GREG ILES
24 Hours

Dedication

FOR GEOFF ILES

who has been there for me from the beginning (almost).

He that hath a wife and children

Hath given hostages to fortune

FRANCIS BACON

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Books By Greg Iles

Copyright

About the Publisher

ONE

“The kid always makes it. I told you that.”

Margaret McDill had not seen the man in her life until yesterday, but he had dominated every second of her existence since their meeting. He had told her to call him Joe, and he claimed it was his real name, but she assumed it was an alias. He was a dark-haired, pale-skinned man of about fifty, with deep-set eyes and a coarse five-o’clock shadow. Margaret could not look into his eyes for long. They were dark, furious pools that sucked the life out of her, drained her will. And now they carried knowledge about her that she could not bear.

“I don’t believe you,” she said quietly.

Something rippled deep in the dark eyes, like the flick of a fish tail. “Have I lied to you about anything else?”

“No. But you … you let me see your face all night. You won’t let me go after that.”

“I told you, the kid always makes it.”

“You’re going to kill me and let my son go.”

“You think I’m going to shoot you in broad daylight in front of a freakin’ McDonald’s?”

“You have a knife in your pocket.”

He looked at her with scorn. “Jesus Christ.”

Margaret looked down at her hands. She didn’t want to look at Joe, and she didn’t want to chance seeing herself in one of the mirrors. The one at home had been bad enough. She looked like someone who had just come out of surgery, still groggy with anesthesia. An unhealthy glaze filmed her eyes, and even heavy makeup had failed to hide the bruise along her jaw. Four of her painstakingly maintained nails had broken during the night, and there was a long scratch on her inner forearm from the initial scuffle. She tried to remember exactly when that had happened but she couldn’t. Her sense of time had abandoned her. She was having trouble keeping her thoughts in order. Even the simplest ones seemed to fall out of sequence by themselves.

She tried to regain control by focusing on her immediate environment. They were sitting in her BMW, in the parking lot of a strip mall, about fifty yards from a McDonald’s restaurant. She had often shopped at the mall, at the Barnes & Noble superstore, and also the pet store, for rare tropical fish. Her husband had recently bought a big-screen television at Circuit City, for patient education at his clinic. He was a cardiovascular surgeon. But all that seemed part of someone else’s life now. As remote as the bright side of the moon to someone marooned on the dark half. And her son, Peter … God alone knew where he was. God and the man beside her.

“I don’t care what you do with me,” she said with conviction. “Just let Peter live. Kill me if you have to, just let my son go. He’s only ten years old.”

“If you don’t shut up, I might take you up on that,” Joe said wearily.

He started the BMW’s engine and switched the air conditioner to high, then lit a Camel cigarette. The cold air blasted smoke all over the interior of the car. Margaret’s eyes stung from hours of crying. She turned her head to avoid the smoke, but it was useless.

“Where’s Peter now?” she asked, her voice barely a whisper.

Joe took a drag off the Camel and said nothing.

“I said—”

“Didn’t I tell you to stop talking?”

Margaret glanced at the pistol lying on the console between the seats. It belonged to her husband. Joe had taken it from her yesterday, but not before she had learned how useless a gun was to her. At least while they had Peter. Some primitive part of her brain still urged her to grab it, but she doubted she could reach the pistol before he did. He was probably waiting for her to try just that. Joe was thin but amazingly strong, another thing she’d learned last night. And his hard-lined face held no mercy.

“He’s dead, isn’t he,” Margaret heard herself say. “You’re just playing games with me. He’s dead and you’re going to kill me, too—”

“Jesus Christ,” Joe said through clenched teeth. He turned over his forearm and glanced at his watch. He wore it on the inside of his wrist so that Margaret couldn’t see the time.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” she said.

“Again?” He punched the number into the BMW’s cell phone. As he waited for an answer, he muttered, “I do believe this has been the worst twenty-four hours of my life to date. And that includes our little party.”

She flinched.

“Hey,” he said into the phone. “You in your spot? … Okay. Wait about a minute, then do it.”

Margaret jerked erect, her eyes wide, searching the nearby cars. “Oh my God. Peter! Peter!”

Joe picked up the gun and jammed the barrel into her neck. “You’ve come this far, Maggie. Don’t blow it now. You remember what we talked about?”

She closed her eyes and nodded.

“I didn’t hear you.”

Tears rolled down her cheeks. “I remember.”

A hundred yards from Margaret McDill’s BMW, Peter McDill sat in an old green pickup truck, his eyes shut tight. The truck smelled funny. Good and bad at the same time, like just-cut grass and old motor oil, and really old fast food.

“You can open your eyes now.”

Peter opened his eyes.

The first thing he saw was a McDonald’s restaurant. It reassured him after his night of isolation. The McDonald’s stood in the middle of a suburban strip mall parking lot. As Peter panned his eyes around the mall, he recognized the stores: Office Depot, Barnes & Noble, the Gateway 2000 store. He’d spent hours in that store. It was only a few miles from his house. He looked down at his wrists, which were bound with duct tape.

“Can you take this off now?”

He asked without looking up. The man behind the wheel of the truck was hard for him to look at. Peter had never seen or heard of Huey before yesterday, but for the last twenty-four hours, he had seen no one else. Huey was six inches taller than his father, and weighed at least three hundred pounds. He wore dirty mechanic’s coveralls and heavy plastic glasses of a type Peter had seen in old movies, with thick lenses that distorted his eyes. He reminded Peter of a character in a movie he’d seen on the satellite one night, when he sneaked into the home theater room. A movie his parents wouldn’t let him watch. The character’s name was Carl, and the boy who was Carl’s friend in the movie said he sounded like a motorboat. Carl was nice, but he killed people, too. Peter thought Huey was probably like that.

