Читать книгу 24 Hours - Greg Iles - Страница 8

As Karen stood gaping, the stranger said, “My name’s Joe, Mrs. Jennings. Joe Hickey. I’m going to help you through this thing. And the first thing to remember is that Abby is absolutely fine.”

The temporary paralysis caused by seeing a strange man where she had expected Abby finally broke, and Karen jerked as though she had taken a physical blow.

“Abby!” she screamed. “Come to Mama!”

“Calm down,” the stranger said softly. “Look at me, not the door. I’m Joe Hickey, okay? I’m telling you my real name because I’m not worried that it’s going to matter later. You’re never going to report this, because Abby’s going to be fine. Everybody’s going to be fine. Abby, you, me, everybody. The kid always makes it through. That’s my rule.”

Absurdly, Karen flashed onto the movie The Jungle Book, which she had watched at least fifty times with Abby. Listening to this man was like listening to Kaa the cobra, who hypnotized you with his voice while he waited for the perfect moment to strike. She shook her head and fixed her mind on Abby’s face, and her fear dissolved in a violent rush, replaced by a fury beyond any she had known. The man before her stood between her and her child. If he wanted to keep them apart, he would have to kill her.

Hickey seemed to sense this. “Abby’s not here, Mrs. Jennings. She’s—”

Karen charged, batting him aside like an old man as she raced into the hallway. She yanked open the bathroom door and, though she found it empty, cried, “Abby! Abby? Where are you?”

She stood blinking for a moment; then she tore through the ground floor, checking every room and closet. With each empty space that greeted her, dread settled deeper into her bones. She raced up the back stairs and began searching the second floor. Every room was empty. She ran into the main upstairs guest room, picked up the nearest phone, and dialed 911. Instead of a dispatcher’s voice, she heard a man speaking in a deep piney woods drawl: “… Preacher Bob’s Fount of Life Church is a Full Gospel church, with no wishy-washy bending of the Word, no newfangled editions of the King James—”

She clicked the disconnect button, but the voice droned on. Hickey must have dialed the prayer line from the kitchen phone and left it off the hook. She slammed down the phone, ran around the bed and picked up the private line. This time a female voice that sounded like an android was speaking.

“… the satellite farm forecast is made possible by a grant from the ChemStar corporation, maker of postemergent broad-spectrum herbicides—”

Karen dropped the phone and stood staring at herself in the bureau mirror. Her eyes were frantic, blanked out like those you saw in the ERs after motor vehicle accidents. Relatives. Victims. Walking wounded. She needed to calm down, to try to think rationally, but she couldn’t. As she struggled to gain control, an image came into her mind with the power of a talisman.

She ran to the back stairs again, but this time she crept down the carpeted steps. When she reached the first floor, she swept up the hallway on tiptoe and darted into the master bedroom, locking the door behind her.

Her heart thumped as though to make up for the beats it had skipped when the stranger first appeared. She put her hands on her cheeks, which felt deathly cold, and took three deep breaths. Then she walked into the closet and stood on the inverted wooden box that gave her access to the top shelf.

Her hand barely reached over the edge, but she felt what she wanted: Will’s .38 revolver. She had pleaded with him a hundred times not to keep the pistol in the house with Abby. Now she thanked God he hadn’t listened. She pulled down the gun and opened the cylinder, as her father had taught her long ago. A gun is just a tool, hon, like an axe or a drill … The .38’s hammer rested on an empty chamber, but five rounds filled the others.

Karen snapped the cylinder home and walked to the bedroom door, steeling herself with each step, clenching the pistol’s checked grip like a lifeline. She was about to face the man who had taken Abby, and she would do whatever was necessary to make him give her back. There was no room for hesitation. Or for mercy.

She quietly opened the door, then edged along the hallway toward the rectangle of light that was the kitchen door. Her breath coming in little pants, she stopped just outside the door and peered into the kitchen.

Joe Hickey was sitting calmly at the kitchen table, drinking from one of the glasses of tea. The realization that she had made that tea for Abby brought a lump to Karen’s throat. She stepped into the kitchen, raised the gun, and aimed it at his face.

“Where’s my daughter?”

Hickey swallowed some tea and slowly set down the glass. “You don’t want to shoot me, Karen. Can I call you Karen?”

She shook the .38 at him. “Where’s my little girl!?”

