24 Hours

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.