24 Hours

“Bring that chair over here.” He pointed not at the French chaise he had been using, but at a straight-backed chair against the wall. “Put it here by the bed and sit down.”

“Why?”

He slapped her face.

A bitterness beyond anything he’d ever seen came into her eyes. But with the bitterness came something else. Familiarity. This was a language she understood. She climbed off the bed, picked up the chair, and brought it back.

“Sit in it.”

She did.

He put down the gun and wrapped the belt around her torso and the chair back, then buckled it. From the bathroom closet he took a terry-cloth robe belt and used it to tie her lower legs to the legs of the chair.

“I’m going to scream,” she said.

“Go ahead. Scream your head off. Then you explain to Joe why he won’t be getting his money in the morning.”

“You’re killing your kid,” she said, as though talking to a man who had lost his reason. “Don’t you get that?”

Will stood back and considered his handiwork. Screaming could become a problem, even if Cheryl didn’t mean for it to. Fear was an unpredictable thing. He went into the other room and brought back a pair of socks with his sample case, then stuffed them into Cheryl’s mouth. Her eyes went wide.

He dragged the chair against the bed, then bent and flipped Cheryl and the chair up onto the mattress. From there it was simple to rock the chair legs and move her to the middle of the bed. She lay with her legs molded in the shape of the chair, feet sticking into the air like a woman in stirrups.

“If you listened to my speech,” he said, “you know a little about paralyzing muscle relaxants.”

Cheryl looked confused. She probably hadn’t listened to his program. She had been trying to seduce him with her eyes, all the time thinking about the moment when she’d have to pull the gun upstairs. Unless she could con him into taking her into his room in the hope of sex, which had probably been her original plan.

Will removed a vial of Anectine and a conventional syringe from his sample case. Cheryl’s eyes locked onto the syringe as he popped off its cap, poked the needle through the rubber seal of the vial, and drew sixty milligrams of Anectine into the barrel. Many people had an irrational fear of needles. It was something you dealt with all the time in anesthesiology.

“This is succinylcholine,” he said in a calm voice. “Shortly after I inject it, your skeletal muscles will cease to function. The skeletal muscles are the ones that move your bones. But your diaphragm is also made of skeletal muscle. So, while you’ll be able to see, hear, and think normally, you won’t be able to breathe. Or move.”

There was more white than color showing in her eyes now.

“You don’t have to go through this,” he said. “All you have to do is tell me where Abby is, and I’ll put this syringe back in the case.”

She nodded frantically.

He leaned over and pulled the socks from her mouth. She gasped for air, then said, “I swear to God, I don’t know! Please don’t stick me with that!”

Will picked up the remote control and raised the volume of the television. The QVC huckster was selling “limited edition” china plates (“only 150 firing days!”) bearing likenesses of Ronald and Nancy Reagan. As he shoved the socks back into Cheryl’s mouth, she tried to bite his hand. He climbed onto the bed and sat on her rib cage. Her upraised thighs held his back like the back of a chair.

“You can scream,” he said. “But the sound won’t last five seconds after I stick you. Listen to me, Cheryl. I first saw this drug used as an intern. An ER doctor used it to restrain a crack addict who’d stabbed a cop in the emergency room. It was awful. I’ve seen murderers turned into whimpering babies by this stuff. They lay there paralyzed, soiling themselves, turning blue. Then you bag them and breathe for them, but the whole time they know that if you stop pumping that bag, their brain is going to shut off like a cheap lightbulb. It must be like being buried alive.”

Cheryl fought the restraining belts like a mad-woman, rocking Will and the chair in her attempt to get loose. He jabbed the point of the needle into her external jugular vein, and she stopped instantly.

“You have a choice. You can help me save my little girl. Or you can find out what it’s like to be dead.”

She closed her eyes, then opened them again. Tears ran from their corners down into her ears. “I nono!” she choked through the socks. “I sweahta gaa!”

“You know something.”

She shook her head violently.

Will depressed the plunger of the syringe.

“Helll,” Cheryl screamed. “Someodeee-”