“Abby is perfectly safe. However, if you shoot me, she’ll be stone-dead within thirty minutes. And there won’t be a thing I can do about it.”

“Tell me what’s happening!”

“Listen carefully, Karen. This is a kidnapping for ransom. Okay? It’s about money. M-O-N-E-Y. That’s all. So, the last thing I want is for anything to happen to your precious little girl.”

“Where is Abby right now?”

“With my cousin. His name’s Huey. Right after you got here, I passed her outside and Huey drove her off in his pickup truck. He’s got a cell phone with him …”

Hickey kept talking, but Karen couldn’t make sense of the words. She couldn’t get past the image he’d just described. Abby alone with a stranger. She’d be whimpering in terror, crying for her mother. Karen felt as though she had been pushed from a great height, her stomach rolling over and over as she went into free fall.

“Are you listening, Karen? I said, if I don’t call Huey every thirty minutes, he’ll kill her. He won’t want to, but he will. That’s rule number two. So don’t get any crazy ideas about calling the police. It would take them an hour just to get me fingerprinted and into lockup, and by the time I saw a pay phone, Abby would be lying dead beside the highway.”

Karen snapped out of her trance.

“But that’s not going to happen,” Hickey said, smiling. “You’re a smart girl. And Huey’s a good boy. Loves kids. He’s practically a kid himself. But he’s a little slow. Since I’m the only person who was ever nice to him, he always does exactly what I tell him. So you want to be real careful with that gun.”

Karen looked at the weapon in her hand. Suddenly it seemed more of a threat to Abby than to the man in front of her.

“You pick things up real quick, I can tell,” Hickey said. “So keep paying attention. This is a kidnapping-for-ransom, like I said. But it’s not like you’ve seen on TV or in the movies. This isn’t the Lindbergh baby. It’s not some Exxon executive, buried-alive bullshit. This is a work of art. A perfect crime. I know, because I’ve done it five times before and I haven’t been caught yet. Not even a whiff of Johnny Law.”

Karen pointed to Hickey’s left arm, where a poorly inked needlework showed below the band of his sleeve. An eagle holding an iron cross in its talons. “Isn’t that a prison tattoo?”

Hickey’s face tightened, then relaxed. “They busted me for something else. How’d you know that was done in the joint?”

“I don’t know.” Karen had seen several tattoos like it on surgical patients in the OR. “I just know.”

“You’re smarter than the average June Cleaver, aren’t you? Well, it won’t help you any. I own you, lady. And your little girl. You need to remember that.”

Karen forced back fresh tears, unwilling to give Hickey the satisfaction of seeing them. The gun wavered in her hand. She steadied it.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “What happened to the kids those other five times, right?”

She nodded slowly.

“Right this second, every one of them is living a carefree life, watching Barney or Rugrats or swimming in their private freakin’ swimming pool. You know why? Because their mamas didn’t shoot me and their daddies were calm and methodical after the first few minutes. Just like you’re going to be.” He took another slow sip of tea. “Needs sugar. I can tell you weren’t raised in the country.”

Karen had been raised on rural army bases, but she saw no reason to correct Hickey’s impression.

“If that gun happens to go off by accident,” he said, “Abby will be just as dead as if you shot her. The bullet in that chamber will kill two people, Karen. Something to think about.”

She didn’t want to put down the gun, but she saw no choice. She tossed it onto the table beside Hickey, cracking one of the white tiles of its surface.

“Good girl,” he said, leaving the .38 where it had fallen. “Yes, ma’am, that’s exactly what a good mother does in a situation like this. I hope your husband’s as smart as you are.”

New fear gripped Karen. “Where’s Will? What have you done with him?”

Hickey made an elaborate show of looking at his watch, which he wore on the inside of his wrist, like certain military officers, as though time were his province alone, and not to be shared with anyone else. “Right about now, hubby’s winged most of his way to Biloxi’s beautiful Beau Rivage Casino Resort.”

Hickey said this with the exaggerated enthusiasm of a game show huckster, but it was the level of his knowledge that crystalized the fear in Karen. He knew their lives, their plans, their exact schedules—

“After hubby gets checked in, we’re going to let him shower up and give his little speech. Then he’s going to get a visit from a partner of mine, and he’ll find out where things stand. The way you just did. Then we’re all going to wait out the night together.”

Terror ballooned in Karen’s chest. “Wait out the night? What are you talking about?”

