24 Hours

He threw the washrag into the basin. He had to know what Cheryl knew. Everything she knew. There was a chance that she’d lied before, that she knew exactly where Abby was being held. But probably she didn’t. None of the previous fathers had dragged it out of her, and he was sure some had tried. How would they have tried? The gun was the obvious tool. But Abby gave Cheryl immunity to the gun, and to everything else. Because the effectiveness of any threat-torture with a steam iron, say-lay in the victim’s belief that his tormentor would follow through. And while they had the children, no one could.

Even if he somehow broke Cheryl, it wouldn’t be enough for her to spill what she knew. She would have to cooperate until Abby was found. Play her role for Hickey during the check-in calls-at least three of them, probably more. What could possibly persuade her to do that? The bruises on her body proved she could take punishment, and God alone knew what horrors Hickey had visited upon her in the past. Yet she stayed with him. She felt a loyalty that Will would never understand. And yet…

Her eyes had shone when she told him about the contact she’d had with Hollywood producers, the contact Hickey had acted so decisively to terminate. And she hadn’t tried to make it more than it was. She admitted the potential roles were soft-core porn, late-night cable stuff. But that had been fine with her. It was a step up, and Cheryl had known it. It was also a step away from Joe Hickey, and on some level she must have known that, too. Known it, and believed she’d been born for more than prostitution and crime.

But to betray Hickey, she would have to believe she could escape him. And that would take money. Enough to not merely run, but to vanish. To become someone else. She might like that idea. Leaving Cheryl the sofa dancer in the ashes of the past. But by the time Will got his hands on that much money, the final act would be playing itself out, and by Hickey’s rules. Earlier, while Cheryl made a trip to the bathroom, he had called downstairs and asked about cashing checks. The casino used TelChek, and that company had a $2,500 limit over ten days. Given his credit rating, he could probably persuade the casino manager to take a promissory note for a larger cash advance, but only if he intended to gamble that money in the casino.

“You okay in there?” Cheryl called.

“Fine.” Maybe he could take the $2,500, max out his credit cards at the ATM, and then parlay that stake into the kind of money he needed-

“Dumb,” he muttered at his reflection. The only games he knew how to play were blackjack and five-card-stud, and he hadn’t played either since medical school.

His right eye suddenly blurred, and a pain like the sharp end of a poker woke to life behind it. The prodromal phase of a migraine. The euphoric clarity he’d experienced moments ago began to evaporate like drunken insight in the haze of a hangover. His thirty-minute window was ticking away. Abby’s going to die no matter what…

He had never felt such desperation. A paralyzing mixture of terror and futility that cornered animals must feel. Abby was his flesh, his blood, his spirit. Her survival was his own. Will had never seen Joe Hickey’s face, but it floated just beyond his blurred vision, dancing like the hooded head of a cobra. The pain behind his eye ratcheted up a notch. He reached into his dop kit and gobbled four Advils. Then he flushed the toilet and opened the bathroom door.

Cheryl didn’t bother to look away from the television.

“Was that Joe?” he asked.

“Yeah. Everything’s cool, just like I said it would be.”

Will looked at her there, wearing his button-down and the remains of her black cocktail dress. The gun lay beside her.

Sensing his eyes upon her, she glanced over at him. “What are you looking at? You changing your mind about getting calmed down?”

“Maybe.”

She gave him a strange look. A hurt look. “Maybe I changed my mind, too. You said some mean things before.”

Mean things. This woman had helped kidnap his daughter. Now she was talking about meanness on his part.

Will walked into the bedroom, his eyes on the gun. But as he neared the bed, something made him continue around it. Past the chair, past the window where he watched the gulf, into the spacious sitting room. Here was the sofa, the wet bar, the desk, the dining table. He looked at his notebook computer on the desk. Eight hours ago he had been running video clips from the hard drive on that machine, proud and self-satisfied, dreaming of stock options and the royalties he would realize on the drug he had worked so hard to develop. What a pathetic joke. What would that money be worth if Abby lay in a coffin beneath the ground? How much time had he spent away from home, away from her, working on the trials for Restorase? How many hours wasted thinking up the stupid name? Fighting with the Klein-Adams marketing people over it? Restorase, Neurovert, Synapticin-