24 Hours

His rambling train of thought crashed to a halt like a locomotive hitting a wall. His eyes went from the computer case to his sample case. Restorase. He had four vials of the prototype drug inside the case. But more importantly, he had two vials of Anectine. It was all part of the display for the Klein-Adams booth. Doctors would recognize Anectine, which was the trade name for succinylcholine, the depolarizing relaxant Will had developed Restorase to counteract. There was also a package of syringes: two conventional, and two of the special contact syringes the Klein-Adams engineering people had manufactured to Will’s specifications. The compressed gas syringes could deliver a therapeutic dose of Anectine in a half second of skin contact.

“Succinylcholine,” Will murmured, and a strange chill went through him. With the chill came visions from the clinical trials of the past year, images that would scare the living hell out of a layman.

“What are you doing in there?” Cheryl called from the bedroom.

“Thinking.”

“Don’t strain your brain.”

He opened the sample case and made sure everything that was supposed to be there was there. Then he closed his eyes and summoned Abby from memory, bringing her to center stage in his mind. Her smiling face and sturdy little body, her beyond-her-years determination, forged during her constant battle with juvenile diabetes. She lived on the knife edge of disaster, yet considered herself far luckier than most children. Will’s pride in her was boundless. Abby was the nourishing flame that burned at the center of his soul. And the woman in the next room had put her life at risk. Dropped her down a black hole of terror. Whatever disadvantages fate had handed Cheryl, she had chosen to help Hickey of her own free will-not once, but six times, by her own admission. Six children put through hell. Twelve parents. Whatever she had to endure now was only what she had asked for.

He walked back into the bedroom as though everything was fine. But instead of stopping at the chair, he walked to the edge of the bed and looked down at Cheryl, much as he might have at Karen when he wanted to make love with her.

She looked up, her eyes curious. “What?”

“I want to kiss you.”

Her cheeks went pink. “You what?”

“I want to kiss you.”

“I don’t do that,” she said in a flustered voice. “That’s too personal.”

“But I want to.”

She bit her lip. “No kiss.” But then she undid the top four buttons of the dress shirt and slid down a cup of her bra. “You can kiss here.”

He smiled and bent toward her breast.

“What changed your mind?” she asked in a softer voice.

As his cheek brushed her skin, he put his hand across her as though to prop himself on the bed, then closed his hand around the butt of her Walther. When he rose up and pointed the automatic at her face, she blinked with incomprehension.

“What are you doing?”

“Pull up your bra.”

She did.

Will took the pager from his belt and handed it to her. “Read the last message.”

“What?”

An ex-hooker would know all about pagers. “Hit the RETRIEVE button!”

She fumbled with the device, then found the button. He could see the words scrolling on the LCD screen, her eyes narrowing as she read them.

“I just got that message from my wife. Do you understand what it means?”

She shook her head.

“Joe is going to kill my little girl. No matter what I do. Whether he gets the ransom or not.”

“He is not!”

“If Karen says he is, he is.”

“Joey would never let her send this message. This is some kind of mistake.”

“No mistake, Cheryl. Karen is smarter than Joe, and she found a way. It’s that simple. Now, you’re about to tell me where Abby is.”

She blinked at him. “I can’t. I don’t know where she

“For your sake, I hope you do.”

Confidence suddenly returned to her face. “Are you going to shoot me? Come on, Doc. We’ve been over this.”

“I’m not going to shoot you. Not with a bullet, anyway.”

Something in his eyes must have gotten through, because a shadow of fear played over her face. “What do you mean?” she said in a higher voice. “I told you before. Even if I did know, and you made me tell, the cops couldn’t get to her in time. Joey’s going to call back in twenty-five minutes. If I don’t answer, Abby’s dead. It’s that simple. And if I do, and I say one word, the same thing. And you don’t know what that word is. So give me back my gun, and let’s forget this happened.”

A surreal sense of detachment was settling over Will. “Remember when you said there was nothing I could do to you that hadn’t been done before?”

She gave him a blank look. “Yeah?”

“You were wrong about that. Do you remember my presentation last night?”

She bit her lip as she thought back.

“Stand up,” he said.

“Screw you.”

He transferred the Walther to his left hand and grabbed her arm with his right. He was surprised to feel no pain. His brain had to be pumping out endorphins at five times the normal rate.

“Unhook my belt,” he said.

“What?”

“Do it!”

She reached up and unfastened his belt.

“Pull it out.”

“What?”

“The belt, damn it. Pull it out of the loops.”

She did.