“This operation takes exactly twenty-four hours. I’m talking from the time Huey and me cranked up this afternoon. A day’s work for a year’s pay.” Hickey chuckled. “We’ve got about twenty hours left to go.”

“But why do we have to wait?” The old panic had come back with a vengeance. “If you want money, I’ll get it for you. All you want. Just bring my baby back!”

Hickey shook his head. “I know you would, Karen. But that’s not the way this operation works. Everything’s set up according to a timetable. That way there’s no surprises.”

“But we can’t wait twenty hours!”

“You’d be surprised what you can do for your kid.”

This is a nice place. We’ll get to know each other a little, have supper, pretend everything’s fine. Abby can watch Huey whittle. Before you know it, I’ll have my money and you’ll have Abby back.”

“Listen to me, you stupid son of a bitch!”

Hickey paled. “You want to watch what you’re saying there, Mom. It’s not smart under the circumstances.”

Karen tried to keep her voice under control. “Sir—Mr. Hickey—if we wait until tomorrow, Abby is going to die.”

His dark eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about?”

“Abby’s a diabetic. A juvenile diabetic. She’ll die without her insulin.”

“Bullshit.”

“My God … didn’t you know that?”

“Talk’s cheap. Let’s see some proof.”

Karen went to a kitchen drawer and pulled out a plastic bag full of orange-capped syringes with 25-gauge needles. She threw the bag onto the table, then opened the refrigerator, where a dozen glass vials waited in compulsively organized rows. She took out a vial of long-acting insulin and tossed it at Hickey.

He caught it and stared at the label. It read: Humulin N. PATIENT: Abigail Jennings, PRESCRIBING PHYSICIAN: Will Jennings, M.D.

“Damn,” Hickey said under his breath. “I don’t believe this.”

“Please,” Karen said in the most submissive voice she could muster. “We must get this medicine to my daughter. She—My God, I didn’t check her sugar when we got home.” Karen felt herself falling again, as though the floor beneath her feet had vanished. “Abby’s due for her shot in an hour. We’ve got to get this to her. How far away is she?”

“We can’t go,” Hickey said in a flat voice.

Karen grabbed the .38 off the table and pointed it at his chest. “Oh, yes, we can. We’re going right now.”

“I told you about that gun.”

She cocked the revolver. “If Abby doesn’t get her insulin, she’s going to die. Now you do what I say!”

Something flickered in Hickey’s eyes. Amusement. Perhaps surprise. He held up his hands, palms toward Karen. “Take it easy, Karen. I meant we can’t go yet. Abby’s being transported to a safe place. Maybe we can go later. Tell me about her condition. How critical is it?”

“How critical? She could die.”

“How long before she’s in trouble?”

Karen did the math in her head. If Abby ate only normal food before falling asleep—if she could sleep at all—she could make it through the night. But Karen had no intention of taking that risk. What if Hickey’s cousin fed her candy bars?

“Juvenile diabetics are very unstable,” she said. “If Abby eats too much sugar, she could get in trouble very quickly. She’ll get dehydrated. Then comes abdominal pain and vomiting. Then she’ll go into a coma and die. It can happen very fast”

Hickey pursed his lips, obviously doing some mental math of his own. Then he reached over the little built-in desk where Karen paid the household bills, hung up the cordless phone, and punched in a new number.

Karen stepped up to the desk and hit the SPEAKER button on the phone. Hickey looked down, trying to figure out how to switch it off, but before he could, a deep male voice said: “Joey? Has it been thirty minutes?”

“No. What happened to ‘hello’?”

“Oh, yeah. I’m sorry.” The man’s voice had an incongruous sound, like the voice of a fifty-year-old child. He’s practically a kid himself, Hickey had said.

“How does the kid look?”

“Okay. She’s still sleeping.”

Karen’s heart thudded. She jerked the gun. “Let me talk to her.”

Hickey warned her back with a flip of his hand.

“Who was that, Joey?”

“Betty Crocker.”

“Give me the phone!” Karen demanded.

“Abby can’t talk right now. She’s sedated.”

Sedated? “You son of a bitch! You—”

Hickey half rose and slugged Karen in the stomach. The breath left her in an explosive rush, and she dropped to the kitchen floor, the gun clattering uselessly in front of her.

“Touch the kid’s chest, Huey. She breathing okay?”

“Kinda shallow. Like a puppy.”