“When I was a little boy,” Huey said, peering thoughtfully through the windshield of the pickup, “those golden arches went all the way over the top of the restaurant. The whole place looked like a spaceship.” He looked back at Peter, his too-big eyes apologetic behind the thick glasses. “I’m sorry I had to tape you up. But you shouldn’t of run. I told you not to run.”

Peter’s eyes welled with tears. “Where’s my mom? You said she was going to be here.”

“She’s gonna be here. She’s probably here already.”

Through the heat shimmering off the asphalt, Peter scanned the sea of parked cars, his eyes darting everywhere, searching for his mother’s BMW. “I don’t see her car.”

Huey dug down into his front coverall pocket.

Peter instinctively slid against the door of the pickup truck.

“Look, boy,” Huey said in his deep but childlike voice. “I made you something.”

The giant hand emerged from the pocket and opened to reveal a carved locomotive. Peter had watched Huey whittling for much of the previous afternoon, but he hadn’t been able to tell what Huey was working on. The little train in the massive palm looked like a toy from an expensive store. Huey put the carving into Peter’s bound hands.

“I finished it while you was sleeping,” he said. “I like trains. I rode one once. When I was little. From St. Louis, after Mamaw died. Joey rode up by hisself on the train and got me. We rode back together. I got to sit in the front with the rich people. We wasn’t supposed to, but Joey figured a way. Joey’s smart. He said it was only fair. He says I’m good as anybody. Ain’t nobody no better than nobody else. That’s a good thing to remember.”

Peter stared at the little locomotive. There was even a tiny engineer inside.

“Whittlin’s a good thing, too,” Huey went on. “Keeps me from being nervous.”

Peter closed his eyes. “Where’s my mom?”

“I liked talking to you. Before you ran, anyway. I thought you was my friend.”

Peter covered his face with his hands, but he kept an eye on Huey through a crack between his left cheek and palm. Now that he knew where he was, he thought about jumping out. But Huey was faster than he looked.

Huey dug into his coveralls again and brought out his pocket-knife. When he opened the big blade, Peter pressed himself into the passenger door.

“What are you doing?”

Huey grabbed Peter’s bound wrists and jerked them away from his body. With a quick jab he thrust the knife between Peter’s forearms and sawed through the duct tape. Then he reached over and unlocked the passenger door of the truck.

“Your mama’s waiting for you. In the playground. At the McDonald’s.”

Peter looked up at the giant’s face, afraid to believe.

“Go see her, boy.”

Peter pushed open the truck’s door, jumped to the pavement, and started running toward the MacDonald’s.

Joe reached across Margaret McDill’s lap and opened the passenger door of the BMW. His smoky black hair brushed against her neck as he did, and she shuddered. She had seen his gray roots during the night.

“Your kid’s waiting in the McDonald’s Playland,” he said.

Margaret’s heart lurched. She looked at the open door, then back at Joe, who was caressing the BMW’s leather-covered steering wheel.

“Sure wish I could keep this ride,” he said with genuine regret. “Got used to this. Yes, sir.”

“Take it.”

“That’s not part of the plan. And I always stick to the plan. That’s why I’m still around.”

As she stared, he opened the driver’s door, got out, dropped the keys on the seat, and started walking away.

Margaret sat for a moment without breathing, mistrustful as an injured animal being released into the wild. Then she bolted from the car. With a spastic gait born from panic and exhaustion, she ran towards the McDonald’s, gasping a desperate mantra: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want … The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want … The Lord is my shepherd …”

Huey stopped his green pickup beside his cousin Joe with a screech of eroded brake pads. Two men standing under the roofed entrance of the Barnes & Noble looked over at the sound. They looked like bums hoping to pass themselves off as customers and spend the morning reading the papers on the sofas inside the bookstore. Joe Hickey silently wished them good luck. He’d been that far down before.

When he climbed into the cab, Huey looked at him with the relief of a two-year-old at its returning mother.

“Hey, Joey,” Huey said, his head bobbing with relief and excitement.

“Twenty-three hours, ten minutes,” Hickey said, tapping his watch. “Cheryl’s got the money, nobody got hurt, and no FBI in sight. I’m a goddamn genius, son. Master of the universe.”

“I’m just glad it’s over,” said Huey. “I was scared this time.”

Hickey laughed and tousled the hair on Huey’s great unkempt head. “Home free for another year, Buckethead.”

A smile slowly appeared on the giant’s rubbery face. “Yeah.” He put the truck into gear, eased forward, and joined the flow of traffic leaving the mall.

Peter McDill stood in the McDonald’s Playland like a statue in a hurricane. Toddlers and teenagers tore around him with abandon, leaping on and off the foam-padded playground equipment in their sock feet. The screeches and laughter were deafening. Peter searched among them for his mother, his eyes wet. In his right hand he clutched the carved locomotive Huey had given him, utterly unaware that he was holding it.

The glass door of the restaurant opened, and a woman with frosted hair and wild eyes appeared in it. She looked like his mother, but not exactly. This woman was different somehow. She looked too old, and her clothes were torn. She pushed two children out of the doorway, which his mother would never do, and began looking frantically around the playground. Her gaze jumped from child to child, lighted on Peter, swept on, then returned.

“Mom?” he said uncertainly.

The woman’s face seemed to collapse inward upon itself. She rushed to Peter and crushed him against her, then lifted him into her arms. His mother hadn’t done that in a long, long time. A terrible wail burst from her throat, freezing the storm of children into a still life.

