24 Hours. Greg Iles

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.”

       FOUR

      Will ate a bite of redfish and looked out over an audience of close to a thousand people eating the same dish. To his right, at the podium, Dr. Saul Stein was giving a rather digressive introductory speech. At last, like a man making a sudden left turn, he veered back onto the point.

      “Ladies and gentlemen, we are very lucky to have with us tonight a physician of the first caliber. A man whose pioneering work on the clinical frontiers of anesthesiology will be published in next month’s New England Journal of Medicine.”

      A burst of applause stopped Stein for several moments, and he smiled.

      “Tonight, we will be treated to a précis of that article, which describes fundamental work carried out at our own University of Mississippi Medical Center. What’s amazing to me is that our speaker—a native Mississippian—entered his field as a second specialty, out of unfortunate necessity. We are very lucky that he did, because—”

      A high-pitched beep stopped Stein in midsentence. Five hundred doctors simultaneously reached for their belts, Will included. General laughter rolled through the huge room as most of the physicians remembered that they were on vacation, and their pagers back in their hometowns. Will was wearing his, but it had not produced the offending beep. Still, he moved the switch on the SkyTel from BEEP to VIBRATE.

      “Who the hell’s on call down here?” Stein barked from the podium. “There’s no getting away from those damn things.” As the laughter died away, he said, “I could easily talk about our speaker for another hour, but I won’t. Dessert is coming, and I want to let Will get started. Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Will Jennings.”

      Applause filled the darkened ballroom. Will rose, speech in hand, and walked to the podium, where his notebook computer glowed softly. He sensed the expectation in the crowd.

      “They tell me you should begin a speech with a joke,” he said. “My wife tells me I’m not much of a comedian, so I shouldn’t risk it. But flying down here today, I was reminded of a story an old paramedic told me about Hurricane Camille.”

      Everybody thought about Camille when they came to the coast. You could still see trees that had been twisted into eerie contortions by the mother of all hurricanes.

      “This guy was driving an ambulance down here in sixty-nine, and he was one of the first to go out on call after the storm surge receded. There were dead animals everywhere, and it was still raining like hell. On his second call, he and his partner saw a young woman lying beside the road in a formal dress. They thought she might be one of those fools who tried to ride out the hurricane by throwing a party. Anyway, he figures the girl is dead, but he doesn’t want to let her go without a fight, so he starts CPR, mouth-to-mouth, the whole bit. Nothing works, and he finally gives up. The next day, they’re hearing who died in the hurricane, because relatives of the missing are coming back to view the bodies in the morgue. The EMT asks about the girl he tried to save, but nobody’s come forward to identify her. A week goes