“Okay, that’s fine. Look, don’t give her any candy bars or anything like that. Okay? Maybe some saltines or something.”

“She needs fluids,” Karen gasped from the floor. “Plenty of water!”

“Give her some water. Plenty of water.”

“Saltines and water,” Huey echoed.

“I may be coming out to see you tonight.”

Karen felt a surge of hope.

“That’d be good,” Huey said. “I wouldn’t be so nervous.”

“Yeah. Drive slow, okay?”

“Fifty-five,” Huey said dutifully.

“Good boy.”

Hickey hung up and squatted before Karen. “Here’s the deal. Before we do anything, we have to let my partner make contact with your husband. We’ve got to make sure old Will’s on the same page with us before we move. Nobody knows that better than you, right? And with this diabetic thing, he might just flip out. I hope not, because if he does, all the insulin in the world won’t save Abby.” Hickey stood. “We’ll take care of your little girl. It’s just going to take a couple of hours. Now, get up off that floor.”

He offered his hand, but Karen ignored it. She got her knees beneath her and used the edge of the table to pull herself to her feet. The gun remained on the floor.

He walked past her to the opposite wall of the kitchen, where a four-foot-wide framed silk screen hung. It was a semi-abstract tendering of an alligator, brightly colored like a child’s painting, but with the unmistakable strength of genius in it.

“You’ve got paintings by this guy all over your house,” he said. “Right?”

“Yes,” Karen replied, her thoughts on Abby. “Walter Anderson. He’s dead.”

“Worth a lot of money?”

“That silk screen isn’t. I colored it myself. But the watercolors are valuable. Do you want them?”

Hickey laughed. “Want them? I don’t give a shit about ’em. And by morning, you’re going to hate every one. You’re never going to want to see another one again.”

He turned from the painting and smiled.

Forty miles south of Jackson, a small, tin-roofed cabin stood in a thick forest of second-growth pine and hardwoods. An old white AMC Rambler rested on cinder blocks in the small clearing, blotched with primer and overgrown by weeds. A few feet away from the Rambler stood a rusting propane tank with a black hose curled over the valve mechanism. Birdcalls echoed through the small clearing, punctuated by the rapid-fire pock-pock-pock of a woodpecker, and gray squirrels chased each other through the upper branches of the oaks.

The animals fell silent. A new sound had entered the woods. A motor. An old one, its valves tapping from unleaded gasoline. The noise grew steadily until the green hood of a pickup truck broke from beneath the trees into dappled sunlight. The truck trundled down the rutted lane and stopped before the cabin porch.

Huey Cotton got out and walked quickly around the hood, the Barbie still sticking out of his pocket. He opened the passenger door and lifted Abby’s limp body off the seat. Cradling her like an infant in his massive arms, he closed the truck’s door with his hip and walked carefully up the porch steps.

The old planks groaned beneath his weight. He paused before the screen door, then bent at the waist, hooked his sausagelike pinkie in the door handle, and shuffled backward until the screen opened enough for him to thrust his bulk between it and the main door. The main door yielded to one shove of his size-16 Redwing boot. He carried Abby through it, and the screen door slapped shut behind him with a bang.

Will landed the Baron behind a vintage DC-3 he would have loved to get a look at, but today he didn’t have the time. He taxied to the general aviation area and pulled into the empty spot indicated to him by a ground crewman. The Gulfport-Biloxi airport housed units of the Army and Air National Guard. There were fighter jets and helicopters stationed around the field, and the resulting high security always gave Will a little shock.

He had radioed ahead and arranged to have his rental car waiting at US Aviation Corp. which handled the needs of private pilots. As soon as the props stopped turning, he climbed out and unloaded his luggage from the cabin. Hanging bag, suitcase, sample case, notebook computer case, golf clubs. Schlepping it all to the blue Ford Tempo made his inflamed sacroiliac joints scream, even through the deadening layer of ibuprofen.

A security guard told him that Interstate 10 East had been closed due to a jackknifed semi-truck, so he would have to take the beachfront highway to Biloxi. Will hoped the traffic was not too bad between the airport and the casino. He had less than an hour to reach the meeting room, and he needed to shower and shave before he took the podium before five hundred physicians and their wives.

