24 Hours

“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.