24 Hours

Will sat in the chair by the bed, facing Cheryl. She was still propped against the headboard-gun beside her, QVC chattering in the background-but she had finally slipped on one of Will’s white pinpoint button-downs. For an hour he had probed her about Hickey, but to no avail. She had given him all the biography she felt safe giving, and beyond that she would only discuss her own interests, such as aromatherapy and Reiki.

Cheryl had somehow got it into her head that the jump from sofa dancing and prostitution to the laying on of hands required in Reiki energy therapy was a natural one. Will tried to lull her into carelessness by telling her about the success of certain alternative therapies with his arthritis, but once he got her on that subject, he couldn’t turn her back to what mattered.

He changed his tack by asking about Huey instead of Joe, but suddenly something buzzed against his side. He jumped out of the chair, thinking it was a cockroach, but when he looked down he realized it was the new SkyTel. The pager was still set to VIBRATE mode from the keynote dinner.

“What’s with you?” Cheryl asked.

“Something crawled over me.” He made a big show of looking under the chair cushion. “A damn roach or something.”

She laughed. “I wouldn’t be surprised. Hey, this brochure over here says they close the swimming pool at eight p.m. That’s kind of cheap, isn’t it?”

“They don’t want you swimming, they want you gambling in the casino downstairs.”

“Yeah.” Her eyes brightened. “You like gambling?” Will was dying to check the pager. He wasn’t on call, so the message had almost certainly come from Karen. The only other people who would be able to persuade his service to page him at this hour would be his partners, most of whom were at the convention. “Not really,” he said, trying to remember the thread of the conversation. “Life’s uncertain enough without that.”

“Party pooper.”

“Do you mind if I use the bathroom?”

Cheryl shrugged and returned her attention to a display of Peterboro baskets on QVC. “Hey, if you got to go…”

Will walked into the bathroom with the Jacuzzi and closed the door, then whipped the pager off his belt and punched the retrieve button. The green backlit screen scrolled:

YOU’VE GOT TO DO SOMETHING BEFORE MORNING. ABBY IS GOING TO DIE NO MATTER WHAT. KAREN. CONFIRM BY E-MAIL.

He scrolled the message again, staring in shock at the words as they trailed past. Abby is going to die no matter what. What did that mean? Was Abby having some sort of diabetic crisis? Karen had given her eight units of insulin in the early evening, and that should hold her until morning. Had Karen learned something new about Hickey’s plan?

You’ve got to do something before morning. What the hell could he do without risking Abby’s life? But the answer to that question was contained within the message. Abby is going to die no matter what. Karen had learned something. And her meaning was clear: he would have to risk Abby’s life to save her life.

He looked around the bathroom as though something in it could help him. The only potential weapon he saw was a steam iron. As he stared at the thing, the phone beside the toilet rang. He looked at his watch. 3:00 A.M. Hickey’s regular check-in call. He heard Cheryl’s muffled voice through the bathroom door. A few words, then silence again. Or rather the droning chatter of the television. He turned on the hot water tap and waited for steam to rise from the basin.

Wetting another washcloth, he wrung it out and pressed it to his face. As the blood came into his cheeks, something strange and astonishing happened. His mental perspective simultaneously contracted and expanded, piercing the fog that had blinded him for the past hours. He suddenly saw three separate scenes with absolute clarity: Abby held hostage in the woods, Karen trapped in their house at Annandale, and himself standing in the marble-floored bathroom. He saw these scenes like a man in the first row of a theater, yet at the same time he saw the relationships between them as though from satellite altitude: visible and invisible filaments connecting six people in time and space, a soft machine with six moving parts. And burning at the center of his brain was awareness of a single fact: he had exactly thirty minutes to save Abby. That was all he would ever have. The thirty minutes between check-in calls. Whether it was this half hour or the next, that was the window of opportunity Hickey had left him.