24 Hours

He rounded the first turn at forty miles an hour. The brakes squealed as they neared the elevator on the terminal side of the building. Hickey seemed to be looking for signs of police. Seeing nothing, he accelerated around the next curve and almost ran over a young woman in a navy blue skirt suit, who was pulling a suitcase from the trunk of a silver Camry. He screeched to a stop, reversed a few feet, then pulled into the parking space beside the Camry.

“What are you doing?” Karen asked.

He jumped out and closed the distance to the woman in the time it took Karen to turn and look. As the woman gaped, Hickey smashed Will’s . 38 into the side of her head. She dropped like a stone.

“Get out!” Hickey shouted at Karen. “Help me!”

A wave of nausea nearly overcame her, but she forced herself to get out and move to the back of the Expedition. Hickey was bent over the prostrate woman, rifling through her purse.

“What are you doing?”

He snatched his hand from the purse with a jangle of car keys and hit the UNLOCK button on the ring. “Get in the backseat of the Camry! Move!”

Hickey grabbed the woman under the arms and heaved her upper body into the Camry’s trunk. There was blood in her hair. The blow from the pistol had torn part of her ear away from her skull. She moaned in pain and confusion, but Hickey took no notice. He stuffed her legs into the trunk, then slammed it shut. When he turned to Karen, his eyes were as cold as any she had ever seen.

“Get your ass in that car, or you’ll never see Abby alive again.”

He didn’t wait for her to obey. He jumped into the driver’s seat, cranked the Camry, and backed out of the parking space.

Snapped from her trance by the realization that he might actually leave without her, Karen leaped forward and began hammering on the back door, which had automatically locked when he cranked the engine. Hickey looked back at her but did not open the door.

“Please!” she screamed, her heart in her throat. “Open the door! Open it!”

He waited a few seconds, then unlocked the door. Karen jumped inside and pulled the door shut after her.

“Get on the floor,” Hickey ordered.

She lay stomach-down across the carpeted hump behind the front seat. Hickey drove at normal speed through the lines of parked cars.

“Are we leaving the airport?” she asked.

“Yes, we are!” he cried in his Wink Martindale voice. “That nice lady left her parking receipt right here on the drink caddy!”

Karen couldn’t believe it. Hickey was going to drive right out from under the nose of the helicopter hovering overhead. The strange thing was that she wanted him to succeed. She had seen enough of his personality to know that if he were arrested, he would clam up and smile at the police while Abby died in a diabetic coma somewhere.

Hickey stopped at the exit booth.

“How would you like to pay for that, sir?” asked a woman with a Hispanic accent.

“Cash, chiquita.”

“One dollar, please.”

Hickey had the money ready.

“Sir, the short-term parking lot is much more convenient for brief-”

“I’d love to chat,” Hickey said, “but you’ve got cars waiting. Hasta la vista.”

He drove away from the booth and joined the flow of traffic leaving the airport. He drove confidently, neither too fast nor too slow. Karen raised up enough to watch him between the seats.

A sound like a muffled drum suddenly echoed through the car. She thought Hickey had switched on the radio, but he hadn’t. The woman in the trunk was beating on the backseat.

“I’m glad she didn’t start that shit while we were at the booth,” Hickey said.

“Help!” screamed the muted voice. “I can’t breathe! Please let me out!”

Karen shut her eyes and prayed for the woman to be quiet. If she kept screaming, Hickey was liable to pull over and shoot her. The speed and intensity of his acts in her driveway and in the garage had sickened Karen. As a nurse, she had seen the effects of violence, but never the acts that produced the damage. Real violence was so unlike what she’d seen in movies that it was hard to grasp. Slashing Hickey’s thigh had been a reflex, an act of self-preservation. But he acted with a merciless dispatch that made her feel worse about the whole human race. The realization of what she had avoided by stabbing Hickey suddenly came home to her with searing clarity. Those other mothers had actually been raped by the man, had suffered the horror of becoming sexual whipping posts for all his repressed anger and resentment. And they had endured that horror for twenty-four hours. It was unimaginable.

The knocking behind Karen went on, but the cries decreased in intensity until they became a keening wail, like that of a small child.

“Traffic update!” Hickey cried.

“What?”

“I thought you might like to know, that helicopter ’s still hovering over the airport, three miles back. Amateurs, baby. Amateurs.”

“Are we going to get Abby now?”

He laughed. “We’re going somewhere, June Cleaver. That’s one thing you can count on. We got an appointment with destiny!”

EIGHTEEN