24 Hours

Abby rubbed her eyes and held out her gold-lamegowned Barbie. “This is Belle. Beauty and the Beast Belle. She’s my favorite Disney princess because she reads books. She wants to be something someday. Belle says it doesn’t matter what you look like. It only matters what you feel inside. In your heart. And what you do.”

Huey’s mouth hung slack, as though he were staring at a magical fairy risen from the grass.

“You never saw Beauty and the Beast?” Abby said incredulously.

He shook his head.

“Let’s pretend I’m Belle, and you’re Beast.”

“Beast?” He looked suddenly upset. “I’m a beast?”

“Good Beast.” Abby wiped her runny nose. “Beast after he turns nice. Not mean like at first.”

She slid off the couch and held Belle out to him. “Say something Beast says in the movie. Oh, I forgot. You missed it. Just say something nice. And call me ‘Belle,’ remember?”

Huey was at a loss. Tentatively, he said, “I’m not going to let anything happen to you, Belle. I’m going to keep you safe till morning comes, and your mama comes to get you.”

Abby smiled. “Thank you, Beast. And if the villagers come and try to kill you, me and Mrs. Potts and Chip will make them go away. They won’t get you!”

Huey swallowed, his eyes bright.

“Now you say, ‘Thank you, Belle.’”

“Thank you, Belle.”

Abby petted the doll’s hair. “Do you want to brush her hair? Just pretendlike.”

Huey reached out shyly and petted Belle’s hair with his enormous hand.

“Good, Beast,” Abby murmured. “Good Beast.”

TWELVE

Karen watched the digital clock beside her bed flash over to 1:00 A.M. She was sitting in the overstuffed chair in the corner, hugging her knees; Hickey lay on the bed, his injured leg propped high on some pillows. The Wild Turkey bottle sat beside him, along with Will’s. 38. His eyes were glued to the television, which was showing the opening credits of The Desperate Hours with Humphrey Bogart and Fredric March. She was glad he hadn’t yet realized there was a satellite dish connected to the bedroom television; she didn’t want him flipping through to Cinemax and getting more ideas from the T amp;A movies they seemed to run all night.

“Bogey’s good,” Hickey drawled, sounding more than half drunk. “But Mitchum was the greatest. No acting at all, you know? The real deal.”

Karen said nothing. She had never known time to pass so slowly. Not even when she was in labor, screaming for Abby to be born. It was as though the earth itself had slowed on its axis, its sole purpose to torment her family. She had entered that realm of timelessness that exists in certain places, a few of which she had visited herself. Prisons were like that. And monasteries. But the ones she knew most intimately were the waiting rooms of hospitals: bubbles in time where entire families entered a state of temporal suspension, waiting to learn whether the heart of the patriarch would restart after the triple bypass, whether a child would be saved or killed by a wellintentioned gift of marrow. Her bedroom had now become such a bubble. Only her child was not in the hands of a doctor.

“You alive over there?” Hickey asked.

“Barely,” she whispered, her eyes on Fredric March. March reminded her of her father; he was a model of male restraint and dignity, yet he would do whatever was required when the going got tough. She still cried when she saw The Best Years of Our Lives, with March and that poor boy who’d lost both hands in the war trying to learn to play the piano-

“I said, are you alive over there?”

“Yes,” she replied.

“Then you ought to feel lucky.”

She sensed that Hickey was looking for a fight. She didn’t intend to give him one.

“’Cause a lot of people who ought to be alive aren’t,” he said. “You know?”

She looked over at him, wondering who he was thinking of. “I know.”

“Bullshit you know.”

“I told you, I was a nurse.”

He glanced at her. “You proud of it? People in agony waiting for pain medicine while nurses sit there painting their fucking fingernails, watching the clock, waiting for their shift to end.”

She could not let that pass. “I am proud I was a nurse. I know that happens. But nurses are stuck with doctors’ orders. If they break them, they get fired.”

Hickey scowled and drank from the Wild Turkey bottle. “Don’t get me started on doctors.”

Karen thought she remembered him saying that all the previous kidnappings had involved children of doctors. He’d said something about doctors collecting expensive toys. But that couldn’t be the only reason he targeted them. Lots of people collected expensive things. Somehow, doctors were part of a vein of suffering that ran deep in Hickey’s soul.

“When did your mother pass away?” she asked.

He turned his head far enough to glare at her in the chair. “What the fuck do you care?”

“I am a human being, as you so eloquently pointed out before. And I’m trying to understand what makes you so angry. Angry enough to do this to total strangers.”