“Oh, dear Jesus,” Margaret keened. “My baby, my baby, my sweet baby …”

Peter felt hot tears rolling down his cheeks. As his mother squeezed him, the little wooden train dropped from his hand onto the pebbled concrete. A toddler wandered over, picked it up, smiled, and walked away with it.

TWO
One Year Later

Will Jennings swung his Ford Expedition around a dawdling tanker truck and swerved back into the right lane of the airport road. The field was less than a mile away, and he couldn’t keep from watching the planes lifting over the trees as they took off. It had been nearly a month since he’d been up, and he was anxious to fly.

“Keep your eyes on the road,” said his wife from the seat beside him.

Karen Jennings was thirty-nine, a year younger than her husband, but much older in some ways.

“Daddy’s watching the airplanes!” Abby chimed from her safety seat in the back. Though only five-and-a-half years old, their daughter never hesitated to interject her comments into any conversation. Will looked at his rearview mirror and smiled at Abby. Facially, she was a miniature version of Karen, with strawberry-blonde curls, piercing green eyes, and a light dusting of freckles across her nose. As he watched, she pointed at the back of her mother’s head.

Will laid his right hand on Karen’s knee. “I sure wish my girls would come along with old Dad.” With Abby present, he often referred to himself as “Dad” and Karen as “Mom”, the way his father had done. “Just jump in the plane and forget about everything for three days.”

“Can we, Mom?” cried Abby. “Can we?”

“And what do we wear for clothes?” Karen asked in a taut voice.

“I’ll buy you both new wardrobes on the coast.”

“Yaaayy!” Abby cheered. “Look, there’s the airport!”

The white control tower of the terminal had come into sight.

“We don’t have any insulin,” Karen pointed out.

“Daddy can write me a subscription!”

“Prescription, honey,” Will corrected.

“She knows the right word.”

“I want to go to the beach!”

“I can’t believe you started this again,” Karen said under her breath. “Daddy won’t be spending any time at the beach, honey. He’ll be nervous as a cat until he gives his lecture to all those other doctors. Then they’ll spend hours talking about their days in medical school. And then he’ll tear up his joints trying to play golf for three days straight.”

“If you come,” Will said, “we can beat the bushes around Ocean Springs for some undiscovered Walter Anderson stuff.”

“Noooo,” Abby said in a plaintive voice. She hated their art-buying explorations, which usually entailed hours of searching small-town back streets, and sometimes waiting in the car. “You won’t be playing golf, Mom. You can take me to the beach.”

“Yeah, Mom,” Will echoed.

Karen cut her eyes at him. Full of repressed anger, they flashed like green warning beacons. “I agreed to chair this flower show two years ago. It’s the sixtieth anniversary of the Junior League, and I don’t know whose brilliant idea it was to have a flower show, but it’s officially my problem. I’ve put off everything until the last minute, and there are over four hundred exhibitors.”

“You got everything nailed down day before yesterday,” Will told her. There wasn’t much use in pressing the issue, but he felt he should try. Things had been tense for the past six months, and this would be the first trip he had made without Karen in a long time. It seemed symbolic, somehow. “You’re just going to agonize until the whole circus starts on Monday. Four nights of hell. Why not blow it off until then?”

“I can’t do it,” she said with a note of finality. “Drop it.”

Will sighed and watched a 727 lift over the treeline to his left.

Karen leaned forward and switched on the CD player, which began to thump out the teen dance groove of Britney Spears. Abby immediately began to sing along. “Hit me baby one more time …”

“Now, if you want to take Abby by yourself,” Karen said, “you can certainly do that.”

“What did you say, Mom?”

“You know I can’t,” Will said with exasperation.

“You mean you can’t do that and play golf with your med school buddies. Right?”

Will felt the old weight tighten across his chest. “This is once a year, Karen. I’m giving the keynote speech, and the whole thing is very political. You know that. With the new drug venture, I’ll have to spend hours with the Searle people—”

“You don’t have to explain,” she said with satisfaction. “Just don’t try to make me blow off my obligations when you won’t do the same.”

Will swung the Expedition into the general aviation area. Lines of single- and twin-engine planes waited on the concrete apron, tethered to rings set in the cement, their wheels chocked against the wind. Just seeing them lightened his heart.

“You’re the one who encouraged me to be more social,” Karen said in the strained voice she’d used earlier.

“I’m not joining the Junior League when I grow up,” Abby said from the backseat. “I’m going to be a pilot.”

“I thought you were going to be a doctor,” said Will.

“A flying doctor, silly!”

“Flying doctor sure beats housewife,” Karen said sotto voce.

Will took his wife’s hand as he braked beside his Beechcraft Baron 58. “She’s only five, babe. One day she’ll understand what you sacrificed.”

“She’s almost six. And sometimes I don’t understand it myself.”

He squeezed Karen’s hand and gave her an understanding look. Then he got out, unstrapped Abby from her child seat, and set her on the apron.

The Baron was ten years old, but she was as fine a piece of machinery as you could ask for, and Will owned her outright. From the twin Continental engines to the state-of-the-art avionics package, he had spared neither time nor expense to make her as safe and airworthy as any billionaire’s Gulfstream IV. She was white with blue stripes, and her tail read N-2WJ. The “WJ” was a touch of vanity, but Abby loved hearing the controllers call out November-Two-Whiskey-Juliet over the radio. When they were flying together, she sometimes made him call her Alpha Juliet.

As Abby ran toward the Baron, Will took a suit bag and a large leather sample case from the back of the Expedition and set them on the concrete. He had driven out during his lunch hour and checked the plane from nose to tail, and also loaded his golf clubs. When he reached back into the SUV for his laptop computer case, Karen picked up the sample case and suit bag and carried them to the plane. The Baron seated four passengers aft of the cockpit, so there was plenty of room. As they loaded the luggage, Karen said:

“You’re having pain today, aren’t you?”

