24 Hours

The scream died in her throat. Her eyelids began to flutter, and her facial muscles twitched far too rapidly to be controlled by conscious thought. Her arms flew up and across her chest; then her body went rigid as the signals reaching its muscle fibers became a garbled storm of misfiring electrochemicals. The smell of human waste reached him, a common side effect of Anectine. It was all familar to Will, though the context was alien. He’d seen this happen to mice, pigs, rhesus monkeys, and homo sapiens, but always in a controlled environment. Cheryl’s eyes were frozen open, filled with limitless horror.

He pulled the socks from her mouth, then climbed off her chest and sat beside her. “I know it’s bad. Maybe you feel as scared as my little girl feels right now.”

Cheryl lay as still as a stone angel on a grave. An angel with screaming eyes.

“We’re going to do this over and over until you tell me where Abby is, so you’d do well to tell me everything as soon as you can.”

Her face was going gray. He checked her fingernails for cyanosis. Hypoxia was taking its toll, and consciousness would soon wink out. In the time it took him to reach down to the sample case for a vial of Restorase, Cheryl’s skin took on a bluish cast. Loading the contact syringes would take more time than he had, so he drew fifty milligrams into a conventional syringe and shot the drug into the antecubital vein at the crook of her elbow. Twenty seconds later, her eyelids fluttered. She blinked, and then her lacrimal glands began draining tears again.

“I didn’t like doing that,” he said. “But you forced me to. Joe forced me to.” He patted her upper arm, then used his sleeve to wipe away her tears. “I know you don’t want to go through it again. So, talk to me.”

“You buh… bastard,” Cheryl whispered. “You made me mess myself. You’re worse than Joey. Worse than any of them!”

“Where’s Abby, Cheryl?”

“I told you I don’t know!”

“You know more than you’re telling me. You couldn’t have pulled this off five times before without knowing something. Where’s the pickup? Where are you going to meet Joe to give him the money?”

“A motel,” she said. “Near Brookhaven.”

Brookhaven was fifty minutes south of Jackson.

“You see?” he said. “That’s something I didn’t know before. That’s a good start. Keep talking.”

“That’s all I know.”

“You know a lot more than that. What’s the name of the motel?”

“The Truckers’ Rest.” She shook her head. “Please don’t do it again. I’m begging you.”

Will steeled himself against pity. She sounded like a child herself, a little girl begging not to be hurt by a monster. Was he a monster? Abby might be begging the same way right now, pleading not to be hurt. And that was partly the fault of the woman before him. An image came to him from somewhere, a man waiting in an airport for a defendant to be escorted through by deputies. He stood at a pay phone, pretending to talk, then drew a pistol from his coat, a pistol that had lain in a cabinet in his home for twenty years, waiting for the day when it would be used to kill a man who had molested a little boy. Will didn’t know if he could commit murder out of revenge. But he could kill to prevent a murder. He could torture to spare his daughter pain.

With the coldness of a Nazi doctor he stuffed the socks back into Cheryl’s mouth and injected her with seventy milligrams of Anectine. He looked straight into her eyes as her face began to twitch and her muscles turned to stone. The terror in them predated human consciousness by millions of years. It was like watching someone drown from six inches away. He loaded another dose of Restorase and watched Cheryl’s fear race up an unimaginable scale, then slow and fade as her brain cells slowly starved of oxygen. She was blue when he shot the Restorase into her arm, and when she came out of the paralysis, her entire body was shivering.

“Where is Abby?” he asked. “Right this minute?”

Cheryl seemed to be trying to speak. He pulled the socks from her mouth.

“Wuh… water,” she croaked.

Will went to the sink and moistened a clean washcloth, then came back and squeezed a few drops into her mouth. “Careful.”

“More,” she begged, coughing violently.

He squeezed a few more drops from the cloth.

Deep sobs racked her chest. Cheryl had seen a glimpse of hell few people ever would, and the experience had shattered her.

“If I tell you anything,” she said, “Joey will kill me.”

“Joe is two hundred miles away. I’m right here. If you tell me where Abby is, the needle goes back into the case, and you can have all the money you need to start over somewhere else. Anyplace you want.”

“You’ve forgotten something, Doctor. When Joey calls back, I can kill your kid with one word. And I think I’m going to, for what you did.”

Will kept his face calm. “You don’t want Abby to die. I sensed that before, when we were talking about kids. About being pregnant.”

She looked away.