24 Hours

“Are you going to try to stab anyone else, Mr. Smith?”

He shook his head violently.

The image cut to a shot of drug vials—Anectine and Restorase—sitting beside a compressed gas syringe on a soapstone surface.

“I know how shocking that footage can be,” Will said. “But remember the scene that preceded it.”

On the Hitachi, Tommy Joe Smith charged the nurse again with the shard of glass.

“The potential applications are limited, thank God, but their necessity cannot be argued. In emergency rooms, psychiatric wards, and prison infirmaries, healthcare workers are suffering grave injury at the hands of violent patients. Now their safety can be insured without resorting to greater violence to restrain the out-of-control patient. Very soon, physicians will be able to use depolarizing relaxants without fear of fatal outcomes or costly lawsuits.”

A collective murmur of approval swept through the darkened room, followed by a wave of applause. Will had known the video would disturb them—as it should have—but he also knew they would recognize the enormous potential of the drug. He glanced to his left and saw Saul Stein grinning like a proud parent.

“As you know,” he said, checking to be sure that the Hitachi showed an anatomical diagram of a hand, “the relaxants work primarily at the myoneural junction, interrupting the normal flow of impulses from the brain to the skeletal muscles …”

He continued almost without thought, thanks to the rehearsals he had done with Karen and Abby. The woman in black was still staring from the front table. She wasn’t smiling exactly, but there was a suggestive curve to her lips that signaled interest in more than drug therapy. He tried to make eye contact with several other audience members, but every few seconds his gaze returned to the young woman. And why not? It was natural for a lecturer to pick out an individual and speak directly to him—or her. It eased the nerves and gave the voice an undertone of intimacy. Tonight he would speak to the woman in black.

Whenever he turned back from pointing out something on the Hitachi, she was watching him. She had large eyes that never seemed to blink, and a mane of blonde hair that fell to her shoulders in the style of Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not. With the exception of Karen, blondes had never done much for Will, but this one was different. What struck him—even in the dim spill of light from the big Hitachi—was her remarkable symmetry. His eyes followed the curve of her long legs as they rose to feminine hips, the hips curving into an hourglass waist. Her breasts were not too large, but almost too perfect. The strapless black dress revealed fine collarbones and strong shoulders. Her neck was long and graceful, her jaw defined, her lips full. But what held him was her eyes. They never left his face, even as he studied her from head to toe.

He turned to the Hitachi to check the video feed, and when he turned back, she shifted in her seat, uncrossed her legs, then recrossed them with the languid grace of a lioness stretching her flanks. The shortness of the cocktail dress gave him a brief but direct sight line between her legs, even from the podium. He felt blood rush to his face. It wasn’t quite Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct—this woman was wearing panties—but she had made sure he could see everything but the brand name on the silk. Those dark panties were a far cry from the white cotton “granny” panties Karen had taken to wearing the past couple of years. As Will dropped his gaze to look at his speech, he realized that he had fallen behind the video. He looked back up and skipped ahead to the proper cue line.

The ghost of a smile touched the woman’s lips.

Huey Cotton stood on the cabin porch, looking into darkening trees as the sun sank behind them. Tiny flashes of greenish-yellow light floated beneath the branches like phosphorescent sparks from an unseen fire.

“Lightnin’ bugs,” he said, his voice filled with pleasure. “I wonder if there’s a mason jar in the kitchen.”

As he watched the little flares winking in the shadows, a soft groan came from inside the cabin. Huey’s smile vanished, replaced by something like fear. He took a deep breath, then turned slowly and looked at the door with trepidation.

“I wish you was here, Mamaw,” he said softly.

The groan came again.

He reached out and opened the screen door, then pushed open the main door and walked inside.

Hickey sat at Karen’s kitchen table, eating a huge muffaletta sandwich and drinking iced tea.

“Damn, that’s good,” he said, wiping his mouth. “You got the dressing just right. Reminds me of New Orleans. That grocery store down in the Quarter.”

“Are you from New Orleans?” Karen asked. She was standing at the island, opposite the refrigerator, packing syringes and insulin into a small Igloo ice chest.

“You hear a New Orleans accent?”

“Not really.” She couldn’t classify Hickey’s speech. There was some Mississippi in it, but other inflections, too. He had to have spent some time outside the South. In the service, maybe.

