out what those were. Very soon.

He was having trouble keeping his mind on track. He remembered the ride to the airport that morning, when he’d asked Karen to bring Abby to the convention at the last minute. He’d had a bad feeling about her refusal. A premonition. Nothing melodramatic, just a feeling that if Karen wasn’t with him on this trip, their lives might skew farther apart than they already had. In his wildest flights of paranoia, he could not have imagined something like this. But he had imagined that without Karen at his side this weekend, he might find himself in one of those situations he’d experienced many times before. Situations in which he had always chosen to spend the night alone rather than accept an offer of female company. But during the ride to the airport, something had been whispering below the level of consciousness, a voice born during long months of miscommunication and silent rejections, whispering that a channel for release was presenting itself. And a part of him had heeded that voice. That knowledge now ate like acid at his heart.

It was a cliche of a cliche. You never knew what you had until it was gone. The idea that Abby could be murdered was so paralyzing that Will did not allow himself to consider it a real possibility. He would get her back, no matter what it cost him. Money. Blood. His life. But even with the best possible outcome, something irrevocable had already occurred. He had left his wife and child alone. Exposed. It was nothing that millions of fathers didn’t do every week, but in this case, some part of him had wanted to be alone on this trip. He could have pushed Karen harder-and earlier-really convinced her that he wanted her with him on this weekend. But he hadn’t. It wasn’t solely his fault. Organizing the Junior League’s sixtieth anniversary flower show was comparable to planning double-blind trials for a new drug, and missing the event itself would be Junior League suicide for the chairperson. But deep down, Will suspected, Karen wanted to commit Junior League suicide. And he had not done enough to help her.

“What are you thinking about over there?” asked Cheryl.

She came out of the bathroom and climbed back into the bed, using the oversized pillows to prop herself against the headboard. The torn cocktail dress was tied around her waist. She wore the black bra as though it were a Madonna-style bustier. Will supposed that to a girl who had turned tricks in cars behind a strip club, wearing only a bra in front of a stranger was no big deal.

“Not speaking to me?” she asked.

Cheryl was the kind of person who couldn’t tolerate silence. Will shrugged and turned back to the lights of the freighter.

“Look, you’re going to get your daughter back,” she said. “It’s just a waiting game. You pay some money-which you don’t give a shit about compared to your little girl-and you get her back in the morning. You ought to try to sleep. I’ve got to take the calls from Joey, so I have to stay awake. But you should crash. I’ll wake you up when it’s time.”

“You think I can sleep with this going on?”

“You need to. You’re going to be a basket case in the morning if you don t.

“I can’t.”

“Yes, you can.”

“Leave me alone, okay?”

“Look, you’re just standing there blaming yourself and trying to figure out a way to rescue your little girl. That’s what they all do. But you can’t. You’re not Mel Gibson, for Christ’s sake. Mel Gibson isn’t even Mel Gibson, you know? You save your little girl by paying Joey the money. It’s that simple.”

“I should trust Joe?”

“Joey’s got a motto on this deal, Doc. You know what it is?”

“What?”

“The kid always makes it.”

Will turned from the window.

“I’m serious,” she said. “He’s said it a hundred times. That’s how we’ve managed to keep on doing this. That’s how we made all our money.”

“And every child you’ve done this to has lived? Been returned to its parents?”