“No,” he lied, closing the cabin door as though the fire in his hands did not exist. Under normal circumstances he would have canceled his flight and taken a car, but it was far too late now to reach the Gulf Coast except by air.

Karen looked into his eyes, started to say something, then decided against it. She walked the length of the wing and helped Abby untether it while Will did his preflight walkaround. As he checked the aircraft, he glanced over and watched Abby work. She was her mother’s daughter from the neck up, but she had Will’s lean musculature and length of bone. She loved helping with the plane, being part of things.

“What’s the flight time to the coast?” Karen asked, joining him behind the wing. “Fifty minutes?”

“Thirty-five minutes to the airport, if I push it.” Will was due to give his lecture at the Beau Rivage Casino Hotel in Biloxi at seven P.M., which would open the annual meeting of the Mississippi Medical Association. “I’m cutting it a little close,” he conceded. “That aneurysm ran way over. I’ll call you after my presentation.” He pointed to the beeper on his belt. “If you want me during the flight, use the SkyTel. It’s new. Digital. Hardly any dead spots.”

“Mr. High-Tech,” Karen said, making clear that she wasn’t impressed with what she considered boy toys. “I just type in the message at home and send it like e-mail?”

“Right. There’s a special Web page for it. But if you don’t want to fool with that, just call the answering service. They’ll get the message to me.”

Abby tugged at his hand. “Will you wiggle the wings after you take off?”

“You mean waggle the wings. Sure I will. Just for you. Now … who gets the first kiss?”

“Me! Me!” Abby cried.

As Will bent down, she turned aside his kiss and whispered in his ear. He nodded, rose, and walked to Karen. “She said Mommy needs the first kiss today.”

“I wish Daddy were as perceptive.”

He gently took her by the waist. “Thanks for giving me time last night to finish up the video segment. I’d have been laughed out of the conference.”

“You’ve never been laughed at in your life.” Her face softened. “How are your hands? I mean it, Will.”

“Stiff,” he admitted. “But not too bad.”

“You taking anything?”

“Just the methotrexate.” Methotrexate was a chemotherapeutic agent developed for use against cancer, but, in much smaller doses, was used against Will’s form of arthritis. Even small doses could damage the liver.

“Come on,” she pressed.

“Okay, four Advil. But that’s it. I’m fine. Good to go.” He slipped an arm around Karen’s shoulder. “Don’t forget to turn on the alarm system when you get home.”

She shook her head in a way that conveyed several emotions at once: concern, irritation, and somewhere in there, love. “I never forget. Say good-bye, Abby. Daddy’s late.”

Abby hugged his waist until at last he bent and picked her up. His sacroiliac joints protested, but he forced a smile.

“I’ll be back Sunday night,” he said, and kissed her on the forehead. “You take care of Mom. And don’t give her any trouble about your shots.”

“But it doesn’t hurt as much when you do it.”

“That’s a fib. Mom’s given a lot more shots than I have.”

He set her down with a muffled groan and gently pushed her toward her mother. Abby walked backward, her eyes locked on Will until Karen scooped her up.

“Oh!” Karen said. “I forgot to tell you. Microsoft is going to split again. It was up twelve points when I left the house.”

He smiled. “Forget Microsoft. Tonight starts the ball rolling on Restorase.” Restorase was the trade name of a new drug Will had helped develop, and the subject of his presentation tonight. “In thirty days, Abby will be set for Harvard, and you can start wearing haute couture.”

“I’m thinking Brown,” Karen said with a grudging laugh.

It was an old joke between them, started in the days when they had so little money that a trip to Wendy’s Hamburgers was a treat. Now they could actually afford those schools, but the joke took them back to what in some ways had been a happier time.

“I’ll see you both Sunday,” Will said. He climbed into the Baron, started the twin engines, and checked the wind conditions with ATIS on the radio. After contacting ground control, he waved through the plexiglass, and began his taxi toward the runway.

Outside, Karen backed toward the Expedition with Abby in her arms. “Come on, honey. It’s hot. We can watch him take off inside the truck.”

“But I want him to see me!”

Karen sighed. “All right.”

Inside the Baron, Will acknowledged final clearance from the tower, then released his brakes and roared up the sunny runway. The Baron lifted into the sky like a tethered hawk granted freedom. Instead of simply banking to his left to head south, he executed a teardrop turn, which brought him right over the black Expedition on the ground. He could see Karen and Abby standing beside it. As he passed over at six hundred feet, he waggled his wings like a fighter pilot signaling to friendly ground troops.

On the concrete below, Abby whooped with glee. “He did it, Mom! He did it!”

“I’m sorry we couldn’t go this time, honey,” Karen said, squeezing her shoulders.

“That’s okay,” Abby reached up and took her mother’s hands. “You know what?”

“What?”

“I like arranging flowers, too.”

Karen smiled and lifted Abby into her seat, then hugged her neck. “I think we can win the three-color ribbon if we give it half a try.”

“I know we can!” Abby agreed.

Karen climbed into the driver’s seat, started the Expedition, and drove along the line of airplanes toward the gate.

Fifteen miles north of the airport, a battered green pickup truck with a lawn tractor and two weed-eaters in back rattled along a curving lane known for over a hundred years as Crooked Mile Road. The truck slowed, then stopped beside a wrought-iron mailbox at the foot of a high wooded hill. An ornamental World War One biplane perched atop the mailbox, and below the biplane, gold letters read: Jennings, #100. The pickup turned left and chugged slowly up the steep driveway.

