24 Hours. Greg Iles
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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