It took him five minutes to reach US 90, the highway that ran along the Gulf of Mexico from Bay Saint Louis to the Alabama border and Mobile Bay. The sun was just starting to fall toward New Orleans, sixty miles to the west. It would still be light when he began his lecture. Bathing-suited families walked and flew kites along the beach, but Will saw no one in the water. There were no waves to speak of, and the “surf” here had always been brown and tepid. The gulf didn’t turn its trademark emerald green until you hit Destin, Florida, two hours to the east.

Will didn’t particularly like the Mississippi Gulf Coast. He never had. The place had a seedy, transient air. A peeling, tired-out atmosphere that drifted over the trucked-in sand and brown water like a haze of corruption. In 1969, Hurricane Camille had torn through the beachfront communities at two hundred miles per hour, and after that things were the same only worse. There was a pervasive sense that the best times had come and gone, never to return.

But two decades after Camille’s fearsome passage, casino gambling changed everything. Glittering palaces rose off the beach like surrealistic sand castles, employing thousands of people and pollinating all sorts of service industries, particularly pawn shops and “Cash Quick” establishments where you could cash your social security check or hock your car title for money to blow at the craps table. But at night you didn’t see all that. You only saw the line of sparkling towers, their Vegas-style signs blazing over the night waters of the gulf as thousands of cars crawled up the coast highway, filled with the desperate and the gullible.

Will felt strange being by himself, away from home. Having the simple freedom to stop anywhere he chose, to take an unplanned turn without having to explain or to answer to anyone. Of course, that freedom was illusory. There were people waiting for him, and he was late already. He pressed down the accelerator, figuring it was worth the risk of a ticket.

As he neared the casino, traffic slowed to a crawl, but he was already in sight of the words BEAU RIVAGE glittering high in the fading sunlight. He turned off the highway and pulled up into the tasteful entrance of the casino resort, thankful for the bellboys who stood waiting to take his bags. Keeping the computer and sample cases for himself, he gave his keys to a valet and walked through the massive doors.

The interior of the Beau Rivage was built on the colossal scale of post-mafia Las Vegas casinos. A fantasy recreation of the ante-bellum South, with full-size magnolia trees growing throughout its lobby, the casino hotel struck Will as a cross between Trump Tower and Walt Disney World. He picked his way through the gamblers in the lobby and walked over to the long check-in desk. When he gave his name, the hotel manager came out of an office to the left and shook his hand. He was tall and too thin, and his name tag read: GEAUTREAU.

“Your colleagues have been getting a little nervous, Doctor Jennings,” he said with a cool smile.

“I had a long surgery this afternoon.” Will tapped his computer case. “But I’ve got my program ready to go. Just get me to a shower.”

Geautreau handed over an envelope containing a credit card key. “You’ve got a suite on twenty-eight, Doctor. A Cypress suite. A thousand square feet. Dr. Stein instructed me to give you the red carpet treatment.” Saul Stein was the outgoing president of the Mississippi Medical Association. “Are you sure I can’t have a bellman take those cases up for you?”

Will strained to maintain his smile as he realized that his privacy had been violated. He could hear Dr. Stein telling the hotel manager about his arthritis, warning Geautreau not to let Will carry a single bag upstairs. All with the best of intentions, of course.

“No, thanks,” he said, tapping his case again. “Sensitive cargo here.”

“Our audio-video consultant is waiting for you in the Magnolia Ballroom. You’ll find the VIP elevators past the jewelry store and to the right. Don’t hesitate to call for anything, Doctor. Ask for me by name.”

“I will.”

As Will crossed the lobby, making for the elevators, a heavyset man in his forties shouted from an open-air bar to his left. It was Jackson Everett, an old medical school buddy. Everett was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and held an umbrella drink in his hand.

“Will Jennings!” he boomed. “It’s about damned time!” Everett shouldered his way across the lobby and slapped Will on the back, sending a sword of pain down his spine. “I haven’t seen you since the scramble at Annandale, boy. How’s it hanging? Where’s Karen?”

“She didn’t make it this trip, Jack. Some Junior League thing. You just get here?”

Everett laughed. “Are you kidding? I flew in two days ago for some early golf. You’re giving the speech tonight, I hear.”

Will nodded.

“Hey, without Karen, you’ll have to hit the casino with me. High rollers, stud!”

“I’d better pass. I had a long surgery, and then the flight. I’m whipped.”

“Pussy-whipped, more like,” Everett complained. “You gotta live a little, son.”

Will gave an obliging laugh. “Let’s get a beer tomorrow and catch up.”