At the top, set far back on the hill, stood a breathtaking Victorian house. Wedgwood blue with white gingerbread trim and stained-glass windows on the second floor, it seemed to watch over the expansive lawns around it with proprietary interest.

When the pickup truck reached the crest of the drive, it did not stop but continued fifty yards across the St. Augustine grass until it reached an ornate playhouse. An exact replica of the main house, the playhouse stood in the shadow of the pine and oak trees that bordered the lawn. The pickup stopped beside it. When the engine died, there was silence but for birdcalls and the ticking of the motor.

The driver’s door banged open, and Huey Cotton climbed out. Clad in his customary brown coveralls and heavy black eyeglasses, he stared at the playhouse with wonder in his eyes. Its roof peaked just above the crown of his head.

“See anybody?” called a voice from the passenger window of the truck.

Huey didn’t take his eyes from the enchanting playhouse. “It’s like Disneyland, Joey.”

“Christ, look at the real house, would you?”

Huey walked around the playhouse and looked across a glittering blue swimming pool to the rear elevation of the main house. Peeking from two of the four garage bays were a silver Toyota Avalon and the white nose of a powerboat.

“There’s a pretty boat in the garage,” he said distractedly. He turned back to the playhouse, bent, and examined it more closely. “I wonder if there’s a boat in this garage?”

As Huey studied the little house, Joe Hickey climbed out of the truck. He wore a new Ralph Lauren Polo shirt and Tommy Hilfiger khakis, but he didn’t look natural or even comfortable in the costume. The lower half of a crude eagle tattoo showed on his biceps below the band of the Polo’s left sleeve.

“Look at the real house, Buckethead. See the third downstairs window from the end? That’s it.”

Huey straightened and glanced over at the main house. “I see it.” He laid one of his huge hands on the playhouse’s porch roof. “I sure wish I could fit in this house. I bet the whole world looks different from in there.”

“You’ll never know how different.” Hickey reached into the truck bed and took out a rusted toolbox. “Let’s take care of the alarm system.”

He led Huey toward the open garage.

Twenty minutes later they emerged from the back door of the house and stood on the fieldstone patio.

“Put the toolbox back in the truck,” Hickey said. “Then wait behind the playhouse. As soon as they go inside, you run up to the window. Got it?”

“Just like last time.”

“There wasn’t any freakin’ Disneyland playhouse last time. And that was a year ago. I don’t want you fooling around back there. The second you hear the garage door close, get your big ass up to that window. If some nosy neighbor drives up in the meantime and asks you a question, you’re with the lawn service. Act like a retard. It shouldn’t be much of a stretch for you.”

Huey stiffened. “Don’t say that, Joey.”

“If you’re waiting at the window when you’re supposed to be, I’ll apologize.”

Huey smiled crookedly, exposing yellowed teeth. “I hope this one’s nice. I hope she don’t get scared easy. That makes me nervous.”

“You’re a regular John Dillinger, aren’t you? Christ. Get behind the playhouse.”

Huey shrugged and shambled across the patio toward the tree line. When he reached the playhouse, he looked around blankly at Hickey, then folded his giant frame into a squat.

Hickey shook his head, turned, and walked into the house through the back door.

Karen and Abby sang at the top of their voices as they rolled north on Interstate 55, the tune one from The Sound of Music, Abby’s favorite musical. The Jenningses lived just west of Annandale in Madison County, Mississippi. Annandale was the state’s premier golf course, but it wasn’t golf that had drawn them to the area. Fear of crime and the race problems of the capital city had driven many young professionals to the gated enclaves of Madison County, but Karen and Will had moved for a different reason. If you wanted land, you had to move north. The Jennings house sat on twenty acres of pine and hardwood, twelve miles north of Jackson proper, and in evening traffic it took twenty-five minutes to get there.

“That will bring us back to doe, oh, oh, oh …”

Abby clapped her hands and burst into laughter. Breathing hard from the singing, Karen reached down and punched a number into her cell phone. She felt guilty about the way she’d spoken to Will at the airport.

“Anesthesiology Associates,” said a woman, her voice tinny in the cell phone speaker.

“Is this the answering service?” asked Karen.

“Yes ma’am. A-l Answer-all. The clinic’s closed.”

“I’d like to leave a message for Dr. Jennings. This is his wife.”

“Go ahead.”

“We already miss you. Break a leg tonight. Love, Karen and Abby.”

“With sugar and kisses on top!” Abby shouted from the backseat.

“Did you get that last part?” asked Karen.

“With sugar and kisses on top,” repeated the bored voice.

“Thank you.”

Karen hit END and looked at her rearview mirror, which was adjusted so that she could see Abby’s face.

“Daddy loves getting messages from us,” Abby said, smiling.

“He sure does, honey.”

Fifty miles south of Jackson, Will settled the Baron in at eight thousand feet. Below him lay a puffy white carpet of cumulus clouds, before him a sky as blue as an Arctic lake. Visibility was unlimited. As he bent his wrist to check his primary GPS unit, a burning current of pain shot up the radial nerve in his right arm. It was worse than he’d admitted to Karen, and she’d known it. She didn’t miss anything. The truth was, she didn’t want him flying anymore. A month ago, she’d threatened to tell the FAA that he was “cheating” to pass his flight physicals. He didn’t think she would, but he couldn’t be sure. If she thought Will’s arthritis put him—and thus the family—at risk while flying, she wouldn’t hesitate to do whatever she had to do to stop him.

If she did, Will wasn’t sure he could handle it. Even the thought of being grounded put him in a black mood. Flying was more than recreation for him. It was a physical expression of how far he had come in life, a symbol of all he had attained, and of the lifestyle he had created for his family. His father could never have dreamed of owning a three-hundred-thousand-dollar airplane. Tom Jennings had never even ridden in an airplane. His son had paid cash for one.