“We’ll just skip over my biography for now,” he said, chewing another bite of the big sandwich. “Maybe we’ll get into it later.”

Karen was closing the ice chest when the garage doorbell rang.

Hickey was instantly on his feet, Will’s gun in his hand. “Who’s that?” he asked, his eyes flicking around the room as though a SWAT team might burst in. “You expecting somebody?”

Karen shook her head. She had no idea who it could be.

“Don’t answer it. We’ll just let them go on their merry way.” He took a step toward the pantry. “Which door are they at?”

“The garage,” she whispered, shocked by the sense of conspiracy she felt with Hickey. But the last thing she wanted was someone disrupting his carefully organized plan while Abby was under his control.

The bell rang twice more. The urgency of the ringer was like a finger poking Karen in the side.

“How come I didn’t hear a car?” Hickey asked.

“Sometimes we don’t.” As she spoke the words, she realized who the visitor might be. Stephanie Morgan, the co-chair of the Junior League flower show. Stephanie drove a Lexus that ran so quietly Karen never heard it pulling up the driveway. And of everyone she knew, Stephanie had the most reason to drop by over the next couple of days.

She and Hickey jumped when the kitchen window rattled. Karen turned and saw Stephanie Morgan’s face pressed against the glass. She was shaking a reprimanding finger, and beside her was the little moon face of her eleven-month-old son, Josh.

“Open the door,” Hickey said in a flat voice.

“Hide,” Karen told him.

“I can’t. She’s looking at me right now.” He slid the gun behind his right leg. “Go open it.”

Karen didn’t want to invite Stephanie into her nightmare, but if she refused to open the door now, Steph would throw a fit, and Hickey’s plan would come apart. She held up her hand and motioned toward the garage. Stephanie nodded and disappeared from the window.

“Let me handle this,” Karen told him. “Please.”

He looked skeptical. “Let’s see if you can.”

When Karen opened the door, Stephanie pushed right past her with Josh in her arms, talking as she went. “Karen, you’ve got to come down to the Colisseum in the morning. I mean first thing. I’ve been down there all day, and the place is a wreck. They were supposed to have those livestock people out of there by lunch today, but there are still cows on the floor. Cows, Karen.”

Stephanie had reached the kitchen. “Hello,” she said to Hickey. “Are you Karen’s secret lover? I always knew she had one. It’s the quiet ones you have to watch out for.”

Karen stepped into the kitchen and rubbed Josh’s arm. The little guy was obviously exhausted from his day at the flower show venue, and he was resting his head on his mother’s shoulder. Or had he sensed something frightening in Joe Hickey?

“Stephanie, this is Joe, my second cousin. He’s from Washington State. Joe, Stephanie Morgan, Junior League soccer mom.”

“Puh-lease,” Stephanie said, giving Hickey a little wave and turning back to Karen. She obviously hadn’t seen the gun. “I want to know why you didn’t answer that doorbell.”

Hickey was watching Karen over Stephanie’s shoulder. His eyes had gone dead the moment she turned away from him. “I had some Mormons around before,” Karen said. “I thought they’d come back for another try.”

Stephanie pulled a wry face. With her overdone makeup, it made her look like a circus clown. “Likely story. I know what you’re doing. Hiding from me. But I’ve got news for you, honey. You can’t. You’re the queen bee of this show, and I need you. When I saw those cows on that floor, I said, ‘There’s only one woman in the Junior League for this job, and that’s Karen Jennings. She’ll have those damn bovines out of here before another cow patty hits the floor.’”

Karen didn’t know what to say. The only thing in her mind was getting Stephanie and Josh out as quickly as possible. She felt a frightening energy radiating from Hickey, a sort of survival desperation. It was in his eyes, in the set of his shoulders and mouth. Something he’d developed in prison, maybe. If he perceived Stephanie as a threat, he would kill her. And eleven-month-old Josh? Karen didn’t want to think about that.

Josh began to cry. Stephanie gave his back a perfunctory pat and began rocking on the balls of her feet.

“I’ll be down there in the morning,” Karen promised. She took Stephanie by the arm and began walking her back toward the pantry. “But Joe’s father passed away recently, and he’s down here to work out some estate problems with me. We only have tonight and the morning to do it.”

“Karen.” Stephanie planted her feet at the kitchen door. “You know how important this is. Lucy Childs is just waiting for us to screw this up.”