“How are your hands? Are you up for eighteen holes?”

“I brought my clubs. We’ll just have to see.”

“Well, I hope you can. Hey, don’t put us to sleep tonight, okay?”

“But that’s my specialty, Jack.”

Everett groaned and walked off gulping his drink.

As Will waited for an elevator, he saw a few more faces he recognized across the lobby, but he didn’t make an effort to speak. He had twenty-five minutes to get dressed and down to the meeting room, where he would still have to set up the notebook computer for his video presentation.

On the twenty-eighth floor, he opened the door to his suite and found his bags and golf clubs waiting for him. The manager had not exaggerated. The suite was large enough for permanent residence. He set his cases on the sitting-room sofa, then walked into the marble-floored bathroom and turned on the hot water. As the bathroom filled with steam, he unzipped his suit bag, hung a blue pinstripe Land’s End suit in the closet, and unpacked a laundry-boxed shirt, which he laid out on the coffee table. Then he stripped to his shorts and lifted his sample case onto the bureau beside the television. From it he removed a bound folder and laid it on the desk. The title on the cover read: “The Safe Use of Depolarizing Paralyzing Relaxants in the Violent Patient.” The paper summarized three years of work in the laboratory and in clinical trials, as well as in the conference rooms of pharmaceutical companies. The culmination of that work—a drug that would trade under the name Restorase—represented potential profits on a vast scale, enough to make Will a truly wealthy man.

Nervous compulsion made him check the other contents of the sample case: a video-adapter unit, which would allow his computer to interface with the hotel convention room’s projection TV; several drug vials, some of which contained prototype Restorase; and some high-tech syringes. Will counted the vials, then closed the case and hurried into the steamy bathroom, pulling off his underwear as he went.

Hickey and Karen sat facing each other across the kitchen table. A few moments before, Karen had picked up the .38, and he had made no move to stop her. She pointed it at his chest as they talked.

“That gun makes you feel better?” Hickey said.

“If you tell me we’re not taking the insulin to Abby, it’s going to make me feel a lot better. And you a lot worse.”

He smiled. “The Junior League princess has guts, huh?”

“If you hurt my baby, you’ll see some guts. Yours.”

Hickey laughed outright.

“I don’t understand why we have to wait until tomorrow,” she said. “Why don’t you just let me empty our accounts and give you the money?”

“For one thing, the banks have closed. You can’t come close to the ransom with automated withdrawals. Even if the banks were open, just pulling out the money would cause a lot of suspicion.”

“What will be different tomorrow morning? How do you plan to get the ransom money?”

“Your husband is going to call his financial advisor here—Gray Davidson—and tell him a great little story. He’s just discovered the missing centerpiece of Walter Anderson’s largest sculpture. It’s a male figure with antlers called Father Mississippi. Only one photograph of it exists, and many people believe it was stolen from Anderson’s house. The value is—”

“Higher than any painting he ever did,” Karen finished. “Because he didn’t do much sculpture.”

Hickey grinned. “Pretty good, huh? I do my homework. These goddamn doctors, I tell you. Every one of ’em collects something. Cars, boats, books, whatever. Look at this kitchen. Every gadget known to man. I bet you got eighty pairs of shoes upstairs, like that Filipino hog, Imelda Marcos. You can’t believe the money these guys piss away. I mean, how many freakin’ gall bladders can you take out in a month?”

“Will’s not like that.”

“Oh, no, he doesn’t spend more money on paintings every year than he pays all his employees put together. These guys … a slip of the knife, somebody dies, and it’s ‘Gee, sorry, couldn’t be helped. Wish I could stick around, but I’ve got a two o’clock tee time.’”

Karen started to argue, but she sensed it wouldn’t help her situation. Hickey knew a lot about their lives, yet there were huge gaps. Abby’s diabetes. Will’s work. Will didn’t even use a scalpel. He was an anesthesiologist. He used gases and needles. She watched Hickey closely, trying to get a handle on the man beneath the bluster. One thing she knew already: he carried a chip on his shoulder the size of the Rock of Gibraltar.