But for Will the money was not the important thing. It was what the money could buy. Security. He had learned that lesson a thousand times growing up: money was an insulator, like armor. It protected people who had it from the everyday problems that besieged and even destroyed others. And yet, it did not make you invulnerable. His arthritis had taught him that. Other lessons followed.

In 1986, he graduated from LSU medical school and began an obstetrics residency at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson. It was there that he met a surgical nurse with stunning green eyes, strawberry-blonde hair, and a reputation for refusing dates with physicians or medical students. After three months of patience and charm, Will persuaded Karen to meet him for lunch, far from the hospital. There he discovered that the cause of her dating policy was simple: she’d seen too many nurses put medical students through school only to be cast aside later, and others caught in messy triangles with married doctors and their wives. In spite of her policy, she dated Will for the next two years—first secretly, then openly—and after a year-long engagement, they married. Will entered private practice with a Jackson OB/GYN group the day after his honeymoon, and their adult life together began like a storybook.

But during the second year of his practice, he began experiencing pain in his hands, feet, and lower back. He tried to ignore it, but soon the pain was interfering with his work, and he went to see a friend in the rheumatology department. A week later he was diagnosed with psoriatic arthritis, a severe, often crippling disease. Continuing as an obstetrician was impossible, so he began to investigate less physically rigorous fields like dermatology and radiology. His old college roommate suggested anesthesiology—his own specialty—a three-year program if the university would credit Will’s OB experience and let him skip the internship year. It did, and in 1993, he began his anesthesiology residency at UMC in Jackson.

The same month, Karen quit her nursing job and enrolled at nearby Millsaps College for twenty-two hours of basic sciences in the premed program. Karen had always felt she aimed too low with nursing—and Will agreed—but her decision stunned him. It meant they would have to put off having children for several more years, and it would also force them to take on more debt than Will felt comfortable with. But he wanted Karen to be happy. While he trained for his new specialty and learned to deal with the pain of his disease, she racked up four semesters of perfect grades and scored in the ninety-sixth percentile on the Medical College Admissions Test. Will was as proud as he was surprised, and Karen was luminous with happiness. It almost seemed as though Will’s disease had been a gift.

Then, during Karen’s freshman year of medical school—the third year of Will’s residency—she got pregnant. She had never been able to take the pill, and the less certain methods of birth control had finally failed. Will was surprised but happy; Karen was devastated. She believed that keeping the baby would mean the death of her dream of being a doctor. Will was forced to concede that she was probably right. For three agonizing weeks, she considered an abortion. The fact that she was thirty-three finally convinced her to keep the baby. She managed to complete her freshman year of med school, but after Abby was born, there was no question of continuing. She withdrew from the university the day Will completed his residency, and while Will joined the private anesthesiology group led by his old roommate, Karen went home to prepare for motherhood.

They made a commitment to go forward without regrets, but it didn’t work out that way. Will was phenomenally successful in his work, and Abby brightened their lives in ways he could never have imagined. But Karen’s premature exit from medical school haunted her. Over the next couple of years, her resentment began to permeate their marriage, from dinner conversations to their sex life. Or more accurately, their lack of one. Will tried to discuss it with her, but his attempts only seemed to aggravate the situation. He responded by focusing on his work and on Abby, and whatever energy he had left he used to fight his slowly progressing arthritis.

He treated himself, which conventional wisdom declared folly, but he had studied his condition until he knew more about it than most rheumatologists. He had done the same with Abby’s juvenile diabetes. Being his own doctor allowed him to do things he otherwise might not have been allowed to, like flying. On good days the pain didn’t interfere with his control of the aircraft, and Will only flew on good days. Using this rationale, he had medicated himself to get through the flight physical, and the limited documentary records of his disease made it unlikely that his deception would ever be discovered. He only wished the problems in his marriage were as easy to solve.

A high-pitched beeping suddenly filled the Baron’s cockpit. Will cursed himself for letting his attention wander. Scanning the instrument panel for the source of the alarm, he felt a hot tingle of anxiety along his arms. He saw nothing out of order, which made him twice as anxious, certain that he was missing something right in front of his eyes. Then relief washed through him. He reached down to his waist, pulled the new SkyTel off his belt, and hit the retrieve button. The alphanumeric pager displayed a message in green back-lit letters:

WE ALREADY MISS YOU. BREAK A LEG TONIGHT. LOVE KAREN AND ABBY. WITH SUGAR AND KISSES ON TOP.

Will smiled and waggled the Baron’s wings against the cerulean sky.

Karen stopped the Expedition beside her mailbox and shook her head at the bronze biplane mounted atop it. She had always thought the decoration juvenile. Reaching into the box, she withdrew a thick handful of envelopes and magazines and skimmed through them. There were brokerage statements, party invitations, copies of Architectural Digest, Mississippi Magazine, and The New England Journal of Medicine.

“Did I get any letters?” Abby asked from the back seat.

“You sure did.” Karen passed a powder blue envelope over the front seat. “I think that’s for Seth’s birthday party.”

Abby opened the invitation as Karen climbed the long incline of the drive. “How long till my birthday?”

“Three more months. Sorry, Charlie.”

“I don’t like being five and a half. I want to be six.”

“Don’t be in too much of a hurry. You’ll be thirty-six before you know it.”

When the house came into sight, Karen felt the ambivalence that always suffused her at the sight of it. Her first emotion was pride. She and Will had designed the house, and she had handled all the contracting work herself. Despite the dire warnings of friends, she had enjoyed this, but when the family finally moved in, she had felt more anticlimax than accomplishment. She could not escape the feeling that she’d constructed her own prison, a gilded cage like all the others on Crooked Mile Road, each inhabited by its own Mississippi version of Martha Stewart, the new millennium’s Stepford wives.

