24 Hours

“Nah. I picked doctors for the reason I told you. They collect expensive toys, go off to meetings all the time. They’re perfect marks. It’s strange the way it happened, really. Your husband was already on my shortlist when he killed my mother. He just went to the top of the list.”

Karen hugged her knees tighter. Hickey had already returned his attention to the movie. He seemed enthralled by the paranoia and hatred crackling off of Humphrey Bogart, an inchoate anger that quite by chance had found a target in the family of Fredric March, a man whose loving family Bogie’s character had never known and never would. She recalled Hickey’s story of the death of his father. Hickey had ordered his cousin to kill the man who brought him into the world, and Huey had obeyed him. Patricide. A man capable of that was capable of anything.

“You just want the money, right?” she said, watching his face in the light of the television.

Hickey glanced away from the screen. “What?”

“I said, you just want the money, right?”

“Sure.” He smiled, but his eyes were dead. “What else?”

Karen kept her face motionless, but her soul was falling down a dark shaft. Abby wasn’t meant to survive the kidnapping. She would live until Hickey’s wife got the ransom money. Then she would wind up a corpse in a ditch somewhere, waiting for the inevitable deer hunter to stumble across her body. Hickey’s other victims might have lived, but this time was different. This time it was not about money.

He wants to punish Will, she thought. That’s why he wanted to rape me. And how could he be sure Will would know he’d done it? By killing me. Because when the medical examiner performed the required autopsy, he would find Hickey’s semen-

It was hard to believe that a simple chain of thoughts could incapacitate a person, but Karen felt her mind and body shutting down as surely as if Hickey had cracked her skull with a hammer. She had to keep functioning. She had to shed her fear for herself. Hickey meant to kill Abby: that was the critical fact. That alone had to determine her actions from this moment forward. The first thing to do was to warn Will. He had to know that waiting out the night and paying the ransom wasn’t going to bring Abby back to them. She wasn’t sure how to warn him yet, but she knew one thing absolutely: if morning dawned without them any closer to saving Abby, she would have to kill Hickey. If he wasn’t alive to give the death order, the giant in the forest might just falter at the brutality of his appointed task. But first she had to get out of the bedroom.

Alone.

Will lay on the sofa in the sitting room of the suite, a hot towel over his face. He was tired of looking at Cheryl in her bra. Tired of listening to her street analysis of his marriage and his present situation. He had paced out a couple of miles on the sitting room carpet, circling the furniture groups, trying to burn off the desperate energy produced by his inability to help Abby. That exercise, combined with his earlier wrestling match with Cheryl, had aggravated his joints to the point that he had to take a powerful painkiller that he kept for emergency situations. The drug and the hot towel had tamped down the pain, but his brain was humming like an overloaded circuit. The QVC shopping network babbled incessantly from the bedroom, where Cheryl lay drinking her rum and Cokes.

His mind was working strangely, like the jump cuts he saw whenever he flipped through MTV on the way to VH1 or CNBC. He saw himself walking into the bedroom, jamming Cheryl’s gun underneath her jaw, and forcing her to tell him where Abby was, the way Clint Eastwood would do it. But Cheryl had hit the nail on the head before. This was no movie. As long as Abby was under Hickey’s control, Will could yank out Cheryl’s fingernails with pliers and it would get him nowhere. When the thirty-minute check-in call came, Abby would suffer horribly or die.

For a while, he’d tried to view his situation as an exercise in problem-solving. It was like a chess game, with only six pieces. But the stakes were so high that he couldn’t make a move. He couldn’t even see a move. Cheryl claimed she didn’t know where Abby was being held. Will wasn’t sure he believed her, but even if she did know-and he somehow forced her to tell him-she claimed it was impossible for police to reach the location within the thirty-minute window. He did believe that. It only made sense-from Hickey’s point of view-and it dovetailed with what Karen had said about where Abby was being held. So, in order for Will to save Abby, Cheryl would not only have to know where Abby was-and tell him-she would also have to pretend to Hickey that everything was fine while the state police or the FBI raced to rescue her.