“Anyway,” Hickey said, “tomorrow morning, Will’s gonna call Davidson and tell him he needs two hundred grand wired to him in Biloxi. He’s got a onetime opportunity to buy this statue, and the owner wants cash. And just in case Mr. Tight-Ass Gray Davidson is suspicious, Will’s lovely wife Karen is coming down to the office to authorize the wire. It isn’t strictly required, but it’s a nice touch. Then you and I are going to drive down to Davidson’s office. I’ll wait outside while you go in and bitch a little. ‘That Will, he goes absolutely off his head when he makes a discovery, but what can you do? Boys will be boys.’ Then you sign off on the money, and the two hundred grand is off to Biloxi at the speed of light. My partner drives Will to the bank in Biloxi, Will goes in, comes out with the cash, and hands it to my partner. And that’s all she wrote.”

“You’re doing all this for two hundred thousand dollars?”

Hickey laughed and shook his head. “See? That’s what I’m talking about. To you, two hundred grand is nothing. A down payment on a house. You won’t even feel two hundred. And that’s the point. The money’s liquid. You can get it easy, and you don’t feel any pain when it’s gone. You’re happy, I’m happy, and your kid’s back safe at home. What more could you ask for?”

“Abby here now! Why can’t she stay with us? Or us with her? That won’t hurt your plan a bit.”

Hickey’s smile vanished. “This whole little machine runs on fear, Karen. Your fear for Abby. Will’s fear for you, and for Abby. Fear is the only thing keeping you from pulling that trigger right now. Right?”

She didn’t answer.

“Most kidnappers are brain-dead,” he said. “They get busted the minute they go for the ransom. Or right after. They try all kinds of complicated shit, but the truth is, no ransom pickup method is safe from the FBI. Not even wiring the money to Brazil. The technology’s just too good now. You should see the statistics. Damn near zero kidnappings-for-ransom succeed in this country. Why? The drop. Picking up the ransom. But I’m not picking up any ransom. Your husband’s doing it for me. You’re sending it, he’s picking it up. I’m not even involved. Is that beautiful or what?”

Karen said nothing, but she saw the merit of his plan. Like all great ideas, it had the virtue of simplicity.

“I’m a goddamn genius,” Hickey went on. “You think your old man could’ve dreamed this up? Fucking gas-passer’s all he is. Pass the gas, pick up the check. And a fine wife like you waiting at home. What a waste.”

She forced herself not to look away as Hickey appraised her body. She would not let him believe she was intimidated by anything but his control of Abby.

“The other way people screw up,” he said, “is taking the kid off with them and sending a ransom note. That leaves the parents at home, alone and scared shitless. Then they get a note or a call—both traceable—asking for more ransom money than they could raise in a week. What else are they going to do but call the FBI? My way, nobody calls anybody but me and my partners, every half-hour like clockwork. And as long as we do that, nobody gets hurt. Nobody goes to prison. Nobody dies.”

“You like listening to yourself talk, don’t you?”

He shrugged. “I like doing things right. This plan is as clean as they come. It’s run perfectly five times in a row. Am I proud of that? Yeah. And who else can I talk about it to but someone like you?”

Hickey was talking about kidnapping the way Will’s partners bragged about inside stock trades. “Don’t you have any feelings for the children involved?” she asked. “How terrified they must be?”

“A kid can stand anything for twenty-four hours,” Hickey said softly. “I stood a lot worse for years.”

“But sooner or later you’ll make a mistake. You’re bound to.”

“The parents might. Not me. The guy I got keeping these kids? He loves ’em. Weighs about three hundred fifty pounds. Looks like goddamn Frankenstein, but he’s a giant teddy bear.”

Karen shut her eyes against the image of Abby being held prisoner by a monster. The image did not vanish but instead became clearer.

“Don’t worry,” Hickey said. “Huey’s not a child abuser or anything. He’s too slow. Only …”

Her eyes flew open. “What?”

“He doesn’t like kids running away from him. When he was little, kids at the regular school treated him pretty bad. When he got bigger, they just yelled things and ran. Then his mama put him in a retard school. Kids are pretty damn cruel. When Huey sees kids run, it makes him lose his head.”

Hot blood rushed to her face. “But don’t you think it’s natural for a child being held prisoner by a stranger to try to run?”

“Your kid the panicky type?”

“Not usually, but … God, can’t we please spend the night wherever they are?”

“I’m getting hungry,” Hickey said. “Why don’t you see about fixing some supper? I’ll bet you were a natural with an Easy Bake oven.”

Karen looked at the gun in her hand. A less useful thing she could not imagine. “When can we take Abby the insulin?”

“Food,” Hickey said, rubbing his flat belly. “F-O-O-D.”