Karen pulled into the garage bay nearest the laundry room entrance. Abby unhooked her own safety straps but waited for her mother to open the door.

“Let’s get some iced tea,” Karen said, setting Abby on the concrete. “How do you feel?”

“Good.”

“Did you tee-tee a lot this afternoon?”

“No. I need to go now, though.”

“All right. We’ll check your sugar after. Then we’ll get the tea. We’re going to have some fun today, kid. Just us girls.”

Abby grinned, her green eyes sparkling. “Just us girls!”

Karen opened the door that led from the laundry room to the walk-through pantry and kitchen. Abby squeezed around her and went inside. Karen followed but stopped at the digital alarm panel on the laundry room wall and punched in the security code.

“All set,” she called, walking through the pantry to the sparkling white kitchen. “You want crackers with your tea?”

“I want Oreos!”

Karen squeezed Abby’s shoulder. “You know better than that.”

“It’s only a little while till my shot, Mom. Or you could give me that new kind of shot right now. Couldn’t you?”

Abby was too smart for her own good. Conventional forms of insulin had to be injected thirty minutes to an hour before meals, which made controlling juvenile diabetes difficult. If a child lost its appetite after the shot and refused to eat, as children often did, blood sugar could plummet to a dangerous level. To solve this problem, a new form of insulin called Humalog had been developed, which was absorbed by human cells almost instantly. It could be injected right before a meal, during the meal, or even just after. Physicians like Will were some of the first to get access to the drug, and its convenience had revolutionized the daily lives of families with diabetic children. However, Humalog also tempted children to break their dietary rules, since they knew that an “antidote” was near to hand.

“No Oreos, kiddo,” Karen said firmly.

“Okay,” Abby griped. “Iced tea with a lemon. I’m going to tee-tee.”

“I’ll have it waiting when you get back.”

Abby paused at the hall door. “Will you come with me?”

“You’re a big girl now. You know where the light is. I’m going to fix the tea while you’re gone.”

“Okay.”

As Abby trudged up the hallway, Karen looked down at The New England Journal of Medicine and felt the twinge of anger and regret she always did when confronted by tangible symbols of the profession she’d been forced to abandon. She was secretly glad that the flower show had given her an excuse to miss the medical convention, where she would be relegated to “wife” status by men who couldn’t have stayed within fifteen points of her in a chemistry class. Next month, Will’s drug research would be published in this very magazine, while she would be entangled in the next Junior League service project. She shoved the magazine across the counter with the rest of the mail and opened the stainless-steel refrigerator.

Every appliance in the kitchen was a Viking. The upscale appliances were built in Greenville, Mississippi, and since Will had done the epidurals on two pregnant wives from the “corporate family,” the Jennings house boasted a kitchen that could have been featured in the AD that had come in today’s mail—at a discounted price, of course. Karen had grown up with a noisy old Coldspot from Sears, and a clothesline to dry the wash. She could appreciate luxury, but she knew there was more to life than a showpiece home and flower shows. She took the tea pitcher from the Viking, set it on the counter, and began slicing a lemon.

Abby slowed her pace as she moved up the dark hallway. Passing her bedroom, she glanced through the half-open door. Her dolls were arranged against the headboard of her tester bed, just as she’d left them in the morning. Barbies, Beatrix Potter bunnies, and Beanie-Babies, all mixed together like a big family. The way she liked them.

Five more steps carried her to the hall bathroom, where she stretched on tiptoe to reach the light switch. She pulled up her jumper and used the commode, glad that she didn’t tee-tee very much. That meant her sugar was okay. After fixing her clothes, she climbed up on a stool before the basin and carefully washed and dried her hands. Then she started for the kitchen, leaving the bathroom light on in case she needed to come back.

As she passed her bedroom, she noticed a funny smell. Her dolls all looked happy, but something didn’t seem right. She started to walk in and check, but her mother’s voice echoed up the hall, saying the tea was ready.

When Abby turned away from the bedroom, something gray fluttered in front of her eyes. She instinctively swatted the air, as she would at a spider-web, but her hand hit something solid behind the gray. The gray thing was a towel, and there was a hand inside it. The hand clamped the towel over her nose, mouth, and one eye, and the strange smell she’d noticed earlier swept into her lungs with each gasp.

Terror closed her throat too tightly to scream. She tried to fight, but another arm went around her stomach and lifted her into the air, so that her kicking legs flailed uselessly between the wide-spaced walls of the hallway. The towel was cold against her face. For an instant Abby wondered if her daddy had come home early to play a joke on her. But he couldn’t have. He was in his plane. And he would never scare her on purpose. Not really. And she was scared. As scared as the time she’d gone into ketoacidosis, her thoughts flying out of her ears as soon as she could think of them, her voice speaking words no one had ever heard before. She tried to fight the monster holding her, but the harder she fought, the weaker she became. Suddenly everything began to go dark, even the eye that was uncovered. She concentrated as hard as she could on saying one word, the only word that could help her now. With a great feeling of triumph, she said, “Mama,” but the word died instantly on the wet towel.

Huey Cotton stood outside the Jennings house, nervously rubbing his palms against the legs of his coveralls and peering through Abby’s bedroom window. Abby. Unlike most names, he could remember that one without trouble. His mother had once read letters to a woman named Abby out loud to him. Dear Abby, she would drawl in her cigarette-parched voice, sitting at the kitchen table in her hair-rollers and housecoat. The people who wrote to that Abby never signed their real names. They were embarrassed, his mother said. They signed big words instead of names, and sometimes they signed places, too, like Bewildered in Omaha. He always remembered that one.

Huey heard the scuff of a heel on wood. He looked up to see his cousin walking through the pink bedroom with the little Abby in his arms. She was fighting, kicking her skinny legs to beat the band. Joey held her at the center of the room so that her feet wouldn’t hit the furniture or the tall bedposts. The kicks got weaker and weaker until finally they were just little jerks, like a hound’s legs when it dreamed of hunting.

The little girl looked like another of the hundred or so dolls that lay around the room like the sleeping occupants of some fairyland, only bigger. Joey walked to the open window and passed her through it. Huey accepted Abby as gingerly as he would a wounded bird, his mouth open in wonder.

“You’re a genius,” Joey said, a crooked grin on his face. “I apologize, okay? She’ll be out for two to four hours. Plenty of time.”

“You’re going to call me, right?” Huey asked.

“Every thirty minutes. Don’t say anything but ‘hello,’ unless I ask you a question. And shut off the cell phone when you get there. Just cut it on for the check-in calls. And remember the backup plan, right?”

“I remember.”

“Good. Now, get going.”

Huey turned away and started to walk, then stopped and turned back.

“What’s wrong now?” Joey asked.

“Can she have one of her dolls?”

Joey leaned back inside the window, snatched up a gowned Barbie off the bed, and handed it out. Huey took it between Abby’s hip and his little finger.

“Don’t crank the truck till you hit the road,” Joey said.

“I know.”

Carrying Abby with maternal care, Huey turned and lumbered toward the playhouse and his concealed pickup truck, the gold-lamé gown of the Barbie fluttering behind him like a tiny flag.

Karen stood at the kitchen counter, thumbing through the NEJM in spite of her resentment. Two sweating glasses of iced tea stood on the counter beside her, bright yellow lemon rinds hooked over the rims. Beside the glasses lay a plastic device for pricking Abby’s finger; it looked like a ballpoint pen. Without taking her eyes from the magazine, Karen called: “Abby? You okay, sweetie?”

There was no answer.

She took a sip of tea and kept reading, thankful for a few moments of silence before the maddening last-minute details of the flower show would have to be dealt with.

Beneath the tall, sweet-scented pines behind the playhouse, Huey opened the driver’s door of his pickup and slid Abby’s unconscious body across the bench seat to the passenger side. She lay still as a sleeping angel. Huey watched her for a while. He liked standing on pine needles. They were cushy, like deep carpet. He wished he was barefoot.

Suddenly, an image of his cousin filled his mind. Joey would be really mad if he messed up. He reached into the truck, shifted it into neutral, and pushed it backward around the playhouse like a normal-sized man pushing a motorcycle. After the truck cleared the playhouse, he stopped, shifted his weight forward, and began pushing again, steering the pickup across the yard toward the steep driveway. The yard had a pitch to it, for drainage, and gravity soon began to help him.

When the wheels hit concrete the truck gathered momentum, and Huey tried clumsily to climb inside. He got one foot up on the step, but as he tried to pull himself through the open door, his boot slipped. He stumbled forward, trying to keep his feet under him as the old Chevy raced down the hill. Only the strength in his huge hands kept him and the truck joined as it careened down toward Crooked Mile Road.

Three quarters of the way to the bottom, Huey flexed his wrists with enough power to snap the tendons of a normal man and dragged himself into the cab by main strength. He hit the brakes just before the truck shot into the road, and the vehicle shuddered to a stop. Abby was thrown forward against the dash, but she did not wake up. Huey pulled her back across the bench seat, her head pillowed on his thigh, then put his hand to her mouth to make sure she was breathing.

After his nerves settled a little, he pulled his door shut, cranked the engine, and turned onto Crooked Mile Road, which led to Highway 463, and from there to Interstate 55. He had a long night ahead.

Karen’s ears pricked up at the rumble of a starting engine. It seemed out of place at this time of day. Her neighbors’ houses were too far away to hear that sort of thing. She glanced through the kitchen window but saw nothing, as she’d expected. Only one curve of Crooked Mile Road was visible from the house, and the height of their hill hid the intersection of the road and the driveway. Maybe it was a UPS truck running late, making a turn in the drive.

She looked back at the hall door and called, “Abby? Do you need help, honey?”

Still no answer.

A worm of fear turned in Karen’s stomach. She was compulsive about controlling Abby’s diabetes, and though she hated to admit it, panic was always just one layer beneath the surface. She put down the magazine and started toward the hall. Relief surged through her as she heard footsteps on the hardwood. She was laughing at herself when a dark-haired man of about fifty walked through the hall door and held up both hands.

Her right hand flew to her heart, and in some sickening subdivision of a second, her mouth went dry, her throat closed, and sweat broke out from the crown of her head to her toes. Almost as quickly, a desperate hope bloomed in her brain. Hope that the stranger’s presence was merely a mistake, some crazy mixup, that he was a workman to whom Will had given a key.

But he wasn’t. She knew it the way you know about the lump in your breast, an alien thing that shouldn’t be there and isn’t going anywhere soon except by very unpleasant means. Karen had lost a sister that way. And her father—a Korean War veteran—had taught her very young that this was the way fate came at you: out of the blue, without warning, the worst thing in the world appearing with a leer and a ticking clock.

“Stay calm, Mrs. Jennings,” the man said in a reassuring voice. “Abby’s fine. I want you to listen to me. Everything is o-kay.”

At the word “Abby,” tears filled Karen’s eyes. The panic that lived beneath her skin burned through to the surface, paralyzing her where she stood. Her chin began to quiver. She tried to scream, but no sound came from her throat.

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